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Reinventing the Past: Why rely on orthodox historical study when you can invent your own?

Rachel Carthy
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Reinventing the Past: Why rely on orthodox historical study when you can invent your own?

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 14, Issue 3, from 2001.

When you think of chess grand masters, you think, by and large, of thoughtful, rational people. You don’t expect to find one speaking out for a very odd brand of historical revisionism. But Garry Kasparov is a high-profile spokesman for New Chronology, a Russian conspiracy theory of history that’s gaining a startling amount of credibility there.

New Chronology does have solid mathematical roots. It’s the work of a group of notable Russian mathematicians, most notably Anatoly Fomenko and Gleb Nosovski, professors at Moscow State University, building on the work of a man named Nicolai Morozov. While imprisoned for his role in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Morozov drew up chronologies demonstrating that the reign lengths and sequences of the Old Testament kings from Rehoboam to Zedekiah were almost identical to those of the Holy Roman Emperors from Alcuinius to Justinian II, implying that these were actually the same set of historical rulers, mentioned in two separate sets of historical records and mistakenly assigned to different dates over 1,000 years apart.

Fomenko and his colleagues have expanded on this by developing the concept of the “dynastic function”, the pattern of reign lengths and sequences which can be statistically compared. They claim to have compiled a “complete list of fifteen-ruler successions from 4000 BC to 1800 AD, drawing from all the nations and empires of Western and Eastern Europe, and stretching back into antiquity through Roman, Greek, biblical, and Egyptian history,” and say that this shows not only many stretches of apparent identity between the Old Testament and Roman-German history from the 10th to 14th-centuries, but also a single large pattern that repeats itself four times from roughly 1600BC to 1600AD. This, they reckon, shows that “history”, as generally taught, is a patchwork of misdated sources, with many historical figures misidentified as more than one person. As examples: Jesus Christ was in fact born in 1064 AD (no, I don’t know where they’re dating the AD from) and is the same person as Pope St. Gregory VII. Apparently one of the Three Kings in mediaeval religious pictures is often shown as a woman. She, say the New Chronologists, is the ninth-century princess Olga, who converted Russia to Christianity (which, by the way, was identical with Islam until the 16th century).

The mathematics are impressive, though more orthodox historians question the data used for the statistics. There are many uncertainties even in the standard chronology, and there are claims that Fomenko and his colleagues have selected their data to better fit their theory. Which, of course, they deny. None of that would really amount to much more than an academic squabble if it weren’t for the growing political ramifications involved. The theory’s more extreme adherents are developing a Russian-supremacist interpretation. They would like to believe that Russia’s empire once stretched all over Eurasia.

This is a resurgence of a very old phenomenon, that I’ve decided to call cryptohistory, mainly because I’ve been interested in it for quite a while and had to find a term for it (1). It has close ties to conspiracy theory, since many conspiracy theories involve reinterpretation of history to show how it’s been manipulated by whichever cabal of conspirators the theorist deems responsible. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, still in print as supposed fact, is a classic example, claiming to detail the plans of the Jewish cabal who intend to secretly dominate the world. A browse round the more paranoid areas of the internet will unearth many, many more examples, varying widely in coherence, sanity and basic literacy.

Not all cryptohistories are necessarily conspiracy theories, although a large number do find it necessary to invoke conspiracy of one sort or another to explain why their interpretations aren’t widely accepted. But many of them are simply revisions or alternate explanations, and some may even be correct. There seems, for example, to be good historical evidence that the canonical Wicked Uncle of English history, Richard III, was not responsible for the death of his young nephews, the Princes in the Tower, and that in fact they outlived him only to be secretly assassinated by the next king, their brother-in-law, Henry VII. Who, when it came down to writing the histories, had the advantage of better publicists and a kingdom full of people who decided it was better to keep their suspicions to themselves and survive. (2)

Actual attempts to re-date history itself are rare, but the New Chronology isn’t the only one. There’s a wide spread of them, ranging from Immanuel Velikovsky (3) (as a sideline from his usual planetary demolition derby) and, more recently, David Rohl (4) in Egyptology to a German called Heribert Illig who suspects that Pope Sylvester II added 300 years to the history of Europe, inventing Charlemagne in the process and confusing modern historians by thus creating the period known as the Dark Ages in which not much happened. Unfortunately, Illig’s work hasn’t yet been translated into English, and since my German is nonexistent I can’t evaluate this further, though he apparently claims that standard chronology has problems with both carbon-dating and parallelism among European, Indian, and Chinese history that his theory can explain. If anyone who can read German cares to investigate further, I’d be delighted to know why Pope Sylvester did this.(5)

An ancient Egyptian temple

Egyptology and Biblical history seem to be the main haunt of re-daters (6), who often try to link them. Sir Isaac Newton was perhaps the first, and certainly the most famous, to devote himself to reconciling the Bible with other historical documents. Nowadays, Velikovsky and Rohl are the most notable in this area. Velikovsky’s second book, Ages in Chaos, argued for a shift of about 500 years in the dating of Ancient Egypt, which he believed would bring it closer into line with events in the Bible. This theory was roundly ignored by Egyptologists, not least because the events he wanted to bring into line included catastrophic near-misses of the Earth by various careening celestial bodies, but Velikovsky has many enthusiastic followers to this day. Rohl is more scientifically respectable. He advocates, at least in his mass-market publications, a much smaller time shift; re-dating the 21st and 22nd dynasties to run concurrently rather than consecutively. He offers what seems (to me at least) to be convincing evidence of misdating. Apparently this isn’t an original theory; it’s been a minority opinion for years, particularly among European Egyptologists.

The movement towards wider social history in the last century has brought a golden age for cryptohistory. Until Marx and Engels famously expanded historical analysis to include social and economic conditions, history was mainly confined to political and military affairs. The rise of feminism has led to the recent prominence of women’s history, which has a fringe of its own, most notably in the likes of Marija Gimbutas and Riane Eisler, with evil male-chauvinist Indo-European invaders wiping out primordial Goddess-worshippers and conspiring to enslave women for the past few thousand years (7). Other groups of people have developed particular interests in their history as an offshoot from and a spur to their campaigns for civil rights – the histories of both black and lesbian/gay people are growing and occasionally controversial fields of study. Again, they have their extremists. Afrocentric history casts Africa as the cradle of all civilisation. The Ancient Egyptians were black, and their culture and knowledge was stolen by whites, who then denied and covered up this mass theft. Again, this feeds off recent archaeological discoveries and historical re-evaluations of African civilisations. Given the sad history of racial prejudice it’s very easy to claim a white conspiracy to denigrate African achievements and hide The Truth.

History is a subject that’s ripe for such reinterpretation. The written records we have are limited and biased – notably, and obviously, towards those people who actually left records, the literate and powerful, who naturally had their own agendas. New perspectives can add valuable understanding, or hint at new possibilities, but the gaps in our knowledge are so large that it’s easy to fill them with guesswork and opinions that only reinforce what we want to believe.

This is nothing new, of course. As long as there’s been history there have been people putting a spin on it, usually to flatter themselves, their community or whomever happened to be in charge at the time, but sometimes in pursuit of stranger agendas. Erich von Däniken’s reinterpretation of ancient history to include alien astronauts was the 1970s version, but there are plenty of earlier examples (usually Biblical). These include writers such as the rather alarming Comyns Beaumont, who was determined to prove that all the events of the Bible actually occurred in Britain and produced beautiful maps of the Home Counties with place names from Israel and Palestine (8). I’m also tempted to include Joseph Smith Jr, whose Book of Mormon has Jewish tribes battling across the Americas. This apparently puts devout Mormon scholars in a bit of a spot, since the Book of Mormon is divinely inspired and therefore unarguably accurate, though unfortunately failing at any point to agree with the archaeological record. Though it is the only theory I’ve ever seen that accounts for the Yiddish-speaking Chief in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles.

Another modern version, with plenty of recent publicity thanks to the David Irving/Deborah Lipstadt trial, is Holocaust revisionism. Antisemitism is prominent in many cryptohistorical theories, perhaps due to their conspiracy theory links. For instance, many versions of Afrocentrism are strongly antisemitic, and the Nazi obsession with reinterpreting history as the preserve of noble, blonde ur-Nazi Aryans and scheming Jews is well known. The Anglo-Israelite Comyns Beaumont, mentioned above, was pretty-much overtly writing to prove that all this Biblical stuff was really the work of noble Northern Europeans. After all, who could God’s Chosen People be but the British?

This isn’t just playing with interpretations, though; there are wider political implications. Cryptohistory isn’t just confined to fringe Web sites. People use history. A shared history, whether it’s true or not, is a cohesive force. The rise of social history is entwined with the politics of society – Marx and Engels were the intellectual force behind Communism. The history of feminism, and of social activism in general, is closely bound up with the practice of same – knowing about the struggles of people you can identify with provides inspiration and strength, as well as knowledge. As they say, you have to know where you’re coming from to know where you’re going. But this can be horribly misused. Look at Communism. Look at Nazism. Read any newspaper, and note how often history is used to justify present atrocities.

An open book with glasses on it

History is vulnerable to hijacking by those with agendas of their own, and cryptohistories, with their lack of academic credentials and support, possibly more so. As an example, Rohl’s new Egyptian chronology is supported by many who wish to see the Bible as a historically accurate document, a hope that mainstream archaeology in Canaan and Israel doesn’t support. I am told that it also delights white supremacists, since his theory has Egyptian civilisation founded by invaders from Asia Minor, who became the modern Jews/Arabs, rather than by Africans.

