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Context, lies and disinfectant

Victoria Stiles
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Context, lies and disinfectant

I don’t mean to shock you and I hope you’re sitting down for this but there’s a lot of false information on the internet. Not only that but users have been ripping things right out of context and sharing them with reckless abandon, for thousands of innocent victims to react to, only to be exposed as naive dupes once the true context is revealed. Why, only this past week it transpired that… nope, I can’t keep this up.

There is no single, correct context we can place something in to reveal everything worth knowing about it. We don’t have to throw our hands up in despair, however, or retreat from all commentary in case we make a mistake. The fact that pictures and texts can be taken out of their various contexts and spark countless responses in a matter of hours is a reality of our age and is something we can learn to live with.

Different types of contextualising information can be illuminating in their own worthwhile way and sometimes a thing’s reception history – the different ways it has been used and interpreted – can tell us more than an analysis of the thing itself. Let’s have a look at one recent example, not to establish hard facts (not least because there may be more waves of those to come) but to see how different layers of context can add to our understanding.

The thing

Dettol Tube Ad with branding missing

A poster advertising disinfectant. The text lists features of working in an office such as “plastic plants” and “accidentally replying-all”. One photograph of the advert which was shared widely on Twitter contained only the text and didn’t mention the brand, so many initial responses were shaped by the assumption that it was part of the UK government’s campaign to encourage people who have been working from home to return to their usual offices. I’d characterise the prevailing mood as one of mocking anger.

Often when something which has been widely shared and discussed is exposed as a fabrication, there’s a wave of retractions, expressions of regret or embarrassment, and a fair few declarations that only a fool believes everything (anything?) they see on the internet. In this case, perhaps because this was a misunderstanding rather than a fake, much of the mockery transferred to the company who commissioned the advert, while the anger at the government messaging which it resembled continued. Many people (justifiably, in my opinion) reserved the right to use this opportunity to vent their feelings on a prominent and contentious issue, even though the initial stimulus what not quite what they thought it was.

Context One – location, audience, purpose

This is what could be considered the “correct” context: the “actually, I think you’ll find…” of the matter. It’s a poster at a public transport hub so likely to be aimed at people who are already commuting to work rather than those yet to be coaxed out.

A photo of the London Underground signage against a blue sky backdrop

The point behind the advert, it can be assumed, is to raise brand awareness. There are several aspects to this and the poster may not be intended to fulfill all of these functions, but generally advertisers want to make people aware of their product, form associations with certain qualities and values, increase the amount that people use, or make people think of their brand in particular when the need for it arises.

When trying to keep something at the front of people’s minds, it can be useful to tap into current trends (even controversies) and try to chime in with people’s emotions. Which brings us to…

Context Two – advertising in a crisis

There seems to have been a trend over the past couple of years for advertisements to list associations with a particular concept. These might be reminders of the small joys of going to a familiar place or perhaps they place a brand at the heart of a common experience. Often these lists will be delivered in a warm, friendly regional accent and they have an irritating tendency towards bad rhymes.

Amid the worries, separations and bewildering abnormality of 2020, appealing to this feeling of togetherness and shared values and experiences has been a popular strategy for brands which don’t want to appear tone-deaf or encourage us to do things which we aren’t currently allowed to do. In this context, our poster appears less like a laughably unrelatable love-letter to the office, and more like a neutral, shared-experience appeal to “think office; think disinfectant”.

Even though it’s playing on customers’ mixed feelings about current events, there’s no reason to suppose that it was directly informed by the government’s campaign for a return to offices.

Context Three – The government’s campaign for a return to offices

Didn’t I just say that this was irrelevant? Well, even if something isn’t created in direct response to a political context, we can still explore how political and cultural messages can interact, influence each other, perhaps deliberately oppose one another, and how all of this can play out in a medium such as advertising.

On a simple level, this advert would likely not exist in this form if the official advice to work from home where possible was still in place. Again, companies don’t want to risk being wildly out of keeping with what’s allowed and accepted at a particular time. More subtly (and this is where I may sound like a conspiracy theorist) this need to take cues from current events and prevailing sentiment can cause advertising to be surprisingly in-step with what might be termed more establishment positions.

Union flag bunting

Think back to Queen Elizabeth’s last jubilee, for example. You’d have been hard pressed to find a shop window display, in England at least, which didn’t have a Union flag or bunting or a cushion with a bulldog on it. Without the need for government directives or any centralised plan, companies responded to what they assumed the majority of customers were feeling, resulting in a consistently patriotic feel on every high street. Norms – even new-normal norms – are powerful things and we can find behaviour-shaping messages echoing from all manner of unexpected directions.

These examples are just some of the many contexts we could explore relating to this one text. The first type of context may seem the most factual, in that it provides the clearest line of causation from intent to creation, but that doesn’t necessarily make it more important or worthy of analysis. There’s always more background to explore and so trying to fully place something in context before reacting to it would be futile. Equally, writing off a text and people’s reactions to it because it was “taken out of context” would waste an opportunity to think through why something has the shape that it does and why it invokes those responses.

