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The Angels of Mons and Elsewhere – Part Two: Even More Tales of Supernatural Rescue

Scott Wood
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The Angels of Mons and Elsewhere – Part Two: Even More Tales of Supernatural Rescue

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 18, Issue 2, from 2005

In the first article in this series, I explained the origins of the fabled Angels of Mons, and the myths that rose around them. However, none of the mythmaking that took place during the First World War was new or unique – the themes that are present in the Angels of Mons reports are echoed in other myths, at various other points in history.

One rumour that multiplied during the war was the story of Russian soldiers being transported, late at night, from Scotland to the Southeast of England to fight at the front. Unnamed commuters would report seeing train carriages full of fierce, furry-hat-wearing men, with snow on their boots, on their way to the front to overwhelm the Germans. History proved this rumour to be false (Terraine, 1980).

After the destruction of the World Trade Centre, a piece of urban folklore sprang up expressing British and American anxiety about possible Muslim terrorists walking among them. A ‘friend of a friend’ (foaf ) helps an Arabic or Asian stranger who is short of money in a supermarket queue (£1 Birmingham, £3 in London). The stranger thanks them and rewards them with some advice: the ‘foaf ’ should not use the London Underground or go into Birmingham town centre, presumably due to an imminent threat. This story was repeated featuring Coventry, Tamworth, Milton Keynes and Chester (Mikkelson, 2002a).

In American versions the warning is “Don’t drink Coke this summer”, or after “June 1st 2002” (Mikkelson & Mikkelson, 2002). Or it’s an American girl whose Afghan boyfriend disappeared on September 11th 2001 is left a letter begging her not to fly on that day and to keep away from shopping malls the following Halloween (Mikkelson, 2002b). The details change, but the themes recur.

Men in White

The Angels of Mons, as they emerged during and after 1915 and in numerous books afterwards, are a folktale. They are more dazzling than snowy Russians or helpful terrorists, but an urban legend all the same. In all accounts the BEF, fighting on the side of God, King and Country, are about to be wiped out by a greater force of supposedly godless Germans. At a crucial moment a shining white figure, or figures, appears between them causing the Germans to either flee in terror or hesitate in confusion. The British use this to escape or rally enough to fight back successfully. Often in the story a captured German, usually an officer, would either ask the identity of the invincible figure in white or simply know that they had been beaten by angels.

This contrasts with The Bowmen and the Rudyard Kipling story The Lost Legion, which Machen based The Bowmen on. In both, soldiers are aided in their time of need by supernatural entities that kill the opposition. There is no mass vision or enquiring enemy; the only person to see the bowmen is the delirious Latin scholar. One exception is the account in The Universe on 30 April 1915 which does describe supernaturally inflicted death (see Part One), but this is the first known Mons account and the most influenced by The Bowmen. There were no woundless Germans dead at Mons, so the story survived because of the move from dead Germans to scared ones. Through this process the Angels of Mons came to resemble, or show the influence of, stories from elsewhere.

During the Angels of Mons debate a letter appeared in The Daily Mail on the 7 August 1915 from Lionel Edwards of Little Leigh Vicarage, Northwich. The letter suggested that events at Mons were not so surprising, as similar events had taken place before. It contained two stories, the first describing the besieged British Embassy in China during the Boxer rebellion. To get to safety the British had to risk coming into view of the Boxer snipers. At the crucial moment the snipers did not fire. When captured rebels were later asked why they did not shoot they said, as did the apocryphal captured Germans, that they were afraid of the people in white between them and the British. The second story tells of an Australian priest giving the last rites to a condemned prisoner. The prisoner claimed to have seen the priest many years ago riding alone through the bush and decided to murder and rob him. He was prevented by the “companions in white who rode either side” of the priest, who remembered being in the area on that date.

When Attila the Hun met Pope Leo I at the city gates of Rome, St Peter and St Paul appeared either side of Leo, threatening Attila with instant death if he attacked the holy city. Attila withdrew. When St Francis Xavier met the Badagars, who intended to kill Xavier and destroy the Christians of Traunancor and Comorinum, he was accompanied by a “terrible giant” with lightning in his eyes, who caused the Badagars to retreat (Brewer, 1884).

China is the venue of angelic intervention in a story repeated by Hope Price in Angels. A city is being looted by a lawless Chinese army, also threatening a missionary compound. A missionary soothes her comrades with Psalm 91:5 and the next day many non-Christians arrive at the mission to ask who their protectors were. The Missionary hears of four tall, non-Chinese (of course) soldiers guarding the mission compound. They were said to have “shone” (Price, 1994, pp. 166-167).

Missionary Sudar Singh was saved in the same way when cornered in a cave by Tibetan villagers angry with his preaching. They stood at the mouth of the cave, calling to Singh to tell them who the men were who were guarding him. Singh could see no one (Schlink, 1985). The astrally-projected spirit of a tribal medicine man was repelled by “strong men in white” when it was sent to trouble another missionary (Schlink, 1985, p. 115).

Saints, as well as angels, have aided outnumbered Christians before the retreat at Mons. Sir Walter Scott, in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft recounts the story of Cortez battling against extreme odds during the conquest of Mexico. St Iago was said to appear at the front of the Spanish on a white horse to lead them on to victory. Scott’s source, Historia Verdadera by Don Bernal Dias del Castillo, reports a witness remembering: “[N]ay, that he beheld an individual cavalier, named Francisco de Morla, mounted on a chestnut horse, and fighting strenuously in the very place St Iago is said to have appeared.” (Scott, 2001, p. 15).

Save the Children

Another Saint to intervene during warfare is Padre (now Saint) Pio. This legend is of interest for two reasons. Firstly, it is a post-Mons account of divine intervention and the attackers driven away were, ultimately, on the winning side. The basic motifs are still the same. During World War Two the American air force were bombing the towns of southern Italy with the exception of San Giovanni. A sky-born apparition of a monk with upheld hands was appearing to the American pilots and a ‘force field’ was stopping any bombs hitting the town. An unnamed American Commanding General, who had seen the vision, went to the town after the war to investigate and meet Padre Pio at a monastery. He recognised Pio as the air-borne monk who had protected San Giovanni, and just as non-religious men were changed after seeing the Angels of Mons, the General knelt before Pio and converted to Catholicism soon afterwards (Day, 2002).

Another branch of this myth substitutes embattled Christian men with children. The book Angels A to Z repeats two incidents of angelic intervention that took place after Mons (Merta, 1996). There is the possibility of a kind of narrative contamination from the Mons legends but I feel there are enough pre-20th century predecessors, St Iago in Mexico, Attila at the gates of Rome and St Francis Xavier being three examples, to demonstrate that all these stories have a common root far older than Arthur Machen’s story in London Evening News.

The first is during the Second World War in Danzig, East Prussia (now Gdansk, Poland). A group of children are sheltering in a schoolhouse from Russian shelling. One of the children who, like many of the angel witnesses, is not a Christian, says “It came up to here on them” to a nurse while tapping his breastbone. When asked what he meant, the boy described men who were standing at every corner of the building, ablaze with light and so tall the gutters of the roof came up to their chests.

The second account describes missionary children trapped during the Jeunesse Rebellion in the Congo as rebel troops advance on their school. The rebels spend three days advancing, then inexplicably retreating and, of course, when a wounded rebel is captured, he tells of hundreds of soldiers dressed in white, protecting the compound that contained the school (Merta, 1996).

There is at least one earlier version of this story. In Kendal, Cumbria in 1745, Highland raiders are prevented from seizing a child they find playing on the floor of an inn parlour by an angel who drives them away. The event is said to have given the Angel Inn of Kendal its name (Findler, 1984).

Inevitably a version appears in one Mons account. A member of the British Expeditionary Force rescues a child from the Germans. A nurse asks him how he did it, he replies:

How did you manage to pick up the child from under the German guns?” I asked. […] “It was a kind of Golden cloud between us and the Germans and a man on a big horse – and then I saw the child in the dust by the roadside, and picked it up.” “Yes sister,” he added, “Lots of the other chaps saw it too.” There was a murmur of confirmation. “The minute I saw it,” he continued, “I knew we were going to win. It fair bucked me up.

McClure, 1983, p. 9

Angels intervene in the Bible, Exodus 14:19. Just before the Red Sea is parted, the fleeing Israelites are saved by the Angel of God within a glowing cloud that “lit up the night” coming between them and Pharaoh’s army. As with some British troops who reach their wits end at Mons, in Exodus 14:11 the Israelites ask Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?” as Pharaoh’s cavalry bears down on  them. In 2 Maccabees 3:254-26 the Temple is saved from a rampaging mob in the familiar way. “For there appeared to them a magnificently caparisoned horse, with rider of frightening mien; [….] its rider was seen to have armour and weapons of gold.” The mob fall back in terror, and two further defenders sent by the “Sovereign of Spirits” appear and flog the leader of the mob.

It is clear to me that the Angels of Mons follows the same pattern as all of the examples above. Outnumbered Christians escape certain harm by divine intervention. Often the events are backed by an enquiry into the supernatural events from the attackers. After some shifting from the initial accounts, inspired by visions in the field or The Bowmen or both, the shape the Mons stories settled into is one of established Christian folklore.

Elsewhere

Do not let it be thought that these stories are exclusively Judeo-Christian, however. While the motif of the enemy fleeing in fear or confusion without engaging the supernatural Guardians is an element of the Christian version of the story, there are parallels in other faiths and myths.

The first major victory in the campaigns led by Muhammad was won at Bedhr, when the greatly outnumbered Muslims were joined in their battle against the Meccans by the angel Gabriel leading an army of angels. Two observers on a hill heard the angels’ stallions neigh as they swept past and saw them moving in a cloud. One of the men died of fright on the spot (Glassé, 1989, pp. 66-67).

No doubt evolving from the Bible stories but with a Celtic influence is the folktale of the Faery Flag of the MacLeods. A battle between the MacLeods and MacDonalds is going badly for the MacLeods until the flag is waved and it seems as if their numbers are greatly reinforced, and the MacDonalds faltered and fell back (Wilson, 1971, p. 71). Gerald B. Gardner tells a similar story about a battle on the Isle of Man (Gardner, 1975, p. 64).

The 14th of August 1915 issue of Light carried a de-Christianised version of the white rider myth is its Sidelights section:

We observe that the ghost of the celebrated General Skobelev, who made so great a mark in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, is reported in a telegram [….] to have been seen of late by many Russian sentries. The apparition appeared clad in a white uniform and riding a horse. According to an exchange its appearance is stated by tradition to mark always a critical moment for the armies of the Czar, and to cause invariable panic in the enemies ranks.

Further back than the visions of St Iago in Mexico, St George at Carthage, and Mons and General

Skobelev, is the story of twin gods Castor and Pollux, appearing before Roman soldiers at the Battle of Lake Regillus in 496 BC. The horse-riding Dioscuri, as they were known in Greece, led the Romans to victory against the Etruscan Tarquins and became patrons of the Roman cavalry (Grant, 1996).

