The new Premier League season starts this weekend, and many people will get back into their weekly routine of watching, listening to, or reading about our teams and how they’re doing. For many people, this routine includes obsessively reading statistics to understand how their team is using tactics or strategy to improve their game, learning about players and their history with injuries and or contracts – predicting if and when they might leave the team on loan or be sold on. Maybe even keeping tabs on other players in the league, to see if they might be bought to enhance your own side, or to make a fantasy football swap at just the right moment.
In the skeptical community, we often see two camps of people: those who are fascinated by the sense of community and camaraderie of football, akin to a religion without the mythology; and those who deride the game as “sportsball”, complaining about any mention of the game and its popularity.
But skeptics ought to pay attention to football – not necessarily because of the ins and outs of the games themselves, but because we can learn about new trends, fads and pseudoscientific claims by engaging with sport, given the influential role sport plays in society.
One particular fad that is hugely popular in professional football, but relatively still unknown outside of it: snus. Snus is a tobacco-based product where dried tobacco leaves are powdered and packed inside a small pouch that looks like a tea bag. It’s taken by placing the teabag under the top lip where it’s in direct contact with the mucus membranes of the mouth and gums and kept in place from 30 minutes to two hours. It provides a steady release of nicotine into the blood stream. Snus is Swedish in origin, and it’s been around for a good while. It was first invented in the 1600s. But the popularity has risen recently, and American versions were first produced in the 1990s.
In Sweden, the numbers of people smoking has declined and some attribute this to availability of product like snus. Snus, people say, is safer than smoking. It can be used as an alternative way of scratching the nicotine itch, in people with nicotine addiction. And while research is still in relatively early stages, it’s probably true that smokeless tobacco pouches are considerably safer than inhaling cigarette smoke directly into your lungs. The research seems to back that up. There’s evidence of increased risk of cancer, cancer mortality and cardiovascular problems among snus users compared to non-tobacco users, but it’s at a smaller level than the risk for smokers. So as a smoking cessation tool, maybe it has some use.
But in the UK, there is an issue within professional football of users who are taking snus, or the tobacco-free nicotine pouch alternatives, for reasons other than smoking cessation. The use of snus in football is the subject of a comprehensive research project from Loughborough University – a leading university when it comes to sports science –commissioned by the Professional Footballer’s Association, the PFA.
Loughborough’s research was conducted among two populations of people using two methods. They interviewed 16 back-room staff from a range of football clubs, predominantly from the Championship (England’s second division) and League One (England’s third division) but a few also from League Two (fourth division) and the Premiership (top division). The subjects held roles in managing player wellbeing or medicine, and they were asked about perceived prevalence of snus, and player behaviours, performance and health impacts, and the level of support they required.
Snus is widely used by professional footballers, and not simply as nicotine replacement therapy.
The research also included an anonymous online survey for professional footballers asking questions around awareness of and level of education about snus; the prevalence, frequency, timing, and type of use; motivations for use/non-use and the perceived effects of use and withdrawal; and the player’s likelihood to quit.
The survey included 649 eligible participants from the men’s game, 31% from the Premier League, 22% from the Championship, 25% from League 1, and 17% from League Two, with an average age of 21. Meanwhile, 51 women were included (the women’s game has substantially fewer professional players currently), all from the Women’s Super League, with an average age was 26.
The surveys found a prevalence of snus usage of around 20% – meaning across both male and female professional footballers, around one in five players admitted to using snus. Additionally, a further one in five said they’d tried snus at least once.
Given that there eleven players per team, that means two are likely to be snus users in any given game. Add in the nine substitutes on the bench, and across both teams there are likely to be eight snus users per game.
As the researchers point out, that may even be an underestimate. Although the survey was anonymous, people tend to be worried about their responses being attributable to them or their team, especially when it comes to taboo topics. The interviews with back-room staff suggested a much higher number, with estimates that ranging from 50% of players, to as high as 75%.
In the survey, only 115 male players and 11 female indicated their reasons for using snus. Of them, more than 90% of respondents said they weren’t taking nicotine pouches as an alternative to smoking cigarettes – so this isn’t about smoking cessation. The vast majority of respondents said they were taking the pouches to help with relaxation, manage stress levels, and to enhance mental readiness.
Nicotine certainly can help with relaxation. It can also help with some mental acuity, and there’s evidence it can enhance memory. It can also act as an appetite suppressant, which some athletes find beneficial for maintaining their goal weight. However, the benefits don’t really outweigh the negatives. Reducing appetite might be useful for weight maintenance, but it’s not great for the nutritional loading which can be required before a game.
Similarly, while aiding relaxation in a very high stress environment like professional football might seem like a great thing, reliance on snus for that relaxation can be unhelpful. One staff member interviewed pointed out that players find nicotine pouches useful after an evening game, where players might be hopped up on caffeine and loaded with adrenaline from the game, and can find it hard to bring themselves down sufficiently to sleep well. However, nicotine is a stimulant, and it has negative effects on sleep quality. And sleep is crucial for recovering even the microdamage a player has after a game, let alone any injuries they might have picked up.
The research revealed there is a key social component in taking snus pouches. Respondents said they used it socially when drinking with friends, or that they felt like they were missing out when not taking the pouches, which encouraged them to try it in the first place. Most troublingly, a significant number of respondents showed signs of addiction. 53% of men and 73% of women showed at least on sign of dependence in the survey. This makes sense – we know that nicotine is highly addictive.
Smoking aside, the negative side effects of nicotine still far outweigh the positives
Unfortunately, according to the evidence, the negative side effects of nicotine far outweigh the positives – while the jury is still out about how much cancer risk is increased when taking oral nicotine pouches, we do know nicotine can have an impact on lots of parts of our bodies. A Cochrane review from 2018 lists nine key side effects of nicotine replacement therapies, including headache, dizziness, nausea, gastro-intestinal symptoms, sleep problems, non-ischemic palpitations, skin reactions, oral reactions, and hiccups. Some of those might sound relatively minor, but for elite athletes whose health is constantly optimised to give them that edge for play and maintaining fitness, it can add up to something quite significant.
On top of that, it’s not clear from the research whether players are taking tobacco-free nicotine pouches, or genuine snus – the tobacco containing version of the product, which is not legally available to buy in the UK. Tobacco, of course, is likely to have other side effects, so it’s not always easy to tease out the differences with smokeless tobacco.
What is the answer here, for the professional game? The truth is, clubs might be reluctant to ban the use of snus or issue fines to players taking it because as one interviewee commented: “Our old sporting director put a fine on it, so if anyone was spotted with snus in the training ground, it was a week’s wages and people got done for it. But all that happens the players just protected each other. So if they saw it lying around, they picked it up and got rid of it because the majority of them took it.”
Instead of outright bans, a better approach would be to normalise conversations around stopping snus cessation, and to offer players education tools and support for coming off snus. And, of course, working to address those reasons players admitted to taking the drug – if so many say they find it useful for managing the stress associated with the game, it might be time to invest in other stress management processes, and teaching players other relaxation techniques.
This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 6, from 1991.
Acupuncture in Belgium
In Belgium the examination, diagnosis or treatment of patients on a regular basis by anyone who is not a registered doctor or dentist is illegal. This does not prevent many laymen from nonetheless practising alternative medicine illegally, as an alternative practitioner will, in general, not be prosecuted unless a specific complaint is made against him or her.
In autumn 1990, two organisations of acupuncturists (including qualified doctors as well as lay practitioners) petitioned the Minister of Health and handed over an extensive file. The case that they presented was essentially that:
acupuncture responds to the needs of the people.
acupuncture by doctors and laymen should be practised only by practitioners trained or recognised by the acupuncturists themselves.
acupuncture should not be the domain of doctors only (the majority of acupuncturists are laymen).
discussion of the scientific basis of the methods is not relevant since their success is ample proof.
They proposed a programme for training as laid out by the North-West Institute of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine – a programme that they claimed was recognised by the state of Washington in the USA.
Acupuncture involves the insertion of needles into fictional pathways on the body called ‘meridians’
The minister called a meeting of the deans of all the medical faculties in Belgium during which he asked them to organise the academic training of acupuncturists and rendered the idea more tempting with a promise that considerable financial support would be provided. Following the meeting, a mixed committee was appointed to look into the matter, and at the end of their study the universities refused to organise postgraduate training in acupuncture. One of the members of the committee put a question to the ministry that they had some considerable difficulty in answering: “On what grounds was acupuncture favoured whereas other alternative therapies that are at least as scientific and popular were not considered?”
In the name of all exorcists and faith healers, I protested against such favouritism. Nothing has since been heard of this initiative.
Homoeopathy and the European Community – The Chanterle Proposal
In 1965 and 1975 the EEC laid down very strict rules for the registration of medicines in the countries of the EEC (Directives 65/65/EEC and 75/319/EEC, and also 89/341/EEC). Very extensive and conclusive proof has to be given of the effectiveness of a medicine under very precise conditions and any undesirable side effects have to be highlighted. These measures created more than a mild panic amongst manufacturers who have been producing old-fashioned patent medicines for many years, but do not have the means to carry out the research which would be necessary to register their products under the proposed regulations.
Other protesters were the homoeopathy practitioners who, for very obvious reasons, would face big problems meeting the demands of proven efficiency. They have lobbied for these directives to be adapted to the special properties of homoeopathic medicines and holistic treatments so to dispense them from the burden of scientific proof. Their main argument was that the different regulations applied by the various countries were an obstruction to free trade.