Cryptohistories often have a great deal of emotional appeal, for various reasons. They can offer simple, easily understandable explanations for complex injustices. Why are women considered inferior? Because the nasty Kurgans invaded and enslaved everyone who didn’t think that way. Why are you not powerful, famous and loved as you deserve? Because there’s a conspiracy – of Jews, of Masons, of white people, of whichever scapegoat is convenient – against you and yours. They can offer support for the status quo by flattering the powerful, or soothing or sidelining the powerless. They can entertain – the excitement of discovering lost civilisations, the thrill of being one of the few in the know.

Returning to New Chronology with this in mind, it’s no surprise that it’s so popular in Russia, considering the present depressing state of the CIS. It gives them a glorious past and more, it gives them a glorious past which has been unjustly and cunningly hidden until rediscovered by brilliant Russian scholars. Apparently this mythical history has become so popular in Russia that some school districts insist that it be taught as truth, and history professors are worrying about an influx of first-year university students who’ve never learned anything else. And I recently heard that President Putin wants New Chronology to be taught in Russian schools. Given the age-old human tendency to invent the histories we want, and then use them to justify our actions, perhaps we should begin to worry.

Notes

  1. The Skeptic’s Dictionary has an entry for “pseudohistory” at http://skepdic.com/pseudohs.html. I decided not to use the term, since it only covers the extreme end of the field I’m interested in and some cryptohistories are more respectable and better supported by the evidence than that term would suggest.
  2. Too many books for and against Richard’s guilt to list here. Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (1951) is a good light read, presented as a modern-day detective story using historical evidence. I also like AJ Pollard’s Richard III and the Princes in the Tower (1991), a well-balanced account.
  3. Velikovsky’s books on historical redating are “Ages in Chaos” (1952), Peoples of the Sea (1977) and Rameses II and His Time (1978). Most of his unpublished work is available on the Internet.
  4. David Rohl: A Test of Time (Arrow, 1996) and Pharaohs and Kings: a Biblical Quest (Crown, 1997).
  5. Heribert Illig: Wer Hat an der Uhr Gedreht? (Econ Verlag, 1999). A discussion of Illig’s work from a postmodern point of view: http://www.philjohn.com/papers/pjkd_h02.html.
  6. “The Revision of Ancient History – A Perspective” by P John Crowe is a massive overview of various attempts to redate Egyptology. Rather heavy going, I’m afraid, and no orthodox Egyptologists are represented.
  7. Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Harper San Frarncisco, 1988), began the modern pseudo-feminist cult of blaming everything that’s wrong with modern society on prehistoric invading Indo-European tribesmen. Dr Marija Gimbutas wrote, among others, Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 7000-3500BC: Myths and Cult Images (University of California Press, 1982) and The Language of the Goddess (Harper San Francisco, 1989), though most of her fellow archaeologists didn’t (and still don’t) agree with her conclusions. See http://www.debunker.com/texts/goddess.html for excerpted arguments against her claims.
  8. Comyns Beaumont, Britain: the Key to World History (Rider & Company, 1947). “Jerusalem” is really Edinburgh. Goliath came from Bath. What more can I say?

From the archives: Nothing but a Dirty Film? Polywater – the cold fusion of the 1960s

Bill Penny
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From the archives: Nothing but a Dirty Film? Polywater – the cold fusion of the 1960s

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 6, from 1990.

In the history of modern science there have been several disputes, sometimes quite heated, over controversial phenomena which were later shown not to exist. These are examples of what is sometimes called pathological science. Examples of pathological science are sometimes raised in discussions on the paranormal partly because they are instances where conventional science can become very similar to the paranormal – see, for instance, Dave Love’s article on cold fusion in The Skeptic 3.4.

Pathological science is of relevance to paranormal research because it shows how researchers can mistakenly come to believe in the existence of a phenomenon. It shows how mistakes, self-deception, and careless or hurried research can lead to mistaken beliefs. But in the hard sciences, such as chemistry and physics, as the weight of evidence against the phenomenon increases, most supporters are able to accept they were mistaken.

The two classic examples of pathological science are N rays and polywater. I will discuss N rays in a future issue but in this article I would like to present the scientific ‘discovery’ which inspired Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle with its lethal ‘Ice 9’-polywater.

In 1962 Nikolai Fedyakin was working in a laboratory in Komstroma, a city about 1 90 miles from Moscow, investigating the behaviour of pure liquids in very narrow (about 0.003 mm diameter) glass capillaries. He found that over a period of a month a column of liquid about 1 .5 mm long formed at the top of some of the capillaries, where previously there had been no liquid. Even odder than this separation of a pure liquid into two parts was the fact that the liquid in the top of the capillary was denser that the original liquid below it. His publication of these findings in a widely read Soviet science publication marked the start of the strange story of polywater.

Fedyakin’s report aroused the interest of some scientists in Moscow, especially Boris Deryagin, the director of the Surface Forces Laboratory at the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Moscow. As early as the 1930’s he had conducted research into how liquids very close to solid surfaces differed structurally from liquids in bulk. Deryagin and his colleagues began by repeating – and improving – Fedyakin’s original experiment until it only took a matter of hours to collect a sample of this modified liquid several millimetres long. To try to prevent impurities getting into the liquid, they took great care over the liquids and equipment they used. However, they found that the modified water they produced had very different properties to normal water: it froze at -30 degrees Celsius, boiled at 250 degrees, was 15 times more viscous and its density was 10% to 20% greater. It was this modified water which was later given the name polywater.

Between 1962 and 1966 Deryagin’s laboratories published ten papers in a small circulation Soviet journal, and in 1965 Deryagin presented details of his work at an international chemistry conference in Moscow. Despite all this activity, western scientists were still not properly aware of the importance of the claims being made. Partly to blame for this was the way in which the papers actually understated the importance of their contents, and an inefficient translation system at the conference.

This situation changed with the 1966 Faraday Discussion at the University of Nottingham, where Deryagin presented a summary of his team’s discoveries. He also speculated that polywater was more stable than ordinary water, with the implication that all water would eventually change into polywater, though this could take a very long time. He claimed that this work on modified liquids proved that liquids could exist in several forms. This phenomenon – called polymorphism – is known to occur in solids. For example, the element carbon can exist as graphite or diamond, and disappointingly, even diamonds are not forever: they change extremely slowly into graphite. As for polywater, Deryagin suggested that it could be caused by the solid surface of the capillary altering the forces between the water molecules to such an extent that the modified water could exist independently of the surface. Surprisingly, there was little reaction from the audience to his work or his speculations.

While he was in Britain, Deryagin visited several British laboratories which were interested in his work on polywater, and subsequently a number of British groups, including one led by Brian Pethica of Unilever, began research into polywater. The Russians continued their research but neither they nor anyone else was ever able to produce more than very small amounts of polywater. In 1967 Deryagin attended the Gordon Conference in the USA but once again his report on polywater was received with little interest. But things began to change with the 1 968 Gordon Conference, where Pethica announced that his group had verified Deryagin’s work. Most of the audience were skeptical but one scientist, Robert Stomberg of the US National Bureau of Standards, was interested enough to investigate further.

In fact, it was due to the US Office of Naval Research that the idea began to be taken seriously in the US. They were alerted in 1968 when the regular summaries they received recording developments in European research began to mention polywater. They reacted by setting up a conference in February 1969 exclusively for US scientists, to increase their knowledge about polywater. In this it was very successful and it was to America that the story now moves.

In early 1969 there were many speculations in the scientific journals on polywater, but the first serious report was in Nature (12 April 1969) in which Pethica summarised his findings. He confirmed some of Deryagin ‘s results but warned that until polywater became available in large amounts it would not be known whether it was just an impure solution or actually a new form of water.

Then, on 24 May, an Anglo-American team, which included Ellis Lippincott, professor of chemistry at the University of Maryland, announced that using spectroscopy they were sure that polywater was ‘a new form of water and not the result of casual contamination.’ They concluded it must be a polymer of water molecules.

But it was a paper which appeared in the 27 June issue of Science which more than anything else aroused the interest of US scientists in polywater. This paper, by Lippincott, Robert Stromberg and others, reported that after comparing 100,000 different spectra with the polywater spectrum they were sure that polywater was a new substance, which they believed was produced when the quartz capillary tube caused the water molecules to form a polymer. Their tests for contamination revealed minute quantities, but these were too small to have caused the difference between the polywater and water spectra. Lippincott and his colleagues increased the publicity they were receiving by travelling widely to different countries to give lectures on polywater.

There was much reporting and speculating on polywater in the scientific press but it was not until a lecture given by Lippincott in New York on 11 September that the news was published in the media worldwide. The media would probably have soon lost interest in this subject if it had not been for a letter F J Donahue sent to Nature. He wrote that polywater was ‘the most dangerous substance on Earth’, fearing that if molecules of polywater got outside the laboratory they could, because they were more stable than normal water, act as nuclei around which normal water could change into polywater, eventually turning Earth into a Venus-like planet. From this point the mass media were to play an important – but bad – role in the polywater affair.

