Scamming Sherlock

Before Columbo, before Inspector Clouseau, before Monk—there was Sherlock Holmes. Nobody could pull the wool over Sherlock’s eyes! He spotted every discrepancy, every minor slip-up made by men who were bent on deceiving others. And it would seem logical to assume that the creator of this fictional master sleuth would himself be impervious to being humbugged by even the most clever criminals and con artists.

Perhaps that was true of Arthur Conan Doyle. Perhaps he would have been able to solve real crimes in the way his alter-ego Sherlock solved them. Perhaps the master-minds of the world would have been nothing compared to his powers of logic and common sense and careful observation.

But how about challenging his powers with … the silly shenanigans of a couple of  schoolgirls ages 9 and 16?

As it turns out, Arthur was no match for these young women. And the aftermath left the great Conan Doyle’s reputation for wisdom sorely tarnished.

Their names were Elsie Wright, who was about sixteen years old, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, who was nine years old when this saga began. In the summer of 1917 Frances was visiting at Elsie’s home in the small village of Cottingley in England. As the stories about the incident go, Frances regularly got in trouble for stumbling into a nearby little brook while playing on its banks, and getting her shoes and clothing wet. When quizzed by her mother why she kept going there, she announced that it was because she enjoyed watching fairies frolicking there. As you might expect, the adults in her family mocked her for these claims.

One day Elsie and Frances decided to conspire to trick these old fogies who doubted their youthful fantasies. Frances had an illustrated book titled Princess Mary’s Gift Book that included an artist’s fanciful vision of fairies. Elsie had been taking art lessons for three years and was quite accomplished at imitating the artwork of others. She used the book’s fairies as templates and drew several fairies of her own, and the girls cut them out with her mother’s fine tailor shears. Elsie borrowed her father’s large camera, the kind that took pictures on glass plates, and she and Frances went off to the brook. Pushing hat pins over a foot long into the paper cutouts, they affixed them into a mound of dirt, and posed Frances behind them. And thus was created the first photo of what were to become famous as the Cottingley Fairies.

Elsie’s father helped her develop the glass plates, but when he saw the “fairies” in the photograph, he was unimpressed and took them for what they were … a visual trick the girls had somehow managed.

For a later photo-shoot, Elsie decided she wanted to pose with a fanciful woodland creature too, and chose a gnome.

The girls had a few prints made of their photos, and passed them out to friends and family.

Elsie and Frances’s little project would have gone unnoticed by the world, and would have soon drifted from their own memory but for one coincidence. Elsie’s mother Polly had been recently swept up into the enthusiasm of that period in time for occult and supernatural topics … including belief in the reality of fairies and gnomes and such creatures

Two years after the girls created their early version of “photo-shopped” photos, Polly attended a Theosophical Society meeting where this very topic was earnestly discussed. And after the meeting, she shared that her daughter and a cousin had actually taken photographs that appeared to show genuine fairies.

Some in the Theosophical Society were impressed and encouraged when they saw prints of the photos, and by early 1920 those photos made their way to the attention of one of the leading Theosophists in England, Edward Gardner. That summer, while working on an article for the Strand Magazine on the topic of fairies, Arthur Conan Doyle heard about the fairy prints, and obtained copies from Gardner. Later that summer, at Doyle’s request, Gardner visited the Wright family to investigate the claims. He left more cameras and photographic plates with the girls so that they could attempt to get more Candid Camera photos of the fairies.

The girls eventually provided their admirers with three more photos. In one, a standing fairy appears to be offering Elsie a flower. In another, a flying fairy appears to hover like a hummingbird in front of Frances. And in a third, much less clear picture, a group of fairies, with neither of the girls present, appear to be sunning themselves in the grass.

 http://www.philipcoppens.com/cottingley.html

[Elsie’s] father returned the plates to London, wrapped in cotton wool. Arthur Wright was greatly puzzled. He understood the photographs were faked, irrespective of him and his wife not finding incriminating evidence that showed their daughter had done it. Still, he could not understand that other grown men had been fooled. Furthermore, his daughter was now the centre of a nationwide, if not international, sensation. As Conan Doyle had used pseudonyms, the children were fairly safe from public scrutiny, but Arthur Wright began to have a lower estimation of Conan Doyle. He found it hard to believe that such an intelligent man could be bamboozled “by our Elsie, and her at the bottom of the class!”

Doyle eventually used the first two photos for his Strand article, and included information about the whole incident and more photos in his 1921 book, The Coming of the Fairies. Yes, in spite of how ridiculously fake the Cottingley photos look to most modern viewers, Conan Doyle became convinced they were legitimate pictures of real fairies, and widely promoted the claims made for them. When someone pointed out what appeared to the average person to be the obvious top of a hatpin sticking out of the stomach of the gnome in the picture with Elsie, Arthur was not dissuaded—he insisted it was a belly button and that it offered proof of how fairies reproduced!

The famous author had long been fascinated by claims of the paranormal, including alleged contact with the dead. Some have said that this was because he had lost so many close family members and, not being a religious man in the normal sense—with a biblical hope in the resurrection—it left him very melancholic. Whatever the reason, he seems to have been particularly susceptible to outrageous claims. Twenty years before the Cottingley situation, Doyle had been obsessed with the activities of “Spritualists” who conducted séances, in which unusual sounds and movements were attributed to communication from the Other World. The first well-known characters in this movement were the Fox Sisters from New York, who became famous in 1848 for the unusual “knockings” in their meetings, attributed to spirits of the dead. The whole organized Spiritualist movement grew directly from their activities, and their fame spread around the world. The movement was rocked twenty years later when one of the sisters confessed that she had been part of a total fraud perpetrated on the gullible. The knockings had been made by various natural tricks, including exceptionally loud “popping” of the joints of the sister’s toes! Yet even when she clearly demonstrated her skill at this type of trick for the public, as part of her revelations of the secrets of the Spiritualists, many refused to accept her confession.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/doyle.htm

Margaret wrote a signed story that appeared in The New York World, Oct. 21, 1888. She said:

“Spiritualism is a fraud and a deception. It is a branch of legerdemain [an illusion designed to fool the naïve], but it has to be closely studied to gain perfection.”

One of those who would not accept Margaret’s confession was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the fictional Sherlock Holmes and a convinced believer in spiritualism. He responded:

“Nothing that she could say in that regard would in the least change my opinion, nor would it that of any one else who had become profoundly convinced that there is an occult influence connecting us with an invisible world.”

The magician Harry Houdini, a showman continually alert to opportunities for self-promotion, publicly exposed mediumistic trickery in his stage shows and wrote pamphlets opposing fraudulent mediums. In spite of this, some spiritualists claimed that Houdini had genuine spiritualistic powers, refusing to accept Houdini’s own statements that only deception was involved in his performances.

Arthur Conan Doyle devoted a whole chapter of his book The Edge of the Unknown to a detailed argument that Houdini had genuine psychic power, but wouldn’t admit it. Curiously, Doyle and Houdini remained friends for a long while, in spite of public clashes over spiritualism. Perhaps they shared an appreciation of the value of public self-promotion. Eventually Houdini became outraged as a result of a seance in which Mrs. Doyle claimed to have communicated with Houdini’s mother, and the details she reported were obviously wrong.

Doyle was a credulous dupe for various kinds of nonsense. He not only believed in spiritualism and all of the phenomena of the seance room, but he also believed in fairies.

Yes, Doyle was duped into believing in the Cottingley Fairies just as he’d been duped by the Fox Sisters. In the matter of the fairies, the creator of the Great Sleuth should have paid attention to the clues that came his way… the Princess Mary book from which the girls copied the bodies of the earliest fairies actually contained one of Conan Doyle’s own stories!

A curious fact is that in this book, a compilation of short stories and poems for children by various authors, there’s a story, “Bimbashi Joyce” by Arthur Conan Doyle! Surely he received a copy from the publisher. If Doyle had noticed this picture, and if he had the sort of perceptiveness he attributed to Sherlock Holmes, he might have concluded that the Cottingley photographs were fakes. But, maybe not. Believers are good at seeing what they believe, and not seeing things that challenge their beliefs. http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/doyle.htm

But Conan Doyle missed the connection, and it wasn’t noticed by anyone else until 1977, when a scholar doing research on children’s book illustrations discovered a copy of the 1915 book and recognized the obvious similarity to the Cottingley Fairies.