They were successful, in that a review of the directives was ordered by the Council, and the matter was delegated to the Committee for the Environment, Health and Consumer Protection as principal advisory organ. In addition the committees for Economic, Monetary and Industrial Affairs and for Agriculture, Fishery and Development of the Country were appointed co-advisors. The Belgian Euro-MP Mr Chanterie was appointed as reporter.
On 23 March 1990, a document was prepared for review by the advisory committees who also added some amendments to the proposal. The whole document (proposal and the amendments) was presented to the European parliament and was approved almost unanimously (only one vote against) on 13 June 1991.
It is interesting to take a look at some remarkable excerpts from this document (Note that since I could obtain only the texts in Dutch and partly in German, my English translation may not correspond literally to the official English version).
The Introduction
Considering that.. homoeopathic medicine is officially recognised in some member states and only tolerated in some other states… it nevertheless is widely prescribed and used in all member states even if not always officially recognised it is desirable, taking into consideration the special properties of those homoeopathic medicines such as the very low concentration of active substance and the fact that conventional statistical methods for clinical trial are scarcely applicable, that a simplified method of registration should be adopted, for those homoeopathic medicines that are commercialised without mention of therapeutic indications and in a non-dangerous presentation.
Freedom of choice of therapy has to be guaranteed. Allopathy, holistic medicine, and homoeopathy are to be considered as different and often complementary approaches each of which has its merits. Given that, in some member states, holistic medicine plays such an important role in alternative medicine, the interests of patients who choose it have to be guaranteed. Even for homoeopathic medicines that mention a therapeutic indication, the registration has to be granted taking into consideration the special properties of homoeopathic medicines. Holistic medicines registered in an official pharmacopoeia are to be treated on the same basis as homoeopathic medicines.
The Articles of the Proposal
Art 1. Homoeopathic medicines .. . are made from substances that are called homoeopathic primary substances (grondstoffen). Homoeopathic medicines contain homoeopathic substances in a dilution of at least 1/10.
Art 2. On the label should be clearly written: “Homoeopathic Medicine”.
Art 3. The proof of therapeutic action (i.e. efficiency) as required by art. 28 section 1.b. of directive 75/319/EEC is not required of those homoeopathic medicines.
Art 6. A member state has the right to refuse the registration of homoeopathic medicines in its territory… but nevertheless will be compelled to permit the use of homoeopathic medicines registered in other member states…
Art 7/1 . The homoeopathic medicine has to be commercialised in such a dilution that it is absolutely not dangerous per dose.
Art. 7/2 The homoeopathic medicine has to contain the warning: if the symptoms persist, seek the advice of a competent homoeopath”.
Art 9. The following items must be formulated within 5 years: – A European pharmacopoeia – Directives for the legal practice of alternative medicine – Measures for the payment by the social security of homoeopathic treatment and medicines – The organisation of official training and education.
Art 10. The member states have to comply with this directive not later than 31/12/92.
This text was approved by the European parliament on 13/6/91, and then presented to the Council for further approval. The explanations (toelichting) and justifications for this proposal also contained some very interesting claims:
A survey made in 1987 for the EC in 9 countries by a Mr Sermeus of the Belgian Consumer Association, showed that between 7 and 25% of the population seek the advice of an alternative therapist at least once a year. In another document they mention 18-75%. In decreasing order of popularity, the survey showed homoeopathy, acupuncture, manual therapies (i.e osteopathy and chiropractic), herbal medicine, massage and paranormal healing and holistic medicine.
People with higher educational qualifications make between 35 and 60 times greater use of those methods than the general population.
One of the causes for the controversy between ‘allopathic’ and homoeopathic medicine is precisely the fact that classical medicine is not willing to accept the proofs offered by the homoeopathic doctors. Scientific articles about homoeopathic medicine are only very rarely accepted by orthodox publications. There exist very extensive lists of publications that prove the efficiency of homoeopathic medicine as well as holistic medicine.
It is in complete contradiction with the philosophy behind those methods to conduct the types of test used for ‘allopathic’ medicine. Instead, test methods that are current in homoeopathic schools should be used.
The fact that conventional medicine cannot understand the working of homoeopathic medicine and holistic medicine does not mean that they don’t work. Tens of thousands of homoeopaths and holistic practitioners and millions of patients are more than sufficient proof of their efficiency.
The right to practice homoeopathic and holistic medicine should be regulated to prevent non-experts from gaining part of the market.
Homoeopathic and holistic medicines should be given opportunities equal to those of allopathic medicine and, in order to guarantee the freedom of choice of therapy for the patient, the health insurance systems should not be allowed to differentiate between holistic and homoeopathic medicine and conventional medicine.
In August 1991 the European Committee made some changes to the proposal. Some articles and amendments were rejected, including all mention of practising medicine, medical education, and reimbursement of medication. These were rejected because they clearly surpassed the limits of the mandate, which was the free traffic of medicines. Also rejected were those sections that took too openly the side of certain traditions in medicine. The Committee’s aim was to keep a neutral position in the controversy between conventional and alternative medicine.
In addition, to avoid the over-extension of the ‘simplified registration’ scheme, all medications which require injection into the patient are barred from the special procedure, as were any products that might be dangerous for the patient. The aim was for the simplified registration to remain the exception rather than the rule.
Nonetheless, despite the edits and rejections, a number of concerning items remained:
Taking into consideration the special properties of those homoeopathic medicines such as the very low concentration of active substance and the fact that conventional statistical methods for clinical trial are scarcely applicable, a simplified method of registration should be adopted for those homoeopathic medicines that are commercialised without mention of therapeutic indication and in non-dangerous presentations and concentrations.
Homoeopathic medicines must be made from basic homoeopathic substances (grondstoffen)
The application file must clearly describe the nature and production of the basic homoeopathic substance, and the homoeopathic character has to be demonstrated by a substantial homoeopathic or holistic bibliography.
Medications that cannot use the simplified registration procedure of art. They must prove that their effectiveness conforms to the basic principles of homoeopathic medicine and holistic medicine.
The Belgian Consumers Association
In October 1990 the Belgian consumers’ organisation published an article about health products and devices that were clearly quackery, in which they protested about them and warned against them. The article also covered the extent of their use, and the satisfaction of the customers using them. In Belgium these products represent a market of 10 billion Belgian francs (£150 million), from a population of 10 million.
In September 1991 the same organisation published the results of a survey of the use of alternative medicine (homoeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic and osteopathy), and concluded that the population makes extensive use of these therapies and that the level of satisfaction is high. The consumer association concluded that a refusal to recognise these alternative treatments was hypocritical and, given the degree of satisfaction experienced by consumers, that there was no valid reason to keep on treating alternative therapies so badly. They further concluded that official recognition should be mandatory and that the treatments should be financed by the national health insurance.
They did not seem to be aware of the contradictions between the conclusions of the two surveys.
Conclusions
This article has detailed a number of examples of actions intended to give legal status to unscientific therapies and these are linked by a number of common factors. For instance, all of the actions were made under the guise of protecting consumers who demand such therapies, and who should have a right to good quality alternative medicine. In addition, the furnishing of reasonable proof of effectiveness is not deemed necessary, since popular success of a given treatment was regarded as proof enough. An important point is that some particular methods are chosen for recognition on the basis that – by ill-defined criteria – they are, in some way, more scientific.
In my experience the promoters of alternative medicine, in most of its forms, are very honest people and their motives are sincere, and in some cases highly idealistic. They want to help the underdog in a just fight against the Moloch of academic, conventional medicine. Protests on behalf of science are dismissed as being of limited vision, representing corporate interests or the desire to maintain a monopoly or even as mindless fanaticism.
The best way to counter these demands seems to be to go along with their reasoning. Ask the supporters of alternative and complementary medicine on what basis their criteria for good quality are founded. If they say that the success of their techniques is proof enough, point out that there are hundreds of other alternative therapies that have very enthusiastic fans. Amongst these are earth ray shielding, Japanese exorcism (Mahi-Kari – a personal favourite) and many, many others. In the name of free trade and free choice of therapy ask them on what grounds the more esoteric alternative therapies are excluded. Defend the underdog – it should be all or nothing.
If any serious progress is made on the path to recognition of some therapies with the exclusion of others, we must officially and vehemently protest the violation of our right to free choice of treatment. I myself intend to demand that gemmotherapy and oenotherapy – treatment by precious stones and by good wine – be made available to me, with all expenses paid by my national health insurance. I am ready to present a file of scientific literature on the subject (the bookstores are full of them), and a users club is in the making.
In the name of free trade and free choice I demand that there is no discrimination between different types of alternative treatment! I exhort all skeptic organisations of the EC, and all interested skeptical individuals to write urgently to their Ministers of Health, their MPs and their Euro-MPs insisting on fair play and equal treatment for all alternative therapies.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), first released in North America in 1985. It had already been available on the Japanese market for two years, where it was known simply as the ‘Famicom’ (Family Computer), but it wasn’t until the North American release that it picked up the NES moniker and its now iconic front-loading design.
Video games have come a long way since then. Today, they rightfully sit alongside music, television, and movies as the dominant forms of popular entertainment. This is despite the intense moral scrutiny video games have been subjected to since their inception.
