I will begin this week with an urgent appeal. This is serious. Linda Rosa, R.N., notifies me of this frightening scenario that I will ask you to react to by sending an email to the "White House Commission on Alternative and Complementary Medicine Policy" to express your feelings about the matter. Do this by going to: http://www.whccamp.hhs.gov/contacts/index.html. This Commission is wrapping up its public input phase, and because the composition of the Commission is so heavily biased against science, we must be concerned about the recommendations they will very probably make to the president and Congress in favor of so-called "complementary medicine." Doubtless, this Commission will ignore your input, but Ms. Rosa - and I - ask you to please take a few minutes to send your comments about the anti-science composition of this Commission, and thereby have it made a permanent part of the official Congressional record.

To convince you of the importance of this request, I will briefly outline here the qualifications of just a few of the members of this White House Commission on Alternative and Complementary Medicine Policy:

Dr. James Gordon, MD, Chair of the Commission, is an ardent advocate of the incredible "alien abduction therapy" which asserts that UFOs regularly kidnap humans and molest them. He supports the teachings of mystic/quack Wilhelm Reich, of Jungian "transpersonal psychology," the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and more. Dr. David Bresler, Ph.D., is a "board-certified" acupuncturist, promotes "guided imagery" (you picture your white cells killing bad germs), and he is a proponent of Iranian faith healer Ostad Hadi Parvarandeh. Thomas Chappell sells "wellness products." Effie Poy Yew Chow, Ph.D., is an acupuncturist and Quigong Grandmaster. George DeVries is the CEO/Pres. of American Specialty Health Plans (San Diego), the nation's largest chiropractic and acupuncture HMO. Veronica Gutierrez, Doctor of Chiropractic, heads an organization that promotes home births, chiropractic manipulation to treat ear infections and to prevent SIDS, and the use of thermography to diagnose "chiropractic subluxations." Dr. Wayne Jonas, MD, is the author of "Healing With Homeopathy: The Complete Guide," and "Healing With Homeopathy: The Doctor's Guide." Sister Charlotte Rose Kerr, R.S.M., is an acupuncturist and a Senior Faculty Member at the Traditional Acupuncture Institute. Dr. Xiaoming Tian, MD, is an acupuncturist/Qigong Pracitioner, and the director of the Academy of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine and Wildwood Acupuncture Center, where Chinese herbal and Qigong remedies are offered. He's also vice-president of the International Academy of Medical Qigong. Dr. Donald Warren, DDS, is a dentist who practices "cranial osteopathy," or skull-manipulation, which he calls "an alternative and complimentary approach to health," and he uses "contact reflex analysis," a form of applied kinesiology quackery where the patient's body is used like an ouija board to diagnose problems and deficiencies.

Please send an e-mail to express your dismay....

A correspondent offers this comment on recent media handling of "demonic possession" and "exorcism," pointing out that the Pope admittedly failed an exorcism he personally conducted. Gee, if The Man can't shoo Satan or his minions, who can? Present-day belief in these medieval notions is incredible. With that fantastic lump of grey computer-jelly behind our eyes, can't we get with it? This week I offer you some examples of really juvenile, wishful, flawed thinking and acting. Writes my correspondent about the "demonic possession":

It is truly amazing that in the year 2000 we are even discussing this superstitious garbage, and even worse that a legitimate news network like CNN is wasting air time on it. Perhaps that is the real problem, the media giving legitimacy to superstitious claptrap.

From the Tulsa World, via Reuters New Service, we are further dismayed to learn this:

When a teacher at Union Intermediate High School in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, fell "mysteriously" ill, student Brandi Blackbear, 15, was brought in for "aggressive interrogation" by assistant principal Charlie Bushyhead. Blackbear admitted she had read books from the school library about Wicca [a witchcraft nature-oriented religion] and said she "might" be Wiccan. She is Roman Catholic, her family says. A federal lawsuit against the school charges Bushyhead suspended Blackbear for 15 days as "an immediate threat to the school," seized her notebooks, and barred her from drawing or wearing any Wiccan signs, because he concluded she had "put a hex" on the stricken teacher. Blackbear denies casting any spells. "It's hard for me to believe that in the year 2000 I am walking into court to defend my daughter against charges of witchcraft brought by her own school," her father said. The school district's attorney, Doug Mann, was eager to comment on the case but could only complain, "It's totally unfair that we are gagged by federal and state law" protecting minors and students when the Blackbears "can say anything they want."

What would you tell us about, if you could, counselor? About broomsticks, eye of newt, toe of frog? Get real!

