I may well be wrong but I’m having doubts about the probability calculations applied to our results. I know I approved the protocol when you first proposed it and I should have raised this then but I have only now become aware of it. Maybe my concerns are based upon a misunderstanding on my part and you will be able to put my mind at rest. I confess that I do sometimes get in a bit of a pickle when considering probabilities and it’s quite possible I have done so again.

And I relate to that. I was never really taught much about statistics, even at the university level (although signing up for every calculus class that wouldn’t tank my degree might not have helped). Nonetheless, I’ve always had a fascination with how the sausage is made in science, so I’ve spent years teaching myself the fundamentals. I don’t think it’s that hard to pick up; at most it requires some vague memories of how to do algebra, and only if you want to check my work. Even if you instead merely skim and take my word for it, you’ll walk away with a greater understanding of the foundations of modern science.

For better or worse.

Tossing coins

The workhorse of science is the Bernoulli Process, or what we think we’re doing when we toss a coin. We can toss that coin an arbitrary number of times (the Second Law of Thermodynamics says otherwise), we either get the outcome we want or we don’t (not really), our previous tosses don’t effect this toss (our muscles say otherwise) and, the more we toss that coin, the closer the ratio of total successes to total tosses approaches a fixed constant with a value somewhere between zero and one. How could we prove that convergence?!

In the magical world of maths, we can just say all of that is true, plus we know what that fixed constant is. We don’t actually know, but we can pretend we do by hiding it behind a variable, r. If that’s our probability of success, our rate of failure must be (1−r). Suppose I toss that coin n times, and it lands heads (which I call a success) k times. You might think the odds of that happening is r multiplied by itself k times, then multiplied by (1−r) a total of (n−k) times, but that’s only true if I got heads k times in a row followed by tails (n−k) times. I could also have tossed some heads, then some tails, then more heads, or any other such combination. We’ve under-counted, but the correction is pretty easy: we multiply by the factorial of n, which is n!=n × (n−1) × ⋯ × 1, then divide by the factorial of k, then divide by the factorial of (n−k).

Congrats, we’ve just reinvented the Binomial distribution! It gives the probability of observing k successes over n trials with a success rate of r. I say “probability” because the Binomial follows the rules of a probability distribution: if we add up the values it produces for all possible values of k (that’s all integers between 0 and n, including both), we get a sum of one.

If Bernoulli Processes are the workhorses, then the Binomial distribution is a prize breed. Prof. French casually name-drops it during one of his articles, and for good reason: Dave Green thought they could predict the future via lucid dreams; French and another person examined 10 dream logs and for each rated how well they matched five candidates, in the end concluding Green got it right three times. That’s k and n, right there!

Removing nuisances

There is a slight problem: what do we do about r? k and n are both integers, which are easy to work with, but r is the sort of thing that ruined Georg Cantor’s life. Let’s set k and n to zero, and see what the Binomial gives us when r is three in ten. Multiplying r by itself zero times seems nonsensical, until dim memories of a math class surface where you were informed that any value raised to the power of zero is one. Calculating the factorial of zero seems equally fanciful (didn’t we stop at one?), but maths boffins have decreed that it equals one as well. So one times one, then corrected by one divided by one and then one again, is… one. The probability of r equalling 3 in 10 is a hundred percent! But we could have substituted any value between zero and one for r, and got the same result.

We need a different type of addition to handle r, and fortunately we have it: integration. I can hear your screams from here, so let me assure you we won’t do any actual calculus around here. Calm yourself down by thinking of a rectangle instead. If that rectangle is one unit high and one unit wide, it has an area of one square unit. If it has a width less than one, then it has an area equal to that width times one.

Notice anything interesting about that rectangle? If I were to randomly pick a number between zero and one, and any number I pick is equally probable to any other I could have picked, the probability of me picking a value between zero and one is 100%. The odds of picking a value between zero and three-tenths is three-tenths, and the odds of picking a value between r and one is (1−r).

We can think of the Binomial distribution with k and n set to zero as a rectangle of height one, and we can think of that rectangle as representing the probability of observing a random number between zero and one. When I plugged an arbitrary value of r into that Binomial distribution, I always get back a value of one; if two outcomes are equally likely to occur, their probabilities must be equal.

Pseudo-probabilities

When we fix k and n and plug r into the Binomial distribution, we get back something that is probability-ish. Under certain conditions it can act like a probability, but if we just call it that we’re likely to forget those conditions. So we we call it a “likelihood”. Hooray for synonyms.

If this “likelihood” is a kind-of-sort-of probability, then it had better sum to one when “added.” Thankfully, the boffins have handed us this gadget:

That’s known as the Beta distribution, and it… hang on, I’m feeling a bit of déjà vu here.

The Beta distribution looks an awful lot like the Binomial distribution, doesn’t it? If we set α to (k+1) and β to (n−k+1), then the bits involving r match up exactly. But does that mean k!=Γ(k+1)? It does! That squiggle is the capital letter Gamma from the Greek alphabet, and the Gamma function is an “all-terrain” factorial; while the original only works for positive integers or zero, the Gamma function handles fractions and complex values with ease (negative integers pop the tyres, alas).

The only difference between the two distributions comes from the numerator, as (k+1) + (n−k+1) = n+2 and thus Γ(n+2) translates into n!(n+1). Or, the Beta’s likelihood is (n+1) times greater than the Binomial’s, when all other values are equal, and that factor compensates for letting r roam free instead of k. We got lucky with the n=0 case earlier, because n+1=1 and thus the Binomial and Beta distributions matched exactly.

But if all values of r are equiprobable when n=0, that implies that before any observations are made our potential Bernoulli Process could converge to any rate. Do you think that if we flip a coin repeatedly, the likelihood of it never landing heads is the same as the likelihood of it landing heads half the time are equal? Surely not! Likewise, you’ll pick the correct image out of five candidates by fluke 1 in 5 times.

Our hypothesis is almost never “each outcome is equally likely.” Even if it is, do you think a million coin tosses will always come up heads exactly half a million times? We are dealing with randomness here, and it’s never that predicable in practice.

Weighing infinities

Just tossing our successes and failures into a Binomial or Beta distribution won’t cut it, we need to find a way to attach a weight to every possible r and do a weighted sum of the probabilities or likelihoods. That was no big deal when we were considering all possible k, as we can count them all, but there are way too many r‘s to count.

Consider the theory that Green would correctly predict 20% of all images, even if their dreams couldn’t predict anything. In that theory’s perfect world, stripped of any randomness, ten trials would result in two successes. A Binomial(2|10,r) distribution can be converted into a Beta(r|3,9) distribution.

That seems like a pretty good weighting for r. It peaks right at 20%, and covers all possible values. The height of that peak is a bit worrying, but if the Beta distribution is supposed to integrate to one, and it clamps down to zero at both ends plus has a bit of a tail at higher values of r, then the peak must be greater than one. Likelihoods aren’t quite probabilities, after all.

A traditional weighted average is done by adding up each value multiplied by its weight, then dividing by the sum of all weights, and we can skip that last bit if we scale all those weights so they sum to one. Scratch out “addition” and swap in “integration,” and we get

The result would be our average likelihood for the “chance” hypothesis, for k successes over 10 trials. Although, that n looks kind of odd when we’ve baked 20% and n=10 into the math. Let’s instead hide that proposed success rate behind a variable, h, and remove the assumption of ten trials.

I know, I know, the reappearance of that integral symbol has you on edge. Fret not, I wasn’t kidding when I said the Beta distribution was a handy gadget. It lets you solve this integral with basic algebra, no calculus necessary! I’ll leave those who want that challenge to figure it out for themselves, for everyone else I’ll just dish the answer.

I swapped in factorials where I could, to help organize things, but in practice you’d use nothing but Gamma functions. Whether you think the result is “clean” or not, note that we’ve removed r entirely.

All we have to do now is plug in a few values, and out pops a weighted average likelihood. What are we waiting for? Let’s plug in three successes for Green out of ten trials, with h=210. As per Wolfram Alpha…

Comparing theories

We now have a result! But what does that number mean? With probabilities there was a guaranteed ceiling of 100%. If one possibility had a value of 85%, we knew every other could be no greater than 15% probable. However, likelihoods have no upper limit. Other hypotheses may be more likely or less, we simply cannot tell from a single number.

So let’s look at every number.

The above chart checks every possible h, and returns their weighted average likelihood. The peak is a bit off, but still roughly where we’d expect it. That hill is very smooth, which makes sense: every possible r is assigned a weight by every value of h we pick, and the closer two values of h are the more similar the assigned weights are.

Detour: greater than zero

It doesn’t make sense that the average likelihood of h=0 is anything other than zero, but that very smoothness is the cause. How precise or “peaky” a Beta distribution is depends on the sum of α and β. But since hn+(1−h)n=n for our weighting Beta, how clustered the likelihoods are around h depends only on n.

Intuitively, though, if I’m claiming a value of h equal to one in a million, the likelihoods should be more clustered than if I were instead claiming h is 20%, even if both have the same n. But if that’s true, then how precise is 20% relative to h = 0.2, 0.20, 0.2000, and 0.2000000? If those all have different precision, then r = 0.2000001 has different likelihoods depending on our choice of h. Ugh!

Alternatively, we could stick to our guns. Low values of n cause our weighting Beta to smear across a wide range of r values, overlapping the Beta representing our actual observations. Hence our integral takes uncomfortably large values at the extremes of h. To get comfy, all we need to do is increase n.

Don’t believe me? Let’s detour to my favourite example from this genre. Buried deep in Mossbridge’s citations is this paper:

Bem, Daryl J. “Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect.” Journal of personality and social psychology 100.3 (2011): 407.

Experiment 2 from that paper involved a computer giving the user the option of picking one of two images. Once the user has picked, the computer randomly decides whether or not the user would get a subliminal “positive” or “negative” image. If the user could predict the future, even slightly, they’d avoid the “negative” image or prefer the “positive” one better than chance.

Still a bit skeptical? Adding a precision term is as simple as calculating s and then swapping hn for shn, (1−h)n for s(1−h)n, and (2−h)n for s(2−h)n.

Comparing theories, for real this time

Oh right, we barely got anywhere on “what does this number mean?” There’s an obvious answer on that chart, the maximum value the average likelihood takes. Since every other value of h is less, we can divide them by it and get back a value safely between zero and one. For an h of 20%, we get a number somewhere around 0.933. The closer to one, the more compatible that theory is with the evidence, so the theory that Green’s performance was a fluke is on solid ground.

It’s an awkward solution, though. Mossbridge’s paper doesn’t just contain the test where French was a judge, it also tasked paid volunteers with evaluating similarity (k=1) and multiple tests where LLMs were judges (k≈3.6). Had I chosen one of those other tests, the maximum likelihood would have been different. It may also have been different had a different set of images been used, or more data points were added, and there’s something unseemly about painting a target around the arrow you’ve shot.

But there’re at least two hypotheses in play on any question. After all, Green is claiming they may be able to predict the future via their dreams. That implies he thinks he succeeded at least once in the past, that he thinks his success rate is better than chance, and he should be able to quantify both theories in some way. We don’t even need a sharp prediction, if we approximate it via a Beta distribution then we can plug that into the maths. A modern computer can evaluate thirty different options before you’ve blinked.

Sadly, Mossbridge’s paper is entirely unhelpful here, even though that information clearly exists:

JM [Mossbridge] agreed that she would be interested if he would be open to attempting to dream pre-cognitively about targets that would be randomly selected after he submitted a dream transcript. DG [Green] agreed, and after a marginally encouraging pilot study, DG suggested bringing open-minded skeptic Chris French (CCF) on board to act as an informed skeptic and another experimental design expert. JM agreed, as did CCF. They then performed another pilot study, which was also encouraging.

I can construct my own “precognitive dreams are real” success rate, with a little help from 13 grad students. They were given a simple task: find a way to flip a coin that biased it towards landing heads. With a few weeks of advance knowledge, and a few minutes of practice, all 13 managed to flip more heads than tails after 300 tosses. And yet coin tosses have a reputation for being fair!