Critics have frequently warned of the corrupting potential of video games, especially on young minds. Prince Harry once called for the game Fortnite to be banned, arguing it was ‘created to addict’. In the 1990s, under President Clinton, the US Congress accused games like Mortal Kombat of teaching children to ‘enjoy cruelty’.
This pattern of concern isn’t new, of course, and is probably just the latest iteration in a long history of moral panics, where each generation struggles to understand the hobbies and interests of the next.
In the 1950s, it was comic books. In the 60s, rock ’n’ roll. The 70s brought fears of Dungeons & Dragons summoning Satan in the suburbs. In the 80s it was ‘video nasties,’ like The Evil Dead or Zombie Flesh-Eaters. Perhaps most surprising: in the 90s there were fears that books were ruining young minds… by which I mean the 1790s, when one memoir warned, ‘the free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted their morals’. That’s what parents now beg their children to read instead of spending another three hours on Minecraft.
Playing with a Nintendo Switch console, its great, great, great grandparent’s controller represented on a shirt. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
In the days before home consoles and PC gaming, kids would go to play at the arcade. This shaped not just gaming culture but also gaming mechanics themselves. High-score tables were designed to drive competition between strangers. A limited number of ‘lives’ reflected the economic model – typically 25¢ per go, with three chances to progress before you had to pay again. Some games allowed you to ‘continue’ if you paid again immediately; others would boot you out, to keep the queue moving and the quarters flowing.
According to legend, Polybius surfaced briefly in Portland, Oregon in 1981. It was supposedly developed by a shadowy game studio called Sinneslöschen (loosely, ‘sense delete’ in German), and appeared in just a handful of arcades. Players reported a powerful compulsion to keep playing. Some are said to have suffered seizures, night terrors, or amnesia. One 12-year-old was said to have collapsed on his way home from the arcade; another reportedly died of a heart attack.
The legend also includes reports of sinister ‘men in black’ visiting the machines, tinkering with the internals, and then vanishing. A few weeks later, the cabinets themselves disappeared without a trace. It’s all very X-Files, very MKUltra.
What I find most interesting about Polybius is that almost every part of the story has elements of truth. Portland really was used as a test market by some games developers. Arcade cabinets with unfinished or unlabelled games were sometimes placed discreetly to monitor player response. Some were deliberately kept obscure, either for market testing or copyright reasons.
There’s also a famous incident where a boy in Portland fell ill after an extended arcade session – but the game wasn’t Polybius, it was Asteroids. 12-year-old Brian Mauro had reportedly played for 28 hours and 14 minutes in an effort to beat the high score. He eventually gave up after developing stomach cramps, which he attributed to ‘too many cokes’. (In some modern tellings of this story, Mauro collapsed at the controls, but this doesn’t seem to be supported by reporting from the time.)
Reports of players having seizures has a foundation in fact too. Photosensitive epilepsy can trigger a seizure in roughly one in 4,000 people. A 1981 case study in the Lancet described a 17-year-old who experienced a seizure while playing the game Astro Fighter, which featured a 15Hz multicolour strobe. He had no prior history of epilepsy.
And the mysterious men in black? It’s possible some were simply technicians servicing or repairing machines, but it’s also possible that government agents really were visiting the machines for a very different reason. In December 1981, The Oregonian ran a story titled ‘Video games gambling count admitted’, detailing how federal agents had seized $200,000 worth of arcade machines that had been rigged to function as gambling devices. Anyone watching a cabinet being confiscated by stern-looking men in suits might understandably have imagined a more thrilling backstory.
Moreover, I’m not convinced that a game like Polybius even could exist. We know visual images can induce migraines and seizures in susceptible individuals, but Polybius did far more than that. A game that hypnotises and mind controls players? Which induces amnesia, or night terrors? Gamers often experience a state of ‘flow’ – deep immersion and focus – but this is a far cry from the hypnotic mind control attributed to Polybius. I don’t know if we could make a game like that today, much less in 1981.
Can’t get it out of your aching head? Image by Jenny Kaczorowski, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
In fact, the earliest recorded references to Polybius are remarkably recent. Back in 2017, the gaming YouTube channel Ahoy published a deep dive into the history and origins of Polybius. They reported that the earliest description of Polybius surfaced in early 2000 on the arcade fan website CoinOp.org. There is no verifiable reference to the game prior to this; not in gaming magazines, the trade press, not even on Usenet. While the article on CoinOp dates itself to 1998, this is not supported by online archaeology tools like The Wayback Machine.
After initially featuring in CoinOp, the story gained further momentum when it appeared in a 2003 article from GamePro magazine titled ‘Secrets and Lies: Greatest Gaming Urban Legends.’ The writer of that article told Ahoy that it was Kurt Koller, the owner of CoinOp, who brought him the Polybius story. There is a good chance that the entire Polybius narrative was stitched together as a hoax, a stunt or even internet performance art, to promote CoinOp.
The ‘real’ Polybius
Once the story had gained traction, modern recreations began to appear. If you search for Polybius today, you’ll find photos of the arcade cabinets – but they’re all modern builds. Screenshots from the game exist, but only from the title screen, never of gameplay. There are games you can download that claim to be recreations or surviving copies of the original, but none exhibit any of the supposed effects.
One such version is credited to an engineer named ‘Ygor Euspanes’ – an anagram of ‘Rogue Synapse’, an indie game developer known for building real-life versions of fictional games. Their catalogue includes Graboids (from the film ‘Tremors’), The Bishop of Battle (from the 1983 horror anthology ‘Nightmares’), and Space Paranoids (from ‘Tron’).
That’s the thing: the ingredients for Polybius were already in the cultural blender. The Last Starfighter (also later a Rogue Synapse game) imagined aliens using arcade games to test human reflexes. The novel Arcade by Robert Maxxe describes a game called Spacescape that rewires players’ minds. Tron depicts a man being transported into a computer world and forced to play deadly video games. These are all stories about games doing more than simply entertaining. They’re games that control, transform, or recruit.
Polybius was on the tip of our collective tongues and just needed someone to say it out loud.
What’s mildly tragic is that this nebulous and chaotic imagery – sinister men in black, corrupted children, and dubious morality – was ultimately crystallised into legend… because someone wanted to promote their website. Someone wanted to sell something.
Which, of all the possible explanations, is perhaps the most boring of them all.
The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020.
It has been a very warm summer in the UK. By mid-July, we’d had our third heat wave of 2025, with temperatures here in Liverpool topping 30°C. That followed the heatwave at the start of July, when Kent hit 35.8°C – just four and a half degrees short of the hottest temperature ever recorded in the UK (Lincolnshire hit 40.3°C in 2022). The UK’s first heatwave of the year, in mid June, caused the deaths of an estimated 600 people in England and Wales.
This isn’t normal. Or, at least, it wasn’t normal – a new report in the International Journal of Climatology highlighted how normalised extreme temperatures are becoming in the UK, as a result of climate change. As the Met Office explained, “the last three years have been in the UK’s top five warmest on record, with 2024 the fourth warmest year in records dating back to 1884”.
Last year was the warmest May on record, and the warmest spring on record. February 2024 was the second warmest ever recorded. We had a top-five warmest winter. For parts of the UK, six of the 10 warmest years on record have come in the last decade – based on records stretching back to the 1780s.
It’s not just the high temperatures that are an issue, it is the increasing extremity of temperatures. Temperatures haven’t been rising steadily at the same rate evenly across the year – we are now far more likely to suffer extreme highs and extreme lows. Compared to the average daily temperatures from 1961-1990, the number of days that are 5°C above that baseline have doubled in the last decade. The number that are 10°C above baseline in that time has quadrupled – we now average more than three days per year that are 10°C higher than the 30-year baseline.
When it’s too hot to eat the ice cream before it melts. Image via piqsels.com
It isn’t even just the heat; it’s also the extreme rainfall events, both in terms of average daily rainfall and extreme flooding events. For the decade from 2015 to 2024, the winter half-year (October-March) was 16% wetter than the baseline 30 year period from 1961-1990. The previous winter half-year, from October 2023 to March 2024, was the wettest in all of recorded history, with records stretching back to 1767. Six of the 10 wettest winter half-years for England and Wales have been in the 21st century.
All of this should be a real concern, even to those who remember the famous Summer of 1976, when the UK had a heatwave that lasted 16 consecutive days – longer than the this year’s heatwaves combined. Even accounting for those 16 days of extreme heat, June 1976 was cooler on average than June 2025. This was not normal, and now it is.
The UK is not prepared for extreme heat. While air conditioning is relatively commonplace in hotels, shops, cinemas, and other large indoor spaces, it is not routinely installed in UK homes. Historically, there hasn’t been a compelling need for domestic AC, but that may be changing, with industry reports suggesting around 20% by 2022 of UK homes had some form of air conditioning by 2020, up from 3% in 2011. In France, which has also seen extreme heatwaves, home AC coverage rose from 14% in 2016 to 25% in 2020; it’s hard to imagine the last four years didn’t see a further rise.
However, air conditioning is not an optimal solution to our increasing temperatures, because AC units consume a lot of power. According to the US Department of Energy, 12% of energy consumption in homes goes on running the air con, and a 2019 report from the International Energy Authority suggests that widespread global AC adoption would contribute 2 billion tonnes of CO2 annually. As the world heats, the go-to solution to our overheated houses will only exacerbate the situation.
