part0011

Sometimes, ideas fall out of fashion because they've been thoroughly debunked. Crop circles, for example, got a lot less interesting when Doug Bower and Dave Chorley confessed to making many (if not most) of the most famously mysterious formations. In other cases, such as spirit photography and physical mediumship, more widespread familiarity with the technology they rely on dates them as quickly as the computer-generated special effects in a 1990s movie.

In the late 1980s to early 1990s, crop circles were an annual summer phenomenon, practically tailor-made for a press hungry each year for stories to fill space during the 'silly season'. Every year the circles got more elaborate –and in response so did the theories attempting to explain them. Martin Hempstead, a physicist and member of the Wessex Skeptics, was one of an indefatigable team who tried to make sense of the phenomenon in the midst of all the media excitement. By the summer of 1991, the Wessex Skeptics had become frustrated with the group's lack of progress at debunking cerealogists' increasingly wild theories about the circles' origin, and decided to take matters into their own hands. This account is taken from a much longer talk Hempstead gave at the fundraising dinner at the third Euroskeptics Congress, held in Amsterdam in 1991, only a few weeks after Doug Bower and Dave Chorley admitted they'd made many or most of the best-known formations. By 1994 it was possible to write the history of the crop circle phenomenon as a hoax, although it took some years longer for interest to fade. Probably no one misses the theories about intelligent plasma vortices or extraterrestrial origins, but there's one thing about crop circles almost no other paranormal phenomenon can say for itself: they sure made great photographs. Appeared in VIII.1-2.

Impatient with our lack of progress, in the summer of 1991 we finally decided on a high-risk strategy. This was to hoax our own circles, and see if the experts could tell the difference. This was high-risk, because failure might prove nothing more than our own incompetence, yet discredit the skeptical viewpoint.

First we had to practise the techniques. With the assistance of National Geographic, visiting England to make a film about crop circles, we rented a field from a friendly farmer (a rare commodity in Wiltshire these days) and made a pictogram. In broad daylight, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. We were buzzed by planes, helicopters, and microlites. Even this level of observation did not stop certain members of the Centre for Crop Circle Studies from declaring it genuine – in fact one gentleman did so when overflying it a couple of days later. Other members, while aware the main pattern was artificial, became convinced that a ring had appeared mysteriously some time later outside our main circle. Furthermore, this ring was said, darkly, to be 'too narrow to be made by trampling'. In fact, it was made just that way, and only minutes after the main circle. I am still not sure that we have convinced them all that we made it!

What were our techniques? Mostly simple and obvious ones, really. A bit of string held by a central person while another described a circle. Trampling. Sticks and rollers to lay the corn. Sighting on a distant object to make the straight corridors. We found that it was not especially difficult to get through the corn without leaving a trail, particularly if you walk along the seed lines and turn around every metre or so to re-entangle the plants by brushing them gently with a stick. We concluded that a garden roller was the best tool, since if used with care it would lay the corn without unnecessary damage. We determined to try again, this time for real.

Fortunately, we were successful, though not at first. Our first attempt was thrilling, and performed without the farmer's permission (we did send the farmer compensation anonymously a week or two later). We wanted to see if hoaxing was possible under the pressure of fear of being caught; we also wanted to avoid asking a farmer to lie, as he or she would need to do if the test were to be effectively blind to the experts. We picked a field on top of a hill near Marlborough. It was a beautiful, crisp night, and the sky was clear with a full moon. Every sound frightened us. Many cars passed, causing us to spend much of our time crouching down in fear of detection. We got hot, tired, and frustrated – our chosen field was muddy and had very deep tramlines. We changed our plans, dropping our elaborate pattern and doing just a huge circle with a ring and a small circle some way off. And we were rumbled – a car stopped! Some people got out, but they soon left, and we thought we had got away with it. Only later did we discover we had been spotted. As we squatted in the damp at the edge of the field, waiting for our getaway car we were filled with undeserved euphoria at our imagined success. It truly was a beautiful night, and we were rewarded for our endeavours by the sound of a female fox screaming its chilling, almost human, cry.

Even though we were discovered by circle watchers, and word got around very fast, we were not stopped or apprehended, which was interesting in itself. Some members of CCCS did not get the news in time, and declared the circle genuine. Many members of the public were impressed, and a few unwitting dowsers found their rods stirring.

Why crop circles should dowse is unclear – something to do with earth energies or ill-defined electromagnetic anomalies, apparently. I have witnessed the replication problems of the dowsing technique at first hand. At Alton Barnes last year, I watched with some amusement as a couple of dowsers compared notes in one of the circles. The woman had found a distinct vortex, and her rods were whirling to back her up, whereas the man had found the same spot to be devoid of activity, and his pendulum hung limply. That dowsing is so heavily implicated in circles 'research' is just a symptom of the subjective nature of these investigations.

But I digress. Chastened with failure, not because our circle had failed to meet the experts' criteria but rather because they were not forced to work blind, we were a bit lacking in eagerness to try again. But the despondency soon passed, and we started plotting again. We were to be filmed for the TV program Equinox, and we decided to get the permission of a farmer this time. We were lucky enough to find just the man we needed – someone who would be willing to dissemble to all and sundry and be convincing with it!

Once again, things started off badly and moved further and further from our well-laid plans. We had scouted the terrain beforehand, checked the tramlines and prepared an appropriate plan. But when we got there, we found that much of the field had, ironically, been laid low by wind damage, and we had to redesign fast. Our problems were doubled when the TV crew did not maintain an appropriate demeanour for the situation; they barged through the corn, interviewing us as we worked and flooding the field in light. Since Wiltshire was infested with circle spotters, we were sure we would be found out. As if to make sure that even if the TV crew failed to give the game away, word would still get out, we accidentally left some string in the field. Fortunately, the farmer removed this the next morning.

We were again despondent; one of us had laid the corn the wrong way, pointing towards the centre of the circle, and the TV crew had trampled through the corn. We were sure that we had made a crude hoax, and that nobody would be fooled by it. Boy, were we wrong! We were still guilty of overestimating the objectivity of the experts.

