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.
King Charles is widely known as one of the world’s most steadfast proponents of homeopathy, a conviction he maintains despite a lack of sound evidence. His advocacy extends back decades. After successfully seeing UK osteopathy and chiropractic regulated by statute, Charles aimed to do the same for homeopathy. This project failed, but his love for homeopathy remained.
Charles champions homeopathy not just for humans, but for animals as well. Farmers in the UK, for instance, have been taught how to treat their livestock with homeopathic remedies “by kind permission of His Royal Highness, The Prince Of Wales.” Furthermore, Ainsworth, a prominent UK homeopathic pharmacy, holds Charles’ royal warrant.
His support has also been evident through his presence and speeches at homeopathic events, such as when he opened the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital. The Smallwood report, commissioned by Charles, even concluded that the NHS could save millions of our money, if only the use of homeopathy could be increased. The College of Medicine and Integrated Health, of which Charles is a patron, regularly promotes homeopathy. And he has frequently lobbied politicians to make homeopathic treatments more widely available through the NHS. In 2019, his commitment was further solidified when he accepted the patronage of the Faculty of Homeopathy.
Cancer Diagnosis and the Homeopathy Speculation
In February 2024, the announcement of King Charles’ cancer diagnosis shocked the world. It also made his health a near-daily subject of news and speculation. While I am delighted that he’s recovering well, many discussing his illness are convinced his relatively good health is solely due to homeopathy. They believe his treatment plan is primarily, or even exclusively, based on it.
Here are some statements I recently encountered on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter):
“King Charles cured his cancer with herbal remedies & homeopathy & didn’t shed a hair like his DIL, if true they had cancer.”
“King Charles uses homeopathy. Is for his cancer in Bangalore.”
“He hasn’t been sick at all, he uses homeopathy and nobody that uses homeopathy will die of cancer.”
“Homeopathy. It is the only guaranteed cure for Cancer and majority of chronic illnesses worldwide proved. Although sneared at by our guilty House of Lords Health Committee. HRH King Charles was the patron of Homeopathic council for many many years, why is that?”
“King Charles has cancer diagnosis and elects to use natural remedy and Kate Middleton has cancer and opts for chemotherapy. I think that is weird. I understand the monarchy has always sought homeopathy as a first route for treatment and pharmaceutical as a last resort.”
“Told my mom I think I have bone cancer and now shes making me eat onions is this the homeopathy stuff that king charles guy is doing.”
“As an Avid Homeopathy Enthusiast King Charles now has the superpower to cure cancer.”
Similar hints have appeared in articles about his cancer, suggesting he might be using an “oxygen tent” and his “proclivity for homeopathic remedies” to battle the disease. Some even argue that Dr. Michael Dixon, appointed Head of the Royal Medical Household, would have ensured Charles’ treatment was homeopathic.
The Reality of His Treatment
However, all of this is pure speculation. The crucial question is whether there is any reliable evidence to support these claims. I have diligently searched for such evidence and have been unable to find any. To my knowledge, there is no indication that King Charles’ cancer is being treated with homeopathy.
Contrary to the widespread assumption that he’s being cured by a homeopath, I’ve always considered this highly unlikely. I am confident that King Charles is receiving the very best conventional treatments that scientific medicine has to offer. While homeopathy has indeed been a long-standing favourite of the royal family, it appears to be their preference only while enjoying good health. When serious illness strikes, they rely on effective medicine – and that demonstrably does not include homeopathy.
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.
There’s something hidden on your plate – maybe it’s the chicken fried in peanut oil, or a touch of dried shrimp added for extra depth in the sauce. For most people, it’s nothing to think twice about. For me, it’s a microscopic sniper waiting to strike.
I’m part of the 30–40% of the global population affected by one or more allergic conditions, but I drew the short end of the stick. I have lived withanaphylactic allergies to peanuts and shellfish since I was old enough to speak. Allergic reactions can range from mild irritation like hives or a rash, to life-threatening emergencies. Mine sit at the severe end of the spectrum, where even trace exposure can provoke a life-threatening immune response.
Even with the widespread prevalence of allergies, misconceptions persist. Despite having an extensive pool of information at our fingertips, we still need to learn how to distinguish fact from fiction. Growing up with allergies, I was always on the lookout for how to solve them, wondering how allergy treatments work. But before I could explore that, I needed to understand how it happens in the first place.