Don't think that it's only folks in small Oklahoma towns and leaders of religious movements who believe this stuff. It's regular folks everywhere, of every level of education and sophistication, who embrace devils and deities. What follows deals with unsavory allegations about an Indian "god-man" who uses simple tricks and the same tired old feel-good techniques that such frauds have offered for so many generations of our species. I present it here as an example of what happens to a wonder-worker when he's been in the public eye just too long, and is finally revealed — though I think they "got" this one for the wrong reason.... More importantly, I think this man is so firmly established with the ruling powers in India, that he's immune to prosecution, and will simply continue on as always.

The Afro-coifed guru Sathya Sai Baba, 74, for years the subject of allegations of fraud, has left India only once, in the Seventies, and that was to briefly visit Uganda. His devotees — and contributors — across the world are estimated at up to fifty million, yet his reputation outside of India has been spread largely by word-of-mouth. He is worshiped as a living god who can profoundly change people's lives, and work miracles, though those are — to any conjuror's eye — simple sleight-of-hand, and not even at all well done. But now his followers are seriously divided by allegations, not that the man is a faker, but that he has for years been sexually abusing young male disciples to whom he has paid very special attention.

In India, his followers include the former prime minister, Narasimha Rao, the present Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and a great number of senior members of the judiciary, academics, scientists and prominent politicians. For more than fifty years, Sai Baba has been India's most famous and most powerful holy man — a worker of miracles, an instrument of the divine. His following extends not only to every corner of the Indian sub-continent, but also to America, Australia, Europe, South America and Asia. Estimates of his followers around the world vary, between ten and fifty million.

To his devotees, Sai Baba is believed to be an "avatar," an incarnation of the supernatural, one of the divine beings such as Krishna or Jesus Christ who are believed to take human form to bring their message to our species. According to his late secretary and disciple, Professor N. Kasturi, Sai Baba was born "of immaculate conception" in the southern Indian village of Puttaparthi in 1926. As a young boy, he says, he displayed miraculous abilities such as "materializing" flowers and sweets from thin air. Sai Baba's "miracles" now include materializing various keepsakes for devotees, from watches to rings. I've always wondered why these watches — mostly Seikos — are materialized bearing serial numbers indicating that they were sold from Japan to a distributor in India, and the rings have cheap lithographed-tin portraits of the guru in a fake gold-colored mount which is invariably represented by the believers to be "pure gold." This man's sleight-of-hand technique is abominable, not worthy of a rank amateur, but he doesn't have to be good, just charismatic. After all, he's fooling people who have happily suspended their critical faculties and who need to be fooled.

Incidentally, this is the very same routine that Madame Blavatsky (Madame Elena Petrovna Blavatskaya, née Hahn) the founder and chief guru of the Theosophy religion, used to convince her followers — who were also drawn from the wealthy and powerful — that she was divine. She regularly caused objects to "apport" for the faithful, and won disciples based on really sophomoric parlor tricks. She reigned in the mid-1800s, and did very well in the business.

There are even gushing accounts — from believers — of Sai Baba having performed medical healings, and of his having raised people from the dead, but his major and most advertised "miracle" is the production from his apparently empty hand of a substance known as "vibhuti" ("holy ash") which turns out on analysis to be powdered ashes of cow dung mixed with incense. Street conjurors in India (jadu-wallahs) perform this trick by preparing small pellets of ashes and concealing them at the base of their fingers, then working their fists to powder the pellets and produce the flow of fine ash. Their trick is indistinguishable from Sai Baba's miracle.... Like Christ, this man is said to have created enough food to feed multitudes, and to have "appeared" by divine means to his disciples in times of need. Documentation of this, however, is not readily available. What is available is a videotape of the guru clumsily trying to produce a necklace for a politician at a public event, fumbling about under a trophy he is carrying, and almost dropping the "apport" in a really sloppy performance. Despite the faithful trying to suppress this embarrassing tape, it is widely available.

At the age of thirteen, this cunning child declared himself to be the reincarnation of the revered Indian saint, Shirdi Sai Baba, who died in 1918. When he was asked to prove his identity, he threw a clump of jasmine flowers on the floor, which "arranged themselves" to spell out "Sai Baba" in the Telugu language. (This demonstration, too, is a standard "guru" trick, most recently used by magician David Blaine in a simpler variation to charm his street audiences.) So many pilgrims flock to Prasanthi Nilayam, the original ashram (a Hindu retreat area) established by Sai Baba, that an airstrip has been constructed near the sizeable town that has quickly grown up around the ashram. Into the shrine pour the largely middle-class, well-educated, family-oriented, folks who just cannot believe they've been fooled by a clever con-man. These aren't stupid people, just naive individuals with far too much trust in their ability to detect fraud.

