TODAY
Today we find ourselves, once again, in the midst of an uprising of belief in the paranormal. It is not a witch-hunt, but resembles the Spiritualism of the late nineteenth century during which men and women sought to find evidence of the afterlife and the spirit world. Television is rife with paranormal-based programming and the Internet has allowed for unprecedented access to other belief systems and other believers so that they can come together and try to find evidence of spirits that walk among us.
The United States is the richest and most technologically and scientifically progressive nation in the world, yet the belief in ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot is stronger than ever. We are ultimately a nation built on the belief systems of Europe, but the United States has coalesced and changed and become its own paranormal nation, awash in belief, mystery, fear, and wonder, despite the skeptics and despite the progress.
This presents us with a cultural contradiction, and it is that contradiction which we will be exploring. Whether or not one believes in the paranormal, the belief therein does exist and manifests in all levels of our society. This continued belief in the paranormal begs the question as to whether or not the paranormal is “real.” However, we may be asking the wrong question; perhaps we should be asking what our belief in the paranormal reveals about our identity, our culture, and our nation. Despite all efforts, the paranormal has never been proven or disproven; there is only belief and non-belief. Both reveal deep, innate, cultural relics that have been passed down through generations and both reflect insecurities, fears, and contradictions in the way that we live our lives and the way that we perceive our lives. The United States of America was born of religious freedom and yet occupies a Native American graveyard. We have been haunted from the very beginning. We are truly a paranormal nation.
CHAPTER 3
Paranormal Hoaxes
In August of 2008 two hunters in Georgia named Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer reported to the media that they had found a dead Bigfoot while hunting in the forest and that they had the creature on ice awaiting scientific inquiry. The story and the pictures showing what appeared to be the frozen dead body of a Bigfoot captured national attention and was reported by all major news stations. The story was also supported by Tom Biscardi, CEO of Searching for Bigfoot, who claimed to have personally laid hands on the beast and publicly verified that it was real on Fox News. Biscardi’s organization paid an unknown amount to have first access to the body. A couple days later, Biscardi had to go on television and admit to being duped by a frozen rubber Halloween costume mixed with a few real animal parts such as tongues and teeth.1 This was obviously a major disappointment and blow to the entire Bigfoot research community, which does, in fact, claim some reputable scientific figures. The fallout for those involved, including Biscardi, was substantial. Both men involved in the hoax, one a police officer and the other a corrections officer, were threatened with lawsuits by Bigfoot organizations, and Whitton was fired from his job as a police officer. Whitton stated, “All this was a big joke. It got into something way bigger than it was supposed to be.”2 While the two claim that the story merely “got legs” and ran on its own, they certainly didn’t shy away from the media attention, and they even helped the process along. They accepted money from Biscardi’s organization, held a press conference claiming that the body was real, and then disappeared while the body was thawed and examined.
I remember that August well. I was just forming the idea for this book at the time, and I remember chatting with some friends at a wedding and telling them the news—they had finally found Bigfoot! We were all skeptical, but bolstered by the news reports and Biscardi’s insistence that he had laid hands on the creature, and that it was, in fact, real. We were skeptical, but hopeful. We wanted it to be real and were disappointed when the hoax was revealed. The people I talked with at the wedding were not die-hard Bigfoot hunters, nor were they active believers in the paranormal, but they still hoped it was true that there was some last bastion of wilderness and wildness that had remained untouched by civilization for all these years. We wanted to believe that there was still some mystery left in the world. We were let down, but it was certainly not the first time that the hopeful public had been duped. In fact it happens time and time again and, on some level, is probably happening right now as people routinely call psychic hotlines, follow individuals who claim to be gods, or parade around in crop circles hoping to absorb the power of the space beings who formed them.
The hoax raises many questions regarding our beliefs, hopes, fears, and motivations. What would drive two men at the beginning of their law enforcement careers to throw everything away and face public ridicule and anger for a “joke”? How is it that we, the public, are continually misled down well-worn roads of false prophets and tricksters? And why does the hoax persist after so many years and so many failed attempts that resulted in anger, mistrust, and scrutiny? What role does it play in paranormal belief systems?
The hoax plays a crucial role in the realm of the paranormal because the hoax creates doubt and relegates professed experience to the realm of lies and deceit. In essence, the hoax ensures that the paranormal remains relegated to the outskirts of accepted experience and will not garner true scientific inquiry; it ensures that the paranormal will always remain mysterious and entrenched in doubt.