Energy wastage is a serious climate change issue. Take, for example, electronic advertising – each large-sized 62 square metre screen electronic billboard consumes annually enough energy to run 32 households. The estimated 14,500 advertising screens across the country could be powering more than 50,000 homes in total. Even if those screens are using truly renewable energy – rather than buying dubious carbon offset credits – they’re still wasting renewable resources that could be better served powering those households, or hospitals, or anywhere else where the consumption is essential. In any sensible world where we took climate change seriously, an easy win would be to turn every one of those superfluous screens off.
Political leadership is needed
The kind of large-scale changes that would substantially limit our carbon emissions and prevent energy waste require a strong political will, and that’s hard to achieve when there are well-funded climate change denialist lobby groups like the Global Warming Policy Foundation and the Institute for Economic Affairs, and while there are politicians who believe they know better than the science.
Unfortunately, there are more than a few in that latter group. We learned that recently, as the Reform UK councillors in charge of my hometown council of County Durham scrapped their net zero pledge, in spite of opposition from cross-party councillors and campaigners. That followed a council meeting in Nottinghamshire, where senior Reform UK councillor Bert Bingham, paused proceedings to explain that climate change is a hoax, and he should know because “he has worked in sustainability for 25 years”. Bingham told the council,
“The statistics are manipulated. I’ve followed it over decades, there’s lots of science out there, but at the moment it seems to be as in a lot of matters with Covid, if you follow the money, you find the science or the pseudoscience.”
Close behind Reform UK – as the Tories are getting used to being – the Conservatives have abandoned their climate change targets, claiming that the aim of Net Zero by 2050 is “arbitrary”, “not based on science”, and a product of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change being “biased”. And while Labour’s Ed Miliband has been doing an admirable job in advocating for solutions to climate change, even telling parliament that politicians who reject net zero policies are “betraying future generations”, we might not be able to rely on policy changes and mass movements to cut carbon emissions and prevent an even greater climate disaster.
A technical solution?
So, what can be done? In April of this year, the UK government greenlit small-scale experiments into geoengineering (much to the chagrin of chemtrail conspiracists across the land). The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) announced a £56.8m programme looking to “explore – under rigorous oversight – whether any climate cooling approaches that have been proposed as potential options to delay or avert [climate] tipping points could ever be feasible, scalable, and safe”.
The project involves five proposed outdoor experiments. One of the projects will explore the efficacy of rethickening arctic sea ice – which makes some sense, because we know that arctic ice is melting, and we know that as the ice coverage shrinks, the big white surfaces that would otherwise reflect light and heat are replaced by dark watery surfaces that absorb heat, which will speed up the melting of the remaining ice and the raising of sea water levels.
Another of the proposed projects studies how milligram quantities of mineral dusts age in the stratosphere – but before the chemtrail conspiracy theorists get too panicked, these chemicals wouldn’t be released, they’d be kept for analysis, it’s just a pilot scheme to understand what happens to them at that altitude.
Contrails over a field, by PiccoloNamek (2005). Image via Wikimedia Commons
The other projects are more likely to draw the ire of the chemtrail busters, however, because they focus on exploring the effects of seawater spray and electric charges on cloud reflectivity. The idea being that, like the ice shelves, clouds reflect heat from the sun so it doesn’t get absorbed by land or water, and if you can make the existing clouds more reflective – either by changing their water composition, or running an electric charge through them – you might be able to mitigate some of the warming.
This might all sound risky, but ARIA do make a point of stating that the experiments “will only go ahead after a period of meaningful public engagement with local communities, and will all be subject to oversight by the programme’s independent oversight committee” and that “all ARIA-funded experiments will be time-bound, limited in size and scale, and their effects will dissipate within 24 hours or be fully reversible.”
In the extensive FAQ on their website, they make it clear that these experiments don’t involve any chemicals that are harmful to humans or animals, won’t affect the growing of crops, and won’t change the weather or the seasons. Also, they make it clear that they are not trying to block out the sun. However, those FAQs did little to reassure anyone who was worried about geoengineering and chemtrails, with a petition on the Parliament website, titled, “Make all forms of ‘geo-engineering’ affecting the environment illegal”, gathering 160,000 signatures:
We want all forms of geo-engineering to be illegal in the UK. We do not want any use of technologies to intervene in the Earth’s natural systems.
We think there is a potential for this to negatively impact humanity, flora and fauna in the future. It has previously been said that Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) is essential to meet climate targets. We believe that this, and all other forms of geo-engineering, should be made illegal in the UK.
The petition received a response from the government, who made clear that:
the wider consequences of Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) are poorly understood, with significant uncertainty around the possible risks and impacts of deployment. As such, the government’s position is that it is not deploying SRM and has no plans in place to do so.
Reasonable criticism
It isn’t just the chemtrail conspiracy community that has issues with these pilot investigations – opposition has been far broader, and more mainstream. Talking to the Guardian, Mary Church, from the Center for International Environmental Law, argued:
Solar geoengineering is inherently unpredictable and risks breaking further an already broken climate system. Conducting small-scale experiments risks normalising highly controversial theories and accelerating technological development, creating a slippery slope toward full-scale deployment.
While some of the theories may appear sound, the climate is a hugely complicated system – or collection of systems – and any change to it might be wildly unpredictable. According to the BBC, studies have demonstrated that Solar Radiation Modification “could cause strong warming high above the tropics, changing large-scale weather patterns, warming the polar regions and altering rainfall patterns around the world”. Brightening cloud cover in south-west Africa off the coast of Namibia, while well intentioned, could cause a drought in South America, which could in turn starve the Amazon rainforest.
Equally, while geoengineering may be capable of bringing down global average temperatures, there’s nothing to say that such a reduction would happen evenly – it may result in even more extreme climate issues in specific areas of the world. It’s very complicated, and we simply don’t know what could happen as a result.
Meanwhile, there are solutions that we do know would work, that are not beset by such uncertainty, and these form the other strain of criticism ARIA has received: spending our time chasing geoengineering solutions can be a huge distraction from the essential work of decarbonisation, carbon neutrality, and reducing emissions. By introducing a technological Hail Mary, we could essentially send the message that it’s fine to carry on as we are, because science is going to come along and solve it all. If and when those proposed technical solutions fail, it will be too late to actually take the mitigating action we need.
This criticism is particularly pertinent, given that the Big Tech and FinTech industries have invested heavily into geoengineering research. Arguably, a technical deus ex machina would mean heavy polluting industries wouldn’t have to tackle their own very significant contributions to the climate crisis. Why turn those big advertising screens off and stop them beaming commercial messaging into unsuspecting eyes if you’ve got a magical machine that zaps out special clouds to keep the heat under control? Or, more cynically, why turn those screens off – or deal with your data centres and your mass wastage – if you can tick the green credentials box on a form by saying you’re investing in the solution? As long as the cost of funding the research is less than the cost of tidying up your carbon mess, you’re in profit.
For what it’s worth, ARIA does actually acknowledge those criticism. They explain:
There is no substitute for decarbonisation, which is the only sustainable way to lower the chances of such tipping points and their effects from occurring.
Our current warming trajectory already makes a number of tipping points distinctly possible over the next century.
If faced with a climate tipping point, our understanding of the options available remains limited. This knowledge gap has driven increased interest in whether there are approaches (also known as “climate interventions”) that could actively reduce temperatures globally or regionally over shorter timescales.
Yet, in the absence of robust data, we currently have little understanding of whether such interventions are scientifically feasible, and what their full range of impacts might be. This programme aims to gather such data so that we can better understand these approaches and their potential effects.
ARIA maintain that they are only running small-scale trials that are time bound and heavily regulated, with no plan to actually deploy them. However, if they come back with promising results, what’s to stop billionaires with commercial biases like Elon Musk from spinning up the scheme at scale, safe in the knowledge that they’re essentially beyond the regulatory powers of any country in the world? It’s a colossal risk, and one that could even be existential.
Is geoengineering the answer?
While there is much uncertainty, one thing is abundantly clear: we cannot just wait to be saved by tech solutions like these – Solar Radiation Modification, Carbon Capture and Storage, even even mass tree-planting schemes (that often end up generating more carbon than they save). They’re unproven, complex, and potentially highly risky. The solution has to be to reduce emissions, to push for policies that promote carbon neutrality, and to push for politicians that will prioritise it.
The idea of seeding the atmosphere with large amounts of chemicals that shouldn’t be there, and that will change global temperatures and weather systems in ways we cannot predict or control, is obviously folly.
However, that is precisely what we have been doing for over a century, with our out-of-control carbon emissions. Climate change is the result of geoengineering, but rather than a small scale trial, it was a mass experiment we’ve ran with no controls, no oversight, and no way of stopping.
Whether we like it or not, those climate crisis tipping points are coming, if they’re not already here. We cannot afford to be complacent, and we cannot afford to let the likes of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Institute for Economic Affairs, and the other wealthy fossil fuel interest groups – nor the politicians they’ve bought and paid for – dissuade us from taking the kind of radical action we need to avert this crisis. But if we don’t, if we fail to decarbonise and reduce our emissions, there may well come a time where the potential benefits of those risky geoengineering experiments are far safer than continuing our inaction.