When you have an allergy, your immune system mistakenly identifies a harmless substance – such as pollen, pet dander, or certain foods – as a threat, and produces immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibodies against it. Upon re-exposure, these IgE antibodies trigger mast cells, a type of white blood cell, to release chemicals like histamine, which leads to symptoms such as itching, swelling, sneezing, or even life-threatening anaphylaxis. Normally, IgE would identify a harmful trigger to the body such as a parasite. In a regular immune system response, mast cells help protect your body against diseases. And, in an actual infection, the symptoms would help you fight against the problem or tell you that something is wrong. In the case of allergies, the immune system isn’t being helpful – it is overreacting to something harmless.
Space-filling representation of the molecular structure of an antibody. This one has two binding sites, at the tips of the two arms extending right and left at the top. Via PDB-101
Although we understand how allergies develop, there is still no definitive way to eliminate them completely. One major obstacle in developing an effective treatment is an inadequate understanding of what precisely occurs during an allergic reaction. Blood tests can identify whether a person has IgE antibodies linked to a particular allergen, but they do not reveal the exact subtype or the specific components within the allergen that trigger the immune response. If someone is allergic to dogs, the test might show the presence of dog-specific IgE, indicating a reaction to dogs in general. However, it cannot pinpoint which specific particles in dog dander or saliva are responsible for the allergic reaction.
If researchers could determine the exact molecular targets that IgE antibodies bind to, they could develop more personalised treatments that address those interactions directly and help prevent allergic reactions. In laboratory settings, scientists use a technique called flow cytometry to label allergens, such as peanut proteins, with fluorescent markers. This process involves suspending cells from a blood sample in a fluid and passing them through a detector that identifies how IgE interacts with the allergen. Although this method provides precise information, it remains too complex and time-consuming to be used routinely in clinical practice.
Another reason is alack of treatment options. Because allergic responses vary widely from person to person, it is challenging to develop a universal allergy treatment, a one-size-fits-all solution. While mild cases may be managed with over-the-counter antihistamines, others require more specialised care.
To be diagnosed with an allergy, the level of allergen-specific IgE in the blood typically needs to reach at least 0.7 IU/ml. In some cases, a person with allergies can have IgE levels of up to 4,000 IU/ml, highlighting just how different these responses can be. A treatment that works well for someone with mild seasonal symptoms might be ineffective for someone with a much stronger reaction, and vice versa.
Trying out alternatives
One treatment I tried a few times wasoral immunotherapy (OIT), a medical treatment designed to help desensitize individuals with food allergies by gradually introducing small, controlled amounts of the allergen to build tolerance over time. To ensure my safety, I was required to stay in the hospital for observation during treatments in case of an allergic reaction. Fortunately, as a result of OIT, I can now eat mussels, oysters, and scallops. However, when given the first dose for shrimp allergy testing, I immediately had an allergic reaction; while OIT can show promising results, it may not be effective for everyone.
It is no wonder with the limited solutions available that parents of children with allergies and those with allergies themselves would turn to ‘alternative’ solutions – my mother being one of the many worried parents trying to seek a solution for her child’s allergies. In our situation, it seemed very promising to hear of friends being cured of their food allergies or eczema after attending a few treatment sessions. One such treatment was NAMBUDRIPAD Allergy Elimination Techniques (NAET) – which claims to be a:
“non-invasive, drug-free, natural solution to alleviate allergies of all types and intensities using a blend of selective energy balancing, testing and treatment procedures from acupuncture/ acupressure, allopathy, chiropractic, nutritional, and kinesiological disciplines of medicine”.
When I was in my teens, my mom and I decided to explore what NAET had to offer, encouraged by the promise of alleviating allergies with minimal risks. I was told to hold a glass vial of liquid, which the NAET practitioner explained to me contained the essence of the allergen, while the strength of my muscles in my opposite arm was tested. The practitioner explicitly told me to hold the glass part of the vial – if I held the cap it would not work. She then applied light pressure to my arm out in front of me and stated that if I was allergic, my muscles would be weaker, causing my arm to drop. But if I was not allergic, my arm would remain strong, withstanding the push.
What the practitioner did not know was that hidden in my hand, I held the vial by the cap, with no contact to the glass. Although it may have been a waste of money and time, the skeptic in me refused to follow the treatment blindly. Despite my hand not being in contact with the glass, it seemed the practitioner continued to find allergies to some of the allergens she was testing, contrary to her previous statement.
Continuing my hunt for more allergy treatments, I went to try a bio energetical treatment calledBICOM Bioresonance therapy (BRT). BRT is an alternative treatment to alleviate allergies and chronic conditions by manipulating the body’s electromagnetic vibrations.
The treatment is based on the belief that all living cells emit specific frequencies and that imbalances or “disharmonious” vibrations – caused by allergens, toxins, or illness – disrupt the body’s function. It involves extracting the patient’s electromagnetic signals through electrodes, processing them via the BICOM device to “invert” or neutralise pathological frequencies, and then transmitting the adjusted signals back into the body. This is said to weaken harmful vibrations and strengthen healthy ones, restoring balance and improving overall physiological function.
