Bad Science Read online

  The final nail in the coffin of Archaeoraptor liaoningensis came from Xing Xu himself. He went back to China in search of the other half of the fossil. (When a rock is split open to reveal a fossil, the two halves contain mirror images of the animal or plant.) It was no doubt a search that involved a lot of mixed feelings, and ultimately, disappointment and embarrassment ruled the day. Xu did find one of the fossil’s counterparts, only this fossil dinosaur tail was still attached to its original dinosaur body. The bird/dinosaur missing link he had declared to be genuine had clearly been pieced together and was undoubtedly a hoax.

  Criticism abounded, with the cleverest rebuke coming from U.S. News & World Report, who declared the Archaeoraptor liaoningensis to be the Piltdown Chicken. It seems that no matter what the era, you can fool some of the paleontologists all of the time.

  Richard Stucky, vice president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology summed it up best when he said, “This is always an issue with commercially acquired specimens where economic values may supersede scientific concerns. Fabrications and enhancement are not uncommon and must always be considered when a specimen is acquired commercially rather than through a scientific expedition.” (The fossil had been purchased for $80,000.)

  We must also include that this is always an issue with commercially and scientifically acquired specimens, where egos, vanity, and the overwhelming desire to prove pet theories may supersede scientific concerns. Ultimately, however, the scientists duped by the Piltdown Chicken are not culprits, but victims—victims of forgers who for the sake of greed and some twisted sense of humor seek to continually sully the good name of science.

  Such people do more than just ruffle a few dinosaur feathers with their fakes and fabrications, and we can only hope that they all become fossils very soon.

  Divine Hands

  Some people are born lucky, while it has been said that others make their own luck. Then there are those who make their own Stone Age artifacts and claim they are real—and for those people it’s only a matter of time before their luck runs out.

  Shinichi Fujimura was born in the Miyagi prefecture of Japan in 1950. As a boy, he found pieces of ancient Jomon pottery in his backyard, which sparked an interest in archaeology. While working in a factory, he began studying archaeology on his own and spent his vacations digging for artifacts. In 1975, he formed a group with other archaeology enthusiasts (Stone Age archeology is a very popular topic in Japan), and this group began discovering many Stone Age sites. Their first important find came in 1981, when Fujimura claimed to have found 40,000-year-old stoneware.

  As this was the oldest stoneware ever found in Japan, the discovery worked wonders for Fujimura’s career. But he didn’t rest on his Stone Age laurels. Almost like magic, he and his team consistently uncovered older and older artifacts—and not just by a few measly thousands of years, but by hundreds of thousands. At over 180 sites, Fujimura’s remarkable archaeological prowess earned him the reputation of having nothing less than “divine hands.”

  However, not everyone was drinking the Fujimura Kool-Aid. While few colleagues had the courage to speak against a veritable living legend, there were those scientists who publicly stated that Fujimura’s “dubious claims” were based upon “flawed research.” Apparently, enough suspicion was eventually cast that one of Japan’s major newspapers, the Mainichi Shimbun, decided to investigate.

  It was October of 2000, and the town of Tsukidate had become a tourist destination with international attention, thanks to Fujimura and his team’s recent discovery of—you guessed it—some of the oldest artifacts ever discovered in Japan. This time the claim was that they had found indications of a dwelling that was 570,000-years-old! To commemorate the find (and make a lot of yen from tourists), Tsukidate made its official slogan “The town with the same skies viewed by early man.” It even began selling a drink called—you guessed it—“Early Man.” (I guess creating a drink called “Recent Fake” wouldn’t have been as big a seller.)

  In November, the Stone Age house of cards finally tumbled down when the newspaper published three shocking photos it had taken in secret. These photos showed Fujimura digging holes, placing artifacts in the holes, covering them with dirt, and later “discovering” them. Caught red-handed, Fujimura confessed during a press conference, claiming that he had done it because he had been “possessed by an uncontrollable urge.”

  Yes, it’s called ego and greed.

  The man with the divine hands admitted he had planted 27 of the 31 artifacts at a level that would make them appear to be much older. He also confessed to planting 61 out of 65 artifacts at another site, and 100% of the stonework from yet another site. However, as is common for charlatans who have been exposed, he still tried to grasp onto some shred of respectability by maintaining that those were the only times he faked results.

  Sorry, Fujimura, your credibility ship not only sailed, it was torpedoed and sank to the bottom of the Bad Science Sea.

  There may be those readers who now say, okay, he was humiliated and exposed as a fraud, but he really didn’t hurt anyone but himself.

  Au contraire!

  How about all the text books in Japan that now had to be changed because they contained decades of bogus finds? How about the dedicated researchers and real scientists who had spent years studying Fujimura’s work? Imagine how stunned and angered his colleagues were, such as Hiroshi Kajiwara, a professor at Tohoku Fukushi University, who said, “My 20 years of research are ruined…Why on earth did he do such a stupid thing?”

  That would be because of ego and greed.