I like a good ghost story. When I’m traveling, one of my favorite things to do is to take a ghost tour of whatever town I happen to be in. I also enjoy putting places in their historical context and imagining what they would have been like at different points in their history. Combined with an interest in the functioning of medieval architecture, this has occasionally resulted in my standing in the middle of a field pointing at a pile of random stones and waxing lyrically about how this priory/tomb/castle was an integral part of the landscape and society in the dim mists of the past.
Sometimes, I might even be pointing at the right jumble of rocks.
Given these proclivities, I was looking forward to a recent visit to Leap Castle in County Offaly, Ireland. The main structure is a Norman tower house castle, which had been expanded by the inhabitants over a 600-year period. Squat, square tower houses like this one dot the landscape of Ireland, but I had never actually been inside one.
Heading to Leap Castle, I had expectations. Ireland has some very good restorations of medieval castles. Ormand Castle is a great example of a thoughtful and carefully targeted restoration to a specific period of time. Kilkenny Castle has been renovated to show the splendour of the Stewart Kings of Great Britain. Leap Castle is privately owned and the owner has been slowly restoring it for years, so I expected to see a thoughtful restoration and hear lengthy explanations of mortar, keystone use, and wall treatments.
I did not expect to see ghosts. I keep looking, but no matter where I go, my skeptical aura seems to repel them or something. However, I did expect to be regaled with carefully rehearsed and emotive stories of hauntings.
I expected too much.
Full disclosure: the owner, who is the primary guide, was not there, and we were given our orientation to the castle by a neighbour who told us that she had heard the stories and introductions to the castle many times. She began by asking what we were interested in. “History, architecture, and ghosts” was our answer. She gave a general summary of the history of the castle – when it was built, which clans had claimed it, and who inhabited it after the clans – with an emphasis on the oubliette, the hole into which prisoners were thrown to die and be forgotten. A few probing questions to draw her out resulted in apologies that the owner wasn’t around.
Then she turned to the ghosts. She pointed out areas where specific ghosts had been seen. The Governess is sometimes seen walking right there and giving people a stern look. There’s a monk in grey that walks across the grounds in front of the castle. She looked at us expectantly. We looked at her expectantly.
At that point, we were turned loose to wander on our own. This was the highlight for me! I circled up the narrow, circular stairs imagining the servants running up and down and trying to pass each other carrying supplies and removing laundry, empty bottles, and platters. I spent enough time in the guardrobe, staring at the medieval toilet, for my companions to give me strange looks. I gazed out through the tower windows at the valley below, imagining the local lord watching for incursions or rebellion. The intent behind the restoration was not as clear as I had hoped. Furnishings and construction methods wandered across centuries, but the strong bones of the tower house peaked through enough for my history-fueled imagination.
However, I left dissatisfied. Not because of what I had experienced, but because I went in with high expectations.
If you are planning a trip to Leap Castle, I would suggest watching some of the ghost-hunting videos available online from various different groups beforehand to get an idea of the ghost stories along with creepy music and earnest “experts”. To get a sense of why such an imposing and solid tower was necessary, you may also want to do some independent reading or listening to Fin Dwyer’s Irish History Podcast, especially the episodes about the Norman invasion.
In general, I would recommend a stop at Leap Castle if you are in the area and have an hour or two. But maybe put it lower on the agenda, and include it if you have some extra time after visiting some other historical sites.
When I wrote the first version of this piece, yet another “gender reveal party” explosion had caused massive damage to the surrounding area. While none had died in that fire, others have in similar incidents.
At the time, I was living in California. I was livid. Having been sheltering in place for months due to SARS-CoV-2 and then not even being able to go hiking (a key outdoor and exercise activity when doing things was… somewhat restricted) because of wildfires and terrible air quality, people setting fires for this nonsense made me absolutely incensed. Pun partly intended.
Swathes of the state were already on fire and someone really decided that what’s between their baby’s legs was so important they had to tell all their friends through a staged-for-instagram display.
As I come back these thoughts some years later, it’s not long after Israeli soldiers apparently blew up a building, then jokingly shouted, “it’s a boy!” because the resulting smoke was partly blue. It’s unclear if they intentionally set it up or it was ‘just’ an utterly tasteless shared moment of humour in destruction. I don’t have the words to comment further on it.
I think the whole concept of the ‘gender reveal’ is very wrong, on several levels, so let’s explore that.
Maybe concentrating on a child’s gender is weird?
Is it really a ‘gender’ reveal?
Why are you so focused on ‘gender’? With a baby, you’re not actually talking about gender. Children don’t have (or, specifically, express) gender. At least not until they’re about 4-5 years old – it’s largely projection from adults before that. Research shows our stereotyping of children by gender begins early. A messy sense of boxed-in identity that is forced on them because of cultural ideas about genitals and, of course, sexism. And, often, it’s about what parents want for the person they made, and for themselves as they watch them grow.
The word ‘gender’ is often misunderstood – it is not a synonym for sex. “What is gender?” is a complicated, messy question that philosophers and sociologists have grappled with for a long time. Europe and the US are, for the most part, binary-gendered societies; we grow up with the expectation that everyone falls into one of two boxes (boy/girl, man/woman) and that generally we can tell who is in which box just by looking, and maybe briefly talking. In this way, gender approximately indicates sex – what it’s really answering is:
“What’s in their pants?“
Sometimes, people use sex to indicate gender instead; emphasising features like breasts, hair, muscles or other secondary characteristics. For some, perhaps if we don’t generally otherwise conform to others’ ideas of what’s “masculine” or “feminine”, this can be a measure taken more for our personal safety than pride in our image.
Gender stereotyping of children begins well before they are able to express their own preferences.
Sometimes we tell other people what our gender is, sometimes others decide it for us. Sometimes we will correct them if they’re wrong.
These facts are part of how we can reasonably say that gender is a performance– a dance of behaviours, attitudes, signals and more, given off by people to tell others around them something about who they are. Cultural ideas about what masculinity and femininity look like vary significantly, and not all cultures even have a binary gender system. This is a huge topic that would take many articles to cover, so let’s return to gender assignment at birth. From Rae Gray at Bitch Media:
Cis parents, in general, are very uncomfortable acknowledging that there could be anything non-cis about their children at all—that pink or blue isn’t the be-all and end-all of gendered human experience and the very real harms that can come from pretending that this is the case.
Gender is an indicatorof sex. It’s not the same thing. Equally, sex is also more complicated than genitals alone – we’ve got chromosomes, the genetic instructions within them, modifications to and activity of those genes, hormone actions and levels, and other physical characteristics.
So it wouldn’t even be accurate to call them “sex reveal parties” – “genital reveal parties” seems most accurate. Is that not… very strange indeed?
What’s the harm?
Gender reveal parties aren’t harmless – even if you do something non-explodey, like a cake.
It is harmful to intersex people, who are often operated on without their consent to make them fit into one of two boxes, because of society’s obsessions with strict binaries and ensuring people (especially their children) don’t deviate. Surgery they did not need that can harm them for life. Even without that, enduring years of stigmatisation of their perfectly normal body is commonplace.
Trans kids (and adults) are also impacted. Parents deciding that the child’s observed sex – usually based on genitals alone – must mean that a host of personality traits will be forthcoming and/or avoided, creates a foundation for failing to accept, love, comfort, support and encourage any child. Especially those who feel that the gender others observe or expect is wrong for them.
Putting less emphasis on it helps free all of us – cis, trans and nonbinary alike – to perform the gender, or lack thereof, that makes us comfortable. Cis girls (like young me!) don’t need to be told they’re too “boyish” for liking shorts, getting muddy or playing with dinosaurs and cars instead of/as well as pink things with sparkles or princesses. Cis boys shouldn’t be told the pink sparkly things, dolls and baking sets aren’t for them.
Trans kids don’t need the weight of assumption about their gender and life choices hanging on the thread of imagination tied to their genitals either. I’d argue none of us do. It harms all of us.
If we’re clear and honest, all of this seems to boil down to ‘penis or vagina?‘ (or, more accurately, vulva) and, really, who cares? The only people this should matter to are the child themselves, parents/guardians who have to take care of them while they’re young, future sexual partners, and healthcare providers. Nobody else needs to know.
Focusing on genitals as if they’re a major determinant of personality is unscientific, reductive and, frankly, sad.
From Jessica Winter at Slate:
A boy has a something, and a girl has a nothing. A boy has a gun, and a girl has a hole. A boy does, and a girl is done to. A boy is an active actor with useful equipment, and a girl is a void with embellishments. It would sound so tiresomely gender studies 101 if these weren’t actual people having actual children
Have we not reached a point where we realise that gender/genitals/sex really doesn’t do much to determine what we can or should do in life? Are we really still fighting for acceptance of women being world-class athletes, leading physicians, soldiers, engineers… or for men to be nurses and carers, teachers, home-makers – for anyone to be free to be whatever they want to be? Or are we clinging tightly to pre-destined paths based on a handful of random physical omens despite the progress (I thought) we’d made?
Some wonder if the reason gender reveal events have become so popular is to use big bangs to extend the appeal of the US-centric and ‘female-only’ tradition of baby showers to men – men with some serious issues around gender roles and toxic masculinity (why could they possibly have those?!). From the New York Post:
“Toxic masculinity is men thinking they need to explode something because simply enjoying a baby party is for sissies,” said Karvunidis, whose original gender bash in 2008 involved cake
I’ve only touched the surface of this conversation and there’s so much more to explore; why do parents do this? Why is binary gender so important to them? What happens when children – or any people – fail to conform to or blur those boundaries?
