part0010

Probably the most popular myth we could include here is astrology, the idea that movements of distant planets and stars influence human personalities and behaviour. The Skeptic has indeed covered astrology many times – and also other old favourites such as graphology, numerology, and reflexology. Here, however, the selection is a bit more broad and eclectic. We see why the belief that we only use 10 percent of our brains defies logic, and find out about the appearance of faces and canals on Mars and the disappearance of the sailors aboard the Mary Celeste. But first ... heard the one about Nostradamus predicting 9/11 ?

The Great Trade' is the World Trade Center; 'a great Lyons' is New York (like Lyons it is not the capital but a major banking centre), and the 'mountains' are the skyscrapers of Manhattan. How amazingly accurate ... I may have creatively translated 'fog' as 'smoke' and left out the reference to Switzerland, but how many people are likely to notice that? Or that the quatrain was previously regarded as an uncannily accurate prediction of the siege of Lyons in 1795 ?

The martial arts have long been surrounded by an aura of mystery and the esoteric. It is therefore not too surprising to find that many martial artists profess to a belief in mysterious energies outside the understanding of Western science. Many martial artists talk about 'chi' (in Chinese martial arts) or 'ki' (in Japanese martial arts), a mysterious energy that allows those who have mastered it to achieve miraculous feats not possible by physical prowess alone. But real evidence for the existence of this mysterious energy is thin on the ground or non-existent. So why do so many martial artists apparently believe in mysterious energies?

Most of the martial arts we practise today came originally from the Orient, where belief in supernatural spirits and energies was, and is, very strong. In fact, it is almost impossible to disentangle the history of some of the older martial arts from the mythologies of the countries in which they developed. It is therefore hardly surprising that this belief in the supernatural should have suffused the martial arts. Also, the techniques of the fighting arts were, until very recently, jealously guarded secrets. An opponent knowing your techniques could easily have made the difference between life and death in an encounter. Inevitably, wherever there is secrecy, rumours and wild stories abound. It is human nature to exaggerate – breaking an inch of pine with a punch can easily become breaking ten inches of pine with a touch after 'Chinese whispers' have taken effect. Claiming to be able to teach not just fighting ability, but mystical powers as well must also have been a big help for instructors looking to recruit students. They were hardly likely to have discouraged such stories.

So why do many people continue to believe in these stories in the late twentieth century? First, because their instructors tell them to, and the instructor is a figure of considerable authority in most clubs. These assertions may be backed up with demonstrations. The complexity of human psychology and physiology allows for many 'tricks', such as the instructor making himself/herself 'heavier'. The usual form this takes is for a student to lift the instructor using their hands under the instructor's armpits or elbows. The instructor will then make himself/herself 'heavier' and the student has a lot more trouble lifting him/her on the second occasion. This can look quite impressive, but it is hardly a rigorous test. I believe it is attributable to simple physiology and psychology. Since the lifts are repeated in quick succession, the student is more tired the second time. Relaxing the shoulders also makes the upward force more difficult to apply. There is also a strong element of suggestion (in fact one skeptical instructor claimed that he had duplicated this feat by suggestion alone), since a test on your own student is hardly a fair test.

Laying claim to esoteric knowledge increases the instructor's standing. His senior students may be stronger, suppler, and faster, but they don't have as much esoteric knowledge. Who can resist making themselves more important? Martial arts instructors are only human after all. Students also have their own reasons for believing in mysterious energies. If they exist, then there is the possibility for an average person to become an immensely powerful fighter without a great deal of strenuous training (I wish!). One only has to look through some martial arts magazines with their endless reviews of wish-fulfilment chop-sockey videos and adverts to 'build big muscles fast' and 'be successful with women' to realize that the martial arts have an almost irresistible pull for the credulous. Mysterious energies promise a short-cut to a much desired end. If mysterious energies don't exist then this means that victory is likely to go to the man (or woman) who is the biggest, strongest, fittest, and has trained the hardest. People want to believe in the irrational, and usually these beliefs are completely sincere. One only has to look at the popularity of crystal healing, Tarot, horoscopes, psychic surgery, miracle diets, 'end of the world' cults, the Bermuda triangle, and UFOs to see this. Martial artists are no exception to this phenomenon. In fact, if they have been drawn to the martial arts by its mystical lure they are likely to be especially susceptible.

Belief in mysterious energies could also be seen as part of a trend towards more and more 'flowery' techniques in some martial arts. As the martial arts become divorced from their original drastic purposes and become more of an end in themselves, techniques lacking in substance are less and less likely to face the harsh reality of combat. It is interesting to note that belief in mysterious forces seems to be inversely proportional to the competitive nature of a martial art. I hear little reference to chi from judoka, kick boxers, and others who are forced to face the true effectiveness of their technique against uncooperative opponents. I have a hunch that proponents of even 'soft' arts (those that have minimal reliance on physical force) that are competitive (for example, tomiki aikidoka and tai-chi practitioners who push hands competitively) talk about chi a good deal less than those who practise only on cooperative colleagues.