Every one of us will inevitably miss something important in our initial reactions and there’s no need to feel ashamed or defensive about this. We really do lose something when the most basic facts – the “well actually” of when, where and why a thing was created – are treated as the end rather than the beginning of the discussion.

The development of the skeptic movement – part 1

Claire Klingenberg
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The development of the skeptic movement – part 1

Whenever we try to write about the beginning of a movement, we must pinpoint a moment in history from which we want to start. Of course, if we were digging more, we could find another, older, root, or another influencing factor, previously unmentioned. There have been several articles written about the history of the skeptical movement, and they do overlap on some milestones while differing on others.

In this article, I will add to the tapestry of skeptic history. Though I will be sticking to the history of the movement within Europe and the Anglosphere, it is in no way to diminish the contributions of skepticism in the world outside of this designated realm, but because that area is best left to those who can inform us about it more completely and in greater context – skeptics, who are active there today. 

This article will divide skeptic history into eras, focusing more on its history than its current state. But before we get into that, let’s do a quick overview of what skepticism and the skeptical movement is.

Skepticism

Simply put, skepticism is systematic doubt. There are three main types of skepticism.

The first and oldest is philosophical, represented by the Sicilian philosopher Gorgias. His ideas are represented by a paraphrased quote of his:

“Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.”

In my humble opinion, this type of skepticism might be too skeptical even for diehard skeptics.

The second is religious skepticism, which started as a way to label questioning religious dogmas by religious scholars within the Roman Catholic Church. Later, the meaning was broadened to include any questioning of religious beliefs and claims.

The third one, the one which is “ours,” is scientific skepticism. It is questioning beliefs and claims using scientific findings. 

When comparing questioning religious claims from the point of the modern understanding of religious skepticism and from the point of scientific skepticism, we can imagine the difference like this: 

Religious skepticism: We have one God, who is three, who are actually one, who is actually three, and sometimes the two of the three are on Earth, while all three being in Heaven. That sounds strange and inconsistent. Let’s think about it more.

Scientific skepticism: Looking at a religious claim which intersects with the material world and examining its feasibility, such as miracle healing, the magical liquifying and solidifying of the blood of St. Januarius, self-lighting Holy Fire candle, by way of example, not limitation.

The Skeptical Movement

The skeptical movement is a social movement based around the idea of scientific skepticism. It promotes the avoidance of making conclusions without a thorough investigation, applying the scientific method and scientific findings to empirical claims across the board, and, most difficult of all, keeping a neutral stance towards unempirical claims and beliefs unless they are in direct conflict of the development of the scientific knowledge base.

So how did it all get started?

The First Era

The first era of skepticism is depicted on a timeline beginning in 1881 with the founding of the VtdK, followed by the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes story in 1887. In 1910 John Dewey defined critical thinking in his work "How to Think" and in 1923 Scientific American and Houdini announced the $5000 prize.

The Starting Point

I do believe I am doing the modern skeptic movement justice when I place it’s founding in the year 1881. The year in which Dutch general practitioners founded the Association against Quackery (Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij – VtdK) in the Netherlands. I will use the VtdK as our starting point. 

The founding of the VtdK was in consequence of a pamphlet created by the Dutch Society for the Advancement of Medicine, in which the points of how to identify a quack were detailed, subsequently giving the world the word quack as a way to label a medical practitioner who did not concern themselves much with science or evidence. The VtdK started publishing their findings in their own magazine, the Magazine Against Quackery (Tijdschrift tegen Kwakzalverij), which is currently the longest-running skeptic magazine in the world. Also, thanks to the work of VtdK, the Netherlands was the third country in the world to adopt comprehensive drug regulation legislation. 

One could argue that the VtdK, concerning the topics it covered at its founding, can not be considered a full-fledged skeptic group. I would argue that the attention given to various topics within the skeptic movement has fluctuated organically over the years, and the VtdK, especially considering its accomplishments, has been given its rightful place.

Now that we have our starting point established, let’s look at how analytical thinking was popularized among the public.

The Art of Nitpicking

In 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. Doyle’s extremely rational character was in many ways an opposite to Doyle himself, who fell for the doctored photo of Cottingley Fairies and was an ardent spiritualist.

Though we can find inspiration for this character both in the real world, such as  Doyle’s professor from the University of Edinburgh Joseph Bell, and in the world of fiction, such as E. A. Poe’s Auguste Dupin, it is the character of Sherlock which became a household name, a monicker, and the key component of the phrase “No sh*t, Sherlock.” 

All joking aside, or not, the popularity of Sherlock stories brought the hobby of systematic nosiness and art of nitpicking into the mainstream and gave the people who had such a hobby and practiced such art both the hope that they are not alone and the impulse to find others like them. The growth of the skeptical movement is not only related to things happening within, but to the influences forming it from the outside.

By the way, though Doyle made the phrase “art of deduction” popular, Sherlock was actually doing inductive reasoning. I would be remiss not to point out the difference.

  • Deduction: Theory → Creating a hypothesis based on known theory → Observing → Confirming.
  • Induction: Observing → Noticing a pattern → Creating a hypothesis → Confirming → Theory.