It took a while for the experts to find it, because it wasn't visible from the road, but within two weeks we had proven that it was possible to mislead the experts, including some who had so far remained immune from the taint of error. Busty Taylor of CCCS found it genuine, and emphasized the departure of the large central pattern from true circularity as the mark of authenticity.

Terence Meaden, who had publicly resisted the possibility that he could be mistaken in his judgement of circles, not only found our fabrication credible, but that it 'fit perfectly the scientific theory I have been putting forward for the last ten years', and was '100 percent genuine'. He stressed how many hoaxes he had seen, and marvelled at the classic layering patterns (another mark of authenticity, according to the experts). He was interviewed in the circle, and brought reporters to see it. A medium flown in from Paris by a producer from Paramount found the energies overwhelming – she developed a headache and had to leave. Dowsers' tools went wild in the circle. (Of course, we can't deny that a lot of psychic energy may well have been trapped in the circle – there was quite a lot of cursing and swearing the night we made it!)

This was not the first time the experts had been misled – Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews had several times in the past been wrong in their claims that circles are genuine – but it was the first that we knew of for Terence Meaden, and proved that the features alleged to be impossible to simulate were in fact quite easy to reproduce. We are now of the firm opinion that there is no substance to the experts' claims that they can distinguish a category of circles for which hoaxing is impossible.

Admittedly, we have never entered a 'fresh' circle, one that has had no sightseers. We have been told by Meaden of a complete absence of collateral damage in these cases. If this is true, we could probably not reproduce them with our present techniques. We always found a small number of damaged plants, in which the stalk was bent in more than one place. On the other hand, damaged plants do not prove hoaxing – in one field, for example, we observed that even in stands of fresh corn some of the plants were damaged. Moreover, it is always possible to remove them, if one is sufficiently patient.

So this was the situation at the end of August 1991– we knew that the experts could be fooled and had, as far as we could tell, no method for reliably distinguishing 'true' circles. We had preliminary evidence that crop circles had not existed for very long. We also knew that our organizational skills needed a little polishing!

When the Turin Shroud was put on display in Turin Cathedral in 1978 more than 3.5 million pilgrims flocked to see it. In 1988, the Holy See agreed to permit the shroud to be independently carbon-dated by three teams, in Oxford, Zurich, and Arizona. The results indicated clearly that the shroud is a piece of linen woven between AD 1260 and 1390, dates that match the shroud's first known public appearances. Most skeptics consider that the image on the shroud of an apparently crucified man was unambiguously proved to be a medieval forgery, albeit one clever enough to form a lasting image with some of the properties of a photographic negative. Others, however, continue to argue that the shroud is between thirteen hundred and three thousand years old. Two weeks before the official 1988 announcement of the carbon-dating results, Steve Donnelly interviewed Joe Nickell, a research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and author of Inquest on the Shroud of Turin, for the BBC Radio 4 programme Science Now. This is an edited transcript. Appeared in 11.6.

SD: The aspect of the shroud which is in the news at the moment is the carbon dating, but what I'd like to talk about are the various hypotheses which have been put forward to explain the image. The reason for this is that, assuming that the question of the dating has been settled, I think the question in everybody's mind is going to be, how did the image get there if it wasn't by miraculous means at the time of Christ? Could you tell us a little about the various hypotheses that have been put up over the decades or over the centuries to account for the image?

JN: Of course, the shroud first came to light in the Middle Ages and the earliest report is a bishop's report to Pope Clement that the forger had been found, and had confessed, and so the earliest claims are that the shroud image was cunningly painted. But when the shroud was first photographed by Secondo Pia in 1898 it was found that the darks and lights on the negative were reversed. That is to say that when you looked at the glass plate negative you saw a positive rather than a negative image, and so the modern era of shroud studies really began there with people asking how it could be possible for a forger to produce a photographic negative in the Middle Ages. Actually, the question is a little bit of a bogus one because it isn't a true photographic negative. There are blank spaces in the image that would not be in a photographic image. Also the colour of the hair is reversed, so that in a positive image Jesus looks like a white haired and white bearded old man. But putting that aside, the earliest obvious theory that would be consistent with the shroud being genuine was that it was simply an imprint made from the body being covered with the burial spices myrrh and aloes, and that this had caused an imprint on the shroud. The problem is, as I've found by experimenting along those lines, that you get a severe wraparound distortion .

JN: It is a mapping type problem, yes, and it is such a severe problem there is no way of getting around it. Also, people realized later that there were places which had been imprinted which would not have been touched by a draped cloth. So a fellow named Paul Vignon suggested that there must have been some form of imprinting across a distance. He postulated the so-called vaporograph theory which included the notion that body vapours – weak ammonia vapours from morbid body sweat – might have interacted with the burial spices on the cloth to produce a so-called vapour photo.

JN: Right. In fact I experimented with that technology. I used a sculpture, coated it with ammonia, and used a cloth treated with phenolphthalein and draped it over, and of course what I got is what most scientists could extrapolate would happen – a big blur. And that theory has been negated now and no one pays any attention to it. Then, because of the faint brown or sepia colour of the image, which is approximately the colour of a scorch, people suggested that maybe it was caused by a burst of radiant energy at the moment of resurrection. The problem with that is that the image on the cloth is very superficial. It does not penetrate through the fibres to the back of the cloth. And while this was used to argue that it was not a painting it also argues against radiation because there is no radiation known that would travel the varying distances from body to cloth, and as soon as it hit the cloth drop to zero.

JN: That's right. But also, there are problems with the fact that the image would really have to be focused in order to get an image that's not blurred and distorted. What one is doing when one goes down that path is just invoking a miracle. And so the question then is whether there is any reason to invoke a miracle. Is the prima facie evidence of a nature that we should give up other explanations? And my position is that we know from a body of evidence that the shroud was produced by an artist in the Middle Ages.

