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At Last a Photo of the Soul? Zatonski Describe Strategies Employed by JOE NICKELL Scientists with Regard to Pseudoscience

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At Last a Photo of the Soul? Zatonski Describe Strategies Employed by JOE NICKELL Scientists with Regard to Pseudoscience REVIEWS ] Reacting to Pseudoscience In the concluding chapter, Witkowski and At Last a Photo of the Soul? Zatonski describe strategies employed by JOE NICKELL scientists with regard to pseudoscience. They include remaining indifferent and keeping silent; playing down the prob- lem; attacking critics by questioning their competence and even their mental health rather than by engaging with the evidence; talking and giving the illusion of action Image of a Spirit. By Paul Williams. Foreword by Gary E. without actually doing anything; passive Schwartz, PhD. Waterside Press, Charleston, SC, 2015. acceptance of criticism; arrogant hostility ISBN: 978-1-941768-39-6. 143 pp. Paperback, $35.00. (insulting pseudoscientific practitioners and using words like psychobabble, mum- bo-jumbo, quackery, and flimflam); and finally open, matter-of-fact criticism— the most fruitful strategy but the one least popular among psychologists. You may find some of these ideas ques- tionable or unpalatable. If so, I hope you ome five years before he a Quantum Reality) and Loyd Au- will read the book and give the authors published his little 143-page erbach (author of ESP, Hauntings, a fair chance to explain their thinking. Sbook, Image of a Spirit, Paul and Poltergeists); and not to neglect This is a well-referenced, well-reasoned Williams was at the bedside of his mention of using “consciousness book chock-full of information about the his dying ninety-two-year-old expanding sacramental substances” state of psychology today. It exposes a lot mother, Mildred. Although she was (28) and taking the drug MDA with of dirty linen that would be of interest to a “rational” woman who “hated all Andrew Weil (88–89), the New any reader. I agree with CSI Fellow James things spiritual,” including “orga- Age doctor/guru (author of Sponta- Alcock, professor of psychology at York nized religion,” she appeared to neous Healing) who wrote a blurb for University, whose back-cover blurb says Williams to have had “a classic Williams’s book. it should be required reading for every Near Death Experience during Approximately an hour and for- psychologist and psychology student and her last two days.” He infers that ty-five minutes after his mother’s anyone contemplating psychotherapy. from her reaching with her frail death, while a Jamaican hospice I have only one criticism. English is not arms and smiling “for minutes on attendant and his lady friend Me- the authors’ native language, and it shows. end at something pleasant to her,” lissa cleaned and dressed the corpse, There are many infelicities of expression although she might only have had a Paul Williams decided to take some and even errors of grammar and usage. dying brain’s hallucination, waking photos with his Blackberry cell This does not interfere with understand- dream, or simple memory. phone. He saw nothing unusual, but ing what the authors meant, but a good Williams seems at pains to con- when he looked at the photos later editor could have done much to improve vert his mother posthumously from (emailed to his MacBook computer n their text. atheist to drum major for every- and “enlarged by the I-Photo pro- thing New Age. He touts his own gram”), he saw in the first picture a nine months of spiritual training in small humanoid-like figure. Harriet Hall, MD, a retired Air Force physi- 1972 called “alchemical transfor- He labels the image a “psi-photo” cian and flight surgeon, writes and edu- mation” (34); his screenplay based (psi referring to alleged psychic phe- cates about pseudoscientific and so-called on The Tibetan Book of the Dead; nomena) and again “this psi ghost alternative medicine. She is a contributing his interest in Kirlian photogra- photo, this ‘spirit picture’” (37, 47). editor and frequent contributor to the SKEP- phy, psychic phenomena, eastern Gary E. Schwartz, a credulous pro- TICAL INQUIRER, a CSI fellow, and a member mysticism, scrying experiences, and ponent of psi and author of books of the CSI Executive Council. She is also an visions; his references to “energy” such as The Afterlife Experiments, editor of the blog Science-Based Medicine and “other-dimensional” images wrote in the book’s foreword that and author of Women Aren’t Supposed to (33, 36); his consultations with a the photo could not possibly have Fly: Memoirs of a Female Flight Surgeon as “psychic”; his conversations with been faked (xiii–xiv). He cites a well as coauthor of the 2012 textbook Con- Dean Radin (author of Entangled professor of computer sciences at sumer Health: Guide to Intelligent Decisions. Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in Dartmouth, Harry Farid, who says Skeptical Inquirer | July/August 2015 61 it passed his foolproof test for authen- mom” (70). Yet Gary Schwartz notes, shot is as unique as people quoted in ticity (his brief report is included in the “. the first thing that strikes many his book suggest—other photo ghosts book). However, that analysis would people is that the head looks more like being typically amorphous—are the only reveal that the photo had not a bird (or some other-worldly entity)” latter then all non-genuine? If there is “been altered from the time of its initial (xiv). Could it be a demon? An extra- no other such picture—as parapsychol- recording” (82–83). In other words, it terrestrial? ogists Radin (72) and Loyd Auerbach could detect a faked photo of a genuine Psychic O’Hara, looking further, (76) suggest—and therefore no known scene, but not a faked scene in a genu- even found she could see the faces of standard or exemplar for comparison, ine photo, and certainly not an illusion at least five people in the streaked and how do we determine that the picture or anomaly caused by, say, some play of spotty image: In addition to (1) Wil- is that of a spirit? The term energy is light or shadow. liams’s mother, there were supposedly (2) his father, (3–4) his mother’s par- used throughout the book, but no en- ents, and (5) a boy (whom Williams ergy known to science could both com- helpfully suggests may be an uncle who pletely leave a human body at death died young). and retain the body’s shape without However, Williams’s sister told him, dissipating over an hour and forty-five “That’s nothing. It’s a reflection.” Sev- minutes’ time. How would such an en- eral others agree with her. But a reflec- tity function without a brain? And why When proponents argue that no tion “Of what?” Williams challenges would it appear in only one of a series (48), apparently misunderstanding her of photos? imaginable glitch could produce point. He seems to think it would have such a glitchlike image, and When proponents argue that no to have been something of that qua- imaginable glitch could produce such then argue (or cleverly imply) si-figural shape that had been reflected, a glitchlike image, and then argue (or whereas a reflection could merely be it’s a ghost, they are committing cleverly imply) it’s a ghost, they are a chance pattern of reflected light. In committing a logical fallacy called an a logical fallacy called an any case, since we are not apprised of “argument from ignorance.” One can- “argument from ignorance.” details of the room—especially behind the photographer—we cannot say what not say, we don’t know what caused might have been there to affect the this, and then conclude, therefore, that scene. Therefore the photo is essen- we do know. That is especially true tially worthless as evidence of anything. when the reason we lack a complete an- Interestingly, the simulacrum ap- swer to the question of how the image pears against the dark background of formed is that the needed evidence is Melissa’s shirt, a “sequined tight black not at hand and may now be impossi- blouse” (22). Parapsychologist Dean ble to reconstruct with any precision. Williams’s alleged psi-image actually Radin is quick to dismiss the sequins Besides, postulating the supernatural looks like a simulacrum—a perceived because, he tells Williams, “There was is equivalent to invoking “X,” since sci- image (such as the “Face” on Mars no strong light in the somber room ence has never proven the existence of or the Man in the Moon) resulting where your mother died that could be the supernatural. from pareidolia, the mind’s tendency reflected by the sequins” (71). But that To argue against a photo glitch but to “recognize” common shapes (espe- is simply not true. Although Williams accept the alleged supernatural is (in a cially faces) in random patterns. Such says he “had the camera’s flash turned biblical expression) to “strain at a gnat, simulacra are often held to be para- off” (21), a light source clearly illumi- normal entities. Not surprisingly, the nated the scene, as shown by bright- and swallow a camel.” Despite attempts to switch the burden of proof, this case “psychic” he consults, Sandra O’Hara ness on the hospice worker’s cheek, n (who has some of the traits associated rubber-gloved hand, and soap bottle, as remains laughably unproved. with a fantasy-prone personality), says well as Melissa’s hair. Was it from an the image is Williams’s mother “leav- overhead light, a window, or something Joe Nickell, PhD, is CSI’s senior research ing her body”—“her soul”—except else? fellow and author of numerous books in- that “she’s gone back to maybe when Williams has backed away from cluding Camera Clues and The Science of she was in her thirties” (106), and Wil- calling the picture “the first photo of liams has described it as “the picture of the human spirit” (90).
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