For now, I’ll conclude with: children can enjoy and do anything, regardless of whatever is in their pants. That’s surely how it should be, anyway.
This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 6, from 1991.
I am a member of the Wessex Skeptics, named for an ancient kingdom in the south of England and at one time ruled over by a famous skeptic, King Canute, who, like skeptics today, is frequently misunderstood and maligned. In vainly ordering the waves of the sea back, and getting rather wet in the process, he was not demonstrating his vanity and lack of touch with reality, but trying to get it through the heads of his sycophantic courtiers that there were limits to even his power.
Wiltshire is a county in the Wessex region, and one that has become very familiar to us over the past couple of summers, as we have investigated the crop circles which have become all the rage there. It is a pretty, rural county of rolling hills and country roads, shared between the farmers and the British Army, and – despite the army – rather peaceful and bucolic. The prettiness and remoteness of Wiltshire and the presence of numerous features in the landscape attesting to neolithic activity – including Stonehenge – seem to have made it attractive to a breed of person favourable to woolly paranormal musings about history and earth energies. It is in the heart of this deceptively quiet countryside that paranormal theoretical entities multiply wantonly, quite without decent necessity, and the bold skeptic venturing here leaves Occam’s razor behind, preferring to borrow his chainsaw.
Here, and in neighbouring Hampshire, where I live, crop circles – although the complexity of patterns makes the term entirely inadequate – have been popping up for more than a decade, allegedly confounding strenuous efforts by experts and ‘scientists’ to explain them. Crop circles are characterised by crisp edges, complex layering of the fallen crop – which may be wheat, oats, barley, rape or even beans – and minimal damage to the plants. The patterns frequently appear overnight, and there are said to be no traces to indicate the passage of anyone – or anything – to or from the circles.
Enormous interest has been generated by these things, and the national newspapers have filled many column-inches with stories about them. The interest was initiated by a few frantic experts, and attracted further ‘researchers’, so that the area around Marlborough in Wiltshire was during the summer crawling with activity from sunset to sunrise. It was getting so that an honest hoaxer could hardly go about his or her trade without disturbance from some ‘circle-spotter’.
These experts fall mostly into one of three groups: CERES (Circles Effect Research), run by Dr Terence Meaden, which subscribes to the theory that some circles are formed by ‘plasma vortices’, spinning masses of ionised air, and the rest are hoax. I will, I am afraid, consistently lapse from correct usage, whereby I should say ‘artifact’ instead of ‘hoax,’ since the latter prescribes the motivation behind the product – our particular interest is primarily in whether crop circles are or are not artifacts, and we know little about possible motivations. The second of the groups is CPR (Circles Phenomenon Research), run jointly by Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado, who seem to believe in no theory, but are firmly convinced that it is a mystery and no explanation is adequate; finally we have the CCCS (Centre for Crop Circle Studies), to which almost everybody else seems to belong.
Although this motley bunch have little in common, they do share one motto, which is repeated so often we recognise it as the territorial call the crop circle enthusiast: ‘no human being could do this’. I am reminded of a scene from Ghostbusters (a marvellous movie, incidentally, and one that I recommend to all without hesitation), when the three heroes, following up an account of an apparition, happen upon a column of books stacked almost to the height of a man amongst the shelves of the New York Public Library. The more scholarly of the trio, a serious parapsychologist, played by Dan Ackroyd, observes ‘vertical book stacking, just as in the XYZ case… ‘ (or something like that), to which his cynical partner, played by Bill Murray, replies ‘Yes, no human being would stack books like that!’
Crop circle investigators actually take this kind of argument seriously. They have all declared the crop patterns impossible to fake. In one case, Meaden declared an eyewitness account impossible to invent, even though it contained no corroborating evidence and no details that did not already exist as speculation in the public domain. These people, who constantly demand open-mindedness from the rest of the world, spend half their lives circumscribing the abilities of the entire human race. We skeptics are often accused of arrogance – this is probably true in some cases, since we are, after all, only human – but the attitude that allows people to make sweeping statements about what other people cannot possibly do smacks of great hubris. Remember, these statements are not based on violations of some law of nature, these are based on the appearance of fallen corn and the field in which it is found. Remember Von Daniken: he didn’t say, “Wow, these ancients were smart – I can’t figure out how they got such a smooth facade on these temples”; instead he said, “I can’t figure out how they did it, therefore they couldn’t have done it, so they must have had extraterrestrial help.”
A crop circle in Le Chalet-à-Gobet, Switzerland, 2007, by Jabberocky, via Wikimedia Commons
In most cases the crop circle experts cannot say that they have tried hard, or even at all in some cases, to simulate the circles. So they are actually saying: “I can’t imagine how it is done, because I don’t think any of the methods I can think of could work, so it must be impossible.” Of course, the general public watching on the 6 o’clock news doesn’t get the full, shaky reasoning – they are treated to the ex cathedra statement from TV-accredited experts that these things cannot be artificial.
Mr Andrews and his pal Pat Delgado have been unrestrained in the techniques they bring to bear on the problem. They have used dowsing, like many others in the field; they have invoked mystery upon seeing peculiar marks on photographs of crop circles and hearing unexplained noises. In one example, a ‘mysterious’ white mark in the centre of a circle photo in their first book becomes upon enlargement an even more mysterious white disk. In fact, this feature looks suspiciously like a sheet of paper lying in the centre of the circle. The pair have even used spagyric analysis, a dubious technique involving crystallisation of the residue of organic material after a harsh processing – it was invented three centuries ago, and popularised by Sir Kenelm Digby, the same man who condensed sunlight and invented the sword salve, a curative material applied to the weapon that had inflicted the wound, not the wound itself. With the results of this last method, they claimed to have detected an alteration in the molecular structure of the laid corn, creating alarm that the grain was dangerous and should be excluded from the food chain.
Terence Meaden, on the other hand, is a man who scorns talk of the paranormal, although he does seem to have used dowsing as a diagnostic indicator of a genuine circle, whatever that is. His claims that ‘plasma vortices’ are a reality rest on little published evidence, and what he has published is mostly in his own journal, The Journal of Meteorology or in self-published books. Occasionally Meaden permits himself the luxury of an ad hominem attack on his critics. In the first paragraph of one of his scientific papers Meaden stated:
This has helped to confirm that aside from a low number of obviously faked circles, the evidence is overwhelming in favour of a natural atmospheric origin for the circles effect, and it is certainly the case that all truly open-minded, unbiased people who have properly studied the facts accept that this is so.
Little detailed and comprehensive information about crop circles has been made public, so anyone who lacks the time and resources – and the disciples – to examine them closely and collect measurements is unable to assess the judgments these experts broadcast so frequently. We do not know if the dimensions cluster around certain values, or the dates of appearance around certain days of the week. CERES has publicised an analysis claiming that crop circles cluster around hills – which would be qualitatively consistent with generation of plasma vortices by trailing vortices – but I find this analysis unconvincing.
The Wessex Skeptics first got involved in the whole confusing business last summer. We visited a few crop circles, but not, unfortunately, fresh ones, and quickly realised that we would make little progress in this manner. Although aware that serious criticisms against all theories of non-human origin had been made, we were initially and naively least dubious about Meaden’s theory. However, we quickly lost confidence in it when we got to Wiltshire.
Meaden has a problem not shared by the other experts. His theory, being physical, has to meet natural constraints or so you would think – while the others, having no theories, are not put out by any amount of contrary evidence. As long as some part of their mystery is unassailed, they are happy. We got to Wiltshire, and were stunned by the Alton Barnes pictogram, which was one of the first of the truly complicated shapes to appear – it was many tens of metres long, a string of circles and corridors.
Our astonishment at its appearance was only exceeded by our surprise at Meaden’s declaration that it was genuine. But he had no choice, for he could find no difference in structure between it and the simple circles. We were highly dubious, because we noted that the axis of the pattern was aligned along its length not just to the tram lines-lines made by farm machinery as it runs through the field, but to the seed lines themselves, which are often a mere 10cm apart! This was a characteristic shared by too many other patterns to be a random occurrence, and we could see no strong reason why a powerful plasma vortex supposedly acting over a second or less should delicately orient itself in this fashion.
A crop circle in oilseed rape/canola, below Milk Hill in Wiltshire, south-west England. Photo by Brian Nelson for Geograph Britain and Ireland, 2008, via Wikimedia Commons
Fortunately for Dr Meaden, he found a way out of such difficulties. He invented hypotheses, which were posed qualitatively and thus difficult to test. Initially he denied that many patterns were aligned but later claimed that the earth in the tramline was compacted, and had a different conductivity, thus – somehow or other – aligning the vortex, which is, after all, electrically charged.
It seemed to us that the plasma vortex theory required that the patterns should have occurred before the public interest in them. Meaden agrees with us, because he has assiduously sought accounts of crop-circle-like phenomena from historical records. One of his more well-known examples is the mowing devil. Presumably because it is inconsistent with his theory, he ignores the fact that the accompanying picture shows the corn to have been cut.
In our opinion, an obvious place to look for old crop circles would be in aerial archaeological photos – after all, they are collected over a range of seasons in the search for features of similar size, in the same regions of the country. We contacted some aerial archaeologists – the six who replied were unanimous that they could not possibly have missed crop circles, and that they have only been seeing them recently.