JN: An earlier series of tests was done by a once-secret commission which later produced a report, although it has been very difficult for people to obtain copies of the original report. But we do know that they took threads out of the shroud from the so-called blood-stained areas and these went to forensic laboratories in which internationally known forensic experts tested them using all the standard tests, then the more specific tests for blood an d

blood compounds, and the fibres failed all those tests. The Church authorities did not like this, apparently, so they issued a rebuttal report, but later the Shroud of Turin Research Project visited Turin and they lifted sticky tape samples from the fibres just by placing the tape on the cloth, peeling it off and mounting these on microscope slides. The samples were first analysed at the world-renowned McCrone forensic laboratories in Chicago. Immediately, they found traces of various substances identifiable as paint pigments. They found red iron oxide of a type used in the pigment red ochre and smaller amounts of vermilion and rose madder.

JN: Right. Even some pro-shroud analysts found traces of the vermilion but much smaller traces than McCrone. One of the big questions was whether that red iron oxide was primarily on the image area or not. McCrone's results, in a blind study, demonstrated that the iron oxide was on the image areas and very little on the off-image areas. McCrone then took the view that the image was a painting. I have a problem with that viewpoint because again the body image is superficial and does not soak through the cloth whereas the so-called blood areas do soak through. Later tests after McCrone (although by pro-shroud people which makes a bit of a problem for objectivity) seem to have found that there is very little pigment or very little iron oxide, and that what you see as a body image is really just a yellowing of the cloth. So what I think might have happened is that a powdered pigment was rubbed onto the fibres and over time that has caused a yellowing just by its presence on there. That is, by being slightly acidic it has stained the cloth over time and most of the powder has been sloughed off.

SD: You have written a book entitled Inquest on the Shroud of Turin on your investigations into the shroud, and in the book you write about a type of rubbing technique which you have used to produce an image very similar to the shroud image. Can you tell me a bit about this and whether you feel that a medieval forger would have had the skill required to produce such an image?

JN: Joe Nickell, master forger! Well, when I began to realize that wraparound distortion was a problem, and when I found out about the lack of history, the forger's confession, and so forth, and also the presence of some reddish granules –although at that time we didn't know what they were – I began to seriously consider the possibility of artistry. I had eliminated contact imprinting. I had eliminated vaporography. The miraculous theory, of course, could not be tested and I felt was not yet warranted until we had tried everything. So I then took the other category of possible solutions – artistry – and began to work on it. Immediately, it occurred to me that a full three-dimensional sculpture would not work. But there did seem to be evidence that it was not a painting and that it did have three-dimensional information – there have been microdensitometer tracings and other studies that show that the darks and lights of the image are consistent with some kind of three-dimensional form .

JN: Right. There was no evidence of capillary action where there would be a soaking of a fluid medium into the fibres of the shroud except in the blood areas. There also were no brush marks, and of course there was the phenomenon of light and dark reversal which would be another unusual characteristic for a painting. And there were other indications. For example, there were various flaws in the image that were interesting. There were the blank spaces we talked about earlier and a number of things that indicated to me that we might be dealing with some kind of imprinting technique from a bas-relief – a low sculpted relief, not a full three-dimensional relief, but not a flat plate like an engraving. So my first experiments were to try to make an actual print by coating the bas-relief and pressing cloth to it.

JN: Well, that was the next step. Printing was a possible technique but it had some serious drawbacks. So I then tried a technique, as you pointed out, analogous to brass rubbing except that usually we put a paper on a flat surface and rub it. In this case, I was using cloth and a curved form, but by wetting the cloth and moulding it to the bas-relief I was able to form the cloth to the relief, rather like a mask. Then when the cloth was thoroughly dry I took a dauber and some powdered pigment and rubbed it on carefully in strokes. When I did this the dauber hit the prominences and left the recesses blank, and since the prominences in a positive image, like a face, are in highlight, my technique produced the prominences as dark areas. So it made a systematic quasi-negative image just like the shroud image. It had the darks and lights reversed, the hair was still white in the positive image, there were blank spaces and tonal gradations, and, in all, there were some thirty points of similarity between my images and the shroud images at the visual or macroscopic level and even at the microscopic level. The only differences, I believe, are those due to the effects of six hundred years, during which time the image would be expected to have yellowed the cloth and most of the powdered pigment would have sloughed off.

JN: I have a very high degree of confidence. It is very unlikely, in my thinking, that the shroud is an ordinary painting. There are serious problems with that, although there are ways around the difficulties. For example, if you wanted the pigment not to soak into the cloth you could give the cloth a coat of a sealer of some kind. The problem there is, why would you have the blood areas soaking through? Why would parts of it soak through and parts not? But it is also very difficult for a person to paint a negative image. It's easy enough to copy one if you have one in front of you. In other words, an artist can look at the shroud and copy it but, you see, he is sort of cheating becaus e

he has a negative already made for him to copy. It's harder to take a positive image and translate it into a negative, whereas my technique does it automatically. And then I would point out that the technique I used duplicates a number of these very particular flaws and peculiar characteristics, and while those might be imitated by a counterfeiter, the question would arise, why would you put these particular distortions, faults, and flaws in? Whereas the answer for me for my technique is because that's what my technique does. It just naturally produces them – blank spaces for example.

JN: Yes, you see, when we look at an ordinary photographic negative we're looking at colours like brown hair which is dark because of its colour. But when we make a rubbing from a bas-relief, that which is raised will be dark, regardless. So the hair becomes dark on the original image but light on the apparently positive photographic negative, so there is that reversal of form. Now it may be that an artist, since rubbings were beginning to become common during the Middle Ages, had studied some rubbings and then did a painting imitating them. I would point out too that there is evidence that the shroud image was once much darker than it is now. So it does appear that the image is losing pigment over time and so the problem is that when we try to figure out exactly what the artist did there is so little left of the original painting or printing that all we have is a residual stain and that does complicate it. Plus the fact that skeptical people with artistic training have really not been allowed access to it.

