Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [24]
7. Prominent personalities lend their support to the claims and are considered unassailable because of prestige, academic background, and so on. Examples: Conan Doyle was almost the only reason that the Cottingley Fairies hoax was—and is—accepted by many people. Today, laser physicists, political figures, astronauts, and authors who declare upon paranormal matters are thought to have expertise that in fact they do not have.
8. Similarly, supposed experts are called in to verify the claims. Examples: Snelling, Gardner, and Hodson were "experts" carefully selected for the job by Doyle. Their acceptance of the miracle was a foregone conclusion. Metallurgist Wilbur Franklin of Kent State University was touted as an expert who could judge the validity of paranormal metal-bending by Geller, and he was widely quoted. Not so widely quoted was his reversal when he took a second look and discovered he had been wrong. Franklin was a "believer" from the beginning.
9. The findings of experts who are critical are minimized or ignored. Examples: The people at Kodak in London were called in to judge the photos and refused to authenticate them. The fact that they said there were many ways to get such faked results was played down by Doyle, who gave the impression that great technical skill was needed for such procedures. In the same way, conjurers, whose expertise qualifies them to judge the validity of paranormal events, are largely ignored—except those among them who are found to be sympathetic to irrational notions.
10. Those who allege paranormal events are equivocal and evasive, allowing investigators to assume facts and fill in details in support of their claims. Examples. In interviews, conversations, and letters, Elsie has introduced half-truths and dropped hints that have led sympathetic investigators to make unjustified assumptions. Doyle, too, professed both conviction and doubt in the same volume, just in case he was proved wrong. In the case of the recent "astral trip" that "psychic" Ingo Swann made to the planet Jupiter, Swann takes little blame for contradictions in his story, allowing scientists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, who endorsed and sponsored the adventure, to select those aspects of this purported event that they believe to be convincing. Swann, incidentally, recently averred that he had "overshot" the planet Jupiter and landed in another solar system altogether, thus leaving Targ, Puthoff, and UFO investigator/astronomer J. Allen Hynek in need of revising their explanation of this "miracle."
11. Conflicting versions or details of a paranormal event are ignored. Examples: Doyle reported that one Cameo camera was given to the girls; Gardner said there were two. Doyle said that when Mr. Hodson (called Mr. Sergeant) went to the glen with the two young girls to look for fairies, "he saw all that they saw, and more," but Hodson's own account shows that they disagreed on several points. Describing a ship named Sandra that "vanished" in the so-called Bermuda Triangle, one author describes the craft as 350 feet in length, on a calm ocean under a "starlit sky." Records prove that the Sandra was 185 feet long and sank in seas buffeted by 73-mile-an-hour winds—just 2 miles an hour less than hurricane strength.
12. A subject's ability to perform trickery is de-emphasized or ignored. Examples: Elsie's artistic ability, job experience, and opportunity to create the fakes were circumstantial evidence of a possible hoax, but Doyle considered this a ridiculous impossibility. Jean-Pierre Girard and Uri Geller are acknowledged magicians whose abilities are unquestioned, but these qualifications are downplayed by modern-day believers.
13. Any controls that seem scientific are used to provide