In 174 AD, another Roman force, trapped, thirsty, tired and greatly outnumbered, were given water by divine intervention, restoring them sufficiently to gain victory. The miracle was ascribed to both Mercury and later to the Christian God, the pagan version requesting the miracle via an Egyptian magician, the Christian by prayer (Mullin, 1978).

The Iliad, like the Bible, contains a number of divine interventions. Athene directs an arrow fired at Menelaus toward his metal belt, though the bolt still floors him. Apollo hides Prince Hector and Agenor from Achilles in a golden cloud and a cloud of smoke respectively, while Poseidon spreads a mist before Achilles’ eyes and takes Aeneas to safety (Homer, 1950).

Artemis is a Greek hunter goddess who appears in the Iliad, though her origins disappear into pre-history. In The Encyclopaedia of Religion she is described in a way that sounds very much like the Angels of Mons and their kin:

Artemis does not fight; she guides and she saves, she is Artemis Hegemone (‘ruler’) and Artemis Soteira (‘saviour’). She is invoked as rescuer in critical situations when a city is threatened with complete destruction. Artemis prepares for action when war goes beyond the civilised rules of combat and veers in the direction of savagery. In these extreme cases the goddess does not resort to physical or martial force, but uses supernatural means to upset the game. To some she brings blindness, leading them in out-of-the-way paths, while others she gives a sort of hyper-lucidity, guiding them miraculously through darkness or illuminating their minds with sudden inspiration.

I do not think the original story of these supernatural saviours will be identified. The story clearly goes back thousands of years and has been adapted by numerous cultures and creeds. The angels, saints, gods and goddesses act by causing confusion, terror and sudden courage, by bringing down smoke clouds and bright lights. Their perceived actions are really what happens in a battle and what happens in the human mind during that battle. It is in the chance, chaos, smoke, flames and visions of humanity and humanity’s environment that we see the faces of the divine and build our stories around them, stories that spread, grow and evolve according to human time and place.

References

  • Brewer, Rev F. Cobham. (1884). A Dictionary of Miracles. London: Chatto & Windus.
  • Day, M. (2002). Blood Brother. Fortean Times, 162, 35–38.
  • Eliade, M. (1987). The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol 1. New York: MacMillan.
  • Findler, G. (1984). Lakeland Legends. Clapham: Dalesman Books.
  • Gardner, G. B. (1975). Witchcraft Today. London: Arrow Books.
  • Glassé, C. (1989). A Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam.London: Stacy.
  • Grant, M. (1996). History of Rome. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
  • Homer (trans. 1950). The Iliad (trans. E.V. Rieu). London: Penguin.
  • Howarth, P. (1994). Attila, King of the Huns: Man and Myth. London: Constable.
  • Merta, M. F. (1996). Battlefield, Angels on the. In R. L.  James, & E. D. Oliver (with K. S. Sisung), Angels A to Z. Detroit: Visible Ink.
  • McClure, K. (1983). Visions of Bowmen and Angels. Retrieved 12 April 2002
  • Mikkelson, B. (2002a). Stalk Tip. Retrieved 18 May 2003, from http://www.snopes.com/rumors/warning.htm
  • Mikkelson, B. (2002b). Mall Risk. Retrieved 18 May 2003, from http://www.snopes.com/rumors/mallrisk.htm
  • Mikkelson, B., & Mikkelson, D. P. (2002). Not the Real Thing. Retrieved 18 May 2003, from http://www.snopes.com/rumors/cocacola.htm
  • Mullin, R. (1978). Miracles and Magic: The Miracles and Spells of Saints and Witches. Oxford: Mowbray.
  • New Revised Standard Version Bible. (1989). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Price, H. (1994). Angels. London: Pan
  • Schlink, B. (1985). The Unseen World of Demons and Angels. London: Marshall Morgan & Scott.
  • Scott, Sir W. (2001). Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. London: Wordsworth.
  • Terraine, J. (1980). The Smoke and the Fire. Myths and Anti-Myths of War 1861-1945. London: Sidgewick and Jackson.
  • Wilson, B. K. (1971). Scottish Folk-Tales and Legends. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

SETI and the Fermi paradox: in search of ET

Dene Bebbington
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SETI and the Fermi paradox: in search of ET

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 18, Issue 1, from 2005

Near the beginning of the film Contact (which is based on the novel of the same name by Carl Sagan) a young girl asks her father if he thinks there are people on other planets, to which he responds: “If it is just us, it seems like an awful waste of space”. It’s easy to sympathise with that comment, the unimaginable scale of the universe – billions of galaxies containing billions of stars – intuitively makes the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) seem like a worthwhile endeavour. But is it?

Project Phoenix is the SETI Institute’s search for signs of alien life, using large telescopes to scan stars for transmissions in certain parts of the microwave spectrum. Specifically, they are looking for carrier type signals that would likely be used by aliens to call attention to their presence. Contrary to what people might imagine about SETI, any message being sent couldn’t necessarily be extracted from the signal until larger instruments were made to demodulate the signal’s content.

So far, if ET is out there, he’s been cosmically silent. Having said that, back in 1977 a candidate signal, ever since known as the ‘Wow!’ signal, was detected on a frequency prohibited for ground- or satellite-based transmitters, but unfortunately it was never picked up again. It’s not known if it was a genuine signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence or something else (maybe noise). To consider whether SETI is a waste of effort we need to examine the factors involved in the likelihood, or otherwise, of intelligent life existing elsewhere in our galaxy, and the universe as a whole.

The renowned physicist Enrico Fermi gave rise to the so-called Fermi Paradox by asking “Where are they?” after doing some analysis (apparently at a lunch table with colleagues!) and concluding that there should be many civilisations in the galaxy. Following on from this, there have been some models (for example, Crawford, 2000) which take certain assumptions and conclude that in just a few million years our galaxy could be colonised by a spacefaring civilisation.

Clearly the Fermi Paradox needs to be taken seriously, but the problem with models of how spacefaring populations could colonise a galaxy is the assumptions they are based on. Not surprisingly, counter arguments have been put forward to answer Fermi’s question, indeed, the matter has even received book-length treatment. In passing I should mention that UFO buffs would doubtless argue that extraterrestrials are already here. As there is no convincing evidence that UFOs are spacecraft from other worlds, and because UFOs can more plausibly be explained as natural phenomena, hoaxes, or optical illusions, there’s no need to take that idea seriously.

The first issue arising from the Fermi Paradox is the possible number of civilisations in the galaxy. There is no definitive answer to that, and probably never will be, but there have been attempts to come up with a figure. The seminal work in this regard is the Drake equation (Drake & Sobel, 1994), named after Frank Drake who founded SETI. The equation is:

            N = R x fp x Ne x fl x fi x fc x L

Where N is the number of detectable civilisations in space, R is the rate of star formation, fp is the fraction of stars that form planets, Ne is the number of planets hospitable to life, fl is the fraction of those planets on which life emerges, fi is the fraction of planets on which intelligent life evolves, fc is the fraction of planets with beings capable of interstellar communication, and L is how long that civilisation is detectable.

The question then is what values should be plugged into the Drake equation? Some of the figures will always be little more than educated guesses, typically based on what we know of life on Earth. Drake has derived an estimate of between one thousand and one hundred million advanced civilisations in our Milky Way galaxy (Drake & Sobel, 1994). Over time this estimate will likely change as detection of planets outside our solar system improves. Even if Drake’s estimate is far too high, if we are not alone in the universe, it would only take one planet to have harboured intelligent life in each galaxy to mean the universe has been home to billions of civilisations.

Over a hundred extrasolar planets have now been discovered, which demonstrates that planet formation is actually quite common. However, those extrasolar planets are mainly gas giants orbiting their star closer than Jupiter is to the sun – not the kind of planets on which we’d expect to find life. In time we may develop technology to detect smaller rocky planets which are more amenable to supporting life. At least we now know that planet formation is not a rare occurrence.

One answer to the Fermi Paradox could be that even though life is common in the galaxy, intelligent life isn’t. Here on Earth, life started fairly early on, around 3.5 to 4 billion years ago (White, 1999; Davies, 2003) with the Earth estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old. It is only in the last few million years that humans evolved, and much more recently that we’ve developed technology that can make our presence known across outer space.

The evolution of beings like ourselves was by no means inevitable; evolution is affected by many contingencies – such as the event(s) that led to the demise of the dinosaurs which had ‘dominated’ the Earth for over a hundred million years. The possibility of at least simple forms of life on other planets (or moons) is taken seriously now; there is even a scientific discipline called Astrobiology to study it. A hypothesis known as ‘Rare Earth’ (Cramer, 2000), suggests that complex intelligent life is very rare because on Earth a fortuitous combination of factors came together to allow the evolution of humans. This isn’t a totally new argument since for some time Creationists and others have argued that the Earth is special because many factors (such as the distance from the sun) are just right for it to support life.

We can look at factors influencing the lifespan of intelligent life here on Earth, although it’s a sample size of one and therefore extrapolating from it is possibly no better than divination. Until now, space exploration has been limited to our solar system, and manned missions haven’t been further than the moon. It’s early days for manned space exploration in particular, as the technology has only been around for a few decades. The costs may come down to a point in the future so that it is a more attractive proposition for governments faced with more pressing claims on their finances. As I write, the Chinese have just put their first man into space, and they may even send a manned mission to the moon, but it’s all probably more to do with national pride and geopolitics than serious space exploration.

Will humans be around long enough to progress to colonising outer space? That’s a difficult question to answer. However, there is a statistical argument known as the Doomsday argument (Bostrom, 2003) that claims we’re likely to be near the end of humanity’s lifespan. Using Bayesian statistics, the claim is that if you take your birth rank in comparison to all people who have ever lived, it is more likely to be the case that humanity will become extinct sooner rather than later. I’ll explain this by a commonly used example first. Imagine two urns containing numbered balls. One urn contains ten balls and the other a million. If you take a ball from one of the urns and it’s numbered six then it’s much more likely to have come from the urn containing ten balls. Now, take your birth order against all the people that have ever lived, this will be in the region of 60 billion. The probability of your birth order being 60 billion is much higher if humanity goes extinct soon than if the total number of people that ever lived reaches, say, trillions. I am not knowledgeable enough in statistics to give a strong opinion either way on the Doomsday argument, but it is taken seriously – academic papers have been published to refute it and defend it.

The Milkyway across the night sky

If other advanced civilisations exist in the galaxy there are many reasons why they won’t have colonies beyond their own planet. Space exploration is not a big priority for humans at the moment, though that might change in future, so why should it be for aliens? Also, the technology to send manned missions outside the solar system seems to be a long way off, and producing unmanned probes that could replicate themselves is only the stuff of science fiction at the moment. One day we might attempt to colonise planets orbiting stars other than the sun, but that is dependent on the vicissitudes of politics, economics, the environment etc.

