From: lippard@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: CSICOP Conference Summary, 2/2
Date: 12 Nov 92 20:10:00 GMT
Distribution: world,local
Organization: University of Arizona
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41


	He then addressed the question of whether science is itself a 
virus, answering it in the negative.  While ideas become 
fashionable and spread, he refrained from using the virus analogy 
for all ideas because viruses are pointless--it is good at 
spreading because it is good at spreading.  Good programs, on the 
other hand, spread because they are good programs--good at 
performing some function, not just at spreading.  Faith, according 
to Dawkins, spreads despite the complete lack of any useful 
virtues.  "Religion," Dawkins concluded, "is an infectious disease 
of the mind."
	In the question and answer session, Robert Sheaffer pointed 
out that religions seem to have some useful characteristics, such 
as working as a system to control mutual envy, give rules for 
behavior, and so on, and Dawkins answered that "you may be right."

Scientific Fraud
The first session on Saturday was a panel on fraud in science 
moderated by Ray Hyman.  I missed most of the first speaker's 
presentation while having breakfast with a few members of the 
CSICOP Executive Council and the delegation of speakers from 
China, but did get enough of Elie Shneour's talk to hear him 
recommend the following policies:  (1) Nobody who hasn't done any 
work should be listed as author on a scientific paper.  (2) Papers 
should be subjected to peer review.  (3) Bad papers shouldn't be 
published at all, which means many journals should be euthanized.
	The second panelist was Paul Friedman, professor of radiology 
at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.  
After the John Darsee affair at Harvard, Friedman helped write up 
a policy for dealing with allegations of research "hanky panky."  
In the past, the first reaction to such things would be to tell 
the perpetrator that "there's a mistake in your paper."  If 
guilty, his reaction might be "I can't find my data," followed by 
"I resign," and the process would end there.
	Friedman stated that the definition of "scientific fraud" 
depends on context.  There are always problems with sloppy work, 
corner cutting, etc. that create noise in the scientific process, 
but deliberate fraud is not very common.  It has increased, but 
seems to be proportional to the number of people practicing 
science.  Senator John Dingell brought scientific fraud into the 
public arena, whereas in the past it had typically been kept 
quiet--perpetrators being bought out, fired, etc.  Was that 
appropriate?  Friedman views that as an open question.
	Generally, when something goes wrong, other researchers know 
about it.  Younger researchers, however, worry about their careers 
being wrecked, worry that there may not really be anything wrong 
but they simply don't understand what's being done.  When Robert 
Millikan performed his oil drop experiments to measure the charge 
of the electron, he did not report all of his data; he selected 
the ones he thought were representative.  An experimenter may 
completely screw up an experiment and start over; nobody publishes 
all of their data.  There is also systematic misrepresentation in 
journals of the order of experimental proceedings, and so forth 
(i.e., the logical structure of a paper is not the temporal 
order).  In applying for research grants, researchers tend to 
report the most promising results which they've already obtained, 
leaving out the rest.
	Peer review at the level of a journal submission or grant 
application, according to Friedman, is not capable of screening 
out fraud.  A certain level of honesty on the part of researchers 
is assumed.  On the other hand, peer review by other people in the 
same lab may be able to catch fraud.
	Other touted self-correcting methods of science are also not 
so great, said Friedman.  Replication, for example, may fail 
because the original work made a mistake.  It may succeed even 
when the original work is fraudulent, if it was plagiarized from 
elsewhere.  Furthermore, a large number of papers are never cited 
by anyone, and no replications are ever done.  It does tend to be 
effective in work that is particularly interesting, such as 
superconductivity and cold fusion (two cases which have had very 
different results).
	Friedman expressed some worry over the Office of Scientific 
Integrity, a self-perpetuating agency which gets millions of 
dollars a year.  Will this agency harm the practice of science 
with fraud accusations?  Institutions doing their own 
investigations, on the other hand, tend to deal with things very 
quietly to avoid wrongly damaging reputations.
	The third speaker was Walter Stewart of the National 
Institutes of Health, who has been involved in numerous 
investigations of scientific fraud.  He began by taking issue with 
a statement made by Richard Dawkins during the question and answer 
session following Friedman's presentation, in which Dawkins stated 
that although there have been some minor problems, the scientific 
community is a shining example to other professions, such as 
journalism, of self-policing that they would do well to emulate.  
By the time Stewart finished his presentation, Dawkins stood up to 
withdraw his previous remarks, but added that "science does, at 
least, have standards to violate."
