Philippics

According to the Otago Daily Times, 19 June 1989:

"British pathologists have challenged the palmist's belief that your hand can reveal the secret of how long you can live. Examining 100 bodies in a hospital mortuary in western England, they compared the length of lifelines on palms with the ages of the deceased, the Daily Mail newspaper said. 'It didn't matter which hand was examined, the lifeline appeared to have no bearing on how long the patient lived', pathologist Dr John Bradfield was quoted as saying."

However according to New Truth, 7 July 1989:

"... Dr John Bradfield and three colleagues at Britain's Bristol Royal Infirmary have been studying the lifelines of 100 people who died between the ages of 30 and 90... 'We wanted to see if there was a trend related to length of lifelines examined on dead people. We were all surprised to find there was one'..."

Very curious. New Truth, incidentally, went on to quote gypsy palmist, Leah Petulengro: "Dr Bradfield's got it all wrong. The lifeline has nothing to do with your life expectancy. It tells you more about your character—

whether you are short-tempered, open hearted...that sort of thing". (My thanks to Mag Holmes for the O.D.T. clipping.)

—

Of course, Skeptics don't believe all they read in newspapers. Do they believe what they read in New Scientist? The "Inside Science" feature of the 18 March 1989 issue was about extra-terrestrial life. A box headed "Spacecraft from another world?" began:

"On 30 December 1979, an Argosy freight plane took off from Wellington, New Zealand. During this routine flight, the captain spotted something he had never seen in 23 years of flying—an unidentified flying object (UFO). By chance, an Australian TV crew was on board the plane and managed to film it."

and ended:

",,.the New Zealand UFO turned out to be the planet Jupiter."

Many Skeptics will recall that New Year when the eyes of the television-viewing world were focused on New Zealand. Some details, however, may be worth emphasising in view of the New Scientist's remarks.

1) The TV crew's presence on the plane was not by chance but was with the expressed intention of filming for a documentary on UFOs. The only thing due to chance was the presence in New Zealand of Quentin Fogarty, a reporter for a Melbourne television channel. He was on holiday in his homeland when his employers asked him to investigate the UFO reports that were coming from New Zealand. He arranged to fly in the Argosy for that purpose.

(In addition to Fogarty, on board was a husband and wife camera team he had hired locally. The wife preferred not to be on the flight back and a Christchurch journalist took her place. Since they were working for an Australian television channel they could possibly be called "an Australian TV crew")

2) Not one, but a variety of UFOs were spotted and filmed.

3) A variety of explanations have been advanced for the UFOs seen. The Jupiter hypothesis is among them. It is considered in the two detailed investigations of the Kaikoura UFO flap which do not incline towards an extraterrestrial hypothesis. To quote from its abstract, the DSIR Report Unfamiliar Observations of Lights in:the Night Sky (1979) suggests that "... the lights were generally unusual views of either terrestrial sources, such as light houses, navigation beacons, and city lights, or of the planets Venus and Jupiter, seen through an unusually clear atmosphere. In the most widely publicised case the most likely source was a squid boat seen under quite normal viewing conditions".

Robert Scheaffer in The UFO Verdict (1981), P.230, says "It is possible that Jupiter may have played a minor role in the incident". (There is, however, universal agreement that the "UFO" filmed a few days later by a New Zealand TV crew was the planet Venus.)

The "Inside Science" pages of the New Scientist are intended as an educational supplement for schools.

—

Brushing up on my history of local ufology, I was reminded of a documentary short on the Kaikoura UFOs which the Wellington Film Society screened in August 1981. Entitled UFOs—A True Story (pre-echoes of Whitley Strieber?), the audience found it side-splittingly funny. It had something of the sublime crassness of Plan Nine from Outerspace. (For those who aren't cult-movie addicts, Plan Nine from Outerspace is "one of the two worst movies of all time". A clip from it appeared in UFO Cover-up, the documentary of comparable tackiness which Television New Zealand broadcast direct from the U.S. via satellite, in October 1988.)

UFOs—A True Story was a 1979 production of V & F Productions. Skeptics might find it worth tracking down.

—

Wellington Central Library has 16 shroud books. Is this a record?