SD: Given the results of the carbon dating that seem to indicate clearly that the shroud dates back to the fourteenth century and not the first century, and given your findings on a fairly convincing method by which the shroud may have been forged, do you think this will kill forever speculation about the authenticity of the shroud?

JN: Well, it's difficult to say. There may be some really pathological believers who simply can't accept what everyone else will be able to accept. But when you look at the totality of the evidence, and you look at the age of the cloth, which is now apparently established with a very high degree of accuracy as the same time as the forger's confession, and you realize that this is supported by the lack of historical record, the method of wrapping the body which is contrary to Jewish burial practice, and the evidence from the paint pigment, the fact is that, although we may disagree slightly about the method of artistic simulation, the skeptics have maybe too many techniques on their side whereas the believers have none. And so the evidence is just overwhelming and if all issues were this clear life would be much simpler .

The early 1970s tales of anthropology PhD candidate Carlos Castaneda's interactions with Don Juan, a mystical teacher he supposedly encountered in Mexico's Sonora Desert, were very widely read – and almost as widely believed, at least as spiritual metaphor if not in literal detail. Many may have wondered whether Castaneda, writing in the first person, had actually accessed new realms of perception while learning magic and the way of a warrior from Don Juan. Few questioned whether Don Juan existed. Unlike Castaneda's publishers or doctoral committee, Robert McGrath, a computer scientist in Urbana, Illinois, with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in anthropology and psychology, was one of those few. Appeared in VII.2.

Those definitely were the days. I remember it well: in the spring of 1972, my first real college seminar. The topic was 'Contemporary Issues in Anthropological Theory'. Present were one professor, a half-dozen seniors and graduate students, and one precocious sophomore – myself. One of the readings was the controversial new book The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda. In my paper, I firmly declared the book to be fiction. The more mature scholars were less certain and more cautious. My judgement that day was based on general skepticism and, I would like to think, good taste in literature. Imagine my pleasure years later when I discovered that I was absolutely correct in my estimate, and that it would be shared by many. Enough brilliant guesses like that and people will think I'm a genius!

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda, and its many sequels claim to be a report of the experiences of an anthropologist who, during the early 1960s, established himself as the student of a shaman. 'Don Juan', the shaman, is said to be a Yaqui Indian from Sonora, Mexico. The narrative is presented in dialogues and first-person reports of the anthropologist's experiences. And such experiences! As an apprentice shaman, 'Carlos' is introduced to magic rituals and the entire world view of Don Juan. The rituals included smoking powdered hallucinogenic mushrooms, the experience of which is vividly recounted. Besides drug trips, Don Juan teaches much 'ancient wisdom' of the 'warrior's way', about 'power', 'stalking', 'enemies', 'luminous beings', and other wonders to be encountered in 'non-ordinary reality'. If the narrative is to be believed, Don Juan has access to realms of perception and action unknown to Western science.

If this book were presented as fiction or as allegory it would be a remarkable document. However, it is said to be based on actual anthropological observations, and field notes are supposed to exist documenting the story. Furthermore, Castaneda was awarded a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) for this work. With the seeming scientific validity of the story, the book has been hailed by college students and the counter-culture, and also saluted and praised by the establishment media. Many anthropologists and other scholars have embraced the book, it has been cited and used as a textbook, and the Goddess only knows how many theses and term papers have been written about the book and its sequels. They have sold millions of copies in the 'anthropology' section of bookstores, and are catalogued in libraries under 'Yaqui Indians – Religion and Mythology'.

But, there have been skeptics. There are always skeptics. In particular, many anthropologists are skeptical of the work, especially those with knowledge of psycho-pharmacology, the Sonora Desert, or the Yaqui Indians. These skeptics found Castaneda's work incorrect, impossible, and derivative.

One of the most convincing skeptical studies of the 'Carlos Castaneda' affair is The Don Juan Papers. Edited by Richard de Mille, this is a collection of essays and commentary on the Don Juan books, the hoax that they represent, and its implications. About half the book is written by de Mille himself and the balance by other authors. If this book had simply debunked the Don Juan tale as a scientific hoax, it would rank as one of the great books of skeptical inquiry ever. But de Mille has done much, much more than that. He investigates not only the Castaneda books, but Castaneda himself, how and why the hoax was successful, the nature of skepticism and belief, the relation of religion and science, the psychology and sociology of science, and, I regret to say, a case of serious scientific misconduct.

Let's begin at the beginning. The Teachings of Don Juan (and the books which followed) is presented as a report of ethnographic field research. However, the raw field notes have never been published, nor have they been made available to other investigators. Nor, indeed, were they ever seen by most of the members of Castaneda's doctoral committee.

The contributors to The Don Juan Papers show conclusively that the field notes have not been seen because the fieldwork could not have occurred. The evidence is overwhelming that Castaneda's 'fieldwork' was done in the stacks of the UCLA library. The description of the desert, its wildlife, and even the mushrooms that figure so heavily in the story are all flat wrong. 'Don Juan' knows few words of Yaqui (and misuses those) and the teachings are a mishmash of Zen, Wittgenstein, and other philosophies that have nothing at all to do with any Native American culture, let alone the Yaquis. In fact, de Mille traces dozens of sources used, including real ethnographies, works of social science, philosophy, metaphysics, occultism, and Edgar Allen Poe.

If Castaneda had simply produced a collage of borrowed texts, the story would end there. But he is no simple plagiarist. For one thing, he cleverly twists his sources to slightly disguise them. For another, his books are artfully constructed to look just like a real ethnographic report, and they have been taken as such by many. Castaneda's books are not parody, they are allegory De Mille claims that there is not one single word of truth in the books, that there is no kernel of fact, and that they are pure artifice. They are, if de Mille is correct, an elegant and exquisite anthropological hoax, perhaps the biggest since Piltdown Man.