By that time, although Doyle himself had gone to his grave evidently convinced of the validity of the pictures, and many die-hard Theosophists and the like clung to the pictures with enthusiasm, they were widely viewed as a hoax by most educated folks. Still, the controversy didn’t totally die out, and it wasn’t until Elsie and Florence themselves, by then old ladies, finally granted an interview in the early 1980s in which they confessed to the ruse that the speculation was laid to rest. Elsie even carefully demonstrated how they pulled it off. A recording of this interview can be seen at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx8yD_cymKA

However, Florence insisted that, although the photos themselves were a hoax, she had literally seen real fairies near the brook, and, in fact, the final picture was “real.” Elsie, however, was adamant that the whole thing was a hoax, including the final picture, and it’s not clear why or how the discrepancy in their individual stories developed. To an objective observer, the figures in the final picture look just as flat and phony as the others.

The reality was that the girls never intended to “hoax the world” with their photos. They were merely pulling a prank on their own families. But they soon found themselves swept along by irrational mania of adults around them, including such famous names as Arthur Conan Doyle. And eventually it became emotionally impossible for them to extricate themselves from trying to live up to the expectations of those adults. As psychic investigator and debunker James Randi put it in an article on his website about the Cottingley mania:

These two little girls perpetrated their innocent hoax, it was taken up by prominent persons who should have known better, and made into a cause célèbre. The children created a monster that eventually devoured them, a monster over which they soon found they had no control. The adults in their lives accepted their claim, promoted it, invested in it, and could not be told that it was a lie.  http://www.randi.org/library/cottingley/

Randi described two other major figures who were taken in by the story:

…However, some public figures were sympathetic–sometimes embarrassingly so. Margaret McMillan, the educational and social reformer (who, among other reforms, brought the benefits of public baths to the slum children of Bradford), waxed fulsome about the Cottingley incidents: `How wonderful that to these dear children such a wonderful gift has been vouchsafed.’

Another eminent personality of the day, the novelist Henry de Vere Stacpoole, decided to take the fairy photographs–and the girls–at face value. He accepted intuitively that both girls and pictures were genuine. In a letter to Gardner he said:

“Look at Alice’s face. Look at Iris’s face. There is an extraordinary thing called TRUTH which has 10 million faces and forms–it is God’s currency and the cleverest coiner or forger can’t imitate it…”

(The aliases ‘Alice’ and ‘Iris’ first used by Conan Doyle to protect the anonymity of the girls were deliberately preserved by Stacpoole.)

A review of the interview of the two elderly ladies had these final comments to offer about the Fairy humbug (humbug: something designed to deceive and mislead):

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/cooper.htm

…The attitude of Elsie and Frances to the whole question of the fairy photographs is a typical Yorkshire one–to tell a tall story with a deadpan delivery and let those who will believe it do so. Indeed, Elsie has often said as much: `I would rather we were thought of as solemn faced comediennes.’

Frances, on the other hand, has always marveled at the fact that anyone could believe them to be genuine. The flying fairy in the third photograph was pinned to the branch behind it; it was drawn freehand by Elsie, and seems to Frances to be out of proportion. The fairy offering flowers to Elsie in the fourth photograph was attached to a branch in a similar way, and sports a fashionable hairstyle that has attracted much comment.

…The second set of photographs was hailed with joy by Gardner. And, trapped by their first trick, Elsie and Frances had no choice but to remain silent; the consequences that would have resulted from any disclosures must have seemed terrifying to them.

It would be comforting if we 21st century hard-nosed realists could rest assured that it was just the gullibility of a much earlier, less-enlightened age that led so many, including a brilliant author of detective novels, to be taken in by such an obvious humbug as the Cottingley Fairies. And to think that such a thing would never happen today.

Unfortunately, I receive CCMails almost every day with hoaxes just as ludicrous or obvious … or easily disproven … passed along by highly educated, intelligent people. Sometimes the photo alterations are a bit more sophisticated… but not by a whole lot! And usually the stories that go with the pictures are a not quite so outrageous as insisting in the existence of fairies. But that tends to just increase the gullibility of readers!

Humbuggery is alive and well and thriving in CyberSpace. Sometimes, as in the Cottingley Fairies incident, the results are mostly benign. But the very fact that intelligent and educated people can be so easily taken in by benign humbugs renders many of them even more susceptible to what can end up yielding much more toxic results. If you are convinced that you can’t  be humbugged, I would suggest you take the advice of the Bible … let he (or she) who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall… for a humbug.

This story is featured on my Wild World of Humbugs website.

Visit the site for more examples of humbuggery.

That No Should Be!

A few years back, a mother of pre-school children on one of my Internet forums had commented:

What I had on my mind this morning is perhaps the problem [introducing young children to the truths of the God] would be solved if we just read to them right from the Bible? [And she specifically mentioned the King James version.] Are we sheltering our children too much by not letting them see how bad human nature really is? At least with the Bible, they can see the consequences of sin and what to do when one does sin. Not so with the stories in pop culture.

Below is the essence of my reply to her, along with some further thoughts I’ve had on the topic recently:

In this case we might want to ask “What would Joseph do?”

As in the Daddy of Jesus.

Or any other Daddy in Bible Times… or throughout most of history. We need to remember that the luxury of every family having every jot and tittle of scripture available in a book to read at our convenience in our own homes is only a recent phenomenon.

I think you’d find that most parents in Bible Times would have “retold stories” from the Bible to their young children from their own minds. I think this is still the most effective method. For those parents who aren’t very creative these days, we have the simplified Bible story books that perform the same job. You may want to avoid those that are extemporaneous re-tellings that may even include subtle doctrinal bias from the author. But there are many that just take their wording word-for-word from a modern translation such as the NIV, but condense it down to just the relevant sentences for a short two-page spread story.

You could just read to them from the King James Bible, from cover to cover. But this may not be really helpful to young children in terms of their own level of comprehension and mental and emotional development. Yes, we appreciate fine literature and want our offspring to learn to love it … but do we really expect them to “get it” when listening to Elizabethan poetry or the works of Shakespeare (which were from the same era as the KJV) at age 5?  I’m not even saying that we can’t read them Elizabethan poetry actually, if the purpose is just to “expose” them to the flow of the language and such. But to think that a five year old is going to get much out of it cognitively I believe is expecting quite a bit from someone who may not even “know their right hand from their left.” Even Paul talks about “milk” and “meat” regarding spiritual understanding for adults. How much more might that apply to children?

I wouldn’t downplay for young children the value of emphasizing the very basic stories included in most Bible Story books, including the parables of Jesus and simple versions of the story of His life. There are life lessons and important understanding about the nature of God and the nature of His relationship to Man that can be drawn from all of the simplest excerpts of the Bible record. The real issue isn’t even exactly what you read or what you weave as a story teller. It would, in my mind, be how you “elaborate” on what you have read or told, and allow them to help you draw conclusions about the events and attitudes and such in the stories you cover.

I would hope that at the youngest of ages we would shelter our children from the worst of human nature and experience in “pop culture” … but also in the Bible too. It is not necessary to prematurely expose them to the worst in order to begin teaching them the best. If they are steeped in what is the best … “The measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” … then as they are gradually exposed to the reality of evil in the world, and in the biblical record, they will recognize it themselves, for it won’t match what they have learned things “should be like.”

Strangely enough, this is how bank tellers are trained to spot counterfeit money. They are not given counterfeits over and over in their training and encouraged to figure out what made them false. They are given legitimate bills and encouraged to become intimately familiar with every aspect of those. Then when they are handed a counterfeit, they won’t even have to pinpoint exactly all the false aspects of it… they may well just intuitively sense “something isn’t right.” And beyond that, they will know what to look for that makes real money …real. If those characteristics are missing, they will confirm that what they are looking at the false.

I’d heard this claim about how folks are trained to identify counterfeits many years ago. But I decided today to do a little digging on the Net to make sure this wasn’t just an Urban Legend. I was pleased to find a blogger who had done his homework on this very topic, and interviewed a currency expert at the Bank of Canada. She confirmed to him that the basic concept is indeed part of the training they give their employees. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 of his findings, and the lessons he took away from the experience, on his blog.

I was discussing this with my husband this morning, and he reminded me how much it sounds like Jesus’ comment that His sheep know His voice, and they don’t know the voice of strangers, and will not follow them. Indeed, sheep don’t learn to identify who ISN’T their shepherd, by continual exposure to others. They just spend so much time with the one person who IS their shepherd, that they recognize every nuance of his voice and immediately realize when some voice is missing those nuances.