The 16 consist of 12 different texts and a spare copy of four of them. Perhaps needless to say, the library has only one book which does not favour the cloth's being the shroud of Jesus of Nazareth. It is Joe Nickell's Inquest on the Shroud of Turin. Yet Nickell's book is not the only non-pro-authenticity book to have been published. The Image on the Shroud by H. David Sox (a clergyman and former secretary of the British Society for the Turin Shroud) is an inexpensive, scholarly book published in 1981 by the reputable Unwin Paperbacks. It was available in Wellington for a considerable period before I bought it. How did Wellington Central Library manage to avoid snapping it up?

—

For me, the most interesting shroud news item to follow the announcement of the carbon-dating test results was in The Evening Post of 15 October 1988. In it, William Meacham, an archaeologist at the University of Hong Kong, informed us that an earlier carbon dating of the shroud had been done in 1982 at the University of California by the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP).

"The two tests... were conducted with techniques identical to those used yesterday, on separate halves of a piece of the shroud removed in 1973, and known by shroud experts as the 'Reis sample' (sic) after the Belgian textile expert it was given to, he said. One half of the thread was dated at 200 AD and the other at 1000 AD, Mr Meacham said. The results were never announced because the test was conducted without the permission of the Turin church authorities."

About a STURP workshop assessment at Los Alamos in October 1979, Sox, in The Image on the Shroud, P.27, says:

"Portions of the Raes' samples were brought form Turin to the meeting by Professor Gonclla for chemical analysis by Rogers. Attached to the samples' container was a Iegal document stating that under no circumstances were they to be carbon dated!"

It therefore looks as if the STRUP carbon dating tests of 1982 were not merely, as Meacham says, "without the permission of the Turin church authorities", but contrary to those authorities' expressed wishes. STURP has a preponderance of committed Christians. I am intrigued by the possibility that in their eagerness to support their religious beliefs by a hoped-for authentication of the shroud, they may have breached the bounds of propriety.

—

A recent letter from a New Ager in a Wellington paper referred to that "leading physicist", Fritjof Carpra. What Capra's contribution to physics has been the writer neglected to tell. True, the American feminist magazine Ms, in its 10th anniversary edition (August 1982), included Capra amongst the "Men who've taken chances and made a difference"—but this was "for recognising the need for radical social and economic change, in his international best seller, The Tao of Physics; and for identifying the current wave of feminism as central to change, in his latest book, The Turning Point". Nothing here about his contribution to physics.

In the May 1989 issue of the New Zealand feminist magazine Broadsheet, Cushla Dobson ended her article with a footnote explaining that some of her "resources" have come from (amongst others) "Fry of Capra" (sic). The other "resource" sources with which Capra had the honour of being grouped included Lazaris, Scth and Jane Roberts. Lazaris and Seth are discarnate spirits, and Jane Roberts is Seth's channeller. She was probably included as a makeweight.

—

You've got to hand it to the modern crop of spirits. The spirits which so entranced the eminent Victorian physicist Sir William Crookes and his contemporaries seem to have been fun-loving, even sexy. "Modern" spirits, however, are

Seth turns up again as a spiritual mentor of Dr Fred Alan Wolf, author of an extraordinary book, The Body Quantum (Heinemann, 1987). Seth inspired him to believe quantum physics can explain the human ego. In an earlier book Wolf had explained hate "tas a quantum statistical property of electrons" while love was explained "in terms of the quantum statistical behaviour of light particles". Whether Seth was also responsible for these insights is not

In The Body Quantum quantum physics are used to account for our body's health as well as the working of the mind. The author is a quantum physicist, not a medical doctor or psychologist. Any misgivings about this extra-disciplinary approach will be amplified by Wolf's endorsing the views of the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle on natural selection. Strangely, the physicist also endorses the physics of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Well, he doesn't quite endorse Reich's orgone energy—he thinks "Orgone is not really an energy but a quantum wave of probability".

The National Library, from whom I obtained The Body Quantum on interloan, said there was a heavy demand for the book. Thus I had less than three weeks to read and digest it—an impossibility. Yet the due date stamps indicated that, apart from mine (due 8 August), there had been only two other borrowings—both in March. Does this signify the book has recently had a quantum jump in popularity.

One shudders at the thought.

—

Transcendental Meditation is currently being promoted in Wellington by a Dr Deepak Chopra as "Quantum Healing".