To understand the Piltdown hoax one must understand the palaeontology, anthropology, and nationalist rivalries of the time. To make sense of the Don Juan hoax it is necessary to have a similar background of academic social science and popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. The Don Juan Papers provides part of this understanding, but as a nearly contemporary response to the hoax some of the story it tells may be difficult to follow it you weren't 'there' yourself. Besides providing the crucial debunking of the fake fieldwork, the contributors to The Don Juan Papers discuss the credulity and outright misbehaviour (de Mille calls it 'Sonoragate') of Castaneda's publishers, and his academic and popular supporters. The collection contains some 'conversion' documents – comments by people who once believed Don Juan and his teachings were literally true and now realize that they were fooled. These documents are interesting because they provide insight into why people believed Castaneda so easily, and fascinating for the fact that so many still value the teachings even after admitting that they are a blatant and dishonest fraud.

Another vital contribution of The Don Juan Papers is the 'debunking' of Castaneda himself. Not only are his books fabrications, but his entire life is concealed behind lies. This in itself is not that unusual, but Castaneda's lies are of a special sort: he is amazingly adept at mirroring back a person's expectations, so that each one who talks to him sees only their own conceptions 'reflected' back to them. De Mille has called Castaneda 'the Rorschach man', after the ink blot test. The Don Juan Papers documents what little is known about Castaneda's 'real' life and builds a (somewhat sad) profile of the psychology of a master hoaxer. This part of the story is, for me, even more interesting than unmasking the hoax, and vastly more interesting than the Don Juan books themselves.

The Don Juan books were a founding influence on the 'new shamanism' and are much beloved of poets, neo-pagans, and many New-Agers. Spin-offs and rip-offs have sprung up. I have even read that there is a man who 'channels' Don Juan, producing new teachings never heard by 'Carlos'. What, indeed, hath Carlos wrought ?

'Britain's Roswell', people like to call it. At 3 am on 26 December 1980, three American servicemen patrolling near the joint RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge base saw mysterious lights in Rendlesham Forest. The lights were seen again the next night. Of all British UFO sightings, this one was by far the most celebrated , and the proximity to the military base and lack of an immediate explanation put Rendlesham on the front pages of the tabloids. Astronomy writer Ian Ridpath (who has posted many documents concerning the case on his site at www.ianridpath.com) and forester Vincent Thirkettle were the first to propose the explanation that the lights the servicemen saw were, surprisingly, the beam of the Orford Ness lighthouse six miles away. Ridpath's explanation was greeted with considerable skepticism, even ridicule, by UFOlogists (some of whom accused him of conjuring up 'flying lighthouses'), but a personal visit with Ridpath to Rendlesham in the mid-1990s showed clearly that the open winter landscape coupled with the shape of the terrain make it not only possible but the most likely explanation.

The 1987 Channel 4 documentary Is There Anybody There?, produced by Karl Sabbagh, examined the Rendlesham case and demonstrated persuasively how confusing and spooky lights can look at night in an unfamiliar location. But it wasn't until the early 2000s that documents came to light that made it plain that Ridpath and Thirkettle were right. James Easton, an investigative journalist and feature writer for Fortean Times, made public not only those documents but also personal information from Kevin Conde, who said that some aspects of the sightings – mysterious lights – were part of a hoax he perpetrated using multi-coloured lights on a car driven slowly through the fog.

In 2004, The Skeptic ran a special issue on Rendlesham that included three long articles putting (we hope) the case to rest. In the first, Easton laid out the evidence he had developed; this piece also appeared in Fortean Times. Easton has since disappeared from, the scene and the websites he maintained on the subject have vanished, but you can still access his information via the Fortean Times site, the Internet Archive, and Ridpath's site.

A second article came from well-known UFOlogist and book author Jenny Randles, who recounted the long, slow process of investigating the case and dissected the more sensationalist claims made about it. Among other points, Randles noted that it is often not in the interests of UFOlogists to solve the biggest UFO mysteries. Skeptics typically only become involved after the cases have made headlines; by contrast, she first became involved in investigating Rendlesham in early 1981, when the story was still just secondhand rumours. It was not until late 1983, when the story landed on the front page of the News of the World, that Rendlesham became widely known. Randles has written two books and a lengthy chapter about Rendlesham.

Randles also lays out some rules for investigating UFOs that might surprise some skeptics. As many as 95 percent of UFOs have prosaic explanations, she writes; therefore, UFOlogists should approach cases with the assumption that ultimately it will be solved and start with the simplest possible explanation.

The third article, which follows here, talks about two aspects of Rendlesham that are less well documented. David Clarke, a teacher in the School of English at the University of Sheffield and author of a number of books on aspects of supernatural belief and contemporary legend, particularly UFO mythology, asks why UFOlogists remain so willing to believe in a government cover-up. Appeared in XVII.2-3.

There are two basic categories of UFO lore: alien abductions and conspiracies. Central to UFO lore is belief in a conspiracy by 'the Government' – and primarily those of the USA and UK – to withhold the 'secret truth' from the general public. This 'truth' being an admission that the authorities have proof of the alien presence on earth, in the form of the wreckage of a spacecraft and the bodies of its crew. The ultimate expression of this modern legend is the Roswell incident, but the idea of an official coverup has become widespread in popular culture. The 'landed Martians' is such a well-known story that it was included in Professor Jan Brunvand's list of modern legends about governments in his book The Choking Doberman.

Brunvand says he received a lot of angry letters for comparing UFO coverups with urban legends. Indeed, many 'serious UFOlogists' are horrified at attempts to study these stories as the modern equivalents of fairy tales and ancient legends. However, there are similarities between UFO cover-up narratives and modern legends such as the vanishing hitchhiker: stories heard as rumour and gossip. Those who pass on the story believe it really happened to a friend of a friend, and the story is given immediacy and legitimacy by the inclusion of 'real' names and places. With the arrival of the internet, new versions spread with dizzying speed around the world, spawning new variations upon the original theme.

While Roswell is the seminal story, the Rendlesham incident is often cited as 'Britain's Roswell'. They are composed of two distinct entities: the popular myth and the few certain facts. In both cases, the two constituents have taken an independent life of their own, and continue to grow apart in ever more distant directions.