Similar to NAET, the procedures at BRT were non-invasive and did not pose much risk. Upon speaking with Mr Vincent Ho, naturopath and principal therapist at BRT, I could tell he was dedicated to his work to help people. During my treatment, it was clear to me that many people felt safe in his care. He had shared with me countless testimonials from patients who reported being cured of their issues, supported by many promising images of patients with eczema before and after their treatment. One of the success stories was a little girl from Dubai, who was brought all the way to Singapore with her family just for her treatment.
The BRT website is full of such testimonials… as well as articles refuting the claims of their critics, including an article from Straits Times. Straits Times claimed that “advocates may trot out testimonials from satisfied customers, but testimonials are not data” – to which BRT responded with testimonials from their “many satisfied patients”:
“If BRT paid me money to tell you the effectiveness of Bioresonance Therapy, then it is an advertisement. But, if I am the one that paid BRT money for my treatments and I tell you the effectiveness of Bioresonance Therapy, then it is called testimonial.”
BRT contends that testimonials are valuable because they are earned through a positive patient experience and not a sponsored presentation of the treatment.
In search for more information on BICOM Bioresonance, I went to theirofficial website in search of clinical studies done to assess the performance of the treatment. What I found was a study expressing that the BICOM optima device for Bioresonance-therapy showed significant improvement in symptoms and quality of life for patients with allergic rhino-conjunctivitis. However, it is important to note that there is a lack of a control group in the study, and the authors themselves admit that it cannot be distinguished whether symptom improvements were due to the treatment, placebo effect, natural recovery, or seasonal allergy variation, stating:
“With the design of this study, namely single-arm with an intraindividual comparison of symptoms before and after therapy, it cannot be excluded that there are other causes for the improvement… such as the natural course of the disease… or placebo effect.” (Section 8.4)
The study relied on patient’s self-reported weekly symptom scores as the primary measure of success – without any objective physiological markers to back them up. Furthermore, the researchers chose to simplify data collection by avoiding daily symptom diaries, claiming that:
“Simplifications were made… As a result, the results are more ‘blurred’ compared to a dedicated patient diary.” (Section 7.6.7)
In such an unblinded study, this opens the door to expectation bias, given that participants know they’re receiving treatment.
I was searching for clear answers; I was met with ambiguous ones. I contacted with Associate Professor Elizabeth Tham, Senior Consultant and Head, Division of Allergy, Immunology & Rheumatology, Department of Paediatrics, National University Hospital. She explained:
“Unfortunately, [these treatments] are all unproven – they either do not target the IgE-mediated pathway, which is how allergies come about in the first place, or they just don’t have any scientific evidence that they work.”
If it worked, it wouldn’t be alternative?
There is no sound evidence to prove that treatments like NAET and BRT work. It is possible that there are ‘alternative’ treatments that do work, but we do not yet have good evidence to think so. As for the positive testimonials, part of the apparent effect of such treatments is the kind practitioners who are genuinely concerned for your wellbeing. When the risk of harm is low, like when dealing with reducing pain tolerance, this approach might be helpful – but, when it comes to cases such as life-threatening allergies, we need to be careful.
As Prof. Tham explains, the problem with patients receiving inaccurate information is not only a waste of money and resources, but also the risk of a serious allergic reaction if the treatment claims that they can eat the allergen. It is safer to stick to mainstream, scientifically proven therapy.
Although it may seem hopeless in the field of allergy treatments available, there may be light at the end of the tunnel. Recently, the FDA approvedXolair (omalizumab), an injection to help treat IgE-mediated food allergy. By binding to IgE, Xolair blocks IgE from binding to its receptors, reducing the risk of allergic reactions after accidental exposure including anaphylaxis. Prof. Tham explained that the use of omalizumab together with OIT is currently undergoing researched, with the aim of allowing patients to move up to dosages safer than OIT alone, bringing science another step closer to addressing allergies.
In the case of less-serious ailment, it may seem more acceptable to try these ‘alternative’ treatments since it does not pose direct harm to the patient. However, it is more than the dangers of an allergic reaction that we need to take note of – it’s also the dangers in the way we think. When assessing any information, it is helpful to be equipped with a skeptic’s toolbox to help us fact-check.
A skeptical toolbox
First, we must be careful to spot when logical fallacies are committed in any reasonings made. One common example is the anecdotal fallacy, where personal stories are taken as proof of effectiveness. While these testimonials may be emotionally persuasive, they are uncontrolled, biased, and often ignore other contributing factors.