	Stewart discussed in great detail the case of MIT researcher 
Thereza Imanishi-Kari (also known as TIK), who fabricated data in 
a paper published with Nobel prizewinner David Baltimore as a 
coauthor.8  In essence, what occurred was that Margot O'Toole, 
TIK's assistant, discovered the fraud and brought it to the 
attention of other people, including MIT Dean Gene Brown and David 
Baltimore, in whose lab the experiments allegedly took place.  For 
her efforts, she was told by Baltimore that anywhere she went with 
her story, he would go too, and that he would be believed.  She 
had given up when Stewart got involved, and they wrote a paper 
documenting the fraud which was rejected by _Cell_ and _Science_, 
and sat upon for four years by _Nature_ before being published.  
In 1988 Senate hearings on the matter took place, the Secret 
Service did analysis of the lab notebooks, and David Baltimore 
continued to defend TIK and call for support from the scientific 
community--which he got.  For three or four years, O'Toole was 
isolated from and ridiculed by the scientific community and was 
unable to find a job.
	The second case Stewart described involved Heidi Weissman, 
who worked in the lab of radiologist Leonard Freeman at the Albert 
Einstein College of Medicine.  Freeman plagiarized some of 
Weissman's work by whiting out her name on a photocopy and typing 
in his own.  Weissman lost her job while Freeman was promoted to 
vice chancellor.  (Stewart says that the "freeman" is the unit of 
plagiarism.)  Weissman sued for the rights to her work, and won.  
She has been effectively blacklisted from working in her field.
	Paul Friedman remarked that Weissman had already been 
complaining about not being promoted and had a reputation for 
being difficult to work with, and that she took legal action 
before the university had finished investigating her complaints.  
Stewart responded that the legal case which she won has been out 
of the courts for three years now, and that a lawsuit is not a 
reason for scientists to avoid criticizing something (e.g., 
blatant plagiarism) that is clearly wrong.  He said that he knew 
of no scientists who had publicly stated that Freeman was wrong; 
both Shneour and Friedman proceeded to do so.  (Shneour maintained 
that other scientists had done so, but could not remember the 
names of any.  He stated that he had a list of names at home.)

Crashed Saucer Claims
Following lunch and brief talks by Sergei Kapitza, editor of the 
Russian edition of _Scientific American_, and Evry Schatzman, 
founder of the French Union Rationaliste and former president of 
the French Physics Society, two concurrent sessions were offered.  
One was on crashed saucer claims; the other on the paranormal in 
China, specifically the form of Chinese traditional medicine known 
as qi gong.  I attended the session on crashed saucers.
	CSICOP Executive Council member and leading UFO skeptic 
Philip Klass moderated the panel, which looked at the three most 
famous cases of alleged crashed saucers:  the Roswell, New Mexico 
case, the Bentwaters/Woodbridge, England case, and the Kecksburg, 
Pennsylvania case.
	Tucson resident and retired U.S. Air Force Major James McGaha 
spoke on the Bentwaters/Woodbridge incident, which took place in 
December 1980.  This case involved sightings over two nights, 
December 26 and 27.  None of the principals described any crash, 
but Jenny Randles, Dot Street, and Brenda Butler wrote the book 
_Sky Crash_ about the incident, based on the claims of Larry 
Warren, who was a security policeman stationed at Woodbridge at 
the time.  None of the principals involved in the sightings 
reported Warren's presence.
	On the first night, airman John Burroughs heard a radio 
report that something had been tracked on radar at Heathrow, then 
saw a light in the woods which he thought might be a crashed 
aircraft.  After obtaining permission to leave the base and 
investigate, he saw an object flying through the forest, which he 
described as being triangular and about ten feet wide (about the 
distance between the trees).  The next day, some circular holes 
were found in the ground in the area.
	On the second night, security police saw a light, called the 
deputy base commander, Lieutenant Halt, and left the base and 
entered the forest with equipment, planning to debunk the UFO 
claim.  They saw a winking light, three lights in the sky, and a 
light beam coming down from the sky.  Halt arrived and saw the 
light, which winked and broke up near a farmhouse, which was then 
lit with a red light, seemingly from within.  (Vic Cuttings, the 
farmer who was present at the time, noticed nothing unusual.)  
Burroughs said he saw a light fly through the cab of the truck 
they had driven to the site.
