Colin Wilson is a remarkable chap. Very well known in the UK as an author of articles, stories, novels, and books on a variety of subjects — particularly on the paranormal — it appears that there is little Mr. Wilson has ever doubted. He certainly gobbled up the entire Uri Geller myth without chewing, and endorsed even the "levitation" party stunt as done by Mr. Geller as a remarkable example of supernatural powers at work. (See http://www.randi.org/jr/05-15-2000.html for a previous mention of this miracle.)

As an example of both his naivety and his willingness to round off a few sharp corners on awkward evidence, Mr. Wilson recently wrote a piece for the London Daily Mail celebrating the stunning accuracy of Nostradamus in regard to the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. He quoted a translation of Quatrain I-87:

Sea of fire at the world centre,
The tower of the new city will tremble:
Two great blocks will be at war for a long time,
Then Arethusa will redden a new river.

Mind you, this is not Mr. Wilson's translation of the French original. It was published in a new book by Luciano Sampietro, a criminal lawyer from Trieste, Italy, who had formerly written only academic legal texts. Seeing the possibility of a renewed interest in Nostradamus (whose popularity has waned ever since the End of the World did not occur as he promised it would in July of 1999) signor Sampietro rushed out a book titled "Nostradamus, the Final Prophecies," with a photograph of the WTC on the cover. Bad taste, it seems, is universal. Wilson refers to this book as, "one of the most remarkable books on Nostradamus ever written." Hmmm.

Wilson happily snapped up this translation, which, with the usual forgiveness always applied to such matters by the naive, could be slightly suggestive of the 9/11 disaster. But let us look into the accuracy of that version. The original reads:

Ennosigee feu du Centre de Terre
Fera trembler autour de Cité Neuve,
Deux grands Rochers long temps feront la guerre,
Puis Arethusa rougira nouveau fleuve.

In English:

Earthquake fire from the Center of the Earth
Shall cause trembling around the New City,
Two great Rocks will make war for a long time,
Then Arethusa will redden a new river.

By way of explanation, "Ennosigee" is the name of the god Neptune as the Earthshaker, who causes earthquakes; Nostradamus placed proper names in italics. And the only identification we have for "Arethusa" is a fountain named after a nymph and located near Syracuse — not the New York Syracuse, the original in Sicily. Also, the "New City" is certainly not New York, but Naples ("Napoli" in Italian, meaning "New City). Quatrain I-87 refers to Italy, certainly, and not New York City. It uses actual, specific, references — geographical, mythological, and geological — to the Naples area. Vesuvius is twelve miles from Naples, a city that has always been subject to serious earthquakes; both Herculaneum and Pompeii are nearby, and we know what happened to them, fifteen centuries before Nostradamus picked up his pen.

Lo! Once more we see that a translation proves to be more creative than accurate! The free treatment of I-87 that Colin Wilson accepts and repeats, is shown to be simply wrong, opportunistic, and mendacious. That gentleman needs to apply more basic research to his chosen subject of expertise.....

Basic research department: the photo of the "UFO" near comet Hale-Bopp that we ran last week, has been happily accepted as real, and nothing we could ever say or do will in any way deter the "Henriettes" out there who dote on such good stories. For those of you who might want a good argument to present in opposition to that belief, I offer the following illustration.

I prepared this material by downloading a standard star map, rotating it a bit, and adjusting the scale to agree with the infamous digital photo by amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek. They are seen here side-by-side. To clinch the "fingerprint" aspect, I've colored (orange) seven of the major stars in the regular telescopic photo, to show that they are congruent with those in the Shramek digital study. The comet, of course, was not in the field when the regular photo was made.

You will note that there appear to be a few bright stars on the left photo that are not represented in the right-hand one. That is due to the fact that when different photographic emulsions are used for these shots, they are usually chosen for their sensitivity, as well as their spectral range. The digital camera, with the very bright Hale-Bopp image ruling the field, simply failed to register some stars.

Do a one-on-one comparison. What was supposed to be a UFO, with its Saturn-like appearance, turns out to be something that's been in that spot for millions of years. But, as I've said, that argument won't shake the "true believer" a bit.

To cap off the tiresome "orbs" discussion, I offer here a photo sent in by a reader (forgive me, I lost the name!) who snapped a digital photo during a rain shower, a photo that should put the whole matter to rest — but won't, of course. These are not rain-drops on a window-pane, but rain-drops in the air as they fell and were "frozen" in place by the camera flash. All the attributes of the mysterious out-of-this-world "orbs" can be seen here — except that the photo wasn't shot in a cemetery, nor at Roswell!