Beliefs also have their own momentum. The more of yourself you invest in a belief the harder it is to change. A friend who practises judo told me an amusing story that illustrates this well. A practitioner of one of the more esoteric martial arts (which it would be invidious to name, so I shall refer to it as 'X') told him that 'X was better than judo' so he suggested they put this to the test. After a few minutes, the X exponent staggered off rather battered and considerably the worse for wear mumbling 'Well, I still think X is better!' If you have spent years developing mysterious energies, then admitting they do not exist means admitting you have wasted a lot of time; this is very difficult. In fact it is often easier to ignore contrary evidence than it is to change your beliefs (this is given the grand term 'cognitive dissonance' by psychologists). Beliefs have a habit of entrenching themselves.

So if mysterious energies don't exist why hasn't the myth been dispelled by now? Can't I disprove the existence of chi? Not really. If I could show that a particular feat could be explained without any need for chi a believer could easily say 'Chi doesn't work on skeptics', or 'Just because that martial artist doesn't have chi doesn't mean no one else has', or 'He was having a bad day', and so on. This is a game we are probably all familiar with and one the skeptic can rarely win.

Few would deny that the opening up of the martial arts and improved understanding of nutrition and physiology have allowed martial artists to make great strides forward over the last few decades. I think it is high time that some of the claims made for mysterious energies were subjected to similar rational analysis. I am not suggesting for a second that all those who profess a belief in mysterious energies are charlatans or that they are not good martial artists. However, they might become even better martial artists if they spent less time 'developing their chi'. Martial artists can perform extraordinary feats, but we don't need metaphysics to explain them. It is time that mysterious energies were relegated firmly to martial arts mythology along with 10-metre jumps into the air .

It's commonly said that we use only 10 percent of the capacity of our brains, a claim that, if true, ought to inspire much research into how to unlock the rest. It also can be, and is, taken to imply that paranormal powers might be hiding in that unused 90 percent. But do we really ivaste most of our brain power? Tackling this question is Canadian skeptic Barry Beyerstein (1947-2007), who was a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Brain Behaviour Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was a co-founder of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), chair of the British Columbia Skeptics Society, and a prolific writer. Appeared in X.2. An earlier version of this article first appeared in the Rational Enquirer , the magazine of the British Columbia Skeptics.

In debates with advocates of the paranormal, I frequently encounter a ploy that rests on the widely quoted, but never supported, assertion that normal people only use 10 percent of their brains. So, the argument continues, if we don't know what the remainder of the brain is there for, it could be the repository for awesome mental powers that only a few adepts have mastered. This enlightened minority could be tapping their latent cerebral potential to accomplish levitation, spoon-bending, clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, psychic healing, and other fantastica scarcely conceivable to mere mortals condemned to subsist on the drudge-like 10 percent. Of course, the one-tenth figure is itself debatable, but even if it were accurate, it would in no way entail the existence of psychic powers, which must stand or fall on their own demonstrable merits. The 10 percent myth is so prevalent that I have become curious about its origins and why it persists despite its inherent improbability.

As someone who spends much of his professional life pondering how the brain works, I am quite willing to admit the extent of our ignorance about how this kilo and a half of grey matter manages to produce thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Nonetheless, I am at a loss to understand how my debating adversaries came to know with such pontifical certainty that we normally use only 10 percent of it. To the best of my knowledge, this alleged 'fact' appears nowhere in the literature of neurophysiology or physiological psychology. On the contrary, it is at variance with most of what we do know about the brain. The 'dormant brain' thesis seems to be another of those 'factoids' that accumulate a patina of believability through mere repetition. It has become firmly ensconced in the conventional wisdom, though no one who has cited it to me has ever been able to state who first said it or what evidence there is in its favour.

Furthermore, virtually all educated people now accept that the human brain is the product of millions of years of evolution. Given the conservatism of natural selection, it seems highly unlikely that scarce resources would be squandered to produce and maintain such an under-utilized organ. The brain is costly to run, consuming approximately a quarter of the metabolic resources of the resting body. How long would you endure paying huge power bills to heat all ten rooms of your home if you never strayed beyond the kitchen?

The brain has evolved a fair bit of redundancy in its circuitry as a safety precaution, but little, if any, of it lies perpetually fallow. The armamentarium of modern neuroscience decisively repudiates this notion. EEGs, CAT, PET, and MRI scans, magnetoencephalography, regional cerebral blood flow measures, and so on, all show that even during sleep there are no silent areas in the brain (see, for example, Per E Roland, Brain Activation, Wiley-Lisa, 1993). Such tranquillity would be a sign of gross pathology. We also know from these technologies and from studying the effects of head trauma that the brain is not an undifferentiated mass. Rather, distinct functions are distributed to different regions of the brain. According to the 10 percent scenario, 90 percent of each of these distributed functional areas would have to be unused in order not to lose certain functions totally in a 90 percent dormant brain. This seems highly implausible in light of animal research where electrodes are inserted directly into the brain to map its microcircuitry and localization of function.

