Next Steps: Baiting the Trap
In a continuation of my previous blog on Guerilla Skepticism and what I believe will be necessary to blast the lid off the dumb-down media and throw some light on rational thinking:
It was great to read in Michael Shermer’s eSkeptic that the wheels are in motion for people fed up with the deceptions we are living through actually taking concrete steps to get the skeptical word out. People are setting traps. Junior Skeptic Editor Daniel Loxton has called for a renewed focus on classical skeptical activism. I’m still not sure whether “classical” is going to get the job done, but I applaud the suggested transition from staying in the background and stepping up to the plate. We need to spend less time bemoaning the past and concentrate on taking it all to the next level.
Danial has a new book , “What Do I Do Next?,” which appropriatly was one of the tangents I went off on during my JREF lecture. Since returning from the cruise, I have had a chance to look at some of the skeptical websites put up by people I met such as Tim Farley’s execellent “www.whatstheharm.net and others such as www.stopsylvia.com (Browne) and www.soccergirlincorporated .com. These are only a few of the sites that are spreading throughout cyberspace to combat all the crap going down and get us on the right track to accomplishing something solid and substantial as a platfrom for real “skepetical activism.” It’s about time.
In lieu of a Skeptologists series contract and after now reading nearly six months of skeptical blogs, it sure looks like something agreesively organized is starting to sprout. The time has come to promote everything we can generate short of disordely conduct: Show up at psychic fairs and hand out fortune cookies! Go to tapings of John Edward or Sylvia Browne wannabee shows and use your hidden camera to catch their employees pumping the audience for pre-show information, then put it up on the internet! Tape a bad psychic or palmreader dishing out a bad reading and send it around. Show up at your local newsspaper office (if you still have one…) in a wizard hat and confront the editor with your cold reading skills after offering to take over their horoscope column for free. Convince a CEO of a major company that you are a Feng Shui master, then pile up all of his or her furniture and belongings in one corner of his office! Bombard Larry King’s news desk with your claim to the “World’s Most Accurate Psychic” then show up in Sylvia Browne drag – do something! Be creative! Make a statement the media can’t resist. I’m willing. let’s kick some woo butt! In case you are wondering what I’m up to… stay tuned.
And don’t be afraid to use deep darkly enfarious curses on those who may accost you! Remember the imortal words of Carnac the Magnificent:
“May a queasy camel freshen up your mother’s evening bath.”
Are you going to pay us to do all this stuff?
I only ask because I’ll need to be able to quit the day job, you know.
It’s not like creativity is that expensive. Activism can be really cheap- in both money and time. All the big skeptics have day jobs.
Pay? Are you kidding? You get paid back with the look on the faces of the people you can draw into your game. It’s fun. More fun than spending your weekend going to garage sales or your kid’s soccer game. Hoaxing is good for you! Then there’s always the off chance of a book deal or movie rights on the story you write (hopefully not from jail)… Think positive! What can you lose by dreaming up a conspiracy plot and delivering with a skepticism message? Our enemies out there in wooville do it all day long – 24 -7. That’s where the “active’ comes into activism.
I confess to being an inveterate hoaxer, beginning with ghosts to scare my sisters when I was a child, to a crop circle with engineering students at NC State in the late 1980s, to many UFOs, to bigfoot tracks.
Never got a dime out of it.
Practical jokes are one thing. Something that will convince an American audience not just that they got had once but that next time they send of $5.99 for a prayer cloth they’ll get had again – that’s going to be full time work, near enough.
But all seriousness aside, I like the idea… I’m just trying to figure out how to implement in the 10 hours a week I have free.
If enough people go onto the set of, say, John Edward, happen to run into the minders and fill them with lies, they can make a good impression on the audience when they say “none of that is true but you wouldn’t have said any of it if you didn’t get that information from your lackeys just a few minutes ago”. Of course the contract you sign before you go in might state that you can’t do that – now which will win out, the contract or the law? After all, contracts cannot be legally binding if they break the law or ask you to break the law.
I love that picture – just seeing Johnny Carson dressed up like that with the envelope to his forehead still makes me fall over laughing. Why are there no more intelligent, practical but funny folks like Johnny on TV?
YOU were responsible for the crop circle phenomenon!?
… wait, I demand evidence, spaceman! ;)
There is a local “woo” conference of some sort locally this weekend. Something about psychics and astrology. I don’t want to actually GIVE them any money, nor spend any of my own (I’m no rich person). Perhaps there is a job for us lay-people who don’t have money, or mad “psychic” skills.