	McGaha explained how the TV show _Unsolved Mysteries_ made 
these events seem more mysterious by reporting that on the second 
night, much of the equipment was working intermittently.  McGaha 
pointed out that their radios were intermittent because they were 
line of sight radios, and their "light-alls," devices with very 
powerful lights on them, are notoriously unreliable.  The holes in 
the ground were examined by the Suffolk police, who said they 
looked like rabbit diggings.
	McGaha offered the following explanation for these sightings:  
On December 26, Cosmos 740 reentered the earth's atmosphere at 
around 21:10, and was picked up on radar.  Shortly before 3 a.m., 
when the first light was seen, a fireball crossed the sky.  At 
around 4 a.m., the Suffolk police were driving in the area (in 
response to the reports) with their lights flashing.  McGaha 
attributes the lights seen by Burroughs to the fireball and the 
police lights.  On December 27, the three lights in the sky were 
Vega, Deneb, and Sirius, while another light was a lighthouse 5 
miles away (in the right direction) which has a 5 second period.  
Lt. Halt is on tape saying "there it is," followed by a five 
second pause, followed by "there it is again."9  Although McGaha 
gave his explanation to interviewers for _Unsolved Mysteries_ and 
one of the producers told him that he wasn't sure the segment 
would be aired because McGaha had completely destroyed the case, 
the show aired anyway--with McGaha's explanations left on the 
cutting room floor.
	Robert Young, the education director of the Harrisburg 
Astronomical Society, reported on the 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania 
alleged UFO crash.  On December 9 of that year, a brilliant bolide 
was seen in the sky by tens of thousands of people over nine 
states and Ontario, Canada.  The path was determined by examining 
photographs and triangulating, and it was determined to have 
disintegrated 14 kilometers above southwest Ontario, and this 
result was published in 1967 in a Canadian astronomical journal.
	Young has examined 91 eyewitness reports, all of which can be 
explained by the Ontario fireball.  Yet his experience with Fox's 
_Sightings_ show was similar to McGaha's experience with _Unsolved 
Mysteries_.  (Young was on the air for about ten seconds.)
	Both _Sightings_ and the September 19, 1990 _Unsolved 
Mysteries_ based their shows on other information.  They looked at 
Ivan Sanderson's calculations of the motion of the fireball, which 
(because of errors) showed the fireball changing direction.  They 
looked at a newspaper headline in the early (county) edition of 
the December 10 _Greensburg Tribune-Review_ which stated 
"Unidentified Flying Object Touches Off Probe Near Kecksburg," but 
omitted the later (city) edition's story about searchers failing 
to find anything.  They reported on five witnesses who claim to 
have seen a crashed object which was retrieved by the military.  
Young gave details on each of these five witnesses and their 
reports:  (1) First reported his story in 1979 on KDKA radio; 
claimed to have been fire chief of Kecksburg at the time.  In fact 
he was the fire chief in 1964, but not in 1965.  (2, 3) These 
witnesses were a father and son; the father is deceased.  The son 
claims the military used their home as a base of operations, but 
does not claim to have seen any recovered object.  Other witnesses 
dispute the claim about the use of their home.  (4) A UFO group's 
display at a local mall in 1987 resulted in this witness coming 
forward.  He says he saw the recovered object, but can't remember 
anyone else who was present.  (5)  This witness showed up during 
the filming of _Unsolved Mysteries_ and claimed to have seen a 
hieroglyphic-covered object that was recovered.
	Young pointed out that the description given by witnesses 4 
and 5 of where the object landed match the location where the 
local newspaper said the search took place--but the newspaper 
account was inaccurate.  None of these five witnesses' accounts 
stand up under scrutiny.  On the other hand, 46 people signed a 
statement which was sent to _Unsolved Mysteries_ prior to their 
show's airing, stating that there was no object which crashed and 
no recovery of an object by the military.  The show failed to 
mention this statement.10
	The final speaker on the panel was Donald R. Schmitt, a 
medical illustrator, co-director of the late J. Allen Hynek's 
Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), and co-author (with Kevin Randle) 
of _UFO Crash at Roswell_, which Phil Klass in his introduction 
called the best of the books on Roswell.  Schmitt began by giving 
his credentials as a skeptic, pointing out that CUFOS debunked the 
Gulf Breeze sightings, MJ-12, and Gerald Anderson, who has made 
claims about the Roswell crash.  He went on to argue that 
something peculiar occurred in Roswell, New Mexico on July 8, 
1947.