  Fujimura lost his position as the senior researcher at the Tohoku Paleolithic Institute, and its director resigned. Museums began pulling all of Fujimura’s artifacts from their displays. Fujimura “wanted to be known as the person who excavated the oldest stoneware in Japan,” and as a result he ruined the professional lives of countless people, and cast a shadow of doubt over other’s legitimate finds.

  However, all of this pales in comparison to another tragic result—one man actually took his own life over the repercussions of the scandal. Hungry for more evidence of forgeries by other researchers, in 2001, some articles in a Japanese magazine asserted that Mitsuo Kagawa, a professor at BeppuUniversity, had also faked his Stone Age discoveries. The shame and suspicion drove Kagawa to commit suicide, but in his suicide note he maintained his innocence. The court ordered the magazine to apologize, as it didn’t have sufficient evidence to make the accusation, but the apology was too late to help Kagawa or his family.

  There is an old saying that people would rather be lucky than good, and indeed, luck often plays a hand in science, sports, the business world, and many other facets of life. Unfortunately, those who perpetrate one act of fraud successfully are often greedy for more and continue to push their luck with false claims of ever-increasing magnitude. The real tragedy is not in the fallen reputations of the egotistic swindlers, but in the honest, hard-working colleagues and peers who get dragged down with them.

  “[The automobile] will never, of course, come into as common a use as the bicycle.”

  Literary Digest, 1899

  The Thirst for Gold

  For countless generations, gold fever has clouded the judgment of otherwise rational and prudent individuals. History has repeatedly shown that a person may be leading a completely ordinary life, but flash gold before their eyes and they suddenly drop everything and dash off on hazardous journeys to remote and dangerous locations to try to strike it rich in the latest gold rush.

  It should come as no surprise then, that if in the late 1890s a humble store clerk, born and raised in a city, who never spent a day in his life riding or camping, was willing to risk everything by trekking to the Klondike in a search for gold, other people would be willing to risk their life savings to obtain gold much closer to home—without getting their hands dirty or even leaving the comfort of their homes. Such was the lure of the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company, which boasted it could ext
ract gold from sea water and make every investor rich.

  It all began in 1896, when a Baptist minister in Middletown, Connecticut, Rev. Prescott Ford Jernegan, claimed he had experienced a divine vision (that should have been the first clue that you were about to get hosed). In this vision, he saw how to make a device he called a Gold Accumulator. It was basically a wooden box with holes in it, and inside was a metal pan filled with mercury and some secret compounds, all of which had a current of electricity running through it. The idea was to submerge it in the ocean, let science do its thing, then in a few days or weeks simply retrieve the box and collect the gold that accumulated in the mercury.

  Jernegan brought his device to the local jeweler, Arthur Ryan, and asked him to test it. If successful, i.e., if gold was produced,

  Jernegan wanted Ryan to help him form a company, get investors, build facilities, and rake in the profits. While it was known that sea water contained traces of gold, there was no practical way to extract it in a manner that made financial sense. Ryan was skeptical, but agreed to test Jernegan’s device. After all, would a clergyman lie about such a thing? (If you answered no to this question, please go back and start reading this book from the beginning and pay more attention this time.)

  To prevent the appearance of anything underhanded, Jernegan said he would show Ryan how to set up the device and then he would leave. If the clergyman wasn’t even there during the test, the device couldn’t be tampered with, could it? (If you answered no to this question, please see above.)

  Ryan and several associates took the device to a wharf in Rhode Island, where they lowered it into the ocean. Despite the cold February weather, the men remained on the wharf all night to guard the alleged Gold Accumulator and guarantee an honest experiment. When morning arrived, they raised the box and lo and behold, there were specks of gold in the mercury! When tested, it was found that the box had produced about $100 worth of gold by today’s value. Certainly not a fortune, but what if a hundred, or a thousand, or tens of thousands of accumulators were at work?

  Investors from New York to Boston didn’t need their arms twisted to open their wallets, and the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company began operations in the remote Maine town of Lubec, ostensibly chosen for its vigorous tidal activity, which supposedly helped the accumulators accumulate.

  The company’s alluring prospectus stated that “Millions of dollars in gold were flowing through Lubec Narrows every single day,” and their company had the means to extract it. The local newspaper, The Lubec Herald, praised Jernegan and his assistant, Charles Fisher, who said about the two men: “The presence of these people is not only desirable for the amount of money they will bring into the town, but we should welcome them for their social qualities. The officers of the company are earnest, Christian gentlemen, and many of their employees are Christians. We wish them all success in their undertaking and hope that they will take millions of dollars from old Passamaquoddy Bay – and we believe they will! With quantities of gold in the salt water there is little need of a trip to Alaska!”

  A tide of people soon flooded the tiny town seeking jobs. Locals invested their life savings—even borrowing money and mortgaging their houses to be able to invest, because the news was good, and kept getting better.

  In 1898, the newspaper wrote that “The inlet to Mill Pond accommodated 240 accumulators of which sixty were pulled up each week. Thus each box was under water a month before its turn came to be examined. During that time the water, chemicals, and electricity had time to work their magic.”

  Gold was being “harvested” at the rate of several thousand dollars per day in current value, and stock was offered in the company to expand even further. The stock initially opened at $33 a share, but within days was trading for five times that amount. There was now $400,000 to put into the expansion and it looked like easy street for everyone.