Another frequent misstep is the post-hoc fallacy — assuming that just because something happened after treatment, it must have been caused by it. For instance, someone might claim, “I went for NAET treatment and now I’m no longer allergic, so NAET cured me.” Without considering natural improvement over time, placebo effects, or unrelated lifestyle changes, this statement implies a causal relationship when there is only temporal succession. For example, it is wrong to assume that a rooster’s crowing causes the sun to rise, simply because the crowing precedes the sunrise.
Then, there is confirmation bias, where only supporting evidence is acknowledged while contradictory research is ignored. It is not uncommon to see positive testimonials for unproven therapy promoted widely, while systematic reviews showing no measurable effect are left out of the conversation entirely.
In addition, we should learn to ask questions. For example, if the treatment works so well, why has it not been adopted by mainstream allergists? Or, is the claim assuming causation when it might only be correlation?
We must remember that our confidence in what we think we know can sometimes cloud our judgment. Being open to new ideas is important, but so is staying grounded in evidence. In a world where misinformation spreads quickly and often carries emotional appeal, developing critical thinking isn’t merely helpful — it’s a form of protection. A skeptical mindset guards us not against curiosity or openness, but against false confidence disguised as certainty.
We’re all familiar with the question posed by so-called spiritualists and psychics as they attempt to contact those who have passed into the other world. But the big problem is: how do you convince your marks… sorry, clients… that you really do have some amazing power? After all, not everyone falls for cold-reading, and not every psychic can do it well enough, so your target audience will naturally be limited.
What if there were some technique that seemed so remarkable, so unbelievable, that it must be supernatural? If you had that, even hardened skeptics might be convinced. In trying to find this concrete proof, the early spiritualists created an arms-race in different practices, until the eventual rise of the Ouija board in the late 19th Century.
If you’ve ever used a Ouija board, especially before you understood how they work, you’ll know that they feel other-worldly. The planchette seems to move with a life of its own, spelling words and phrases that resonate and give answers to sometimes profound and deep questions. Personally, I remember using one with a few friends as a teen and being freaked out. It might have been something to do with the darkened room and questionable smoke still hanging in the air but, for a time, I genuinely thought we had spoken to the spirit of Jimi Hendrix. Especially when some other friends, who had been away on holiday, said they too had been using a Ouija at the exact same time we had, and they too had communed with a rather busy Jimi. How freaky!
The idea of being able to talk to the dead and give answers through a medium, can be traced (at least in modern times) to the Fox sisters of New York, who became famous in the mid-19th century for their ability to hold seances with the deceased. Following the horrors of the US Civil War in the 1860’s, the relatives of dead soldiers sought some comfort in being able to speak with husbands, sons, or brothers who had so cruelly and suddenly been ripped from their lives. It was a boom-time for the spiritualists.
One spiritualist technique was table-tapping, or table-tilting. Using a hidden lever, or a concealed third party, the psychic would move the table and tap out a code to reveal letters/words, while the participants all rested their hands on the table top. But this was a bit slow and quite boring after a while, and soon someone hit on the idea of using a pencil attached to a small facsimile of the table, later removing the legs and attaching castors allowing it to move over the paper easily. With, again, everyone placing their hands on what became known as a planchette (literally French for little plank), the pencil would write answers on the paper as it moved.
Toy and novelty companies initially manufactured this planchette with its hole or clip for a pen, but unfortunately, the writing was often undecipherable – as you might expect. To counter this unintelligibility, proponents created a board which already had letters written on it and, rather than writing out the answer, they could use something to point to the letters. Initially, this was a stick or rod that could be moved by the participants’ fingers to trace out words. An article in the AmericanSpiritualist Magazine reported:
“The method is this: I have on the table painted the letters of the alphabet, thus: On this table we place a polished little rod, rounded below and pointed on both ends; The upper side is wide for the fingers to rest, and also rough so they do not glide off. The table of course must be very smooth — I facilitate operations by putting a little powdered soap-stone on it. On this rod the fingers of the two persons sitting on the opposite sides are placed, and the rod is allowed to glide from letter to letter.”
The author added that this method proved much quicker than traditional tapping and that they were able to have “Intercourse with their spirit friends…” much faster. So much so that their spirit son agreed: “Oh dear papa and mama you have made our work so easy now”, he exclaimed from beyond the grave.
More common than a rod was to use a miniature four-legged table – a holdover from the table-tapping – which participants rested two fingers on as it moved around the marked board. The New York Tribune in 1886 reported on a craze in Ohio for the use of the table:
“I know of whole communities that are wild over the ‘talking board,’ as some of them call it. I have never heard any name for it. But I have seen and heard some of the most remarkable things about its operations—things that seem to pass all human comprehension or explanation.”