In contrast to the growing support for polywater, at the end of 1969 a letter was published in Nature from a researcher into glass solubility suggesting that polywater was just silica contaminated water. In 1970 a team led by Dennis Rousseau of Bell Laboratories reported in Science (27 March) that careful chemical analysis showed that polywater was simply water contaminated with sodium, potassium, chlorine amongst other things, but hardly any silicon. In June many of the leading people in the polywater debate attended a conference at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania Deryagin dismissed the contamination explanations by saying that these were the result of careless work, and that his own samples contained only minute levels of contamination. The revelation by Lippincott that his polywater spectrum was almost certainly caused by contamination shook the belief of many supporters. Little new evidence was presented, and most of the scientists left as they had arrived, unconvinced by either side in the debate.

Little new data emerged during the rest of 1970 but many articles continued to be published including one by Deryagin on the evidence for polywater (Scientific American, September 1970). Robert Davis of Purdue University received much publicity without having published a single paper on polywater at that time. To support the contamination theory on polywater he was able to show an article from an obscure Russian journal in which a chemist reported that in 1968 an analysis of samples of Deryagin’s polywater suggested it was caused by contamination. Its chemical composition suggested it could be of human origin, possibly sweat. This was reported in the New York Times of 27 September. In October Davis appeared in Time magazine with a photo of him at work, wringing sweat out of a T-shirt.

The year 1971 began with Pethica and his colleagues announcing that the recent work of others led them to think that polywater was a contaminated solution rather than a polymer of water. Deryagin’s reply to this showed that he still believed in polywater. Chemical analysis continued to provide evidence against polywater and by now much of the argument had moved away from whether polywater existed to what the cause of the contamination was. The sweat and carelessness theories continued to have some support but it was the silica contamination explanation which was receiving increasing support. Headlines in Nature such as ‘Polywater and Polypollutants’ and ‘Polywater Drains Away’ reflected how attitudes were turning towards acceptance of contamination.

During 1972 and early 1973 papers on polywater were still being published, though in decreasing numbers. Nothing of significance on polywater was reported until the 17 August Nature in which Deryagin stated that more careful work had shown that polywater was caused by impurities in the water. The composition of these impurities depended on the method of preparation, but always included silicon (Scientific American September 1973). This can be considered the end of the polywater affair though the results of polywater research continued to be published for the next few years.

It is now believed that the properties of polywater are due to high silica concentrations. But is is also known that it could not all come from the quartz capillary tubes because quartz is not soluble enough to produce the required concentration of silica. This fact had been used by Deryagin against the claims of silica contamination. This is one of the questions which Felix Franks, in his definitive Polywater (MIT Press, 1981), claims had still not been satisfactorily answered when he wrote about these events in 1981. The negative label attached to polywater research may have delayed investigation into the exact nature of the contaminants, but what is now clear is that polywater was not at all what it originally appeared to be.

From the archives: A panoply of paranormal piffle – The Skeptic meets Stephen Fry

Steve Donnelly
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From the archives: A panoply of paranormal piffle – The Skeptic meets Stephen Fry

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 5, from 1990.

For anyone possessing a television, a radio or, for that matter, the Friday edition of the Daily Telegraph it is difficult to avoid Stephen Fry’s pugilist’s nose, mellifluous tones and dry wit. The actor’s art does not give much scope for personal opinion but in his writings Fry’s irreverence for the irrational, his antipathy for the antiscientific and his intense disdain for daftness become apparent. In the Listener in December 1988, for instance he wrote ‘It’s extremely unlucky to be superstitious for the simple reason that it is always unlucky to be colossally stupid…’ It was in the context of this skepticism, unusual in actors who are generally regarded as a superstitious lot, that Stephen Fry agreed to be interviewed by the Skeptic.

It was perhaps appropriate on arriving at the Groucho Club for the interview that our conversation began with an unintentional spot of comedy. This resulted from the fact that I could not initially persuade the reels on my (borrowed) cassette recorder to turn round. The first recorded phrase of the interview was thus ‘…and you are an electrical engineer and you don’t quite know how to operate a cassette recorder…’.

But then (I suspect unusually for actors) Fry is quite at home with technology and is a keen user and programmer of Apple Macintosh computers. It would be tempting to think that this was perhaps natural for someone whose father is a physicist and a computer buff but, in fact, his father’s scientific, mathematical and musical abilities had the effect of initially pushing Fry away from these areas: ‘From an early age-and without wanting to be too psychoanalytic about myself – I think I probably gave up on things that I thought I could never compete with my father on. So I became far more interested in the arts and gave up piano lessons as soon as I possibly could-at the age of about eight-and went round claiming I had a maths block. But after I’d left Cambridge when I was a bit more grown up I became very interested in computers – I got an early BBC micro and then bought a Macintosh the year they came out and began programming and discovered I didn’t have a maths block at all.’

Although he was a student at Cambridge at the end of the seventies (1978-1981) this was a few years after the infatuation of the student community with Eastern religions. And although his mother’s family was religiously Jewish and his father’s family Quaker, western religion did not feature greatly in his upbringing either:

‘I had a sort of vague yen to go into the church when I was about 15 or 16 – I rather fancied myself in a cassock – but I think, generally speaking, I have always inclined towards what is loosely called liberal humanism. I’ve never really been strongly drawn to anything religious. This is not to say that I can’t be drawn towards anything spiritual which is not the same thing at all. But I’ve always, for as long as I can remember, had an irritation with things superstitious. I have a great belief in reason – the world is so remarkable and extraordinary anyway that to try and find things that are subject to no testing, no logic and no reason is ugly. The world is far too mysterious a place in its own right to try to add mysteries.’

Although he read English at Cambridge and took no science courses Fry nonetheless has a sympathy for science which is unusual in arts graduates, and does not feel that a scientific understanding of the world reduces our appreciation of it:

‘Just as there is nothing intrinsically dry and unspiritual about science, similarly there is nothing intrinsically mystical and irrational about the study of literature. Indeed, when I was at Cambridge we were going through the great structuralist debate and a lot of people were saying that the trouble with structuralism is that it is a rather scientific method, so that at linguistic levels you actually have complex formulas for the description of phonemes and so on. They felt that English should be about your response to a text, and there is of course room for that, but my view has always been that you don’t find the Lake District less beautiful just because you happen to know about the rock structure underneath it. If anything, geologists may even find it more beautiful because they see what Eliot might call the skull beneath the skin, which gives them a greater sense of the beauty of it. Similarly I have no patience for people who say that Shakespeare was ruined for them by having to study it at school; a further understanding of something never ruins its beauty.’

At this point Stephen Fry paused to blow his nose and remarked on the fact that for many years he had felt that he was immune to colds as he never seemed to catch them. Unfortunately, a few days previously, the Cosmos had responded to this false confidence by giving him the grandaddy of all colds – and in the acting world having a cold brings its own problems:

‘I would say the worst thing about being in a play is the moment you get a sniffle like I’ve got now, and you’re in your dressing room, suddenly there is a knock on the door and you hear:

“Stephen, hello it’s Lucy here. I heard your cough and there’s a wonderful little man in Camden Passage who does Bach wild flower remedies. Here’s his card.”

“Yes thank you”

And then there’s another knock:

“Would you like to borrow my crystals?” somebody else says. And it continues:

“Knock, knock” –  “I’ve got four piles of vitamins. Here’s a bottle of vitamin C there’s one of vitamin B, one of vitamin D and one of vitamin K, which not many people know about.”

“Get out!”, I cry. “I’ve got a cold, for God’s sake leave me alone, I don’ t want your crystals, I don’t want your homeopathy, I don’t want your little weird spongy trace element pills that melt on your tongue. I don’t want any of this drivel, I just want a handkerchief!”

But he does proffer an explanation for this type of almost superstitious belief in unproven, quack remedies or formulae for self-improvement that seem so popular amongst actors and perhaps more particularly amongst actresses:

‘One of the explanations is that actresses careers are very difficult. They have to rely so much on their personal appearance, on their health, and on their skin quality, that they’re desperate for anything that they think might even have a 0.01% chance of making them fitter, or look better or glossier.’

Fry, himself, however, did not avail himself of a unique opportunity for self-improvement which he had seen on a TV programme:

‘I was so staggered when I saw some television programme about an American who is genuinely producing jeans with crystals sewn into a special gusset because he believes the crotch is the centre of consciousness and that the crystals resonate with some cosmic frequency. He’s making a fortune out of people buying jeans with bits of mineral in them.’

As lone skeptic in the midst of a generally credulous community of actors and actresses, an easy course of action might be to keep one’s views on homeopathy, astrology and psychic powers to oneself. Stephen Fry, on the contrary, expresses his views and expresses them forcefully. Andrew Lloyd Webber has a long-weekend party at his house in Newbury every year and often organizes a debate in the evenings. One year Fry was asked to propose the motion ‘Sydmonton (the name of Lloyd Webber’s house) Believes that Astrology is Bumf’ and was seconded by John Selwyn Gummer (of mad cow disease fame). The motion was opposed by no less a personage than Russell Grant who was seconded by the woman who taught TV ‘s cuddliest astrologer his mystical arts. Fry began his speech in blunt terms: ‘I said that not only does Sydmonton believe that astrology is bumf, it believes that it is crap, it’s a crock of horseshit, that it’s bullshit.’ But this rhetoric was followed up with some good skeptical entertainment as Fry had asked his agent to obtain ‘serious’ astrological readings based on information given to a number of astrologers about him, Hitler and various other persons. He proceeded to amuse the gathering by reading these totally inaccurate personality profiles thereby somewhat weakening the opposition’s argument.