Defining Critical Thinking

The next important milestone is the definition of critical thinking published by philosopher and pedagogue John Dewey in his book How We Think published in 1910. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, a good summary of the book was published on Brain Pickings.

Dewey defines critical thinking as a reflection of thought, emphasizing the following:

  • Pausing decision making – We think better when we think slower, meaning we are more rational decision-makers when we pause to think. This is pretty much the summary of Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
  • Healthy skepticism – ‘Nuff said
  • Open Mind – Meaning not rejecting things outright

Dewey’s definition of critical thinking pretty much sums up scientific skepticism and Dewey’s influence brought these ideas to the forefront. 

Dewey’s definition of critical thinking pretty much sums up scientific skepticism and Dewey’s influence brought these ideas to the forefront. 

Houdini vs. Mina

Houdini’s contributions to the skeptical movement have been highlighted numerous times, so I will only summarize. After the death of his mother in 1913, Houdini -who used to pretend to be a medium communicating with the dead -started to look for “real” mediums to reconnect him with his mother. Though he searched thoroughly, visited all the big names of his time, he realized his suspicions that all mediums are just for show, were correct. He started to challenge mediums and spiritualists and in 1923 was invited to become part of Scientific American Investigation Panel, which offered $5000 (about $76000 today) to whomever could, without question, connect with the other side. 

One of the mediums, and the most worthy adversary, was a friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, just as Houdini was, Mina Crandon. Their incredible battle of the wills and abilities is written about in detail (and in English) by the founder of the Italian Skeptics, CICAP, Massimo Polidoro.

Houdini’s work was, thanks to his popularity, a great way to promote critical thinking and the skeptical approach.

An End of an Era

We can consider Houdini’s death as the end of the first era of the skeptical movement. This era enriched the skeptical movement with two crucial topics, fighting against quackery and testing woo. It also gave the outline of skeptical thinking, as well the ideas to organize and promote skeptical thinking in ways which are interesting to the public.

In my next article, we will examine how the skeptical baton was picked up after Houdini, and how the movement developed into the international community we see today.

Hydroxychloroquine: when bad science goes mainstream

Natália Pasternak
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Hydroxychloroquine: when bad science goes mainstream

From the small number of participants, the very loose controls, the statistical sleight of hand, and the cherry-picking of data points, we could easily have been looking at one more run-of-the-mill “homeopathy works!” paper; totally forgettable and easily forgotten, a good sparring tool for a fledging skeptic. Yet this was no homeopathy paper: it boasted the signature of one of the most-cited microbiologists in the world, involved legitimate drugs, and promised to cure people infected by a pandemic virus.

The study in question – “Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial”, by the team of French superstar-microbiologist Didier Raoult – claimed to identify a miracle treatment for COVID-19 in the form of antimalarial and antibiotic drugs currently used by malaria and lupus patients. After the paper was presented to the media (taking place, of course, prior to publication in a journal of negligible impact), it received a mixed reception around the world. Britain and Italy simply ignored it; in the US, Donald Trump liked it, and publicly touted it in his daily press briefings. But in Brazil, fell head over heels in love with it.

President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro
(Brasília – DF, 24/03/2020) Pronunciamento do Presidente da República, Jair Bolsonaro em Rede Nacional de Rádio e Televisão..Foto: Isac Nóbrega/PR

Bolsonaro had been pushing against social distancing and quarantine measures ever since they were adopted by city mayors and state governors, and recommended by his own Minister of Health (following guidelines from the World Health Organization). Perhaps he saw the hydroxychloroquine craze as a way to push even harder. What is clear is that after he sang the praises of the drug, within hours it had vanished from pharmacies and drugstores, putting the people who really needed it in grave danger.

The “cancer cure” scandal in Brazil

The Brazilian skeptic movement was awakened out of a kind of coma in 2015, when a retired Chemistry professor became a national celebrity by touting a “miracle cancer cure”. Back then, skeptics and “quackwatchers” went into the fray with a large portion of the mainstream Medical and Scientific communities by their side; the defenders of the “miracle cure” were mostly media personalities and politicians (including Bolsonaro, then a Member of Parliament).

Today, however, we suddenly find ourselves quite alone. Blinded by Raoult’s reputation, intimidated by the president’s endorsement or just too eager to embrace any shred of hope that presents itself, scientists who were vocal opponents of that miracle “cancer cure” now seemingly overlook the many problems and signs of misconduct in the study, and declare hydroxychloroquine “promising”.

The Ministry of Health, who during the “cancer cure” crisis never even contemplated giving the “miracle” pills to patients of SUS (the Brazilian counterpart to the NHS), produced a technical note instructing doctors in the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.

The Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital, one of the finest medical centers in Latin America, launched a very weak “study” – without placebo group and very weak controls – of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19. This so-called “clinical trial” is so flawed in its design that it can’t do anything but show “positive” or “indefinite” results.  A  Chinese study, small, but with decent controls, that found no benefit of hydroxychloroquine against the new coronavius, was available when the Albert Einstein Hospital published its design, but was blatantly ignored. What gives?

