232 Hum Nat (2011) 22:225–246 were once allied with Tierney have said he misrepresented them. Martins is obviously one example, but another is the anthropologist Brian Ferguson, whom I asked about his experience with Tierney. Ferguson has been highly critical of Chagnon’s distribution of trade goods among the Yanomamö, and has argued this has significantly contributed to tensions, violence, and cultural disruption (Ferguson 1995). Ferguson told me that in many places Tierney did represent him correctly. But: I was sent the prepublication copy of the New Yorker article. They called me to fact-check and everything was fine except one passage where Tierney has me saying something to the effect of “missions could be disruptive but according to Ferguson they are less so than Chagnon was,” downplaying the impact of the missions. I said, no I didn’t say that, and I don’t believe that to be true. I think [the missions] were very disruptive in the period I’m talking about. . . . I said that’s not what I said. And I got a call from Patrick Tierney and he got quite angry about it and said that I was backing down and that I was making a political move here and that he had me on tape saying what he said I said. And I said you’d better get that tape ready, because that’s not what I said (Ferguson 2009). Ferguson also told me: the missions have had a very destabilizing effect on the Yanomami and the missions seem to be unconscious of how much they’ve encouraged conflict among Yanomami groups. That’s a big thing in my book. But it’s not a big thing in Darkness in El Dorado. The missionaries are pretty much uniformly critical of Chagnon. So if you’re against Chagnon, Tierney is going to put you in there in a positive light, and that’s what Tierney does (Ferguson 2009). That is indeed what Tierney does: tell a fairly simple tale of good and evil—the missions are good, Chagnon and Neel are evil—but not a non-fiction tale. In spite of all this evidence against Tierney, a few anthropologists have tried to find new evidence to salvage what they can of Tierney’s claims against Neel and Chagnon. This is particularly true in the case of Terence Turner. Turner, who helped Tierney while he was writing the book (Tierney 2001:xviii; Miller 2000), has since tried to salvage Tierney’s claims by digging through Neel’s papers, producing copious annotations (Turner and Stevens 2001). Turner is still apparently convinced that Neel’s funding from the Atomic Energy Commission must have meant some kind of nefarious activity (Terence Turner 2009). Barbara Rose Johnston has hinted similarly (Johnston n.d.) But this digging has not panned out, and in fact, as historians Diane Paul and John Beatty have noted, “by the late 50s and early 60s, [the AEC] funded approximately one-half of all federally funded genetic research in the U.S.” (Paul and Beatty 2000). Meanwhile anthropologist John Frechione has done extensive work on a paper with Tierney trying to show that Neel’s movements during the 1968 epidemic put science before emergency medical care (Frechione 2009), but again, nothing seems to have come of this salvage operation. Turner and Frechione have also both tried to help Tierney’s case by conducting interviews with Brandon Centerwall, the physician son of late physician Willard