Astrology is clearly a subject about which Fry has strong feelings (to be expected in a Sagittarius): ‘The constellations are all based on the parallax from which we view them so that it is totally arbitrary when we say that a particular constellation looks like, say, a pair of scales. Then to say, given that from this particular point of view this particular constellation looks slightly like some scales, someone born under it therefore is balanced is just the most insane thing you’ve ever heard. Or to say that someone born under Gemini, the twins, displays some kind of split personality, it seems so clear that this is just nonsense. And then people say “It stands to reason you know…” . It stands to all kinds of things, but reason is certainly not one of them.’

He recently participated in television programme on Channel 4 called Star Test in which celebrities are interviewed by a computer. The interviewee is alone in a studio with the cameras operated remotely and is asked by an electronic voice to select a topic and then to select a number from 1 to 5. So far so good – but the next question asked of him was ‘what is your star sign? ‘ – not a good question to ask the man who once said, in an interview with the Independent, that the length of his penis was likely to reveal as much about his personality as his star sign (–and no Freudian will disagree with that!).

‘… And so I refused to say anything and just stood up – you’re supposed to sit down – with the cameras following me, and spoke angrily about astrology for about 2 minutes. I expect they ‘ll cut this bit because I went on and on and on and on…’

Fry, when confronted with the there-are-more-things-inheaven-than-are-dreamt-of-in-your-philosophy school of logic, stresses the word ‘dreamt’ and insists that he also dreams of heffalumps, unicorns and tolerable estate agents. However he does accept that it is possible for people to have a significantly greater sensitivity to certain stimuli than most of us and that this can lead to, for instance, an apparent ability to dowse for water:

‘I was in the South of France recently where a friend of mine who is a great skeptic, Douglas Adams (author of Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), has a house. Now, all of Provence is desperately short of water, it’s the worst crisis they have ever had. If you want water you have to ring up for the water lorry and pay a vast amount of money to have your tank filled. It really is very, very bad. And he was talking to a chap who looks after a lot of houses belonging to English people in that area who was saying “well you either pay for the lorry each time it comes or you can have someone to come and dowse”. And indeed there are dowsers in Provence who make a fat living out of finding water for people.

‘Now, goodness knows I certainly don’t believe that a mystic power comes out of the earth but I do believe in hyperaesthesia and I know of a great many people who are able to read signs in a semiotic way; who are able, for instance, to see someone talking and know that he is lying simply because they are so good at reading signs that most of us don’t notice. Similarly, someone who is experienced in the kinds of places where water is likely to be, may well see patterns in the plants or geology of the area that indicate the presence of water – perhaps at a subconscious level. But he may genuinely believe that the water is influencing his dowsing twig. So I won’t dismiss dowsing because, in my view, anybody who can make a decent living by dowsing, amongst people as naturally cynical as the French, in an area where water is so rare must have some talent for finding water. But I don’t for a moment believe that there is any outside agency which is making the twig move’.

Another esoteric art for which Fry has a certain respect but without believing that there are any mystical elements to it – is the use of randomness to help gain insights into oneself or into problems: ‘I think the use of the aleatory in life is rather good. The I Ching for instance – which I don’t actually think any Chinaman believes to be particularly mystic – is a rather useful way of confronting anything. But the thing that you must do is think of the question you want to ask, ultimately, yourself. In fact, you can use any random event. For instance, you may have an important decision to make and what you can do is concentrate on the first thing you see out of the window – which could be a sparrow. You look at this sparrow with the question in your mind and anything the sparrow now does – via the natural patterning and metaphorical symbolizing abilities of the mind – will help you to come to grips with the problem. Essentially, you have the answer yourself but you just want to be shown an authority for it. Everyone needs a sense of some authority behind what they’re doing it, no-one wants to think of himself as being entirely alone and self-determining. In reality, of course, the real authority comes from oneself but we search for something to sanction what we’ re doing and rather reasonable things like the I Ching, ultimately, turn the authority back to oneself by the way in which one is obliged to frame the question.’

Tolerant of oracles and dowsers, vociferous in his opposition to astrology and quackery – but what is Stephen Fry’s particular bete noire amongst the mindless, mystical menagerie?

‘I suppose the one that really gets me going probably more than most is what the Greeks used to call metempsychosis – what we now call reincarnation. It doesn’t take much to realise that even at the rate at which we are increasing as a population, there are still many more dead people around than there are living ones. Therefore there is a surplus of dead people so that they can’t all be reincarnated – except as wasps perhaps, rather than WASPs. So I would love to hear one of these fatuous people who claim they’ve been around in previous lives just for once having lived in a period of time or as a person that wasn’t dramatically interesting. Why must they all have been a serving maid to Cleopatra or caught up in the persecution of the Jews in York or something that is so easily researchable, so pointlessly predictable?

And the other thing that really annoys me is the people who claim to have seen ghosts. They nearly always—because they think its going to impress you more – tell you about it in a rather matter-of-fact tone of voice. Whereas, if l was going to even vaguely begin to believe that someone had seen a ghost, I would expect them to be absolutely staggered because it turns upside-down one’s whole preconception about what the physical universe is.’ He leaned forward and gesticulated with his cup of cappuccino. ‘If I dropped this and it went upwards, I would be talking about it for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t just dismissively say “Yeah, it’s interesting – I let go of this cup and it fell upwards – would you like another cup of coffee?”. And similarly with ghosts. Seeing a ghost would overturn everything you understand about the universe around you. You would have to be excited about it. Yet the person who recounts his experience pretends he’s bored with it How can you take it seriously? The whole paranormal panoply gets me going. It’s all such ineffable piffle, isn’t it?’

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

From the archives: A hole in the head – Creationists and APEmen in Lowestoft

Jean N Dorricott
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From the archives: A hole in the head – Creationists and APEmen in Lowestoft

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 5, from 1990.

Perhaps you don’t know that when ancient man (ably assisted by Raquel Welch) roamed the earth, his life was made more perilous by fire-breathing dinosaurs. Evidence for this lies in an unexplained cavity in the skulls of some dinosaurs, and the widespread legends of dragons from Europe and Asia.

This gem of information was related to a small but fascinated audience in Lowestoft public library lecture room in June, by Dr Rosevear PhD, C Chem, FRSC, Chairman of the Creation Science Movement. Outside the rain poured down and the great winds blew, as if in support of his theory of the year-long Flood of Noah, during which all the Earth’s sedimentary rocks (including those formed under desert conditions) were laid down. So inclement was the weather that only 18 people struggled damply through the wet streets to hear him speak on the downfall of modern science due to the infallibility of the bible.

Lowestoft had been promised this intellectual treat since January 1989, when a local optician stated in the weekly Lowestoft Journal that evolution is rubbish, not logic. I leapt to the defence with a short letter – and the ensuing correspondence from many different writers carried on for three months (it was a dull winter for news in Waveney that year!). The outcome was a promised visit from Dr Rosevear in March, which had to be cancelled due to illness.

Reasoning the Creationists would have another bite at the cherry, I joined the CSM to keep informed of personnel movements and to collect some of their literature. I also read up a selection of books on the American experience. Various queries resulted in helpful contacts with the Association for the Protection of Evolution, and a meeting with one of the APEmen.

When Dr Rosevear informed us the postponed visit would take place this June, I went into action and contacted by previously prepared letter all the science departments in our local High Schools and College of Further Education, and the various mainstream churches. Interest was very small – but enough, as it turned out. The mainstream churches were indifferent on the whole as they find no problem in assimilating evolutionary theory into Christian teaching, and have no truck with the CSM literature produced for Sunday Schools (Our World, published by Creation Resources Trust). One of the High Schools showed particular concern as the staff had experienced pupils querying evolutionary theory at GCSE level because it ‘contradicted the bible’. There are a couple of large fundamentalist free church groups in this area which attract young people.

So, on this wet June evening, we few gathered together to hear why Science is Wrong. The presentation of the talk was poor, partly due to a mislaid slide projector, but the general style was the usual one of casting doubt on radiometric dating methods, and making out that scientists are all at each other’s throats, quite incapable of coming to rational conclusions about anything. Mention was made of Barry Setterfield’s work on the decrease of the speed of light which changes the age of the universe from several billion years to a few thousand. This intellectual tour de force seems to have been conceived by Setterfield working on his own at home, and due to family illness he is unable to reply to the various criticisms of his figures.

From CSM pamphlet 262, we learn that by using values for the speed of light, c, from Roemer’s time (1675!) to the present, and by using a graph whose y axis starts at 299800 (no units given), Setterfield can draw a curve, in which c, when extrapolated back to 4000 BC, reaches infinity. (In the actual graph it merely approaches a very large number). A recent lecture given to the Stanford Research Institute is reported by CSM to have received warm applause, careful and lengthy discussion and no protests. However, SRI have now withdrawn their initial support due to pressure from ‘certain quarters’.

Furthermore, discussion with astronomers (unnamed) indicated that the curve did not follow a cosec2 formula, as Setterfield initially deduced, but would take the form of the square root of an exponentially damped sinusoid, ie at some periods of time the speed of light would be zero. I assume this is astronomer’s code for ‘rubbish!’, which is printed in the CSM leaflet in error.