  At least until Jernegan and Fisher disappeared in July of 1898, and the gold accumulators suddenly stopped accumulating.

  Was foul play involved? Yes, but the missing men were most assuredly not the victims.

  When Ryan and his associates spent that cold night on the wharf in Rhode Island making sure no one tampered with the box, they did not take into consideration what was going on under the surface. It seems that Fisher was an accomplished diver, and while Ryan and the other suckers were freezing their butts off on the wharf, Fisher was under water substituting the plain mercury for the gold-studded mercury.

  Fisher also did some night diving in Lubec to add some gold to the accumulators that were scheduled for collection. To put icing on the phony cake, Fisher had also purchased bars of gold, which he then showed to the investors, passing them off as ocean-fresh specimens of the latest gold to be taken from the sea. Unfortunately, the only thing taken was the investors.

  An article in the August 1, 1898 edition of The Boston Herald summed it up nicely: “Never did a fisherman bait his traps with more alluring or attractive morsels than did Reverend P. F. Jernegan tickle the fancy and stimulate the greed of victims with his brilliant and enticing prospectus of the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company, now a practically defunct organization, with the reverend promoter flown to foreign parts, an alleged swindle of the first magnitude.”

  Over 700 workers were suddenly unemployed, the life savings of hundreds of people had gone out with the tide, and the little town of Lubec, which had high hopes of becoming world famous for its vast wealth, faded into obscurity. (There are unconfirmed reports that today, even residents of the town never heard of Lubec.)

  So, as lives lay in ruin throughout the northeast, where were the two swindlers? Fisher took his $200,000 and disappeared off the face of the earth. The most reverend Prescott Jernegan took his family to Europe—under an assumed name—with his cut of the money.

  Apparently, however, the good Christian gentleman had a pang of guilt while living it up in Brussels. He decided to return money to the investors, but it must have been just a brief pang as he returned only $75,000. Some used this act to claim that Fisher was the mastermind behind the scheme and that Jernegan was a reluctant participant.

  Returning all $200,000 is an act of remorse by a reluctant participant. Stealing and keeping $125,000 is not.

  Jernegan eventually ended up in the Philippines, where he became a schoolteacher and the author of a book on the islands’ history. He was never brought to justice.

  As for all the investors, given the money Jernegan returned, plus what was realized in the sale of the company’s assets, a mere 36 cents on the dollar was recovered. (Actually, only a 64% loss on an investment wouldn’t be half bad in today’s market, and surely good enough to earn those on Wall Street a hefty bonus!)

  In all fairness to those who were duped, with all the marvels of technology the modern age has witnessed, it wasn’t all that farfetched that a scientific method had been found to cheaply extract gold from the oceans. With gold fever raging from the Klondike gold rush, the time was right for just such a scam as Jernegan and Fisher’s to succeed. Unfortunately, the moral of the story is that people will always be blinded by greed, and those who are ignorant of science are susceptible to the schemes of those who claim to wield its secrets.

  While having reserves of gold isn’t really a bad thing, ultimately, the best thing to accumulate is knowledge.

  Catch My Drift?

  When I was in the fourth grade, I distinctly remember a lesson in school that was fun (which is probably why it stands out from the usual mind-numbingly boring classes). The subject was continental drift, and each student was given a copy of a world map and a pair of those ubiquitous round-tipped scissors. The idea was to cut out the continents and fit them together as best we could into Pangaea—the original single landmass from which all the continents split and went their separate ways.

  What had become mere child’s play in elementary schools across the country was once a hotly debated—and resoundingly criticized—theory in the early 1900s. While as a nine-year-old, I wa
s unaware of whom I had to thank for this exercise in cutting and fitting continental puzzle pieces. Now being older and wiser (as well as being in the possession of several very pointy pairs of scissors), I know that it was the German-born scientist Alfred Wegener.

  Wegener earned his Ph.D. in astronomy in 1904, but almost immediately turned his attention to meteorology. However, that didn’t satisfy his interest in geophysics, so he researched that topic on his own while he taught and wrote books on meteorology, before, during, and after fighting in World War I, where he was wounded twice. (Don’t you just hate underachievers?)

  Wegener noticed two major things that led him to his theory of continental drift: the coasts of South America and Africa looked as though they once fit together, and similar fossils were found in similar strata on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, strongly suggesting that they were once part of the same landmass. The conventional wisdom (and I use that term loosely) was that ancient land bridges were responsible for the fossils—apparently very, very long land bridges that stretched across the ocean. Wegener didn’t buy it, and in 1912 he first published his theory that the continents on either side of the Atlantic Ocean had once been together and were now steadily moving apart.

  An illustration of an early

  landmass configuration.

  (Not quite as good as

  my fourth grade Pangaea.)

  He didn’t know what the mechanism behind such massive movements could be, but undaunted, he continued his research and in 1915—not letting a little thing like the world war get in the way—he published the book Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, otherwise known as The Origin of Continents and Oceans. The more he learned, the more he shared in subsequent revised and expanded editions of the book.