Other mediums built increasingly complicated gadgets and contraptions that spelled out letters and words using wires, wheels and levers. These dial plate machines or psychographs started to be sold in the late 1800s in specialist magazines, as different ideas spread amongst the spiritualist community. However, a marked board and a small table or rod proved simple to make, and soon the more complicated contraptions faded into obscurity.
Ouija: the board game
An original Ouija board, manufactured by the Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore, c. 1890 (Public domain)
Around the same time, a toy maker in Massachusetts – W.S. Reed – created a version they called the Witch Board. Reed released an improved version in 1891 that combined the wheeled planchette (sans pen) with the marked board, they called it The Espirito or Revelator. Unfortunately for them, a Baltimore toymaker named Elija Bond, also came up with the idea and this time patented his invention. Along with his partners Charles Kennard and W.H. Maupin of the Kennard novelty company, they heavily promoted this version and, with its patent, it soon became the standard, with the Baltimore Sun newspaper calling it “The Wonder of the 19th Century”.
Kennard claimed that the name of the new board – Ouija – came to him after using it with a lady-friend. It spelled out O-U-I-J-A when asked what it should be called, going on to explain it meant good luck – though coincidentally, Miss Peters (the lady-friend) was wearing a locket on a chain with that word written on it.
Charles Kennard lost control of his company within a few years to a financial investor, and it would change its name to the Ouija Novelty Co. reflecting the dominance of their best-selling product. Over the next few decades, various legal battles and takeovers left William Fuld as the main patent holder, and it was his name that became synonymous with the Ouija board in the early 20th Century. The board became almost ubiquitous after the horrors of the First World war and the 1918 Flu pandemic, as grieving relatives sought to somehow remain in contact with their loved ones.
Fuld died falling from a roof in 1927 and his sons took over, eventually selling the patent to Parker Brothers in 1966, which eventually became part of the conglomerate Hasbro.
Devilish warnings
Almost from its invention, Ouija boards have been the subject of dire warnings from religious organisations. Many have accused players of meddling in satanic forces, and some publications claimed that adherents had summoned the Devil through their use. Its use in the 1973 film The Exorcist (12-year-old Regan plays with a Ouija board and meets a new imaginary friend she names Captain Howdy, who turns out to be “the devil himself”) reinvigorated its popularity, and it has become a staple of horror movies.
In November 1891, the Boston Globe reported on a woman being “CRAZED THROUGH OUIJA!”. Mrs Eugenie Carpenter, a 28-year-old “fine looking woman” wandered the streets of the city in an undressed state, exclaiming “Ouija said so, and I knew it to be true!” It seemed her husband had left her, and she had later argued with a new lover. The board had told her that he no longer loved her and would not return.
In 1920, the small California town of El Ceritto became the subject of Ouija-Mania when several women used a board to contact one of the women’s daughter, killed in a hit and run, in the hope of identifying the killer – but it soon became more ominous. The group feared they had unleashed evil spirits, which caused their children to go into trances, and they believed the spirits could only be stopped by performing a series of increasingly bizarre rituals. Soon church leaders and officials in the town stepped in and banned “spirit boards” from the town.
Several versions of the Ouija have been sold over the years, from a pink teen girls’ version in 2008, to a glow-in-the-dark board complete with ultraviolet planchette that reveals hidden messages. Many other talking boards are available online and in specialist stores. There’s even a Buffy The Vampire Slayer board, as well as many other, often beautiful, alternative designs away from the regular arc of letters and numbers on the more traditional Ouija. All use the same principle of participants laying hands or fingers on a mobile planchette, which reveals answers as it moves – supposedly independently of the contributors’ desires.
So, if it is independent, what is the cause of the movement?
Charlatans, and the ideomotor effect
Norman Rockwell cover of the May 1, 1920 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, showing a Ouija board in use (Public Domain)
There’s no doubt that frauds and charlatans would simply deny moving the planchette, even though they knew full well they were doing so. And this was certainly the case with the early table-toppers, but the beauty of the Ouija was that it could be done by anyone, and even though none of the participants consciously move it, it still moved.
Most skeptics will already be aware of the ideomotor effect. It is a term that actually predates the Ouija board, having been coined by the physiologist W.B. Carpenter in an 1852 scientific paper. The term was characterised as “the reflex or automatic muscular motions which arise merely from ideas associated with motion existing in the mind, without any conscious effort of volition.”
There are many articles, and YouTube videos available that can explain the effect if you wish to check further, but I would urge skeptics to try the board for themselves. It is a fascinating psychological tool and gives an insight into how we can so easily fool ourselves with something so simple.
Is it an almost unconscious movement made by us, especially when muscles are under stress of trying not to move? Or could it really be the Devil? After all, he would want you to think it wasn’t him, wouldn’t he…
This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 6, from 1991.