HDR image of the Orion Nebula and 'Running man', surrounded by other distant stars and galaxies. A range of dust colours in the nebula are visible; orange, blue, pink, purple and more.
An HDR image with the full Messier 42 view of the Orion Nebula, also showing the NGC1999 region at lower right and Running Man Nebula (SH2-279) at the left. Keesscherer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There are many interesting conclusions to be drawn from Setterfield’s work. From E=mc2 creationists can deduce that if c was faster in the past, then radioactive decay would also be faster, so allowing us to alter all our radiometric dating to fit in with an earth created about 6000 BP. However, according to Alan Lewis and Michael Howgate of APE, stellar energy production would have raised by a factor of at least 5 x 1022, resulting in super pyrotechnics just as God said ‘Let there be light’. And the poor newly formed plants and animals would have died immediately from radiation sickness, bombardment by super-dense molecules, intense solar radiation and having bones too thin to hold their own weight. The CSM assure us the world was very different before Eve spoilt it with her Sin of Disobedience – and if Barry Setterfield is right, it certainly was completely different from today.

The liveliest part of the evening was the constant interruption of the speaker by Alan Lewis of APE, who kindly came up from London with his partner for the meeting. He has had considerable dealings with CSM, and they were dismayed when he turned up. (However did he find out about their meeting?) When Dr Rosevear made a false statement or misrepresented what scientists put forward, then Alan interrupted him – there were a lot of interruptions! At one point he even corrected Dr Rosevear’s misunderstanding about animal feeding habits, and was thanked by the highly embarrassed speaker. Eventually Mrs Rosevear left to phone the police, but she had no support from our Lowestoft force who have better things to do than sit in on creationist meetings.

The APE strategy had two valuable effects. First, it put Dr Rosevear off course, and the talk became even more wildly muddled. Secondly, it ensured that the tape recording made by the faithful would be completely useless in spreading the creationist gospel.

Unfortunately the 10 non-scientific church members present accepted everything the speaker told them, reasoning that as he is a scientist and a Christian, he would relay accurate scientific information. They assumed Alan was a godless sinner out to destroy God’s kingdom – and at similar meetings in less peaceful surroundings, Alan has received physical rough handling. It was valuable to have seven other scientists present, who could raise more issues, and question time was dominated by their objections. One inquiry was whether Dr Rosevear discounted all the work done by thousands of scientists over the past hundred years, and he actually admitted this was so.

After the gathering broke up in some disarray, the supporters of evolutionary theory retired to the nearest local for a far more interesting conversation with Alan Lewis about the problems of dealing with these odd groups of religious fanatics. He has followed their fortunes for some years so is conversant with all their theories.

While one cannot open closed minds, one can at least raise doubts, and it may be worthwhile emphasising, when dealing with this sect, that any organisation which takes the moral high ground, as the CSM claim to do, should be extremely careful that they do not deliberately misrepresent scientific discoveries. I discussed this with Dr Rosevear. Both he and his wife are charming and courteous people, and how they can countenance deception I cannot understand.

I pointed out that in their literature they claim that those who support evolutionary theory also support racism, pornography and lawlessness; that they still publish a pamphlet reporting that Dr Colin Patterson, a senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in 1981, holds anti-evolutionary views, although Patterson has strongly denied their interpretation of his talk; that in their children’s literature they produce drawings of dinosaur and human footprints in Cretaceous rocks in the Paluxy river bed, while admitting to adults both sets of footprints are dinosaurs. If readers of the Skeptic come across creationist literature, it may be worth while writing to the CSM asking for further explanation, as a useful time-wasting device.

We should also be aware that while mainstream churches are unlikely to support creationists, in Britain at any rate, they may not be prepared to make active protest. Their attitude would be that the job of refuting creationists lies with scientists, and that by highlighting these events the creationists may receive too much media coverage. Professor Derek Burke, the Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, who has had considerable dealings with the American creationists over the years, wrote to me that it may be better to boycott such events as they tend to lead to public controversy and such groups are unimportant fringe movements of no consequence. They have a more active following in the USA and Australia – and some connections in Germany and parts of eastern Europe.

We are pleased the importance of CSM in Lowestoft is minimal, in spite of the interest shown last year, and we hope the hostile reception they received will discourage their return to this area.

Editor’s note: when this story was first published in 1990, it mistakenly identified Dr Rosevear as being Chairman of the Christian Science Movement – he was, at the time, Chairman of the Creation Science Movement, and the text here has been updated to correct that original error.

From the archives: The 1988 Nullarbor UFO Mystery – Solved

A.T. Brunt
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From the archives: The 1988 Nullarbor UFO Mystery – Solved

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 3, Issue 5, from 1989.

In January 1988, reports of UFO sightings over Australia’s Nullarbor region were widely reported in the Australian media. The editor of the Star ‘newspaper’ judged the story to be of sufficient interest to merit front page treatment in its January 22 edition. On the request of Popular Astronomy editor Ian Ridpath, retired meteorologist A.T. Brunt conducted an investigation into the sightings. This is his report.

Quite a few unusual lights have been sighted over Australia’s Nullarbor Region, but none have received the notoriety of the two 1988 incidents. There are no towns of any size between Ceduna and Norseman or Kalgoorlie (Figure 1); most are railway sidings or road settlements of just a few people. Although the Eyre Highway runs closer to the coast than the Nullarbor Plain itself, the whole area has become known as the ‘Nullarbor’. Between Madura and Eucla, an area known locally as ‘The Basin’, there is a line of 100m hills to the north, but east of Eucla the highway is located on higher ground.

A black and white line drawing of a map of the Nullarbor region of southern Australia. Two Xs mark the location of incidents discussed in the article, close to Madura. In the top right is a representation of the whole of Australia with the Nullarbor shaded in black in the lower left. Below this is a zoomed-in view showing the Transcontinental railway running east from Kalgoorlie and through Forrest, Hughes and Denman. Below this, the Eyre Highway runs east from Norseman (north of Esperance) through the coastal areas of Madura, Mundrabilla Roadhouse, Eucla and east through Ceduna. Marked by a thicker line is the Great Australian Bight (an ocean bay with high cliff coast) south of this. The scale shows 0-300kms and roughly down the centre is marked the SA/WA Border.
Figure 1: Location map: area of incidents marked X

It really is a perfect area for ‘UFO’ spotting. The dry, desert conditions give rise to decreased cloudiness, there are no city lights to distract the spotter, road and rail traffic is fairly sparse and the horizons are so flat and wide. There is an awesome splendour about the night skies there that has to be seen to be appreciated.

A line drawing of a shape like a flower bud with a scribble in the centre, above a wobbly line. Drawn by a driver who was travelling eastwards on the Eyre Highway, who was forced into evasive action due to seeing a bright light that 'jumped about a bit' and that was shaped like 'an egg in an eggcup and about 1 metre wide'
Figure 2

The first of the 1988 incidents occurred about 4:20 am Central Daylight Saving Time (CDST) on 20 January, when the Knowles family was travelling eastwards on the Eyre Highway. About 40km west of the Mundrabilla Roadhouse, they saw a light over the road ahead of them. At first they thought it was the light from a truck approaching them from the east, but the light became brighter and bigger, frightening them into taking evasive action. The driver of the car said that the light appeared and disappeared ‘after jumping about a bit.’ He described its shape ‘like an egg in an eggcup and about 1 metre wide’ and its colour as ‘bright and white with a yellow centre.’ His sketch of its shape was included in newspaper articles (figure 2).

There were other vehicles within 30 or 40km but the occupant of only one, a truck driven by Graham Henley, reported seeing any unusual light. He was driving east some distance ahead of the Knowles’ vehicle and said he saw a light that was ‘too high up to be another truck or vehicle’, it was ‘white and yellow in colour’ and it ‘disappeared and reappeared’. The crew of a tuna boat fishing in Bight waters ‘hundreds of kilometres away’ also saw a strange light on the same night and it was elongated in the vertical, but no direction or elevation of this light was reported.

The Knowles family claimed that their car was picked up by the ‘UFO’ and as it was dumped, a tyre burst. They also claimed that a black ash covered the car and that there were indentations on the car’s roof. They drove off at high speed and were obviously very distressed and somewhat hysterical when first interviewed.

Their vehicle was subjected to thorough inspections on several occasions by the Police and various UFO research groups in Australia, but none of these inspections showed anything unusual about the car. There was no black ash inside or outside the car; the only addition was a black deposit on the metal rims of the two front tyres, which was consistent with material from the brake linings. The rear right-hand tyre had burst in a normal manner, such as one would expect from a vehicle driven at high speed, leaving some rubber marks on the wheel arch. The dents on the roof were insignificant, and there was no proof that they were not there before the event. So there was nothing mysterious, only the unusual, egg-shaped white and yellow light they saw. The second incident occurred about 1 a.m. Central Standard Time on 17 October 1988 in roughly the same area. There seems no doubt that the first incident helped to precipitate the second. A bus, driven by Mr Peter Chapman with 25 passengers on board, was travelling westward along the Eyre Highway about 20km west of the Mundrabilla Roadhouse. The driver saw a light on the righthand (northern) side of the bus and woke five of the passengers who also saw the light.

Newspaper reports said that the driver was ‘terrified’ but he evidently wasn’t sufficiently terrified to waken the other 20 passengers sleeping in the bus. He didn’t stop to observe the light, which he described as ‘a bright white light which appeared to be hovering about 20m above ground and giving the impression that the light was moving. ‘ He also said that ‘the bright light followed the bus for about 10 miles as they travelled at high speed to escape.