I have a couple of other simple applications of this principle of knowing what “should be” that applied to my own young daughter, Mona.  When Mona (now 40) was 2, we took her to see the Disney movie Fantasia. When it got to the section that showed various mythological creatures including centaurs (half man, half horse) she burst out giggling and expounded for all to hear, “That man has horse’s feets. That no should be!”

I didn’t have to point out to her that this was fiction. She knew, from her limited exposure to pictures of horses and being around men that men just DIDN’T ever have “horse’s feets.”

Another example: From early on, we always taught her never to litter—not even throw a tiny gum wrapper on the ground. It was just “the way things were.” As she became old enough to understand some of the reason why, we would talk about such scenarios as what would happen if every person in her city just tossed their gum wrappers on the ground all the time. Eventually we’d be knee-deep in gum wrappers! And thus as she grew older and watched teenagers walk by our house from school and carelessly toss McDonald’s cups and burger wrappers on the lawn, she was aghast. How COULD they act so irresponsibly?? We didn’t have to point any of this out to her. She spotted it all on her own.

In other words, she knew what “the real thing” looked like, and when confronted with a distortion, she recognized immediately “that no should be.” I believe young children are capable of the same thing regarding more abstract notions of moral behavior.

A very young child who has never even seen someone in their own corner of the real world strike another person in vicious anger doesn’t necessarily need yet to see the full picture of the carnage of war and crime in the Bible, or on the nightly news. If they are nurtured in an environment where kindness is the cornerstone, they will internalize that value.

In the early years of our country, small children were weaned on books that described the imagined tortures of hell. This was thought to be necessary to “scare them out of hell.” And thus a six year old might hear or read stories in which children or teens were naughty, died at a young (but “accountable”) age, and went to hell. And she would perhaps read vivid descriptions about a bonnet bursting into flames and searing a head, with the skin popping and crackling but never being consumed, and small bare feet dancing forever on burning coals. This sounds very gross to us, but I’m not sure it is any more gross than forcing a young child of that age to focus on the Bible story of the concubine of the fellow being gang-raped, dying, and then being cut into pieces to be mailed around to the various tribes. Thus I really do think that it is appropriate to choose which Bible stories will be most helpful in leading children to understand the love of God, and the basic principles of obedience to Him and love toward Him and to fellow man.

There’s plenty of time later for the “Soap Opera” parts of the Bible!

If we immerse our young children’s thoughts in “whatsoever is good, pure, of good report,” both in the world and in the Bible, when they finally encounter a situation that is far from those qualities, they will immediately realize, “That no should be!”

In fact, maybe we adults ought to consider whether it might be good if we would become more like little children ourselves, and focus more in our thoughts on all those things that should be … rather than on what “no should be.”

Never Forget

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The everlasting God, the Lord,
The Creator of the ends of the earth,
Neither faints nor is weary.
His understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the weak,
And to those who have no might He increases strength.
Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
And the young men shall utterly fall,
But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint.

(Isaiah 40:28-31 New King James)

Back in 1989, the Lord “quickened to me” (as the Charismatics put it ) the scripture in Isaiah 40:28-31, especially the part in verse 31 that says in the King James version … “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings as eagles.” In other words, I began to view the passage as specifically a word of encouragement from Him to me to meet a special need I had at that very moment, in addition to its obvious universal application to anyone who “waits on” (a phrase that implies “puts their expectant hope in”) the Lord.

At the time, I was totally drained of emotional and spiritual strength. In early 1988, after 20 years of involvement with a particular religious movement, my husband, George, and I had concluded that it had so many problematic elements that we could no longer be a part of it. George was a church pastor at the time, and we had poured the last ten years of our lives into building up a local congregation of our denomination. All of our friends were “in the church,” much of our energies, talents, emotions, and resources had been poured into the effort. When my husband announced he could no longer be supportive of the denominational leadership, and resigned his post as pastor, all but a handful of our former friends cut us off in disgust from any fellowship.

We ended up meeting in our living room weekly with a tiny group who shared our concerns. But as the months went by, even most of those people lost interest in getting together, and drifted away. I was not only profoundly lonely, but felt lost without any obvious outlet for my energy, talents, and spiritual gifts. I was physically, emotionally, and spiritually drained of all strength.

This went on for many months. And then one day I “discovered” that Isaiah passage. It’s not that I’d never read it before. I’d worked my way through several translations of the Bible verse by verse over the years, and had read past that passage numerous times. But it had never “jumped off the page” at me as it did this time.

And at that point, something odd started happening. As the weeks and months (and eventually, years) went by, the Lord used that passage numerous times to give me hope. In some of the darkest times, I would be about to go under from doubt and discouragement, and suddenly, out of nowhere I would be given “a sign.”

What do I mean? I mean that the unexpected sight or mention of eagles at just the right moment became a frequent symbolic reminder to me of that passage, and a fresh reminder of God’s love—and promise of hope for the future—for me.

For instance, one day in 1989, I was wandering through the local giant “superstore,” head down, staring at the floor as I walked along, depressed to the nth degree about the seeming hopelessness of ever finding a spiritual home where I could be active in serving again. Suddenly I felt “prompted” to “Look up.” At that exact moment clear across the store… hundreds of feet away… one of the sets of outside automatic doors opened up. And passing by the store out on the street was a semi-truck with a huge painting of a giant eagle on its trailer, wings full-spread, just at that moment framed in the doorway in full sight. It made me grin from ear to ear, and you might say “revived” me.

That same type of unexpected “eagle reminder” happened over and over for me.

Another time, I was visiting a large mega-church to hear a popular television preacher who had been invited as a guest speaker. This was during another period of doubt and discouragement, and I was praying quietly as I waited for the sermon to start, asking God to give me a sign that He was actively concerned about my plight. The preacher stepped up to the lectern and mentioned that he had originally planned to speak on a certain topic. But in the plane on the way there earlier that day, he felt this strange urging from God that he should completely change the subject of the sermon, so he did. And he launched into a sermon on … all the “eagle” passages in the Bible, starting with Isaiah 40:31.

On another occasion, I was presented an opportunity to work with a pastor of a little independent church group … but one that had a doctrinal base exceptionally different from my background. When I first was deciding if I should become involved I found myself wanting a “sign.”

I was in the pastor’s office one day in 1990. I had been led by the Lord to be there, I was quite sure, but after all, these folks didn’t understand all the things in the Bible just the way I did. And so I thought perhaps I was just inventing an excuse to find fellowship somewhere regardless of doctrine. I really felt that the Lord was prompting me to help this man, so I had approached him and offered my volunteer services as a “Jill of all Trades”—secretarial work, writer, teacher, whatever he had need for.

But just to be sure, I was silently praying fervently in my head for a sign on our first day of working together.  While talking to the pastor, I asked how I might help him. He admitted that a personal tendency to A.D.D. left organization of his personal space NOT one of his strong suits. So he suggested that as a first project, I could go through his totally disorganized shelves of religious literature in his office and organize the materials. For starters, he pointed to a shelf behind me that was crammed with hundreds of magazines. I turned to look at the shelf, with the prayer for a sign still going on in my head. AT RANDOM I leaned over and pulled out one of the magazines. On the cover was… an eagle, full wingspread, and the caption said, “They that wait upon the Lord… “ etc. I gulped.

But like Gideon and the fleece in the Book of Judges, I prayed silently again for further confirmation that same day. After I finished the shelving project, the pastor said that there was a big collection of used books in a back storeroom that had been donated by members. He suggested I could sort through them and organize a little “church library.”

I headed for the storeroom and found a huge, cluttered pile of hundreds of books spilling out of boxes that were stacked willy-nilly in the middle of the floor. With the prayer for another sign still going on in my head, I pulled a paperback … AT RANDOM… out of one of the boxes. Tucked in the pages of the paperback book was a cardboard bookmark. And on the bookmark? A picture of an eagle… and the Isaiah 40:31 scripture again!

I decided to quit fighting it. 

I ended up working with that man for four years. He not only accepted my assistance in secretarial work, he eventually invited me to do much more. He gave me many opportunities to speak to the group he was responsible for, in Bible classes, public lectures, and even on occasion in sermons. Since he had no preconceived theological prejudice against a woman sharing what the Lord had given her, he encouraged me to actively speak about what I understood. And thus I was able to teach about many of the doctrinal areas that had originally caused me concern. I am still reaping fruit from my four years of speaking, teaching, and writing under that man’s encouragement … I have been able to re-use much of the material I developed there in articles for websites, in blog entries, and in seminars I have given around the country in the past decade and more. The “confirmation” I received through the incidents in his office has been confirmed many times over.