One of the problems for skeptics is that the field is so limited. It seems like we go round and round in circles: parapsychology, psychics, spiritualism, New Age, astrology, UFOs, on and on. Of course, there’s no reason why we can’t branch out a bit. Fuzzy reasoning is fuzzy reasoning, whether it’s applied to the paranormal or to more commonly accepted cultural myths.
It seems to me it was about a year ago that I saw reviews of Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner, appearing in the UK press, although the book was actually published in the US in 1986. I finally found the book on my last visit to the US. Cadillac Desert is one of those rare books which you think must be the product of endless years of passionate research. Lovingly written, it rivals the world’s finest books in its use of language and vivid imagery. It also details one of the most scandalously irrational misuses of natural resources known to man, affecting the lives of millions of people. I long to write the screenplay. The western half of America is what they call ‘near desert’. However, settlers, moving westward across the continent, thought they could solve this problem. Till the soil, they believed, and the climate would change; ‘Rain follows the plough’, went the folk saying.
For a time, it seemed as though they might be right. Just as the natural cycle of terminal and chronic illness can make people believe they have been healed by ineffective treatments, the natural cycle of rain and drought made the settlers of western America believe that they had conquered the land.
When they found out they were wrong, they set themselves to mining ground water – a resource Reisner calls as precious and irreplaceable as oil. At the rate they were going, he says, the water that took thousands of years to build up would be gone by the end of the century. The next step was water projects. All those famous dams, built one after another from the 1930s onward: Boulder, Hoover, Grand Coulee, and many, many others. In one area of California, people actually fought a small war – with guns – over the allocation of water rights. By now, there are no rivers left in western North America that haven’t been dammed, diverted, or developed; one even runs backwards.
Many myths contributed to this extravagance, which, by building expensive projects and selling the water at prices far lower than cost, laid the foundations of today’s trillion-dollar national debt. When Europeans settled North America, they came with the presumption that the climate wasn’t actually very much different than the one they had at home. There was, for a time, a theory that similar latitudes perforce had similar climates. Even the dams themselves generated a special mythology: that we could conquer Nature and the desert Dams became a religion to the people – the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers – who built them, to the point where even after all the good sites were gone the building continued. Dams were built beyond reason, on sites that were doomed, with costings that could never be paid back.
Then there is the myth of the small farmer, who needs that water to survive. In fact, the farmers who benefited from this artificially cheap water tended to be little people like Standard Oil. Artificially cheap water led to profligacy, the growing of such water-demanding crops as rice, and the founding of large western cities. We laugh at Los Angelenos because they believe in things like the New Age and flee their city whenever Nostradamus predicts an earthquake. But in fact LA’s entire water supply passes over one of the more vulnerable areas of the San Andreas fault.
When, or if, the Big One comes, LA’s entire water supply will almost certainly be cut off. The city is huge, rich, important, and unbelievably precariously balanced. These days, the talk is of bringing water down by aqueduct from Alaska – more than 1,000 miles north of LA. The energy consumption of such a project alone is immense. But water projects win politicians – particularly western politicians – votes.
One of the biggest political mistakes President Carter made, says Reisner, was to declare a ‘hit list’ of all the water projects he wanted to cancel. This list, Reisner believes, contributed as much to his defeat by Reagan as the Iranian hostage crisis. The history of water management in the US has every kind of faulty reasoning known to man or skeptic, from mythology, to dishonesty, to absolute unwillingness to admit a mistake. The lives of millions of people depend on giving up their most cherished myth, that man can reclaim the desert.
But there’s more than that, says Reisner: desert civilisations have failed throughout history. The reason? Salt, which accumulates in the land as the irrigation water evaporates. In the western US, he says, it’s happening already.
When we think about genetics, why do we almost automatically think about differences? We ask how different we are from other people because of our genes, and from other organisms. As a geneticist, I’ve always found it curious how we tend to focus on differences. Why not ask how similar we are? This was the topic of my talk at the Fronteiras do Pensamento Festival in May 2025, in Porto Alegre. I took the opportunity to talk about differences, similarities, races, genders… and jam jars (which will make sense in the end, I promise).
Some facts to ponder: we humans are approximately 99.9% identical in our genome. In the 0.1% that varies, we have a huge number of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms); letters in the genome – called nucleotides; A, T, C or G – that can differ. SNPs don’t necessarily make a meaningful difference to the gene they’re in, but certain SNPs might show up more frequently in one population or geographic region, and with different frequencies in a different group. And it’s difficult to draw any conclusions from this.