One passenger said she saw the light in the driver’s mirror; she thought ‘it was a reflection of the headlights of a transport behind the coach.’ The highway tends slightly south of due west in this sector and, with comments like ‘on the right-hand side’ and ‘in the rear-view mirror’, it does seem that the most likely direction of the light was from the north-east. No unusual effects on the bus and no unusual marks were reported. Also, there were no comments on the shape of the light which the driver said was ‘not bright enough to illuminate the bus or the surroundings’.

Investigation of the weather conditions prevailing at the time of these incidents showed that each was characterised by fairly cloudless and calm conditions, although such conditions resulted from differing meteorological situations. In order to find a factor which might be common to both incidents, their salient features have been extracted and listed in Table 1 for comparison purposes. Apart from the fact that they both occurred on the Eyre Highway west of the Mundrabilla Roadhouse, there seems to be nothing which one could say was definitely common to both incidents.

Feature20 Jan 1988 sighting17 Oct 1988 sighting
Location  About 40km W of the Mundrabilla RoadhouseAbout 20km W of the Mundrabilla Roadhouse
Time of yearSummerSpring
Direction of travel of observersEastWest
Likely bearing of lightFrom eastFrom north west
Shape of lightVertically elongatedNot specified
Claimed physical effectsCar lifted, black ash, etcNone
Prevailing weather conditionsStrong high pressure area W of Perth. Very pronounced ridge of high pressure along the whole southern coastline of W.A., extending as far east as Ceduna. 0-2 eighths low cloud, very light windsHigh pressure area of the head of the Bight. Almost cloudless. 1-2 eighths high cloud. Very light winds, e.g., Forrest E 2 knots  
Upper air temperatureTemperature inversion at For- rest 3800 to 5300 ft approx 5°. Greatest increase in temperature near the top of the inversion layer. Stronger inversion in the ridge of high pressure along the coast, e.g., Esperance 8°CMarked temperature inversion. 1000-1400 ft, 8°C at Forrest. Greatest change of temperature near bottom of inversion layer    
Table 1 : Comparison of the 1988 incidents

That is, until the upper air temperature profiles are examined. In each case, the nearest temperature sounding (Forrest, about 1 00km to the south) showed a marked temperature inversion – that is, warmer air overlying colder air. These soundings are shown in Figures 3(a) and 3(b). Again, one can pick out differences in the two profiles, but the fact remains that on both occasions there were marked departures from the usual temperature decrease with height.

Figures 3a and 3b are two line graphs of Air temperature profile 7 am 20/01/88. On the Y axis is Height (thousands of feet) and X is unlabelled, starting at 0 and with an 8 after two half ticks or one major tick, with 7 major ticks in total. The lines begin at 8 on X and 10 on Y then move down and to the right, with some switching back as they go.
Figures 3a and 3b

The meteorological situations are interesting. The surface weather chart for 6 am CDST 20 January 1988 (Figure 4) shows a pronounced ridge of high pressure extending along the whole of the southern coastline of Western Australia from a High centred well west of Perth. This is quite unusual for a summer chart. The ridge was over 1000km in length and, as ridges associated with subsiding air and increased stability, it is understandable that the Forrest inversion was not an isolated one. In fact, inversions were evident over the whole 1000km (plus) length of the ridge from Ceduna to the SW corner of Western Australia, but they were much stronger along the coastline; for example, at Esperence the inversion was 8° C.

Figure 4, a weather chart for 6 am CCST 20/1/88. The surface weather is shown by isobar lines on the black and white map. A Ridge of high pressure is noted, from a High point in the west, and a Trough to the right, moving north from the Low in the lower right. The High pressure ridge follows the coastline past Forrest and to Ceduna.
Figure 4: Weather chart for 6 am CDST 20/1/88

The surface chart for 3 am CST 17 October 1988 (Figure 5) is a little different. It shows a large high pressure area over the head of the Great Australian Bight, again with evidence for widespread inversions over the Bight area. All the evidence showed that the inversion at Forrest was representative of the area where the sighting took place.

Figure 5: a weather chart for 3 am CST 17/10/88 showing a large high pressure area over the head of the Great Australian Bight. The black and white map is marked with isobars
Figure 5: Weather chart for 3 am CST 17/10/88

The refractive properties of inversions have been described in many meteorological texts, but, in view of the general lack of knowledge about meteorological optics (even among scientists) it is appropriate to summarise what refraction does in the lower levels of the atmosphere.

We all know that light travels in straight lines provided the medium is homogeneous. For most of the time, the atmosphere acts as a homogeneous medium, but there are exceptions when sharp discontinuities in the vertical structure of the air cause aberrations in the straight line path. And one of the main discontinuities is a pronounced temperature inversion when there is a sharp density difference in the air above and below the inversion. This causes refraction and the path of light is bent downwards, giving the impression that the object is seen much higher than it really is.

For example, the wave fronts from a distant light source on the Earth’s surface will be quite regular until the upper part of the wave front passes through the inversion. Here the temperature is higher, the speed of light is fractionally greater, and this part of the wave front is speeded up. Such a distorted wave front (upper part speeded up, lower part retarded) may reach an observer in a suitable position and his eyes see an image (normal to the wave front) in a position which is well above where the surface light source actually is. Such an image is known as a superior mirage (see Figure 6).

Figure 6 - diagram of how a 'superior mirage' is created. On the left, a car is travelling to the right along the surface, below an inversion layer of air, itself below the higher, less dense air. The car's line of actual sight is drawn in a solid line, but when it passes through the inversion layer, the perceived sight continues straight on the diagonal trajectory (shown by a dotted line, which connects with the superior mirage, a bright light in the sky). Following the solid sight line, there's a truck coming from the right, whose lights are creating the mirage as it drives up a hill ahead of the car, coming towards it.

The Glossary of Meteorology defines a mirage as ‘a refraction phenomenon wherein an image of some object is made to appear displaced from its true position.’ The key word is ‘displaced’, but it is important to realise that distortions of shape, colour, size and intensity also occur. These distortions obviously make identification of the object more difficult.

Even under the most steady meteorological conditions with a simple temperature profile, when it is possible to see a good identifiable mirage for many minutes, it should be stressed that the air is moving and the path taken by the light reaching the observer’s eyes is subject to changing meteorological conditions. When the temperature profile is more complex, multiple images may appear, some in grossly distorted forms with unusual colouring. Some of the distorted forms can fool even those quite used to the characteristics of refracted images.

When either the observer or the object is in motion, the images can appear and disappear quite rapidly or they can seem to perform rapid gyrations creating the illusion of extraordinary spacecraft. In addition, interference between incident and refracted rays can produce complicated mirages whilst focussing of the rays can ‘cause bright and dazzling images which jump about or even disappear at the slightest movement.’

When an inversion is horizontally extensive, such as in a long ridge of high pressure, it is possible for light rays to be bent several times following the shape of the earth’s surface, in much the same way that radar ducting takes place. When there is a wide horizon and an extensive inversion, it is possible to see the mirage of a light which may be 100-150km away. The light is usually on the earth’s surface but the refracted image (often distorted) can appear as a light at low elevations in the sky.

It is important to remember that the atmosphere can act as a lens under refractive conditions and the size and intensity of images can be magnified many times. The magnification can be so great that large objects, like mountains or islands have be ‘seen’ at sea over verified distances of up to 1000km (The Marine Observer, 1981). Each instance of long-distance mirages is associated with a pronounced and widespread inversion, such as those found in long ridges of high pressure.

Some of the best examples of refracted lights in Australia would be the ‘Min-Min Lights’ of Queensland. Invariably, there is never a sound or any physical trace when these ghostly lights are seen bobbing up and down above the treetops. In each case, there is ample evidence for a marked inversion and the direction of the ghostly light fits in with the direction of a distant stretch of highway, sometimes 100-150km away. The brighter lights come from truck spotlights at high beam (used to avoid kangaroos and wandering stock), but Min-Min lights have been known to be caused by distant cars. These bizarre lights in the sky are never seen on windy nights, or cloudy nights, only on the occasions when it is fairly calm and clear, the atmosphere being stable enough for inversions to occur.

And the Nullarbor lights are the same. You will never see them on windy or cloudy nights. On clear, calm nights passengers waiting at sidings on the long, straight transcontinental railway line have reported seeing the light of an approaching train for at least an hour before it actually arrived. At the normal train speed of 110 km per hour, people must be able to see the headlight of a train which would be at least 110km away at the time. It first appears as a light in the sky and only in the last 10 to 15 minutes does it ‘come to earth’, as it were. Australian National Railways advise that, at high beam, these lights are of approximately 2000 candle power; no wonder their refracted lights can be seen at such great distances over the flat Nullarbor. The Brown Mountain UFOs (Klass 1974) are good examples of refracted lights from American trains, but in much more irregular country.

The very scattered road traffic over the Nullarbor must also generate mirage-like lights in the sky, particularly some of the interstate trucks which are specially equipped for night travel. Campers on the Nullarbor report strange lights at times, some of which could perhaps be attributed to activities at the Woomera rocket range. It is interesting that one of ·Australia’s best hoaxers, the Nullarbor Nymph (Geniece Brooker Scott) spent many nights posing as a wild girl living with kangaroos and confirmed that she has seen lights in the sky; she said ‘they could be meteorites or satellites-or something else!’

To return to the 1988 incidents. The unusual lights seen on both occasions were obviously refracted images of distant light sources, because both occasions were associated with pronounced temperature inversions. If additional confirmation is needed, the light seen on 20 January 1988 ‘jumped about a bit’ typical of refraction focussing and was elongated in the vertical, which fits the towering type of distortion one would expect from the inversion shape on that particular night. The inversion on 17 October 1988 should have given rise to a squat (horizontally elongated) image, but Mr Chapman did not specify its shape.