Henry Ford once said, 'Whatever you have, you must use it or lose it.' Muscles atrophy from disuse and so, apparently, do brain circuits. My own research and that of many others indicates that neural systems deprived of normal input either fail to develop or deteriorate permanently. If 90 percent of our brains were really idle, we would expect massive areas of degeneration but no such signs show up in normal people on the various scanners mentioned above. Of course, the 10 percent utilization figure could refer instead to storage capacity, processing speed, or some other index of brain activity (rather than simply to volume) but I know of no way to determine the theoretical limits of such processes in order to estimate the average person's efficiency. At any rate, research suggests that it is not lack of storage capacity that hinders performance most; the bottleneck is more likely to be difficulty in retrieving what we've safely stored.

If the 10 percent figure makes no sense neurologically, I would suggest that this presumed neural tithing in ordinary people is, instead, a metaphor for widespread human longings. It is comforting to believe that we all have this latent potential, and this may explain in part why so many people cling to this dictum of neuro-mythology. In addition, the remarkable ability of developing brains to reorganize and recover from neural damage may also have contributed to the plausibility of the belief. For instance, young children have been known to recover a surprisingly high level of functioning after loss of an entire cerebral hemisphere to injury or disease. This is far less than 90 percent of their brains, of course, but because dead nerve cells are not replaced after birth, these patients must be making do with what remains, suggesting there might have been some unused parts. In fact, it seems instead that the functions of the destroyed areas actually 'crowd in' alongside those the undamaged portions were already handling, rather than colonizing previously unused areas. Immediately following the trauma, such children experience devastating disruptions of behaviour and consciousness but, gradually, most abilities, including language, recover quite substantially. Unfortunately, this ability of the remaining neural tissue to assume the additional duties of destroyed parts wanes with age, as a visit to any neurological ward will quickly convince you. Even among those who suffer brain damage as young children and regain near-normal functioning, some deficits do remain, although it sometimes requires fairly sophisticated tests to reveal these shortcomings. The ability to achieve such a high degree of recovery seems to be largely lost by the time of puberty. Much recent research has been devoted to finding ways to suppress certain features of mature brains that largely prevent adult neural tissue from re-establishing functional neural connections after brain damage. Popularized accounts of the dramatic recoveries of some of these young brain damage victims probably fuelled the misconception that they never really needed the extra brain tissue in the first place.

This misapprehension was reinforced in an otherwise informative TV documentary that aired on the Public Broadcasting System and the Knowledge Network in North America. It featured the Sheffield University paediatric researcher John Lorber and an extraordinary group of his patients. Referred to Lorber because of fairly minor neurological complaints, these young adults were of normal or above-normal intelligence and were coping well educationally and socially. Astonishingly, CAT scans had revealed that their cerebral hemispheres had been compressed into a slab only a few millimetres thick. The compression had been caused by enlargement of the underlying fluid-filled ventricles. This had probably occurred insidiously as the normally circulating cerebrospinal fluid dammed up behind constricted outflow channels over an extended period. The condition is known as hydrocephalus and if it is of very early onset and left untreated it will cause the entire head to balloon out in a grotesque fashion because the infant cranium has not yet calcified. Severe mental and behavioural retardation typically ensue. In Lorber's cases, the cranium had presumably already solidified by the time of onset of hydrocephalus – trapping the cerebral hemispheres literally 'between a rock and a hard place'. The absence of mental retardation in these young adults, despite their tremendous neural shrinkage, led Lorber and the producers of the show to ask the misleading question that, unfortunately, became the title of the episode: 'Is the Brain Really Necessary?'

What Lorber's remarkable cases demonstrate is not, as the documentary coyly suggests, the irrelevance of the brain to our mental lives, but rather the amazing ability of the brain to adjust to massive disruptions, providing they occur slowly enough and early enough in life. CAT scans cannot reveal how much of the thinning of the cerebral hemispheres in Lorber's patients was due to cellular loss and how much to compacting of brain cells into less than their normal volume. In addition, there is reason to believe that the greater share of cell loss in such cases may be among the supporting glial cells rather than in the neurons that actually mediate mental functions. The fact that these patients can get by with reduced brain volume does not imply that they wouldn't have put any additional tissue to good use had if been retained. I also suspect that their degree of normalcy may have been somewhat exaggerated for dramatic effect. Nonetheless, Lorber's cases are an eloquent testimonial to the resilience of the young brain and its ability to reorganize and carry on after major insults. Mature brains subjected to more rapid increases in intracranial pressure, due to growing tumours for instance, certainly show much more drastic impairments. Lorber's CAT scans also serve the useful purpose of reminding neurologists and neuropsychologists that deeper structures in the brain (which are largely spared in these cases) contribute more to our mental abilities than our fascination with cortical structures sometimes leads us to think.