Mark, thanks for mentioning our new skeptical activism project, “What Do I Do Next?” (to which Skeptologist Brian Dunning was a major contributor). To learn more about the project, you can read the eSkeptic announcement here — which includes links to the full PDF version, point form html Quick Reference Guide version, and the Skepticality interview in which Swoopy and I announce and discuss the project.
I hope people find it useful.
It would be a shame if some of Sylvia Browne’s ,Jenny McCarthy’s,or Kevin Trudeau’s books got misplaced at your local library or bookstore.Just sayin’, a real shame!!! (Peachs $1.89)
Peaches; Now that might be considered crossing the line, which has never especially bothered me much in the past. Better the books got “recycled” some way back to their doorstep one at a time. Not a bad idea though. Sounds expensive and your library card would likely have to be chalked up to the cause.
Mark,
I would never cross the line! How dare you accuse me of taking a book from it’s proper place in a Library and moving it to the section on Government behind some vast tome that no one ever reads! That sir would be totally unethical and guerilla like!
RE: Woo books at the public library. A certain inveterate hoaxer I know once took the covers off books on woo, placed them over copies of The Demon Haunted World and Flim Flam, and then replaced them on the library shelf.
Hey DA, didn’t you describe yourself as an “inveterate hoaxer” ? Sounds like a ‘cover story” to me!
Oh. Now I see what you mean. Switching book jackets is brilliant! We should all go to the library this weekend and SUBVERT THE WOO SYSTEM! It might also work at Barnes & Noble, etc. Feed Your Inner Guerilla!
“Hey DA, didn’t you describe yourself as an “inveterate hoaxer” ? Sounds like a ‘cover story” to me!”
Um, er.. pure coincidence. I must have been referring to some other inveterate hoaxer. Heck, i’m not even DA. I don’t know him!
No, I confess. I actually have done the book cover switch, more than once, but not in a few years.
I’ve done a great deal of hoaxing in order to study public (and hopefully media) reaction, typically light-in-the-sky UFOs sent over,say, a crowded NC beach at night, sometimes a high school football studio. I’m usually at the launch site while an accomplice is mixed in among the target crowd with a videocam, which is also a sound recorder, of course.
My purpose is to present to an unknowing number of the public a stimulus, an observation, that is not readily identified, and to then measure reactions. I don’t use UFO models. I use gas-filled balloons with battery powered lighting (no fire balloons, too risky), sometimes with a single constant light, sometimes with blinking arrays. Almost everything is bought from (plug alert) American Science & Surplus, every science/tech geek’s best friend. The result at night is a moving light that defies immediate explanation.
Being among the target audience lets you listen in on the commentary if/when the ‘UFO’ is spotted. (And they’re not always spotted, given the vagaries of the wind and of the human attention. Perhaps one-third go unnoticed, dammit). Speaking very generally, the most people, maybe two-thirds to three-quarters, make a few guesses and assume it’s something mundane they just can’t figure out. Maybe another fifth guess at mundane but silly explanations, like secret gov’mt craft, etc. Ah, but a good 5-10% go directly and immediately to Alien Space Ship, entertaining the mundane guesses from nearby witnesses for maybe thirty seconds or less. That is the extent of their ‘ruling out’ process, thirty seconds of serious consideration.
I’ve had two make the local media in and around Cherry Point NC, and one on the Outer Banks, near Kitty Hawk, of course. They were straightforward accounts, with commentary from eyewitnesses. Though they only make up about 5-10% of the witness pool, it’s the Alien Space Ship guessers who get the ink.
It gave me some insight into how ‘UFO flaps’ may be created. On the first night or two that a UFO is seen, the witness pool is generic. But, if those sightings get any publicity at all, the crowd who come out to look for UFOs on ensuing nights is increasingly pro-Alien Space Ship, which leads to more UFO reports, and if the media sticks with it you have a ‘UFO flap’.
I was vacationing in Florida during the Gulf Breeze UFO flap, when Ed Walter’s fake UFO pics had people hitting the beach at night in droves trying to see UFOs, media running amongst them sticking mikes under everyone’s noses. The surest way to get rid of the TV cub reporters was to offer them a mundane explanation for that light over there above the horizon. They were not interested in my belief that it was highly unlikely that Alien Space Ships used navigational light arrays identifical to those used by human aircraft.
Dog Bites Man = Not News
Man Bites Dog = News
Maybe the UFOs were Xenu’s spaceships, which you may recall were almost exact replicas of the Douglas DC-8.