But before we move on, we should establish a working definition of a hoax for our purposes. A hoax is a deception perpetrated by one or more individuals who claim to have evidence or secret knowledge of the supernatural in an effort to gain fame, money, notoriety, or legal benefits or to ridicule the beliefs of others. It involves fraudulent evidence, public manipulation, and, ultimately, to truly be considered a hoax, it must be exposed, though we will examine some cases that have never been proven one way or the other. Proof of a hoax can be quite difficult, as all parties have to agree and admit to the hoax or be caught in such a compromising position that they cannot avoid admitting the truth.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOAXING
Hoaxing is as old as supernatural belief itself, dating back to the origins of humanity. Ancient shamans used to communicate with the gods and spirits and manipulate them in order to ensure both the survival of their tribe and to ensure their position of power within the tribe. However, the shamans were not always able to summon “powers” at their command, so they resorted to trickery and illusion to maintain their status in the community. “Generally, two explanations are offered for the sham of shamanism. Briefly they are: shamans use deception to enhance healing via placebo effects, and shamans use tricks to demonstrate power and compel obedience.”3 The history of trickery and the demonstration of supernatural powers through trickery have been recorded in some anthropological texts, but are largely unknown, as many of the ancient rites and practices have all but died out, save for a few primitive tribes around the world that still engage in them.
In recorded history, however, one of the earliest known hoaxes dates back to 1661 England and the Ghostly Drummer of Tedworth. According to the Museum of Hoaxing, “The case of the ghostly drummer of Tedworth soon became famous throughout England. Its notoriety prompted Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman and member of the Royal Society, to visit the Mompesson household and investigate the spirit. He collected eyewitness accounts of the spirit’s activities, recorded hearing noises himself, and eventually became convinced that the spirit was real.”4
Unfortunately for the investigating clergy, skeptics began pointing out serious holes in Mompesson’s story, like why no one was ever allowed in the cellar, why the drumming always happened at night, and why it seemed to come from outside the house rather than within. The king himself actually sent men to Mompesson’s home to investigate, and they determined there was no evidence of paranormal activity. The Drummer was never actually proven as a hoax, and the story eventually passed into legend.
The story of the Drummer of Tedworth is a good base narrative for how hoaxes generally unfold: a claim, a subsequent investigation by
someone with mystical knowledge (in this case a clergyman), a subsequent publication of their finding (often for profit), public interest, and then the descent of the skeptics and outside investigators who break open the psycho-structure of the hoax. For our discussion in this chapter, we will refer to this general sequence of events as the Drummer Cycle.
The psycho-structure of a hoax will be discussed later on, but for our purposes, psycho-structure involves the psychological willingness of direct participants or the public to believe what is being claimed, i.e., those who truly believe the hoax and invest a large personal stake in the belief, often putting reputations on the line in defense of it, and thus, greatly resisting having that belief torn open and exposed as a fraud.
A hoax involves manipulation of the medium used to inform and entertain the public, thus, as the medium (newspapers, television, Internet) changed and evolved with technology, so did the nature of the hoax. When widespread printing and distribution of newspapers emerged, along with increased literacy among the public, the newspaper became the realm of the hoax. One of the most famous hoaxers in U.S. history was Benjamin Franklin, a publisher and avid writer, and one of the founding fathers of our country. Franklin authored several hoaxes through the pages of newspapers that he owned and did so largely through pen names. “Like other eighteenth century literary figures such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, he used hoaxes for satirical ends, to expose what he perceived as public foolishness and vice to the light of public censure.”5 Some of his more famous pranks did involve the paranormal. “The Witch Trial at Mount Holly” details a fake witch trial at Mount Holly, which captured the attention of the Philadelphia public and was eventually reprinted in the British Gentleman’s Gazette. According to the Museum of Hoaxes, “The piece is noteworthy for revealing that by 1730 it had become acceptable for the educated class in America to ridicule beliefs such as witchcraft, even though the majority of the population still clung to those beliefs.” It should be noted, however, that it was also the educated upper class that sent the Salem “witches” to the gallows.
In 1835, news of life discovered on the moon swept through New York City on the front page of the New York Sun. The article detailed a discovery by Sir John Herschel of a race of beings that he had observed living on the moon; this would become one of the more fantastic hoaxes to sweep across the country.
It described a lunar topography that included vast forests, inland seas, and lilac-hued quartz pyramids. Readers learned that herds of bison wandered across the plains of the moon that blue unicorns perched on its hilltops, and that spherical, amphibious creatures rolled across its beaches. The highpoint of the narrative came when it revealed that Herschel had found evidence of intelligent life on the moon; he had discovered both a primitive tribe of hut-dwelling, fire-wielding biped beavers, and a race of winged humans living in pastoral harmony around a mysterious, golden-roofed temple.6
Sound ridiculous? Yale believed it. “Yale College was alive with staunch supporters. The literati—students and professors, doctors in divinity and law—and all the rest of the reading community, looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith.”7 Eventually the hoax was revealed, but not before the New York Sun sold many, many papers.
As the mediums through which people experienced the world changed, so did the methods of hoaxing. As print and newspapers began to contain more and more photographs, those photographs were almost instantly used to create images of ghosts. The public, new to the technology and not fully understanding how it operated and how it could be manipulated, initially met many of these ghost photographs with belief and fear. “An American jewelry engraver and amateur photographer named William Mumler is regularly credited as the first person to produce a photograph of a spirit—that of his young female cousin, who had died twelve years before. He published the photograph in 1862 and the media sensation it provoked inspired him to give up engraving and set himself up as a Spirit Photographic Medium.”8 He was eventually charged with fraud. His defense? That spirits of the dead really did appear to the living, and therefore he had no reason to fake his photographs. He was acquitted.