Science and skepticism in Brazil

Sadly, it looks like here in Brazil, science and skepticism don’t walk hand in hand, as they ought to. Critical thinking must be learned, preferably from a young age, if we wish to prevent this kind of misconceptions in the future. The fact that many undergraduate and graduate science students believe in pseudoscientific claims such as astrology, homeopathy and UFOs shows us that we are failing. While on one hand, this behavior may seem harmless, on the other hand, its potential to do harm becomes clear in an emergency situation like a pandemic, when decisions must be made quickly. To ensure that these decisions will be science based, we need people to be science based too.

And if we can’t get scientists and health professionals to think critically under stress, we are in deep trouble. What are the main differences between the cancer miracle cure hype in Brazil, and the chloroquine hype now?

First, the situation. A pandemic causes people to panic in fairly large numbers, and for several reasons: they are afraid of dying, and of losing their significant others, and they want to go back to their normal lives. The need to believe in a miracle cure that can end this situation faster is greatly enhanced.

Secondly, the appeal to authority, which to most skeptics is a fallacy we train ourselves to try to spot, goes unnoticed by most scientists.

This illustration, created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses. Note the spikes that adorn the outer surface of the virus, which impart the look of a corona surrounding the virion, when viewed electron microscopically.

The proponent of the miracle cancer cure, Gilberto Chierice,  was a Chemistry professor from a small campus of a Brazilian university. The proponent of chloroquine, Didier Raoult, is one of the world’s most published scientists, director of a hospital and recipient of several awards, which may have led people to overlook the weakenesses of the hydroxychloroquine study.  People put their belief in Raoult, rather than critically examining his studies – and the fact that he chose to broadcast the “cure” himself, on YouTube, before the paper was even published in preprint, certainly didn’t help.

Spotting red flags

It was easy for skeptics to see the red flags: announcing  to national news before peer review, using bad scientific methodology, cherry picking of data, the lack of proper controls, withholding data, the list goes on. These are not new to anyone used to analyzing medical quackery, but without training in spotting methodological flaws, even medical and science professionals were fooled. Doctors said that they had a “feeling” it would work. Scientists told us that “during a war we should bend the rules”. Unfortunately, basing medical interventions on gut feelings brought us bloodletting, mercury poisoning for yellow fever and a vast array of alternative medicine. And while we may need to bend the rules during a pandemic, if we bend them this far, we’ll break!

A study conducted by professors Raymond Hall and Kathleen Dyer in State California University demonstrated the need to teach critical thinking to undergraduate science majors, in a more direct way than just teaching scientific method. They showed that it is necessary to teach students how to differentiate science from nonsense. After completing their course, the majority of students were able to overcome unwarranted beliefs. Perhaps, given such training, those students would have sees through the chloroquine hype which bewitched so many. Perhaps it’s time for skeptics to press for the inclusion of critical thinking in basic education. It could be the only way to prevent the next generation from being fooled during a time when we need them to trust science the most.

Coronavirus, conspiracy, challenges and compassion

Michael Marshall
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Coronavirus, conspiracy, challenges and compassion

As the new editor of The Skeptic, it is my duty and my privilege to be able to steer one of the longest-standing institutions in UK skepticism into its next chapter.

The Skeptic, which started life in 1987 as a print newsletter entitled The British and Irish Skeptic, has gone through many changes during its 33-year existence. I hope that its new formation – as an online skeptical news platform publishing expert analysis and commentary on a regular basis – will be particularly suited to countering the kind of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and superstition that surrounds us today.

I owe a great deal of thanks to outgoing editor Deborah Hyde, not only for her expert tenure at the helm of The Skeptic for the last decade, but also for her patience during this transition. I have no doubt that Deborah, along with previous editors Professor Chris French and Wendy Grossman, will continue to be invaluable sources of guidance and advice, as well as regular contributors (indeed, you can read Wendy’s thoughts on ‘the new era’ in her latest article).

Any change of leadership naturally offers the opportunity for reflection, and it’s hard to argue that the need for reason and critical thinking has ever been more urgent than it is right now. The coronavirus pandemic has inevitably been a focusing point for all manner of untrue claims, from the proliferation of false and scaremongering messages about bodies piling up at ice skating rinks and the virus shifting to killing babies; to 5G masts around the country being blamed and vandalised; to nonsensical conspiracy theories about the virus being an act of biological warfare from China – possibly (and quite bafflingly) with the aim of enriching the US Center for Disease Control.

A crisis of this scale necessarily produces an information vacuum, and there has been no shortage of groups looking to fill that hole with misinformation. We’ve seen misleading advice around how to fight off the disease with supplements (the fallacy of which is deftly explained in Pixie Turner’s first article for The Skeptic). We’ve seen countless homeopaths offering advice on which homeopathic remedies to take to combat the virus – hardly a surprise, from an industry whose own Professional Standards Director was revealed to be an anti-vaxxer. We’ve even seen under-informed contrarians seeking to undermine public health policy under the misnomer of “lockdown sceptics” (just when we’d managed to reclaim the word ’skeptic’ from climate change deniers, too).