	Schmitt's central evidence was the wire transmissions between 
Roswell, Fort Worth, and Washington D.C. on July 8.  An "official 
press release" was issued on that date, resulting in a news story 
titled "Flying Disc in Army Possession" at 4:26 p.m., Washington 
time.  By 5:30, it was reported that a reporter in Fort Worth was 
allowed to examine debris, which was sent on to Wright field.  At 
6:30, Major E.M. Kurtan said there was nothing to it, it was a 
high altitude sounding device, and there was no need to send it on 
to Wright.
	The wire transmission evidence prompted Schmitt to ask:  Why 
did it take two hours to identify the object as a radar device 
which had been in use for twenty years?  (Before the invention of 
radar, according to Schmitt, the same kind of balloon device was 
used for visual tracking.)  Schmitt argued that what was found at 
Roswell was no such thing.  He eliminated various possible 
explanations:  a V2 launch scheduled for July 3 was cancelled due 
to a pad fire, there are no Japanese balloon bombs unaccounted 
for, etc.
	Schmitt said he has talked to 150 people who were involved in 
some way.  Of 30 military personnel he has spoken with, he said 
that none of their military records can now be found.  Two 
witnesses say there was a nurse at the base hospital who observed 
alien bodies, who was allegedly transferred to another base and 
then died in a plane crash.  Schmitt can't find any record of the 
plane crash, nor any records supporting the existence of this 
nurse.  Rather than conclude that the witnesses were in error, 
however, he concludes that there is a coverup.
	Schmitt claimed that some of the witnesses he has spoken to 
say that they were threatened by military personnel that their 
children would be killed if they ever talked about it; children 
were told they'd never see their parents again if they did.  W.W. 
Brazell, the rancher on whose property debris was found, allegedly 
told his family that the military had threatened him.  Schmitt 
said he has six deathbed statements, including one of a general, 
stating that "it was no goddamn weather balloon."
	After some skeptical questioning by audience members, Phil 
Klass then addressed the subject.  He began, "It may shock some of 
you to hear what I am about to say.  I agree there is a major 
saucer crash coverup.  We disagree about who is covering it up."  
He then proceeded to present information which he said had been 
neglected by proponents of a UFO crash at Roswell.  On September 
23, 1947, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, Wright-Patterson base 
commander, wrote to the chief of staff of the Army Air Force with 
an assessment of UFOs.  In this letter, which is quoted 
extensively by UFO proponents, Twining stated that "the phenomenon 
reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious."  What 
they never quote, however, is that he also wrote in the same 
letter that there is "a lack of physical evidence in the shape of 
crash-recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the 
existence of these objects."  This was several months after 
Roswell, so Klass offered three possible implications of this 
letter:  (1) Twining was lying to Air Force headquarters.  (2) 
Nobody told Twining about the crashed saucer.  (3) There was no 
crashed saucer.  Klass enumerated case after case of documents, 
many formerly classified Secret or Top Secret, which made similar 
comments, all after Roswell and authored by people who should have 
known if flying saucers had crashed there.11

CSICOP Video
After the two concurrent sessions on crashed saucers and qi gong, 
the new CSICOP video, "Beyond Belief," was premiered.  The video, 
hosted by magician Steve Shaw of Project Alpha fame, addressed the 
subjects of astrology, firewalking, and the Gulf Breeze UFO.  The 
video will be made available to local groups for their meetings or 
for public access cable.

Dinosaur Valley State Park/Dealey Plaza
On Sunday, after another screening of the CSICOP video and a 
"conversation session" with some of the CSICOP Executive Council 
members, the North Texas Skeptics arranged an optional trip to 
Dinosaur Valley State Park.  This trip, guided by Ronnie Hastings, 
was a visit to the dinosaur tracks at the Paluxy River which have 
been claimed by creationists as evidence of human beings living 
contemporary with dinosaurs.12
	A number of conference attendees, however, chose instead to 
visit Dealey Plaza, the site of John F. Kennedy's assassination in 
1963.  At Dealey Plaza, one can visit The Sixth Floor, a museum in 
the former Texas School Book Depository, walk on the grassy knoll 
and observe the view from behind the wooden fence (where vandals 
have written "Kenney [sic] was shot from here" in several 
different places), or talk with any one of several conspiracy 
theorists hawking tabloids which describe their theories.

Notes
1.  I disagree with Scott's last sentence.  The nominalist/realist 
debate _is_ relevant outside freshman philosophy classes--for 
example, in _graduate_ philosophy classes.