These kinds of “eagle incidents” happened so frequently to me for a quite a while that even my daughter began noticing them with surprise.

Later I wasn’t quite as “hungry” for encouragement from eagle sightings, as I eventually had my strength renewed, and the Lord opened the door for many new opportunities to use my talents, spiritual gifts, and enthusiasm.  But I never wanted to chance letting myself forget that important scripture. I began collecting and displaying eagles in my home. I’ve shared these eagle stories in seminars at times, and as a result, a number of friends over the years have presented me with eagle-themed gifts. The collection below is just above my computer desk. It includes a friend’s lovely hand-made cross-stitch picture on the wall, and another friend’s gift of a large ceramic eagle on the right. (The musical statue on the left plays “Born Free.”)

To this day, if you would come to visit me, you would see eagles everywhere. I have plaques, statues, refrigerator magnets, key chains, and more. I want to NEVER FORGET what the Lord has promised me (and anyone who will put their expectant hope in Him.) So wherever I turn now there are reminders.

In 1992, Mona presented me a gift of my very own eagle mascot, that I named Jonathan Livingston Eagle.

No, of course he isn’t real.    Although some people do a double-take when they see the picture, as the manufacturer did such a believable job with plush to create him.

In the past couple of years, I have found myself “needing” the reminder of the “eagle’s wings” again. I’m now 65, and I’ve been experiencing a number of health issues that have been draining both physically and emotionally. In particular, I found in 2010 that I had lost 90% of the optic nerves in both eyes to a silent, degenerative disease that I discovered had been insidiously working since birth. In the past year and a half, the specialist I am seeing hasn’t found any treatment that is working to slow the degeneration down. So without a miracle, at some point in the near future I could go blind. I’ll be going back to the specialist in two weeks, and the prospects of learning what I may be facing have prompted me to write this blog entry today—so that I can remind myself, while sharing with others, all the ways God has intervened in my life in the past. He has never let me down nor forsaken me yet, no matter the circumstances! So as I look at the eagles above my desk at this moment, their symbolism reminds me that He can renew my strength in any circumstance. Actually, I don’t look at this promise as having to do in particular with my physical strength, but with the spiritual and emotional strength to face with confidence and the joy of the Lord any challenge that comes.

I don’t mean to imply with my stories that my experiences are somehow unique among Christians! It is clear that in Bible times God used many ways to communicate with His people. Sometimes it was with unexpected circumstances that confirmed His presence in their lives; sometimes it was with verbal words they could hear; sometimes it was in dreams or visions; sometimes it was in a message conveyed by another human but obviously from God. I am convinced that He uses these same methods today. Whenever I share stories of God communicating with me in some way, or moving in miraculous ways in my life, it prompts others to share similar stories with me from their own lives. I believe that sharing these incidents is one way that we “build one another up,” and at the same time lift up praises to God for His work in our lives.

I’m convinced that God can and will communicate with all His children. His methods will vary widely, and I certainly don’t think everyone should expect to have their attention drawn to Isaiah 40:31! But if any sincere believer will “listen” with their heart, I know they will hear from Him in some way.

I have one last eagle story to share. In 2003, my daughter Mona, her husband Scott, and our grandchildren Jonathan and Katie (11 and 9 at the time) traveled with us to an 8-day convention in Florida in celebration of the biblical Feast of Tabernacles. But what we hadn’t told Jonathan and Katie was … after the convention we were going to take a side-trip to Orlando, to spend four days at Walt Disney World and one day at Universal Studios.

We all shared a condo and had a great time for the eight days. And on the eighth day, we told them that we really DID have plans for something special for Jonathan’s 11th birthday, which was the next week. They finally guessed what that plan was … and about jumped out of their skins with excitement.

The five days we spent in the Orlando area were awesome, with picture-perfect weather and lots of family fun. Katie was chosen out of the crowd to be on a closed-circuit TV show at the Nickelodeon Studios. Mona and Scott were chosen out of the crowd to be extras in a display of special effects for a water battle scene on the back lot tour of MGM. (They were on the deck of a cruiser being attacked by planes and got totally soaked by explosions in the water surrounding the boat. They did a good job of portraying terror and panic.) And Mona and Katie got to dance in the street with the Blues Brothers at Universal Studios.

My favorite part of all of the attractions is just the beautiful environment at Epcot Center … and even, on a cutesier level, at Magic Kingdom. I was pleased that Jonathan’s very first reaction to walking down the Main Street at Magic Kingdom wasn’t anything about the glittery attractions and all the cartoon characters wandering the streets. Instead, he said with awe, “This place is so PEACEFUL! I love it here.” As a life-long Walt Disney fan and budding filmmaker at the time (he is now 19 and majoring in film directing at Savannah College of Art and Design), his favorite part was the Walt Disney life story museum at MGM Studios. There he got to see lots of memorabilia, including miniature stage sets handcrafted by Walt himself. He took dozens of pictures, with plans to alter them with computer tech to insert himself directly into those little sets. And he came back with his brain exploding with ideas for his own animations.

But my favorite part was on the last day of our vacation, which was Jonathan’s birthday. I was sitting on a bench eating next to the lagoon at EPCOT and gazing across the water when right in front of my eyes appeared … an eagle in full flight! I almost fainted! It soared across the lagoon and landed in a tree right near me. It then took off again and circled the lagoon several times, landing again in the tree. George was able to get some footage of its flight. When we got ready to walk on down the pathway to the Canadian pavilion, it took off and soared in a path right over our heads and off into the distance. I’d never seen an eagle in the wild before, and never expected to, since I thought they mostly hung out in places like British Columbia and Alaska. Who would ever have expected to see one in the wild at Walt Disney World in central Florida?!

Jonathan (who’s always known about my love of eagles, and by age 11 understood their biblical significance to me) came alongside me at that point and said that he was convinced that God had sent the eagle for me to see, to help Jonathan thank me and his Grandpa George for making the wonderful trip possible. WAHHHHH!

The Open Door

A few years ago, my daughter and I went to visit the local historical museum in Allegan, Michigan. We’d lived in the small town for several years, but had never gotten around to checking out the museum. We were in for a pleasant surprise.

The museum is housed in a lovely Victorian-era home.

Many of the rooms are outfitted with donated furniture and accessories to look as they did at the turn of the last century. There’s a pretty parlor. 

There’s a dining room with elegant place settings on the table as if the family is about to sit down to dinner.

There are four bedrooms in the main part of the house. Here’s the cheerful, beautifully-appointed fourth one.

But there are many more than four bedrooms, actually. Here’s the fifth one.

For, you see, this home was the home of the local sheriff. And at the time, the laws in Michigan, and in most of the rest of the United States, required the sheriff to actually live in the jail itself so he could keep a close watch on the prisoners around the clock.

So the local folks in Allegan built a lovely home for the sheriff and his wife and children … and attached cell blocks on the back of it. From the angle in this picture you can see the cell blocks extending out the back of the home.

Here’s one of the men’s cell blocks.

And here is the one bathroom cell that all had to use.

Well, except for one special guest at a time. For you see, there was one special “room with a bath.” …

Some ungrateful residents of that room—the solitary confinement cell—didn’t seem to appreciate its convenience …

If allowed a cigarette, some seem to have used the ashes on the butt as a “writing implement” to adorn the ceiling of the cell with wistful notes about their incarceration.

As you can see, under the SAME roof were miserable quarters and beautiful quarters. People weren’t in the miserable section because they were captured and enslaved—like the ancient Israelites in the Bible, or ante-bellum slaves in the South in the US. They were there because of choices they made themselves. They put themselves in bondage!

My visit to that unusual setting put me in mind of a principle from the Bible.

Jesus once told some Pharisees that they were in bondage.

The Pharisees answered him, “Abraham is our Father and we have never been in bondage to any man.”

But Jesus told them they were in bondage, just not to other men. They were in bondage to their own sinful natures. And He declared that the Son could set anyone in that condition free.

Sometimes Christians who are still in bondage to some part of their nature say the same thing. They don’t think they can be in bondage because they are Christian. And actually, they aren’t in bondage … Jesus has opened the door to the cell.

But if they don’t walk out, they might just as well be in a cell with the door locked.   Because they really AREN’T free to follow Jesus wherever He leads them in daily life, whether a geographical place, or a “thing to do.”

I would suggest to you that if you can’t admit you are in bondage, you’ll never get free.