Many readers have assured me that the "folding-a-twenty-dollar-bill" site was meant as a joke. I agree. I didn't have the time to discover the give-away lines there, I admit. Chris Fuss tells us that the site http://www.allbrevard.net simply shows that

. . . by folding a $20 bill the right way, you can get pictures of the burning Pentagon and Twin Towers. The pictures sorta look right, if you try to rationalize it enough, but that's not the point I'm making here. Read the "comments" section to see the firestorm the whole thing brewed up! The people who made the site made no comments at all about what it might mean. They just told you how to fold money to get an interesting coincidence. The way people have added their own interpretations to it is just unbelievable!

True. But that's just my point, too. Countless persons seized upon this "joke" and took it quite seriously! David Berryhill tells me that at one point the author of the site addressed an item of angry e-mail that arrived about that piece:

If you thought the $20 bill thing was serious, you have either been in school too long or not long enough. Sometimes people amaze me.

I'm not only Amazing, I'm amazed, as well.... I must add that I think it's all in bad taste, in any case. And Steve Meltzer asks:

I only wonder if anyone has tried this with Israeli, Indian or Pakistani money to confirm that they were in on the conspiracy as well. I'm sure you won't find such silly things on the money in Saudi Arabia.

Oh yes you will, Steve. If you look hard enough....

A reader forwarded to me information on an example of a quack device being sold in Australia, called the "EMPower Modulator." It's made and sold by Harmonic Products. Please read the following excerpt taken from an excellent treatment of the subject and on pseudoscience in general by Aussie Daniel Rutter, then follow my suggestion that follows it:

If someone sells you a magic marble which, they say, will make you feel happier, and if you believe their claim, then you will probably feel happier with the marble in your pocket, or on your mantelpiece, or up your bottom, or wherever you're meant to put it. The thing's not promising to change anything quantifiable, after all; nobody said it'd make you a foot taller or immune to sunburn or able to fly.

Suggestion is a very powerful thing in situations like this. Bear in mind that people who are not raving loonies in their everyday life can, nonetheless, be persuaded that sorcerers are wandering around stealing people's penises.

Stare at someone long enough looking for an aura, and you'll see one. Wave your hands over someone long enough hunting for subtle energies, and you'll feel them. Hunt for backwards messages in speech and you'll find them; look for signs of fakery in Apollo Moon Program photos and you'll find them; search for corroboration for the idea that many of the world's celebrities are reptilian shape-shifting aliens, and you'll find it.

Fraud is lying for money. If you're selling useless magic marbles but you think they really work, then you're not committing fraud by selling them. Your local consumer protection organisation might still want a word with you, but they're probably not going to get you for fraud.

Similarly, if you believe your EMPower Modulator works — as, I'm sorry to say, I suspect Harmonic Products actually do believe — then you're not committing fraud by selling it. There are other issues to do with the making of therapeutic claims and so on, but if the vendor doesn't know the product is rubbish, then it's not simple fraud.

There are quite a few products like the Modulator available here in Australia, and other equivalent products elsewhere in the world. They're not going away. And it's not surprising that people of normal intelligence can believe that a device like the Modulator might work. We live in a world of atomic clocks, of ten dollar lasers you can hold in your hand, of supersonic passenger planes, space stations and "ferrofluid." Holograms. Magnetic resonance imaging. Personal computers, for that matter. Compared with these real scientific miracles, the Modulator looks less out-there.

So that's an explanation of the popularity of weird stuff like this. But it's not an excuse. Not for people who buy Modulators and similar devices, and certainly not for people who make these things. If you want to find the truth about the world — do science. In other words, rather than just gathering possibly erroneous impressions supporting one idea, you have to try to disprove your ideas, even if you really want your ideas to be true. If human auras exist, for instance, then you should be able to see them even if there's a partition stopping you from seeing the persons themselves. Do a test where you don't know if there's a person on the other side of the partition or not; see if your idea holds up.

Or, indeed, just allow someone else to test your Modulator, to see if it works. A number of people have offered their services to Harmonic Products, to help them do proper tests of their various claims; not once, to my knowledge, has a proper test been done. LISTEN System, live blood analysis, et cetera; yes. Tests that don't themselves need testing to see if they mean anything; no.

It's a free country. I think you should be free to spend $A295 on a 1.4 metre extension cord if you want to.