One of the biggest stirs in paranormal photography occurred in England in 1916 in the case of the Cottingly Fairies. Two young girls photographed a group of fairies dancing in the forest. The photographs eventually became famous and even prompted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes books, to publish a book entitled The Coming of Fairies in 1922. The girls’ poor father supposedly never knew of the hoax and believed that his young girls had actually photographed real, live fairies—a belief he died with. While the girls never fully admitted to the hoax, they declined to answer when they were asked in an interview in 1971 if they could swear on the Bible that the photographs were real. One of the women, Elsie, laughed and ended the interview. The photos, by today’s standards, wouldn’t have warranted a second glance, but people were new to the technology and, for the most part, couldn’t understand or fathom that these images could have been faked.
Photographs and print gradually gave way to radio and television. Probably everyone has heard of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast done by Orson Welles; however, this cannot be classified as a hoax as there were several announcements made regarding the program that clearly indicated it was fiction. Nevertheless, it caused one of the biggest public panics in U.S. history. The advent of television and its popularity led to an eerily similar incident in Great Britain, the 1992 faux-documentary entitled Ghostwatch.9 Presented as actual video footage of a real haunted house, Ghostwatch investigators filmed a small family being terrorized by the ghost of a former inhabitant. The video footage showed young girls running from their rooms as furniture was tossed about, and a BBC presenter, Michael Parkinson, being possessed by a spirit called “Pipes.” There were mediums channeling the voices of spirits and further incidents of possessions of the family living in the home. Interviews with neighbors revealed a terrifying history of the house. A former resident had claimed to be possessed by the spirit of a woman and consequently hung himself. His twelve cats, however, were left hungry and eventually fed on the body before anyone discovered it.
As the investigators probed the house, they were confronted with voices, objects moving, possessions, the sound of howling cats, and great gusts of wind. The investigators, to their horror, concluded that by engaging in a national live audience they had actually conducted a séance on a massive scale and the ghosts would now be unleashed upon England. According to the Museum of Hoaxes, “The program elicited a huge, national reaction. Many phoned the police and warned them that the forces of darkness had been unleashed upon the nation. Some women reportedly were so scared that they went into labor early, and rumors circulated later that a few teenagers had committed suicide. However, there was nothing real about the show. It had been entirely staged.” When it was later revealed that the program was a fake, there was much public and media outcry. The result was that the BBC put a decade-long ban on the program being repeated; the ban was eventually lifted early. Sadly, there was at least one suicide blamed on the program, for which the BBC was held accountable.
One of the most successful and innocently intentioned hoaxes in history was that of crop circles. Two artists, Doug Bower and David Chorley, met regularly at a pub for some pints and to talk about art. It was there they hatched an idea to make people believe that UFOs were landing in cornfields. Bower had previously spent time in New Zealand and had read an article about circles appearing in reeds and grass in Queensland.
And one day when we were walking out on Cheesefoot Head [two miles east of] Winchester, one summer evening, in the midst of the cornfields, we sat down there, and, trying to get a bit of inspiration for paintings, and I suddenly remembered this article that I read while in Australia. And I told him about it and I said we could have quite a bit of fun, if we could devise some kind of way to make a circular mark in the cornfields here, and sort of arouse a bit of inter
est. People would think that a UFO had landed in the night, when they discovered it the next morning.10
Undoubtedly, this is how many hoaxes originate, over a couple of beers and some fun ideas. However, sometimes they become bigger than could ever have been conceived. At first, no one really noticed the circles, but when the news did break, it became a media sensation almost overnight. When a weatherman stated that a certain weather or wind anomaly could have caused the circles, the boys changed it up and began putting elaborate designs in the crops. Their work, unrecognized as it was, inspired pranksters in other countries, some of whom took the crop circles to entirely new levels. Cult-like groups were traveling to the circles to immerse themselves in the “energy” left behind by the space visitors, and investigators proclaimed that there was no way these designs could be man-made. Chorley and Bower’s admission years later reddened the faces of thousands who had believed.
One of the interesting aspects of hoaxing is that often the belief continues even after the fraud has been exposed. People who begin to wrap their entire belief system around something like crop circles will psychologically resist any breakdown of that psycho-structure. Thus, there are still pockets of people who believe that crop circles are the work of alien forces. This is a phenomenon that has been studied and documented in cults; when the leader of the cult is exposed, either through police intervention or, more commonly, when the prophesies fail to be met, the belief structure of the cult is shaken. This results in some people leaving the cult but also in some members entrenching themselves deeper in the belief system. In his book, Deadly Cults: Crimes of True Believers, Robert L. Snow writes,
Although failed prophesies by cult leaders can cause some members to leave, many don’t because of a psychological phenomenon called, cognitive dissonance. This phenomenon makes some cult members become even more dedicated to the cult after a prophecy fails … individuals have a psychological need to maintain order and balance in their lives, in these instances, the only way they can do that is by rationalizing why the predicted event didn’t occur, but to do it within the framework of the cult belief.11
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