RE #16: inveterate indeed! My hat is off to you sir!
Did you ever come forward to burst their bubble (balloon), or did you remain anon?
I wonder what it would look like with a couple of those cheap laser pointers dangling from a slow rising balloon?
tmac: “Did you ever come forward to burst their bubble (balloon), or did you remain anon?”
Not to observers, nor to media, but to friends unconnected to the, um, social experiment, yes.
“I wonder what it would look like with a couple of those cheap laser pointers dangling from a slow rising balloon?”
Oh, I know exactly what it looks like. Those little thingies are perfect because of the light effects, of course, but also because they are so small. You fill a balloon, and then you must add ballast weight till it rises very slowly. Otherwise it just shoots straight up and the wind has no chance to take it over or near the target audience a mile or so away. One laser… too light. Two lasers… still too light. Three lasers…. ah, Goldilocks perfect!
A good looking build consists of a reflective surface balloon of good size, mylar works great, at least three feet across, with two spots hanging below. One spot light points downward, the other upward illuminating the underside of the reflective balloon.
Another model works great in daylight. Take 3-4 large plastic garbage bags, color black or very dark, snip the ends off and tape them together with 2″ shipping tape (leave the ends on the two outermost bags in the 3-4 bag string. The hot summer sunlight is absorbed quickly by the dark/black bags, which heats the air inside, which expands filling your 8-10 ft long, 2-3 ft diameter ‘UFO’, and eventually it just lifts off. Once high enough you can’t tell it’s just garbage bags taped together, it looks just like a ‘cylindrical object’ flying in the sky. As it rises it crosses through layers of air moving at different speeds and twists and turns, often in a seemingly controlled way.
For the hoaxer that doesn’t mind spending $20-$100, the internet is full of miniature airships, blimps, etc., that are helium fillable with a little battery powered motor spinning a propeller. Many of these are RC, but the control range is usually too short to keep you hidden from the target audience.
American Science & Surplus has all manner of cheap LED lights in all manner of configurations – singles, strings, panels, etc. – as well as little batt kits to power them. Helium is easy to come by, wherever you can buy party balloons. Since I want to be covert, I’ll just get a bunch of balloons and transfer the helium to my UFO rig here in my secret laboratory high atop Podunk Mountain here in NC.
I bought a pair of bigfoot casts, left & right, of course, made of a firm rubbery latex type material that actually include dermal ridging. I rigged a come-along strap system so I can strap them to my boots. Coincidentally and luckily, I’m almost bigfoot sized, 6’5″ 260 lbs, but I do NOT go out in gorilla suits. Not in NC. Dead by breakfast. My size does let me make loooong strides in my bigfeet. When feeling sporty, I toss them in a backpack and go to likely sites: ATV trails in the woods, shores near lakes, ponds, and rivers in or near the woods, construction sites – anywhere there is bare dirt that sees pedestrian traffic, ideally recently rained on so as to better take my tracks. I can take the bigfoot feet out of my backpack and strap them on in less than 2 minutes, take them off just as quick.
I’d really like to do more crop circles, but the bar has been raised by those cereal grafitti artists in the UK. It takes a lot of planning and a well trained team to do one well anymore.
#19 DA, that is fantastic! you have really given this a lot of thought. I hope you inspire a bunch of skeptic guerrilas out there.
Do the hot air garbage bags pose an aviation hazard that we might have to worry about? None of us want anything bad to happen.
Re: “I’d really like to do more crop circles, but the bar has been raised by those cereal grafitti artists in the UK. It takes a lot of planning and a well trained team to do one well anymore.” Yeah, those guys are awesome!
“Do the hot air garbage bags pose an aviation hazard that we might have to worry about? None of us want anything bad to happen.”
No more so than a given bird or kite or whatever. Of course, I wouldn’t release one within proximity of an airport.
I once went ‘undercover’ as a Junior MUFON UFO Investigator in the early 1980s, just to see what their training is, how they’d have you approach an investigation, and all that. I wasn’t even whelmed. Absolute hacks.
I currently have two hoaxed UFO reports in the MUFON ‘archive’, both of which were copied out and into a half dozen other believer UFO sighting databases as unexplained cases. Though I gave my name, address, two phone numbers, and my email address to facilitate their, ahem, ‘investigation’, both went directly to the online report databases, completely uninvestigated, no contact whatsoever.