Although the origins of the Great 10 Percent Myth remain obscure, it has long been a staple of self-improvement courses like those of the Dale Carnegie organization. It remains a popular selling point for the hawkers of Transcendental Meditation courses and a variety of crackpot 'brain-tuner' devices so dear to New Age entrepreneurs. The myth has been around for a long time. For instance, Dwight Decker, in a 1994 internet posting to the sci.skeptic Usenet newsgroup, noted that in the foreword to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), the journalist Lowell Thomas cites the 10 percent myth and credits it to the pioneering psychologist William James (1842-1910). One of Decker's sources said he remembered James discussing it in his magnum opus, The Principles of Psychology (1890), although Decker and I have both been unable to find such a reference. What gave rise to James's idea that we only use 10 percent of our brains, the source said, were anecdotal accounts of people who had suffered drastic losses of brain tissue due to accidents or disease, or who had been born with conditions (such as hydrocephalus) that left them with very little brain tissue at all. Yet they seemed to function more or less normally (obviously, cases such as those reported by John Lorber have been known to neurologists for a long time as well). Although he tried diligently, Decker was unable to locate such a passage in any of James's better-known writings. Perhaps James could have uttered it in one of his many public addresses and was merely quoted (or misquoted) elsewhere. Decker has also located references to versions of the 10 percent figure in the 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica and the 1929 edition of the World Almanac, all of which shows that the misapprehension was already widespread in the early part of the twentieth century. However it may have arisen, belief in 'the myth' obviously caught on: it was canonized at mid-century by no less a personage than Albert Einstein who once uttered it as a speculative reply to the constant barrage of questions about the source of his brilliance.

I believe this vision of the largely vegetative brain acquired at least some of its spurious scientific gloss from laypersons' misinterpretations of early neurological experiments with lower animals. Pioneering studies by Karl Lashley, for instance, showed that large portions of rat cortex could be removed with apparently little disruption in behaviour (later tests did find deficits that weren't obvious with the earlier research methods). In the same vein, confusion regarding certain terms used by early comparative neurologists may have compounded this misinterpretation. With evolutionary advancement, the cerebrum of mammals has enlarged greatly but a progressively smaller proportion of it is concerned with strictly sensory or motor duties. This was demonstrated in the 1930s by electrically stimulating the exposed cortical surface in a variety of species from different levels of the evolutionary tree. Because the current was unable to evoke overt responses from these increasingly large non-sensory and non-motor areas in the so-called 'higher' species with larger brains, those areas were referred to by some researchers as 'silent cortex'. Obviously, they did not mean that these regions were literally silent or unused. As we have seen, they are anything but silent – these so-called 'association areas are responsible for our most uniquely human characteristics, including language and abstract thought. Areas of maximal activity shift in the brain as we change tasks and vary attention and arousal but there are normally no dormant regions awaiting new assignments.

A final speculation about the origins of the 10 percent myth is that it might have been derived from misconstruals of rightfully modest admissions by neuroscientists concerning the limitations of our understanding. Despite the huge amount that we have learnt about the brain, it is only honest to confess how much remains to be discovered. Such modesty would have been even more appropriate at the dawn of the twentieth century, when 'the myth' seems to have taken hold. Possibly, some early investigator's (probably optimistic) estimate that researchers only knew what 10 per cent of the brain does may have been misread as an assertion that we normally only need or use 10 percent of it.

In the end, I think this persistent curiosity boils down, once again, to the comforting nature of most occult and New Age beliefs. It would be nice if they were true – death would have no sting and there would be no shortcomings in life, materially or mentally. The 10 percent myth suggests we could all be Einsteins, Rockefellers, or Uri Gellers if we could just engage that ballast between our ears! This 'cerebral spare tire' concept continues to nourish the clientele of 'pop psychologists' and their many recycled self-improvement schemes. As a metaphor for the fact that few of us fully exploit our talents, who could deny it? As a spur to hope and a source of solace it has probably done more good than harm, but comfort afforded is not truth implied. As a refuge for occultists seeking the neural basis of the miraculous, the probability is considerably less than 10 percent .

What happened to the ship Mary Celeste (not to be confused with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's entirely fictional Marie Celeste) , found floating empty in the Atlantic Ocean in early December 1872, is an enduring maritime mystery. In writing about it for an earlier issue (VII.6), London writer Brian Haines was unable to provide an explanation. Alan Hunt, a London writer, part-time lecturer at City University and the Working Man's College, a former civil servant at the Department of Education and Science, took up the challenge. Appeared in VIII.5.

The Mary Celeste remains a considerable mystery of the sea. It is surely extraordinary that a ship in reasonably good shape should have been abandoned by her crew for the hazards of a small boat on the open seas. It is surprising to realize today how small these ocean-going sailing ships really were. The Mary Celeste was little more than 100 feet long with a tonnage of approximately 280. The brigantine left New York Harbour on 5 November 1872 with a cargo of 1,700 (or 1,701) barrels of alcohol. This would not have been drinkable.