The last variable in the Drake equation is the length of time a civilisation remains detectable. This will be influenced by the lifetime of the civilisation and how advanced their technology becomes. If the Doomsday argument has merit then we are entitled to wonder if other civilisations will also have a short lifespan. It is possible to come up with many good reasons to argue either way about the longevity of civilisations, but ultimately it’s little more than conjecture. We also need to bear in mind that the existence of suitably advanced extraterrestrials will need to coincide in certain ways with SETI – there’s a ‘window of opportunity’ for us to detect any signals sent not too long ago. Consider this: if a planet ten thousand light years away was home to an advanced civilisation that became extinct a million years ago, then their final signals would have passed Earth too long ago. Similarly, any signals being sent for the first time from anywhere more than a few tens of light years away wouldn’t have reached us yet.

Sadly we may never know if humankind is the only intelligent life to have inhabited the galaxy or universe. There are good grounds on both sides of the argument for the existence of extraterrestrial life, so after asking if SETI is a worthwhile project, the answer surely has to be yes, if we want to try for an answer to a most profound question: are we alone?

References

  • Bostrom, N. (n.d.). A Primer on the Doomsday argument. Retrieved 5 October 2003, from http://www.anthropic-principle.com/primer1.html
  • Cramer, J.G. (2000). The “Rare Earth” Hypothesis. Retrieved 5 October 2003, from http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw102.html
  • Crawford, I. (2000). Where Are They? Scientific American. Retrieved 5 October 2003
  • Davies, P. (2003). Born Lucky. New Scientist, 179(2403), 33.
  • Drake, F. & Sobel, D. (1994). Is Anyone Out There? Glasgow: Simon & Schuster.
  • White, M. (1999). Life Out There. St Ives: Warner Books.

An anaesthesiologist examines the Pam Reynolds story Part 1: Background considerations

Gerald Woerlee
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An anaesthesiologist examines the Pam Reynolds story Part 1: Background considerations

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 18, Issue 1, from 2005

Ever since it was first reported by the cardiologist Michael Sabom, the near-death experience of Pam Reynolds has been held by many to be definitive proof of the paranormal and the reality of a life after death (Sabom, 1998). Her story has been told and retold, assuming almost mythic proportions. Finally, here was a person who returned from “clinical death” to tell of the reality of an existence beyond the veil of this earthly life. Proof at last, according to many!

It is true that the report of Pam Reynolds is a story of a wonderful experience which must have had a profound effect upon her. What Pam Reynolds experienced was not just an ordinary hallucination. She really did “see”, feel, and undergo all she described. She really did undergo a wondrous, seemingly inexplicable, life-changing experience – an experience possibly giving her much spiritual comfort by confirming deeply rooted socio-cultural expectations about a life after death, as well as the nature of the universe. And it was certainly an experience whose details seemingly prove the reality of a life after death. But is this true? I decided to examine the reality of the proof offered by this experience.

Pam Reynolds is the pseudonym of a woman 35 years old in 1991 when a diagnosis of a large aneurysm of one of the arteries of her brainstem was made. An aneurysm is a balloon-like weakening of an artery, and in the case of Pam Reynolds, this was a large aneurysm of the main artery providing her brainstem with blood.

A large aneurysm of a brain artery is like a time-bomb. It can burst at any moment, causing enormous bleeding within the head, depriving the parts of the brain normally fed by that artery of blood. Pam Reynolds’ aneurysm was very likely to burst, so depriving her brainstem of blood. Sudden bursting of this aneurysm would suddenly stop the blood supply to her brainstem, causing her to die immediately, because the brainstem is that part of the brain generating consciousness, controlling breathing, and many other vital body functions. So an operation was planned to remove this aneurysm.

The planned operation technique was complex. Pam Reynolds was brought under general anaesthesia. Her skull was opened and the aneurysm exposed. This was too large to treat safely, so her doctors connected blood vessels in her left groin to a heart bypass machine to cool her body down to 15 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit). Her heartbeat was then stopped, the blood drained from her head, and the aneurysm carefully removed. Subsequently, her body was warmed up again, normal heartbeat and blood circulation restored, the head, and all other wounds closed, after which she was allowed to awaken slowly in the recovery room. After recovering the ability to speak, she told of a truly amazing experience undergone while apparently unconscious under general anaesthesia and low temperature cardiac arrest.

She told of awakening and undergoing an out-of-body experience during the initial phase of the operation. She found herself in a position from which she observed the neurosurgeon at work, and where she could “see” and describe the pneumatic saw used to open her skull. She heard the cardiac surgeon say that the blood vessels in her right groin were too small. Subsequently, she passed through a black vortex to arrive in a world of light where she met with her deceased grandmother and uncle, as well as other deceased relatives. They helped her, “fed” her, and finally returned her to her body, after which she finally awoke in the recovery room (Sabom, 1998).

Surgeons in a surgery theatre working on a patient who is behind a screen

This is a fantastic story. Wondrous even. Superficially it appears to be definitive proof of an afterlife. But this is not the case. As an anaesthesiologist hardened and scarred by more than twenty years busy clinical experience, combined with a personal fascination in the ways the functioning of the body can generate apparently paranormal experiences, I know this experience to be a product of the way the body and mind of Pam Reynolds reacted to her situation and anaesthesia.

I will begin with a quick discussion of the reality of the paranormal. The reason for this approach is that many people attribute the observations of Pam Reynolds to paranormal perceptive abilities. But after believing in the possibility of paranormal perceptions for nearly all my adult life, I have finally come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no evidence for paranormal perceptions. Not only this, but I find that people possess absolutely no paranormal perceptive abilities at all! So what are my reasons for such an absolute and rigid-sounding statement? I will summarise the evidence (Woerlee, 2003, see chapters 7 & 8):

According to polls conducted with many thousands of respondents in many countries, about 25-85% of all people have experienced at least one or more “unexplained” or paranormal experience.

This means a large proportion of the world population has latent or actually manifest paranormal perceptive abilities.

The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882, and similar societies were founded almost simultaneously in other countries. University departments have conducted paranormal research for more than 50 years. Private institutions have also performed much paranormal research. Yet despite intensive, well conducted, and methodologically outstanding research performed during 120 years, no convincing and reproducible evidence for the reality of paranormal perceptive abilities has ever been found. And here we are speaking about an ability that may be present or latent in 25-85% of all people! Jessica Utts summarised this sorry state of affairs at the end of an article written in 1991. She stated that there is no real convincing evidence for paranormal perceptive abilities, but there may well be “something”, even though this may not be paranormal. No change has occurred in this sad state of affairs since 1991.

Nonetheless, paranormal perceptive abilities may not be manifest in experimental situations. Studies of tens of thousands of spontaneous paranormal perceptions and events reveal that 50% of these reports occurred during dreaming. Humans dream 4-6 times each night, spending about 2 hours per night dreaming, which means that 50% of all paranormal perceptions occur during a situation occurring during 1/12 of each day. So dreaming appears to be a state of mind conducive to paranormal perceptions. Careful dream research never yielded conclusive results.

Pharmacological enhancement of the neurotransmitter predominance during dreaming sleep is an effect of many medicines commonly used in normal medical practice. In the past this was done with Reserpine, a commonly used antihypertensive drug in the 60s. Rebound REM sleep occurs after stopping antidepressive drugs such as amitryptaline (a drug which is still commonly used). Yet no-one ever reports, or has ever reported, amazing paranormal abilities manifested by people experiencing these effects from these drugs. Strange…

Dream reports are said to provide evidence of paranormal perceptive abilities. In such situations people rake up the tired old story of Mark Twain’s dream of the sad demise of his brother Henry. My first reaction is that this is a dream reported more than 100 years ago! And the author said that he had recounted it many times before it was finally published 100 years ago. Aren’t there any more recent ‘veridical’ dreams?

If you calculate how many dreams are dreamed by each individual during a human lifetime, and by the world population, you quickly come to the conclusion that nearly all dreams have no relation to events in the future and are quickly forgotten, some dreams have some relation to the future and are remembered, and an incredibly few dreams are an exact report of a future event. And this last category of dreams is certainly remembered, and such dreams assume almost mythical proportions and are reported for more than 100 years.

Blind and deaf people develop their remaining senses to compensate for the loss of these senses. Epidemiological data from the USA population extrapolated to the living world population reveal that worldwide there are more than 7.7 million totally blind people on this world, more than 4.2 million totally deaf people, and more than 0.5 million totally blind and deaf people. In the past there have been countless millions of such people.

If these people develop paranormal perceptive abilities, then there would be popular knowledge and beliefs about blind and deaf people indicating their possession of paranormal perceptive abilities. But there is no popular belief saying that blind and deaf people are paranormally gifted. No-one goes to a blind and deaf psychic with the expectation that these people are more gifted with paranormal abilities than those with normal sight and hearing. No-one is jubilant upon hearing that a loved relative has become totally blind and totally deaf, even though these people could be expected to develop paranormal abilities which would more than compensate for their loss of sight and hearing. No-one expects blind and deaf people to cross busy roads using paranormal sensory abilities – everyone would call blind and deaf people wanting to do such a thing suicidal and foolish.

All the training of blind and deaf people is oriented towards the use of their remaining physical abilities, never towards the development of paranormal perceptive abilities. In fact, all people ever expect from the blind and deaf is that they are just that – blind and deaf – even though about 25-85% of blind and deaf people supposedly have latent or manifest paranormal abilities. All these things mean that blind and deaf people possess no paranormal perceptive abilities.

Gambling casinos are wonderful laboratories for testing the reality of paranormal perceptions. Casinos do not have to cheat to earn money – simple statistics means they always earn money by being scrupulously honest. Furthermore they are legally obliged to monitor the randomness of their gambling machines scrupulously. To make matters even better, gamblers are superstitious and really do want to win, and about 25-85% of gamblers supposedly have latent or manifest paranormal perceptive abilities.

So many millions of people visit and gamble at casinos, that even if only very few people had paranormal perceptive abilities, this would be conclusively proven by the statistics from gambling casinos. Yet the numbers churned out by roulette wheels and slot machines are truly random, and the earnings of casinos with slot machines and roulette wheels are precisely what the statistics of chance indicate they would earn.

Absolutely no evidence for paranormal perceptive abilities is to be found in these figures. Paranormal perceptive and psychokinetic abilities are not manifest in casinos, even though a significant proportion of gamblers should possess such abilities.

The totality of all these separate pieces of evidence clearly indicates that paranormal perceptive and psychokinetic abilities simply do not exist. Paranormal abilities are no more than a fantasy nestling in the human psyche; a wishful fantasy of fantastic powers fulfilling some deep desire nestling within all of us.

Having dealt with this fantasy, it is then possible, in part two, to deal logically with the perceptions of Pam Reynolds. This does not mean the experience of Pam Reynolds is in any way lessened. For to the woman called “Pam Reynolds” this was a profoundly meaningful experience. Even so, this does not preclude the fact that her experience was rooted in changes in the functioning of her body.