Randi speaking: here's the promised suggestion: go to http://www.dansdata.com/empower.htm and read the entire testing procedure. Very well done, I think you'll agree, and you'll be surprised (?) to learn what was found when the thing was opened up! Then, after reading it all, reconsider the "toaster test" described. I think I may have spotted a possibility in there that author Dan Rutter just might have missed. There's a small anomaly mentioned there that might indicate he missed one variable. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to find the possible flaw in Mr. Rutter's "toaster test" protocol. As always, should you or any of your colleagues be caught or killed, the JREF will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This recording will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Reader.....

Still more on those damn "rods"......!

Roger Harris points out that on most video cameras, only shutter speeds of 1/60s and 1/100s are possible, so the 1/2000s speed quoted by scientist Maccabee is not at all likely, though it could be possible with some equipment. Then Roger gives us information that tells us that "not likely" has now decidedly become, "not true." This is an excerpt from his analysis:

Concerning the rod video analysis by Dr. Bruce Maccabee . . . Henrik Herranen is correct to point out that this doesn't really look like a video shot at 1/2000s shutter speed, and not only because of the blurring of the cave wall behind the [para] jumper, but also because the jumper is overexposed, which is virtually impossible at 1/2000s. But there's a much stronger case: This is one of the video sequences that I composited, and in looking at my image again, I realize that in the original version of these images posted by Escamilla, there is a camera-generated display of the current settings in the lower left corner. This display shows that the camera is in auto-exposure mode and is shooting at 1/60 second! Somehow, this camera setting display has disappeared from Maccabee's images, and he has blithely accepted Escamilla's assertion that the camera was shooting at 1/2000s exposure. When the real exposure time is taken into account, we see exactly the effect that I mentioned above: If you take all the fields, each captured in 1/60 second and with a 1/60 second exposure time, then you simply get a continuous streak.

How the truth will "out"! Another manufactured myth dies....

Reader Richard Schultz gives us a good way of double-checking an experimental observation:

I read with some interest the story on your website about the middle school science teacher who shows that the chances of an astrology column being "correct" are exactly what one would expect from chance. He said that one problem is that some of the students think that astrology still "works" for 1 in 12 students. Perhaps he could try the experiment with his classes every day for a week and show that the fraction of students who get their horoscope correct on a given day continues to be 1/12, but just which 1/12, is completely random.

To clarify Richard's point, I'll relate an experience I had with Dr. Charles Tart, then a parapsychologist at UC Davis, some years ago. In a public speech, Tart outlined what he described as a quick method he used in class in order to sort out students for a demonstration. Before trying a simple ESP experiment, he would ask the class to stand up, then he'd begin tossing a coin. For each toss, students were asked to guess which side of the coin would fall "up," and they were told that they should sit down if they were wrong. Now, all other things being equal, and assuming that the students were being honest, it's obvious that after four tosses, a class of 40 students would provide about 2 or 3 persons still standing, about half being eliminated on each coin toss. Tart pointed out, correctly, that those standing had survived chances of just over 6 percent. This, he said, indicated that they might have better "psi" powers than the others! Those were the subjects he'd use in the ESP test.

Dr. Tart hastened to add that this was just a very rough, "quick-and-dirty" way of selecting out likely "sensitives," and yet his statement stunned me, as a layman listening to a PhD. He rambled right on before I could object, and had I been able to, I'd have suggested that if he were to repeat that elimination process, using the same class, chances were that he would not end up with the same 2 or 3 persons standing! His method wasn't just "approximate," it was useless and naive!

Last week I inquired of my physicist professor friend, Hungarian Dr. Gyula Bencze of the CRIP Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, concerning an Internet site for "Foundations of Physics Letters," based in Hungary, where endorsements of, and explanations for, the "MEG" device described here the last few weeks, are to be found and are often quoted. The FPL folks give their address in Budapest as "Institute for Advanced Study, Alpha Foundation Institute of Physics." I provided Dr. Bencze with the names of those listed who had gushed over the "MEG," all apparently authorities, as well as their listed affiliations. I think readers will agree that even such a basic title for a journal implies authority, but being naturally suspicious, I asked Dr. Bencze to look all this up for me. He didn't have to look far. Said he:

I have never heard of the Institute for Advanced Study, Alpha Foundation Institute of Physics. . . . I know of the existence of an Alpha Foundation only through a man named Milan Mészáros, one of the persons you mentioned in your other message. He is in his early fifties . . . and as I learned . . . he was fired [as a physicist] together with a number of other unqualified personnel as soon as one of my university classmates was appointed head of the Physics Institute which had jurisdiction. . . . These people, as well as their institutions, are not connected in any way with the academic community in Hungary. The journal "Foundations of Physics Letters" also has a rather bad reputation; it publishes all kinds of nonsense. In any case, our library does not subscribe to it.