The master of the Mary Celeste was a Captain Briggs, who was a part-owner of the ship (possessing one-third of the shares in a small consortium that owned the ship). The captain's wife and small daughter were aboard along with a crew of seven. It has been reported that on the night before leaving New York, Briggs and his wife dined with a Captain Morehouse of the De Gratia. The seamen were old friends. During the loading of the Mary Celeste, the long boat, which normally hung on davits over the stern, was damaged. One small boat remained, which was lashed on top of the main hatch.

The De Gratia left New York a week later, its first port of call being Gibraltar, the same as that of the Mary Celeste. On 5 December, the De Gratia sighted a ship in difficulties. Getting no response, three of the crew boarded the troubled ship, which proved to be the Mary Celeste. It was deserted. There were no lifeboats, and there was water in the hold. It was decided that the water could be pumped out and the ship sailed to Gibraltar, the purpose being to collect salvage. The Mary Celeste, with its crew of three, arrived at Gibraltar on Friday 13 December, one day after the De Gratia. The claim for salvage was referred to the Admiralty Court, the President of which was a Queen's Advocate by the name of Solly Flood, who suspected an insurance fraud. Three months later, salvage was awarded but at approximately one-fifth of the value of the ship and its cargo. Some plausible solutions may be summarized as follows:

Flood seems to have considered solutions (1) and (2), and the inquiry at Gibraltar dragged on for three months. It is possible that Flood believed that some of the missing crew would appear alive. The strongest argument against Captain Briggs being involved in an insurance fraud is that he was part-owner of the Mary Celeste. This is not as simple as it sounds. He had probably borrowed the money for his third share in the syndicate owning the Mary Celeste from a man named Simon Hart who is later quoted as part-owner. The owner of the other two-thirds was a Captain J. H. Winchester, who went to the Gibraltar inquiry to protect his own interests. Winchester, after giving testimony at the inquiry during an adjournment, went to Cádiz, ostensibly for pleasure, giving the impression that he would return to Gibraltar. Captain Winchester turned up in New York a month later. The family of the missing Chief Mate Richardson thought that either a mutiny or a criminal conspiracy held the clue to the disappearance of the crew. It should be remembered that it was an age when ship-owners often sent men to sea in 'coffin' ships hoping to claim insurance.

Following the completion of the inquiry, the New York Sun of 12 March 1873 stated under the headline 'The Abandoned Ship' that the explanation was 'No Mutiny but a scheme to defraud the Insurance Company'. A reporter claimed that the Mary Celeste had been improperly cleared and sailed under false colours after leaving port. Reference is made to the proceedings of the inquiry about a ship or vessel 'supposed to be the Mary Celeste' . It seems unbelievable that those who boarded the Mary Celeste did not seem to identify the ship until they had boarded her. Was her name not painted on the stern? No evidence was given that she was flying the United States flag, and no mention is made of the flag in the detailed inventory.

The inquiry took such a long time that Captain Morehouse decided that his cargo should be delivered to Genoa. He put Deveau in charge of the De Gratia while he remained to fight the salvage claim. Deveau was of course one of the principal witnesses, whereas Morehouse had remained on the De Gratia. Although Deveau did return to Gibraltar this was not true of one of the crew who had boarded the Mary Celeste. He was said to have damaged his back while unloading in Genoa and was not fit to return. Flood was furious. He could not believe that the Mary Celeste had remained on course after being abandoned on 25 November. He was aware that Briggs and Morehouse were old friends. The Naval historian J. G. Lockhart has said that they dined together the night before the Mary Celeste left port. There would seem to be evidence to support some kind of insurance swindle.

The evidence to support a hasty abandonment of the ship seems even stronger. Missing from the abandoned ship were the chronometer and sextant, as well as a navigation book. The boat that had been lashed to the main hatch had been taken. Flood could not believe that an unmanned ship could have remained on course for eleven days. But what if the log had not been kept up to date? If the weather was bad the crew may have been so busy that they intended to make the log up later. Perhaps the skeleton crew on the Mary Celeste would not make up the log until they neared Gibraltar. All the evidence supports the idea that the Mary Celeste was abandoned in a hurry. Although the Captain's navigational instruments had been taken, the bulk of the crew's personal possessions had been left behind. This suggests a hasty leaving, or a belief that they would return, or both. It is likely that the small boat was attached to the Mary Celeste with the intention of returning when the immediate danger was over. We know that the ship's boat was not attached in the normal manner. We might guess that at some point the towing rope snapped, leaving the unfortunate occupants adrift in the open sea.