Central to the Rendlesham incidents is the testimony of a group of USAF security policemen who reported mysterious lights outside the perimeter of RAF Woodbridge, in Suffolk, on two occasions in December 1980. The most senior officer was USAF Lt Col (later Col) Charles Halt, who was the Deputy Base Commander of RAF Woodbridge. It was Halt who prepared an official memorandum summarizing these incidents for the attention of the British Ministry of Defence (MoD). At that time, Woodbridge and its twin base at Bentwaters were tenanted by USAF as part of their air defence responsibilities in Europe. Halt was, at face value, an experienced officer who was held in high regard by his superiors.

UFOlogists first learned that a UFO incident had occurred in the forest adjoining the twin RAF bases at Bentwaters/Woodbridge early in 1981. Although the bases were loaned to the USAF, responsibility for events off-base – and indeed defence of surrounding UK airspace – rested with the Ministry of Defence. Almost immediately, speculation was rife in the UFO community about an official cover-up.

In 1980 an air staff secretariat known as Defence Secretariat 8 (DS8) was the only government agency officially acknowledged as having an interest in UFO reports. Policy documents released at the Public Record Office (PRO) reveal that UFOs were the lowest priority among the many other operational duties handled by DS8. A single member of staff (usually an Executive Office or Higher Executive Officer, both junior posts) spent a small proportion of his or her time examining reports received, purely for evidence of 'defence significance' (that is, for evidence that the UFOs were intruder aircraft). Essentially this policy had remained unchanged since 1958 when DS8's predecessor S4 (Air) accepted responsibility for responding to all inquiries concerning UFOs. On accepting the burden, a senior civil servant suggested that responses to questions on the subject should 'for the most part be politely unhelpful'.

There has been much speculation in UFO circles that DS8 and its successors were merely a 'shop window' for a more covert MoD investigation team. PRO records suggest this perception is the result of a misunderstanding. Since 1958 S4 (Air) and later DS8 routinely copied all the reports they received to two other military and scientific branches of MoD. These are a defence intelligence unit, DI 55, and an RAF Ground Environment branch, which is responsible for the air defence radar. Records show that neither was interested in UFOs outside of a limited defence remit, and had rarely made inquiries of their own in recent years.

The MoD has historically said little or nothing in public concerning the extent and nature of its UFO investigations. Its policy of playing down the subject was in sharp contrast with the USAF, which maintained a highly public UFO project (Blue Book) until 1969. Even after the closure of Blue Book, American UFOlogists were able to use their country's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain access to documents produced by a variety of official agencies. It was via the US FOIA in 1983 that a copy of Col Halt's memo was obtained by an American UFOlogist, and released into the public domain .

Until recently, it was impossible to obtain information from the MoD concerning what they did, or did not, know about specific UFO reports. The Ministry maintained that all correspondence with members of the public was confidential, and files could only be released after 30 years had passed under the Public Record Act. Under the current 'thirty-year rule', files on the Rendlesham Forest incident would not have been made public until 2011.

When UFOlogist Jenny Randies, with Brenda Butler and Dot Street, began to investigate the story early in 1981, they were informed that Halt's report was 'passed to staff concerned with air defence matters who were satisfied that there was nothing of defence interest in the alleged sightings'. From 1981 until 2001 this bland statement remained the standard official response to all inquiries about the incident. While adequate for media and public consumption, it encouraged some UFOlogists to believe a cover-up was under way.

As Britain did not have a FOIA (a partial equivalent took effect in January 2005), little progress could be made with the Ministry of Defence until very recently. In 1994 a Code of Practice for Access to Government Information was introduced that provided limited access to material closed under the thirty-year rule. Paradoxically, although the UFOlogists who were promoting the case claimed they were determined to discover 'the truth' about Rendlesham, until 2001 no one made use of the new legislation to request access to official records. During the research for my book Out of the Shadows (Clarke & Roberts, 2002), I made an application under the Code for access to records that were relevant to the case.

In May 2001 the contents of an MoD Air file – 150 pages in length – were released. The file was unclassified and contained nothing 'secret' or 'top secret' as the UFOlogists had claimed. Five documents were initially withheld, two on the grounds of 'defence, security and international relations' and three briefing documents because they contained 'internal opinion, advice, recommendation and deliberation'. Speculation was immediately rife within the UFO community about the nature of their contents. One magazine editor declared they were withheld because they contained 'top secret' information about the case, or revealed the much sought-after 'smoking gun'.

All five documents have now been released on appeal, the first two in October 2001 and the remaining briefings early in 2003. They contained nothing remotely 'top secret' and the reasons for their retention had more to do with civil service bureaucracy than they had with the desire to conceal any 'secret truth'. Their significance lay in the mystery that surrounded their content.

Jenny Randles acknowledges that the file 'tells us much more about the MoD than it does about the events in Rendlesham Forest'. A small amount of material relates to the official investigation of Halt's report – if it can be so described – between 1981 and 1983. The vast majority of its content consists of long and often tedious correspondence between Sec(AS)2, the MoD secretariat which replaced DS8, and members of the public between 1982 and 1994. The later material documents the MoD's often tortuous attempts to avoid answering specific questions and its desire to avoid unwelcome publicity on the subject.

The file contains evidence that the MoD was not officially aware of the incident until DS8 received a copy of Lt Col Halt's memo, forwarded by the British base commander, early in January 1981. By the time action was taken –in the form of circulating the paperwork to other branches – a month had passed and 'the scent was cold'. In February checks were made with the radar cameras at Eastern Radar (RAF Watton) and the Central Reporting Centre at RAF Neatishead in Norfolk. This found 'no entry in respect of unusual radar returns or other unusual occurrences'.