If you have come under the blood of Jesus Christ—“our Passover Lamb”—you are free in Him from the guilt of your sins. But you could still be in bondage if there is anything that is hindering you from going on to your “Promised Land” and serving God with all your mind, body, and spirit. Thinking it through, I had to come to admit I wasn’t totally free in all areas of my life—because of choices I was making.

What kinds of things keep Christians in bondage?

Some people are in bondage to time by being workaholics. They are so worried about making more and more money that they shortchange many other parts of their lives, including relationships with family, and having time to do things to further the Kingdom of God.

But maybe that isn’t your problem with time ….

Some people are in bondage to wasting time, and procrastinating doing the things they know they should.

Other people are in bondage to things in their Mind:  The Bible says, “Let THIS mind be in you, that was in Christ Jesus.”  The way that mind is formed in you is in part by what you allow into your mind, or enthusiastically put into it.

The “brain food” you regularly stuff in your mind can either be the equivalent of nourishing, whole foods, or … junk food.

Putting wrong stuff in will assure that what your mind produces is inferior. As the old “GIGO” computer acronym puts it—“Garbage In, Garbage Out.” Paul reminded Christians that “whatsoever things are good, pure, of good report” etc., are the things we should think about.

Other people have put themselves into bondage by making consistently poor choices throughout life about their bodies—lack of exercise, poor nutrition. Such choices can leave a person unable to fully accomplish what they know God has set for them to do. Obviously we can all have serious illnesses or injury or chronic conditions beyond our control that limit us. God will help us to accomplish many things in spite of those. BUT … what a shame if we have imposed limits on ourselves through our own choices. I know that I have personally had a struggle with this issue throughout my life, and at 65 regret that I haven’t been consistent in rejecting that particular brand of bondage.

Others of us have self-imposed bondage because we’ve allowed our “things” to be in charge of our life.

I was for many years in bondage to that kind of issue myself. With the help of the author of that book above, and God blessing my efforts, I have found freedom in that area of my life in the past twenty years or so. I can’t stress enough what a strong hold this particular bondage has on many Christians! I wish freedom for them all.

And many of us are still in bondage to emotions that we’ve not dealt with … here’s one example :

Do you find yourself regularly being grumpy at, or even blowing up in anger at people just because they have inconvenienced you?

Or maybe your emotional struggle is with anxiety.

Do you find yourself constantly worrying about things you have no power to change? Is it holding you in bondage much of the time?

Perhaps you’ve faced these problems in your life, and have just given up on them because you seem helpless to force yourself to change. Maybe you think you’re just “too old” to change.  But our God is a God of New Beginnings all the time. As the old saying goes, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” You really can do as Paul said and “forget those things that are behind.” But then what?

The reality is that the most effective change and growth comes NOT from fighting that “old man” that you used to be. It comes from becoming like a little child again, REALLY “starting fresh”—and looking to Jesus as your elder brother that you admire and want to be like. 

It’s not so much that you need to look at yourself and keep trying to decide what you need to “stop doing.” It’s that you need to look at Him and see what you need to START doing. You need to focus on, as the old saying goes, “What would Jesus Do?” Because that is what we want to do in every part of our lives.

You need to look at what a “Free” person does in every aspect of life. Because Jesus said pointblank that you ARE set free in Him. If you aren’t acting like it, that isn’t His fault. You have built your own jail, and put yourself in bondage in it.

We are all called to look to Jesus, not to look back at the way we did things when we were that “old man” that we were before conversion. Change and growth doesn’t come by fighting that Old Man’s habits. That leads to defeat. We are not CALLED to fight him and his habits. We are called to leave him in the dust of Egypt and move on out to the Promised Land.

Let me give you just a few examples of what I mean. Have you been in bondage to poor health choices?

Don’t fight your old eating or exercise habits. Walk away from them and move on to the freedom to imitate those who have the habits you want to have.

Or if you struggle with unhealthy emotions, don’t fight your worry and anxiety. Walk away from them and move on to the freedom of focusing on the promises of God

Don’t fight feeling grumpy at other people for doing things that inconvenience you. Walk away from that angry Old Man and focus on moving on to the freedom to look at others as Jesus does, as children of God.

Don’t fight your clutter …  walk away from the Old Man who needed to hang on to things, and move on to the freedom to begin making the choices of a person who is not in bondage to possessions.

To be a free person, you must act like a free person. And you do that by looking to Jesus, who is the source of all freedom.

Through His own blood, Jesus, the Son, HAS set you free from the bondage of sin and death. You ARE free indeed. So act like it.

It’s the lie of the Devil that the jail doors are locked!

You can walk right out and follow Jesus on down the road.

If  you are still a prisoner of a quick temper, or regular worrying over nothing, or wasting time,  or not prioritizing your time for the truly important things, or thoughts that are regularly negative, or health problems that are caused by your own poor choices, you are denying the freedom we have in Christ.

If you find yourself trapped in a cell again of your own making  … Who has the Key?

YOU DO! That Key is to look to Him.

You have a choice. Jesus said He came to set people free. We can make choices that keep OURSELVES in bondage, unable to joyfully serve Him.

Or we can choose to live in the freedom He bought for us.

The Son has set us free. But we have to choose to live as free people in every part of our lives!  The door IS open. Come on out.

A Time for Laughter

This is an open invitation to my friends to take their best shot at sending me an email that will make me laugh! See, for the past nine days I’ve avoided reading, listening to, or watching anything possibly funny because it HURT to laugh.

On Friday, December 2, after an urgent visit to our nearby hospital’s ER, I was hustled in for emergency surgery to remove a seriously infected gallbladder. The surgery went smoothly.

Things have greatly improved since the days in decades gone by when they sliced a HUGE opening in your belly to get at the gallbladder, and recovery from the patch-up job took weeks. Older readers may remember the scandalous photo of President Lyndon Johnson back in the 60’s showing off his bare belly with its fearsome-looking gallbladder surgery scar. Nowadays, surgeons can usually do “laparoscopic” surgery, which requires four very small incisions. One is made through your belly button to insert a teensy camera. Two smaller ones are made off to the right side to allow surgical instruments to be inserted to do the surgery. And after they have clipped all the tissue holding the gallbladder in place, it is pulled out through another fairly small hole just below your breastbone.

But I didn’t realize until after the strong painkillers wore off that the small hole in my tummy through which the doc extracted the bad bladder was smack-dab in the middle of the abdominal muscle that contracts when you lower yourself to sit down, when you tense to raise yourself to a standing position … and when you laugh.

The first night I was home after the surgery, I made the mistake of thinking it would be pleasant to distract myself from my post-operative discomfort by watching a DVD with my husband. It was the introduction to a series from a ministry called “Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage.”  I should have taken the time to read the description of the session, titled “The Tale of Two Brains.” I checked just now… it literally says “laugh till you hurt.” Speaker Mark Gungor has the talents of both a pastor … and a stand-up comedian.  I’m not sure what listening would have been like if I’d been in “normal health.” But with stitches in my mid-section, it literally felt like a knife was being plunged into my belly when Mark got to some of his funniest routines! Needless to say, I decided at the end of that session to put off watching the rest of the series for a couple of weeks.

So for the next week and a half, I literally had to warn family and friends to avoid being goofy around me, or sending me “funny” emails, or doing anything else that might make me laugh. Yesterday was the first day I noticed that I could stand up, sit down, and laugh without pain. What a relief! (It’s actually been impossible to do much more than tone down my friends and family a tiny bit … humor is a way of life for most of them and for me.)

But actually, that’s not what I wanted to write about in this blog entry. It’s what I noticed after that belly-laugh-muscle healed up. It was only when I quit having to baby it every time I stood up or sat down … or fought off laughter … that I noticed something really odd. You see, for the past two years, I have had some significantly miserable “back pain” issues, especially when lying down to go to bed at night. I would usually feel OK sitting up at my desk, or standing, or walking. But when I’d lie down to try to go to sleep, the back pains would start almost immediately. Sometimes it was aching and sharp pains in the muscles next to my tail bone. I would have to shift and shift and shift my position in bed, elevate my legs with a pillow perhaps, turn from side to side, to find some position where the pain subsided.

Sometimes it was a nagging ache between my shoulder blades that seemed to radiate up to my shoulders and then down the upper part of each arm. I would try propping my arms “just so” on separate pillows to try to alleviate this.

Sometimes it was an odd sharp pain along the top “ridge” of my hip bones, that wasn’t related to muscle pain, just left that ridge feeling “painfully tender,” and would leave me again shifting and shifting position trying to find a position that alleviated it somewhat. Many nights I’d end up taking Tylenol or Ibuprofen to try to dull the pain, but often even those didn’t help.