It is one thing to be confident about refraction causing an image in the sky, but quite another to find out what actually caused the light which was refracted. So much depends on the attitude of the light source and the height and strength of the inversion that it is difficult to specify what distance would result in the type of focussing necessary to produce a bright and dazzling image.

Let us consider the observed facts on both occasions. The Knowles family on 20 January saw the light to the east which they ‘first thought was a truck approaching from the east’. There were no bright astronomical bodies in that direction and the sun was 29° below the horizon; besides, its azimuth was 145°. There were, however, several vehicles, both eastbound and westbound on that section of the Eyre Highway at the time (Basterfield and Brooke, 1988). Although some of the other drivers reported no unusual lights, it should be remembered that this is typical of refracted lights.

It is difficult to determine which vehicle was in the correct position to permit focussing of the refracted light and cause a ‘bright and dazzling image’, but one cannot rule out a westbound vehicle descending into Eucla (100km to the east) because of its elevated position. A vehicle at that distance would not have been considered to be part of the incident.

This leads to the conclusion that the first impressions of the Knowles family were correct, ie, that it was indeed ‘a truck approaching from the east’. It was the distorted image of its headlights which was so frightening and bizarre. All the other things that happened to their vehicle were either of their own doing or their own imagination whilst in a state of fright, as none of their claims in this regard were substantiated by inspections of the vehicle.

The vertically elongated image observed by the crew of the tuna boat on the same night would obviously have been from a different light source. Nevertheless, the tuna boat was still near the ridge of high pressure and the same widespread inversion would have covered its position. So they too would have observed a refracted light in the sky but, without any direction indicators, it would be impossible to say what the light source was. The most obvious choice is another ship.

In the second incident, the light appeared to be ‘hovering about 20m above the ground’ and ‘on the right-hand side of the bus’, the most likely direction being from the north east. Basterfield (1988) identified the light source as being the planet Jupiter and indeed its position (azimuth 040°, elevation 26°) seems correct, especially as the observation was made over a line of low hills and the sky was almost cloudless. There is no doubt that refraction in the inversion layer would have changed this normally bright light into a distorted and enlarged image. In addition, it was recorded that the driver and passengers were aware that they were almost exactly in the area of the first incident nine months earlier and they certainly would have been looking for lights.

It is interesting that Australian National Railways advised that there was a westbound goods train between Denman and Hughes, approaching the WA/SA border at the precise time and date. The bearing of this light was 040° from the sighting position but the distance (170km) puts it slightly out or range, especially in view of the line of 100m hills between the headlight of the train and the observer. Nevertheless, mirages have been observed over that distance. In view of the fact that the bus driver and the passengers saw only one light, it must have been the planet Jupiter. They would not be the first to call planets ‘UFOs’; this is quite easily done when refraction distorts their normal shape and intensity.

So, if anyone is looking for UFOs (strange lights) they should certainly try the wide open spaces of the Nullarbor. But stay near the highway as this is the best producer of unusual lights. Never choose windy nights or cloudy nights; it is necessary to have the faintly calm, clear nights which are indicative of inversion conditions when refraction occurs. Best of all, choose a night when the high pressure centre is near you or a long ridge of high pressure extends over you. Even though there is a roadside sign near the WA/SA border warning travellers to beware of UFOs, it is hoped that you will be better informed. There are quite a few occasions each year when pronounced inversions cover the area, so be on the look-out for them. However, the type of refraction focussing such as the Knowles family experienced is much rarer; the light source has to be at the right focal length and the height and length of the inversion have to be just right for a large dazzling image to appear.

If you see a strange light, stop, note the time and take rough bearings of the direction and elevation whilst watching its movement, reporting this to the nearest police. There is no need to be alarmed or to panic like the Knowles family; no-one has ever been hurt by such lights. Rest assured, we are not being invaded by extra-terrestrial beings from wherever-the unusual lights are naturally occurring refraction phenomena. Many of the ‘UFO’ interpretations seem to come from people who ignore the known wonders of our atmosphere; they seem to be unaware that science fact is much more wonderful than ‘UFO’ fiction.

References

  • Basterfield, K. & Brooke, R., The Mundrabilla Incident – January 20th 1988, UFO Research Aust. Newsletter, April 1 988.
  • Basterfield, K., The Mundrabilla. ‘UFO’ of October 17th 1988, UFO Research Australia., 1988.
  • Corliss, W. R., Handbook of unusual natural phenomena, Sourcebook Project, USA, 1 977.
  • Humphries, W.T., Physics of the Air, McGraw-Hill Book Co., London, 1929.
  • Klass, P. J., UFOs Explained, Random House, New York, 1976.
  • Sheaffer, R.S., The UFO verdict, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1981.
  • The Marine Observer, Vol. 61, No. 1 ,232, April 1971.
  • Viezee, W., ‘Optical Mirage’, extract from Scientific study of UFOs, Condon, E., Bantam Books, 1969.

IQ tests continue to flourish, in spite of inherent biases, because we so badly want to feel special

Wendy M. Grossman
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IQ tests continue to flourish, in spite of inherent biases, because we so badly want to feel special

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 3, Issue 5, from 1989.

Mensa hit the news in August when they launched a search for Britain’s 1,000 brightest children in the Sunday Times. Later, they admitted this was a ‘stunt’ to attract media attention. They may have gotten more than they wanted: on 14 August the Independent reported that educational psychologists said the tests Mensa was administering were “culturally biased towards white, middle-class children” and pointed out that “the test assumes that intelligence is based on the ability to read, write, spell, and do arithmetic. Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci, two of the greatest brains to ever have lived, both suffered from dyslexia.”

This is neither the first time Mensa has searched for so-called ‘gifted’ children, nor the first time IQ tests have been criticized. And yet, we continue to believe, paranoiacally, in IQ test scores, and a society based on them continues to exist. This is not sour grapes on my part: I was trawled in just such a child-testing exercise when I was 14. This is, by the way, a matter of deep embarrassment on my part, so I do hope you won’t tell anyone…

Same routine: Mensa supplied a test to be taken at home, supervised by parents. Those who passed went on to some sort of central testing place where the tests were supervised by Mensa’s flunkies. It’s hard to see why people think testing at home encourages cheating. Since you have to take a supervised test afterwards, where would cheating get you? Certainly in my parents’ house these things were taken very seriously, and no trickery went on. I found the test ridiculously easy, and was sent on for the supervised tests.

I remember my mother posted my final score and my letter of acceptance from Mensa on the refrigerator, proudly. I was enrolled, and I began getting Mensa newsletters. I think I went to one meeting. It was all adults: Mensa had no idea what to do with the 14-year-olds they had recruited. When I was 17, a new friend said rather forcibly that the idea of Mensa was snobbish and, worse at that time, ‘straight’. I resigned, over my father’s protests: “I like reading the newsletters!” I told him he should join himself. I guess he thought he wouldn’t qualify even though he always used to say, “you got it from somewhere, you know.”

View of a test paper with someone's hand writing on it - a white student holds a red and black pencil in their right hand and is writing on the test paper on a cream-coloured desk
A student taking a test writes their answers with a pencil

People talk in the British press about the damage that being labelled ‘not clever’ could cause. I had the opposite problem: I was an ‘underachiever’. I could think quickly and score well on standardized tests, so why wasn’t I an ‘A’ student? My IQ test scores pursued me like an animated yardstick in a cartoon. Of course, the school would never tell me what they were. I’m not sure why, but I gather asking what your own IQ score is, is about like asking someone else what their age or income is. I guess they figure, if you know, you might tell someone. Such is the power of the IQ score.

Mensa should acquire two books for its library: Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and David Owen’s None of the Above: Behind the Myth of Scholastic Aptitude. Both are classics of critical thinking about the science of intelligence. Both call into question some of the basic assumptions we make about intelligence, aptitude, and education.

Gould’s book traces the history of science’s attempts to measure intelligence, from measuring skulls, to weighing brains, to test scores. Over and over, white, middle-class male scientists found that white, middle-class male brains were biggest, strongest, quickest. And regularly, a little while later, along came someone else who proved that their work was faulty, biased, and sometimes even fraudulent.

Into the fray came Binet, the grandfather of IQ testing. His assignment was to devise a test which would identify children with learning disabilities so they could be helped. That was all. He specifically said, according to Gould:

The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.

Gould, p. 151

Binet foresaw the potential difficulties for children if his system were used to rank them, as it is now. He worried about self-fulfilling prophecies:

It is really too easy to discover signs of backwardness in an individual when one is forewarned.

Binet refused to label the results of his tests as inborn intelligence. His successors in America, however, seized on mass intelligence testing as a way of life, and abused the results in exactly the ways Binet had foreseen. And a few he had not: the results of the first mass intelligence tests, conducted by the US Army in World War I, were used as evidence in favour of limiting immigration in 1924 Congressional debates.

David Owen’s book concentrates on a later outgrowth: the SATs. These ‘Scholastic Aptitude Tests’ are taken by all American teenagers who want to go to college. The idea behind them sounds all right: America is huge, State curricula differ, and colleges need some way of comparing the many applicants from different areas and different schools. So far, so good.

Owen, however, shows – often hilariously – that what the SATs really test is your ability to think like the people who designed the test. He explains how the questions work, how to identify the correct answers without doing the arithmetic, and even gives a short course in how to answer questions about the content of the provided paragraphs without actually reading them.