This Sai Baba man claims that he is an instrument of the divine, and that he is omniscient, capable of seeing the past, present and future of everyone and everything. If so, his powers apparently failed to foretell for him the present scandal that has now developed around him. The principal event that takes place in the Sai Baba ashram is "darshan," a ceremony in which the guru emerges twice daily from his quarters adjacent to the main temple and walks among the thousands of devotees seated on the hard marble floor. Hands reach forward to touch his feet or to pass him letters of supplication. Occasionally he pauses, to offer a blessing or to "materialize" vibhuti for a supplicant. It is during darshan that Sai Baba, by some unseen criteria, chooses people from the crowd for private interviews. It appears that those chosen few persons are frequently attractive young men, who thereafter seem to develop an aversion to further selection by Sai Baba.

Recently, a committed adult English devotee named David Bailey, 46, was cautiously approached by students from the college who came to him alleging that they had been sexually abused by the guru. They asked, "Please sir, can you go back to England and help us." They were unable to tell their parents what was happening to them because they were afraid of being disbelieved, and they feared — quite rightly — for their personal safety. Dismayed by their allegations, Bailey severed his association with Sai Baba and began to assemble a dossier of evidence from former devotees around the world. This document became known as "The Findings," a chronicle of the reality behind the façade, the fakery, trickery and even the financial irregularities in the funding of several Sai Baba projects such as a water supply to villages around the ashram, and a hospital, often cited as evidence of his munificence. Regardless, Sai Baba has proved remarkably immune to controversy, the accusations doing little to dent the esteem in which he is held. All that, it appears, is about to change. Bailey's document The Findings recently found its way onto the Internet, where it has become the center of a raging debate about the guru.

All this is nothing new to B. Premenand, a prominent Indian Skeptic and my good friend, who has made a career out of debunking frauds like Sai Baba through his publication, The Indian Skeptic, and who very effectively duplicated the "vibhuti" trick and the other "materializations." Premenand points out that there have now been serious numbers of defections from Sai Baba groups throughout the West. In Sweden, the central group has closed down completely. Some devotees, however, express their total disbelief and denial of the accusations. "No," they say, "Sai Baba is God." One very prominent still-faithful follower in America says, "All I know in my heart is that Swami is the purest of the purest, and that everything he does is for the highest good of everybody. If other people feel something else, that's how they feel. It's a mystery to me, and that's how I'm leaving it. I just know in my heart what I've found." Sai Baba is quoted by the faithful as saying, "When doubt walks in the front door, faith walks out the back door. Keep your doors closed." Well, some doors are ajar...

I've said it before, and it's still true: no amount of evidence, nor the quality of it, will serve to un-convince the true believer. Their belief is something they not only want, they need it. Anil Kumar, Sai Baba's principal English translator, typifies this fact. Every great religious teacher, he says, has faced criticism in their lifetime. Such allegations had been leveled at Sai Baba since childhood, "but with every criticism he becomes more and more triumphant." Kumar considers the controversy "all part of [Sai Baba's] divine plan. It's a paddy field with husks around the rice. Eventually all the unwanted parts will go to leave the true substance inside." Jerry Hague, the American trustee of the Sai Baba operation, shares that view. Sai Baba, he says, would never respond or say anything about all this. "Why would he? That's the human way. That's not his way. You can try and write about this, but you won't be able to make any intellectual sense of it. Nobody can."

Well, I can. And I think you can. What really disturbs me about all this is that Sai Baba is not being criticized for his fakery, his cruelty to believers, his lies, his trickery and deception, but for his peccadillos — however harmful and reprehensible those are — that make more newspaper space and are "spicier" than his more far-reaching and criminal acts. We got Al Capone for income-tax evasion, not for murder, and faith-healer W. V. Grant went to prison for income-tax problems, too, not for swindling millions of dollars from innocent victims and removing them from medical care. Where are the priorities here? Frankly, I don't much care about Sai Baba's sex life, but I do care about the millions of people he's bilked, ruined, and betrayed.