The obvious conclusion is that human beings cannot detect small biases, and thus any person claiming to do better than chance must have produced more than a small bias over chance. Conversely, there wouldn’t be any debate over whether or not anyone can predict the future from dreams if some people had a 99% success rate. With eight and a half billon of us currently running around, and billions more existing in the past, even if only a handful of people could do dream prediction a success rate that high should have been noticed. Since there is a debate, the average success rate must be a small bias over chance.

We’re both pushed up and pulled down towards the probability of a “small bias,” thus that probability is a natural choice for a success rate. The average success rate of those thirteen students was 56.7%, so let’s call that a “small bias” over a fifty-fifty chance.

Betting on theories

20% isn’t 50%, unfortunately, but we can work around that via gambling. Bookies prefer to use “odds” instead of probability, because it’s more intuitive to them. If they quote something as having 4 to 1 odds against, they’re saying they’ll pay out four dollars for every dollar you bet, if that thing happens.

Calculating odds is trivial, the bookie just tallies up wins and losses, then divides the losses by the wins to get the odds against. These fractional odds are very likelihood-ish, but they differ in that they only apply to Bernoulli Processes. That means we can easily translate a Bernoulli Process probability into odds by dividing that probability r by (1−r), and reversing the process by dividing that odds o by (o+1). Ever heard of 50-50 odds? A 50% success rate translated into odds would be 50, divided by 100 minus 50.

We can think of odds as representing the long-term monetary advantage one person has if the probability of success is really 50%. Our mythical bookie offering 4 to 1 odds would wind up with one dollar in their ledger for every four dollars in ours, if they were that far from reality. What probability r would offer a similar advantage over a 20% success rate? We can use ratios to work that out.

There we go, a ratio of 56.7% to 43.3% odds against 50-50 odds translates to roughly a 24.7% success rate against a 20% success rate. Plugging that into those Gamma functions, we get …

… and the “small bias” hypothesis is more likely than the chance one, given the data. Excellent, Green is vindicated!

But I doubt this has put you in the mood to pop some champagne. The two average likelihoods are nearly identical! We can make your vague feelings more concrete, though, by reversing the process. Likelihoods aren’t tied to Bernoulli Processes, but like probabilities they are proportional: when we say one hypothesis is twice as likely as another, that’s akin to saying we’d place 2 to 1 odds against the other being true.

Suppose I’m on the fence about whether these experiments show Green can predict the future. You’ve walked through all the above maths, though, and know the hypothesis that Green can predict the future is slightly more likely than that he can’t. If I were the clueless bookie from before, how much could you profit off me?

For every dollar I put in, you’d make about $1.06. Or, if you prefer to think in terms of probabilities, your success rate is less than a “small bias”, as we defined it earlier, thus it’s likely I wouldn’t even notice your advantage unless I was keeping careful books.

There is, however, a slight problem: I’m not actually on the fence over whether you can predict the future via dreams. Here’s how the image was selected:

First DG recorded his dream the morning after having had a lucid dream, then sent CCF his transcript. After receiving the transcript, CCF selected a target for the dream at random from a database consisting of 478 pre-pooled online targets. … To select the target from this pool CCF generated a number between 1 and 10 at either Google or Random.org to give the year (1=2006, 10=2016), then two more numbers to give the month and week of the target. … CCF then sent the target URL to DG, who spent between 5 and 120+ minutes reading about the target and viewing any accompanying videos or images.

There’s no way Green could be running a simulation, because he’d somehow have know the exact results returned by Google or random.org, at the exact moment French asked either service to generate random numbers. The latter uses multiple radios scattered across the globe as a source, which is fed through some contraption they haven’t detailed. The former doesn’t say how they generate random numbers, but I bet they just asked French’s browser to do their dirty work.

French may be radiating some mysterious form of thought wave/particles that travel through time, but we’re pretty confident we know all the relevant physics and it can’t be explained by a known force. Time travel is nowhere near practical. The Earth itself orbits the Sun at 30km per second, so any signal would have to not only have to be isolated from billions of others, but to get around the inverse-square law must be focused at a point thousands to millions of kilometres away. I think it’s more likely Green broke into both Google and random.org, sabotaging their random outputs for days at a time in a way nobody noticed… and I don’t think that’s very likely at all!

Still, we should never say something is impossible and, besides, division by zero would break the maths. I’ll instead be exceedingly generous, and put my odds at a million against.

And after taking this evidence in favour of precognition into account, my odds are still roughly a million against predicting the future via dreams. I won’t be popping a cork.

Concluding remarks

I seriously doubt Chris French walked through the above analysis while typing up that email to Mossbridge. But he was doing a similar calculation in his head. The primary difference between the two is that the above is much more rigorous and explicit. I have brushed a few things under the carpet, but if you trust your hammer you don’t really have to know how it’s made. While the maths may have been annoying or opaque to you, it also lays everything out on the table. You can’t critique vague doubts.

Those 10 trials Mossbridge carried out were indeed evidence in favour of the theory that people can predict the future via dreams, it’s just that the amount of evidence they provided was very weak. While that may not be a satisfying conclusion to this story, don’t forget that you’ve now got a hammer in your hand.

The post Learning about science and statistics through pseudoscience appeared first on The Skeptic.

Published in 2001, the book “The Varginha Case,” by Ubirajara Franco Rodrigues, is practically required reading for those who delve into the swamps of ufology. So I’m fulfilling that prerequisite. I think we can learn a lot about pseudoscience, and therefore about science, by investigating these reports and the discussion surrounding them.

The Varginha Case, one of Brazil’s most famous UFO reports, centred on the testimony of three girls (Liliane, Valquíria, and Kátia) who claimed to have seen a strange creature in a vacant lot in the Jardim Andere neighbourhood of Varginha, Minas Gerais, on January 20, 1996. The girls described the being as humanoid, with brown, oily skin, large, red eyes, a head disproportionate to its body, and prominent veins. The girls’ strong emotional reaction, as they ran home in terror, lent weight to the story and drew the attention of the press and ufologists, who soon associated the incident with the crash of a supposed unidentified flying object in the region.

Many of the accounts of the Varginha Case contain, in addition to possible exaggerations and biased interpretations, a significant omission: the old urban legends about a certain Zé Gomes, owner of a plot of land in Jardim Andere, which borders the lot where the girls claim to have seen the creature. For decades, rumors circulated in Varginha that Zé Gomes practiced black magic rituals. It was said that he had a “pact with the devil,” that he summoned demonic entities, and that he had even “bottled a little demon.” These stories were part of the local imagination long before the infamous 1996 episode.

I learned about this thanks to an audio recording posted on the João Marcelo YouTube channel, narrated by Ubirajara Rodrigues, who is now very skeptical of a strictly extraterrestrial view of UFO investigations, but who was one of the main investigators of the case at the time. In addition to the legend of Zé Gomes, the recording recounts a story about how a local esotericist claimed to have opened a “portal” in a certain part of the city, from which emerged thin humanoid creatures with red eyes and horns – a description that coincides, to some degree, with the girls’ accounts years later. This suggests that the sighting may have been influenced, at least in part, by this pre-existing cultural melting pot.

This isn’t to say the girls lied, but to recognise that testimonies are constructed within a psychological and cultural context. Even Ubirajara, one of the case’s lead investigators, admits that, initially, his own expectation of alien contact led him to ignore these local legends. He also considers another plausible hypothesis: the girls, already frightened by rumours of someone attacking people in the region, may have come across someone or something crouching near a wall and, in a panic, interpreted the scene in light of their beliefs and fears, as a “demon.” The confusion, reinforced by social panic and the way in which reports spread, would have created the fantastic narrative we know.

To this day, the three girls maintain their story and categorically assert that they didn’t see a person there. I don’t want to suggest that they saw nothing. However, it should be noted that they were Catholic and, initially at least, believed they saw a demon, not an alien – precisely on the land that belonged to Zé Gomes.

There is also the broader cultural context of Varginha and the surrounding region. In his 2001 book, Ubirajara presents this cultural backdrop well. Regarding the city, he writes that it is:

… located an average of an hour’s drive away, on all sides, from extravagant settings: towards São Paulo, the city of Pouso Alegre is home to a world-renowned alleged paranormal site. At the opposite extreme is the controversial São Thomé das Letras, the focus of mystical fads. To the southeast, the late clairvoyant Neila Alkmin lived in Conceição do Rio Verde. The Brazilian Society of Eubiose (SBE) established itself in São Lourenço, Carmo de Minas, and Aiuruoca. Toward Belo Horizonte, Carmo da Cachoeira is almost entirely taken over by followers of someone who claims to receive knowledge from extraterrestrials, who are acquiring properties and living in a rural community every day. And they say other projects continue to arrive in the region. All within about an hour’s drive.

In fact, specifically speaking of Varginha, the city had been dealing with UFOs for decades. In the November 29, 1970, edition of the Tribuna Varginhense newspaper, an article reports an alleged sighting of a flying saucer over the city. One of the locations where one of the sightings occurred? The Jardim Andere neighborhood, where, in 1996, the “Varginha ET” was seen. In the National Archives, you can even find a 1971 report from the Ministry of Aeronautics about the case in question (you may need to log in to the GOV system to access it). 

Given all this, the simplest option is perhaps the most plausible. It’s reasonable to assume they saw something and misinterpreted it, something the science of behavior and perception knows well.

However, what’s troubling is that, instead of addressing these more prosaic explanations, part of contemporary ufology responds by doubling down: it now proposes that the case didn’t involve aliens, but rather extradimensional beings arriving through magical portals, in a desperate attempt to salvage the case at the expense of another, even less plausible, hypothesis. As fascinating as it is to imagine visitors from other planets or realities, the lack of concrete evidence must outweigh the desire to believe.

This story was originally published by Revista Questão de Ciência in Brazil. It is translated and reprinted here with permission.

The post The demons of Varginha: The cultural context behind Brazil’s famous UFO case appeared first on The Skeptic.

Reminiscing a few years later, the author of the analysis, the astrologer R. H. Naylor (1889–1952), didn’t find himself encumbered by undue modesty. He is quoted thus in Kim Farnell’s “The True History of Sun Sign Astrology”:

In 1930 I commenced a series of Astrological articles which have entirely altered the orientation of the public mind towards Astrology. I am aware all this sounds egotistical and perhaps boastful, but it so happens it is true.

Naylor, in his reading of the newborn princess’ stars, offered some general remarks about how the royal baby would “share certain basic characteristics common to all people born in the present month”, an indirect nod to the sun-sign astrology prescribed by another seminal British astrologer, Alan Leo (1860–1917). Leo was the creator of the assembly-line horoscope, in which the astrologer keeps prewritten paragraphs with stock interpretations for the positions of planets etc. and produces ‘personalised’ readings by joining them according to data furnished by the client. He also went on to champion another work- and time-saving strategy: the absolute predominance of the sun sign, which allowed astrologers to mass produce readings by reducing the public to 12 self-contained categories.

When Naylor brought astrology into the British press, the system was still in its early stages. His “Baby Margaret” column offered predictions and astrological advice for people who had birthdays in the week following the publication. For instance:

It’s not particularly lucky to have your birth anniversary fall on Tuesday, August 26, this year. Progress will be rather slow, probably through a failure to grasp opportunities offered. Young folk will suffer from irritating restraint on the part of their seniors. People of mature age, on the other hand, will have to make sacrifices in the interest of the younger generation.

It would be hard to find a better invitation to exercise personal validation, a process in which people interpret generic utterances as highly personal and specific: several of those who were accused, in such a shotgun fashion, of “a failure to grasp opportunities offered” would have very different, and very particular, “opportunities” in mind, and many would feel compelled to compliment the astrologer on his perspicacity. It is also a very good prefiguration of the kind of language that would later become typical of the sun-sign newspaper column.