The SATs are administered by the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. Most students assume a connection with Princeton University; there is none. The ETS is an independent, secretive organization which has parlayed tests into a fortune (tax-free) and which administers more tests every year.

ETS now supplies tests for licensing teachers, hairdressers, golfers, among many others, and for admitting graduate students, law students, and medical students. It’s quite an empire. ETS reacts a bit like the British government when challenged: they claim superior knowledge, refuse to give information, and lose inquiries in red tape. They also accuse critics of wanting to destroy the fabric of society. A bit excessive, perhaps.

Fortunately, America has a legal system which allows challenges even to its major institutions. Recently, a court ruled that New York State’s use of SAT scores to award state scholarships discriminates against girls. This was the first time a court has ever confirmed the SATs sex bias. Result: New York State is designing a new test. Oh, well…

The criticisms these books raise are biting, legitimate, and undoubtedly right on the money. And yet… it’s very hard to shake the nervous feeling that there must be something in it: it’s so accepted. What would I rather believe? That I think exactly like the unoriginal, conservative, middle-class white men who design the tests? Or that I really am smarter than 99% of the rest of the population?

When I was a kid, I had a button which was an advertising gimmick for General Electric: “Be nice to me, I’m going to be a GEnius someday.” I guess I’m still working on it.

From the archives: The many traditions of Christmas that are now lost to history

Toby Howard
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From the archives: The many traditions of Christmas that are now lost to history

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 3, Issue 5, from 1989.

Of all the traditional festivals we celebrate each year, Christmas is one of the richest in terms of its customs. It is a time for rituals – some relatively modern, like Christmas Cards and Christmas Trees, and some exceedingly ancient, such as exchanging gifts and hanging decorations. There’s the build up to Christmas (“how many shopping days is it now?!”), and then there’s the aftermath. Christmas is one of the most important events in the year, and almost everyone will, to some extent, have some part to play in its customs.

The origins of our modern Christmas are ancient: in antiquity the winter solstice was celebrated on the 25th day of December, as the ‘Birthday of the Unconquered Sun’. This midwinter festival was a joyous time marked by festal fires to celebrate the slow departure of Winter, and to usher in fertility and good fortune. It was only around the beginning of the 4th Century that Christianity assigned the Nativity of Christ to the date of the existing pagan festival. The revamped festival soon absorbed influences from other sources, including those of the Germanic midwinter feast of ‘Yule’. By the 11th Century ‘Christ’s Mass’ had solidified into an uneven fusion of the Christian Nativity with Yule, Roman and pagan customs.

Many of these traditional elements were condemned as superstitious by the Protestant Reformation. Today, recognisable pieces of pagan ritual still remain: the mumming plays, with their pre-Christian themes of death and resurrection; sword dancing and wassailing.

One pagan practice that has nearly died out is the wearing of animal disguises at the Winter festival. In this country the custom lives on in the ‘Mari Lwyd’ Hobby Horse of Llangynwyd, with its hinged snapping jaws and bottle-glass eyes. Mari Lwyd visits the houses of the village wassailing – drinking toasts and singing the health of everyone on the route.

A Mari Lwyd Creator: R. Fiend Copyright: © Mari Lwyd, R. Fiend via Wikicommons CC BY-SA 3.0
A Mari Lwyd horse skull from Wales, a horse skull on a pole with bells and ribbons and a white sheet. Creator: R. Fiend, via Wikicommons CC BY-SA 3.0

Memories of the ancient Fire Festivals live on with the Yule log. One Christmas Eve tradition, now sadly in decline, was to carry the new Yule log into the house and set it alight with the remnants of the previous year’s; it was commonly believed that to burn the log for twelve hours or more would ensure that the following year would be free of misfortune, and that the charred remains of the Yule log could preserve the house from fire, storms and lightning.

Another custom with extremely ancient origins is the decoration of buildings with greenery during the Christmas period. Today we buy our Christmas decorations man-made, pre-cut and shrink-wrapped; but whatever their form, evergreens such as holly, ivy and mistletoe have long been symbols of life and fertility, and their presence at midwinter festivals serves to ensure that life will return again.

The Church has found a convenient context for these fundamental beliefs: the berries of the holly symbolise the blood of Christ, and its prickles His Crown of Thorns. Mistletoe, however, occupies a special place. It has long had sacred and magical associations (it was the Golden Bough of classical legend) and to the Church it remains thoroughly pagan – by tradition it is never allowed to hang in a place of worship. For a long time mistletoe was the centrepiece of the ‘Kissing-Bough’, a large garland of greenery and ornaments which was hung from the ceiling of the main living-room.

Surprisingly, the Christmas tree is a relatively new tradition; originally of German origin, it spread to America in the 18th century, before coming to England, it is thought, in the early 1800’s. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had their first tree in 1841, and its popularity soon spread.

Most areas have their own local Christmas customs; an interesting example is ‘Tolling the Devil’s Knell’, which takes place every Christmas Eve at All Saints’ Church in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. The tenor bell sounds a stroke for every year since Christ’s Nativity – with the final stroke coinciding exactly with the first chime of midnight. Christ is born and Satan is dead – but every year the Devil tries to reappear, and one extra chime must be sounded to banish him, or he will return to plague the parish for the next twelve months.

But for all its fascination, Christmas is still a time better experienced than discussed. As an old Cornish Christmas Wassailers’ song has it:

            Ask not the reason, from where it did spring;
            For you know very well, it’s an old ancient thing

I hope you enjoy your customs this year – whatever they are – and a very Happy Christmas to you all!

Folklore and rituals say so much about society, even if the superstition behind them isn’t true

Toby Howard
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Folklore and rituals say so much about society, even if the superstition behind them isn’t true

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 3, Issue 5, from 1989.

“If you’re so skeptical…” a colleague said to me the other day. I wondered what I’d said, what sort of hole I’d dug for myself, what incriminating evidence I was about to face. “If you’re so skeptical, why do you believe in all that folklore rubbish? People dancing round maypoles, wearing antlers, dressing wells with flowers and bearing rushes? What’s it supposed to achieve? Good luck? Prosperity? A fruitful harvest? In this day and age, it’s ridiculous. Why don’t you and your lot tell them it’s all rubbish?”

“Me and my lot”? I felt like a hit-man in some sort of skeptical Mafia. But did she have a point? In one sense, I think she did. For instance, I cannot honestly believe that the locals in the Helston Furry Dance in Cornwall are really driving out the darkness of Winter and welcoming in the luck of Summer. Nor can I believe that the bizarre South Queensferry Burryman – covered from head to toe with sticky thistle burrs – keeps the town in good fortune as long as his annual Parade is observed. And I cannot believe that whoever draws the Cream of the Well – the first water – on New Year’s morning will be certain of good luck in the coming year.

Two men in uniform flank a central 'Burry Man', a Scottish traditional dress in which a man is covered in burrs, hat covered in flowers and a sash made of a folded Royal Standard of Scotland, showing the red dragon on a yellow background. He holds two waist-high poles decorated withh leaves and flowers (to support himself as he walks). Image by Michael Mabbott.
John Nicol, South Queensferry’s current Burry Man, takes a rest in full regalia supported by his two attendants (2007). Credit: Michael Mabbott. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Having said this, why, last New Year, was I the First Foot – the dark-haired man standing in the cold outside the front door at a minute to midnight, with a penny in my pocket, a lump of coal in one hand and a piece of bread in the other? If I don’t believe and if, as I suspect, many others who take part in customs don’t believe, why do we all do it?

The answer, of course, is that there is far more to ritual than a claimed supernatural result. Rituals in themselves cannot affect the material universe, but they can have great importance and meaning for individuals, and for society.

So can we believe and not believe, at the same time? Bergen Evans, in his classic book The Natural History of Nonsense says that “we function on a dozen different levels of intelligence”. He is surely correct, but – call me a traitor if you will – I find his relentless cut-and-dried exposure of human error and stupidity wearisome. Naturally I don’t think that birds choose their mates on St Valentine’s day, but it’s such a lovely idea…

Coincidentally, the previous evening I had watched The Wicker Man, an obscure (but now cult) film from the early seventies. In it, Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is a devoutly religious Presbyterian police sergeant and lay preacher who has been called to a remote Scottish island – Summerisle – to investigate the disappearance of a young local girl. In fact, there is no missing girl; Sergeant Howie has been chosen for his special qualities and lured to Summerisle for a quite different reason. The island’s fruit and crops have failed, and one more failure would mean disaster for the island.

According to the tradition of the island, a sort of folky druidic mish-mash served up by Lord Summerisle – Christopher Lee at his full height – there is only one solution: to appease the Goddess of the Sun and the Orchards with the dreadful sacrifice of a true Christian believer. Sergeant Howie is imprisoned in a huge wickerwork pyre in the shape of man, and burns to a martyr’s death.

It’s a good yarn, with the subtle twist that you’re never quite sure whether Lord Summerisle really believes in what he’s doing. Is the ‘religion’, with all its traditional elements of hobby-horse, fool and teaser, a religion at all? Is it genuine folk-memory, of the kind – albeit free of sacrifice – that survives to this day around the country? Or is it all a cynical manipulation by Lord Summerisle?

It is interesting to consider the question of why we sometimes accept and do things which – if we try to intellectualise – appear hard to justify. However you care to explain it, the fact is that ordinary people do get up to extraordinary things.

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