Although COVID-19 has been a major focus of skeptical attention, it is far from the only pseudoscience game in town. Ghosts and UFOs are still being seen, and we will be here to highlight alternative explanations for them. Psychics and mediums may have had to put their tours on hold while theatres across the country have closed their doors, but plenty of their numbers claim to be busier than ever giving readings online – though, of course, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Medical misinformation, too, remains rife, with cancer quackery in particular causing huge amounts of pain and suffering for vulnerable patients and their families. The Skeptic will be here to help unpick the misinformation, and to offer an informed perspective on the false hope sold by alternative medicine evangelists.

We will also be tackling what I believe may be the defining pseudoscience of our age: conspiracy theory. Where once the domain of fringe pockets of people doubting the official story regarding JFK’s assassination, the September 11th attacks, or the moonlanding, conspiracy theory has gone thoroughly mainstream. It has become commonplace for social media feeds to be filled with family and friends sharing allegations that Big Pharma has the cure for cancer but is keeping it from the people, that governments are controlled by a shadowy cabal of uber-elites who orchestrate major world crises, and that the world we are presented with is a deliberate attempt to keep us distracted from The Truth.

In fact, just last week, cities across the UK saw marches of ‘QAnon’ followers and ‘PizzaGate’ truthers – people who believe that a deep-state whistleblower with top-level security clearance in the US government is risking life and limb to post oblique and cryptic hints aimed at exposing a vast conspiracy of celebrity paedophiles and child traffickers, whose headquarters was in the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant that does not have a basement. How we got to a place where so ludicrous an idea is taken seriously enough by people to host marches through cities an ocean away from Washington is something I’m sure we will be exploring in the pages of The Skeptic.

QAnon conspiracy theorists marching in Liverpool, August 2020. One man wearing a "Save our children UK" T Shirt holds up a placard reading "Research Pizzagate". Another man has a "Keep Calm and QAnon t shirt" Source: https://i.imgur.com/brFk9UX.jpg
QAnon conspiracy theorists marching in Liverpool, August 2020

Identifying and debunking these pernicious pseudoscientific ideas may be one thing, but effectively challenging them is another matter entirely. It is comforting to think that simply showing that an idea is not supported by evidence is enough to take the momentum out of a pseudoscientific movement, but experience shows us that information alone is not always enough to dissuade people from their beliefs. This, I think, is the big challenge for skepticism today: how can we most effectively turn the tide and encourage people back to reason?

The answer, in part, lies in the honesty and humility of our intentions. If we as skeptics are only interested in being right in order to preserve a sense of superiority over those we disagree with, I fear we will be wholly ineffective in affecting any real change. We will also be fooling ourselves. If, instead, we recognise that we are all prone to irrationality and bias, and in having an awareness of that we can try to challenge our own beliefs and biases as much as possible, we may have a hope of reaching people.

This is why I am such a firm believer in the notion of compassionate skepticism: that our aim isn’t simply to be ‘right’, but to understand ourselves and the world around us, and to help others do the same. To do that effectively we have to understand who we are trying to reach, and how to communicate with them. “Facts don’t care about your feelings!”, people are so fond of saying, but in practice, people’s feelings often don’t care about facts – and people’s actions and beliefs (including our own) are informed first of all by their feelings. The detail you are far more likely to go out of your way to fact-check is the one that feels false, not the one that feels true.

Moreover, in a very real way, feelings ARE facts – facts about who you are speaking to, how receptive they are likely to be to information they disagree with, and therefore how best to communicate with them if you want to be effective.

With that in mind, I believe it is important to remember that facts and logic aren’t weapons to be used to ‘destroy’ people we disagree with; they’re tools to evaluate and understand. It is easy to convince ourselves that we as skeptics are hyper-rational, unbiased actors whose conclusions are exclusively based on reason and logic, but that would be a self-delusion. The most that we can do – and what we will always strive to do at The Skeptic – is to try our best to apply skepticism, to think critically, to try to minimise the impact of our own biases in doing so, and to always be aware that the people we disagree with are just as human as we are.

Electrician sheds light on viral Birmingham ghost mystery

Hayley Stevens
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Electrician sheds light on viral Birmingham ghost mystery

Picture the scene. It is almost 2am and you’ve been out for the evening with friends, and now you’re walking home. You are on a quiet street, next to the fencing surrounding a building site. There’s an access road that runs through the plot of land, and you know that if you slip inside, it’ll knock some time off your walk home in the cold early hours of the day. So, you do exactly that and then suddenly, before you know it, you’re a ghost.

The Limitless Security "ghost". A night time image of a building yard shows a ghostly woman wearing a full length dress. Her skin and the dress are similar shades of eery white and her hair is dark.