We wanted to carry out an exhaustive – and exhausting – look at the thousands of photos that have been taken since the 1930s, but time constraints have thus far limited us to several hundred taken in the right season over a couple of spots which have proven attractive to crop circles over the past ten years. We could not see the recent photos, but found no circles at all – only one circular feature in fact, which turned out to be a barrow. Even this limited survey might crudely suggest that an average season pre-1980 had less than one crop circle per 100 square miles, even ignoring the fact that these sites were recently crop circle-rich. Our preliminary conclusion – which really should be reinforced by a thorough search – is that crop circles, at least in their present profusion, are not old. Ironically, a search such as the one we contemplate is the only approach likely to give Meaden’s theory real support, if crop circles could be shown to have existed before any whisper of media interest had arisen.
In 1990, Meaden was scathing of suggestions that the frequency or complexity of circles might be increasing:
Some commentators query the increasing complexity of these formations. But are they becoming more complicated? Are plain circles being embellished by pranksters? Such facile questions belie the intricate matter which is the circles effect.
He has now accepted this feature, and recognises the need to account for it. Once again, hypotheses – including the solar cycle, the ozone hole, long hot summers and changing agricultural patterns – have been entertained by him and his followers to explain the changing frequency. I am surprised they don’t mention the decade-long reigns of powerful conservative rulers in Britain and the US – but then, perhaps a period of laissez-faire favours the hoax hypothesis!
Lacking a quantitative basis, the theory cannot be tested on these grounds, but we can see that plasma vortices are strange beasts. They can be turned on or off by slight large-scale climatic change, even though they are apparently short-lived micrometeorological phenomena. They are sensitive to crop strains and farming methods. On the other hand, they can strike oats, barley, rape, beans, wheat, at many stages of their life cycles and from May to September, and can even appear in grass, snow and sand!
Impatient with our lack of progress, we finally decided this summer on a high risk strategy. This was to hoax our own circles, and see if the experts could tell the difference. This was high risk, because failure might prove nothing more than our own incompetence, yet discredit the skeptical viewpoint.
First we had to practise the techniques. With the assistance of National Geographic, in England to make a film about crop circles, we rented a field from a friendly farmer (a rare commodity in Wiltshire these days) and made a pictogram. In broad daylight, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. We were buzzed by planes, helicopters and microlites. Even this level of observation did not stop certain members of CCCS declaring it genuine – in fact one gentleman did so when overflying it a couple of days later. Other members, while aware the main pattern was artificial, became convinced that a ring had appeared mysteriously some time later outside our main circle. Furthermore, this ring was said, darkly, to be ‘too narrow to be made by trampling’. In fact, it was made just that way, and only minutes after the main circle. I am still not sure that we have convinced them all that we made it!
What were our techniques? Mostly simple and obvious ones, really. A bit of string held by a central person while another described a circle. Trampling, sticks and rollers to lay the corn. Sighting on a distant object to make the straight corridors. We found that it was not especially difficult to get through the corn without leaving a trail, particularly if you walk along the seed lines and turn around every metre or so to re-entangle the plants by brushing them gently with a stick. We concluded that a garden roller was the best tool, since if used with care it would lay the corn without unnecessary damage. We determined to try again, this time for real.
Fortunately, we were successful, though not at first. Our first attempt was thrilling, and performed without the farmer’s permission (we did send the farmer compensation anonymously a week or two later). We wanted to see if hoaxing was possible under the pressure of fear of being caught; we also wanted to avoid asking a farmer to lie, as he or she would need to do if the test were to be effectively blind to the experts. We picked a field on top of a hill near Marlborough.
It was a beautiful, crisp night, and the sky was clear with a full moon. Every sound frightened us. Many cars passed, causing us to spend much of our time crouching down in fear of detection. We got hot, tired and frustrated. Our chosen field was muddy and had very deep tramlines. We changed our plans, dropping our elaborate pattern and doing just a huge circle with a ring and a small circle some way off. And we were rumbled – a car stopped! Some people got out, but they soon left, and we thought we had got away with it. Only later did we discover we had been spotted. As we squatted in the damp at the edge of the field, waiting for our getaway car, we were filled with undeserved euphoria at our imagined success. It truly was a beautiful night, and we were rewarded for our endeavours by the sound of a female fox screaming its chilling, almost human, cry.
Even though we were discovered by circle watchers, and word got around very fast, we were not stopped or apprehended, which was interesting in itself. Some members of CCCS did not get the news in time, and declared the circle genuine. Many members of the public were impressed, and a few unwitting dowsers found their rods stirring.
Why crop circles should dowse is unclear – something to do with earth energies or ill-defined electromagnetic anomalies, apparently. I have witnessed the replication problems of the dowsing technique at first hand. At Alton Barnes last year, I watched with some amusement as a couple of dowsers compared notes in one of the circles. The woman had found a distinct vortex, and her rods were whirling to back her up, whereas the man had found the same spot to be devoid of activity, and his pendulum hung limply. That dowsing is so heavily implicated in circles ‘research’ is just a symptom of the subjective nature of these investigations.
But I digress. Chastened with failure, not because our circle had failed to meet the experts’ criteria but rather because they were not forced to work blind, we were a bit lacking in eagerness to try again. But the despondency soon passed, and we started plotting again. We were to be filmed for the TV program Equinox, and we decided to get the permission of a farmer this time. We were lucky enough to find just the man we needed – someone who would be willing to dissemble to all and sundry and be convincing with it!
Once again, things started off badly and moved further and further from our well-laid plans. We had scouted the terrain beforehand, checked the tramlines and prepared an appropriate plan. But when we got there, we found that much of the field had, ironically, been laid low by wind damage, and we had to redesign fast. Our problems were doubled when the TV crew did not maintain an appropriate demeanour for the situation; they barged through the corn, interviewing us as we worked and flooding the field in light. Since Wiltshire was infested with circle spotters, we were sure we would be found out. As if to make sure that even if the TV crew failed to give the game away, word would still get out, we accidentally left some string in the field. Fortunately, the farmer removed this the next morning.
We were again despondent; one of us had laid the corn the wrong way, pointing towards the centre of the circle, and the TV crew had trampled through the corn. We were sure that we had made a crude hoax, and that nobody would be fooled by it. Boy, were we wrong! We were still guilty of overestimating the objectivity of the experts.
It took a while for the experts to find it, because it wasn’t visible from the road, but within two weeks we had proven that it was possible to mislead the experts, including some who had so far remained immune from the taint of error. Busty Taylor of CCCS found it genuine, and emphasised the departure of the large central pattern from true circularity as the mark of authenticity.
Terence Meaden, who had publicly resisted the possibility that he could be mistaken in his judgement of circles, not only found our fabrication credible, but that it “fit perfectly the scientific theory I have been putting forward for the last ten years,” and was “100% genuine.” He stressed how many hoaxes he had seen, and marvelled at the classic layering patterns (another mark of authenticity, according to the experts). He was interviewed in the circle, and brought reporters to see it. A medium flown in from Paris by a producer from Paramount found the energies overwhelming – she developed a headache and had to leave. Dowsers’ tools went wild in the circle. Of course, we can’t deny that a lot of psychic energy may well have been trapped in the circle – there was quite a lot of cursing and swearing the night we made it!
This was not the first time the experts had been misled – Delgado and Andrews have several times in the past been wrong in their claims that circles are genuine – but it was the first that we knew of for Terence Meaden, and proved that the features alleged to be impossible to simulate were in fact quite easy to reproduce. We are now of the firm opinion that there is no substance to the experts’ claims that they can distinguish a category of circles for which hoaxing is impossible.
Admittedly, we have never entered a ‘fresh’ circle, one that has had no sightseers. We have been told by Meaden of a complete absence of collateral damage in these cases. If this is true, we could probably not reproduce them with our present techniques. We always found a small number of damaged plants, in which the stalk was bent in more than one place. On the other hand, damaged plants do not prove hoaxing – in one field, for example, we observed that even in stands of fresh corn some of the plants were damaged. Moreover, it is always possible to remove them, if one is sufficiently patient.
So this was the situation at the end of August – we knew that the experts could be fooled, and had as far as we could tell no method for reliably distinguishing ‘true’ circles. We had preliminary evidence that crop circles had not existed for very long. We also knew that our organisational skills needed a little polishing.
Then, on 9 September, the Today newspaper dropped a bombshell on the tightly knit little world of the crop circle experts. It published a story in which two men, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, claimed not only to have been hoaxing circles for years but actually to have started the entire craze, basing their idea on some UFO hoaxes in Australia in the 1960s. They backed up their claims by making a pattern into which Pat Delgado was lured by the newspaper. He not only fell for it, he raved about it:
In no way could this be a hoax. This is without doubt the most wonderful moment of my career. What we are dealing with here nobody in the world understands. We are left with the fact that these crops are laid down in these sensational patterns by an energy that remains unexplained and is laid down by a high level of intelligence.
When informed of the hoax, he reacted with characteristic humility:
They are to be admired in the way they have conducted their nocturnal escapades which made it look as though there was a real intelligence that we don’t understand. From this simple prank developed one of the world’s most sensational unifying situations since biblical days… this is a lesson to us all that we should look and listen to the beautiful and small things in life.