Unfortunately, on both occasions the MoD were reliant upon the dates of 27 and 29 December for the UFO events in Rendlesham Forest supplied by Col Halt in his memo. Both dates were incorrect, a mistake that could have been easily rectified. All the evidence suggests no follow-up request was ever made to Halt or his USAF superiors by the MoD. This lack of official interest was confirmed by the Group Captain, Neil Colvin, responsible for Air Defence at MoD in 1981. In a letter dated 3 February 2003 he wrote: 'I remember the alleged sightings by US airmen at Bentwaters [sic]. I recall that we could not explain them but were very skeptical of the reports. We were not privy to the actual evidence of the sightings by the personnel concerned, nor did we have the opportunity to interview the individuals involved.'

Possibly the most astounding revelation contained in the file is that it was not until 1983 – two years after the events – that the MoD obtained the correct dates. These were supplied not by the USAF but came from a member of the public! Shortly after Halt's memo was published by the News of the World, astronomy writer Ian Ridpath made inquiries with Suffolk Police and was able to confirm from their records the correct date for the initial sighting by the airmen. Ridpath wrote to advise DS8 on 14 November 1983 that police had first been called to the scene in Rendlesham forest at 4.11 am on 26 December 1980. He added: 'They said that all they could see was the lighthouse [at Orford Ness]. They were called out again at 10.30am on Dec 26 to examine the reported landing marks. There seems little doubt that the date of Dec 27 given in Col. Halt's letter is wrong. This also casts doubt on the second date he gives for the later events. '

As a result of this, DS8 wrote to the RAF Base Commander, Squadron Leader Donald Moreland, asking if he could recheck the dates. Moreland's reply, dated 25 November 1983, compounded the errors and demonstrated the complete lack of interest the MoD had in the events of 1980. He wrote: 'The incident is now almost 3 years old and no one here remembers it clearly. All we have is Lt Col. Halt's letter dated 13 January 1981.'

A similar lack of interest related to claims of higher than expected levels of radiation recorded by Col Halt in the area of the forest visited by the UFOs, Early in 1981 the MoD asked its defence intelligence specialists to comment on the data recorded in Lt Col Halt's memo, but made no attempt to establish independent confirmation of them. R. C. Moorcroft at DI 52, responding to DS8 on 23 February 1981 to the question, noted: 'Background radioactivity varies considerably due to a number of factors ... If you wish to pursue this further I could make enquiries as to natural background levels in the area.' There is nothing to suggest that any further action was taken. The radioactivity issue was not raised again until 1994 when Nick Pope, who was then Executive Officer at Sec(AS) 2, took the matter up with Giles Cowling at the Defence Radiological Protection Service, a branch of the Government's Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DERA). Pope's handwritten notes of his discussion with Cowling, dated 15 April 1994, form the last enclosure in the file. Pope – who subsequently described these notes as 'the first and only official investigation into this aspect of the case' – ends with the comment 'The level of 0.1 is completely harmless.'

In Octoberl983 the News of the World broke the story contained in Lt Col Halt's memo and the MoD Press Office began to receive calls from the world's media. DS8 prepared what it called a 'Defensive Press Line' anticipating the questions that might be asked. The most amusing comment noted that the MoD and USAF 'both referred callers to the other ... [this] will have done nothing but confirm suspicions held in UFO circles that we are engaged in a cover-up.'

When in 1984 the retired head of DS8, Ralph Noyes, contacted his former colleagues to ask for clarification of their position he had to send two reminders before receiving a standard reply. This delay contributed to Noyes' increasingly public pro-UFO stance and by 1987 he came to believe that the MoD had indeed lied about the incident. He was joined by a former Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Lord Hill-Norton. The Admiral, who became a UFO believer in retirement, also took up the case and reached the same conclusion. Ironically, while supporting the idea of a high-level conspiracy, the Admiral asks us to believe that he was not part of it, and that the subject 'never once crossed his desk' during his service as CDS!

The most recent MoD briefing on the Rendlesham Forest case contained in the file was compiled by Britain's self-styled Fox Mulder, Nick Pope, in 1994. In this Pope followed the standard MoD line that 'no evidence was found of any threat to the defence of the United Kingdom and no further investigations were carried out ... no further information has come to light which alters our view that the sightings of these lights was of no defence significance ... in the absence of any hard evidence, the MOD remains open-minded about these sightings'.

Pope served the standard three years as a junior officer with Sec (AS) 2 from 1991 to 1994. After leaving this post he produced a book, Open Skies, Closed Minds, that took a pro-UFO stance. Fie maintains there was no coverup of the Rendlesham incident but rather 'a lack of action' by the MoD. In 2000 he provided the foreword to Georgina Brum's book on the Rendlesham incident, You Can't Tell the People. Although this book's author strongly believed in a cover-up by the British and US Governments;, Pope failed to appreciate the contradiction in his stance. During an interview I recorded with Pope in 2001 it became clear that he had abandoned the objective viewpoint he displayed while working for the MoD. When asked for his current belief about what happened at Rendlesham he told us: 'As you know, despite the fact that I am a non-conspiracy theorist and a rational guy, you know that I am a believer in the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis and I will go with the ETH on this one. Am I allowed to give my answer as an extraterrestrial spacecraft? That's the answer I'm going with on this case.'

As the MoD maintained from the very beginning, there is nothing in the file to support claims that a cover-up had taken place to hide evidence of UFO landings in Suffolk. Rather than being a 'smoking gun', the file's contents chart the growth of a modern legend from birth to full maturity. As is the case with Roswell, the established facts have only a loose connection with the mythology that has grown up around the case in the UFO literature.

Folklore and UFO lore share the same kind of evidence: the testimony of narrators describing extraordinary experiences. In UFO lore reports made by military witnesses, particularly senior officers, are accredited with special status. The existence of official documents describing extraordinary events is the UFOlogical equivalent of the 'holy grail'. This is where the circular arguments that bedevil UFO lore begin.