That’s what happened to one unsuspecting woman on the 18th of August in the centre of Birmingham. Don’t worry, she didn’t die – but she did get captured on CCTV as she strolled through a building site. The camera in question belongs to Limitless Security and at 1:53am the Managing Director, Adam Lees, received an alert to tell him that something had been captured moving on one of their cameras. The news broke the next day on the BirminghamLive website where Lees is quoted:

“[i]n the early hours of Tuesday we had an alert to say a motion-sensor camera had picked up movement on the site… I checked and saw that picture. I notified security on site straightaway who did a patrol but found nothing. It’s incredibly strange. I have no idea what it could have been, but I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.”

You might ask what could be spooky about a woman cutting through a building site. Although she was wearing a red dress, the CCTV camera was using a night-vision mode and as movement was detected, a motion-sensor light was triggered alongside the camera. The woman in a red, floor-length dress suddenly became a luminous white figure wearing a long, flowing white dress and floating past the camera.

Soon, people were sending the photo to me because they wanted to know what it could be. On the first day the photo made the press, I gave it a quick glance and decided that it was either a person or someone messing around. However, my job was demanding my time and I thought nothing more of it. Only, this was a ghost that wasn’t going away, and the image began to spring up all over the internet, so I decided to try and find out what was going on. Was this a simple misidentification, or was it a deliberate hoax? I don’t like to think ill of others without just cause and I couldn’t see a motive to hoax a ghost photo like this. After all, Limitless Security were approached by the press and hadn’t approached journalists themselves. Lees’ daughter tweeted the image to her followers because they were baffled by what had been caught on camera and it got picked up from there.

There’s nothing to indicate forgery so there had been a person in front of the camera which meant that either someone had been mistaken for a ghost, or the photo had been staged… or it was actually a ghost. I decided it was best to speak directly with those involved and contacted Adam Lees, and although I was expecting no response at all (as is often the case) I was pleasantly surprised when Lees responded that not only would he answer my questions, but he wanted me to know that ‘there’s nothing paranormal about [the photo].’ Lees explained that ‘the image is 100% genuine but it is of a lady walking through the site. It had us all baffled at first but a few days later we discovered a separate CCTV camera had picked her up’.

Taken from a higher angle, it is clear that the woman was wearing a long red dress as she walked through the yard.

The separate camera belonged to Stewart Chapman, an electrician working on the Sherborne Street site. A screengrab of Chapman’s footage was floating around social media and shows that the ghost in a flowing white dress is actually a woman in a red dress. I asked Chapman what had happened, and he told me:

“We have all of our CCTV active as we are about to hand over the first three blocks of apartments. Where Limitless Security have their camera, I have a CCTV camera positioned directly above it, but nobody knew that it was active. When we received the email from Limitless Security saying there was a ghost on site, we all thought it was fantastic until I noticed where it was and thought “I have a camera above there!” So, I went through the footage and found the two ladies wandering onto the access road.”

I shared the screenshot from Chapman’s footage on my blog and considered this a shut case. However, a few days later I received an email from a marketing agency acting on behalf of 300- Security Services. They’re the company who had patrolled the site on instruction from Adam Lees. A woman named Sarah told me that she was working ‘on behalf of the security company that visited the scene of the Birmingham ghost.’ She offered to send me the press release and (perhaps naively) I thought that it would be about the folly of security staff getting spooked before discovering that the ghost was a living woman. However, what arrived was a release under the title ‘Time to be alarmed? Security firm on hand as Birmingham’s answer to the ‘Ghostbusters’.

The release reads:

‘From mysterious movements at night to unexplained disturbances in the day, there aren’t many callouts that shock the team at 3000 Security. But a recent disturbance on a building site in Birmingham was enough to make the team’s hair stand on end. Arriving on-site minutes later to undergo a full patrol of the area and scouring the security footage led to more unanswered questions. The image clearly showed an eerie-looking figure dressed in white, in front of the site’s security fencing.

Darrell Coghlan, Managing Director at 3000 Security said: “We’re used to calls about

unexplained disturbances at night – but never have we seen proof like this. Although the site was confirmed as having the ‘all clear’, this has to be one of the spookiest calls we’ve ever been asked to assist with.”

The press release ends with: ‘whether you’re a believer or not, this mystery still stays unsolved.’

I emailed back to ask if Coghlan and 3000 Security Services knew that the mystery had been solved and why they were still promoting it in this manner. Their response? “No comment.” Sometimes when you say nothing it speakers louder than words and that is certainly true in this case.

Although it’s clear that the photo wasn’t staged, it has certainly been milked for all it’s worth by those involved which leads me to conclude that if there’s something strange in your building site, who you gonna call? Probably not security… 

Skeptic at large: a new era

Wendy M. Grossman
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Skeptic at large: a new era

There’s an old aphorism that runs, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

I’ve never been quite sure whether this means that when you’re hiding out in a war zone with death all around you, no matter what you actually (don’t) believe you instinctively pray for help because there’s nothing else to do… or that atheists in such situations suddenly discover the inner devout believer they’ve had the luxury to deny existed until now. I’ve always hoped the former. Who wants to find out in extremis that they’re a lifelong hypocrite?