I kept making excuses for all this, assuming it was creeping arthritis or something related, an unavoidable side-effect of aging.  Many mornings I’d wake up exhausted from so little sleep because of how long it took me to fall asleep … and fall back asleep, if I had to get up in the middle of the night for a bathroom visit.

And then I finally realized yesterday … every last one of those pains has been gone since the gallbladder surgery nine days ago! I can get immediately comfortable when I lie down, and there are no nagging pains later.

At first I thought maybe it was “all in my head,” as this seemed too odd to make any sense. And then I decided to Google “back pain” and “gallbladder.” Was I in for a surprise! Every last one of the symptoms described above is cited all over the Internet in medical articles about complications from infected gall bladders!

I have always vaguely realized that our bodies are made in such a way that sometimes pain or problems in one body part can “bounce around” and be manifested in another part of the body. But I related that in my mind to something more “logical,” such as tense neck muscles manifesting in a headache. I had no idea that there are some direct connections between the gallbladder and other widely-spread internal parts.

After reading up more on gallbladder symptoms, I also realized that I had ignored some very direct gallbladder attacks in the same past two years. I kept attributing my symptoms to either some sort of “stomach bug” or perhaps mild food poisoning. On two different occasions, several months apart, I had extremely bad stomach pains and nausea (but unable to vomit) all through the night. Because the symptoms lifted almost totally the next morning, I didn’t think to talk to a doctor about it.

And on another occasion, several months later, I had what I thought at the time was a heart attack. The pain had started between my shoulder blades, several hours later was a stifling pain in my chest and upper arms. The ER staff accepted it as a likely heart attack, since there was a small presence of some chemicals in my blood that can be a heart attack indicator. I was admitted to cardiac ICU and went through a heart catheter procedure the next day.

When I came out of the anesthetic, the doc said, “Your arteries are clean as a whistle! What are you doing here?” After discussing the circumstances that led up to my hospitalization, they decided at the time that I had perhaps had a “panic attack” from a severe emotional trauma, which can definitely mimic heart attack symptoms. But after talking to the gallbladder surgeon, I discovered that such emotional distress can ALSO trigger a gallbladder attack … and the symptoms of severe gallbladder attacks are also very commonly mistaken for heart attacks!

I was chatting about these new developments with my daughter Mona and husband George today. We all agreed that we can see some strong parallels between the way a toxic gallbladder can sneakily and negatively affect widely-scattered parts of your body… and the way a seemingly small toxic part of a person’s life choices can sneakily have a wide negative affect on many aspects of one’s life. And just like I kept “making excuses” for puzzling symptoms, and trying to ignore them, we can make excuses for things in our life that really, really should be faced and dealt with.

We thought through what aspects of our lives might have some problematic little issue that seemed fairly minor, but that might have its tentacles spread much wider. And we came up with all kinds of examples.

For instance, we have had issues with “hoarding” in the past, which we still struggle with at times. It seems like that would just lead to minor inconveniences such as having to rush around and “clean up” when company is coming. But the reality is that a hoarding tendency that gets out of hand can have all kinds of physical and emotional side effects.

There is the expense and inconvenience to store and/or move items that are, to put it kindly, often worthless. (When my mother in law died, she had been paying out of her meager Social Security income, for over twenty years, monthly charges for three large, garage-sized storage units. I cleaned those units out after her death. It was 99% total junk, crumbling and/or mouse-eaten, most of which she hadn’t looked through in thirty or forty years.)

There is the relational friction that hoarding can cause between a hoarder … and a mate who prefers simplicity and neatness. If taken too far, hoarding can make a home so crammed and cluttered that it is impossible to even entertain friends and family, further affecting relationships.

There is the stress that can be caused when really important items cannot be located … because they are lost in the hoarded piles. (After my mother in law’s death, while emptying her crammed apartment, I found a diamond necklace worth thousands of dollars—a treasured gift from her own mother—lying on a shelf under a pile of random clutter.)

There is the emotional embarrassment, and lowering of self-esteem if “outsiders” discover the problem.

And at bottom … there is whatever is CAUSING the tendency to hoard in the first place, and the failure to deal with those issues.

What could seem like an isolated problem … “just keeping too much stuff” … is really the nerve center of a whole galaxy of other problems. It’s not really just a “small problem.” It’s a toxic source of negativity that can make life miserable!

When we fail to deal with something toxic in our life, to face up to it and identify it—and take the steps necessary to get help if necessary to root it out… just as that nasty old gallbladder was extricated from my innards! … we may be unwittingly contributing to unnecessary misery in other parts of our lives.

I intend to do some more “introspecting” with this metaphor in mind, and see what else I might need to get rid of to improve my quality of life. I invite you to consider doing the same. I sure wish I’d gotten rid of that nasty old gallbladder several years ago! But I am grateful to God for the relief that I am now experiencing, for a return to “A Time for Laughter.”

Wild World of Humbugs

The Wizard (covering up with the curtain): The Great Oz has spoken. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain….the…Great…er…Oz has spoken.

Dorothy (pulling aside the curtain and reprimanding): Who are you?

The Wizard: (stuttering) I, I, I am the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz.

Dorothy: You are!? I don’t believe you.

The Wizard: I’m afraid it’s true. There’s no other Wizard except me.

Scarecrow: You humbug.

Tin Man: Yeah.

The Wizard: Yes. That’s exactly so. I’m a humbug.

Humbugs have been around for a long, long time. But since the word humbug itself isn’t used much these days, this passage from the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie has likely been the first … and maybe only … exposure most have had to the term.

I think this is a shame, because the term (and all it implies) is more relevant to our world of the 21st century than it ever has been! And there hasn’t been a good term invented that can replace it for clarity and comprehensive application.

Back before TV, back before radio, back before telephones, back before photocopy machines and digital cameras and the computer software to alter photos easily, a person who was a humbug had to put a lot more effort into his humbuggery than is necessary these days.

The most historically famous humbug was PT Barnum, circus promoter and master con-artist of the 19th century. One biography of Barnum is even titled King of Humbugs. This wasn’t a put-down–it is a title Barnum gave to himself!  Barnum was a master at coming up with elaborate hoaxes to deceive the masses, and was proud of it. But it took him a lot of money and often weeks or months or years to pull off many of his famous deceptions, and spread the news of them widely.

If Barnum lived today, the Internet, email, and digital photography would make his efforts so much more efficient. But then again, we don’t need an expert like Barnum any more to pull off widespread humbugs. Any 15 year old kid with a Net connection and a computer can, with a little bit of creativity, create a humbug within a few hours, and within a few hours more hoodwink more people than Barnum ever personally humbugged in his whole life.

I decided a while back that if any 15 year old kid could do it, why not a 65 year old grandma? So herewith, I give you my entry into the world of humbuggery—my very own Cybermarket Tabloid, the Irrational Enquirer!

I didn’t even have to mess with finding irrational stories to include in my tabloid. The headlines above were all related to stories I have received in my email inbox, breathlessly forwarded to me by well-meaning friends who were sure I’d want to know about these astounding “facts.”

I’ll be sharing a number of Irrational Enquirer stories in upcoming StarrTrekking blog entries, including the ones on the cover of this issue. For this blog entry, let’s start with the Legend of the Killer Tsunami

The Rest of the Story …

As a former life-long resident of northern Michigan, and someone who has driven past Mackinaw City, Michigan, in the depths of bitterly cold Michigan winters numerous times, you can imagine my interest in this email that made the rounds one recent winter, explaining this amazing photo.

 Frozen Wave Phenomenon on Lake Huron.

Michigan has had the coldest winter in decades. Water expands to freeze, and at Macinaw [sic] City the water in Lake Huron below the surface ice was supercooled. It expanded to break through the surface ice and froze into this incredible wave.

This wave phenomena [sic] is seen in Antarctica, but in Michigan? Yes, it’s been quite a winter!

And more photos of this phenomenon from different angles came along with the explanation.

I’m sure the reaction of many people among the hundreds of thousands who no doubt received a CCMail with these photos was … “Wow! That’s amazing!” For, of course, “Seeing is believing,” isn’t it? And the details are so explicit. Surely no one would make up such an outlandish tale if it weren’t true.

But when I went out to the Web to find more about these amazing photos, I found the following posted on a number of sites, next to the same collection of photos.