2.  Dunbar pointed out a couple of cases where there were some 
studies which bore some resemblance (though quite distant) to the 
claims of the "melanin scholars."  For example, a study did find 
that reaction times of people with brown eyes were faster than 
those of people with blue eyes for some task.  The "melanin 
scholars" claim that this can be attributed to melanin.  What they 
don't note is that all the participants in this study were white 
males.
3.  "Multicultural Pseudoscience," _Skeptical Inquirer_ vol. 16, 
no. 1, Fall 1991, pp. 46-50; "Magic Melanin," _Skeptical Inquirer_ 
vol. 16, no. 2, Winter 1992, pp. 162-166; "Afrocentric 
Creationism," _Creation/Evolution_ vol. 11, no. 2 (issue XXIX), 
Winter 1991-92, pp. 1-8.  These articles address the specifics of 
the _Baseline Essays_.
4.  The passage continues with "However, there are several reasons 
for exercising caution when interpreting these data" and offers 
many qualifications.
5.  Harding is the author of a number of books, including _Whose 
Science? Whose Knowledge_ (1991, Cornell University Press).  In an 
August 31, 1992 message to the BITNET SKEPTIC Discussion Group, 
Bernard Ortiz de Montellano pointed out that Harding in this book 
uncritically accepts bogus claims from Afrocentric pseudoscientist 
and "melanin scholar" Hunter H. Adams.  Harding cites Adams as a 
reference for the claim that ancient Egyptians invented the 
telescope, based on alleged Russian discovery of an ancient 
Egyptian lens.  Adams in turn cites Peter Tompkins' book, _Secrets 
of the Great Pyramid_ (Harper & Row, 1971), which in turn cites 
Peter Kolosimo, _Terra Senza Tempo_, published in 1969 in Milan.  
Tompkins points out in a footnote that "Several attempts to check 
these data with Soviet academicians have so far been without 
result."  Ortiz de Montellano points out that Tompkins is also 
coauthor of the 1973 book _The Secret Life of Plants_, about Cleve 
Backster's claims that plants feel pain, enjoy music, communicate 
with humans, and so forth.
6.  Blackmore has taken her own advice, and some of the fruits of 
her research include non-paranormal explanations of out-of-body 
and near-death experiences and other "psychic" experiences.  See 
her "Near-Death Experiences: In or Out of the Body," _Skeptical 
Inquirer_ vol. 16, no. 1, Fall 1991, pp. 34-45 and "Psychic 
Experiences: Psychic Illusions," _Skeptical Inquirer_ vol. 16, no. 
4, Summer 1992, pp. 367-376.
7.  See his book, _Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency_.  A 
"holistic detective" investigates a case under the assumption that 
all things are connected, and therefore everything is evidence, 
reminiscent of Carl Hempel's raven paradox ("All ravens are black" 
is equivalent to "all non-black things are non-ravens," so 
whatever is evidence for one is evidence for the other).
8.  See, for one summary, Philip J. Hilts, "The Science Mob," _The 
New Republic_ vol. 206 (May 18, 1992):24-31.  Stewart himself 
wrote a summary for _Nature_ (July 28, 1988).  The Stewart article 
makes the case that fraud occurred; the Hilts article covers how 
the scientific community and Baltimore in particular responded.
9.  See, for more details on this case, Ian Ridpath, "The 
Woodbridge UFO Incident," _Skeptical Inquirer_ vol. 11, no. 1, 
Fall 1986, pp. 77-81.  Also see Robert Sheaffer's "Psychic 
Vibrations" column, _Skeptical Inquirer_ vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 209-
210; Steuart Campbell's letter, "The Suffolk 'UFO' Lights," 
_Skeptical Inquirer_, vol. 11, no. 4, Summer 1987, pp. 425-426, 
and Ridpath's reply.
10.  See Robert R. Young, "'Old-Solved Mysteries': The Kecksburg 
Incident," _Skeptical Inquirer_ vol. 15, no. 3, Spring 1991, pp. 
281-285.
11.  See Philip J. Klass, "Crash of the Crashed-Saucer Claim," 
_Skeptical Inquirer_ vol. 10, no. 3, Spring 1986, pp. 234-241.
12.  The Paluxy River footprints have been thoroughly debunked and 
even most creationists now admit that they do not provide evidence 
of humans and dinosaurs living together.  See, for example, the 
special issue of _Creation/Evolution_: vol. 5, no. 1, 1985, titled 
"The Paluxy River Footprint Mystery--Solved."




Jim Lippard              Lippard@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU
Dept. of Philosophy      Lippard@ARIZVMS.BITNET
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721