The UFOlogists want to know the truth about a baffling subject and because the government is involved they assume, wrongly, that it must know all the answers. From the standpoint of believers in alien visitors, all that has to be done is to force the government to release 'the truth' and the UFO reality would be established to everyone's satisfaction. Unfortunately, to use the words of Daniel Webster, 'There is nothing so powerful as the truth and often nothing as strange.' When information is not forthcoming, or when it is released but does not provide the conclusive evidence demanded by believers, a deeper cover-up is suspected and so the argument becomes a circular one.

In the early 1990s, a prominent British skeptic told me that alien abductions, then a new fad in the US, would never catch on as a belief in the UK because, essentially, British people are too sensible. He was, sadly, wrong – and there's no very good way you can prove someone wasn't abducted. You can, however, test any physical traces the 'aliens' leave behind, as Susan Blackmore and David T. Patton, then both members of the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the University of the West of England, Bristol, show here. James Basil, discussed here and whom I met when we both appeared on the same TV programme, claims to have been repeatedly abducted throughout his life, beginning at the age of five, leading me to suggest in a column that it would be helpful if he kept himself supplied with a kit so he'd be prepared to collect physical evidence. In this case, he apparently needed no tools, as the aliens helpfully left a small object in his mouth for Blackmore and Patton to study. Appeared in XI.3.

James Basil is an 'abductee'. In 1992, at the age of 13, he had a terrifying experience in which he reached out in his bed and found he was touching another hand – a smooth lizard-like hand with curled fingers. After this he began to remember other experiences, including being floated across the hallway into a UFO outside his bathroom window. He later found himself back in bed, with two aliens, one male and one female, standing by his bed. Subsequently he had many other memories of abduction by aliens.

In March 1997 he came to interview me (SB) for a student media project. He asked for my views on alien abductions and sleep paralysis, and then revealed that not only had he experienced sleep paralysis, but was also an abductee – and in his opinion the two experiences were quite different. He also thought he could prove his experiences were real because the aliens had implanted a small object in his mouth, which he had subsequently removed. He asked me whether I would be interested in seeing the implant and possibly analysing it to find out what it was.

Physical evidence of abductions is extremely rare. In his 1981 book Missing Time, Budd Hopkins described the insertion of small 'implants' into abductees' noses, legs, and other body parts. In 1994, writing in his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, JE Mack reported several abductees who claimed to have 'tracking devices' inserted into their bodies by the aliens. Some abductees claim that the aliens do not want the implant removed or subjected to X-rays or scanning. Some of the implants have reportedly been removed from abductees' bodies but they usually mysteriously disappear according to DM Jacobs in his 1993 book Secret Life: First Hand Accounts of UFO Abductions. Mack reports one implant that turned out to be 'an interesting twisted fibre consisting of carbon, silicon, oxygen, no nitrogen, and traces of other elements' and others that were clearly of normal biological material. He concluded that 'it may be wrong to expect that a phenomenon whose very nature is subtle ... will yield its secrets to an epistemology or methodology that operates at a lower level of consciousness'. Many would not agree. This seemed like a unique opportunity to investigate putatively alien material.

The 'implant' is about 2mm by 3mm and dullish grey. Little can be discerned with the naked eye. After all, dullish grey metal could cover miniaturized alien technology – or more dullish grey metal. The obvious next step seemed to be electron microscopy but that is expensive and not available in the psychology department! So, with some trepidation, I sent out an email to everyone in our faculty asking for help. Within one hour I had already had three replies offering help and advice, and by the following day several more. The consensus seemed to be that the best non-destructive method would be to use the scanning electron microscope (SEM) and the attached X-ray microanalysis system which would give an analysis of the elemental composition. So on 9 April 1997 James and I visited Dave Patton.

First we examined the object through a stereo light microscope which revealed irregular edges and surface detail and colour. Part of the surface was covered with yellow-brown material which we assumed to be dried organic matter from Basil's mouth. The object was then mounted on an SEM holder using double-sided sticky tape and viewed using a Hitachi S-450 scanning electron microscope.

In a scanning electron microscope, electrons that are emitted or reflected when a very fine beam of electrons is scanned and rastered across a specimen (usually in vacuum) are collected to form a television-type image of the specimen. These microscopes can give very high magnifications, sufficient to resolve features as small as one millionth of a millimetre in the best instruments.

In addition to producing a magnified image, the beam can be focused onto one spot and X-rays, which are also emitted when the electrons strike the specimen, can be collected, analysed, and used to provide an accurate 'fingerprint' of the elements present in small regions of the specimen.

We spent about an hour just examining the surface at various magnifications (see Figure 3b). We saw several fibres and small rounded features on the surface, which James compared with other alien implants he had heard about. Nothing we saw looked like miniature technology or mechanical components, but then of course alien technology might be unrecognizable to human eyes. The final step was therefore to use Energy Dispersive X-ray Microanalysis (EDX) to determine the object's composition. Potentially this might reveal a combination of elements unlikely to be found on earth.

EDX was performed using an 'EDAX PV9100' system. The composition of the 'alien implant' is given in Table 1 . This provided the answer we needed. Dental amalgam varies considerably in its exact composition but is typically 50 percent mercury with the other 50 percent being silver and tin, usually in the proportions 73 percent to 27 percent.

Our conclusion is that the 'implant' was a displaced dental filling coated with dried organic material. The fibre shown in Figure 3b could possibly have been initially on the surface and been partly detached during specimen mounting. The rounded objects could be dried organic, possibly cellular, material. Since the object was in James' mouth for about two weeks it seems likely that these features are organic and derived from him.

This investigation raises many interesting questions. First, how far should scientists be prepared to go in using their time and expensive equipment to test extraordinary claims? Obviously there must be a limit, but in this case we believe it was well worth the effort. If we are not prepared to help, the

believers in UFOs and the conspiracy theorists are given more cause to claim they are being unfairly treated and that the 'scientific community' is biased against them. Judging from the very positive response, many other scientists at the University of the West of England agree. Also, we might have found the first-ever piece of alien technology on earth.


Element	Implant	Amalgam
	% by weight	% by weight

mercury	40.5	50
tin + silver	46.3	50
others (Ca, Cl, and Si)	10.7