One of the most interesting things about the ongoing pandemic is the extent to which so many people are suddenly eagerly embracing science for answers and advice. There are exceptions, such as Congressmember Devin Nunes (R-CA), who as late as March 14 posted a video clip on Twitter telling healthy people they should go out and support their local empty restaurants and bars. And, it emerged in early April, a bunch of people in Britain bought into the hoax claim that the incoming fifth generation of mobile networks (5G) are a vector for spreading the virus and accordingly have vandalised or set fire to a number of completely unrelated mobile masts.

mobile telephone mast

I’ve thought before that whatever they think they think or say they think, people’s behaviour in a crisis often betrays an inner cognitive dissonance. In 1987, soon after I founded The Skeptic, the weekly spiritualist newspaper Psychic News reported that burglars had broken into its London office. And – with no apparent awareness of the irony – they reported that they had called the police to investigate. The police. Not their best psychics.

I remember this recently, when the Catholic Herald announced that on February 28 the Lourdes shrine closed its healing pools as a precaution against spreading the coronavirus. Read the note on its website: “Our first concern will always be the safety and health of the pilgrims and the shrine’s working community. As a precaution, the pools have been closed until further notice.” Oh, really?

It turned out the shrine was still permitting pilgrims to visit; it didn’t close down celebrating public mass for another couple of weeks. Even so, it clearly suggests that the people running the operation know perfectly well that they’re selling false hope, not miracle cures. The reality is perfectly captured in a famous quote usually attributed to Émile Zola: “The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.”

In this atmosphere, when the general public is abruptly listening to scientists, in the US two plain-speaking heroes are emerging. The first is the epidemiologist Antony Fauci, a New Yorker of Italian descent whose storied history includes work on every health crisis since the emergence of HIV/AIDS. The second is the even more blunt, combative New York state governor, Andrew Cuomo, son of Mario, who governed the same state in the 1980s, when I lived there. “No one likes him,” says an New York state-based online acquaintance – but in this crisis he’s become an unlikely star – the grim figures in the country’s most-ravaged city presented with the honesty and empathy missing from the president. For many of us, the facts are less frightening than fantasies that will go bust. This is a crisis a con artist cannot lie, deny, bargain, bluster, or bully his way through. Reality has a way of blowing up bullshit.

Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.

That said, unassailable facts may up-end people’s beliefs, but they don’t help heal divisions, and these days they don’t change people’s minds. It seems to me perfectly possible that the top-layer belief can mutate from “the virus is a hoax” to “my friend’s in a coma” without dislodging the longer-term, more deeply-held belief by his base that “Donald Trump is doing a good job, and when he’s failed it’s because evil Other People undermined him”. Even against the worst COVID-19 numbers, that belief will spring eternal, no matter how much detail the press can find to show otherwise.

New Humanist recently ran a fascinating essay by Eleanor Gordon-Smith, who argues that the key to persuading people is connecting to their emotions. Emotional engagement has long been an issue for skeptics, who are often accused of being cold, negative, and closed-minded. In 1976, when CSICOP was founded, people disagreed about interpretations but could mutually accept a set of facts; today that common base is gone, replaced by clashing sets of incompatible claims. As The Skeptic enters this new phase, being taken over by its fifth editor (sixth, if you count my 1987-1989 and 1998-2000 stints separately), finding new ways to understand and engage with people’s emotional connections to beliefs that are unsupported by evidence will be increasingly important. As our new leader put it in a recent email, while many skeptics like to say that “Facts don’t care about your feelings”, it is also true that “Feelings don’t care about your facts”.

For now, however, let’s close with the US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who wrapped up the passage of one of the coronavirus-related legislative packages: “To those who choose prayer over science, I say that science is the answer to our prayers.” Amen.

Wendy M. Grossman (www.pelicancrossing.net) is founder and (twice) former editor of The Skeptic, and a freelance writer.

COVID-19 nutrition myths

Pixie Turner
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COVID-19 nutrition myths

As a healthcare professional, the amount of corona virus misinformation I’ve seen spread on social media over the past few weeks and months has been alarming. For many of us, rational thought around health has fled the nest and we’re left with an urge to do something to help ourselves. Enter quacks, the misinformed, and the fame-hungry, many of whom are profiting off this.

Here are the most common COVID-19 nutritional myths I’ve noticed floating around.

Immune-boosting supplements

In my view, the focus on ‘immune-boosting’ foods and supplements exists for two main reasons: (1) many people don’t understand how the immune system works, and (2) we like simple answers. Unfortunately, ‘immune boosting’ isn’t really a thing, and even if it were, we wouldn’t want it. You cannot turbocharge your immune system with something as simple as a vitamin C supplement. Your immune system, like many other systems in the body, is complex, and operates best within specific biochemical parameters. You don’t want your blood pressure to be too high or too low. Too little fibre in your diet isn’t great but too much is also painful. So if you could ‘boost’ your immune system with a simple supplement, you’d see a surge in the inflammatory response. This would mean more pain, fever, redness, swelling, and discomfort. All the things we take medication to try and dampen down in order to make day-to-day life more manageable.

Image of fibre rich vegetables

Does this sound like something you’ve seen before? That’s because an immune system in overdrive is an example of an autoimmune disorder, where the body begins to attack itself.

