Answers From An Ivory Tower, Marching Into the 17th Century, How Wrong Can You Get?, Tightening the Woo-Woo Limits, Oklahoma Is Not “OK” for Psychic, Official Dutch Woo-Woo, I Sense a Joke, Time-Keeping Problems, From a Different Viewpoint, Shades of Project Alpha, Advisory, More Free Energy, In The New York Times, and In Closing...

Ever since I first came upon the worldwide community of dowsers, I’ve been aware of how fearful they are of having their favored delusions questioned. Since dowsers constitute – by far – the most frequent applicants for the JREF million-dollar prize, I’ve tried to encourage them to stand back and take a look at their own claims, and that suggestion has been steadfastly resisted. In fact, a notice went out years ago to members of the American Society of Dowsers – see www.dowsers.org/join_us.htm – to ignore any offer from the JREF – or from me, personally – to test the fundamental dowsing claim, that a forked stick, pendulum, parallel wires, or other similar simple device could be used to find water, other substances, persons, dogs, or lost items. In effect, this was putting up a barrier to any and all possible questioning or investigation of the basic dowsing claim.

Could Astrology Be Bunk?, Another Devastating Video, A Revelation, Sniff the Woo-Woo, Three Weeks to Go, A Presumption, More UK Woo-Woo, More Unfounded Hysteria, In Closing…

Perish the thought! How could it be that a belief thousands of years old might be erroneous? No, don’t hand me that tired old the-Earth-isn’t-flat parallel. Belief in astrology is very well established, and astrologers are wealthy and in demand. Even India, one of our centers of philosophical and mathematical genius, has astrology as an intimate part of it’s day-to-day life!

Well, we’re now informed that serious researchers have – beyond any reasonable doubt – tossed astrology on the scrap-pile, as a result of the completion of the most thorough scientific study ever made into it. You see, they have been tracking more than 2,000 persons, most of whom were born within minutes of each other. Now, according to classical astrology, these subjects should have had very similar traits, since birth-time is a very important factor in this ancient “science,” and should be a particularly decisive element in the fortunes of humans. Astrology has always insisted that its central claim, that human characteristics are molded by the influence of the Sun, Moon and planets at the exact time of birth, is a valid item to be examined in order to test this “science.” Up until now, they have simply pointed out whatever similarities they could find between what they call, “time-twins,” a process which to the serious investigator is categorized as “data-searching,” or looking for corroborative data rather that examining all available data.

A Great News, The Stupid Fuel Magnets Are Back, More "Qi" Discussions, A Moatter of Some Sensitivity, From An Unexpected Source, Where's that Damn Ark, The Opinion From Backstage, Beyond Parody, My UK Visit.

We have a most welcome note from Dr. Bruce L. Flamm, MD, who for the last eight years has been battling the ridiculous report that prayers intoned for infertility patients in Korea could result in a 100% increase in pregnancy rates among the subjects. We’ve followed this for some time now – just do a search on SWIFT for “Flamm,” and you’ll see. Now, the Los Angeles Superior Court has – finally – thrown out the major defamation lawsuit that Korean fertility specialist Kwang Yul Cha filed against Dr. Flamm, a California physician who had published several articles questioning the validity of the report. That lawsuit, first filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in August 2007, was thrown out last November but then reinstated in January. Now it’s finally dismissed.

Our Defense Dollars, Another Woo-woo Group, Maybe Not Such a Joke, That Strange Glove, More Audiophile Crapiola, Sylvia in Vegas, License to Be Silly, Ol’ Bob Has a Way About Him, In Closing..., JREF YouTube Update, Galapagos, Tour Penn Jilette's Home, UFO's Are Real!

Reader Tim Fuller alerts us to this:

We hear now that U.S. troops in Afghanistan will be receiving a new tool that the Pentagon seems to think will help them root out potential terrorists. It’s a hand-held lie detector! See www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23926278. This is a bit more serious than the average charlatanism, in that it involves the life and death of our troops, as well as the demise of others who are supected of criminal activity by failing a polygraph examination. Polygraphs have never worked, that’s been clearly shown, but someone has dragged more of our tax money from the defense budget to squander on another expensive and embarrassing farce...