Ice Wave in Lake Michigan

And they complain about global warming…………

Amazing pictures up around Sturgeon Bay. Wisconsin has had the coldest winter in decades. Water expands to freeze, and at Sturgeon Bay the water in Lake Michigan below the surface ice was super cooled. It expanded to break through the surface ice and froze into this incredible wave.

There have been pictures of this wave phenomena in Antarctica, but in Sturgeon Bay? It’s been quite a winter!

This explanation, along with the same set of photos, was making its way around the Net via email CC lists at the exact same time. I assume that large numbers of people who received this “Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin” version were equally impressed and reacted with “Wow! That’s amazing!” For, of course, “Seeing is believing…”

If seeing is believing is still true in the Internet Age, I am certainly being asked to believe a lot … for have a look at these other CCMails that accompanied the same exact set of photos.

Antarctica Wave – pretty awesome

The water froze the instant the wave broke through the ice. That’s what it is like in Antarctica. Water freezes the instant it comes in contact with the air. The temperature of the water is already some degrees below freezing. Just look at how the wave froze in midair?

 

Antarctic wave

A volcano erupted 400 feet below the ice in Antarctica. The melted water froze in the shape of a wave the instant it broke through the ice and came into contact with the frigid air.

So there you have it—absolutely identical waves created in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Antarctica, either by “supercooled water expanding to freeze” breaking through ice and freezing in an instant, or volcanically heated water shooting up through ice and … freezing in an instant. Viewed by the same tourist with a pink neck scarf!

He … or is it she? … certainly gets around!

On other websites and forums the same pictures were described as a “frozen tidal wave” or “frozen tsunami.” And they were always accompanied by that same hapless tourist who  avoided tragedy by arriving long after the event.  You can see a full set of the 18 pictures on the Hoax Slayer website.

If you weren’t sure when you first saw the pictures, hopefully you realize by now—all of these tall tsunamic tales are pure baloney…no matter how specific the geographic or scientific details offered seem. Here is a clear explanation from the urbanlegends.com site about the matter.

The photographer, astrophysicist Tony Travouillon, confirmed via email that the pictures were actually taken near the Antarctic coastal base of Dumont D’Urville in 2002.

They patently do not show “a wave frozen in mid-air.” One can discern wave-like features, to be sure, but those “waves” are clearly the weathered facades of massive, solid blocks of ice which could not have frozen instantaneously, contrary to what is claimed.

The phenomenon captured in the images, Travouillon says, is called a blue iceberg. The ice is bluish because it is denser and contains fewer air bubbles than the more reflective white ice visible nearby. The tinting can be the result of an accumulation of marine (saltwater) ice on the bottom of a floe which has tipped over, revealing its translucent, polished underside, Travouillon explains. Or, according to other sources, it can be the result of an iceberg partially melting and refreezing. Still other sources cite as a possible cause the extreme compression undergone by ice originating from deep inside a glacial mass.

In any case, the “blue bergs” of Antarctica are gorgeous natural phenomena in their own right and deserve to be appreciated for what they really are.

You can see more details on the formation of blue icebergs on the Hoax Slayer site.

It’s too bad that pictures of such fascinating and beautiful natural phenomena can’t be shared by people without the pseudo-scientific baloney attached to them. In many cases the actual facts about the pictures are very interesting in themselves.  It would only take a couple of minutes to research the validity of the descriptions in such emails before passing them on. Of course, if you’d do that, you would likely find, as I have over the 15 years I’ve been on the Net, that only a very, very tiny percentage of such emails pan out to be “as advertised.” The vast majority have been humbugs.

Why not “Just Say No” to blindly passing on CC mails full of patently bogus descriptions of unusual pictures? Otherwise, you just may find your email featured in a future issue of the Irrational Enquirer!

 

 

Historical Humbugs: Scamming Sherlock

Humbug  

1 a : something designed to deceive and mislead
b : a willfully false, deceptive, or insincere perso
2 : an attitude or spirit of pretense and deception
3 : nonsense, drivel
Merriam Webster Online Dictionary

Before Columbo, before Inspector Clouseau, before Monk—there was Sherlock Holmes. Nobody could pull the wool over Sherlock’s eyes! He spotted every discrepancy, every minor slip-up made by men who were bent on deceiving others.

And it would seem logical to assume that the creator of this fictional master sleuth would himself be impervious to being humbugged by even the most clever criminals and con artists.

Perhaps that was true of Arthur Conan Doyle. Perhaps he would have been able to solve real crimes in the way his alter-ego Sherlock solved them. Perhaps the master-minds of the world would have been nothing compared to his powers of logic and common sense and careful observation.

 

But how about challenging his powers with … the silly shenanigans of a couple of schoolgirls ages 9 and 16?

As it turns out, Arthur was no match for these young women. And the aftermath left the great Conan Doyle’s reputation for wisdom sorely tarnished.

Their names were Elsie Wright, who was about sixteen years old, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, who was nine years old when this saga began. In the summer of 1917 Frances was visiting at Elsie’s home in the small village of Cottingley in England. As the stories about the incident go, Frances regularly got in trouble for stumbling into a nearby little brook while playing on its banks, and getting her shoes and clothing wet. When quizzed by her mother why she kept going there, she announced that it was because she enjoyed watching fairies frolicking there. As you might expect, the adults in her family mocked her for these claims.

One day Elsie and Frances decided to conspire to trick these old fogies who doubted their youthful fantasies. Frances had an illustrated book titled Princess Mary’s Gift Book that included an artist’s fanciful vision of fairies. Elsie had been taking art lessons for three years and was quite accomplished at imitating the artwork of others. She used the book’s fairies as templates and drew several fairies of her own, and the girls cut them out with her mother’s fine tailor shears. Elsie borrowed her father’s large camera, the kind that took pictures on glass plates, and she and Frances went off to the brook. Pushing hat pins over a foot long into the paper cutouts, they affixed them into a mound of dirt, and posed Frances behind them. And thus was created the first photo of what were to become famous as the Cottingley Fairies.

Elsie’s father helped her develop the glass plates, but when he saw the “fairies” in the photograph, he was unimpressed and took them for what they were … a visual trick the girls had somehow managed.

For a later photo-shoot, Elsie decided she wanted to pose with a fanciful woodland creature too, and chose a gnome.

The girls had a few prints made of their photos, and passed them out to friends and family.

Elsie and Frances’s little project would have gone unnoticed by the world, and would have soon drifted from their own memory but for one coincidence. Elsie’s mother Polly had been recently swept up into the enthusiasm of that period in time for occult and supernatural topics … including belief in the reality of fairies and gnomes and such creatures

Two years after the girls created their early version of “photo-shopped” photos, Polly attended a Theosophical Society meeting where this very topic was earnestly discussed. And after the meeting, she shared that her daughter and a cousin had actually taken photographs that appeared to show genuine fairies.

Some in the Theosophical Society were impressed and encouraged when they saw prints of the photos, and by early 1920 those photos made their way to the attention of one of the leading Theosophists in England, Edward Gardner. That summer, while working on an article for the Strand Magazine on the topic of fairies, Arthur Conan Doyle heard about the fairy prints, and obtained copies from Gardner. Later that summer, at Doyle’s request, Gardner visited the Wright family to investigate the claims. He left more cameras and photographic plates with the girls so that they could attempt to get more Candid Camera photos of the fairies.

The girls eventually provided their admirers with three more photos. In one, a standing fairy appears to be offering Elsie a flower. In another, a flying fairy appears to hover like a hummingbird in front of Frances. And in a third, much less clear picture, a group of fairies, with neither of the girls present, appear to be sunning themselves in the grass.

[Elsie’s] father returned the plates to London, wrapped in cotton wool. Arthur Wright was greatly puzzled. He understood the photographs were faked, irrespective of him and his wife not finding incriminating evidence that showed their daughter had done it. Still, he could not understand that other grown men had been fooled. Furthermore, his daughter was now the centre of a nationwide, if not international, sensation. As Conan Doyle had used pseudonyms, the children were fairly safe from public scrutiny, but Arthur Wright began to have a lower estimation of Conan Doyle. He found it hard to believe that such an intelligent man could be bamboozled “by our Elsie, and her at the bottom of the class!”  http://www.philipcoppens.com/cottingley.html

Doyle eventually used the first two photos for his Strand article, and included information about the whole incident and more photos in his 1921 book, The Coming of the Fairies. Yes, in spite of how ridiculously fake the Cottingley photos look to most modern viewers, Conan Doyle became convinced they were legitimate pictures of real fairies, and widely promoted the claims made for them! When someone pointed out what appeared to the average person to be the obvious top of a hatpin sticking out of the stomach of the gnome in the picture with Elsie, Arthur was not dissuaded—he insisted it was a belly button and that it offered proof of how fairies reproduced!