There are two theories to explain the sudden desertion of the larger ship. The most usual of these is that Captain Briggs feared an explosion might occur. The cargo of alcohol may have become volatile. This sometimes happened when ships of such type passed through varying temperatures. A process called 'dunnage' could occur, when ice melted in warmer temperature and released fumes. This was accompanied with loud crackling which might be mistaken for fire below. One hatch at least had been removed on the Mary Celeste; it may have been deliberately removed to allow fumes to escape, or been blown off. Captain Winchester supported the alcohol fumes theory, as did the widow of Captain Morehouse when quoting her dead husband's opinion in 1926.

Should it be thought unlikely that an experienced captain would leave a larger boat for the open seas in a small boat, it is interesting to consider that in 1919 the schooner Marion Douglas was abandoned off Newfoundland yet managed to cross the Atlantic, and was towed in for salvage after being found off the Scilly Isles. Even more recently, and more amazingly, a Greek tanker, on New Year's Eve 1978, was thought to be in trouble. Thirty-seven of the crew took to the boats and perished in the sea. Three members stayed on board and survived.

There is another point of interest. The mystery of the abandoned ship is older than the Mary Celeste. As we have today 'urban myths', so there are traditional myths of the sea. The Times of 6 November 1840 is said to have reported that a large French vessel, The Rosalie, was found abandoned by a coaster, on or about 26 August. The greater part of her sails were set and she did not seem to have sustained any damage. The cargo was still in perfect condition although there was about three feet of water in the hold. This is about the same as in the case of the Mary Celeste although this may well have been average for the typical sailing ship. There was a cat, some fowl, and a canary on board. Everything pointed to a hasty abandonment of the ship, no member of the crew being on board. The truth of this story may be doubtful but it does seem to indicate an earlier example of a myth which is later echoed by the Mary Celeste. The recent version was circulated by the indefatigable Charles Fort. Lawrence Kusche, in his The Bermuda Triangle Mystery –Solved, reveals that Lloyds of London could find no record of such an incident; nor could the Musee de la Marine in Paris.

Some myths owe their existence to imperfect technology. As Paul Chambers, author of a number of books about the paranormal, explains, the Martian 'canals' and the 'face on Mars' are two such. Higher-resolution telescopes and better quality photography showed these up for what they were: artefacts of the human ability to see patterns where none exist. Keep this in mind every time you see a TV show where the heroes apply fantasy 'computer enhancement' techniques to turn a few pixels of a fuzzy, low-resolution CCTV image into a high-resolution, zoomed in image that shows the words ivritten on a pill in someone's hand in ultra-sharp relief. Appeared in XII.3-4.

In April 1998 NASA's Mars Surveyor probe returned a number of high-resolution photographs taken of features on the northern Cydonia Plain of Mars. For over 20 years these photographs had been eagerly awaited by both occultists and astronomers and it was hoped that they might settle a long-running debate about whether an alien intelligence had left its mark on the surface of Mars. In the event, the new photographs not only settled this outstanding question, but also proved to be the final chapter in a modern story that shows a strange parallel to a similar debate that occurred over a hundred years ago.

Since the late 1970s a minor cult has developed around a series of photographs taken by the Mars Surveyor's predecessor, the Viking mission, which spent nearly six years mapping the Martian surface using two orbiting satellites. This cult is centred around a landform that was photographed by Viking on the northern Cydonia Plain of Mars. This feature resembles a human face and has been heralded as proof positive that extraterrestrial life once existed in our solar system. Indeed, the whole affair has become quite an industry which is collectively known as the 'face on Mars'.

The term canali, meaning waterway in Italian, was first used by Angelo Secchi in 1858 to describe a series of features on the Martian surface that he assumed to be large rivers or inland seas. In 1877, another Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, produced the first detailed map of Mars which included a number of dark straight lines that criss-crossed their way across the lighter regions of the planet. In common with Secchi, he believed them to be waterways and also called them canali. The canali caused much debate among the astronomy community of the time. English and Irish astronomers generally refused to believe in their reality, while Americans and continental Europeans not only believed in them, but spent hours trying to map them. At no point did anybody try to suggest that they were anything other than natural features, and it was not until 1894, when Boston businessman Percival Lowell took an interest, that they were connected with an extraterrestrial civilization.

Lowell, in common with many English-speaking astronomers, had mistranslated cattail into the word canal, which implied an artificial origin for the structures. Using an observatory that he had built himself in Arizona, Lowell set about mapping and measuring the canals. Within a year he had produced a book, Mars, linking the canals to a dying race of Martians who had built the canals to transport melt water from the planet's polar ice caps to more fertile ground around the equator. In subsequent books (Mars as the Abode for Life, Mars and its Canals) Lowell claimed to be able to see the seasonal spread of vegetation following the melt water down the canals and even the cities that the canals were feeding. Eventually, Lowell surmised that the transformation of Mars from a once exotic and watery world into a dying desert held an omen for the Earth which, he concluded, would one day end up as barren and desert-like as Mars.