And what about the predictions for the newborn princess? Nicholas Campion, in his two-volume history of Western astrology, singles out one of them as an undisputed astrological triumph, “simple” and “effective,” a “successful forecast”. The prediction was that “events of tremendous importance to the Royal Family and the nation will come about near her seventh year (1937)”.

Notice the open-endedness: “tremendous importance” may fit any number of events, from the birth of a child to a marriage, a scandal, serious illness of some sort, and even suicide or murder. “Near” 1937 is as fuzzy a timeframe as it can be: one might argue that anything of royal importance happening between 1935 and 1940 would satisfy it.

In actual events, in December 1936 King Edward VIII (1894–1972) abdicated the throne to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson (1896–1986), making Margaret’s father the new king of England, George VI (1895–1952). It was the greatest scandal in the history of the British monarchy before the recent events involving former-Prince Andrew.

Here we find another staple of the astrological way to describe the future, a prophecy that is useless until after the fact it supposedly predicted. Once distilled to its core assertion – “something very important for the royal family and the nation will happen between 1935 and 1940” – the prediction becomes thin, unsubstantial, almost ethereal; the number of events that could be retrofitted to satisfy it boggles the mind. For instance, if the abdication hadn’t happened, the start of World War II in 1939 could easily have been recruited to make it “true.”

Anyway, Naylor’s knack for saying useless things that sounded like successful predictions – even when they failed – turned astrological advice into circulation steroids for newspapers. In his memoirs, the journalist Arthur Christiansen (1904–1963), who was in charge of editing Naylor’s columns, wrote that:

Naylor and his horoscopes became a power in the land. If he said that Monday was a bad day for buying, then the buyers of more than one West End store waited for the stars to become more propitious. Gradually, of course, every newspaper published a horoscope, and you paid your money and bought and sold from Monday to Friday according to which prophet you followed.

Christiansen, curiously, didn’t consider Princess Margaret’s birth chart a great triumph. Focusing on the rosy predictions for her romantic life and contrasting them with reality – the princess was impeded from marrying the man she really loved and forced into an unhappy relationship marred by scandal and infidelity – the journalist commented: “How wrong can you be!”

What Science Says About Astrology by Carlos Orsi is out on May 19th, published by Columbia University Press.

The post How a very wrong Royal horoscope put astrology on the map in Britain appeared first on The Skeptic.

As many readers will be aware, Nick was one of the most prominent figures in the world of ufology largely as a result of being in the right place at the right time. He worked as a civil servant for the Ministry of Defence from 1985 to 2006. From 1991 to 1994, he had a job in the Secretariat (Air Staff) Sec AS 2a – in other words, he worked on the “UFO desk”. He was the man responsible for investigating reports of UFOs, primarily with the aim of assessing any possible implications for national security.

The hugely successful series The X-Files first aired in 1993 so it was inevitable that Nick was often referred to as “the real-life Fox Mulder” when promoting his first book, Open Skies, Closed Minds (Pope, 1996). The subtitle of the book was, “For the First Time a Government UFO Expert Speaks Out”. I reviewed Nick’s first book for the Skeptical Inquirer (French, 1997). His second book, The Uninvited (Pope, 1997), dealt with the phenomenon of alien abduction. In 2012, he moved to America where he continued his successful media career including regular appearances on the History Channel’s series, Ancient Aliens.  His third and final book, co-authored with John Burroughs and Jim Penniston (Pope, Burroughs, & Penniston, 2014) claimed to present “the inside story” of the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident. I confess I never got around to reading that one.

It is worth remembering that investigating UFOs was only one small part of Nick’s job during his time at the MoD. And he was the only person with that responsibility. Furthermore, although Nick himself was open to the possible validity of the so-called ET-hypothesis (that is, the idea that at least some close encounters involve extraterrestrials), none of his superiors, who all had access to the same evidence that Nick did, took the idea seriously. Of course, his bestselling book, Open Skies, Closed Minds, could only be published with approval of the MoD but that should not be taken as an endorsement of the arguments presented.

Once Nick moved to the States, I did not really follow his career that closely, so I will limit myself in the rest of this piece to my memories of some of our “close encounters” prior to his move across the pond. Back in those early days, our paths crossed many times, usually in the green room of various daytime TV shows. At the time, Nick was arguing for the possibility that an alien race was secretly engaged in hostile acts directed against the human race. He subsequently distanced himself somewhat from such views but continued to argue that at least some sightings of UFOs might be indicative of extraterrestrial origins. As you might assume, my role in our shared TV experiences was to present the skeptical case against UFOs but on a personal level Nick and I got along well enough.

One of our most memorable encounters took place in 1997 in a live one-and-a-half hour debate on ITV’s Strange But True? to mark the 50^th anniversary of both the Roswell incident and the term “flying saucer” entering the English language. The programme was presented by Michael Aspel and featured Nick Pope, Timothy Good, and Stanton Friedman on the pro-UFO panel pitted against me, physicist Frank Close, and astronomer David Hughes on the skeptical panel. I found the full debate on YouTube and rewatched it before writing this piece – OMG, I looked young!

The format of the programme was a mix of actual live debate and interviews along with pre-recorded interviews and dramatic reconstructions. One of the cases featured was the Rendlesham Forest incident. My wife kindly recorded the programme so that I could watch it the next morning. I did so relaxing on the sofa, next to one of my daughters who was almost four years old at the time. As the programme presented a dramatic reconstruction of a UFO landing amongst the trees, watched by frightened US airmen, my daughter turned to me with an earnest look on her face as she informed me, “I think that is a UFO, Dad”. That was pretty cute but there is a serious point here. Such programmes are very fond of dramatic reconstructions – but they are always dramatic reconstructions of the paranormal version, never of the alternative skeptical version.

I may be biased (okay, I am biased!) but I thought our side made some good points. For example, Nick had always made a big deal of the radiation readings taken by the airmen at the alleged landing site of the UFO in Rendlesham Forest, stating that the radiation levels were “ten times normal”. Frank Close had gone to the trouble of checking with the makers of the radiation meter used by the airmen as to whether or not the radiation levels reported were of any significance. He was able to quote from their reply: “This measurement was the bottom reading of the machine and was of little or no significance at all.”

For my part, I had anticipated that the programme-makers might pick up on any UFO-related stories that had appeared in the media in the few days preceding the programme. They did. This section of the programme was introduced with the words, “Coming up, the conversation that NASA doesn’t want you to hear between two astronauts who’ve just spotted a UFO”. Wow! So there really is a massive cover-up!

To be fair, Michael Aspel did say that this particular episode had “an unexpected conclusion”. The video footage shown was supplied to the programme-makers by “an aerospace communications consultant who was monitoring NASA transmissions”. It showed NASA’s control centre at Houston. The following conversation between two experienced astronauts, Mark Lee and Steven Smith, can be heard just after they had returned to the Space Shuttle’s airlock having made some repairs to the Hubble Telescope:

Smith: What a flash…?
Lee: What’d you say Mark?
Smith: I saw a light flash … (unintelligible) … there it is again.
Lee: I thought it must have been me…
Smith: What?
Lee: I said I thought it was my imagination…
Smith: I saw it too so it’s not… There’s two of them. (Pause) There’s another one. What are they?
Lee: I think I saw lights flickering in here…
Smith: Who’d be taking pictures? (Pause) What is this? (Pause) It’s just gone past in front of us… (Pause) Further lights…
Lee: Which ones?
Smith: I lost surveillance for a second… but had ’veillance the whole time… (unintelligible) (Pause) Gone up…

At this point, an official in NASA control centre walked over to the communications console. Shortly after this, the communication is terminated.

Michael Aspel turned to Stanton Friedman to ask what he made of the video. To be fair to Stanton, he said he did not know what to make of it. I did, because I had anticipated that this might come up and had contacted renowned UFO skeptic James Oberg to ask for an explanation which he had kindly supplied. I proudly announced that I was about to solve a mystery live on air – with full acknowledgment to James Oberg of course. The astronauts were in the airlock at the time that the conversation took place. They were dozing when they noticed some LEDs on a piece of diagnostic hardware that they had brought in with them. They started musing about the lights on that box and it was those lights that they were talking about. There was only a 3-inch window in the airlock and that only offered a view of the payload bay. It would have been impossible for them to see anything at all in outer space.

At this point, Nick Pope pointed out that there are lots of videos from NASA of objects moving around outside space capsules. Nick opined that not all of these objects could be explained away as being ice crystals because some of them show objects that move, stop, and change direction. As far as Nick was concerned, they were clearly “under some sort of intelligent control”. I pointed out that astronaut Captain Ed Mitchell, who is himself a strongly pro-UFO individual, had described all alleged reports from astronauts as – and I performatively looked at my watch at this point to make sure that we were after the 9 pm watershed – “bullshit”.

Throughout the programme, viewers were invited to call in to indicate their responses to the question, “Have aliens already visited the Earth?” Over 100,000 did so. It turned out that the viewers had not found the skeptics’ arguments convincing as 92% of the viewers voted “Yes”. Or is it just possible that the sample of viewers who were prepared to devote one-and-a-half hours to watching a live debate about UFOs as their primetime Friday night viewing and to then go to the trouble of actually phoning in their responses might just have been a slightly unrepresentative sample in the first place? I guess we’ll never know.

Obviously, Nick and I knew each other’s arguments back to front. Also, Nick was unfortunate enough to look a bit like me. On more than one occasion, a TV researcher would come into the green room just prior to us going on camera and get us confused. We used to joke that he should go on as me and I should go on as him. We never actually did that on TV but we did once both take part in a Skeptics in the Pub event in London where, just for the hell of it, Nick presented the skeptical point of view and I presented the believers’ arguments. Of course, everyone in the audience was fully aware of who was who. Prior to the event I asked Nick whether he thought we should play it for laughs or play it straight. He recommended playing it straight – so I was a bit miffed when he went on after me and essentially did ten minutes of stand-up! I got my own back to some extent during the right-to-reply part of the event – not least by honestly pointing out that I had found the arguments he had presented much more convincing than those I had presented.

References

• French, C. C. (1997). An encounter with the man from the ministry: Essay review of Open Skies, Closed Minds by Nick Pope. Skeptical Inquirer, 21(1), 50-53.
• Pope, N. (1996). Open Skies, Closed Minds: For the First Time a Government UFO Expert Speaks Out. London: Simon & Schuster.
• Pope, N. (1997). The Uninvited: An Exposé of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon. London: Simon & Schuster.
• Pope, N., Burroughs, J., & Penniston, J. (2014). Encounter in Rendlesham Forest: The Inside Story of the World’s Best-Documented UFO Incident. New York: Dunne.

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That’s what intellectual honesty demands isn’t it? When you have a position and disconfirmatory evidence comes along you must reevaluate your stance. For me this is a hypothetical I suspect I will never face as regards Bigfoot. But for those believers out there who have relied on the Patterson-Gimlin Film as the greatest evidence that there is a mysterious if elusive hominid living in the wilds of North America, it seems they’re about to have to face this exact situation. 

If you’re at all interested in the Bigfoot question, then you’re already familiar with the Patterson-Gimlin Film (PGF). But for those of you who woke up this morning from a coma and your last memory was watching an episode of “In Search Of…” about Bigfoot, let me catch you up on the cumulative scientific evidence supporting the existence of these mystery apes that has been accrued in the intervening decades since 1967.

…

Now that we’re all caught up with the new and convincing evidence, let’s return to the PGF. 

Since it first was announced in 1967, the shaky, blurry footage of a furry humanoid figure with pendulous breasts walking across the open foreground of an autumn forest has become a literally iconic image of Bigfoot. Thousands of hours of consideration, speculation and attestation have coalesced around this 40 seconds of color film. It has become the nucleation point of an industry. The silhouette of frame 352 has adorned bumper stickers, air fresheners, beer, coffee, and beef jerky. I’m not saying all this to mock the commercialism, but to marvel at the conceptual penetration, its scope and sprawl. I could argue this is all “Bigfoot”, but it is more specifically the figure depicted in that film, a creature affectionately called “Patty” by Bigfoot enthusiasts.