The famous author had long been fascinated by claims of the paranormal, including alleged contact with the dead. Some have said that this was because he had lost so many close family members to death and, not being a religious man in the normal sense—with a biblical hope in the resurrection—it left him very melancholic. Whatever the reason, he seems to have been particularly susceptible to outrageous claims.

Twenty years before the Cottingley situation, Doyle had been obsessed with the activities of “Spritualists” who conducted séances, in which unusual sounds and movements were attributed to communication from the Other World. The first well-known characters in this movement were the Fox Sisters from New York, who became famous in 1848 for the unusual “knockings” in their meetings, attributed to spirits of the dead. The whole organized Spiritualist movement grew directly from their activities, and their fame spread around the world. The movement was rocked twenty years later when one of the sisters confessed that she had been part of a total fraud perpetrated on the gullible. The knockings had been made by various natural tricks, including exceptionally loud “popping” of the joints of the sisters’ toes! Yet even when she clearly demonstrated her skill at this type of trick for the public, as part of her revelations of the secrets of the Spiritualists, many refused to accept her confession.

Margaret wrote a signed story that appeared in The New York World, Oct. 21, 1888. She said:

“Spiritualism is a fraud and a deception. It is a branch of legerdemain [an illusion designed to fool the naïve], but it has to be closely studied to gain perfection.”

One of those who would not accept Margaret’s confession was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the fictional Sherlock Holmes and a convinced believer in spiritualism. He responded:

“Nothing that she could say in that regard would in the least change my opinion, nor would it that of any one else who had become profoundly convinced that there is an occult influence connecting us with an invisible world.”

The magician Harry Houdini, a showman continually alert to opportunities for self-promotion, publicly exposed mediumistic trickery in his stage shows and wrote pamphlets opposing fraudulent mediums. In spite of this, some spiritualists claimed that Houdini had genuine spiritualistic powers, refusing to accept Houdini’s own statements that only deception was involved in his performances.

Arthur Conan Doyle devoted a whole chapter of his book The Edge of the Unknown to a detailed argument that Houdini had genuine psychic power, but wouldn’t admit it. Curiously, Doyle and Houdini remained friends for a long while, in spite of public clashes over spiritualism. Perhaps they shared an appreciation of the value of public self-promotion. Eventually Houdini became outraged as a result of a seance in which Mrs. Doyle claimed to have communicated with Houdini’s mother, and the details she reported were obviously wrong.

Doyle was a credulous dupe for various kinds of nonsense. He not only believed in spiritualism and all of the phenomena of the seance room, but he also believed in fairies.

Yes, Doyle was duped into believing in the Cottingley Fairies just as he’d been duped by the Fox Sisters. In the matter of the fairies, the creator of the Great Sleuth should have paid attention to the clues that came his way… the Princess Mary book from which the girls copied the bodies of the earliest fairies actually contained one of Conan Doyle’s own stories!

A curious fact is that in this book, a compilation of short stories and poems for children by various authors, there’s a story, “Bimbashi Joyce” by Arthur Conan Doyle! Surely he received a copy from the publisher. If Doyle had noticed this picture, and if he had the sort of perceptiveness he attributed to Sherlock Holmes, he might have concluded that the Cottingley photographs were fakes. But, maybe not. Believers are good at seeing what they believe, and not seeing things that challenge their beliefs. http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/doyle.htm

But Conan Doyle missed the connection, and it wasn’t noticed by anyone else until 1977, when a scholar doing research on children’s book illustrations discovered a copy of the 1915 book and recognized the obvious similarity to the Cottingley Fairies.

By that time, although Doyle himself had gone to his grave evidently convinced of the validity of the pictures, and many die-hard Theosophists and the like clung to the pictures with enthusiasm, they were widely viewed as a hoax by most educated folks. Still, the controversy didn’t totally die out, and it wasn’t until Elsie and Florence themselves, by then old ladies, finally granted an interview in the early 1980s in which they confessed to the ruse that the speculation was laid to rest. Elsie even carefully demonstrated how they pulled it off. A recording of this interview can be seen on Youtube.

However, Florence insisted that, although the photos themselves were a hoax, she had literally seen real fairies near the brook, and, in fact, the final picture was “real.” Elsie, however, was adamant that the whole thing was a hoax, including the final picture, and it’s not clear why or how the discrepancy in their individual stories developed. To an objective observer, the figures in the final picture look just as flat and phony as the others.

The reality was that the girls never intended to “hoax the world” with their photos. They were merely pulling a prank on their own families. But they soon found themselves swept along by irrational mania of adults around them, including such famous names as Arthur Conan Doyle. And eventually it became emotionally impossible for them to extricate themselves from trying to live up to the expectations of those adults. As psychic investigator and debunker James Randi put it in an article on his website about the Cottingley mania:

These two little girls perpetrated their innocent hoax, it was taken up by prominent persons who should have known better, and made into a cause célèbre. The children created a monster that eventually devoured them, a monster over which they soon found they had no control. The adults in their lives accepted their claim, promoted it, invested in it, and could not be told that it was a lie.

Randi described two other major figures who were taken in by the story:

…However, some public figures were sympathetic–sometimes embarrassingly so. Margaret McMillan, the educational and social reformer (who, among other reforms, brought the benefits of public baths to the slum children of Bradford), waxed fulsome about the Cottingley incidents: `How wonderful that to these dear children such a wonderful gift has been vouchsafed.’

Another eminent personality of the day, the novelist Henry de Vere Stacpoole, decided to take the fairy photographs–and the girls–at face value. He accepted intuitively that both girls and pictures were genuine. In a letter to Gardner he said:

“Look at Alice’s face. Look at Iris’s face. There is an extraordinary thing called TRUTH which has 10 million faces and forms–it is God’s currency and the cleverest coiner or forger can’t imitate it…”

(The aliases ‘Alice’ and ‘Iris’ first used by Conan Doyle to protect the anonymity of the girls were deliberately preserved by Stacpoole.)

A review of the interview of the two elderly ladies had these final comments to offer about the Fairy humbug:

…The attitude of Elsie and Frances to the whole question of the fairy photographs is a typical Yorkshire one–to tell a tall story with a deadpan delivery and let those who will believe it do so. Indeed, Elsie has often said as much: `I would rather we were thought of as solemn faced comediennes.’

Frances, on the other hand, has always marveled at the fact that anyone could believe them to be genuine. The flying fairy in the third photograph was pinned to the branch behind it; it was drawn freehand by Elsie, and seems to Frances to be out of proportion. The fairy offering flowers to Elsie in the fourth photograph was attached to a branch in a similar way, and sports a fashionable hairstyle that has attracted much comment.

…The second set of photographs was hailed with joy by Gardner. And, trapped by their first trick, Elsie and Frances had no choice but to remain silent; the consequences that would have resulted from any disclosures must have seemed terrifying to them.

A Lesson for the Learnin’?

It would be comforting if we 21st century hard-nosed realists could rest assured that it was just the gullibility of a much earlier, less-enlightened age that led so many, including a brilliant author of detective novels, to be taken in by such an obvious humbug as the Cottingley Fairies. And to think that such a thing would never happen today.

Unfortunately, I have receive CCMails regularly over the past 15 years with modern hoaxes just as ludicrous or obvious … or easily disproven … passed along by highly educated, intelligent people. Sometimes the photo alterations are a bit more sophisticated… but not by a whole lot! And usually the stories that go with the pictures are a not quite so outrageous as insisting in the existence of fairies. But that tends to just increase the gullibility of readers!

Beyond that, in the realm of religion—and particularly speculative prophecy—the Internet provides a canvas upon which elaborate humbugs are woven that lure huge numbers of people into involvement in spiritually unhealthy schemes. It can be even more troubling when the humbuggers themselves begin to believe their own humbuggery. A man with spiritual delusions of grandeur can be SO persuasive to others!

Humbuggery is alive and well and thriving in CyberSpace. Sometimes, as in the Cottingley Fairies incident, the results are mostly benign. But the very fact that intelligent and educated people can be so easily taken in by benign humbugs renders many of them even more susceptible to what can end up yielding much more harmful, even toxic results. If you are convinced that you can’t  be humbugged, I would suggest you take the advice of the Bible … let he (or she) who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall… for a humbug.

We need an antidote to these modern infestations of Cyber-Humbugs. I attempt to provide that in my blogs and websites.