Skeptics take aim at alien abductions, lie detectors

MINNEAPOLIS - Life would be more exciting if science lightened up a bit. Elvis Presley could croon at the White House. Aliens could stalk the aisles at 7-Eleven. Martians could

Tuesday, April 11th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

MINNEAPOLIS - Life would be more exciting if science lightened up a bit.

Elvis Presley could croon at the White House.

Aliens could stalk the aisles at 7-Eleven.

Martians could carve a giant stone face on their planet to keep an eye on those pesky Earthlings.

It's almost too bad these events don't happen, because pseudoscience can be a lot more fun than real science.

"Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled," astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in his 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

The late Dr. Sagan, a vocal skeptic, would probably be the last person to return as a ghost. And yet his presence seemed to hover recently at a scientific meeting in Minneapolis.
At its national gathering, the American Physical Society sponsored two sessions dedicated to pseudoscience, in which Dr. Sagan was mentioned frequently. While the rest of the conference dealt with topics such as nanotechology, quantum computing and magnetoresistance, these sessions were filled with alien abduction, communication with the dead, "creation science" and even lie detection.

Physicists crowded the lecture hall, even though the conclusions were not extraordinarily new or surprising. Common refrains: Pseudoscience can be dangerous as well as silly; people are exposed to vast amounts of nonsense through television, books and other mass media; and believing in something doesn't necessarily make it true.

Yet pseudoscience continues to flourish. Pick any week, and physicist Bob Park can point out examples of what he calls "voodoo science."

"You never want to underestimate the human capacity for self-deception," said Dr. Park, who organized one of the Minneapolis sessions. He is a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park and author of a weekly newsletter (available at www.aps.org/WN) that frequently skewers pseudoscience.

At the meeting, Dr. Park reported how inventors continue to market machines that, if they worked, would violate the basic laws of physics. Other speakers noted that tales of alien visits and abductions are more popular than ever. And a Minnesota psychologist, whose research has shown that lie detector tests are often biased against innocent people, described how the tests are still used in cases like the alleged espionage of physicist Wen Ho Lee.

"Voodoo science is a target-rich field," said Dr. Park.

His favorite targets include BlackLight Power Inc., a New Jersey-based company that says it can harvest energy in a new and unusual way. BlackLight's president presented the research recently at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.

BlackLight (www.blacklightpower.com) says it can manufacture "hydrinos," hydrogen atoms whose energy is lower than the ground state - which is, by definition, the lowest energy level an atom can attain. The difference in energy between a hydrino and hydrogen's ground state could be exploited as an energy source, BlackLight says.

But having a hydrogen atom below its ground state "is like being south of the South Pole," said Dr. Park.

Lawyers for BlackLight have demanded that Dr. Park, and several other scientists, stop saying that they think hydrinos are essentially bunk. BlackLight is considering going public with its stock this year.

The company has also patented its hydrino process, but patents don't guarantee the science will work, Dr. Park said. Other than a perpetual-motion machine - for which inventors must prove a working model before patenting it - an invention doesn't need to be proven to work before it can be patented.

Similarly, alien abduction claims don't need to be proven before they are made in public. At the Minneapolis meeting, Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach described how abduction tales may be a mass psychological phenomenon run amok.

Mr. Achenbach interviewed many abductees for his book Captured by Aliens. He even underwent hypnosis to see if he himself was an abductee with repressed memories. (He couldn't be hypnotized.)

Despite the popularity of aliens in modern culture, science has been unable to determine whether they exist or have visited Earth. No photograph, movie, shred of metal or other evidence has definitively proved an alien presence, Mr. Achenbach noted.

Still, millions of people (estimates vary from one-third to one-half or more of the U.S. population) say they believe aliens have visited Earth.

"I view this as a kind of heresy of modern astronomy," said Mr. Achenbach. It takes to the extreme the belief of Dr. Sagan and other scientists - that with billions of stars in the galaxy, intelligent life must have evolved on planets around at least a few of those stars. Intelligent aliens might even have the technology and desire to fly across the galaxy and visit other civilizations.

But in the world of abductees, aliens are fascinated with humans. They travel light-years across space only to poke at the human anatomy, all because people are inherently too interesting to ignore. The idea is enchanting, Mr. Achenbach said, but there is no evidence it is true.

Most people who say they have been abducted by aliens are sane, he noted. In fact, they probably have seen aliens - during a dream, powerful hallucination or other psychological experience, most scientists think.

The mass media provide a context for this belief to grow, through best-selling books about abduction experiences and television specials about alien autopsies. Moreover, the X-Files television series is probably the biggest force behind aliens' popularity in recent years, many scientists think. (Gillian Anderson, the actress who plays skeptical FBI agent Dana Scully on the show, told Mr. Achenbach that she believes that aliens have visited Earth.)

"People don't develop these ideas in a vacuum," said Mr. Achenbach.

Less controversial than aliens, but perhaps more debated by scientists, is the issue of whether lie detectors lie.

At the Minneapolis meeting, psychologist William Iacono described his research suggesting that polygraphs have little, if any, scientific merit, the way they are currently used. Professional polygraph examiners disagree, saying plenty of studies confirm their reliability.

Dr. Iacono runs a University of Minnesota lab that measures physiological responses such as those used in lie-detector tests. Polygraphs measure tiny changes in blood pressure, breathing, sweat or other factors. Examiners frame their questions in such a way as to elicit "guilty" responses - a faster heartbeat, shallower breathing - from guilty people.
Law enforcement agencies, the legal community and private companies use polygraph tests; around 25,000 are administered every year.

On its World Wide Web site, www.polygraph.org, the American Polygraph Association states that it "believes that scientific evidence supports the high validity of polygraph examinations" when properly given.

But the problem, Dr. Iacono argued, is that "there is no evidence they work, and substantial evidence that innocent people might fail."

Typically, an examiner intersperses nonrelevant questions - such as, "Have you ever used an office phone for a personal call?" - with relevant questions such as "Did you take the money from your boss's desk?" The response to the nonrelevant question is used to calibrate the expected stronger, guilty response to the relevant question, since most people probably have made a personal call at the office.

The problem, Dr. Iacono said, is that relevant questions are important to both innocent and guilty people. An innocent person might easily become nervous and respond in confusion, he said. At the same time, a guilty person familiar with polygraphs can cheat the system, perhaps by biting his tongue during the irrelevant question to trigger a strong physiological response.

Some forms of polygraph questioning do work, Dr. Iacono noted. The key is to ask multiple-choice questions that could be important only to a guilty person. For instance, an examiner could ask "How much money was stolen?" followed by the choice of several amounts. Theoretically, only a guilty person would physically respond to the correct choice - so even if he lies, the polygraph would detect his involuntary response.

But polygraph examiners usually don't use the multiple-choice technique, Dr. Iacono said. Instead, they ask vague, open-ended questions that often elicit more, perhaps unrelated confessions from the person being tested.

The debates over polygraphs, alien abductions and puzzling patents aren't likely to be resolved any time soon. But physicists said they would continue to try to distinguish pseudoscientific claims from true mysteries.

Joe Nickell, a senior research fellow with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, noted that science is all about answering difficult questions.

"We think mysteries are not to be dismissed or fostered," he said, "but carefully investigated."

Web resources

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which publishes such tidbits as failed psychic predictions, is available at www.csicop.org.

The Web site of the Skeptics Society, www.skeptic.com, has timely articles interspersed between its commercial pitches.