Thus was exposed by far the most public of Delgado’s errors, and it has cost the credibility of crop circles dearly. This is somewhat paradoxical, of course, since Bower and Chorley’s confession is not necessarily inconsistent with Delgado and Andrew’s postulates of superior intelligence and unknown forces!
The story told by the two putative hoaxers rang true, and the reporter claimed they had a lot of corroborative – although circumstantial – evidence. Several national newspapers and the broadcast media picked up the story, although the TV networks carried it without reference to the article. Consequently Delgado and Andrews were able to walk into a circle they knew the two men had made and declare it, on camera, an ‘obvious hoax’ without Delgado being challenged on his previous statements. Well, yes.
Nevertheless, the wagons were circled to fend off this assault Delgado retracted the statement of complete capitulation attributed to him by the press, prompting Today to respond “come on, Pat, admit you were had”. Andrews continued to assert there were unfathomable mysteries – for example, the alleged impossibility of making a mature rape circle, since the stalks break however you try to bend them. Not so, if you do it right, it takes a little time, but then there aren’t that many crop circles in rape.
CCCS claimed they had filmed a circle in formation, although this is yet to be shown to the world. And George Wingfield, member of CCCS, launched charges of a government cover-up, aimed at discrediting crop circles in the eyes of the public. There was damning evidence for this. The copyright of the first Today story was assigned to MBF services, which people like Wingfield know is a cover for the government secret service (maybe they should have just signed it MI5 – that would doubtless have proved it wasn’t the secret service). Finally, in what sounded like a case of sour grapes, CCCS began to hint that the police should deal with the hoaxers.
The CCCS response prepared for the press is clear about their views concerning hoaxing. They put the following arguments against claims that all circles were artificial:
The crop circle phenomenon has been under systematic study for 12 years, beginning in 1980. Over this period, something like 2000 events have been recorded… Many events have been very complex and very large. Some circular events have been larger than 300 feet in diameter. Some linear events have been as long as 250 feet from end to end. If this is the world of hoaxers, their dedication and energy is little short of marvellous. Simple events would have been enough to satisfy the ordinary malice of hoaxers; the exuberance of what we have seen needs much further explanation.
The first two points are obviously irrelevant to the argument, while the third is more interesting. It is – essentially – claiming an understanding of human nature sufficient to rule out hoaxing, which later is described as ‘far more implausible than any other hypothesis.’
I have spoken briefly with Doug Bower, who seemed a pleasant enough chap, and very amused at the discomfiture of the experts. Bower and Chorley’s comments about the reactions to their circles are illuminating:
We heard this bloke Delgado had reported them… He started saying they had been done by a ‘superior intelligence’ – we liked the sound of thaL We laughed so much that time we had to stop the car and pull into a lay-by because Doug was in stitches so much he couldn’t drive. Even if we were clumsy and caused a mess, they were still so keen on dismissing that humans had done it that they explained it away by saying, ‘Oh, the first onlooker must have done that.’ On the whole, the hoaxers’ story seems credible, although there are details that would bear checking. Nevertheless, if what this duo say is true, then they are responsible for starting what may rank as the biggest amateur hoax in peacetime history. Any offers for candidates who can rival their achievement?
So what is our conclusion about all this? We think there is no firm evidence, and certainly none that has been made publicly available, which is inconsistent with 100% hoaxing. The apparent confession of the initial hoaxers has the potential to clear up much of the mystery, although some may remain – for example, who made the other 90% of crop circles (assuming the reported total of 2,000 is accurate), and how did Doug Bower find a wife who would let him stay out until the early hours of the morning every Friday night for five summers, and never once ask him what he was doing!
Much of the remaining mystery resides in that class of paranormal phenomenon which will be so familiar to you all – malfunctioning cameras, strange noises, unexplained illnesses. None of this evidence is really available for inspection, and most of it is unlikely ever to be explained. We tend to discount it. CERES has collected 20-30 eyewitness accounts; some are not explicit observations of the formation of a circle, others are unambiguous. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine the truth of such claims, and the prior expectation of fabricated stories seems quite high. After all, the media made the subject sensational in 1990, and even offered monetary rewards for explanations of crop circles. They were thus effectively trawling the entire adult population of Britain for accounts of observations, offering fame and fortune to respondents. With tens of millions of people in southern England and ample precedent for hoaxed stories, for example in the field of UFOs, fabricated accounts of crop circle formation seem inevitable.
The burden of proof that crop circles are anything but hoaxes is now well and truly on the shoulders of the experts, but don’t hold your breath. Can we draw any lessons from what appears to have been a decade-long fiasco? Well, we can use it as an illustration of poor investigation. The episode has been a classic display of this, with a long list of errors and weaknesses, amongst which are:
Appeals to authority
Unchallengeable statements
Use of subjective techniques to gather evidence
Publication through the mass media, avoidance of the
Unusual scientific channels
Untested assumptions of competence
Ad hoc bandages for defective theories
Allegations of cover-up
Ad hominem attacks on critics and so on, and so on.
Mostly the crop circle experience has just been a bit silly. However, there are worrying aspects, not the least of which has been the role of the media
The broadcast and print media have carried frequent items about crop circles. Delgado and Andrews and Meaden have appeared on TV and radio, usually on different programs, and almost invariably they are up against no one more qualified than an ill-informed interviewer who seems to know nothing about science and allows them to present themselves as thoughtful, knowledgeable and careful investigators. Rarely have critical scientists been brought on, and when they have it is often to criticise Meaden, who considers himself in the scientific arena.
Delgado has said ‘it is as though orthodox physics and science have been on trial for the last ten years and have failed to produce an answer.’ Well, if this is a trial of science, it is a trial in absentia, and it is not surprising that there has been no answer. I see no indication that there has been any attempt to apply the scientific method, no rigorous testing of hypotheses. Instead – and this applies to all the major protagonists – there has been a haphazard accumulation of what might loosely be called ‘data,’ and the construction of vast and shaky edifices of speculation. This applies even to Meaden, whose latest concoction is a theory that megalithic circles were constructed to immortalise crop circles. He now invokes this as proof of crop circles in prehistory! Empty of content as this theory may really be, it has turned out very popular. Recently, when I was putting our viewpoint to a farmer, she silenced me with a completely unexpected ‘well, why is Stonehenge round, then?’
What could the media have done? They certainly couldn’t force scientists to investigate crop circles, in which most of them took no real interest. But they could have found some to challenge the quality of the experts’ evidence and question glib references to electromagnetic forces, dowsing and mysterious energies. In talking to one journalist, I got the feeling that this omission might not always be malicious, that journalists could not identify the matter as a pseudoscientific one and that they had little choice but to accept the experts at face value. They are actually glad of conflicting views; it makes for good entertainment.
That, of course, is the other problem. Rarely do the media examine issues like this thoughtfully, and they do not keep stables of their own experts in science and pseudoscience as they do in economics and politics. Skeptics must not only investigate the issues, they also have to work hard to get themselves and their viewpoint noticed. But it is possible. I was lucky enough to be on TV suggesting hoaxing as an explanation last year the evening before Delgado and Andrews were taken in by a hoax during ‘Operation Blackbird’, their surveillance effort. And when Bower and Chorley broke their story, we were able to seize the chance and put our point across in a handful of newspapers and on BBC local TV.
Far more daunting is the challenge to get thoughtful coverage of the issues. Too often, one has but a brief moment to summarise a complicated position. How the British public will ever come to understand and respect the scientific method without detailed exposure of the issues is unclear to me. And they need this understanding and respect for the scientific approach. Probably, like me, you feel that environmental issues are important. If so, you may agree that the Green movement is doing a lot of good work bringing attention to the issues. Unfortunately, in Britain, green matters, like health, seem to attract and nurture careless and wishful thinking, along with an anti-scientific attitude. Holders of such views, some of whom have seen crop circles as a cry from Mother Earth, ignore the facts that, although science and technology may have facilitated and sometimes brought about environmental abuse, along with their benefits, they have also given us the power to know what is happening to the environment and – perhaps – to correct it.
My heart sinks when I think of the damage that I fear has been done to the public understanding of science by media coverage of the crop circle fiasco. It sinks further when I think that in one hundred years’ time, some convinced patron of the paranormal will write whatever passes for a book, and a chapter will be devoted to the Wessex Crop Circle Enigma of the twentieth century. These circles mystified scientists, the author will say, and have never been satisfactorily explained, even to this day. I find my only consolation in the hope that the growing and vigorous skeptical movement that started at the same time – speaking in quarter centuries – will have made its mark, and there will be plenty of late 21st century skeptics to say just where the author has gone wrong.
Notes
The other members of the Wessex Skeptics involved in the investigations were: Robin All en, Bertrand Desthieux, David Fisher, Chris Nash, Matthew Trump. With thanks to: Paul Adams, Debra Chesman, Chris Cutforth, Kate Fielden, Mike Hutchinson, Martin Pitt, Juniper, VECA.
Since this article was written, the Wessex Skeptics have been contacted by Dr Meaden, who has informed us of a change in his position; he no longer believes that the pictograms are genuine products of plasma vortices, and now thinks that all but a subset of the simpler patterns are the result of human activity. A survey of aerial photographs would be a promising line of investigation. Dr Meaden is also now of the opinion that information apparently obtained by dowsing is unreliable.