Hmm. Interesting validation credentials for Bearden and his associates..... But there's more, which might indicate a certain lack of technical knowledge and skill on the part of these scientists. Gary Lorman writes:

A few weeks ago you had the "MEG" site listed. I followed one of the links and found a page explaining "How to condition a carbon compound resistor to properly measure the output of the MEG device." I had to laugh when I read about the resistor color band changing from yellow to orange. Of course it is going to change color! They're putting 12v. at 4amps (about 48 watts) into a transistor switching circuit, and running that into a 1/2 watt resistor! Even with the losses in the circuit, that resistor is way overloaded.

Hey, Gary, when I worked for International Resistor Corporation labs in Canada as a kid, I was in charge of "torture tests" that carbon-filament — as well as wire-wound — resistors had to pass. I tested randomly selected samples to failure, both by subjecting them to molten solder and by overloading them with wattage.... Guess what? Yep, the colored "code" bands (red=2, orange=3, yellow=4, etc.) — though they were designed to be tolerant of ordinary overloads — often changed color when they got hot enough. Folks, if Gary and I are aware of this fact, how is it that a gaggle of PhDs don't know anything about it? And why does it appear to them as a marvel?

Michael Cox comments on the item last week concerning how using a felt-tip pen on a CD can defeat the anti-copying technology currently in use. He writes:

The technique involves marking on one face of the CD around the edge with a black magic marker. This works because it obscures the outer tracks on which the protection is based, and is a perfectly understandable phenomenon, not mysterious in any way. Note that this is reminiscent of the "green pen" hoax but not really the same at all. There is no way the green pen could have any effect whatsoever on the CD or the reading of it. Anyone who doesn't know this, doesn't understand how CDs work.

Accepted, Michael. But that green pen — which is supposed to vastly improve the performance of a CD — is still on sale for that purpose in the "high-end" audio outlets. Along with the "counterfeit detector" pen and the magnets in Florsheim shoes, it's a total scam, swindle, and fake, but no one in our consumer agencies has any intention of doing anything about it.

Go take a look at http://www.americanantigravity.com/index.html and see very interesting videos of what the supporters seem to believe is a breakthrough in science. If this device is "antigravity," then a pogo stick and a crow are both antigravity items, as well.

I saw a similar demo at the University of Toronto back in 1946. That demo used a flat circular coil of wire; I believe this is the same thing, but a triangular form leads one away from the "induction" conclusion. It's a matter of high-voltage electrical fields generated by something that you don't see in the videos; there's always a source of high voltage present, a CRT (computer monitor or TV receiver) or a HV power supply, just out of camera view. What's also not obvious here is that the triangular frame — which weighs only a few grams — is tethered down by very fine invisible threads, a fact which when known, makes the apparent "maneuvering" appearance less mysterious by far.

Take a look...

Robert White, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Space and Remote Sensing Sciences Group, comments:

I imagine you may have seen this disturbing trend among our "science" television channels, too. It would seem that many of the cable channels I once was excited to see added to my cable list are declining into a state of sensationalism. I have noticed that channels such as "The Learning Channel" and several (if not all) of the "Discovery" channels have begun to program more and more shows based on pseudoscience and sensationalism. Last night I watched a program based on the "Ten Most Unexplained Phenomena of Mankind." While there were some scientists on the show refuting claims by many supposed experts from such topics as alien abduction to crop circles, it was evident that little time was given to them to present their cases and they sounded more like pompous "nay-sayers" than serious researchers. Almost every one of the cases presented has been well researched and proven to be poppycock, except for life after death phenomena...and just how can anyone really prove that one incorrect?

This show was just one of many that now flood our airwaves and cable signals. The shows are filled with PhD's and experts claiming this and that with hardly a shred of real truth brought to the fore. With the prevalence of TV and cable in most households, youth and adults alike are being nurtured on pseudoscience and are coming to believe, more than ever, that a lot of this sensationalistic tripe is real. I even have a colleague who teaches high school science and she is finding that more and more kids believe in the supernatural and in pseudoscience, than in proven scientific theories. Most of these kids don't even know that two objects of different masses, when dropped together, will fall at the same rate in a gravitational field, but they can tell you which crystal will help to heal your aura!