Might be time for another. Certainly they’ve improved their investigative methodology. (Sarcasm Alert)
Doubt it will happen here, this being specifically a skeptical site, but I usually get at least one UFO believer castigating me for ‘ruining’ the UFO investigative process. To them I reply, what good is a UFO investigative body that doesn’t even try to account for hoaxing? And doesn’t pointing out fundamental, fatal flaws help the process, identifying where improvement is necessary?
“I currently have two hoaxed UFO reports in the MUFON ‘archive’, both of which were copied out and into a half dozen other believer UFO sighting databases as unexplained cases.”
It would be great if we could get one of these hoax’s to get widespread sensational national coverage. Of course the true believers would come up with some conspiracy theory that would twist it into proof that UFO’s do exist. ‘Phoenix Lights’ comes to mind.
I knew a guy in high school who made some Bigfoot feet in woodshop, took them out into the woods and left some prints. They got found, and the next thing we knew, the local newspaper sent reporters out there to camp and search for the animal. The real story came out soon enough, but not soon enough for the reporters to avoid embarassment.
I forgot about it for 20 years, until a photo of the prints turned up in Scientific American about 1996. It was a good, skeptical article, of course, but it lacked the real explanation of the prints. I wouldn’t be surprised to find them in somebody’s “evidence” archives to this day.
People want to believe in stuff, which makes them easy to fool.
That a UFO report would go directly to the database with no investigation whatsoever is bad enough, but they also changed – edited – one of them without asking me. I had purposely described my UFO as “Boxy and angular”. That language was removed and replaced with “disc-shaped”. Remember that the next time you hear believers extol the “similarities of reports” as evidence of credibility. Bigfooters are also notorious for ‘helping’ sighting reports achieve similarities. Two ways: lies of commission, like literally rewriting the report, and lies of ommission, where they toss out reports that don’t match their beliefs as to what UFOs or bigfoot look like or how they behave. That’s how woo databases are massaged.
“Two ways: lies of commission, like literally rewriting the report, and lies of ommission, where they toss out reports that don’t match their beliefs as to what UFOs or bigfoot look like or how they behave. That’s how woo databases are massaged.”
Sounds like a case of misremembering the hits and dismembering the misses .
“Sounds like a case of misremembering the hits and dismembering the misses.”
Sure, there’s a lot of that, but mostly it’s just belief bias. I think some people believe that UFOs are ‘real’ or that bigfoot exists for so long they forget how tenuous was and is the evidence for them. There are bigfoot orgs, for instance, who fully believe they ‘know’ what bigfoot looks like, how it behaves, what it eats, etc., and they quite sincerely toss out bigfoot reports that don’t match their template. Turn in a bigfoot report that matches all the others in all regards except one – claim your bigfoot was dark brown but hairless/furless – and it will get tossed out because everyone at that org ‘knows’ there are no hairless bigfoot. Enter another report ‘correct’ in all aspects except one – claim you saw your bigfoot 50′ up a pine tree – and it will get tossed because everyone knows bigfoot doesn’t climb trees.
Questioned about the dirth of physical, scientific quality evidence, and they will, without a hint of irony or awareness, point out how all the reports in their database hold improbable similarities.
I guess an inveterate hoaxer might want to sit in on the next bigfoot ‘internal review board’ so as to get all the details right. Wouldn’t want to let all their hard work get tossed by the ‘experts’.
There are Natural Resources type agencies in the Pacific NW states that use helicopter mounted infrared cameras to count up different species. Bigfoot, desperate to remain unevidenced, has succeeded 100% in avioding detection by this apparatus. From this we can safely deduce that bigfoot has dug hidey holes every 50′ and likely has an extensive tunnel system throughout the Pacific NW. This tunnel system is no doubt where they stash their food supplies and to where they remove the carcasses of their dead. It’s clear as day and all very scientific.
(Just practicing for when it’s my turn to speak at the next Bigfoot Internal Review Board….)
i love it, all the contrarily.
Queens psychic
What a nice string of comments! But still, I must say, that just doing the hoaxing isn’t really what I’m after “guerilla” wise. After each deed is done, how do we (as the hoaxer who wants to make his or her point) rub the noses of the media in the trap they have walked into? Don’t get me wrong, you guys are doing a fantastic job, but like showing how a magic trick works, it’s just not enough. We need to SHOW how easy it was to get the kind of results you obtained. I’m not discounting any of it mind you and I’m the first to admit to armchair guerillaizing. This is all easier to say than to do. But do you get my drift? What we need is a sort of Candid Camera of the paranormal. Can you imagine the look on Larry King’s face when he has to wipe the egg off it after seeing the garbage bags being launched and giving air time to some loon who has written a book on the same sighting? Just a long-shot example of where I’m going.