Now this almost sacred image is going to be facing some shocking scrutiny in the face of a new documentary film from director Marq Evans that could potentially undermine the claims of authenticity that have buoyed the PGF for 60 years. The documentary debuted at the SxSW festival in Austin, Texas in March, and while the wider public may not yet be aware of what is coming, the Bigfoot enthusiast community is already fracturing into factions around the claims made in a film almost none of us have had an opportunity to see.

What we know about the documentary comes mostly from the promotional material the filmmakers have released to the public, and from the reports of people who got to see it at SxSW. In particular, Eric from “Hairy Man Road” was able to see the new documentary and he created a 30-minute reaction video where he describes what he saw and speculates that the evidence in “Capturing Bigfoot” is going to be the end of serious belief in the PGF. 
Long time Bigfoot researchers will be familiar with the research of Greg Long whose book “The Making of Bigfoot: The Inside Story” laid out the well documented case that Roger Patterson was not some amateur nature photographer who got lucky and happened to catch the best footage of the creature by accident. Long’s assertion was that Patterson was a tricky grifter and unreliable character who crafted the bigfoot suit, rented a camera to film the hoax, hired a local named Bob Heironymous to “be the guy in the suit” – and then never paid him a promised $1,000 for that work.

During the course of the new documentary, much of Long’s claims sound as if they’re confirmed. I’m being tentative with my wording here because I (and nearly all of the people vociferously commenting about this) have not had a chance to see the new documentary yet. Many of the original people involved with the PGF appear in the film, as do many Bigfoot experts, and from what I’ve seen and read, the heart of the film is the story of Rogers’ son, Clint Patterson.

In the documentary, Clint reveals that he learned a few years back that the PGF was a hoax, and when he confronted his mother about the deception and wanted to reveal the truth it fractured their relationship. The movie generated a lot of revenue when it was originally toured around the Pacific NorthWest and has continued to bring in royalties to Clint’s mom, Patricia. Facing the loss of that revenue created strains in their relationship – but according to Eric’s video, Clint and his mother reconcile. Clint also apparently gets Bob Heironymous the $1,000 his father had promised to the old Yakima resident for his work in the suit. 

Notable Bigfoot personages like Jeff Meldrum (who passed away in September 2025) appear in the film and react to the shocking evidence that is the core of the documentary. 

Over the course of the documentary’s story, director Marq Evans was contacted by a person who had a piece of film in a safe that her father had told her was important and part of the PGF story. When Marq assisted in getting the film developed, it turned out to be – apparently – another effort of Patterson trying to show Bigfoot on film, only in this clip the footage clearly shows a man in a suit – a suit which bears an undeniable similarity to the “creature” in the PGF. The authenticity of what’s on that piece of film will likely be vociferously debated, but Evans has at least confirmed the film’s stock is historically appropriate. 

Having not yet seen the film, this is all tantalising to a life-long Bigfoot enthusiast. Everything sounds like it confirms the story that Greg Long put together for his deep dive into the PGF. So many stories have been told about this film and so many people have obsessed over every frame and detail, that I’ve often described it as a Rorschach test of Bigfoot Belief. Researchers like M. K. Davis – a believer in Bigfoot – painstakingly stabilised the shaky footage and to skeptics his version is much more clearly a man in a suit. Believers see an uncanny animal like no other. 

What we’ll see when we can finally obsess over this new footage in “Capturing Bigfoot” is exciting to speculate about, and I am genuinely excited to get a chance to see (and hopefully own a copy) for myself. I’m also hoping to interview Marq on MonsterTalk when he works out his distribution plan and goes into promotion mode. 

A few weeks ago, my co-host Dr Karen Stollznow and I had a discussion about what is likely to happen next. We talked about how the revelations about the hoaxed “surgeon’s photo” impacted Nessie, and how dating and research on the shroud of Turin revealed that it was a medieval forgery. I was immediately contacted by listeners who wanted me to know that the shroud has not been disproven. 

While the revelation – if confirmed – that the PGF was hoaxed is a big deal, Bigfoot is now an entrenched part of American mythology and no film or confession will dissuade the faith of people who believe they have had experiences or interactions with Bigfoot. For skeptics, Bigfoot is a fascinating bit of monster culture perpetuated by hoaxes and pious frauds. For believers bigfoot is what religious studies professor Dr Joe Laycock would call “phenomenologically actual”. Whether it’s a natural animal or a paranormal entity, for experiencers the PGF is not a load bearing structure in the house of Bigfoot, but “Capturing Bigfoot” may end up being just as scrutinised as its more famous predecessor. 

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Von Däniken is the author(-ish) of the book “Chariots of the Gods?”, and the person most responsible for popularising that theory. Däniken’s theory covered most of the bases of skepticism – UFOs, conspiracy theories, alternative history, psychics; but ultimately his theory was pseudo-archaeology which can be summarised as: aliens did it. If, by “it” you mean an ancient structure, that is massive, and non-European, a UFO did it and not people.

He also introduced the world to memetic former bodybuilder George Tsoukalos, who you will know as the guy from the meme with the crazy hair (and I mean that in a good way) and the caption “I’m not saying it’s aliens but it’s aliens.”

This is not a dance-on-the-man’s-grave article. That’s crass, and there’s plenty of worse people for whom I’ll read an obituary with great pleasure; I write this because von Däniken is one of those people who pulled me out of my conspiracy phase, because I absolutely devoured his book when I first read it.

First, let’s talk about the man himself.

Erich von Däniken was born in Zofingen, Switzerland. He was raised Catholic, though the Church’s teachings apparently did not take, and he was arrested at the age of 19 for theft – which would begin a running pattern for his life. After his four-month suspended sentence, he moved to Egypt to work in a hotel… where he was again arrested, and convicted for fraud and embezzlement. This is where his ancient aliens theory began, which von Däniken claimed came to him in a vision. His vision became an article titled “Besuch aus dem Weltraum?” (“Were Our Ancestors Visited by Extraterrestrials?”), and eventually this would become the book “Chariots of the Gods?”.

First published in 1968 and with the infuriating punctuation that requires us to ask the title, the book was not initially a hit. In fact, it had a rough time even seeing publication. It wasn’t so much his ideas that were holding the book back, but his writing style: the book would only be published after an extensive rewrite by Wilhelm Roggersdorf. While this would normally be fine – lots of books go through intense rewrites – Roggersdorf was the pen name of Utz Utternman, the former editor of the official Nazi party newspaper “Völkischer Beobachter”. After the rewrite the book is published to a surprisingly receptive audience. By 1974 the book had topped five million sales, and by today it has sold over 70 million copies worldwide.

If a reader flips through this book they might wonder how it was that a convicted fraudster was able to travel to all of these archaeological sites for research. The prosecution on a subsequent fraud trial claimed that he was falsifying records and using the hotel’s books, that he was managing to take out personal loans, which he claims to have spent on research for his book. His defence was that the banks should have done a better job at researching before issuing the loans – which is kind of fair, but when you submit a loan application you’re not supposed to be lying about it. Nevertheless, he served one year of a three-year sentence.

In reality, there is very little evidence that he actually traveled to any of the places in his original book. Eventually he did, when the book makes him famous and wealthy, but initially the book seems to have developed from the research desk. Again, this is fine, but to say that the book was drawn from extensive research is incorrect. The book shows some severe similarities with two other works, primarily Robert Charroux’s “One Hundred Thousand Years of Man’s Unknown History.” In fact, the similarity between these two works was so intense that later editions of von Däniken’s book, where the “?” has been dropped, contain citations to Charroux’s work.

However, like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, we can’t stop at just one plagiarism. Von Däniken’s book (and possible Charroux’s) owes a lot to the fictional work “The Morning of the Magicians” by authors Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, published in 1960. This is where the tale gets interesting. Just after World War II, the French were stuck reading American Pulp magazines, because of the devastation of the war. Jason Colavito argues that one of the most popular authors for the postwar French was H.P. Lovecraft. If you were on the internet in the 00s, Lovecraft’s work enjoyed a bit of a resurgence. The two most popular tales are The Call of Chthulu and  At The Mountains of Madness; both tell of archaeological discoveries that are otherworldly in nature.  

These were fictional stories written for pulp magazines like Astounding Tales. Such stories inspired Pauwels and Bergier to write their speculative “Morning of the Magicians”, which wasn’t especially popular in France but enjoyed some popularity in Germany – so much so that a different lawsuit would place the German translation of Morning of the Magicians (Aufbruch ins dritte Jahrtausend) in later editions.

Von Däniken’s work would continue despite the lawsuits, frauds, embezzlements, and importantly his ignorance of both history and archaeology. His work also persuades William Shatner to narrate Mysteries of the Gods (based on Daniken’s Messages of the Gods). In 1973, the Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling would host the Xerox-produced documentary “In Search of Ancient Astronauts.” This episode would spawn the “In Search of…” television series hosted by Leonard Nimoy, which – in addition to widely publicising cryptozoology, conspiracy theories, and the Holy Blood, Holy Grail claims – is also the series that is very likely where your uncle got the “They used to say that the climate was cooling but now its warming?” reason to deny climate change.

The thing about von Däniken’s primary book, Chariots of the Gods?, is that it’s easy to read. You can blast through it in a short afternoon; because it’s not written for you to read it. A proper history book wants you to understand the story it’s telling — a book like von Däniken’s (and just about every conspiracy book that I’ve read) just wants you to get the gist. If you start paying attention to the book, you’ll notice that it doesn’t hold up. The book suffers from an Aristotelian Prime Mover problem: if we needed aliens to build monoliths, then someone must have taught the aliens.

There is very little evidence for von Däniken’s claims. The very best we could give him is that yes, sometimes things built in the past look impossible for us to make. They, however, only look that way, and we know that they weren’t impossible because they are there, right in front of us. The entirety of the Ancient Alien hypothesis leans so heavily on the famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” that Clarke should be considered a co-author.

The thesis is so much an argument from ignorance that we almost forget the special pleading that it involves. Special pleading is a fallacy that wants you to make a great intellectual leap first and if you do so, the rest of the argument will make sense. In this case we have to believe that ancient people did not understand what was happening around them, so they used the only reference they had – religion – to describe events.

When von Däniken points out a helicopter in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, his theory would make sense provided we are completely ignorant of hieroglyphics’ meaning (in this case the pharaohs Seti I and Ramesses II). The people of ancient Egypt just made those words up for helicopter apparently. When the Hindu Mahabharata mentions flying chariots, they can only mean spaceships. And then there is my favorite example, when the god of the Old Testament destroys Sodom, of which von Däniken writes:

Admittedly these are awkward questions about a serious matter. But since the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, we know the kind of damage such bombs cause and that living creatures exposed to direct radiation die or become incurably ill. Let us imagine for a moment that Sodom and Gomorrha were destroyed according to plan, i.e. deliberately, by a nuclear explosion. Perhaps—let us speculate a little further—the ‘angels’ simply wanted to destroy some dangerous fissionable material and at the same time to make sure of wiping out a human brood they found unpleasant. The time for the destruction was fixed. Those who were to escape it—such as the Lot family—had to stay a few miles from the centre of the explosion in the mountains, for the rock faces would naturally absorb the powerful dangerous rays. And—we all know the story—Lot’s wife turned round and looked straight at the atomic sun. Nowadays no one is surprised that she fell dead on the spot. ‘Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrha brimstone and fire…’

Chariot of the Gods?, page 35

Take a look at that excerpt once again. He’s using so many weasel words that we should call it a boogle (I had to look that up). Every claim that he makes is a ‘maybe’ or an assumption; he tells us to “imagine” that what he is saying is the truth. The evidence for this story, even Biblically, is spurious, but we do know that ancient cities come and go (looking at you, Troy), while evidence for nuclear detonation lasts for millennia.