We can say for example that, in a certain region of the African continent, a population has a SNP with a G in 60% of sequenced individuals. And perhaps this population also has a higher or lower frequency of heart disease. But we can’t say that this SNP is the cause of heart disease. It could just be coincidence. We don’t know what this SNP does; we only know that it’s there, at a frequency of 60%. This also doesn’t mean that it won’t exist in other populations, on other continents, at different frequencies.
The same SNP appears at 20% in a population from the European continent. If you have this SNP in your genome, we can calculate the probability that your ancestors came from this or that continent… but it will always be just a probability. We have to be wary of over-extrapolating from probabilities. Hypertension (high blood pressure) is more common in African-American men than in white Americans, but the frequency in men from sub-Saharan Africa is lower than in both. Single Americans are more likely to have heart disease than married men. I don’t imagine it’s a matter of genetic predisposition.
We also know that, within this 0.1% that varies from person to person, we find greater variation within certain populations than between different populations. Around 96% of this 0.1%. This means that if we randomly pick two people from the same region of the African continent, they will have more different genomes than a person from another part of the world. In other words, the differences that, historically and culturally, are used to define “race” – white, black, Asian, etc. – are 4% of 0.1%.
Genetics and race
We are all, from a biological perspective, much more similar than different. This is why genetics and anthropology societies consider human races to be social constructs, not biological ones. Races need to be studied and taken into consideration in public policies for social justice, because they have been a factor in discrimination and marginalisation. But they are not a biologically relevant concept.
To facilitate this understanding, let’s compare it to dog breeds. Does it make biological sense to talk about canine breeds? With significant genetic differences? Yes. The difference is stark: if in humans the genetic basis of so-called “racial” differences is 4% of the overall variation of 0.1%, in dogs the average genetic difference between breeds is approximately 27% of the overall variation (which is much smaller than the human variation).
In dogs, genetic differences are greater between breeds. Dogs of the same breed are absurdly similar to each other. The explanation for this is historical and commercial. Dogs were artificially selected. The artificial production of breeds led to a reduction in genetic diversity within each group. Imagine someone wanted small, white, furry, docile dogs to be companion animals. This breeder begins selecting from every litter those that most closely resemble these characteristics. And they cross them with each other, producing puppies that are increasingly whiter, smaller, furrier, and more docile. With each generation, genetic variation decreases, and the “purity” of the breed increases. Mutts, on the other hand, have a genetic diversity profile closer to that of humans. We are all mutts, and that’s a good thing.
Dog breed morphology varies hugely. Clockwise from the left: a bloodhound, a Chinese-crested, a Dandie Dinmont terrier, a Scottish deerhound, a long-haired Chihuahua and a French bulldog. Image by Mary Bloom, via Wikimedia Commons
Would it be possible to create human races the way we did for dogs? Yes, and some people have already tried (for example, Hitler’s obsession with the so-called “Aryan race”). But to do so, a process of “domestication” would be necessary, just as was done for animals and plants. This would reduce genetic diversity and increase susceptibility to and incidence of disease. This is already happening in various dog breeds. Many of them are more prone to deafness, skin diseases, hip and spinal problems, for example.
But what about differences in human appearance? Where do they come from? What do they mean? Let’s take the obvious: skin colour, which has historically been used as the primary marker of human “races.”
Evolutionarily, skin colour became associated with geography because of sunlight. The closer you are to the equator, with its higher amount of UV light, the more populations have darker skin tones, which offer greater protection. The farther you move from the equator, lighter skin becomes advantageous because it better utilises the limited UV light available at high latitudes to fix vitamin D.
There are several genes that code for skin colour and regulate the amount of melanin, which produces the enormous spectrum of colours we see in humans – because skin colour exists on a spectrum. Just look at makeup foundation charts. There are over 60 skin tones, from lightest to darkest. Children of the same parents can have different skin tones, depending on which genes they inherit from each parent. People with very similar skin tones, but from different regions of the planet, can have the same colour, but encoded by different genes. The same skin colour may not have the same genetic origin. Appearance does not define ancestry.
In dogs, the opposite occurs. Genes for coat type, for example, are the same across different breeds, and it’s easy to trace their origins because selection was entirely artificial. In other words, the genes that code for coat colour, ear shape etc., are generally known and have a common origin. We can easily trace the ancestry of dogs.
The same thing happens with other traits, for example lactose tolerance, which in adult humans is evolutionarily linked to dairy farming. The persistence of the ability to digest milk into adulthood emerged independently, and with other genes, in Europe, the Middle East, parts of Africa, and South Asia. In other words, there is no single “race” of lactose-tolerant people.
Genetics and gender
Let’s talk about gender differences. Are men and women more equal or more different? To answer that, I need you to open a jar of jam. And I’m sure that at some point in your life, you’ve either asked for help, or been asked for help, to open a jar of jam. And I’m also willing to bet that you’re a woman if you asked for help, and a man if you were asked for the job.