I suppose this trend is nothing new, since almost every newspaper in the country has a horoscope section, but almost none (if any) have a daily article on astronomy. When it gets down to it I understand that they are all competing for ratings, but when did the truth and teaching become secondary to money? I must have been blinded in my own pursuits to have missed the transition. I suppose there are others, like me, who are or should be disturbed by the trends of our media. I would like to encourage them to send an e-mail or letter to these media outlets and encourage them to pursue the truth and not conjecture. In the end they do have a responsibility to mankind that should outweigh the responsibility to their stockholders, but it is up to us to point it out to them, since they seem to have been blinded by the bottom line.

Thanks for letting me vent. Keep up the good work in helping open our eyes.

On www.talkorigins.org you'll find interesting stuff. Recently, a discussion took place between Al Petterson and "Anne," who had seemingly bitten off too big a chunk to chew.... She wrote:

Let's start with this: You say the earth is vastly older than 10,000 years. I say it only LOOKS older than that. At the moment when God created the earth, He created it as an "adult." Just like Adam and Eve LOOKED like adults when they were only one day old. They didn't start out as embryos, and neither did planet earth.

Randi comments: This is a common technique in pseudoscience — and in religion. Preposterous scenarios are freely invented to explain away damning facts that doom the argument, simply because those offering such vapidities are certain that they're right, and cannot even consider that maybe they're not. Al does a bang-on job pointing out Anne's failure to support her argument, while I'm sure he knows that she dismisses what he says even before he says it:

Anne, you've undermined your position right from the start. See, you're precisely right.

The universe looks old. Exactly as it would look if it's really old. As if it has one, specific, consistent history. As if it has been expanding for fifteen billion years from a single point. As if light has been traveling through it, lensing through gravitational fields, and as if events hundreds of thousands of light-years away have sent light at right angles to us, hundreds of thousands of years ago, which reflected off other objects and then came toward us. We can use Euclid's geometry to show how far away these objects are and how old their light is.

The Earth looks old. Exactly the way it would look if it's really old. As if it's been around for four-and-a-half billion years, and was hot and molten for the first half-billion of it, as if the continents have been gradually moving for the entire time, and as if the oceans and rivers and streams and tectonic flows have been shaping it, slowly, for all that time. As if Africa and South America have been receding from each other for millions of years, as the deposits have built up on the continents and the sea floor has spread, with the magnetic iron and nickel in the volcanic deposits recording the Earth's changing magnetic field, exactly in time with the changes we have been measuring.

It looks just as if radioactive isotopes have been here, changing into their stable daughter elements in accord with the laws of physics, changing the ratios of those daughter isotopes in exact proportion to the elements (not the isotopes) found in the rock, just exactly as if they've been doing so for hundreds of millions, or billions, of years.

Life on Earth looks old, exactly like it would be if it's really old, as if it's been here for almost the entire history of the Earth, as if it's been changing all that time, with new species appearing, each similar to something that was here before. As if coral, dated to three hundred million years ago by the radioactive material in the rocks it was growing on, was showing four hundred days in a year, exactly matching the predicted slowing effect of lunar tides on the Earth's rotation over three hundred million years.

Life on Earth looks as if it's descended from a common ancestor. Exactly like it, just as if it's arranged in a nested hierarchy of similarity, instead of all the infinite other ways it could have been arranged, and as if the junk, noncoding DNA in each animal has exactly the same similarity relationship as the morphological hierarchy, like the errors in DNA, shared in the nested hierarchy, such as why humans and chimps and gorillas can get scurvy but all the other mammals can produce their own vitamin C.

Certainly God could have created the Earth six thousand years ago. Or last week, for that matter. But regardless of when it was created, it was created to look exactly as if it had all this history?

Hallelujah! Kudos! Well done! The question this raises is, of course, which of the two scenarios is more likely to be true?

The town of Hooke, in Dorset, England, has moved well beyond talking coffee percolators. They have toasters (and other household appliances) talking — in Russian, yet. Chairman of the Hooke Parish Council, John Dalton, says of his toaster, "It's unnerving! Normally it just makes toast!" The quite ordinary source of all this lingual flap has been traced to a high-powered BBC short-wave radio station antenna just a mile outside of the town. A station technician notes that

Two different types of metal next to each other can pick up a radio signal. The two bits of metal act as a very basic diode and turn the signal into sound.

I'll point out that this phenomenon has occasionally been noted by persons with their teeth filled just right, the amalgam of silver/mercury doing diode duty and producing music and news that can actually be heard by anyone who puts an ear to the mouth of the involuntary relay server. Meanwhile, BBC station technicians in Hooke will help homeowners clear up the interference, they've promised. It's the least they can do!