The only supplement I’d happily recommend is a daily vitamin D supplement, and even then, only if you’re spending less than 30 minutes outside in the sun with exposed skin each day.

The virus can’t survive above 26 degrees C, so if you drink hot water you won’t catch it

This one is simple. Its loosely based on the idea that viruses tend to be far more widespread in the winter months. Unfortunately, what this particular idea fails to take into account is that the human body has a temperature of around 37 degrees C, which is far higher than this.

Image of a pot of tea being poured into a tea cup

The virus is also spreading in countries that have been experiencing summer, with high temperatures. So no, hot water won’t help.

If something as simple as hot water prevented COVID-19, no one in the UK would have it thanks to our near psychopathic reliance on mugs and mugs of tea.

An alkaline/vegan/keto diet will fix it

Uncertain times tend to push people further into their entrenched beliefs. Right now we’re seeing militant vegans on Instagram argue that eating animals is the reason why we have coronavirus, while the constipated keto pushers on Twitter argue that not eating carbs somehow… cures you of everything? Of course, neither is right, but neither will give up their fight either.

The narrative of prescriptive, rigid, controlled eating patterns allegedly curing all kinds of ills is nothing new, and speaks to our desperate need for control. In fact, the most helpful food guidance people can follow right now is to try to eat a variety of foods, let go of any calorie deficits, and not stress about it too much. After all, not having enough food, and stressing about food aren’t particularly great for your immune system.

Higher LDL cholesterol is a protective factor

The prominent quacks in the low-carb statin-denial corner of Twitter are still insisting on their ideological world view even though decades and decades of research says they’re wrong. Currently, they are suggesting that low cholesterol levels predispose someone to infectious diseases, and that high blood LDL cholesterol levels (this is generally described as the ‘bad’ kind) is protective in some way. They therefore make the recommendation that patients with COVID-19 should be taken off their statins. In other words, they should stop taking life-saving medication. Needless to say, this is incredibly dangerous, and not recommended in the slightest.

In summary

Anyone who is using this virus to promote a particular food ideology, who is targeting vulnerable people by selling supplements using illegal health claims, or who is food shaming others is truly the worst kind of person.

Image of a smart phone with the instagram logo on the screen

I fully understand and appreciate why people are willing to try all sorts of weird and wonderful solutions that claim to help them. This is an incredibly uncertain time, and in times of uncertainty we are particularly vulnerable to misinformation. We will happily latch onto things that make promises to us, that help us feel like we have some semblance of control right now. But sadly those promises are too good to be true.

It’s also not surprising to me that food shaming is pretty high on social media right now. We use shame to direct attention away from ourselves, and in doing so we highlight our own vulnerabilities and insecurities. The low-carb doctors who are attacking others on Twitter for eating custard creams are desperately seeking validation. The wellness wanker Instagrammers who are shaming people for buying (god forbid) frozen and packaged foods right now are so desperately afraid that they will no longer be relevant, that people won’t care about their cute little detox protocol when there are bigger concerns right now.

In the end, miracle foods don’t exist, and during a global anxiety-inducing pandemic I think we all need a biscuit or two to get through.

Pixie Turner is a Registered Nutritionist (RNutr), author and public speaker

Blockbuster Science: the real science in science fiction – David Siegel Bernstein

Paul Taylor
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Blockbuster Science: the real science in science fiction – David Siegel Bernstein

Books that are designed to entice people, especially young people, to appreciate science are generally a Good Thing, given the general indifference and ignorance that depletes our culture. Bernstein’s chatty style bustles us straightaway into spacetime and relativity in the very first chapter, ending with a section of bonus materials including a bit of mass-energy arithmetic yielding an energy equivalent, for a 68 kg person, of 417 years of US energy production.

Relativity dealt with, we’re ready to dive into the enchanted, entangled realm of quantum mechanics in Chapter Two. This is followed by the first interlude, a touch of atomic theory. We then strum through string theory before getting the measure of the universe.

Doctor Who pops in now and again, and there’s the odd whoosh of Starship Enterprise but more science fiction references begin to appear in the chapters on parallel worlds and powering up our civilizations, which considers the Kardashev scale of civilizations and Barrow’s alternative, inward-looking scale.

Whizzing around black holes, we hurtle through evolution, DNA and Douglas Adams before reaching genetic modification and zombies. Then it’s cyborgs, Star Wars and global warming. A large tardigrade floats past and we achieve artificial intelligence and robotics, with Roger Clarke’s extended set of Asimov’s Laws. Bonus materials: a list of celebrity science fiction robots.

With The Day the Earth Stood Still, we pause to look at extra-terrestrials and a world protocol for alien contact before embarking on interstellar travels and dwelling on dark matter. After superconductors, cloaking and sundry gadgets, we face realities and blink at the end of the world.

This very handy book also offers a glossary, notes, a reading/movie/song list and an index. Those who enjoy science fiction may well enjoy its science a lot more after reading Blockbuster Science and, for many of us, enjoying science is a way of enjoying life.

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