Why is opening windows generally easier for men than for women? Researcher Janet Hyde answered this question 20 years ago in a study published in 2005. She conducted a meta-analysis of studies on gender differences in abilities and behaviours, and classified the differences with a coefficient. The higher the coefficient, ranging from 0 to 2, the greater the difference. The closer to zero, the greater the similarity.
Some factors, like height, are obvious, with a coefficient around the maximum degree. In other words, if you randomly choose a man and a woman, it’s very likely that the man will be taller. Very likely, but not 100% certain.
The measured differences were classified into six categories: cognitive abilities, verbal and non-verbal communication, social or personality differences, measures of well-being such as self-esteem, motor differences such as throwing and strength, and general differences such as moral values.
Hyde found that the most significant differences were for throwing force, throwing speed, and grip strength. The latter is precisely the force needed to open a jar of jam. The coefficients of difference in sexual behaviours like masturbation and casual sex were also quite high. But then we wonder if there isn’t a strong cultural component here. Do women masturbate less because they think it’s wrong? Or do they prefer not to talk about it, even in opinion polls?
What didn’t make a significant difference was any of the “common sense” stuff. In total, 78% of the behaviours or skills studied had coefficients close to zero (30%) or less than 0.35 (48%).
Think about how many common-sense assertions about “essential” gender differences are part of our culture. We generally agree that men are better at geospatial location, women at languages. That women are more sensitive, men more rational, women more caring, and men better at maths. None of this has been statistically validated as significant. The degree of difference in behaviours like competitiveness was only around 0.07. Mathematical problem-solving ability: 0.08. Spatial orientation: 0.19 in one study, 0.13 in another, 0.44 in a third. Helping others was 0.13.
The belief that men and women have fundamentally different brains, programmed to be this way or that, is untenable. Of course, there are biological, evolutionary, and hormonal differences. But when it comes to specific abilities and skills, the truth is the same as for race: the difference is greater within gender than between genders. For example, there is more variation in mathematical skill levels among women, or among men, than there is when comparing men and women.
Furthermore, the brain is plastic. It’s not preprogrammed. We’re constantly learning new things, and these learnings are reflected in structural changes in the brain. The best example of this is the famous study of London taxi drivers. Until recently, becoming a taxi driver in London required passing a rigorous test (‘The Knowledge’). Candidates had to memorise the city map, know exactly which streets were one way, and how to take the quickest route between two points. They studied hard to obtain their licence.
The result? London taxi drivers had a brain region, the hippocampus, much more developed than non-taxi drivers in a control group. And the hippocampus became more developed according to the length of time they had worked as a taxi driver. So, do studies showing that men and women have different, more- or less-developed brain regions describe a purely biological phenomenon?
Only if we could track the brains of boys and girls from birth would we be able to identify cultural and social differences that shape behaviour and abilities – such as the amount of time we spend stimulating girls and boys with different types of toys, or the differences caused by varied tones of voice and facial expressions.
How this knowledge helps us
And why does all this matter? This is what I discuss with my students in the Evidence for Public Policy course at Columbia University. Knowing that biological races don’t exist can correct injustices that use these concepts to marginalise populations. At the same time, ignoring cultural and social factors can backfire, leaving discriminated populations without protection.
The same goes for gender. The insistence that men and women are more different than they actually are, and that this is immutable, is often used as an excuse to put women in their “rightful place.” It also serves to discourage girls and young adults from pursuing certain careers.
It can also lead to injustices in the professional world. A 2008 study conducted by Victoria Brescoll and Eric Luis Uhlmann of Yale University compared how volunteers reacted to a video simulating a job interview under identical conditions, changing only the interviewee’s gender. The videos showed the interviewee reacting angrily to a specific situation.
The volunteers rated the women worse in all situations, even though the videos were identical. Furthermore, they attributed the women’s behaviour to innate factors, with phrases like “she’s aggressive” and “she has no self-control.” For the men, aggressive behaviour was attributed to external stimuli: “He was angry,” “he was provoked.”
There are interesting ways to control these biases. One strategy that has been tested is using double-blind auditions for hiring. Orchestras that use this method have managed to increase the hiring of women from 5% in the 1970s to over 30% today. During the selection process, candidates play behind a screen. The judging committee cannot see the musician, it only listens and evaluates the performance.
It won’t be easy to change common sense. But we have to start somewhere. I started with my students. You can start with your family, your circle of friends. Remember the jam jar? It can be a great excuse to start a conversation: “Did you know something funny, that grip strength to open a jar is one of the few significant differences between men and women?”