References:

  • Sabom, M. (1998). Light and death. Michigan: Zonderva.
  • Utts, J. (1991). Replication and meta-analysis in parapsychology. Statistical Science, 6, 363-403.
  • Woerlee, G. M. (2003). Mortal Minds: A Biology of the Soul and the Dying Experience. Utrecht, The Netherlands: de Tijdstroom.

The Angels of Mons and Elsewhere – Part One: The Bowmen and Other Legends

Scott Wood
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The Angels of Mons and Elsewhere – Part One: The Bowmen and Other Legends

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 18, Issue 1, from 2005

Extracts from The Sunday Times, 30th August 1914:

Regiments were grievously injured, and the broken army fought its way desperately with many stands, forced backwards and ever backwards by the sheer unconquerable mass of numbers of an enemy prepared to throw away three or four men for the life of every British soldier. 

We have to face the fact that the British Expeditionary Force, which bore the great weight of the blow, has suffered terrible losses and requires immediate and immense reinforcement. The British Expeditionary Force has won indeed imperishable glory, but needs men, men and yet more men.

(My emphasis)

After reading the above, describing the retreat from Mons, Arthur Machen wrote the story The Bowmen. It appeared in the London Evening News, issue of 29th September, 1914, and told of a British soldier, a ‘Latin scholar’, caught in the carnage of Mons. He remembers an inscription Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius or “May Saint George be a present help to the English”. Delirious, he starts crying the motto out at the top of his voice while firing wildly into the German lines. All of a sudden ghostly archers appear before him shouting “St. George for Merry England” and “Knights of Heaven aid us”. Only the scholar can see the bowmen, yet when they shoot their arrows, the Germans fall to the ground dead but unmarked.

A few days after publication, both The Occult Review and Light (A Journal of Psychical, Occult and Mystical Research) contacted Machen asking him what the truth was behind the story. None, Machen replied, and the subject, he felt at the time, was left at that (Machen, 1915).

Light received a visitor the next year. A military officer asked to see the issue that mentioned Machen’s story. He said that some troops at Mons had seen a cloud that had saved the British from the Germans. “[T]his legend of Mons is fascinating,” said Light, 24th of April 1915, “we should like to hear more of it.”

A letter claiming to describe actual supernatural intervention at Mons appeared in the Catholic newspaper The Universe, 30th April 1915. British soldiers, trapped by German fire, decide to try and rush the Germans. They yell, “St. George for England!” and as they leave their trench they are joined by a large company of men with bows. After defeating the enemy, they notice that many of the fallen Germans are unmarked. Unlike in The Bowmen, there is an addition to the story. A captured German officer asks the author of the letter who the officer on the great horse was; they could not hit him in spite of him being such a conspicuous target.

The popularity of The Bowmen spread across the country. Machen’s editor was allowing the story to be printed in parish magazines and when one priest had sold out of copies of his magazine he asked if he could reproduce the story as a pamphlet. He asked if Machen would write a preface explaining the origins of the story. Machen replied that there were none, but the priest told Machen that, no, the story was true, and he had merely added his own fictional flourishes to an actual event (Machen, 1915).

Angel of Mons, Eastleigh War Memorial
The Angel of Mons, Eastleigh War Memorial

The Church Family Newspaper of July 1915 reprinted a letter that first appeared in the All Saints, Clifton Parish Magazine from a Miss Marrable. She had talked to two officers about the angels at Mons. One officer, expecting to be wiped out, saw the angels and was amazed to also see the Germans standing in a daze long enough for the British to escape. A solider present, previously not religious, became so, after witnessing the angels.

Light carried numerous reports, both sent to them in letters and taken from other publications. A correspondent called ‘Scota’ supplied three accounts to the 8th May issue of Light, describing how the German cavalry charge was checked by a luminous cloud containing bright, moving objects.

The same issue of Light reprinted an account of the Angels of Mons by A. P. Sinnett from The Occult Review entitled Meteorites and the World Crisis. In it the British are about to be overwhelmed but the German army halts. Those with ‘superpsychical’ sight see a row of shining beings between the armies. When asked why they halted, captured Germans claim to have seen massive reinforcements coming to the aid of the British.

The following is from Bladud, The Bath Society Paper, for 9th June 1915, by Rev. M.P. Gilson of All Saints Church in Clifton:

The first is an extract from an officer’s letter: ‘I myself saw the angels who saved our left wing from the Germans during the retreat at Mons. We heard the German cavalry after us and ran for a place we thought a stand could be made; we turned and faced the enemy expecting instant death. When to our wonder we saw between us and the enemy a whole troop of Angels’.

From another source I heard that many prisoners were taken that day who surrendered when there was no call for it. […] Some of these German prisoners were asked afterwards why they had surrendered, ‘for there were many more of you than us; we were a mere handful,’ they looked amazed and replied ‘but there were hosts and hosts of you.’ It was thought that the angels appeared to them as reinforcements of our ranks’.

In 1915, Arthur Machen released, or at least gave permission to be released, The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War, an anthology which included The Bowmen. In the introduction, Machen took the opportunity to put the record straight about the mystery of Mons, as he saw it. His theory was that the public, priests and soldiers writing from the front had taken his story and through a number of retellings, lost the elements of St. George, the British being, he felt, uncomfortable with such Catholic ideas as saints. The word “shining” to describe his ghostly Bowmen was transformed into the “shining warriors” and “angels” that were now being reported as real. He went on to name some of the bishops, deans and others he felt had spread the ‘angels’ story and attacked the “second, third, fourth, fifth hand stories told by ‘a soldier’, by ‘an officer’, by ‘a catholic correspondent’, by ‘a nurse’, by any number of anonymous people” (Machen, 1915, p. 86).

Phyllis Campbell was a writer who claimed to have been a nurse at the front and had written under the name Phil Campbell in The Occult Review, August 1915, about the visions at Mons. As a parting shot Machen mentions her, and her conviction that “[E]verybody who had fought from Mons to Ypres saw the apparitions”. If that be so, it is again that nobody has come forward to testify first hand to the most amazing event of his life” (Machen, 1915, p. 86).

On the Side of the Angels

Shortly afterwards, Harold Begbie, a popular writer at the time, published On the Side of the Angels: A Reply to Arthur Machen. Begbie reprinted articles from Light and The Occult Review and elsewhere. He had little new to say, but his book stoked the debate.

In answer to Machen’s challenge a letter appeared in the London Evening News for 29th September 1915, from a ‘distinguished Lieutenant-Colonel’ describing ghostly horsemen marching alongside the British as they retreated from Mons.

In the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) enquiry into the Angels of Mons (see section 3, below), the Lieutenant-Colonel’s account was juxtaposed with a letter that appeared in the Evening News from a named source, Lance-Corporal A. Johnstone, late of the Royal Engineers, which described how he and his comrades had mistaken mist-shrouded shrubs and bushes for the French Cavalry (McClure, 1994).

Advertisements for ‘Mounted Colour Pictures of the Angels of Mons’ appeared in the London Evening News in October, sadly not photographic evidence but paintings inspired by Machen’s and Begbie’s books. The Angels of Mons featured as a subject in a book of songs about the war, and as the years and the war rolled on further letters, pamphlets and books were produced. Ralph Shirley published Angel Warriors at Mons (Newspaper Publishing) and Phyllis Campbell wrote the pro-Angels book Back of the Front (Newnes) in 1915. Dreams and Visions of the War by R Stuart (Pearson) was published in 1917 and contained pro-Angels accounts of Mons, as well as stories from Ypres, Neuve-Chappelle, Loos and other battles. Meanwhile, in the London Evening News, Machen continued to claim that the Angels of Mons were a fiction of his own invention. He must have been tearing his hair out.

Angels and Sceptics

The SPR conducted their own investigation into the Angels of Mons:

In the main, the result of our enquiry is negative, at least regards the question of whether any apparitions were seen on the battlefield, either at Mons or elsewhere. Of first hand testimony we have received none at all, and of testimony at second-hand we have none that would justify us in assuming the occurrence of any supernormal phenomenon.

McClure, 1994

Private Cleaver of the 1st Cheshire Regiment was willing to sign an affidavit before Flint County Justice of the Peace George Hazlehurst to the effect that he had seen “the Vision of Angels with my own eyes”. It consisted of “a flash, nothing more” (Daily Mail, 24 August 1915). However, after some enquires to Cleaver’s regiment it was found that he had not arrived with the British Expeditionary Force until September and so could not have been at the retreat from Mons (London Evening News, 2 September 1915).

A hoaxed story appeared in The Daily News, 17th February 1930, claiming that the angels were merely footage of soldiers, projected on “‘screens’ of foggy white cloud banks” by the Germans. The intention had been to scare the British troops but the projections had produced the opposite effect (the hoax was exposed in the paper the next day; McClure, 1994).

Other than that, the accounts of Mons have stayed in two camps. The books Angels by Hope Price (Pan, 1994), Angels A to Z by James R Lewis & Evelyn Dorothy Oliver (Visible Ink, 1996) and The Book of Miracles by Stuart Gordon (Headline, 1996) hold with the pro-angels side of the story. Sorry, You’ve Been Duped! by Melvin Harris (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986) and An Encyclopaedia of Claims, Frauds and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural by James Randi (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997) not surprisingly go with Machen’s version of events. The Guinness Encyclopaedia of Ghosts and Spirits (Guinness Publishing, 1994) and Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Cassell, 1989) dispute the existence of the Angels, while Gustav Davidson’s A Dictionary of Angels including the Fallen Angels (First Free Press, 1971) simply records the phenomena.

A Story Going Strong

There have been a number of recent developments and additions to the story of the Angels of Mons. Kevin McClure published Visions of Bowmen and Angels in 1994, which gathers together most of the different Mons accounts. It includes the following letter:

Then there is the story of the ‘Angels of Mons’ going strong around the 2nd Corps, of how the angel of the Lord on the traditional white horse, and clad all in white with flaming sword, faced the advancing Germans at Mons and forbade them further progress. Men’s nerves and imagination play weird pranks in these strenuous times. All the same the angel at Mons interests me. I cannot find how the legend arose.

Charteris, 1931, in McClure, 1994

Brigadier General Charteris’ book At G.H.Q. (1931) dates the letter as 5 September, over three weeks before The Bowmen was published in the London Evening News. Assuming that the date is accurate this letter provides compelling evidence for the Angels of Mons.

However, Dr David Clarke, in his article Rumours of Angels: A Legend of the First World War in 2002 points out that a further letter in the same volume is dated 11 February 1915, yet discusses an account of the Angels of Mons that was not published until May 1915 (Clarke, 2002, p. 164). In conversation, Dr Clarke told me that there is no account of the Angels of Mons among Charteris’ original letters, making At G.H.Q. an uncertain source. Dr Clarke goes on in a Fortean Times article, and a subsequent lecture at the 2003 Fortean Times UnConvention, to suggest that Charteris actually instigated the rumours of angels with the press to boost British morale after the battle of Ypres and the first use of gas in the war (Clarke, 2003, p. 38).

