Dan McKinley

Many of you may have heard stories about the CIA spending tax dollars on “remote viewing” and other paranormal spook activities during the cold war. Incredibly, many of these stories turn out to have been true.

Some senior officials kept an eye on the phenomenon. Kress reports that in November of 1976, CIA Director George Bush became concerned about reported Soviet advances in parapsychology, and called in the agency's RV researchers for a briefing. (Such concerns often provided the impetus for U.S. government parapsychology research; the fear that the Soviets were getting ahead in the mind-war game was widespread among paranormal enthusiasts at military and intelligence agencies) [source].

Not to be outdone, the military may have pursued avenues that were even more bizarre.

In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. [Emphasis mine, source].

Despite substantial effort and investment, none of this produced one single verifiable, reproducible result. Surely, the agencies involved have wised up.

Right?

Well, I wouldn’t bet the farm on that just yet.

It has recently emerged that the source for the New York City subway terror scare passed a polygraph test. Reading this I was, in a word, livid.

What does a polygraph test have to do with psychic spies? Although it probably is not apparent to readers familiar only with Law & Order, both of these instruments have about the same degree of accuracy.

(Please don’t email me about Law & Order. I love Law & Order. I am not throwing Law & Order under the bus.)

Polygraphs may be very popular on television, but there are legions of pretentious whores on television. The National Academy of Sciences agrees (in substance, anyway), giving this recommendation regarding the use of the polygraph by the government:

We have reviewed the scientific evidence on the polygraph with the goal of assessing its validity for security uses … Overall, the evidence is scanty and scientifically weak. Our conclusions are necessarily based on the far from satisfactory body of evidence on polygraph accuracy, as well as basic knowledge about the physiological responses the polygraph measures [source].

The fact that this instrument is being relied upon to safeguard American civilians should infuriate anyone even remotely scientifically literate. The government may as well be identifying terror suspects using a dowsing rod.

“Insane,” responded Drew Richardson, one of the FBI’s top polygraph experts until he retired a few years ago, in an e-mail to SpyTalk. “I would say placing any significance on an examinee passing some portion or all portions on eight out of 15 CQT polygraph exams with all exams having covered the same subject(s) is, in a word, insane” [source].

Further reading:

• Polygraph (“Lie Detector”) – Skeptic’s Dictionary
• Polygraph is Quackery

John Dvorak recently posted this plug for what appears to be a pseudoscience site, holoscience.com. Quote:

This site is devoted to looking at space science in a holistic, interdisciplinary manner. It also has some exceptionally cool images.

The comments on his blog appear to be either disabled or not working, so I will post a reply here.

This site appears to be yet another "theory of everything, the scientific establishment is against me" kind of site. Example quote:

"The Big Bang is already dead! The unheralded "Galileo of the 20th century", Halton Arp, has proven that the universe is not expanding."

Everything written in the News area of the site appears to be self published and not peer-reviewed. There seems to be a war going on at Wikipedia over another apparently self-published article about the "Electric Universe" theory espoused on the site. View the discussion here.

Hi William, please refer to the list of papers on the article page going back to 1930 to show serious study in this field. A Google search will reveal 6,240 pages returned on a search for "'electric universe' + plasma" …. . –Bongani 19:38, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

No, thats a long list of papers which have something to do with electricity in space, and have nothing to do with EUM. One of the characteristics of pet/psuedo science [sic] is appropriating irrelevant papers that have the right-looking words in them. Any article that states That the Sun and stars are powered by an external electric current is (to be frank for just a moment) wacko nonsense. Any article that makes such a controversial statement, and then fails to back it up with a peer-reviewed paper, is unsuitable for wiki as "original research". … William M. Connolley 20:05:57, 2005-07-09 (UTC).

And as you can see the neutrality of the original article is disputed.

I can't believe Dvorak posted this, frankly. But it fits with the horoscope ad displayed prominently on his site. Holoscience does have "purty pictures," though.

Update (11:15) - It appears that Dvorak might have posters on his site other than himself. Not sure why or who they are, but I thought I should mention that the opinion I quoted above may not be directly attributable to the popular PC Magazine columnist.

According to this article, the word debate seems to be sorely in need of redefinition.

President George W. Bush stirred the debate on the teaching of evolution in schools when he said this week that he supported the teaching of alternative viewpoints - such as the theory of Intelligent Design - to help students "understand what the debate is about" [emphasis mine].

Please do not trouble yourself - I have already suggested a number of alternatives to the archaic meaning (“to engage in argument by discussing opposing points.“) to the custodians of Dictionary.com.

1. Impassioned and reasoned logic countered with childish misrepresentations and/or outright lies.
2. Deliberately creating confusion between the Scientific Process and a Scientifically-Conducted Gallup Poll.

If you are not looking forward to another unreasoning dark age, except this time with nuclear bombs, might I suggest taking this opportunity to donate to these charities:

1. The Council for Secular Humanism
2. Americans United