Perhaps in the 1960s we might forgive von Däniken for some of his ignorance, because today we know roughly how all of his examples were constructed. It turns out the Great Pyramids were built by laborers paid in beer, Stonehenge was built with leverage and sleds, and the Aztec ziggurats were built with labour. It turns out that if you have enough people and a little ingenuity, you can build a great many things. von Däniken would agree… provided you were European.

One of the most popular criticisms of von Däniken has been the racism implicit in his theory. It’s not just a little thing either, because von Däniken goes out of his way to choose examples from every culture not European. The Egyptians, the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Rapa Nui all needed starship help, while the Romans and the Greeks did not. Europe’s ancient world does not lack monoliths, but for some reason von Däniken ignores them.

This is despite how easily some of these monoliths fit into his theory. The Parthenon, the most famous of the temples of the Acropolis of Athens, for example: the entire design seemingly reflects a mathematical relationship that would have been cutting edge for the Greeks but, more importantly, the columns have a slightly inward inclination that if we drew a straight line from the tops of them would meet a point 1.5 miles in the air. My example here is no different than the Peruvian Nazca lines that, according to him, only make sense from the air (or the large, elevated hill right near the Nazca plain), yet Greeks could do it while the Peruvians could not.

Apologists like to hem and haw about knowledge base, and maybe that would be a good point if von Däniken didn’t continue: in Sign of the Gods (1979) he asks:

The evolutionists say that man descends from monkeys. Yet who has ever seen a white monkey? Or a dark ape with curly hair such as the black race has? … Was the black race a failure and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or a yellow race?

Which is followed by the tired “I’m just asking questions” defence. It becomes rather obvious why he thinks that Romans can build aqueducts, but Egyptians can’t build triangles.

Von Däniken’s book pulled me out of conspiracy theories because it is only compelling as long as you never look anything about the subject up. Ever. In the 1960s there was no Wikipedia, but there were archaeologists like David Soren who were extremely dismissive of von Däniken’s work, and scientists like Carl Sagan who would write the preface to a thorough debunking of Chariots called “The Space Gods Revealed”:

That writing as careless as Von Däniken’s, whose principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober commentary on the credulousness and despair of our times. But the idea that beings from elsewhere will save us from ourselves is a very dangerous doctrine—akin to that of a quack doctor whose ministration prevent the patient from seeing a physician competent to help him and perhaps cure his disease.

It’s not just a goofball theory with no effects. The belief in the theory that von Däniken made popular not only promotes a racist view of the past, and it not only denies the ingenuity of the ancient people, but it also prevents us from understanding our history and our future.

With thanks to editor of The Skeptic, Michael Marshall, for assistance with some of the biographical details.

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Every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain. And I naturally go, when I hear about sort of extra-natural phenomenon, that’s where I go, is the Christian understanding that, you know, there’s a lot of good out there, but there’s also some evil out there.

Last year, Marjorie Taylor Greene went on Bill Maher’s show and affirmed that she believes in demons and that extraterrestrials could in fact be “fallen angels” cast out of heaven. What began as a conversation about UFO secrecy ended with Greene suggesting UFO entities might literally be demonic, leaving Maher visibly taken aback. These are not fringe pastors saying this on late‑night AM radio; these are well‑connected Republican politicians speaking in front of large national audiences.

Folklorists and anthropologists have long known how this kind of reasoning works. Marshall Sahlins famously argued that Hawaiians made sense of Captain Cook’s sudden arrival in 1778 by folding him into their existing ritual and mythic framework, identifying him with the god Lono because his timing coincided with a festival cycle devoted to that deity. Sahlins called this broader pattern ‘mythopraxis’: people use myths not just as stories about the past, but as active templates for interpreting and organising new historical events in the present. Mythopraxis is myth‑in‑action, a way of taking puzzling novelties and domesticating them by slotting them into familiar sacred scripts.

Sahlins’s thesis has sparked heated academic debate, with many scholars doubting that Hawaiians ever truly regarded Cook as Lono. Yet even if we acknowledge this dispute, the underlying idea remains anthropologically useful: communities often ‘recognise’ the unprecedented by assimilating it into what their symbolic universe already provides. In that sense, Vance is doing something structurally similar when he encounters reports of UFOs and “naturally” classifies them through pre‑existing Christian demonology.

This lens also illuminates the psychology of alien abduction and encounter reports. Scholars of religion and anomalous experience have long noticed the overlap between nightmarish encounters with demons and modern accounts of hostile extraterrestrials: beings who paralyse, violate, or terrorise sleepers, who seem to cross physical and spiritual boundaries, and who leave the experiencer both shaken and oddly certain something ‘really’ happened.

Historically, Western Christians spoke of incubi and succubi; in a more secular, technological age, the same broad phenomenology has often been reframed as grey aliens and abduction narratives. In all of these cases, hallucinations, hypnagogic imagery, and sleep paralysis loom as plausible mechanisms, but the interpretive frame – demon or alien – does the cultural work of making sense of the terror.

Joseph Laycock and Eric Harrelson argue in their book, The Exorcist Effect, that horror films and religious belief now interact in a recursive loop. The 1973 film The Exorcist, marketed as “based on a true story,” both drew on existing Catholic demonology and, in turn, reshaped how Americans imagined and even experienced demonic possession; cinematic tropes migrated into actual exorcism claims and practices. Laycock and Harrelson call this the “Exorcist effect”: religious ideas inspire horror media, and then horror media feeds back to intensify and standardise later religious experiences.

If we map that cycle onto Vance’s comments, things look even more tangled. Obsessions with demons are hardly new, but The Exorcist and its imitators have given contemporary believers a vivid, Hollywood‑inflected vocabulary for thinking about evil spirits. That visual and narrative repertoire can then be extended outward: once we have a ready‑made script about invisible malevolent forces invading bodies, it becomes easy to project it onto any ‘uncharted territory’, from psychological distress to unidentified aerial phenomena. Yet demons, at least in classical theology, are immaterial spirits that can move between bodies; Vance, by contrast, talks as if these entities might be fully corporeal, sky‑travelling agents that behave like aliens but are ontologically demonic. Logical consistency is not the point here; the point is to impose some narrative order on what feels mysterious and threatening.

From a human perspective, this is all understandable. Faced with ambiguous stimuli – lights in the sky, strange dreams, historical shocks – people reach for the interpretive tools their culture hands them. But with possible extraterrestrial life, the stakes are unusually high, and Vance is not just any other human being. He is the vice president of what is still the most militarily powerful nation on Earth, and he helps shape both intelligence priorities and public expectations regarding potential contact. The United States formally enshrines a separation of church and state, but when a sitting vice president publicly frames ambiguous aerial phenomena as demonic, the line between personal theology and potential policy framing begins to blur.

This rhetoric sits inside a wider MAGA subculture that is fascinated by the Devil, apocalyptic imagery, and end‑times scenarios. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, speaking from a very different social location, has given lectures warning of a coming Antichrist, presenting the twenty‑first century as a choice between a deceptive, peace‑promising “one‑world state” and an Armageddon‑style collapse. We do not know how literally Thiel himself takes such eschatology, but Vance’s comments sound far more literal: he appears genuinely inclined to parse anomalous aerial phenomena as the activity of evil spirits masquerading as aliens.

If extraterrestrial civilisations exist – a very large ‘if’ – we would need a cautious, level‑headed approach. The rational starting point would be diplomacy and information‑gathering, especially if the technological asymmetry many people fear actually exists. Framing hypothetical visitors as embodiments of absolute evil is a poor basis for first contact; at best, it distorts risk assessment, and at worst, it primes a self‑destructive crusade against entities we barely understand. The history of human conflict offers endless examples of how demonising the Other leads to catastrophic miscalculation long before any literal demon appears on the scene.

One might also ask: why must Vance assume such beings, if they exist, are demons? Why not angels, or something morally mixed or neutral? Erich von Däniken and the “ancient astronauts” crowd are guilty of spectacularly bad (and possibly racist) history and archaeology, but at least they entertain the idea that advanced nonhuman intelligences could be benevolent or civilising forces.

Contemporary disclosure‑style documentaries such as The Age of Disclosure – however dubious in their evidentiary standards – also float the possibility that UFOs might be engaged in non‑hostile nuclear ‘safeguarding’, allegedly interfering with weapons systems to prevent human self‑annihilation. These scenarios are wildly speculative, and skeptics would be wise to treat them with a very large pinch of salt, yet they still underscore how underdetermined the data are: demonology is hardly the only symbolic toolkit available.

The pattern in Vance’s choice of frame points back to something deeper in the MAGA imagination. Within that movement, the Other is rarely just different; the Other is frequently coded as evil, a node in a cosmic war of good vs evil, rather than a fellow citizen or interlocutor. Historian Elaine Pagels shows in her seminal 1995 book The Origin of Satan that the figure of the Devil in Jewish and Christian traditions gradually crystallised as a way to name, structure, and morally charge human enemies, turning social opponents into representatives of a cosmic adversary. Read in this light, Vance’s demon talk is less a literal ufological theory than a cue about who, in his worldview, belongs on the wrong side of a cosmic struggle: not only hypothetical little green men, but anyone who falls outside the white Christian demographic template that anchors his base.

For skeptics, the task is not to swap Vance’s demonology for some rival mythology about benevolent “space brothers,” but to keep track of how all such stories arise from very human needs to tame ambiguity and threat. A critical outlook asks first about evidence, psychology, and cultural script before promoting any grand narrative – supernatural or extraterrestrial – as fact. That same outlook should also insist that public policy, especially on matters as consequential and uncertain as UFOs and possible contact, be grounded in shared reasons and empirical warrants, not in the private metaphysics of leaders who see every unknown as one more front in a cosmic war.

The post Why aliens look like demons to US Vice President JD Vance appeared first on The Skeptic.

Nevertheless, that shared love of the supernatural led to them founding the New England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR) in 1952, the oldest ghost-hunting group in America. They were barely 26, yet Ed was already describing himself as a self-taught demonologist, and Lorraine a ‘light trance medium’ who could go into a semi-trance-like state to communicate with the dead, while retaining all memory of what she had said and done. From these simple origins, many highly questionable legends would be born.

In 1970, the NESPR was contacted by a 28-year-old student nurse named Donna from Hartford, Connecticut, who feared her Raggedy Ann doll, ‘Annabelle’, was haunted. According to Donna – or at least according to what the Warrens claim Donna said – Annabelle could move by herself, and had violently tendencies. Donna had a roommate called Angie, who had a fiancé called Lou (just ‘Lou’ – those looking for further identifying information that could be used to corroborate the tale will be disappointed). Annabelle, we’re told, disliked Lou, and one night Lou woke to see the doll at the end of his bed, climbing slowly up his body until it made its way to his neck, at which point it strangled him until he blacked out.

Or so Lou told Angie, who told Donna, who told the Warrens, who sold the story to the newspapers. The morning after the attack, Lou checked his neck for marks, and there were none – which the Warrens claimed was evidence that the attack was definitely supernatural.

Ever-willing to lend a helping hand when it comes to indulging someone’s paranoia in a way that could be turned into lucrative publicity, Ed and Lorraine took Annabelle from Donna, concluding that it was indeed possessed by an actual demon. Staying in the Warrens’ possession for decades, Annabelle continued to show her malicious streak. Years later, one young man (no name, no identifiable information) visited the Warrens’ Occult Museum and made fun of Annabelle, pulling silly faces at the demonic doll – on the way home, he lost control of his motorbike, hitting a tree and dying on impact. At least, according to the Warrens.

There may be other context, which the Warrens avoided disclosing, in the Annabelle doll affair: in 1963, The Twilight Zone aired an episode titled ‘Living Doll’, in which a child’s toy became possessed by an evil spirit, causing it to take revenge on a little girl… and her mother, Annabelle. Had the Warrens drawn inspiration from fiction for their demonic tales? If they had, they neglected to mention it in the 1980 book The Demonologist, an exclusive telling of the Warrens’ stories.

The Harrisville Haunting

In 1971, Roger and Carolyn Perron and their young family moved into their new 200-acre home in Harrisville, Rhode Island. Shortly after the move, the children claimed to see spirits inhabiting the house, whom they claim caused items to go missing. Clearly, there was only one possible explanation: witch ghosts. Specifically, the ghost of Bathsheba Sherman, who had lived there in the early 19th century with her four children, three of whom died mysteriously before the age of seven. Bathsheba’s tragedy seemed suspicious to her superstitious community, and they labelled her a satanist who had sacrificed her own children with a knitting needle, though there wasn’t enough evidence to convict her in court.

A friend of Carolyn Perron contacted Ed and Lorraine Warren, who turned up to the house to investigate, with Lorraine confidently asserting that the haunting was a dark presence named Bathsheba, who had indeed sacrificed her children to Lucifer before hanging herself and cursing anyone who would move into the property. Had Lorraine’s psychic powers connected her with a ghost? Or had she merely researched the house in advance, finding the name of a past inhabitant whose tragic story was at least enough of a local scandal as to end up in an unsuccessful criminal case, and a matter of public record?

Speaking to the Providence Journal in 2013, to coincide with the release of The Conjuring – the Hollywood movie based on the Warrens’ account of what took place in that house, on which Lorraine served as a consultant – Lorraine explained that her biggest concern about the Harrisville haunting wasn’t so much the dead witch and the spooky events, but the family’s lack of religious faith. “At that particular time, the people did not have religion,” she said. “It was very dangerous.”

She also explained that, while in one of her light trances in the house, she saw “the most grotesque thing [she had] ever seen in [her] life,” which she managed to dispel by shouting at it to “go away in the name of God” – which was further evidence of her psychic gifts, because nobody else present could see anything there at all.

Amityville

From then on, if something spooky happened in the New England region, the Warrens were there to validate it. In 1975, George and Kathy Lutz moved into a new house on the south shore of Long Island, New York, in a suburban neighbourhood called Amityville. Less than a year earlier, the house had been the scene of a multiple murder, with Ronnie DeFeo killing a young family in their sleep – something the family had been aware of when they bought the house.

Within days of moving in, the Lutz family claim to have noticed odd phenomena. There were “odours that came and went”, and the house would make sounds in the middle of the night. Doors were ripped from their hinges. Sometimes, rooms were unexpectedly cold. If that wasn’t enough to justify media attention, Lutz claimed there were a few occasions when he saw his wife physically transformed into an old woman, with the face, hair and wrinkles of a 90-year-old.

One night, according to Lutz, he heard his children’s beds “slamming up and down on the floor” above him, but he couldn’t get up to help, because he felt pinned down by an unseen force. When he looked across the room, he claimed, his wife was levitating and moving across the bed.

The family left the house the next morning, just 28 days after they moved in. A day later, a removal man arrived to move their furniture out of the house, but he saw nothing at all paranormal.

A month later, Ed and Lorraine turned up to investigate… along with a film crew from the TV station Channel 5 New York. Unsurprisingly, they concluded it really was the work of malevolent spirits, despite other investigators concluding that the whole story was a hoax, and despite a litany of evidence that disproved the account given by the Lutzes. None of which prevented the Lutz family from selling the book and movie rights to their story, and touring TV talk shows with their tale. For their part, the Warrens span their fleeting involvement with the story into The Conjuring 2, released in 2016.

The Enfield poltergeist

Their supernatural tourism and exploitation wasn’t limited to New England – they even made it over to regular England, too. In 1977, they arrived at an unassuming semi-detached council house in Enfield, North London, amid reports of poltergeist activity.

According to the young sisters of the family, Janet and Margaret Hodgson, the house was plagued by disembodied voices, loud noises, thrown toys, and overturned chairs – and if all of that sounded like the work of attention-starved children, how are we to explain the photographic proof of Janet levitating above her bed?

The Warrens were persuaded that this was definitely a case of “demonic possession”. More skeptical investigators on the scene pointed out that the photos looked an awful lot like a young child jumping off her bed. The same investigators pointed out that the Warrens came to their demonic conclusion rather hastily, soon after highlighting how the story could be a lucrative source of income, were it told correctly. When the other investigators were reluctant to play ball, the Warrens left Enfield, though an exaggerated version of their involvement in the case was adapted into The Conjuring 2.

10,000 cases

In 1981, when Arne Cheyenne Johnson was accused of killing his landlord, Ed and Lorraine popped into the case to claim the killing was a result of Johnson being possessed by a demon. The judge threw out his attempt to plead Not Guilty by Reason of Demonic Possession… but that didn’t stop the Warrens’ version of events becoming the plot of the 1983 book The Devil in Connecticut, and the 2021 film The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.

1983 was also the year that the couple investigated a “werewolf demon” possessing a man called Bill Ramsey – who, unlike traditional werewolves, didn’t transform into a giant man-wolf, but merely became more aggressive and sometimes bit people, before he was successfully exorcised by the Warrens. However, the lack of photo or video evidence has called this claim into question.

In more than four decades of work, Ed and Lorraine claimed to have investigated more than 10,000 cases – though, of course, there is a lack of corroborating evidence for that claim, too. There is no real evidence for any of their conclusions in the alleged paranormal cases they inserted themselves into throughout their careers, yet it was hard to find someone with a spooky story that the Warrens’ wouldn’t validate as genuinely demonic – especially if they could use it for publicity.

Ed died in 2006, and Lorraine in 2019, but their place in paranormal history and myth-making has been well and truly cemented, not least thanks to the work of a string of Hollywood spook stories that claim to be based on the real-life cases Ed and Lorraine investigated – but, crucially, primarily relying on their own self-serving accounts.

When the first of those films, The Conjuring, was released in 2013, USA Today spoke to Steve Novella, who was president of the New England Skeptical Society and who actually met and investigated the Warrens. Novella said at the time: “The Warrens are good at telling ghost stories. You could do a lot of movies based on the stories they have spun. But there’s absolutely no reason to believe there is any legitimacy to them.”

It seems like Hollywood was listening to at least the first half of that, releasing nine films in a cinematic universe following The Conjuring. But for all of the remarkable deeds attributed to Ed and Lorraine, the only thing they actually managed to conjure was a lasting legacy as paranormal pioneers, pieced together from exaggerations, falsehoods, and awkward cameos in other people’s tragedies.

The post Ed and Lorraine Warren: past masters of paranormal self-promotion appeared first on The Skeptic.

Contrast this with another UFO landing case from Voronezh, Russia, a few years earlier on 27th September 1989, where dozens of children in a similarly little-known location apparently saw a landed UFO, from which an awkward looking three-eyed robot emerged and zapped a boy, making him disappear. Even with this science fiction-sounding detail, this story was widely reported as genuine, making the front-page of two dozen newspapers around the world. The Ariel School encounter made no such headlines. It didn’t even feature in “It’s a weird, weird world” – the regular column dedicated to bizarre stories in The Herald, Zimbabwe’s largest newspaper.

This may have been because its most fantastic claim – that aliens with big black eyes communicated a telepathic warning about technology and pollution to the children – took time to emerge. It only appeared months later, after many interviews, when some of the children were questioned by Dr John Mack from Harvard University.

To this day, the case remains a favourite among UFO enthusiasts, who see these compelling interviews with the children as proof of the reality of alien visitation. Online, a new generation of visualisations has arrived: mostly AI slop renderings of archetypal silver flying saucers and the now ubiquitous “skinny bob” version of the alien “grey.” None, however, include depictions of a plump man that looked like a hippy, a man with long black hair, a man with a band around his head, or of a black and green striped UFO – all of which are details reported at the time but which are now studiously ignored, presumably because they don’t sound alien enough.

While the central claim – that aliens actually visited Earth in a UFO – is essentially impossible to falsify given there is only eyewitness testimony from a fraction of those present (around 60 out of 250 children, and much of it contradictory), the Ariel School story contains three separate, more concrete claims. To this day, these other claims still determine how the story is retold, but by looking at the available media of the time they are easier to examine and address:

• Claim 1. Two days prior an alien spacecraft was seen arriving in the skies over Southern Africa.
• Claim 2. The Ariel children had no prior exposure to UFO pop culture or alien lore.
• Claim 3. Related to this is the claim that the message warning about technology and environmentalism they received could only have come from aliens.

Claim 1: The earlier sighting

The mystery of Ariel School begins two days earlier, with the atmospheric re-entry of a Russian rocket-body that occurred on Wednesday 14th September, 1994. Witnessed by thousands “from Zaire to Johannesburg,” some reported a soundless object flying in an arc, others claimed to see a craft with windows, while still others believed a large alien mothership was accompanied by several smaller craft (the debris).

Local journalists and UFO investigators had heard about the Russian launch of Kosmos 2290, but couldn’t explain why a rocket part that typically stays in orbit would come back down after 18 days – so instead, thought it was an alien spacecraft.

However, this kind of thing had occurred before. On 10th March 1983, a very similar event involving the same second stage part of a Russian rocket that was also used to place a spy satellite into orbit (Kosmos 1444) burned up in the skies over Arkansas and Mississippi. In orbit for eight days, it was seen re-entering at a similar time of just after 8pm. Witnesses stopped their cars on the highway to gaze at the spectacle, and a similar degree of misperception occurred. One witness described it as coming down slowly and then accelerating away at high speed. Prompt reporting of the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s identification of the object as man-made drew a line under further speculation about an alien invasion, and a UFO flap was averted.

However, the news in Zimbabwe didn’t operate so efficiently. The UK’s The Daily Telegraph (on the morning of 16th September 1994 – before the Ariel School event had even occurred), and ITN’s space correspondent and founder of the venerated Kettering Group, Geoffrey Perry, confirmed: “UFO was rocket”. Yet, it took a full three weeks for The Herald to publish a vaguely worded follow-up report that what was seen in the skies over Southern Africa was the same kind of school bus-sized rocket body re-entering the atmosphere – and not an alien mothership. This was far too late. A UFO flap had already begun. The mystery event at Ariel School had taken place, and breathless television interviews with the children had followed.

Claims 2 & 3: Innocence of UFO culture, warnings about technology, and pollution

A persistent myth regarding this event is that the children attending Ariel School, located in the suburbs of Harare, existed in a bubble untainted by pop culture influences. Again, Cynthia Hind, the first ufologist to go to Ariel School, offered her opinion:

Now the people in Africa don’t have television. They might have a radio, but I can tell you the media don’t deal with UFOs there.

Which seems an odd thing to say, given that “the media” had just spent several days wondering if a rocket re-entry was the arrival of an alien spacecraft. After the children drew pictures of the UFO and aliens they’d seen, Hind also claimed:

They drew in their drawings many things that I don’t think they could know about.

These just seem like silly fibs, but what’s sillier is that in thirty years no one seems to have bothered to check if there’s any evidence to counter this claim, seemingly accepting that the media available to the kids is somehow lost to time.

Cynthia Hind, who lived in Zimbabwe, had also undercut her own assertion that the media didn’t deal with UFOs when on 20th April, 1994, The Herald published an article she had penned, with the headline: “UFO – It’s no longer a question of ‘are we being visited?’”. In it, she expressed her certainty of alien visitation and outlined the main elements of the alien “abduction syndrome.”

She also mentioned that the film UFOs: Miracle of the Unknown had recently aired on television. This hour and a half movie contains authoritative-sounding assertions of the reality of flying saucers, includes Erich von Däniken’s ancient alien claims, George Adamski’s alleged alien contact, and a telepathically-received warning that humans should stop their development of nuclear weapons, as well as numerous photos of silvery flying saucers – such as the classic hoax image created by Billy Meier, later used in the famous “I Want to Believe” poster seen in The X-Files.

The expensive fee-paying Ariel School with tennis courts and a swimming pool was attended by the children of families with means. Television was a part of their lives, and programming schedules of the day are evidence that even without access to relatively new satellite television, the two terrestrial Zimbabwe Broadcasting Channels (ZBC 1 and 2 – which often only ran from mid-afternoon to “close” around midnight; remember when TV closed for the evening?), aired content indistinguishable from that available to children living in say, Manchester, England.

“TV” consisted of shows imported from Canada, the UK, US, Japan, and Australia: Jeeves and Wooster, Allo Allo, Teenage Mutant Turtles, The Benny Hill Show, MacGyver, The A Team, Miami Vice, Neighbours, and The Fresh Prince of Bell Air – as well as the globally dominant The Oprah Winfrey Show. There was also plenty of Science Fiction: Star Trek, The Empire Strikes Back, Ewoks (cartoon), Voltron, The Twilight Zone and Gerry and Silvia Anderson’s UFO (the opening sequence of which included a silvery UFO landed among some trees, firing off a green laser).

Broadcast in the months prior to the Ariel school event, there were several programs that, in one way or another, dealt with the popular theme of aliens and what they would make of human life should they arrive here.

Shows such as ALF the “Alien Life Form” – a hairy being who crash lands in California and is taken in by a loving family (his homeworld having been destroyed by nuclear war). The Boy from Andromeda was a children’s sci-fi film from New Zealand, in which a large-headed grey alien in a tight-fitting silvery suit arrives on Earth from his dying planet. “We put too much trust in computers; now the computers are against us,” he says – foreshadowing one Ariel pupil’s claim that the aliens told her telepathically that “we mustn’t get too technologed (sic).”

There was also The Cat from Outer Space– a light-hearted Disney movie where a dome-shaped flying saucer with landing gear arrives. Its occupant is an alien in the form of a domestic cat which communicates telepathically and exercises telekinetic powers. Hard Time on Planet Earth featured an alien military commander (Martin Kove), sent to Earth as punishment to spend time in a weakened human form, where he learns about human culture from watching TV, and uses his residual alien powers to help people.

In Starcrossed (1985), a humanoid alien woman escapes her homeworld pursued by “men in black” type characters; she also learns about human culture from watching TV, falls in love with an earthling (James Spader), communicates with him telepathically, and has telekinetic powers. In one scene she’s shown with half her face painted grey with large dark eye make-up, just like a grey alien.

Also popular was Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left – an Australian children’s sci-fi series following aliens on the run from their home planet who have to disguise themselves as a human family. It includes a motif of children joining hands and communicating telepathically with an orbiting spaceship to manifest physical objects (two Ariel girls claim to have held hands before seeing an alien being materialise right in front of them). Delta Space Mission was a Romanian cartoon movie (aired the same afternoon as the Ariel sighting) involving a female alien with blue/green skin, large almond-shaped eyes, and various depictions of spacecraft.

What seems obvious from just this sample of UFO-related shows is that the means of alien travel, how they communicated by thought alone, their struggles to empathise and learn about human nature, and what message they brought, were all thoroughly understood, and regularly featured on available TV at the time. It’s also clear that some of the children, when asked to draw the UFO they had seen, drew their favourite UFO from TV. And, when asked to imagine how the aliens feel, provided responses like one girl who said “I think that in space there is no love and down here there is.”

While ufologists claim their drawings are identical, some drawings resemble the silver, domed craft with green-tinted windows from The Cat from Outer Space; others, the silvery object with circles around its rim from Gerry Anderson’s UFO; while others resemble the orb-like spaceships in Delta Space Mission. There was even the classic oval saucer with tripod landing gear that was an image so deeply embedded in our culture that it also appeared in a playful advertisement for a clothing store named United Factory Outlet (U.F.O.) on the front page of The Herald newspaper.

If ecology and environmentalism wasn’t already a subtext linking these shows, there were also several programs that dealt with the topic explicitly. A Nuclear Free Pacific (1988), a film about nuclear proliferation, aired the day after the event at Ariel School – it opens with images of a bomb exploding. Earth Journal with Dr Richard Leakey was a series about agricultural heritage, recycling, and conservation. Each episode ended with “Earth Tips”: ways that viewers can help the environment.

Then there was Captain Planet, (sing it with me) “he’s our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero… he’s our powers magnified and he’s fighting on the planet’s side”. The cartoon here offered similar instruction to budding “Planeteeers.” Compare that to the claim from one boy at Ariel, who told John Mack that the aliens were trying to tell us “something that’s going to happen,” a warning about “pollution or something.”

The “Intruders” influence

Most significant to the core claims that telepathic aliens with big heads and large black eyes emerged ‘out of nowhere’ at this one strange event at the Ariel School is the broadcast of the CBS miniseries Intruders. Shown at 8:40pm on 28th February, 1994 – just six months before the disturbance at Ariel School – this intensely emotional dramatisation of real-life claims of alien abduction included harrowing visualisations of women being captured by beings who slip through the walls of their homes, only to have alien implants inserted and removed, while being experimented on under eerie blue lights by grotesque alien surgeons. Practical special effects include models of terrifying “greys” with awkward bulbous heads and large glistening black eyes, who communicate telepathically with their captives.

Long after the event at Ariel School, we see evidence that the details of this show had reached the children. One girl, interviewed in 1996, tells Dutch investigator Tineke de Nooij: “I dreamed that the same one [alie] I saw without hair, he came into my bedroom and he took me from my bed”. Another girl describes how she’d heard how “I heard this lady on TV [and] she said this lady got kidnapped and she had babies that were aliens.” These are all specific plot details from the CBS show.

It just so happens that Intruders was based on real claims of alien abduction. The principal character, a psychologist (played by Richard Crenna) was based upon Dr John Mack – the same John Mack who would later interview the children at Ariel School and coincidentally “discover” that they, too, had encountered aliens with large black eyes who telepathically communicated a warning about ecological catastrophe.

Parents of the Ariel pupils may have watched the series and known about its connection with Dr Mack. They may also have seen him discussing his book on alien abduction on Oprah Winfrey’s show in April that year, two months after Intruders aired on local television in Zimbabwe. At least one newspaper article in The Herald, 5th July, 1994, was published that described Mack’s work, and its controversies. This might explain why out of a claimed 62 witnesses, only 12 children sat for the intense interviews with Mack when he arrived at their school in November that year (and out of those twelve the public has only seen snippets of nine of the children’s remarks).

What the children saw and heard is still the subject for speculation (and I’ve done my fair share). There were enough witness interviews, albeit conflicting in their detail, to be reasonably sure that there was a physical, non-imaginary stimulus for the disturbance at the school. How that stimulus was interpreted and relayed by the children remains woefully unexplored especially among ufologists, who consider a landed UFO and aliens with shape-shifting abilities as the only possible explanation for the wide variation in testimony, and who choose to ignore the media context of the moment.

While it may not have become “the biggest story of the 20th century” it seems on-track to become the most frequently mistold of the 21st. It all began with some poor journalism that conflated the rocket re-entry event with the disturbance at the school, and was made worse by attempts to minimise the effect of the children’s exposure to pop UFO culture or their awareness of environmental catastrophising.

Note: television schedules were reviewed on microfilm at the British Library. While I have images of each page it’s currently not possible to obtain high-resolution scans of the whole pages, only photos of the monitors. That feature has not yet been restored to users since the recent cyberattack.

The post The influence of sci-fi media on Zimbabwe’s Ariel School UFO sightings appeared first on The Skeptic.

In my book Ghosts (2021), I included two first-hand accounts of alleged ghostly experiences, each involving eight people: one in the Crosby/Seaforth district of Liverpool in 1944, and the other at Guisborough Priory in North Yorkshire in 1967. However, the prize – if indeed there was a prize – for the greatest alleged ghost sighting must go to the one discussed by Alan Murdie in his article ‘Spectres of the Stage’ in the magazine Fortean Times.

Alan discusses Nick Bromley’s book Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres (LDP Books, 2021), which features a report of the Grey Lady of the Theatre Royal, Bath, who apparently appeared on stage in the middle of the play The Dame of Sark on 23^rd August 1975. According to the reports, the ghost appeared next to the actress Anna Neagle and four other cast members, and was witnessed by over 850 people, including the audience.

Alan comments: “The experience was apparently a collective one, though one might wish for more corroboration on this claimed aspect.” I couldn’t agree more.

So, I lost no time in ordering Nick Bromley’s book direct from his website, very reasonably priced at £9.99 plus postage. While I waited for the book to arrive I googled this apparent mass ghost sighting, wondering why I had never heard of it before, and thinking that a collective experience such as this must have been repeated on many websites.

Well, it wasn’t.

I found two very brief accounts of the mass sighting on the websites Reddit and Tolino. The latter contains a PDF version of the book Supernatural England (Countryside Books, 2002) edited by Betty Puttick, which includes the line: “…and Dame Anna Neagle and the cast of The Dame of Sark, saw her in August 1975″, though it contains no further details, nor does it mention the 850 alleged witnesses in the audience.

There was another online mention of Dame Anna Neagle’s sighting, which was detailed in a book about the paranormal experiences of actors, written by Michael Munn. I ordered a copy of that and several more books which may help me in my research.

When I received Nick Bromley’s book, I quickly turned to the two-page section detailing the mass eyewitness ghost sighting. It stated that two Canadian girls in the audience saw the ghostly figure in the box in the dress circle during the interval, which then faded away as the curtain came up for Act Two, then re-appeared on stage. At which point Dame Anna stood stock still and the other four actors ran off the stage. One of the Canadian girls in the audience is said to have screamed and fainted, and people in the auditorium were scrambling over their seats to escape. The author concluded the account by saying that “…the indomitable Dame (Anna Neagle) completed the week’s run (of the show) but was never to play Bath again.”

I also bought Malcolm Cadey’s book Paranormal Bath (Amberley Publishing, 2010) which I found to be an odd book. As one of the online reviewers had noted, the book is billed as being about the ghosts of Bath, but after a lengthy introduction, preface and prologue, pages 19 to 93 are exclusively about the ghosts of the Theatre Royal, with short accounts from other haunted locations in the city compressed into pages 93 to 97.

That suited me just fine. If the book was mainly about the Theatre Royal, then surely an account of the mass sighting would be included in the book – which it was, and in greater detail. It states that an unnamed actor delivered his last line in Act One, then exited the stage, complaining to the stage manager about how a member of the audience had put him off his performance by standing up in the dress circle box and walking off, while being dressed rather oddly, with a noticeable feather plume in her hat.

The stage manager made enquiries, but no one was found of that description. He noticed two girls in the audience – the ‘Canadian girls’ as described in Nick Bromley’s book – who were signalling something to him, but he didn’t understand what they wanted, so he hurried backstage again in time for the start of Act Two.

Malcolm Cadey further recounts the appearance of the Grey Lady onstage, much as Nick Bromley describes it, but adds that one of the Canadian girls screamed and fainted, and had to be carried out on a stretcher by members of St John’s Ambulance. He also added that four of the actors ran offstage, and refused to set foot in the theatre again, later sending someone to pick up their belongings. To replace the actors who walked out, Cadey writes:

Understudies were hurriedly instated and Anna Neagle, being the trouper that she was, stuck it out for the rest of the week. However, she swore that she would never set foot in the Theatre again. She kept to her word; if she came back on circuit she stayed in the hotel and understudies played her part.

The author concludes: “The Grey Lady (appeared) in view of 857 witnesses. How many witnesses do you need to prove a sighting?”

The website Theatricalia details the whole cast and crew of the production of The Dame of Sark at the Theatre Royal in Bath, stating that the play was on tour in theatres around the country, and it ran at this location between 18^th to 30^th August 1975. As far as I can see, there were no cast changes when the play transferred in the following week to the Theatre Royal in Brighton, which ran from 1^st September to 6^th September 1975.

I thought it strange that both books had included so much detail, but not the names of the actors who fled the stage and refused to appear there again. The same website included the names of the four actors: Alan Gifford, Ian Liston, Alister Cameron and Nicholas Loukes. I searched their online career biographies and added the term ‘ghost’ next to their names, but found nothing.