Officially Endorsing the Useless, An Improvement?, Maybe They’re Kidding – We Hope So, Pre-Summer Madness, Disturbing, Obscurity Par Excellence, Question, Takeover, Haunting in Homestead, Sailing Stones - by Jeff Wagg, The Flamingo - by Jeff Wagg

Our good friend Bob Park – go to listserv.umd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=bobparks-whatsnew&A=1 and subscribe – ran this appropriate observation, not hesitating a bit to express his opinion:

VOODOO MEDICINE: TREATING ACUPUNCTURE ADDICTION.
A couple of weeks ago the Metro Section of the Washington Post ran a front page story about a pilot program in a Washington suburb to incorporate acupuncture into the treatment of drug addiction. There is something called the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association that certifies people to administer acupuncture for drug addiction. As I read this I paused to watch a chiropractor on Good Morning America wrenching some poor woman’s neck to lower her blood pressure.

Tragedy, A Lifetime of Superstition, Medium Not at All Well Done, We Sure Get Letters, Organized Quacks, Iowa County – A New Level of Idiocy, It’s a Neologism!, Real Stuff, Find Us On YouTube, and In Closing…

Madeline Kara Neumann, 11 years old, died a horrifying death recently. She died from ignorance.

No, not her own ignorance. She was an innocent victim of her righteous parents’ unknowing error. They were led to believe that there exists an invisible deity – somewhere in the sky – who has absolute power to subvert the laws of nature that govern our real world, and they chose to believe that strange notion because everyone they knew and trusted had similarly opted to accept this mythology that has created and supported a vast network of priests and organizations that depend upon the public’s naivety and ignorance. It’s called religion.

 Char Charred, A Good Move, The Other Way Around, Censorship in India, I Didn't Know That, Correction, That "Assignment," Wisdom From Sylvia - Book Review, The Dreaded Randi Doll, and In Closing..

Reader and frequent correspondent Dr. Jan Willem Nienhuys reports that I just appeared on Dutch TV – on one of the public, not the commercial, stations – in a program named “Zembla.” This program staff visited the JREF recently to video a session in which I disassembled a Char Margolis performance of the same old "cold reading" process on her highly-popular TV program in Holland. Writes Dr. Nienhuys:

[Your input] was combined with comments by a professor of psychology, Prof. Dr. J.A.P.J. Janssen, who is in Cultural and Religious Psychology at the University of Nijmegen. He said all the kinds of things that skeptics say. He was invited to have a reading done – on camera – at the house of Robbert van den Broeke, another Dutch “psychic.” [See several references on SWIFT] He wasn’t impressed.

This program Zembla did go to great lengths to expose Char, traveling all the way to interview you. They also did some research and located a few disgruntled people who were not so positive about their readings. One of them, Marian van den Hul, had a reading that was broadcast on the Char show. Marian's husband had died and she was left with two young children. Marian was not convinced that Char contacted her dead husband:

He Has Passed Away, Compulsive Grubby, One Faker Endorses the Other, It’s a Start, Another Epiphany, Interesting, A Potential Applicant, Commendable, Jamy Speaks, Readers Digest Gets Its Lumps, In Closing…

I lead off this SWIFT entry with sad but rather expected news. Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, who was kind enough to write a flattering introduction to my book, “An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural,” has passed away at his adopted home in Colombo, Sri Lanka, at the age of 90. He left written instructions that his funeral be strictly secular, and had directed that "Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral."

Purple Plates, Another Withdrawal, Don’t Miss This, A Request, Airborne News, An Assignment, Another Pet Psychic, No Wonder!, Very True, Moving Forward – Maybe, PBS Offends, Lilieci Case Solved, A Loser Is the Winner, That Pot Head Man, Unlikely Penguins, Adelaide Woo-Woo, Homeopathy Alert, and In Closing…

Reader Dean Malandris:

Those of us trying to maintain our life raft of sanity in an ocean of stupidity have probably developed a sense of being "comfortably numb," as Pink Floyd once said. If rationality is represented by low-lying land mass, and woo-woo is represented by the ocean, then the more I look around, the more I'm convinced that we're suffering Intellectual Global Warming.

I originally thought this was a web site that might have described, in intricate detail, the contents of Nikola Tesla's kitchen cabinets, or side board, but oh no: www.tesla-energy.com

The only sensible thing I could make out was on the "About Plates" page, where it says:

Breaking News, Easy Solution, Another Wrist-Slap, Just Another Cold Reader, A Happy Convert, Explanation, Prophet/Profit Manual, Musical Advice, Rebuttal, That Old Null Hypothesis Problem, Steorn’s Demise Again Denied, Who & Why?, That Health Anchor, Desiré?, and In Closing…

The corpse of Padre Pio, the Italian monk from the Capuchin order who was said to have regularly exhibited stigmata – wounds on his hands, feet and side like those of Jesus Christ during his crucifixion – and who was made a saint by Pope John Paul II, has been exhumed on the 40^th anniversary of his death. Some seven million people visit his tomb every year. Those wounds reputedly bled frequently throughout his adult life. He was exhumed in order to be put on public display at the end of April. We’re told that the remains will be “prepared by experts before being placed in a glass coffin.” I certainly hope so.