He was also quite capable of changing his theories to suit the latest scientific opinion about Mars. For example, when it was discovered that the dark regions of Mars could not be vast oceans as was previously thought, his theory changed to make them dried-out ocean basins which had dark layers of vegetation growing in them. Lowell had many backers but, unfortunately for him, few of them were astronomers and many of them tried to steal his glory by coming up with more and more outrageous theories, particularly to do with contacting the Martians, until no astronomer would touch the issue with a barge pole.

The end of the canals came about due to a combination of things. One of these was Lowell's claim to have seen structures similar to the canals on Venus –something that was blatantly impossible due to the high temperatures there. Shortly after this, in 1900, Edward Maunder and John Evans devised an experiment which proved that when a series of loosely spread dots on a sheet of card were viewed from a distance they joined together to form canal-like networks. After this it was quickly realized that the poor optical quality of telescopes was causing smaller features on Mars, such as canyons and craters, to join up to give the impression of canals. This was confirmed in 1965 when Mariner IV sent back the first pictures of the Martian surface with not a canal or Martian to be seen.

In 1976, ninety-nine years after Schiaparelli published his canali map, the Viking orbiter returned a picture of the northern Cydonia Plain to Earth. A NASA technician noticed that one of the features on the plain resembled a human face and, with NASA ever keen to generate publicity for its costly ventures, the photograph was released to the press as a curio. Very quickly, rumours started up about the face that linked it to pyramid-shaped features to the west of it. To scotch the rumours NASA acted quickly, claiming that the face had been photographed from a different angle and was nothing more than a hill.

The issue was dropped until, in 1982, two engineers searched all 68,000 Viking photographs looking for further evidence of the face. They found seven in total (two high-resolution, five low-resolution), all of which showed the face as it had first been published in 1976. Although this was probably because the angle of the sun was approximately the same when these photographs were taken, they wrote a book linking the face to ancient Egypt. As with the canals, it took a flamboyant publicist to move the issue of the face from relative obscurity into the public domain.

In a scenario that seems to draw much from Arthur C. Clark's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hoagland declared that the Cydonia landforms were built 500,000 years ago by a race of transient aliens who had left a message for humanity in their ruins. By drawing straight lines between the Cydonia landforms, Hoagland found a geometric significance in the angles between them and deduced that the ruins were indicating that the latitude of 19.5° (the latitude that corresponds with the intersection of three vertices of a polar-oriented tetrahedron and its circumsphere) was significant. On this latitude on Mars is Olympus Mons, the solar system's largest volcano, while on Earth can be found the Hawaiian volcano chain. On other planets this latitude was associated with features such as Jupiter's Red Spot and the Great Dark Spot of Neptune. Hoagland now believes that this latitude marks the location of a vortex that can provide the Earth with infinite power once we have learned how to utilize it. In the meantime, the face on Mars bandwagon is rolling on with the feature now being linked to ancient astronauts, government conspiracies, and, most bizarre, proof that Elvis has visited Mars! I won't comment on David Percy's assertion that the features on the Cydonia Plain match those of the Avebury Circle – or Eric Crew's assertion that they form a map of our solar system.

The similarities between the two episodes are quite uncanny, something that owes more to the stupidity of human nature than any supernatural synchronicity. For a start, the controversy behind both began almost exactly one hundred years apart and look set to be resolved nearly one hundred years apart as well. Each case was initiated by an announcement from an astronomer that was picked up by amateur pseudoscientists and interpreted as being evidence of life on Mars. This was then taken, reinforced with further, less convincing evidence (for example, the seasonal spread of vegetation with the canals and the pyramids near the face), and then heavily promoted to the general public in a series of books and lectures by a highly charismatic personality who claimed to have the backing of science but in fact did not. Once in the public domain, the issue was added to by other interested parties until what was originally a simple astronomical observation ended up reading like a Hollywood science fiction script. The canals went from being rivers to a vast network of artificial waterways and cities feeding a dying planet, while the face went from being an amusing example of simulacra to evidence of an ancient race of aliens trying to communicate their secrets to humanity using planetary geometry

Perhaps the reason behind the similarity in the rise to prominence of both issues is the rather hazy nature of their evidence. The canals were only ever viewed distantly through telescopes and, although the issue was effectively resolved by 1900, their existence could not be fully denied until Mariner IV visited the planet in 1965. A major problem with the canals was that not everybody could see them. In order to overcome difficulties people were having in seeing and interpreting the canals, Lowell and others would draw endless maps of them that were very subjective – impossibly detailed given the quality of telescopes at the time.

Similarly, the landform that makes the face on Mars is only 1.8 km in diameter and at the edge of the Viking's photographic resolution. On the original photographs the face is a very blurred and indistinct feature whose interpretation is open to question. Many of the other features on the Cydonia Plain, including the city, Tholus, and the D and M pyramid are smaller than the face and even more out-of-focus. To overcome this, many computer enhancements have been made of that region of the Cydonia Plain which have sharpened the shadow boundaries, increased the contrast, lessened the grain, and filled in details missing on the original photographs. All of this makes the images look sharper and gives the landforms straighter lines and darker shadows and therefore makes them look more artificial.

Subsequent attempts to remove the shadows and to alter the angle of view of the face are computer-generated reconstructions which, considering the limited of amount information in the original Viking photographs, have little basis in fact, although many people still view the results of statistical analyses as being definite conclusions, which they most certainly are not. Statistics, particularly multi-variate techniques such as fractal analysis, are designed to help researchers look at specific areas of their data more closely, not to give definite answers. In the case of the Cydonia analysis, this means that the fact that Mark Carlotto's fractal analysis highlighted the face and other features does not mean that they are artificial, but merely that they fit the criteria laid down in the algorithm of the original computer program. Also, it is unusual that the fractal analysis does not highlight any of the meteorite craters that litter the Cydonia Plain. Being perfectly circular, these should achieve a high score using fractal analysis but do not. Apart, that is, from one small and rather unremarkable crater that Carlotto calls 'the bowl', and which, he feels, may have some similarities to 'a Mesoamerican pyramid'.

In addition to enhancing their visual evidence, the supporters of both the canals and the face have used mathematics as a means of reinforcing their theories. Percival Lowell added thick appendices to his books on Mars, which were stuffed full of mathematical equations that, according to him, proved everything from the rate of cooling for all the planets to the composition and pressure of the Martian atmosphere. Almost without exception, everything Lowell calculated has now been proved wrong.

In order for his canals to exist, Lowell needed his equations to prove that Mars was a habitable planet. Since then, however, the large amount of data sent back by the Viking, Pathfinder, and other probes showed Mars to be an inhospitable place with sub-zero temperatures, a thin atmosphere with no ultra-violet screening and, most importantly, no liquid water. As supporters of the face are using NASA data, they cannot argue that the surface of Mars is currently a pleasant place to live. How, then, could there be a living alien civilization up there now? To overcome this, Hoagland used astronomical alignments to calculate that the face was built 500,000 years ago and that its builders had left geometric clues in the landscape.

Hoagland's use of geometry on the Cydonia Plain is interesting. It should be obvious to anybody that using straight lines to join random features on a map will produce geometric shapes. Join any three objects and you get a triangle, superimpose geometrical shapes onto non-linear landforms (such as a pentagon that was superimposed on the so-called 'D and M pyramid') and you end up with rigid geometrical shapes on paper where none exist on the planet's surface. Geometry, after all, is a branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of lines, curves, and surfaces and therefore once you have geometrical shapes it is relatively easy to find a mathematical significance within them. The latitude of the sites, so highly regarded by Hoagland, is also a function of planetary geometry and again it is easy to find mathematical significance in them.

Why is the use of mathematics so crucial to both the canals and face? The probable answer is because it appears to add independent scientific evidence to the arguments and because these theories are difficult for a non-mathematician to argue against. Many areas of the paranormal are shored up with apparently complex theories that use quantum physics, mathematics, or genetics that non-specialists find hard to argue against. If, however, a specialist does place convincing arguments against a paranormal theory they can always be accused of being part of the international scientific conspiracy against extraterrestrial intelligence. In the case of the face, the nature of the published evidence makes it hard to verify the mathematical claims and Mark Carlotto even wrote in his section on mathematics, 'Please note that the diagrams in this section are included for illustrative purposes only, and are not sufficiently precise to serve as a basis for testing the claims presented here.'

In the 1890s, at the height of the public interest in the canals, five mediums (independently of each other) claimed to have mentally visited Mars or to have spoken to Martians. Without exception, they reported a desert world inhabited by a dying race of aliens, some of whom were building canals to try and save themselves. These descriptions are identical to those then being promoted by Percival Lowell in his best-selling books on the canals on Mars.

One hundred years later, in the 1990s, we have a similar group of psychics, now called remote viewers, who claim to have visited Mars and in particular the Cydonia Plain. This time they have not found any trace of the canals or dying aliens, but instead large pyramids 'laid out in a specific geometric pattern' that were built by beings that were 'moving through our solar system and had to move onto a different location'. These are pretty accurate descriptions of Hoagland's (and others') theories concerning the face. In other words, the mediums and remote viewers are merely reflecting contemporary occult thinking about life on Mars.

Like the canals in their day, the face on Mars affair is rapidly gathering more and more unsubstantiated and esoteric theories, making it a scientifically untouchable subject. Negative attention meant that debate about the canals was abandoned by the astronomical community and the subject was left to amateurs and pseudoscientists. The same is now true of the face with few, if any, planetary scientists even bothering to comment on the issue at all.

Some have already claimed that NASA has conspired to remove vital information from the Mars Surveyor photographs, but most, to be frank, have simply ignored the newer photographs in favour of the older Viking ones. In 1998, Graham Hancock produced the number one bestseller The Mars Mystery, which, despite hastily added comments about the Mars Surveyor results, advocates alien intervention in human affairs. Fuelled by Hancock's success, a new generation of Mars books followed in 1999.