As with all of the history of the Angels of Mons, an answer to Dr Clarke’s article in Folklore appeared in the next issue, dated April 2003. Jacqueline Simpson disputes his dismissal of Charteris’ book and wonders if military historians hold Charteris to be an unreliable source. My own theory on Dr Clarke’s Charteris conspiracy angle is discussed below.

A stranger development occurred in 2002 when Danny Sullivan claimed to have film footage of the Angels of Mons. The Sunday Times ran with the story and Sullivan’s claim that he had sold the film to Marlon Brando. Sullivan, looking as if he wished to learn more, posted an appeal on his website for any information about the angel. When Chris Morris investigated the claim for the Radio 4 program The Making of an Urban Legend, Sullivan confessed to making the story up in an attempt to sell a book of local mysteries. Since the Sullivan story, the Angels of Mons have been referred to more often in the singular, Angel of Mons.

Chris Morris’s program also contained a recording of a BEF soldier who was at Mons, John Ewings, describing a man that appeared in the sky with “a flaming sword” who caused the Germans, surrounding John and his comrades, to flee. This footage could be the actual, first-hand evidence so many have longed for. The Angels of Mons debate is not over.

‘All Day Long We Marched’

The Sunday Times article quoted at the beginning of this article is false. A journalist appalled at seeing the British in such disarray wrote it, and the official censor, F.E. Smith, saw it as a recruiting opportunity. Instead of toning the article down, as expected, he rewrote it to emphasise the need for fresh recruits (Farrar, 1998) and urged the newspaper to print the story as a patriotic duty (Tuchman, 1962). The quotes that are in bold in the report at the beginning of this article are the censor’s additions (Times Newspapers, 1914, pp. 222-223).

During the retreat the BEF took 1,600 casualties, the Germans around 5,000 (Keegan, 1998). Over 14 days, the BEF had 15,000 casualties compared to the French army’s 210,000 over the same period. The Sunday Times article certainly didn’t hinder recruitment, which peaked around the same time as the retreat from Mons (Fergusson, 1998). The myth of the defeat at Mons was created.

The BEF were one cavalry and four infantry divisions up against 14 German divisions. However, the smaller British forces were made up of many Boer War veterans who had learnt from the Boers valuable lessons on rapid trench digging and using cover. The British were so well dug in that the Germans felt they faced “an invisible enemy” (Keegan, 1998, p. 110). The BEF did not retreat to escape a bloodbath or because of depleted numbers, but to meet up with the French army who were withdrawing due to heavy losses (Keegan, 1998).

The BEF had been marching for days during the retreat. One veteran wrote:

August 25th. We’d started off about 5am still retiring, and so far we had had no food since Sunday the 23rd. All day long we marched.

Denmore, 1997, p. 3

The angels are variously described as appearing glowing within a cloud (Light, 8 May 1915), in a yellow mist (Begbie, 1915, p. 56), in a clear, cloudless sky (Daily Mail, 12 August 1915), as well as being responsible for the dark cloud that hid the British from the Germans (Light, 15 May 1915). The diversity of the accounts would point away from the view that they are genuine reports of the supernatural, and instead, toward mythmaking at the front by tired soldiers and at home by anxious civilians. The varied stories would also suggest the story of the angels did not derive from a single source such as John Charteris spreading moral-boosting myths. “The First World War was the first media war” (Fergusson, 1998, p. 212) and a nation that was uneasy about a war just across the Channel was looking for any sign of hope. This was certainly provided by the Angels of Mons and any story coming from the front soon became confused and meshed with sermons, myth, The Bowmen and commercial and emotional exploitation.

In part two, I intend to show that the Angels of Mons did not evolve from any First World War origin, but from stories far older.

References

  • Begbie, H. (1915). On the Side of the Angels: A Reply to Arthur Machen. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
  • Brewer, E. C. (1983). Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. (rev. I.H. Evans). London: Caswell.
  • Campbell, P. (1915). Back of the Front. London: Newnes.
  • Charteris, Brigadier-General J. (1931). At G.H.Q. London: Caswell.
  • Clarke, D. (2002). Rumours of Angels: A Legend of the First World War. Folklore, 113 (2), 151–173.
  • Clarke, D. (2003). Angels of the Battlefield. Fortean Times, 171, 30–38.
  • Davidson, G. (1971). A Dictionary of Angels including the Fallen Angels. New York: First Free Press.
  • Denmore, B. J. (1997). The Retreat from Mons, August 23rd–September 5th, 1914. In J.E. Lewis (ed.), True World War 1 Stories (pp. 3–8). London: Robinson.
  • Farrar, M.J. (1998). News from the Front: War Correspondents on the Western Front 1914-1918. New York: Sutton.
  • Fergusson, N. (1998). The Pity of War. London: Allen Lane Penguin.
  • Gordon, S. (1996). The Book of Miracles. London: Headline.
  • Guiley, R. E. (1994). Guinness Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. Enfield: Guinness.
  • Harris, M. (1986). Sorry, You’ve Been Duped! London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
  • Keegan, J. (1998). The First World War. London: Hutchinson.
  • McClure, K. (1994). Visions of Bowmen and Angels. Retrieved 12 April 2002
  • Machen, A. (1915). The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War. London: Simpkins, Marshall & Kent.
  • Merta M.F. (1996). The Angels of Mons. In K.S. Sisung (ed.), Angels A to Z (p. 33). Detroit: Visible Ink.
  • Morris, C. The Making of an Urban Legend. Radio 4, 2002 (Tape in author’s possession).
  • Randi, J. (1995). An Encyclopaedia of Claims, Frauds and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
  • Shirley, R. (1915). Angel Warriors at Mons: an Authentic Record. London: Newspaper Publishing.
  • Stuart, R. (1917). Dreams and Visions of the War. London: Pearson.
  • Sullivan, D. (n.d.). The Doidge’s Angel Homepage. Retrieved 3 October 2002
  • Tuchman, B. W. (1962). August 1914. London: Constable.
  • Film was Just a Hoax. (n.d.). Retrieved 3 October 2002

Electromagnetic protection: the dodgy devices promising to protect you from EMFs

Steve Donnelly
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Electromagnetic protection: the dodgy devices promising to protect you from EMFs

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 17, Issue 1, from 2004.

Did you realise that computers, mobile phones, televisions and other electrical devices all create alternating fields of magnetic energy that upset your brain and nervous system and destabilise your electromagnetic field? Of course, this may not immediately have any effect on your body but over a period of time, particularly when your bioelectric aura is weakened from stress and nutritional deficiencies, believe me, my sceptical friend, you are in BIG trouble.

What happens, you see, is that these nasty energies enter the body through your acupuncture points and “flow through your piezo-electric connective tissue” to have a distinctly adverse effect on every cell of your body. Personally, I was ignorant of all this until I, thankfully, happened upon the web pages of the BioEnergy Fields Foundation. I’m glad I have never had acupuncture treatment because, presumably, the evil energies would penetrate more easily through the little holes.

Fortunately, I now know that if I can keep my biovibration field in good nick – i.e. coherent and having a full frequency spectrum – then it will effectively block all this electromagnetic contamination and, all importantly, will not “transact with the anticoherent pool of environmental fields”. And believe me, there is nothing worse than an embarrassingly transactional, anticoherent biofield!

But, as Cherie Blair well knows, help is at hand through a large range of hi-tech but aesthetically pleasing devices available from prices ranging from under £30 to almost £2, 000. For instance, the Bioelectric Shield will act as an “energy balancer and energetic ‘mirror,’ reinforcing your body’s natural energy field while also helping you cope with the energy overload and stress of daily life”. This involves the careful arrangement of precision-cut quartz crystals and other minerals to stabilize your energy field.

Although ‘several systematic programs of kinesiological and meridian testing have confirmed a 100% – 400% boost in measures of energetic well-being’ in users of this device, if, like me you have a PDA, a mobile telephone, a laptop, and live in a house with mains electricity, the Bioelectric Shield may not be sufficient. In fact you may have to go to a higher level of spirituality to get the protection that you need.

The Wheel of Life medallion is “possibly the most powerful source of usable healing life energy available. There is no electrical circuitry, no magnets, simply metal and precious stones. It uses sacred geometry to create a flow of life force energy that can protect and heal.” Furthermore, as far as the stresses on the immune system caused by electromagnetic energies are concerned, “exhaustive tests with kinesiology, biofeedback machines, and kirlian photography show that 90% of these stresses are countered by the forces operating within the Wheel of Life”.

The only problem with the Wheel of Life might be the invocation regularly needed to activate it. I’m sure that I could explain away the fact that I was wearing an attractive crystal pendant to my academic colleagues as a whim of fashion, but standing in my laboratory chanting (three times) “I invoke the Light of God within. I am a clear and perfect channel. Light is my Guide” could make some problems for me – although it might be easier for colleagues involved in photonics research.

So it looks as though the device for me will have to be the Teslar watch, which has the advantage of being discreet (just a normal-looking wristwatch, with a number of different designs). It is also an active device which oscillates between 7 and 9 Hz, with an average of about 8 Hz which is apparently close to the Schumann Resonance, “the magnetic field resonance that the earth emits”. This miracle of microelectronics collapses the fields due to the electronics of the watch itself and these collapsed fields cancel out “the harmful ‘static’ caused by Electromagnetic Fields (EMF) and Extremely Low Frequencies (ELF), which has been demonstrated by EAV testing and Fast Fourier EEG analysis”. Sounds good to me.

So I will finish here and head into town to see if I can find a Teslar watch anywhere on the high street. This will then put me in exactly the right frame of mind to go back to my hi-fi dealer and follow the advice in the back of the manual that came with a hi-fi amp that I have recently bought. It suggests that it is possible to obtain improved performance of the amplifier by substituting the provided mains cable with a specially developed high quality alternative. This allows “the component’s power transformer to draw current more easily from the mains supply and enhances its overall performance”. I wonder if there is an accompanying invocation?

Death and the microtubules: experiences from the BBC’s ‘The Day I Died’

Susan Blackmore
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Death and the microtubules: experiences from the BBC’s ‘The Day I Died’

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 17, Issue 1, from 2004.

I never should have said yes. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do any more ‘rent-a-sceptic’ slots, and here I was appearing on one of the worst ever TV shows on near-death experiences (NDEs). So how did it happen?

The producer, Kate Broome, told me that The Day I Died would take the science seriously, that there would be a searching exploration of the whole topic of consciousness, and that this programme would be entirely different from its predecessors. So I believed her. She and her BBC team came to my house and we did a very interesting and enjoyable interview. We covered not only the physiology of NDEs, but theories of consciousness, the reasons why quantum theories of consciousness fail, the nature of self and why NDEs might be genuinely mystical experiences without being evidence for life after death.

Then I saw the advance advertising: “NDEs used to be the domain of parapsychology, but now research by some scientists and medics is daring to suggest the impossible – that NDEs are evidence that the mind can live on after the brain has stopped functioning…”. Different from its predecessors? Hardly. Popular? Of course. This is what every previous NDE programme has claimed, and this is what most people already believe.

In the end, as anyone who watched the programme will know, The Day I Died was just an updated version of all the myriad shows that have gone before. Some of the new cases were excellent, and the interviews with people who had experienced NDEs were fascinating, but the science was not. Peter Fenwick and Sam Parnia described their recent research and their belief that it proves the independence of mind. Renta- sceptic said her usual pieces about tunnels, lights and how they are constructed in the dying brain (they could have cut them from interviews I did ten years ago instead of carefully extricating them from what I wanted to say this time).

Finally they got to consciousness. With clever computer graphics and ‘Horizonesque’ hype they explained that brave scientists, going against the reductionist grain, can now explain the power of the mind to transcend death. It all comes down to quantum coherence in the microtubules. And to make sure the viewer knows that this is ‘real science’ the ponderous voiceover declared “Their theory is based on a well established field of science; the laws of general relativity, as discovered by Einstein.”

This was where my fury erupted. As I wrote to the producer afterwards “it is dishonest to present a completely unworkable and mysterious theory as though it were real science, and to dress it up in the trappings of real science, as you did with Hameroff ’s theory. It may be true that you ‘were very clear to point out that is not proven’, but pointing out that it is not proven is not the same as pointing out that it (a) does not make sense, (b) does not fit with lots of reliable evidence about the brain, and (c) is rejected utterly by most scientists and philosophers who know about it.” And there is no way they could claim ignorance as I had explained, in the interview, the many problems with the theory.

So, in case you are wondering, why can’t quantum coherence in the microtubules explain consciousness and the NDE?

The theory first appeared in The Emperor’s New Mind by mathematician, Sir Roger Penrose (Penrose, 1989). Penrose argues that when mathematicians have conscious insights they are not doing ordinary computations such as might be carried out by a computer or a neural network. Instead they must be capable of handling non-computable functions. He accepts that our brains are completely controlled by physics of some kind but, he claims, it needs to be an entirely new kind of physics.

Penrose explains that there are two levels of explanation in physics; the familiar classical level used to describe large-scale objects, and the quantum level used to describe very small things. The trouble starts when you move from one to the other. At the quantum level superposed states are possible; that is, two possibilities can exist at the same time, but at the classical level either one or other must be the case. So when we make an observation at the classical level, the superposed states have to collapse into one or other possibility; a process known as the collapse of the wave function. Penrose argues that all conventional interpretations of the collapse of the wave function are only approximations, and instead proposes his own theory of ‘Objective Reduction’. This new process is gravitational but non-local in nature. This means that it can potentially link things in widely separated areas, making large-scale ‘quantum coherence’ possible. Although this can only happen when the system is isolated from the rest of the environment, Penrose suggests that this might happen inside the brain – but where?

It was the American anaesthesiologist, Stuart Hameroff, who suggested that the answer might lie in structures called microtubules. He had come across evidence (subsequently found to be invalid) linking microtubules to the abolition of consciousness in anaesthesia. He reasoned that microtubules might therefore be necessary for consciousness. This was the idea that gave rise to the Penrose-Hameroff theory explained so enthusiastically in The Day I Died.

Microtubules are, as their name suggests, tiny tubelike proteins. Hameroff & Penrose (1996) proposed that their shape and the spiral structure of their walls might mean that quantum effects within them could be kept reasonably isolated from the outside, making quantum coherence possible. But why is this relevant to consciousness? Hameroff argues that the real problems for understanding consciousness include the unitary sense of self, free will, and the effects of anaesthesia, as well as non-algorithmic, intuitive processing. All these, he claims, can be explained by quantum coherence in the microtubules. Non-locality can bring about the unity of consciousness, quantum indeterminacy accounts for free will (see Dennett (2003) for reasons why it cannot), and non-algorithmic processing, or quantum computing, is done by quantum superposition. As for NDEs, on The Day I Died, Hameroff explains that when the brain stops functioning, the information in the microtubules is not lost. Rather it leaks out into the universe at large and then continues to hang together by quantum coherence. This, he claims, can explain how the conscious self can be experienced as hovering above the body.

So how good is this explanation? We can begin with consciousness itself, which is conventionally equated with subjective experience. The ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996) is to explain how subjective experience can arise from (or perhaps be) the objective activity of brain cells. Penrose & Hameroff ’s theory has nothing whatever to say about this. If quantum computing does occur in the brain this would be very important, but it only adds another layer of complexity to the way the brain works. So we must still ask “How does subjective experience arise from objective reduction in the microtubules?” The strange effects entailed in quantum processes do not, of themselves, have anything to say about the experience of light or space or pain or colour or time.

One of the strengths of the theory is supposed to be that it accounts for the unitary sense of self, but nothing in the theory explains how to get from interacting quantum effects to the feeling that ‘I’ am a continuing self who makes decisions and lives my life. Also, as we have seen, the theory requires that the quantum process is isolated from the rest of the environment, but a hovering self during an NDE would not be.

Several commentators have pointed out these, and many other problems. Many conclude that the theory just replaces one mystery (subjective experience) with another (quantum coherence in the microtubules?). Even people renowned for their unconventional thinking have rejected it outright, such as computer engineer and futurist, Ray Kurzweil (Kurzweil ,1999). But the most devastating critique is made by philosophers Rick Grush and Patricia Churchland. They take Penrose’s argument step by step, and demolish each one.

An obvious problem is that microtubules are not specialised structures confined to brains: they occur in almost all cells of the body, in both animals and plants, and are involved in supporting the cell’s structure, in cell division, and in transporting organelles within the cell. It is true that some anaesthetics affect microtubules, but many others do not, even though they obliterate consciousness. Also drugs are known that damage the structure of microtubules but appear to have no effect on consciousness, and there is no evidence that microtubules are implicated in other major changes in consciousness, such as sleep-wake cycles.

Concerning the physics, Grush & Churchland argue that microtubules cannot provide the conditions of purity and isolation required by Penrose’s theory, nor could effects be transmitted from one microtubule to another, as is required for explaining the unity of consciousness in the way Penrose requires. In addition the theory provides no explanation of how the quantum effects could interact with effects at the level of neurons, neurotransmitters, and neuromodulators, when the microtubules are supposed to be isolated from their environment.

Grush & Churchland (1995) conclude that “… the argument consists of merest possibility piled upon merest possibility teetering upon a tippy foundation of ‘might-be-for-all-we-know’s … we judge it to be completely unconvincing and probably false.” (p. 12). Churchland (1998) puts it even more strongly: “Quantum coherence in the microtubules is about as explanatorily powerful as pixie dust in the synapses.” (p. 121).

They also ask why such a flimsy theory has proved so popular. Perhaps, they suggest, it is because some people find the idea of explaining consciousness by neuronal activity somehow degrading or scary, whereas ‘explaining’ it by quantum effects retains some of the mystery.

Whatever the reason, the TV show proved equally palatable, and if the producers’ aim was popularity, then they certainly succeeded. Most viewers want to believe in life after death and they like to see ‘evidence’ that confirms their traditional dualism. I accused the producers of making a dishonest programme and misleading viewers, accusations they strongly denied. Kate Broome replied that “I think we tried to at least suggest that there are other ways of looking at this subject other than in a reductionist way”.

Yes, they did. It’s just that every previous programme on NDEs has done exactly the same, giving viewers the answers they want rather than trying to find out the truth.

Although we may never get to see it on TV, the real science of NDEs is much more exciting than quantum coherence in the microtubules.

References

  • Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind. Oxford: University Press.
  • Churchland, P.S. (1998). Brainshy: Nonneural theories of conscious experience. In S.R. Hameroff, A.W. Kaszniak & A.C. Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates (pp. 109–124). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Dennett, D.C. (2003). Freedom Evolves. New York: Penguin.
  • Grush, R., & Churchland, P.S. (1995). Gaps in Penrose’s toilings. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(1), 10–29.
  • Hameroff, S.R., & Penrose, R. (1996). Conscious events as orchestrated space-time selections. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3(1), 36–53.
  • Kurzweil, R. (1999). The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York and London: Texere.
  • Penrose, R. (1989). The Emperor’s New Mind. London: Vintage.

From medicine to miracle – the remarkable healing of Dr Mary Self

Peter May
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From medicine to miracle – the remarkable healing of Dr Mary Self

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 17, Issue 1, from 2004.

Public interest in ‘healing’ knows no bounds. The alternative medicine industry is vastly prosperous, and the range of therapeutic absurdities is endless. Respectable members of the medical profession, who have at least a working familiarity with the issues of medical science, all too easily become caught up in it.

Already this year a GP has been disciplined by the General Medical Council for determining a homeopathic therapy for a child with gastroenteritis, using a suspended crystal as a dowsing instrument. The hint of redness in the child’s hair provided extra evidence that phosphorus was the appropriate element to use (or not use, if it is diluted out of existence!). The fact that there is no credible scientific evidence for homeopathy, crystal therapy or dowsing seemed irrelevant to the practitioner, who was herself suspended by the GMC in an attempt to rid the medical profession of madness.

For all the magic, few of these alternative therapies hold out any hope of miraculous cure. Miracles are largely the preserve of the religious, and particularly the Christians. There have been few famous miracle workers in history. Most of those found outside the pages of the Bible owe their inspiration to those inside the Bible, the most notable, of course, being Christ himself. For many people, the word ‘miracle’ is itself a shorthand for ‘the type of extraordinary healings that Jesus did’.

The pages of the Gospels describe numerous miraculous cures. They share a number of features in common. They were generally speaking instantaneous events, usually happening at a word of command. The physical illnesses described were incurable then and now, e.g. congenital blindness, a fixed curvature of the spine, a wasted and paralysed hand, deaf-mutism, even death itself. They were not the sort of psychosomatic conditions that commonly respond to alternative medicines. The healings were reported to have been complete and lasting. There is no suggestion that they were remitting diseases that recovered for only a limited period of time. Finally, of course, no other effective treatment was on offer.

While it may be difficult to define a miracle, certain characteristics, i.e. instantaneous, at a word of command; complete; cures of incurable diseases that could not spontaneously remit and where no other effective treatment was given, at least help us to describe a miracle, so that we might know one, if ever we saw one!

Why might we expect to see one? Well, considerable numbers of people claim they are happening all over the world today. They include intelligent people and even some members of the medical profession. Stories of such events have great appeal and spread like wildfire, especially if they have some sort of medical testimony to support them.

Examination of such stories, however, is less than straightforward. It is not easy to gain permission from the patient to have access to their confidential, medical data. In many parts of the world, there are no medical data to be obtained. Furthermore, if one story is exposed for being less than it is cracked up to be, ten other stories are immediately put forward to fill the void. Only a hardened cynic, it seems, could reject the flood of so many apparently compelling tales!

Finding a way through this avalanche requires an effective strategy. I believe I have found one. Instead of asking for examples, I invite whoever is making the claims to produce their best case. This is very telling. Immediately the great mass of healings can be put to one side. Rather than the investigator having the temerity to identify the most remarkable cases, healers can use all their knowledge and experience to select the best. The case to be examined is the case the healer (or claimer) puts forward. An improvement on this approach is to ask for their three best cases, so that no one can claim that an unfortunate choice has invalidated the inquiry.

To present a selection of three best cases is a challenge indeed. However, to the extent that these healers believe their own propaganda, they are likely to respond positively. Many healers have already published their selection in a ‘best selling’ book promoting their activity. Others are selected by the media, and promoted in newspapers and on television. For an investigation to take place, the subjects must of course give their signed consent for their medical records to be seen by others. To withhold such consent, of course, does nothing for their credibility.

Consider the recent story of Dr Mary Self recounted in a book of which she is a co-author (Self & Chaytor, 2001). On any level, it is one of the most impressive miracle stories of recent years. As a psychiatrist, she tells her story with the authority of someone who understands scientific medicine. She is young, attractive, medical – and cured.

As a teenager, Mary developed a rare tumour of her leg. Its nature was not well understood. It is now, some 20 years later, thought to have been a rare tumour called a mesenchymal chondrosarcoma. It was clear at the time of onset that the therapeutic options were very limited; an above-knee amputation held out the best hope of a cure. Showing considerable perseverance, Mary picked herself up from this dreadful blow and went on to study medicine.

Seventeen years later, when she might reasonably have thought she was long since cured of her disease, she was devastated to find she had a recurrence in the form of a secondary tumour in her lung. Against the odds, this was successfully removed by surgery. The histology of the tumour matched with the original and led to a careful revision of the histological diagnosis of both leg and lung tumours.

By now, Mary was married, had two young children and was training to become a psychiatrist. The emotional tension of her story is palpable! Within a year of her lung surgery, she now developed pain in her pelvis. CAT and isotope scanning revealed a shadow on her pelvic bone, which her doctors assumed was a further metastasis. Her prognosis was bleak. A former Catholic, and now a Baptist, Dr Self sought prayer from her many friends and contacts.

Further investigations were arranged to follow the course of this ‘shadow’ and help clarify decisions as to whether any further treatment should be attempted. Subsequent scanning, however, showed that the shadow had actually decreased in size! Over the next few months, it had disappeared completely. An estimated 10,000 people around the world had been encouraged to pray for her healing. Their prayers, it seems, were answered in an astonishing way, though not, it should be said, in the instantaneous manner of the New Testament miracles.

According to her book, written jointly with a tabloid journalist, Dr Self told her surgeon that she believed it was a miracle. He replied, “I will buy that.” He is quoted on the dust cover as saying, “I have been a consultant for 11 years and have not seen a case like it.” But what did he mean? Did he really think this was a miracle of the type reported in the Gospels, or was he saying he was lost for an adequate explanation and shared her great joy in being free of disease? In the confidential environment of a consulting room, where the doctor tries to sit alongside his patient in friendship and support, many a doctor has used words that should not be taken outside of that context. What did he really think?

The book does not report his further comments. However, the book’s co-author, Rod Chaytor, wrote a double-page feature article about the healing of Mary Self in the Daily Mirror (Chaytor, 1999). There he recorded the surgeon as saying:

She is saying it is a miracle. I am saying it is unexplained. It is important to say we do not have proof this was a metastasis in the pelvis. Everyone assumed it was on the basis of the scans.

A biopsy had in fact been performed. The book describes the anguish associated with this, and the build up to the meeting with her surgeon when she would be told the result (p. 239). In the emotion of it, the reader is left to believe it was malignant. She states for instance, “It has been confirmed three times now” (p. 240). However, the text of the book fails to offer a clear statement to this effect from the surgeon. In the Daily Mirror article, however, Mr Chaytor reported that the biopsy did not confirm a metastasis and that the specialist believed the scans “weren’t completely consistent” with a secondary. Why did he not include these statements in the book? Can the answer be that they undermine the whole story? What has Mary Self been healed of? It seems that we do not know.

I was invited by BBCTV to comment on her case. I accepted on the condition that Dr Self gave me written permission to clarify these details with her surgeon. It was thought that I was being unnecessarily fussy to insist on signed consent. However, previous investigations of miracle claims, that did not produce the desired results, have led to threats of High Court action against me and complaints to the General Medical Council. Nothing short of a signed statement of con-sent from Dr Self would induce me to contact her surgeon and, I trust, nothing less would be required for him to speak candidly with me. Time and again, I have learned that there is no substitute for having direct access to the medical evidence when investigating such claims and that can only be done with secured permission. However, despite three requests, and numerous reassurances from the BBC, it became apparent that she would not agree and the interview was cancelled.

It seems to me that if the person claiming to be healed is not prepared to let the story be properly investigated, they should not be prepared to publicise it either. There seems to me no moral justification for them to both ‘have their cake and eat it’.

Notwithstanding this, the programme went ahead (Heaven and Earth, shown on BBC1, 5 January 2003). It was introduced not only as a story “which has no rational explanation” but also as a miracle claim, which has “the physical proof to back it up”. The televised account was inevitably abbreviated, but in so doing compressed and confused separate events. Dr Self spoke of her amputation and said, “seventeen years later my cancer relapsed.” This was quite true, and a proven secondary was successfully removed from her lung. This, however, was not mentioned apart from the fact that she had to embark on further treatment. What we were told instead is that the tumour in her leg was followed 17 years later by a ‘tumour’ in her pelvis. The surgeon confirmed that her doctors feared the worst but did not embark on further treatment.

However, they were astonished to find that this new shadow on her pelvis gradually disappeared. There was no mention of the fact that an attempt was made to biopsy it or that the biopsy did not confirm a malignancy. Nor was there any comment to suggest that its appearance was in any way atypical. Whether or not it looked like a tumour, ‘physical proof ’, it seems, was not established.

Her story is certainly unusual. As Prof. Chris French said in the television programme, spontaneous remissions of proven tumours do happen, although they are extremely rare events. Interestingly, some types of tumour are more likely to remit than others. Not enough is known about this particular cancer to say just how unlikely it would be. Unlike Christ’s miracles, remissions are always gradual. Since her rare tumour has already raised its ugly head after so many years in the form of a lung secondary, no-one can confidently say she is now cured. Whether the shadow in her pelvis was also a tumour remains unproven.

The book itself makes tiresome reading. It describes the endless roller-coaster ride of her emotions, with overwhelming despair, rather than faith, exhausting the reader at every set back. Most disappointing was the failure, both in the book and on television, to be clear and straightforward about the crucial, medical details of this story.

References

  • Self, M., & Chaytor, R. (2001). From medicine to miracle. London: Harper Collins.
  • Chaytor, R. (1999). Healed with prayer. Daily Mirror, December.

The mosaic of memory: how we constantly rewrite our memories of our past

Chris French
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The mosaic of memory: how we constantly rewrite our memories of our past

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 17, Issue 1, from 2004.

On Saturday, 25 January 2003, a play was presented at the Gulbenkian Studio theatre in Newcastle. The play, written by Josephine Fagan and entitled Paper, Scissors, Stone, explored the relationship between events and memories, interpretation and belief, true and false realities. The production was funded by the SciArt Initiative that supports collaboration between artists and scientists, awarded to Professor Pam Briggs and director and designer Neil Murray. I was invited to lead an interactive discussion on the nature of memory following the performance. I reproduce here, more or less verbatim, my introductory talk.

My talk was preceded by a brief introduction by Neil Murray in which he provided another example of a false memory from his own experience. He recalled how many years ago he and his wife had been on a train when they realised they were sharing a carriage with Paula Yates. Murray had tried to pretend that he was unimpressed at being in the presence of this celebrity, but his wife quickly struck up a conversation with Yates on the nature of motherhood. Murray distinctly recalled the fact that Yates had been embroidering a pair of jeans as she chatted.

Over subsequent years, Murray had recalled this mildly interesting anecdote on several occasions. One evening, he was at a dinner with his wife sitting a few places away from him when he overheard her retelling the tale of her encounter with Yates. “But you didn’t mention the jeans she was embroidering,” he commented. “What are you talking about?” his wife replied. “Don’t you remember?” he retorted. “She was embroidering those fantastic jeans? How could you forget them?” His wife’s response caused him considerable consternation: “She wasn’t embroidering anything – and, in any case, how would you know? You weren’t even there!” Clearly, either Murray or his wife has a false memory for an event that they both insist they can clearly remember. My own comments follow.

I’d like to thank Neil for his introduction and I intend to follow his lead by illustrating the way memory works – and doesn’t work – by mainly relying upon anecdotes. Neil wanted this brief talk to be (and I quote) “engaging and not at all like a science lecture … not too stuffed with facts”. As a scientist, I obviously took very slight umbrage at the notion that a science lecture couldn’t be engaging – but I guess I know what he meant. I will attempt to keep this talk at least 95% “fact free”. But please take it as read that what I will say about memory is supported by a wealth of experimental evidence.

Textbooks often begin their discussion of memory with the rather obvious observation that memory does not work like a video camera. At first glance, it might strike you that it would be better if it did. Imagine if you could just press the right mental button and be treated to an exact mental replay of events you had witnessed in the past – wouldn’t that be fantastic? Well, yes and no. One can think of several situations where it would be advantageous – settling arguments between Neil and his wife, for example. But I only have to think about the disorganised state of our video collection at home to realise some obvious problems. How on earth would you ever find the memory that you wanted?

But the problem isn’t just one of locating the right bit of mental footage. Unlike material recorded on videotape, memories can and do change over time. A memory is more like a dynamic mosaic than a series of static unchanging frames recorded by a video camera. The very first time that you try to recall an event, even a recent one like getting to the theatre tonight, you will engage in a constructive process – you will literally build that memory from different types of bits and pieces. Some of those bits and pieces will correspond to more or less accurate memory traces laid down at the time you witnessed the event, but even then you may not put them together properly.

Furthermore, the mosaic that you build will be influenced by things that happened to you before the event in question, that led you to have particular expectations and a particular way of viewing the world. It will also be influenced by your current view of the world and of yourself. There will also be a general tendency to fill in any gaps in such a way that the whole ‘makes sense’.

In general, we do not remember the surface details of events at all well; we remember the gist. We automatically extract the important essence of events and forget the superficial and transitory packaging. This is both the great strength and the great weakness of the way our memories work. It is a strength because we don’t process and store all of the minutiae of life. We pay attention to the important stuff and forget the rest. Why lay down in memory a complete verbatim record of every conversation you ever had, every song you’ve ever heard? But the weakness is that sometimes we do need that level of detail and it will probably elude us. Or, worse still, we may confidently believe that a memory we hold is a true reflection of an event when in fact it may be distorted beyond recognition.

There are only a few areas where the accuracy of our memories is so important that we make any attempt to assess it. Examples include forensic psychology – it appears that we are probably far more impressed by eyewitness testimony to crimes than we should be. Another area where it becomes important is my own speciality, which I call ‘anomalistic psychology’ for want of a better description – the psychology of unusual experiences and beliefs. Just how accurate are eyewitness reports of UFOs, ghosts and the Loch Ness monster? Or even alien abductions? And of course there’s always the settling of marital arguments, as we’ve seen.

Most of the research on eyewitness testimony has been driven by the need to understand factors affecting the reliability of reports from witnesses to crimes. It is now generally accepted that such reports can often be wildly inaccurate, leading to gross miscarriages of justice. The circumstances surrounding crimes are often precisely those that will lead to poor recall. The event is unexpected, often over in seconds, and sometimes extremely frightening. Or it may be that the police need details of events that preceded a crime – events which no-one at the time realised would be that important. One obvious reason that we may fail to remember things accurately is simply that we failed to pay attention to the right details at the time. Typically, we pay attention to the information that is relevant to our goals at the time – and it can sometimes be amazing what we miss!

I can illustrate this with a true story of a visit to an estate agent that I made with my wife, when we were looking to move house about ten years ago. As we left the estate agent’s office, having looked at details of various houses, I said to my wife, who is also a psychologist, “That was very strange. It reminded me of a psychology experiment.” She was rather confused by this and asked me what I meant. I said “You mean you didn’t see it?” “See what?” she said. I told her to look through the estate agent’s window to see if she could see anything a little bit unusual. She did – and could not believe that she had failed to spot a full-size stuffed bison that for some unknown reason was on display in the office! This nicely illustrates the fact that people may vary in terms of what information they encode at any particular moment. My wife was very focused on house buying – what price, where, how many bedrooms – my mind was perhaps not so fully focused on the important task in hand.

Recent research into what is known as ‘change blindness’ provides another illustration of our inattention to aspects of our surroundings. In a typical study, people queuing at a library issue desk are handed a form to fill in by the librarian. At one point in the interaction, the librarian disappears from view, as though retrieving a dropped piece of paper, but another completely different person emerges in their place. Around half of the participants simply do not notice the change.

A huge amount of experimental evidence, in addition to our everyday experience, shows us that our memories are poor if we haven’t paid attention in the first place. No big surprise there. But what about those situations where it’s really important that we pay attention and get things right? Even here, our memory can play cruel tricks. Donald Thomson, a psychologist in Australia, was arrested by the police and forced to take part in a police line-up. He assumed he was being harassed in response to his strong views on the unreliability of such line-ups. Things got very serious, however, when he was identified by a very distraught woman and told that he was being charged with sexual assault.

It transpired that the assault had taken place with the television on in the room at the time of the attack. The program being shown was a live debate on the reliability of identity parades, featuring both Thomson and the Assistant Commissioner of Police. The victim had unintentionally based her description of the assailant on Thomson who was on television at the time. Fortunately, he had a large number of viewers to provide him with a watertight alibi.

There are, of course, those vivid memories that we just know are right. One example is so-called flashbulb memories. We can all remember with perfect accuracy where we were, what we were doing, who we were with, when we heard about the attack of September 11th – can’t we? There seems to be something about such moments that burns the details into our very brains cells.

I can still remember, for example, hearing the news of John F Kennedy’s assassination. I was only 7 years old at the time, so when I heard the newsflash on TV, it didn’t mean that much to me. But I remember ambling into the kitchen to tell my mum and dad about it anyway. It was from their reaction that I realised that this was news of stupendous importance.

I used this example of a flashbulb memory in my lectures for years in my adult life and on one occasion happened to mention this to my mother. She told me that it just didn’t happen that way at all. We were not at home and it was not me that broke the news. Interestingly, I had been the victim of a false memory that put me right at the heart of the action!

Again, experimental evidence has shown that flashbulb memories – frequently held with great conviction – are often just plain wrong. American students recorded details of how they heard the news of the Challenger disaster the morning after it happened – who they were with, what they were doing, and so on. A couple of years later, many of them had completely different recollections of that event.

It appears that when we try to recall something, the mosaic memory we bring to consciousness consists of memory traces of the original event plus other memory traces, perhaps relating to other similar events or even to daydreams or fantasies. Gaps in memory will sometimes be effortlessly and automatically filled in to produce our recollection – and we will often have no way of knowing which bits we can trust and which we cannot. Sometimes we may be fooled into thinking that

something really happened when in fact we only imagined or even dreamt it. Our ability to distinguish between memories for events that really happened and those memories that are internally generated is known as reality monitoring. An everyday example is trying to decide whether you really did lock the backdoor or just thought about it. At the other extreme is psychotic breakdown in which the sufferer is totally unable to distinguish between mental events and events out there in the real world.

Although psychologists have long recognised that firsthand accounts of witnessed events were unreliable, it is only within the last decade or so that research has been directed at the possibility that people may sometimes have rich and detailed memories for events that they have never actually witnessed at all. The main reason for this explosion of research into false memories was the sudden increase in cases of alleged recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, especially in the USA.

Typically in such cases, adults would enter psychotherapy suffering from a variety of common psychological problems such as depression, low self-esteem, or insomnia. As part of their psychotherapy they would engage in mental exercises, such as hypnotic regression and guided visualisation, intended to unlock any repressed memories of traumatic childhood events thought to be causing their problems.

Many thousands of people who had entered therapy with no conscious memories of being abused as children became convinced that their now-aged parents had indeed inflicted terrible suffering upon them decades earlier. In some cases, these allegations included claims of satanic ritualised abuse, involving human sacrifice, cannibalism, sexual torture, and forced abortions. Many of these cases went to court and led to convictions even though the cases rested entirely upon verbal testimony. Families were torn apart in the most brutal way imaginable.

Experimental psychologists tended to doubt the accuracy of the memories recovered via hypnosis and related techniques. A huge amount of experimental evidence shows quite convincingly that hypnotic regression does not provide a magic key to unlock the unconscious mind, forcing it to reveal its hidden memories. Instead, the hypnotic regression procedure is such that it provides a context in which individuals often produce an account mixing fantasy with pre-existing knowledge and expectations – and then believe with total conviction that the account reflects events that really took place.

Indeed, experimental psychologists have expressed doubts about the very concept of repression itself. The idea that the unconscious mind can somehow automatically take over and hide away memories for traumatic events is not supported by any convincing experimental evidence, although there are many accounts of what appears to be repression occurring outside the laboratory.

In the early days of the controversy, those who believed that recovered memories were largely accurate would sometimes object that, although memory for peripheral details of a witnessed event might be distorted, there was little evidence that people were prone to false memories for episodes that had never actually occurred at all.

Things have moved on since then, thanks to the pioneering work of Elizabeth Loftus, among others. We now know that it is alarmingly easy to plant false memories in a sizeable minority of the population using well-established experimental techniques. It has been shown, for example, that hypnotic regression is not the only way to induce false memories. Simply getting people to imagine events that did not actually take place is often sufficient to lead people to believe that they did witness or take part in the events in question.

The difficulties of deciding whether a memory reflects a real event or not is illustrated by something that happened to Elizabeth Loftus herself. Loftus’s mother had died by suicide. She had drowned herself in a swimming pool, but Loftus had never actually seen her mother’s body – or so she thought.

Many years later, and long after Loftus had established her reputation as the leading psychologist in false memory research and one of the main critics of the concept of repression, she was attending a family get-together when one of her uncles insisted that she had in fact seen her mother’s body. He said that Loftus was the person who had found the body floating face down in the pool. An image of her mother’s lifeless body immediately filled Loftus’s mind. She was flabbergasted – for years, she had questioned the notion that the mind just locks away memories that are too ghastly to face. But it appeared she had done just that.

Over the next few days, her memory of that terrible sequence of events become clearer and more detailed as she dwelt upon this horrible revelation. And then she called her brother to tell him – and he said the uncle was wrong, Loftus had not found the body! This was confirmed by other family members. Far from experiencing a recovered memory, Loftus had been the victim of a false memory. I should, however, point out that I only think I’ve recounted that story accurately, as I couldn’t find the book where I read it when I wrote this talk – so maybe the whole thing is a false memory on my part?

The events portrayed so well in the play show all too realistically how our views of things can change over time. Initially, the brother and sister are viewed benignly – although one or two aspects of their lives are generally thought to be a little odd. But over time this view gradually changes, and with it the very memories that provide the evidence for those views. Each of the villagers make small contributions to the changing story, but the cumulative effect is like the sea eroding a rock. The final ‘truth’ explains everything – all the pieces of the jigsaw fit. Except, of course, that from our privileged viewpoint, we can see that this accepted ‘truth’ is far from historically accurate. There can be no doubt that the stories we tell ourselves and believe to be true, on both the individual level and on the societal level, are often just as fictitious.

For now, I’d like to finish with a somewhat more light-hearted practical demonstration of how our memory can play tricks. No doubt you would expect that you would remember a simple stimulus accurately if you had been exposed to that stimulus literally thousands of times during your life, especially if it was something a little bit odd and unexpected? If you’re wearing a watch, have a look at it to see if the numbers are represented by Roman numerals. If it is, without looking at your watch again, I want you to ask yourself this simple question: How is the number ‘4’ represented on your watch?

Now all look at your watch again. I suspect many of you will be surprised to see that it is represented by ‘IIII’. If it is, how many hundreds of times have you looked at your watch and never noticed that the four is represented in this unusual way? Almost everywhere else, four is represented as ‘IV’ in Roman numerals, but on the vast majority of clocks and watches it is represented as ‘IIII’. But we often see what we expect to see and remember what we thought we saw.

My wife, Anne Richards, and I carried out a little study based upon this. We showed people a clock with Roman numerals on it – our kitchen clock as a matter of fact! Some people were told to draw the clock from memory, others to copy it while in full view. Those who copied it tended to represent correctly the four as ‘IIII’; those drawing from memory misremembered the four as ‘IV’ in line with their general expectations for Roman numerals. We argued that people rarely notice this ‘oddity’ in everyday life because you don’t need to pay attention to the numerals themselves to tell the time – only their relative position is important. As I said earlier, sometimes our memories will be inaccurate simply because we didn’t pay attention to certain details at the time.

But even here there’s an interesting postscript to the story. When we wrote up this paper for the British Journal of Psychology over 10 years ago, we included an account of how this odd aspect of clocks first came to our attention. Please indulge me while I briefly quote from the paper:

The inspiration for this study was supplied by an incident involving the first author (CCF) and the second author’s daughter, Lucy Richards, a couple of years ago, when the child was aged about eight. In the course of visiting her grandparents, Lucy’s attention was caught by the Roman numerals upon a clock face in the room. The conversation then proceeded something like this:

Lucy: On the clock, why does ‘V’ come after ‘IIII’?
CCF (without looking up): It doesn’t say ‘IIII’. It says ‘IV’ for four.
Lucy: It doesn’t. Look.
CCF (looking at clock): Incredible! You’d think clock-makers of all people would know Roman numerals! But this is how it should be. (Shows his wristwatch.) Would you believe it, they’ve got it wrong here as well!

My wife agrees that this is more or less how it happened – except she insists that the conversation was between her and Lucy, not me and Lucy!

So we’re back, more or less, to where we started …

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