While we're on using our judgement and our sensory systems, I'll mention a subject that many persons write me about, telling me that their eyes deceived them. We tend to trust sight as our most reliable measure of reality. Color, depth, shape, movement, all are brought to us by our eyes, and millions of years spent using our sight to warn of possible danger have taught us that it's important. However, as our understanding of "seeing" gets fuller, we're learning that sight is not infallible. Some ten per cent of the population claim to have seen a ghost or some other apparition that seems completely invisible to others. Neurons in the brain firing without visual stimulation, as an automatic reflex, can inject images of things that aren't there into otherwise ordinary scenes. Even worse, our brain appears to be programed to supply — by inventing them — missing bits of things that were only partly or poorly seen. This process, paraeidolia, enables the brain to complete the shapes partially formed by clouds, or the face of someone we have in fact only slightly glimpsed in the dark. So, next time you find yourself listening to someone offering an account of "sighting" the Loch Ness monster or an Abominable Snowman, and claiming "I saw it with my own eyes," will you accept the evidence or maybe want to "see" something a little more concrete? At the JREF, we receive rafts of cloud photos in which the senders think they have found Jesus or Elvis. We try to treat them kindly, but they resist any and all rationalizations, and claim that we've refused to pay them their prize money.

Here's the latest technological breakthrough in pseudoscience by none other than Thomas Afilani. He's the "inventor" who sold the "DKL Locator" nonsense to that company. They're the group that ignores the offer of our million-dollar prize for one successful demonstration of their expensive device. Well, Tom, this prize is also yours if you can demonstrate your Electroscope Gravitator, just once. I'll await your enthusiastic response....

No, Alifani won't respond. He knows full well that this is a fake, a farce, a fraud, a hoax, a rip-off. And he gets rich by fleecing the gullible. Just why can't the FTC do something about this sort of swindle? Doesn't anyone in Washington care, at all? This is a criminal act, to offer a farcical "invention" like this as genuine! Where is our protection? If they could close down the "Stimulator," they can close down DKL and Alifani. Right?

Rupert Sheldrake is at it again! After informing me that the owners of a gifted telepathic dog in the UK had forbidden me access to test the canine for the JREF million-dollar prize, he has now revealed yet another "staggering" animal to the world. Aimee Morgana of New York city claims to have a psychic parrot that "knows exactly what visitors are thinking." This avian marvel, N'Kisi, passes telepathy tests using her 555-word vocabulary to comment on peoples thoughts, says her owner. Note the careful wording; "comment on," rather than "read." Ms. Morgana sits in one room looking at images while N'Kisi is in another. When a photo of a bouquet is viewed by her owner, the bird screams, we're told, "That's a picture of flowers!" A picture of a telephone earns the response, "What'cha doin' on the phone." Former Cambridge scientist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has carried out a test of this paragon of avian savvy using 70 images, and he says that the parrot got it right 32 times. "You'd only expect 5.2 hits like this to occur by chance. This was staggering," said Sheldrake. Yes, if the report is true, I agree. Hey, Rupert, we'll test N'Kisi. Any time. Can't wait. I guess we'll probably get a personal letter from N'Kisi, seeing how smart the bird is. At about the same time we hear from Alifani....

The claims of Ms. Morgana, we're told, have been tested by a Mail on Sunday (UK) journalist who was shocked to see that the parrot "knew" she had earlier been talking about a friend's dead pet! The proof is that the parrot commented "Remember the cat?" Perhaps along with "Here's the bus!" and "Is it lunch time?"

Sorry. We need something better. But we're ready to be shown. Show us.

We got all sorts of wrong answers on last week's puzzle, but Trent Hanson sent the correct answer (shown here) within hours of the puzzle going up. Xcott Craver (that's the spelling!) was second by two hours.

Here's this week's problem, told to me by another fan of the PRI show, "Car Talk." It seems Click and Clack related this one on a show I missed....

There are two rooms. You're downstairs, connected with upstairs by a staircase. In your room, you have three electric switches. Each is connected to the mains and to a different light-bulb upstairs. The switches are not identified as to which bulb they will turn on. Your task is to match the switches with the bulbs upstairs. You can turn on and off any number of switches, go up and down stairs as often as you want, but you can't see the bulbs upstairs from your room downstairs. The three bulbs are clustered together, so they throw essentially the same shadows. Question: what's the minimum number of times you have to go up or down the stairs to match the three switches with the three bulbs?

Answers to: randi@randi.org. Sorry, I can't respond to all.

Next week, I'll tell you briefly of some facts about a simply depressing use of your money, the full story of which will appear in the next Skeptical Inquirer. It involves Elizabeth Targ, daughter of Russell Targ, one of the laser physicists who brought Uri Geller to the attention of the world. You won't believe this one. Incidently, if you don't subscribe to S.I., look in at www.CSICOP.org and get with it!