The body was in "fair" condition, a Church statement said, and “his nails looked as if they had just undergone a manicure.” The statement also said that the body “has been conserved well,'' and “we could clearly make out the beard,” except that

The top part of the skull is partly skeletal but the chin is perfect and the rest of the body is well preserved.

The Latest on the Geller Front, Steorn: Still Active?, South Africa Again, And Once More, Howe Numb Noory, Hot Air A-Plenty, Homeopathic Tragedies Revisited, Accept the Good Part, The Grubbies Attack!, Defended, Price Winner, Norwegian Nuttery, In Closing..

The TV program titled “The Next Uri Geller” – just run by the Pro-Sieben channel in Germany – now has its audience wondering just why anyone would want to have another such character. Though it was all kept very secretive, the strange clauses in the contract signed by mentalists who asked to be part of the program, have now been made public, and since German law is very contract-oriented, there are many questions being asked – a little too late. Some of the contract terms were anything but magical; at first, the producers didn’t even want to lay down the prize of €100,000 that they’d advertised!

Scientology Under the Microscope, Freiburg Fumble, To Read, Comments on Comments, Shut Down Due to Failure, Excuses and Creative Editing, New for TAM6, and In Closing…

An Internet site that has examined some of the claims made by the Church of Scientology [CoS] concerning the history of their founder Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, is chock-full of obscenities and juvenile comments, a factor that goes directly into the CoS arsenal and provides them with all sorts of weapons with which to devalue that site – though not the facts stated therein. However, the site’s observations deserve to be disseminated, and I summarize them here:

1: According to “official” Church of Scientology biographies, L. Ron Hubbard was brought up in Montana, on a ranch that took up about one quarter of the entire state. He spent his childhood mastering the skills of hunting & tracking; along the way becoming the nation's youngest ever Eagle Scout – and at the age of four was honored with the status of “Blood Brother” by the Native American Blackfoot Tribe.

Achtung JREF Members in Germany!, Fleeced Again, What Makes Us Tick, Ecology Matters, Calling In the Expert, Marc Salem, Obviously Spirits, Oz is Back, DKL Redux, As For the Witches, Another Marvelous Machine, and In Closing... 

The program that I taped in Germany last week about Geller’s current series being shown there – “The New Uri Geller” – will be titled “Kraft der Gedanken” – “Power of Thought” – as part of the “Welt der Wunder” – "World of Wonder" – series. This hour-long program will investigate whether or not there is any merit in the claims of people such as Geller, who has said for the last 36 years that he doesn’t use trickery when he bends spoons and does his "telepathy" demos. The conclusions arrived at in this program will not be very welcome to Mr. Geller, I believe.

The program will first be shown in Europe on February 24 at 7 p.m. on RTL2, then on March the first at 7 p.m. and at 11 p.m. on NTV. There will be repeats on March 3^rd at 10 p.m. and on March 4^th at 8 p.m. on NTV.

Monstrous UFO Thingy, Blocked, Credit Where It’s Due, Hard To Believe, Little Blue Books, Passing of a Legend, Coop's Party, In Conclusion…

Never unwilling to bring you important breaking news, I hasten to inform my readers that the UFO matter now seems to have been definitively resolved. Well, according to Dr. Bruce Cornet, M.S., Ph.D., of El Paso, Texas, that is. In a recent posting to his huge mailing list – some 401 recipients, though I’m not on there! – he announced:

I agree with Victor's comments about skeptics and debunkers. We have been through similar cycles many times in the last 50 years, and each time the amount of solid evidence has increased. The tables are slowly turning on "DERANGED DEBUNKERS" and "SLIMY SKEPTICS", and it is they that will ultimately be relegated to the lists of "MENTAL PATIENTS" because of their inability to accept what is outside cultural reality. IMO they contribute little to human advancement.

More Superstition in High Places, In Australia Too, Hidden Motives, I’m Properly Scolded, Snap It Up!, Psychic Well Busted, Crisis For Quackery, It’s Certainly Remote, More Tiresome Details, We’re Blocked, Please Define “Crackpot,” Starbuck Wisdom, and In Conclusion…

Reader Adam Beach, in New Zealand, reports:

I just thought you and your readers might find this interesting, recently our country has had an unusually large number of brutal murders and attacks, which has made the politicians whip up into a frenzy, as it makes for good issues to gain votes on. However, some have some rather silly explanations. Here is an excerpt from one of the local papers: