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NATO was created to ensure peace – disinformation seeks to undermine that

Tom Williamson
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NATO was created to ensure peace – disinformation seeks to undermine that

Summer 1945, the end of the Second World War. Europe lies in ruins, tens of millions are dead. The Axis powers are no more, with Nazi leader Adolph Hitler dead in a ditch, his body covered in petrol and set on fire, while Italian dictator Benito Mussolini hangs upside down from a lamp post. In the east, Joseph Stalin has the Soviet Union in his vice-like grip. In the words of Winston Churchill, an iron curtain is descending over Europe. Already, western leaders are discussing how to defend themselves should another world war break out.

Following a series of meetings in the late 1940s, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or NATO, was born. The initial premise was simple: should one member of the alliance be attacked, the other members would come to their aid, as set out in Article 5. Although not set in stone, the de facto power NATO counteracted was the Soviet Union. They reacted in 1951 with the Warsaw Pact, a treaty that saw the Soviet Union formally ally with several Eastern Bloc countries, including the former East Germany.

The Cold War between the east and west lasted until 1991, when the Soviet Union, under the ailing presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, collapsed. From it emerged 15 new countries, with Russia being the largest and most powerful. Rather than disbanding, NATO engaged with the former Eastern Bloc countries. The NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council was set up in 1998, while NATO expanded in 1999, welcoming Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. The expansion continued throughout the noughties with a raft of countries joining in 2004, including the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia). This, combined with their membership of the EU, marked a remarkable transformation for the Baltics after they spent 50 years forcibly incorporated into the USSR.

But, has NATO been a force for good or, as its critics would claim, an instigator of war? After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, starting a war that is still grinding on over three years later, a new slogan emerged from the Stop The War Coalition, backed by prominent politicians such as the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn: “No to war, no to NATO expansion”.

The narrative here is that NATO is somehow responsible for Russia invading Ukraine. To unpick this, we need to first examine how NATO works. Unlike the former Soviet Union, NATO does not expand by conquest. Members have to apply. If they meet the application criteria and their membership is ratified by all existing members, they are allowed to join. As Russia is not a NATO member, it does not get a say in which countries can and can’t join. So, the membership of countries such as the Baltic states cannot be seen as provocational. The Baltic States wanted to join, as is their right as independent nations. They applied and were accepted, they were not coerced or conquered.

Russia may complain about “encroachment”, but the truth is it has shared borders with NATO countries for over 20 years. In fact, the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, the westernmost part of Russia, is surrounded by the Baltic sea to the north, Lithuania to the west and Poland to the south. The entirety of its land borders are with NATO countries. If NATO wanted to annex it, they would have done so a long time ago. NATO has never invaded Russian territory, and has no plans to do so. If Russia believes NATO is a military threat to it, the threat is 100% perceived and not at all real.

A small map of the globe in the top left has a box around Europe indicating the wider image, showing NATO member states in dark green, with non-members in grey.
NATO member states as of December 2024. Via Qbox673, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

A supposed reason for Russia invading Ukraine back in 2022 was to prevent Ukraine joining NATO. Although this was given post hoc, with the actual reasons given by Russia at the time being “denazification” of a country with a Jewish president and stopping a non-existent genocide in the Donbas, it was far from valid. Ukraine is its own country with its own agency, and whether it wants to join NATO or not is not Russia’s business. Russia does not get to dictate which international organisations its neighbours can or can’t join, even if they share a border.

A claim often repeated by Russian president Vladamir Putin is that Mikhael Gorbachev was promised that NATO would not “expand one inch eastwards” by US Secretary of State James Baker. This notion comes from the tumultuous days around 1989, when the world order was in a state of flux. For decades, the USSR adopted the Brezhnev Doctrine, a foreign policy whereby any country within the Soviet sphere of influence that appeared to abandon socialism could be invaded and subjugated. This happened to East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956. The Czech Republic’s Prague Spring was crushed in 1963. With the rise to power of Gorbachev in 1985, the Brezhnev Doctrine was abandoned. One by one, the Eastern Bloc countries overthrew communist regimes in the revolutions of 1989, culminating with the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu on 25 December 1989. 

East Germany’s socialist government collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell, ending 40 years of the German Democratic Republic. Discussions began in earnest as to how to resolve the German question. Although a unified Germany may seem obvious now, back then the idea was met with opposition, including from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who genuinely feared that a unified Germany could once again start a world war. On 9 February 1990, James Baker met with Gorbachev in Moscow. The topic of NATO expansion came up, and Baker uttered his famous words. Nothing formal came from this promise, and no treaty establishing it was ever signed. In addition, Gorbachev was President of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union no longer exists. In fact, after it dissolved on 25 December 1991, Gorbachev was left out in the cold with no political power whatsoever. Any verbal promises made to him back in the early 90s have no meaning today.

Margaret Thatcher's caricature puppet from the British satirical TV show, Spitting Image
The Spitting Image satirical TV programme’s puppet of Margaret Thatcher. By mattbuck, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Another criticism levelled at NATO is that it is a dinosaur of the Cold War, it has gone way past its sell-by date. However, although the Soviet Union was seen as “the enemy” back in those days, no specific nation or power is referenced in the articles of NATO. The world is an uncertain place, and no one can say where the next threat will come from. Following the Cold War, NATO represented over 40 years of international military cooperation, there was no rush to disband it. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO has been involved in several military operations that have gone beyond simply defending the alliance. These include maintaining a no-fly zone over Bosnia, blockading the former Yugoslavia, and patrolling the skies over Libya during the final days of the Gaddafi regime. All of these actions were part of complex geopolitical situations, nearly always involving a United Nations mandate.

Today, NATO is very much active. After Russia illegally annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014, it was clear that a country that bordered NATO states was prepared to invade its neighbours. Following a summit in Warsaw in 2016, the Enhanced Forward Presence, or EFP, was created. This operation has seen thousands of troops deployed throughout NATO’s eastern flank, in an effort to deter any aggression.

To this day, no NATO member has ever faced direct military action from a third party state. Article 5, which states that an attack on one is an attack on all, was only ever invoked once, and that was by the USA following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001.

The knowledge that powerful allies will come to your aid if you are attacked is highly appealing today. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Finland and Sweden abandoned decades of neutrality and decided that NATO membership was right for them. After objections from Turkey were overcome, the two Scandinavian nations were admitted, increasing the length of NATO and Russia’s border by over 800 miles. Once again, NATO expanded through mutual agreement and not through conquest.

NATO’s primary function remains: it is first and foremost a defensive alliance. The main reason for joining is very simple. If you’re in NATO, you don’t get invaded. If you live in a Baltic state that shares a border with a country that subjugated you in the days of the Soviet Union, not getting invaded is very, very appealing indeed.

The Skeptic Podcast: Episode #001

The Skeptic Podcast
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The Skeptic Podcast: Episode #001

From the pages of The Skeptic magazine, this is The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020. 

On this episode:

Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, or to support the show, take out a small voluntary donation at patreon.com/theskeptic.

A psychic child bride and ghostly inspiration: the invention of chiropractic

Michael Marshall
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A psychic child bride and ghostly inspiration: the invention of chiropractic

While many will be aware that Daniel David Palmer – the inventor of chiropractic – claims to have discovered the discredited back-cracking technique while curing a deaf janitor, the pseudoscience at the heart of the chiropractic story doesn’t stop there.

Daniel David Palmer was born in what is now Ajax, Ontario on 7 March 1845. His father, Thomas Palmer, raised Daniel in the biblical literalism of the Seventh Day Adventists, moving his family to Ohio in 1865 to follow job opportunities. By his late 20s, Daniel David, or ‘DD’, had renounced his faith, declaring himself an atheist. He tried his hand unsuccessfully at a range of jobs, including beekeeping, fruit farming, and running a grocery store. He also married three times in five years – first to Abba Lord in 1871, then to Louvenia Landers in 1874, followed by his wedding to his housekeeper Lavinia McGee in 1876.

His marriage to Abba Lord was eventually annulled in 1877, but of the three it’s certainly the most interesting, and arguably had the greater impact on his subsequent life and work. Abba Lord was a spiritualist medium when she met and married DD Palmer in 1871. She was also just 13 years old. By the time she met Palmer, Lord had worked the lucrative commercial mediumship market for at least a year, offering soul readings, psychometry, handwriting analysis, clairvoyance, and even spiritual advice on how to bring up children – ironic, given her age and career.

At the time of their marriage, DD claimed to be skeptical of mediumship – which does somewhat raise the question as to what drew him to the psychic 13-year-old. Palmer wrote in 1872:

I was a disbeliever in psychometry, clairvoyance and all mediumistic phenomena, and I had satisfied myself it was a delusive humbug, and fancied that I should have no trouble to convince my equal partner that such was the case; for she was so purely honest that I knew she would not practice a knowing deception.

This apparent skepticism led to Palmer to put Lord’s psychic ability to the test – a test he felt she passed convincingly. From that same 1872 letter:

I patiently waited to inform her of the failures to guess correctly. During the first week she diagnosed ten cases of disease without a single failure, all of which were unknown to her previously. This was too good for guessing and I was compelled to acknowledge one humbug as truth.

From here, it seems, Palmer’s skepticism was gone (and with it, his atheistic doubt of an afterlife):

I soon found I could put her in a mesmeric sleep — willing her to awake at any time desired by me, whether present or absent, and send her spirit or intelligence to any place however distant, leaving it with her when to return, which was usually about five minutes, — then her apparently lifeless body would be reanimated, telling me more or less what she had seen and heard while absent.

It is worth dwelling on this period of Palmer’s life a little, as it implies he was either taken in by the tween charlatan he had married… or that he was willing to imply as much in his writing. Either way, it gives us some invaluable context to the next chapters of Palmer’s life. Once Lord had moved on, several marriages later, when a harsh Midwestern winter killed off Palmer’s bee business, Palmer reinvented himself as a magnetic healer before founding the chiropractic movement.

As the story goes, Palmer was practicing magnetic healing in his office in Davenport when he noticed that the building’s janitor, Harvey Lillard, had a severe hearing impairment. Palmer decided that such deafness had to be related to the presence of a lump he noticed on the janitor’s back, which he began to treat. Once the lump was treated, the deafness was miraculously cured, and chiropractic was born.

Unsurprisingly, Lillard’s family tell a slightly different story – that Palmer overheard Lillard telling a joke outside his office, and joined the group just in time to catch the end of it, and at the punchline, he slapped Lillard on the back in a hearty 19th Century expression of amused camaraderie. Several days later, Lillard remarked that his hearing had improved. Neither his deafness nor his subsequent recovery were documented in any measurable way, but on such scant foundations, a pseudoscientific empire was built.

As a result of this encounter, Palmer decided that spinal lesions – which he began to call subluxations – were responsible for 95% of anything that might go wrong with the human body, and that the other 5% was due to displaced joints elsewhere in the body. His reasoning was that the spine was a superhighway for what he called “innate energy”, which told the body how to be healthy, but when that energy hit a subluxation, it would prevent that energy from arriving, and the body would go haywire in its absence.

This was, of course, untrue, but it wasn’t even new untruths – people soon noticed that what he was suggesting was incredibly similar to Andrew Still’s principles of osteopathy, invented a decade earlier. Initially, Palmer denied having any knowledge of osteopathy, but in 1899 he finally admitted that he had taken some osteopathy classes in the past, but they weren’t the inspiration for chiropractic. Instead, as he explained in 1910, he had learned about the fundamentals of chiropractic from Dr Jim Atkinson… who was a spirit he talked to via a medium. As Palmer wrote in his book, “The Chiropractor”:

The knowledge and philosophy given me by Dr. Jim Atkinson, an intelligent spiritual being, together with explanations of phenomena, principles resolved from causes, effects, powers, laws and utility, appealed to my reason. The method by which I obtained an explanation of certain physical phenomena, from an intelligence in the spiritual world, is known in biblical language as inspiration. In a great measure The Chiropractor’s Adjuster was written under such spiritual promptings.

In fact, by this point Palmer was professing to be so explicitly religious that he would talk of chiropractic as a religion – a religion that required him to be the leader. Writing in 1911, he compared himself to Mary Baker Eddy, who twenty years previous had founded the Christian Science movement:

Mrs. Eddy claimed to receive her ideas from the other world and so do I.  She founded theron a religion, so may I.  I am THE ONLY ONE IN CHIROPRACTIC WHO CAN DO SO…. We must have a religious head, one who is the founder, as did Christ, Muhammad, Jo. Smith, Mrs. Eddy, Martin Luther and others who have founded religions. I am the fountain head. I am the founder of chiropractic in its science, in its art, in its philosophy and in its religious phase.

Those block capitals are present in Palmer’s original letter – he was extremely clear that no other person could lay claim to being the head of the chiropractic movement. The reason for his agitation? He was not the only Palmer looking to run the family business.

BJ Palmer

Bartlett Joshua Palmer, or “BJ” Palmer, was the son of DD’s third wife, Lavinia. BJ was at least as committed to chiropractic as his father, having been one of the first students to attend the Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, which DD had founded in 1897. The two men did not see eye to eye on much – a disagreement that was at least in part rooted in DD’s treatment of his children after Lavinia died in 1885. BJ wrote that his father would beat him and his sisters with straps so severely that DD would sometimes be arrested, and spent nights in jail:

Our older sister was badly injured and has been sickly all her life. Our younger sister had a severe abscess caused by beatings. We have a fractured vertebra and a bad curvature from same source.

Aside from the regular beatings, DD didn’t have much time for his children – most of his time was spent growing the chiropractic movement. Although, it’s worth pointing out, DD did find time to take three more wives – Martha Henning in 1885. Villa Amanda Thomas in 1888 and finally Molly Hudler in 1906.

1906 was a big year for DD Palmer, because it was the year that the law came knocking: Iowa had recently passed a new medical arts law against practicing medicine without a license, essentially to clampdown on charlatans like the Palmers, and DD was the first chiropractor they prosecuted. Despite having more than enough money to pay the fine – and, more to the point, having enough acolytes who would have been willing to pay the fine on his behalf – he elected instead to play the martyr and serve 17 days in jail, no doubt hoping that the resulting publicity would help spread the message of chiropractic, and of its founder so committed to his ideals he was willing to be imprisoned for them.

Things didn’t quite work out as he hoped, and upon his emergence from prison, he had a falling out with his son which resulted in him selling the chiropractic college to BJ and heading out West, founding new schools in Oklahoma, California and Oregon… all of which failed, while BJ’s practices flourished. The disparity in success soured the relationship between father and son even further, and the pair soon became rivals. DD would write in criticism of the direction BJ was taking the chiropractic movement, even giving lectures to opposing chiropractic colleges. Then, in August 1913, DD was marching on foot in a parade in Davenport when he was struck from behind by a car, injuring him sufficiently that he never really recovered. The driver of that car? BJ Palmer.

DD Palmer died two months later, in LA. While the official cause of death was listed as typhoid, some saw foul play. As the book Trick or Treatment explains:

it seems more likely that his death was a direct result of injuries caused by his son. Indeed, there is speculation that this was not an accident, but rather a case of patricide.

With DD Palmer now fully out of the picture, the chiropractic movement grew and grew under BJ Palmer, becoming the pseudoscience we know today. Along the way, BJ had a son of his own, and named him David Daniel Palmer, who himself went on to become a leading chiropractor, giving himself the nickname “The Educator”.

In 1922, the Palmers bought a radio station to market their chiropractic industry, as well as broadcasting weather reports and sports updates – rather incredibly, the young sports journalist they hired to fulfil that role in 1932, was a 21-year-old Ronald Reagan.

To this day, Daniel David Palmer remains revered by chiropractors as an inspirational and visionary figure. DD was a man born into a deeply religious movement, who recognised it was all nonsense, until he met a barely-teenaged con artist who pushed him back into belief… or, perhaps, a willing collaborator who eagerly took on board the tricks of the trade, how to sell a con successfully, and how much money and influence could be gained from dishonesty.

Over a century later, the pseudoscientific ideas he promoted – whether handed to him by helpful ghosts or plagiarised from osteopaths – have become a worldwide industry that’s globally and erroneously synonymous with spinal health, cementing a legacy that enriched, empowered and ultimately divided three generations of his family.

The Beecher story, the origin of the placebo effect myth, likely didn’t happen

Mike Hall
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The Beecher story, the origin of the placebo effect myth, likely didn’t happen

Henry Knowles Beecher, a medical doctor and anaesthetist who served with the United States Army during the Second World War, is widely credited with popularising the modern concept of the placebo effect in medicine.

According to the story, while working at an army field hospital, Beecher faced a critical shortage of morphine for wounded soldiers in need of urgent pain relief. In desperation, he administered injections of saline (salt water) instead. To his astonishment, the soldiers responded as though they had received actual morphine. This remarkable observation sparked Beecher’s interest in the placebo effect and initiated decades of research into its extraordinary power.

The most extraordinary thing about this story, however, is that it probably never happened.

In 2015, the writer Shannon Harvey spent some time reading through Beecher’s published work and even contacted the library at Harvard, which holds his private archives. Harvey discovered that, while Beecher wrote extensively about the placebo effect, the story about running out of morphine does not appear in any of Beecher’s public or private writings. Nor does it appear in his 1976 obituary in the New York Times.

While Beecher wrote extensively about the placebo effect, the story about running out of morphine does not appear in any of Beecher’s public or private writings

Several years later, science communicator Jonathan Jarry and I tried tracing the origins of this tale. Jarry documented the numerous variations he encountered. In some versions, the events are set in North Africa; in others, they occur on a Pacific island or in Italy. Some accounts involve a nurse mistakenly administering saline, with the observant and guileful Beecher taking note. Others depict Beecher himself administering the saline. In one telling, Beecher even hands out cigarettes instead of salt water.

Curiously, the earliest version of the story we found wasn’t even about Henry Beecher. It appeared in a 1978 episode of the TV series M*A*S*H, in which wounded soldiers are given powdered sugar cribbed from the tops of doughnuts after a supply of morphine is accidentally contaminated and fresh stocks won’t arrive until morning.

When Jarry spoke with the writer of that episode, he learned that the plot had been provided by the series producer, Gene Reynolds. Where Reynolds got the idea from remains a mystery. He passed away in 2020.

The closest parallel we found in Beecher’s work comes from a 1946 paper, titled ‘Pain in Men Wounded in Battle’. In it, Beecher criticises the rote use of morphine on the battlefield and argues that other factors, such as anxiety, traumatic shock, or even simple thirst, are often the immediate cause of a wounded soldier’s distress. He recounts the case of a 19-year-old soldier who was severely injured and ‘wild with pain.’ The soldier was mistakenly given a sedative instead of morphine, which it turned out was sufficient to calm him down and allow him to sleep, without the need for pain relief. Beecher notes, ‘the dose [of sedative] given would not have controlled pain’ and concludes ‘his manic state was not due to pain.’ 

Regardless of whether the legend is true, Beecher played a pivotal role in highlighting the importance of the placebo effect in clinical research. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of his landmark paper, ‘The Powerful Placebo,’ which found that 35% of patients in clinical trials improve after the administration of a placebo alone.

This appears to be the origin of the widely circulated medical truism that 30% of the effect of any drug is placebo, but these are fundamentally different claims. Saying that ‘30% of patients improve after a placebo’ is not the same as stating that ‘30% of a drug’s effect is attributable to placebo.’ This distinction is overlooked, and the latter interpretation has become the commonly cited version.

Beecher derived this statistic by examining fifteen studies which reported placebo effects, but the specifics of these studies raise questions about his methods and the legitimacy of this figure. For one thing, Beecher claims that the fifteen studies were ‘chosen at random’, but almost half of them were authored or co-authored by Beecher himself. This somewhat undermines the claim of random selection and suggests the possibility of a selection bias.

Also, none of the fifteen studies Beecher analysed were explicitly designed to investigate the placebo effect. Consequently, Beecher attributes all improvements in the control groups to the placebo effect, ignoring other possible explanations.

For example, in a 1933 study on the common cold, patients are reported as showing an improvement a couple of days after receiving a placebo, but six days after the onset of symptoms. Beecher attributes this improvement to the placebo effect, disregarding the fact that many colds will naturally improve within that timeframe — a fact even noted in the original paper! This failure to account for the natural course of an illness will have inflated the apparent placebo effect.

He also overlooks the influence of parallel interventions, where patients receive some additional treatment alongside the placebo that influences their outcomes. A patient who is coincidentally taking penicillin for an unrelated condition might see their improvement attributed to the placebo when the penicillin was actually responsible. Despite some studies explicitly mentioning such additional treatments, Beecher still credits all observed improvements to the placebo effect.

Another oversight was conditional switching of treatments. In this 1933 paper on angina, which is referenced in ‘The Powerful Placebo,’ patients in the placebo group were switched to the treatment group if their condition deteriorated. They were switched back to placebo once they were stable again. This practice exaggerates the apparent placebo effect, as patients are only permitted to remain in the placebo group for as long as they are improving.

In 1997, researchers Kienle & Kiene revisited the original fifteen papers cited in ‘The Powerful Placebo,’ and concluded that not a single one of them presented any compelling evidence for a real, therapeutic, placebo effect. They identified numerous unaddressed factors that could create the illusion of a placebo effect, including the natural progression of illness, parallel interventions, and conditional switching of treatment, as well as regression to the mean, observer bias, and answers of politeness. Perhaps the most damaging, however, is Beecher’s frequent misquoting of data. Reporting on a 1954 study on coughs by Gravenstein, Beecher claims that 36% of 22 patients showed an improvement with a placebo. However, Gravenstein does not have a placebo group of 22 patients, or any figure reported as 36%. Gravenstein even remarks that it was ‘not possible to answer the question’ of placebo effectiveness, as patients could not be studied without medication for any extended period.

This is not the only example of misquotation or even the most egregious. According to Kienle & Kiene, Beecher also ‘cited as a percentage of patients what in the original publications is referred to as something completely different, such as the number of pills given, the percentage of days treated, the amount of gas applied in an experimental setting, or the frequency of coughs after irritating a patient.’

Despite its reputation, nothing in ‘The Powerful Placebo’ demonstrates a convincing effect which could only be explained by a real, therapeutic placebo effect. Yet it remains one of, if not the, most cited paper in the placebo effect literature. This prompted Kienle & Kiene to comment that something about the placebo topic invites ‘sloppy methodological thinking.’

The same errors made by Beecher are still being made in the modern placebo effect literature. Correlation (the patient took a fake pill and improved) is mistaken for causation (the improvement was prompted by the fake pill.) Confounding effects like disease progression, parallel interventions, and regression to the mean are ignored.

Placebos have a crucial and perhaps irreplaceable role in medical research as a control, but that doesn’t mean they have a role in clinical care. After 70 years, perhaps it is past time we put the myth of the Powerful Placebo behind us.

From the archive: Scratching Fanny – the accusant ghost of Cock Lane

Richard Whittington-Egan
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From the archive: Scratching Fanny – the accusant ghost of Cock Lane

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 2, from 1991.

A small, inexplicable scratching in the wainscoting of a house in Cock Lane, a narrow thoroughfare within the purlieus of Smithfield and the parish of the tolling of the hanging bell of Newgate Prison, was the modest herald of a curious case which was to blossom into a classic eighteenth-century enigma. All London was set, literally, by the ears by the escalating furore of rappings, crashings and scratchings perpetrated by an alleged spirit entity nicknamed ‘Scratching Fanny’. No less a personage than Dr Samuel Johnson was to set forth upon intrepid investigation and, in due course, pronounce the prankish poltergeist a great sham, and the whole paradox was to culminate in court, with a man accused of murder by a ghost defending his good repute by counter-charging criminal conspiracy.

To unfold the origami-complex pattern of this ‘Cock Lane Tale’ we must travel first to Norfolk. There, in 1758, dwelt one William Kent, innkeeper and owner of the post office at Stoke Ferry, who, the previous year, had wed Elizabeth Lynes, daughter of a prosperous Norfolk grocer. Within 12 months she died in childbirth. Her sister, Fanny, who had come to tend her during her confinement, stayed on to look after the child, who soon died, and she remained with the widower. Predictably, they fell in love. Marriage was, however, out of the question. A deceased wife’s sister came within the forbidden degree of consanguinity. They decided to live together as man and wife, and, in October 1759, took lodgings in the Cock Lane home of Richard Parsons, officiating clerk of the church of St Sepulchre without Newgate.

In November, Kent had to attend a wedding in the country. While he was away, Elizabeth, Richard Parson’s ten year-old daughter, kept Fanny company, sharing her bed. And that was when, for the first time, the eerie scratchings and knockings were heard. Shortly after William ‘s return, the Kents left Cock Lane. Not only was Fanny by now a good six months pregnant and needing a house of her own, but bad feelings had blown up between Kent, who had lent Parsons, a feckless drunkard, 12 guineas, and Parsons, who having failed to make any effort at repayment, had been informed that the matter was in the hands of Kent’s lawyer.

On February 2, 1760, Fanny died, at the new house in Bartlet’s Court, Clerkenwell, of smallpox. She was buried in the vault of St John’s, Clerkenwell. In the course of the ensuing year William Kent did his best to put his twice shattered life back together. He set up in business as a stockbroker. He married again.

A heavily filtered and stylised photograph of the St John's gate in central London, with some people moving through the main arch. The photo is slightly yellowed and has effects around the edges mimicking an old-style monochrome photograph
St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell. Used as a tavern and Victorian commercial premises before reverting to the Order of St. John in the 1870s. By Alison Day, via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0

Meanwhile, at the house in Cock Lane the noisy manifestations had, after a lull, broken out afresh, the unquiet spirit which seemed to focus on and around the bed of little Elizabeth Parsons proving more boisterous than ever. Parsons called in a carpenter to dismantle the wainscoting. No down-to-earth explanation there. Turning his eyelids heavenwards, he humbly prayed the Reverend John Moor, assistant preacher at St Sepulchre’s, to bring his spiritual expertise to bear. A code of taps was introduced – one for yes, two for no, a scratching for displeasure.

By a system of leading questions, the entity was induced to state that it was the spirit of Fanny, that her ‘husband’ had poisoned her with red arsenic administered in purl (a popular restorative infusion of bitter herbs and ale or beer), and that she hoped he would hang! The spirit knocking while Fanny was yet alive was said to have been that of her sister, Elizabeth, warning her against Kent. It was a scenario which did not entirely displease the grudge-nurturing Parsons, and one, moreover, which it was his pleasure to bruit abroad. Neither was it exactly anathema to Fanny’s brothers and sisters, who were disputatious regarding her will, in which she had devised bar half-a-crown apiece to them – to William. A caveat was entered to prevent Kent from proving the will in Doctors’ Commons, but it stood legally invulnerable.

It was not until January 1762, that Kent saw an item in a newspaper, the Public Ledger, and became aware of the ‘phantastic’ accusation being levelled against him. Horrified by the public scandal, he went promptly to attend a seance at Cock Lane, and hearing the accusations rapped out, shouted angrily: ‘Thou art a lying spirit!’

In February 1762, the Reverend Stephen Aldrich, Rector of St John’s Clerkenwell, persuaded Parsons to allow his daughter, Elizabeth, to come to his vicarage to be tested by an ad hoc committee of learned investigators, including Dr Johnson. Fanny did not manifest. She had, however, previously promised to rap evidentially on her own coffin if at 1AM the investigators adjourned to St John’s vault. They did. She didn’t. Then… little Elizabeth was caught in the act of secreting a sounding board of wood in her bed. The Cock Lane Ghost collapsed amid widely echoed charges of fraud.

To complete his already partial vindication, William Kent brought, on 10 July 1762, the affair to the Court of Kent’s Bench at the Guildhall. On an information laid against them by William Kent, the Reverend John Moore, Richard Parsons, Mrs Parsons, Mary Frazer (who had acted as entrepreneurial ‘medium’ at Cock Lane), and Richard James (responsible for the prejudicial insertions in the Public Ledger) were charged with a conspiracy to take away Kent’s life by charging him with the murder of Frances Lynes.

The trial judge, Lord Mansfield, summed up for 90 minutes. The jury took a quarter of an hour to find all the defendants guilty. Moore and James were ordered to pay £588 to Mr Kent Richard Parsons was sentenced to two years imprisonment and three spells in the pillory. Mrs Parsons got one year, and Mary Frazer six months.

Parsons protested to the end that the knockings were genuine, and it must in all fairness be said that posterity has come to recognise that the Cock Lane manifestations did unquestionably bear the characteristic stigmata of similar outbreaks of poltergeistic infestation subsequently held by serious investigators of psychic phenomena to display the diagnostic hall-marks of paranormality.

Conspiracy theorists cry betrayal at Trump’s selective approach to immigration

Dave Hahn
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Conspiracy theorists cry betrayal at Trump’s selective approach to immigration

In March of last year, I wrote an article in which I lamented that David Icke was right. It’s been almost a year, and that headline – indeed the very idea of writing that down and then attaching my name to it  – was difficult. However, skepticism means facing down uncomfortable truths, and admitting things that we may not want to admit but the evidence points us there. I had to admit that Icke had made a good point.

I’ll explain. It’s not that Icke is right about anything in his conspiratorial worldview. However, Icke was right to lambaste the people in what he called the “Mainstream Alternative Media” (MAM). This is the group that includes, according to him: Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Jordan Peterson. They have each built a public persona as someone who is “fighting the system,” “being a rebel,” and looking out for the common person. While the people within the group have had their share of in-fighting over the years, they’ve always been fighting about the little details. Carlson, for example, hadn’t partook in alien conspiracy theories for most of his career, while Alex Jones believes that alien invasions are happening and that he’s fighting the actual Christian Devil. But these are minor differences, ignoring those, they’ve all been on the same side. That is, until recently, when Icke noticed that this group of supposed rebels have begun worshipping at the altar of Elon Musk.

Icke’s position is that this is absurd. While all of them have worldviews based on fictional sources, a poor understanding of economics, and thinly veiled white nationalism; they apparently fail to recognise a true enemy when they see it. Musk, Icke explained, had not done anything to prove his worth, other than buying Twitter and reinstating their previously banned accounts. He’s clearly part of “the system.” Icke reasons, in an incredible broken clock moment, that if the conspiracy worldview was true, someone like Musk would not be allowed to succeed. His purchase of the platform would not have been allowed to go through. Further, Icke says Musk is exactly the type of person that the whole lot of them have been warning the world about: an obscenely rich technocrat that literally has a business which puts computer chips in people’s brains. Every caricature that they developed about someone like Bill Gates actually applies to Elon Musk. Icke isn’t actually correct, because there is no “they.” There are no lizard-aliens, Illuminati, Globalists, or International Jewish Cabal. There are only two options: either Icke and the entire Mainstream Alternative Media are wrong, or Musk is a tool of the system.

That was back in March. Since then, Musk spent his time cozying up to then-candidate Trump, and probably tipping some votes in his direction. Musk has ingrained himself into the new administration, and in doing so he’s been attempting to influence policy. His policy decisions have created a greater schism in the conspiracy theory world, and it has been revealed to the true believers that they have been duped.

The breaking point came over the issue of H1-B Visas. Under US immigration law, an H1-B Visa is a specialty Visa that allows an individual to come to the United States to work in a particular field. The person is considered a “non-immigrant worker.” Under the law, this means that the person has no intention of becoming a citizen and is only in the US for professional reasons. After a period of three years (with a possible extension to six) they are supposed to return to their country of origin. I will not speculate on the intention of the programme, only to say that my country’s immigration system needs some kind of overhaul, because the H1-B Visa programme can lead to abuse.

For example, let’s say that you own a social media company. You could extend an offer to citizens in a country with a lower economic system, so that they come to the US and work. You can pay them lower wages than citizen workers, and then after the three years are up, the workers can be sent back home. In the late 18th and 19th century we called a programme like this “indentured servitude.” Poor Irish people, for example, fleeing the extreme poverty of their own country, would enthral themselves to wealthier individuals to gain passage to the United States. After a period, that individual would be “released”.

However, the rift is not actually over the unfairness of this for those workers. The rift is in the Trump/Musk endorsement of the H1-B programme in general. The conspiratorial side, the true believers, saw this as a stark betrayal of an important reason that they supported Trump to begin with: he is supposed to protect their border. He spent the entire campaign, and one disaster of a debate (which ultimately didn’t matter), spewing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Both of his campaigns for president have been based on protecting the United States from the immigrant hordes, and now he’s telling the public that he’s in support of bringing people into the United States to work.

To be clear: I’m not endorsing either side of this fight. For me it’s clearly an “Alien versus Predator” situation, where I’m just sitting back and watching the carnage.

Trump and Musk’s endorsement of the visa programme angered true believers like Laura Loomer. Loomer is a name familiar to those of us who follow conspiracy theorists, but also to those who follow political campaigns as she was a guest and advisor to then-candidate Trump over the summer. Loomer aired her grievances on social media, alongside other high profile conspiracy theorists like Steve Bannon and InfoWars second chair Owen Schroyer.

This could have just been a minor policy disagreement. During the first Trump presidency, conservative pundits criticised the president for not being strong enough on the immigration issue, but they were never overly hostile about it. However, the problem escalated, because suddenly the critics of Trump’s position began losing their check marks on Musk’s platform, and accounts were suspended.

The conclusion that people like Loomer and Schroyer reached was that they were being censored by the “free-speech absolutist”. Musk, it should be noted, has never been a free-speech absolutist. The first thing he did after taking over Twitter was banning an account which tracked his private jet. Then he labelled news agencies that he didn’t agree with as “government propaganda.”

The explanation for Loomer’s account was that other platforms have blocked her, and the Twitter algorithm automatically blocks accounts. That is a very weak and obviously incorrect statement. If it were true, people like Alex Jones, Owen Schroyer, and Laura Loomer would never have been reinstated. I can’t say with definitive proof that Musk banned their accounts, but I can say that the situation surely points in that direction.

The schism shows us the difference between the believers and the opportunists. In the conspiracy world, immigrants are nothing more than tools brought in to cause terrorism, turn the kids gay, and vote Democrat. People like Alex Jones have been screaming this for the entirety of the Obama and Biden administrations; people like them are a major reason that immigration is even an issue in the presidential elections. It’s not that this should be a deal-breaker for these people, it should be the deal-breaker. The fight likely explains the horrid immigration policies that are going forward now in the United States. They were bad during the first Trump administration, but there is a new vigour by which people not deemed “real Americans” are being hounded, and those with questionable citizenship are being arrested and forcibly exiled. My assumption is that this fight is likely a contributing factor to Musk’s new habit of offering Nazi salutes (twice at the Presidential Inauguration) and endorsing the extremist positions of the German AFD Party.

Don’t Be A Dick: revisiting Phil Plait’s 2010 advice to skeptics

Sean Slater
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Don’t Be A Dick: revisiting Phil Plait’s 2010 advice to skeptics

Here at Edinburgh Skeptics, our previous Chair, Ben Makin, coined our pithy motto: Respect People, Challenge Ideas. We think it encapsulates the standards we believe we should aspire to. And, though we don’t always live up to it in every interaction, we are always conscious of it when talking with believers in pseudoscience, either in person or online.

A few similar attempts have been made over the years to focus on similar concise phrases. The LBC radio host James O’Brien created Contempt for the conmen, compassion for the conned for instance, about the Brexit campaigners, which, although it has the benefit of being alliterative, has the disadvantage of being gender specific. Hey, women can con people too!

But none sparked the furore within skepticism that the astronomer Dr Phil Plait ignited with his talk at 2010’s The Amaz!ng Meeting where he implored to his audience: “Don’t be a dick!”.

Phil Plait, also known as “The Bad Astronomer,” is an American astronomer, skeptic, and science communicator. He has made significant contributions both in his field and in public science education, via media and podcasting, and on his Bad Astronomy blog. He has authored three popular science books: Bad Astronomy, Death from the Skies, and Under Alien Skies. These works demystify complex astronomical concepts for the general public. He has also appeared in several science documentaries on The Discovery Channel and has been a regular on skeptical podcasts such as A Skeptics Guide to the Universe as well as hosting his own Crash Course in Astronomy series on You Tube.

For those of you who are too young to be aware (or too old to remember), The Amaz!ng Meeting (abbreviated to TAM) was a precursor to the much-loved QEDcon. It was held in Las Vegas, with a brief pair of London events. In 2010, Plait was invited to give a presentation at the Vegas meeting and his speech focused on what he felt was an increasing problem in organised skeptics’ interactions: specifically, people acting in an obnoxious and dismissive way to others, especially to believers in pseudoscientific ideas.

Plait thought the tone of skeptical outreach had deteriorated substantially. He asked attendees whether they had previously believed in things like bigfoot, UFOs, and alt-med, and if so, what had caused them to change their mind? Was it people getting in their face, mocking them and using names like idiots, the r-word, or other ableist slurs?

He put forth a rhetorical question: how do we, as skeptics, convince people that they are not thinking clearly, when they are not thinking clearly?

Using studies to reinforce his ideas, Plait talked about how engaging confrontationally with believers can often lead to them double down in their errant beliefs. It is hard to get someone to change their mind, especially with a message that can be discomforting for many people, often requiring huge shifts in how they view the world. Humans tend to identify profoundly with their beliefs, be they political, religious or worldview-based, and will react defensively if they feel these are coming under attack.

Readers will likely agree that science and an understanding of reality can be profound, glorious or even magical (in the sense of awesomeness), but not everyone feels this way. Skepticism is, by its very definition, seen as negative. I’m sure many of you will have had the experience of family or work colleagues talking about a TV show they watched on UFOs, or announcing they saw a reiki practitioner for their leg pain and it really helped, and then disparaging you when you push back with some skeptical facts. No matter how gently and well-meaning you think you’ve done so.

Plait asks an important question: what is the goal of the skeptical movement? Is it to counteract pseudoscience specifically, and bad thinking in general? Or are we just a social group for freaks and geeks and simples – to borrow a line from a song – where we can rail at the stupidity in the world? If our goal is to help people walk away from the irrationality that causes harm to them and wider society, then we need to be conscious of how we do that.

One point of later criticism of the talk was that he did not give any specific examples, and that left the door open for detractors – and there were many – to dismiss this accusation of bad behaviour, because Plait was talking in generalities without evidence. Especially, as he accused “some atheists and skeptics” of hubris and of being dickish to others. Some, who wondered if they were the ones who had been dickish and hubristic and therefore the ones being attacked, pushed back. But as Plait himself later remarked:

“I was thinking fairly generically when I wrote the talk, and though I did have some specific examples of dickery in mind, the talk itself was not aimed at any individual person”.

There is no doubt that the skeptical movement had changed during the noughties. Previously, while dominated by the JREF, CSI (formerly CSICOP) and magazines like Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic in the USA, and The Skeptic in the UK, the focus had been principally on pseudoscience and the paranormal – topics like UFOs, alien mysteries, astrology, cryptozoology, ghosts and the supernatural. The great and the good of those driving the focus were largely from either academia or from the performing arts, especially the world of magic. There is an argument that, as successful as the movement had been thus far, there was often too much focus on things that were usually seen as harmless eccentricities by much of the public.

However, in the post-9/11 era, there was a greater interest in, and identification with, the increasingly organised atheist lobby – the so-called New Atheists. This led to a welcome influx of younger and less academically based people into the mix. The subsequent explosion of blogs, podcasts, videos on social media meant that there was a wider audience – and range of activists – prepared to challenge beliefs that had until then been much more socially accepted in wider society. The increasing success of the movement meant that some people were now applying the tools of skepticism to more entrenched ideas, especially ones that had held unwarranted, or even sometimes damaging, power over them as individuals in the past.

Anger, especially deriving from a sense of injustice, can be an immense driver, and understandable in many circumstances, but Plait saw a change in the community where younger, more enthusiastic skeptics were being deliberately and ruthlessly provocative to people who did not agree with them, regardless of the subject matter and regardless of who they were talking to. They were bringing anger where it was arguably not warranted, and in doing so they were causing reputational damage to the movement, which too often was counterproductive to the goal of changing people’s minds.

There was much pushback to Plait’s talk from within the skeptical/atheist movement, ranging from ‘He’s right, but…’, to calling him an ‘accommodationist’ and an apologist for dangerous beliefs. He was accused of pandering to the old guard, and of not understanding the trauma of people trapped in religion, especially fundamentalist Christianity and Islam, and therefore demanding that others surrender to the extremists.

This debate within skeptical circles has arguably only become more strident and entrenched with time. There is no doubt that as the movement diverted from its more traditional focus, political differences came much more to the fore. A movement that had been predominately male for a long time was starting to grapple with the importance of diversity, and activists – of all genders – sought to challenge the status quo. Others were uncomfortable with this and felt that skepticism and atheism should focus simply on the task at hand, and ignore all the Social Justice Warriors.

This polarisation continues even now. We’ve had pushback when Edinburgh Skeptics has announced that we are inclusive, that we support transgender rights, or that we support Pride, or ensure our speaker lists are largely gender equal; that we are progressive and happy to support people.

There are many outliers and you don’t need me to go full Godwin’s to show you these, but most people – especially those not actively involved in hoodwinking the public – hold ideas for reasons they themselves don’t fully understand and it is unlikely their mind will be changed by calling them morons or idiots. This is simply what Plait was referring to.

There is no doubt that the current political landscape demands that we fight robustly against misinformation and those who want to restrict the rights of so many others, but rather than simply making ourselves feel good about how right we are, if we want to be effective, compassionate skeptics, we need to think about how we communicate and heed Phil Plait’s advice. Don’t be a dick.

Project Blue Beam is finally happening… as long as you cherry pick very carefully

Nick Garratt
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Project Blue Beam is finally happening… as long as you cherry pick very carefully

You may have heard the buzz about the unknown aircraft flying around over New Jersey – if you’re not aware, you can read my previous article for The Skeptic, where I ‘drone’ on about it. It seemed to be mostly based on your usual run-of-the-mill misidentified planes or satellites, but it wouldn’t be an internet frenzy without conspiracy subreddits and Facebook pages proposing outlandish theories. One notion being pushed by the loudest proponents, with the shiniest of tinfoil hats – such as Rosanne Barr and Alex Jones – is that we are seeing the implementation of “Project Blue Beam”.

If you haven’t come across Project Blue Beam before, it was a supposed plan first laid out by a Canadian conspiracy theorist called Serge Monast. In 1994, a transcript was published of a talk he had given several times, titled Project Blue Beam (NASA). Monast claimed that he had seen documents of a secret plan by the New World Order, under the guise of NASA, to end all religions and topple nation states, bringing forth the new government that would rule the entire world.

This plan was initially going to happen in 1983 – supposedly the start of the Age of Aquarius (there is no consensus on when the Age of Aquarius started/will start, but I have seen nothing to suggest it was 1983). Something had happened to delay that date (Monast doesn’t know what) and so it had been pushed back to the mid-90’s. Alas, when the new date came around… nothing happened.

Monast died mysteriously soon after the release of his publication, so could not comment on the reason for this second delay. And by “mysterious” and “soon” I mean he had a heart attack two years after he’d published the transcript of the talk he’d been giving for several years, and continued to give in his remaining time.

But with the arrival of these lights over New Jersey, Project Blue Beam is back in the hearts and minds of ufologists, religious zealots, and QAnoners once again. It’s finally happening, just as the plan suggested… right?

There are apparently four steps to Project Blue Beam:

1.    The Breakdown Of Archaeological Knowledge

Step one is a nice easy one to lead us in: stage fake earthquakes, which will uncover planted “discoveries” that will undermine all the well-known evidence of the archaeological record that proves Christianity to be true.

How will these fake earthquakes be achieved? It’s unclear. Maybe some of the weather weapons Joe Biden was said to be using to cause storms and hurricanes in the US during hurricane season have an earthquake setting.

It is also unclear as to how the false evidence gets planted. Whether someone sneaks in to drop a bunch of bones and/or pottery, then tells archaeologists to go take a look; or maybe the archaeologists are all in on it – that’d explain why 2024 Ockham Award Winner, Flint Dibble, is so distrusted by the defender of truth, Joe Rogan…

You may have also been wondering what the existing scientific evidence is that archaeologists have been collecting that proves the truth of Christianity. I certainly was. While some biblical scholars have claimed that certain archaeological finds point to the veracity of the stories about Jesus, no hard evidence has ever been located.

Photo of the slopes of Mount Ararat in Turkey with a site that some claim to be the site of Noah's Ark
The supposed site of Noah’s Ark near Mount Ararat, Turkey. By Mfikretyilmaz, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 3.0

2.    The Drone Show!

This is the part that has excited the conspiracy theorists, as Monast talked about light shows in the sky. But, if we take a look at his actual words, it doesn’t actually match up:

“The second step deals with the gigantic space show with three-dimensional optical holograms and sounds, laser projections of multiple holographic images to different parts of the world, each receiving different images according to predominating regional/national religious faith. This new god’s image will be talking in all languages.”

The stories online have all focused around the USA, primarily New Jersey; have only referred to lights in the sky, rather than gigantic 3D images; none of the lights indicated anything religious; and nobody heard anything spoken. The shaky footage from mobile phones doesn’t demonstrate Serge’s step two, at all! There are only two correlating words: “light” and “sky” – that’s the whole shebang.

3.    Telepathic Talk From Fake God

For good measure we will finish the other steps. Step three involves satellites beaming messages directly in to the heads of every human being on Earth, spoken in the native language of every single individual on Earth (this is done with super-smart computers on those satellites – now we’d probably claim AI and super-computers, but Serge hadn’t heard of those things in 1994).

What these messages are exactly is not provided, though Monast points to fear being used to control the masses and, in the published version of the speech, the transcriber interrupts at the shift between steps two and three to provide a handful of quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a debunked piece of antisemitic propaganda that was claimed to be written by a cabal of evil Jewish men planning to take over the world).

4.    The Night Of The Thousand Stars

Our final step involves a night where humanity collectively loses its mind as a result of a faked alien invasion (perhaps this is the part that Rosanne and her ilk are warning about, though starting with step four seems a bold strategy). In addition to the fake alien invasion, we also have a fake rapture to make Christians believe they are being taken to Heaven. Step 4c is that electrical devices with microchips inside them will go crazy, and satanic ghosts will drive people to a purge-like night of death and disorder. Why Serge put your smart fridge spoiling your milk alongside demonic spirits bringing about the end times, I can’t say, but he did!

And there we have it: Project Blue Beam being enacted before our very eyes! If you look at it just the right way. And by right way, I mean you only read the words “lights” and “sky”, and ignore everything that clearly isn’t actually happening.

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