In fact, I searched online for the whole of the cast and crew detailed on the Theatricalia website and found that the vast majority are now either deceased or untraceable. The exception, however, was the producer of the play, Ray Cooney – a celebrated playwright himself – who was detailed in the programme for the night’s performance with the words ‘Presented by Ray Cooney.’

When I contacted ‘Ray Cooney Plays’, the general manager, Michael Barfoot, replied:

Ray has asked me to reply to you that he knows nothing about this alleged appearance of a ghost on stage at the Theatre Royal Bath during a performance of The Dame of Sark in 1975.

Elsewhere in his book, Nick Bromley states that at the end of each performance of a play, the stage manager compiles a report about how the performance progressed, including any problems or mishaps, and sends it to the producer. Therefore, if a ghost had appeared on stage, in the middle of the play, with the performance having to be halted and four members of the cast refusing to return to the theatre, resulting in understudies stepping in to complete the evening’s performance, and the hurried recasting of the four characters, Mr Cooney as the producer, would certainly have got to hear about it.

In Paranormal Bath, Malcolm Cadey says that he used to work at the Theatre Royal Bath, and therefore many of the first-hand accounts are from colleagues, past and present, and his account of the alleged mass sighting appears to have come from someone he refers to as ‘Molly, the manager of the Upper Dress Circle Bar.’ She was approached by one of the Canadian girls, after her friend had fainted and had been carried out of the auditorium on a stretcher. So, no surname, and even the first name might be an alias.

Cadey also names two other people who were present on the night: the stage manager Norman Wootton, and Sid Payne, who – with his pet dog – was tasked with checking security after the eventful evening’s performance.

Curiously, on the Theatricalia website, the name of the stage manager is not mentioned – only the assistant stage manager: Jackie Garrett, and the deputy stage manager: Tania MacDonald. Norman Wootton is not included anywhere.

I emailed the Theatre Royal, Bath about the incident and didn’t get a reply, and Nick Bromley advised me that while researching for his book and contacting theatres around the country, he got the impression that theatres tend to be reticent about releasing details to the media about any ghostly reports. On 27^th June 2025, I received an email from the press officer acknowledging my letter enquiring about ‘ghost stories at the Theatre Royal, Bath’, promising he would make enquiries on my behalf and get back to me. I sent a reminder in early August 2025, and I still haven’t received a reply.

So where did the information about the mass ghost sighting come from? As with so many books on fortean subjects, the books by Nick Bromley and Malcolm Cadey don’t include any list of sources, bibliography, or an index. Unfortunately, I discovered that Malcolm Cadey is now deceased, so I can’t contact him about his sources.

I wrote to Nick Bromley to ask if he had got his account of the mass witness ghost sighting from Malcolm Cadey’s book. When Nick phoned me soon after, he explained that although he had a copy of Paranormal Bath, which we discussed in our phone call, he had heard about the event from a stage carpenter when he visited the theatre in May 1976, less than a year after the alleged event.

Nick also told me that he seemed to remember the sighting had been reported in the actor’s periodical The Stage which, back in 1975, was titled The Stage and Television Today, but he has been unable to locate it. Back issues are available online at the British Newspaper Archive website, and I also tried – and failed – to locate the issue.

I also bought the book Anna Neagle: An Autobiography (Futura Publications, 1979) published four years after the alleged incident. However, I discovered that the book was largely a reprint of her original 1974 autobiography, published one year before the alleged sighting, and although there was a chapter added on to the new edition about what had happened to her in the years since it was first published, there was, again, no mention of the incident. In fact, The Dame of Sark and the Theatre Royal Bath were not even mentioned, let alone anything about her alleged ghost sighting.

When I received Michael Munn’s book X-Rated: The Paranormal Experiences of the Movie Star Greats (Robson Books, 1996), I found the mass eyewitness sighting was not included. Instead, there is the following quote allegedly from the actress:

…I saw (The Grey Lady), in that box, on the opening night of The Dame of Sark (on 23 August 1975). The curtain went up, I walked on, and I saw her in the box. I had been told I might see her, so it wasn’t a surprise, but it still sent the shivers down my back.

Page 22

What are the chances that Dame Anna Neagle told Michael Munn about her sighting of the Grey Lady at the beginning of Act One, of which she presumably had no corroborating witnesses, and yet decided not to mention her sighting of the Grey Lady appearing on stage at the beginning of Act Two on the same date, in which she had over 850 corroborating witnesses?

I also bought the book of the script The Dame of Sark written by William Douglas-Home (Samuel French, 1976), as I wanted to discover which characters/actors were on stage at the time when the alleged sightings took place, as stated in the books by Bromley, Cadey and Munn.

According to the text, the play’s six scenes were not formally divided into acts. However, as over twelve months have passed between the action in Scene Three and Scene Four, and the gap between them is roughly halfway through the play, I think we can safely assume that the interval would have occurred at the end of Scene Three.

I started with Malcolm Cadey’s account of the actor who was put off his lines by a strangely attired figure in the audience – presumed to be the Grey Lady – and who then delivered his last line of the scene and exited the stage, complaining to the stage manager about it. According to the printed text of the play, there is a character, Colonel von Schmettau, who leaves the stage just before the end of Scene Three – or Act One, as it was originally described – so this detail appears to be correct.

Concerning the mass ghost sighting, both Nick Bromley and Malcolm Cadey state that at the beginning of Act Two – which I now assume to be Scene Four – there are five characters on stage. Nick Bromley writes that:

…the curtain rose, and the stage lighting came up. Dame Anna was standing with four other members of the cast in their opening places on stage. She was astonished to see a column of whirling smoke appearing next to her.

Likewise, Malcolm Cadey writes:

It was time, the curtain lifted and the opening scene of Act Two was about to start when…On stage, what looked like a swirling pillar of smoke, appeared right next to Dame Anna Neagle, who, horrified, but still keeping her composure, did a graceful side-step away from this strange occurrence…Four other members of the cast took one look at this happening and walked off stage, leaving the Theatre and not coming back. They sent for their belongings later.

In both accounts, five characters are on stage when the ghost appears. However, according to the text of the play, this doesn’t appear to be the case. When the curtain goes up, there are only three characters onstage: Sibyl, Bob and Muller – played in the Bath production by Anna Neagle, Alan Gifford and Ian Liston. Some characters leave the stage, then return, and two other characters, Lanz and Braun – played by Alister Cameron and Nicholas Loukes – arrive onstage.

Within around five minutes of the opening of the scene, there are indeed five characters onstage. However, the books by Bromley and Cadey both state that the ghost appeared at the very beginning of the scene, when there were in reality only three characters on stage. So, unless I have misinterpreted this, then that detail appears to be incorrect.

As for Dame Anna’s lone sighting, Michael Munn writes that she walked onstage at the beginning of the play. According to the text of the play, the character of Bob Hathaway is on stage alone as the curtain comes up in Scene One (Act One), but then Dame Anna’s character Sibyl Hathaway walks onstage a few seconds later. So that detail is correct.

But even this lone sighting in Scene One may not have happened either. There is an article in the Guardian by Tim Adams about his meeting with the author Michael Munn to discuss the various questionable claims he made in his many books about his alleged close personal friendships with movie star greats including Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, John Wayne, David Niven and Steve McQueen.

In his book Steve McQueen: Living on the Edge, Munn claims to have gone on a three-week motorcycle road trip with the actor, with Munn riding pillion, during a break in the filming of McQueen’s movie Le Mans (1971) – a claim which surviving friends and family of the actor have questioned, and which book critic Antonia Quirke described as ‘preposterous’. In light of this, I would be very skeptical about the alleged conversation between Dame Anna Neagle and Michael Munn.

There is also a third version of the alleged sighting by Anna Neagle recounted on the YouTube video The Ghosts of Bath – part of the Ghost Casebook series – which states that in 1975 (no exact date given) the actress saw the Grey Lady in the dress circle box, staring at the stage, after the production was over.

I also bought David Brandon’s book Haunted Bath (The History Press, 2009) which includes Dame Anna Neagle’s lone sighting of the Grey Lady, but doesn’t specify whether it was before, during or after the performance.

So, there are now four different versions of the Anna Neagle/Grey Lady story. Michael Munn’s version states it happened at the beginning of the performance; Nick Bromley and Malcolm Cadey say it was a mass sighting that happened in the middle of the play; The Ghosts of Bath says it happened after the performance was over; and David Brandon doesn’t seem to know when it happened!

Not to mention, of course, that if true the mass sighting witnessed by over 850 people would have been splashed across every newspaper in the country, and interviews with the cast and crew would have featured on programmes such as Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, or Strange But True?, and virtually any other programme about ghosts and the paranormal in the intervening years. Alleged UFO events such as Roswell and Rendlesham have been endlessly re-enacted on TV, so I’m sure this alleged ghostly event would have received the same treatment. We would also have expected that at least some of the 850 audience members would have got in touch with a newspaper and recounted the sighting, or that the media would have got hold of the story from somewhere else.

So, did the mass sighting by Dame Anna Neagle and over 850 people really occur?

It looks very unlikely to me, considering the comments made by Ray Cooney, and the lack of evidence supporting the claims that four professional actors walked out of the theatre, and their characters had to be hurriedly re-cast.

However, I would still love to know the original source of the story. Call me naïve, but it does seem strange to me that someone would fabricate such a detailed and colourful account, and then expect everyone to believe it without, as Alan Murdie put it, any corroborating evidence.

Unfortunately, that is where my research has to end.

The event may be included in back issues of local newspapers in Bath, and I have written to the newspaper staff and asked them to do an appeal to local people for information, but they didn’t reply, and online searches for my appeal have drawn a blank. Back issues are available on microfilm at the Bath city library, but to search them I would need to take a trip to Bath, including a costly overnight stay, to go through the archives.

Also, as already mentioned, the play has a character named Colonel von Schmettau, who was the last to exit the stage at the end of Scene Three. In the original London production, he was played by Tony Britton, but in the touring company, including the production at the Theatre Royal, Bath, he was played by Nicholas Courtney, who is probably best remembered for playing Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in TV’s Doctor Who.

He may have discussed his own experience at the end of Scene Three, and the alleged subsequent mass ghost sighting, in his autobiography Five Rounds Rapid! (Virgin, 1992) and the revised edition Still Getting Away With It (privately published, 2005), but none of the online reviewers of the books have mentioned the inclusion of the experiences, and as the books are now out-of-print and remaining copies selling for over fifty pounds, I am afraid that buying either book is a costly purchase too far for me. If any reader has read one or both of these books, I’d welcome them getting in touch with details of any ghostly contents.

Can anyone throw further light on the story?

END

Sources:

• Michael Munn: the celebrity biographer reveals all, The Guardian, 25 July 2010
• Brandon, David, Haunted Bath (The History Press, 2009). *Dame Anna Neagle’s sighting ‘in 1975’ on page 70.
• Bromley, Nick, Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres (LDP Books Ltd, 2021) *Account of mass witness sighting in Act Two of the play on pp 134-135.
• Cadey, Malcolm, Paranormal Bath (The History Press, 2010) *Account of mass witness sighting in Act Two of the play on pp 81-82.
• Munn, Michael, X-Rated: The Paranormal Experiences of the Movie Star Greats (Robson Books, 1996) *Dame Anna Neagle’s personal sighting in Act One of the play on pp 21-22.
• Murdie, Alan. ‘Spectres of the Stage’: an article in Fortean Times magazine. Issue 407, pages 16-19. (FT407:16-19).
• Neagle, Anna, Anna Neagle: An Autobiography (Futura, 1979).
• Puttick, Betty (Editor) Supernatural England (Countryside Books, 2002).
• The Ghosts of Bath (YouTube video channel: Ghost Casebook series).
• Emails from Michael Barfoot, General Manager of ‘Ray Cooney Plays’, on behalf of Ray Cooney: 28/04/25 and 01/05/25.

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