Hey maybe we can get Sascha Baron Cohen to do some kind of ‘physic’ sting! Hmmm on second thought, probably not, he’d want too much money.
Come on Devil’s Advocate, I know you got something!
Seriously, though, sometimes all it apparently takes is a slow news day, and if you can get some gullible local news team to show a piece of footage from someone who got duped, there’s a chance that it could go national. Again, Phoenix Lights.
“Come on Devil’s Advocate, I know you got something!”
Oh, I’ve got something. I think it might be a good time to set up another James Randi/’Carlos’ hoax (Australia 1988). Of course, we’d need to find a professional mentalist not cowed by the limelight of the stage who could believably fake ‘psychic’ powers, and we’d have to find a locale where his face isn’t so easily recognizable as to blow the game before it is played. Hmmm, where to find a mentalist with such abilities?
Most TV talk shows that promote psychic and other woo are filmed in LA and NYC. Skeptics in those locations would do well to flood the studio audiences to wreak mayhem on the psychics involved. This happens occasionally but isn’t well publicized in the media. However, if it happened in larger numbers and kept happening and kept happening, eventually it would become a story unto itself….
Many of these same TV (and radio) talk shows use the caller phone-in system. We’d do well to flood those phone lines with skeptics seeking to game the process just as with the in-studio thing.
Many newspapers and TV stations are going to or have gone to an online version and these online versions often have a Comments section after every story. I read the online News & Observer (Raleigh NC) daily for news, of course, but also to look out for uncritical woo stories. I enter skeptical assessment in the Comment section, and also follow it up with a Letter To The Editor in particularly egregious cases. These are often printed because the media loves controversy.
So, in addition to hoax techniques posted earlier, there’s a single ‘big stage’ suggestion, a suggestion to organize audience and telephonic assaults on uncritical presentations of woo in TV and radio, and a suggestion to attack woo on the grassroots level in our respective home areas.
I firmly believe those who post regularly at Skeptiblog could come up with a great many other suggestions and/or refinements and I hereby challenge them to do so.
[Major KUDOS to Mark Edward for interacting so well and so often with his audience via the comment section here at Skepticblog. Some of the blog entrants seem to employ a 'post & forget' system and do not respond to follow up questions and comments. It cannot be overstated how important, how beneficial it is to interact with the audience the blog seeks to engage. It goes miles in helping to instill a sense of inclusion in readers by eliminating the sense of remove from the 'stars' of the skeptical movement. Skepticism ought always seek to be a populist movement, built from the grassroots up, not the ivory towers down. Thank you, sir.]
RE: The James Randi ‘Carlos’ hoax:
http://skepdic.com/carlos.html
Wow. Sounds like you guys really have an axe to grind. Ill bet most of you probably think the universe around you isnt really real either, and its all a big hoax. You guys are totally caught up in the whole cynical modern age mindset thing thats going around, and sound really bitter because of it. Well, whatever you do I hope you get charged to the full extent of the law for it. Afterall, its illegal to launch flares on helium baloons and other stuff into the air, or havent you heard?
@Patrick, Yes, I suppose many of us do have an axe to grind. Mine needs sharpening after trying to hack through the wall of BS so many frauds and charlatans have thrown up against Reason.
As to your point about the “cynical modern age mindset” you feel we possess, you couldn’t be more wrong. Rational consideration of evidence to determine what we can know with confidence and what we can reject is the antithesis of new age woo and post-modern philosophical navel-gazing. The universe around me is “real,” because a failure to recognize a speeding truck as a threat will result in very “real” consequences.
Finally, we are in agreement that anyone, regardless of belief (or lack of) who breaks the law should be prosecuted and face the “real” consequences of their actions.
I also love the picture of Johnny Carson. I frequently look up his old shows on Youtube. For anyone who missed the show where he totally destroyed Uri Geller’s credibility, though he did it with a great amount of politeness and charm, i would recommend it highly. It’s a shame none of the current talk show hosts are nearly as skeptical.
My own battle on the skeptic front is to debunk the most popular woo in the Western world–Xtianity. Anyone interested should visit jesusneverexisted, askwhy or Ex-Christians. It makes me sick to think there are deluded, often ingenuous, fudgewads trying to substitute ID for science in the classroom. I’ve never understood how anyone could seriously assert that science and religion are not incompatible.