265: Fake Science

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it is another hour of high-minded radio broadcasting distributed by Public Radio International, which is to say, it's This American Life, which is to say, hello. It's post time.

It's opening day at Arlington Racetrack just outside Chicago. And maybe because of the rain, maybe because not that many adults can come out to the track in the middle of a weekday, there are just four guys, regulars, in one of the rooms reserved for regulars. Four guys in a spacious room with what have to be 20 television monitors.

Ira Glass

This is Roger Vice. Really, that's his name, Mr. Vice. A guy who makes his living betting on the horses. The kind of disciplined guy who gives the impression that maybe his goatee and his clothes never get messy.

Ira Glass

Mr. Vice shows me a product called Thoro-Graph which is basically a computerized analysis and printout of speed ratings and histories for each horse, and a cheat sheet that he made for himself with other data which gets surprisingly precise and technical.

Ira Glass

Mike is retired from the Post Office, and his table is the messiest one in the room. Three of the guys here on opening day, Craig, Jeff, and Mr. Vice, all do this very technical analysis to make their bets. Mike is the outcast.

Ira Glass

Betting only long shots makes him really different from Jeff, who puts a lot of bets out there looking for a small percentage return. And from Craig, who plays more favorites, and who overhears Mike describing his system to me and then turns to me and says, you ever read the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? That's Mike's system. And in the eighth race, I get to see Mike's system in action.

Ira Glass

We watch the race on the TV monitors. Intrinsic Worth is wearing the number five and comes out of the gate poorly.

Ira Glass

And then, to make a short story very short, in the final stretch number five comes in from 20 lengths back.

Ira Glass

And then it's over.

Ira Glass

Which for Mike was not even enough to place a bet. And this is why he and his system are taking a beating today. He picked the right horse. He was confident. But he didn't get long shot odds. So he didn't put in a bet, and he didn't make any money. These other guys in the same situation, they would have bet. They're like a group of scientists who all look at the same data and then all come to completely different conclusions, which when you think about it, is about as different from the way that regular scientists work as you can get.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, people who are using the tools of analysis, the scientific reasoning of real science in settings where scientists don't really belong. It's fake science. We all do it every day in all sorts of situations. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in four acts, "Spook Science," "Government Science," "Beauty Science," and last, but not least, "Radio Science." Four acts of people tossing around questionable data, making logical jumps that they really should think twice about, in short, acting like you and me. And if you've got any question at all about the truth of that last statement, well, stay tuned.

Ira Glass

Act One, Spook Science. Jake Warga heard of a group in Seattle that is trying to use whatever scientific methods it can find to hunt for ghosts. He tells this story.

Jake Warga

I've been invited to spend the night in a cabin deep in the woods, no electricity, no phones, with a group of ghost hunters. They've been asked there by the owner who thinks it's haunted.

Jake Warga

Patricia Woolard is Vice President of AGHOST, which stands for Amateur Ghost Hunters of Seattle-Tacoma. Ross is the president.

Jake Warga

The location is an old mining camp going way back to the early 1900s. At one point, it was a Bible camp during the summer. And there were rumors of child abuse. And in the early '30s, a woman died of TB, but the ground was too hard to break for a grave. They decided to wait until first thaw. So they put the body in a small cabin on the property. They had her children take shifts and stay vigil by the body just in case she came back. They did this for over a month until the ground thawed and, I guess, it became clear she wasn't coming back.

Jake Warga

AGHOST's President, Ross Allison, is going over about seven silver cases he has loaded with electronic gear. Ghost hunters love gadgets. Luckily, Ross's day job is at a photo/electronics retailer.

Jake Warga

This place is like a horror movie set of itself, complete with creaking doors and wind chimes. And just like in the movies, it's starting to get dark.

Jake Warga

EMF, by the way, stands for electromagnetic field. Spirits are apparently energy that can be detected with devices that measure electricity in the air. The EMF detectors they're using are sold as devices for telling where the wires in your walls are. But cameras are the most popular ghost hunting tool because they can capture orbs. Orbs are the little circles of light that sometimes show up in photographs or videos. Most people think they're particles of dust or stray light hitting the lens. Ghost hunters believe they might be the energy of spirits. And most everyone is wearing a cassette recorder to record the voices of the dead. The theory is that deep in the background hiss of a recording hide unexplained voices. Basically, if I went out to a cemetery, started recording and asking questions out into the air that, upon playing back the tapes, really cranking up the silent spots, I should get responses.

Jake Warga

The voice is saying, I'm here.

Jake Warga

Stephanie is our psychic, but not like you might think. No crystal balls or late night TV commercials. She's studying for her real estate license. She's just a part of the group and sensing things is her role. We don't tell her about the history of the site.

Jake Warga

I'm waiting outside the small cabin, listening on a wireless mike I have on Stephanie. I try not to pee myself because they're in the cabin that has the body.

Jake Warga

They leave the cabin and start up a path into the woods. Huge pine trees surround us.

Jake Warga

She describes what she sees. Short woman with curly hair in the style of the 1930s. Later, going through old photos with the owner, Stephanie points to one photo. "Fern [? Killins," ?] it reads. That's her. That's the woman. It turns out that Fern is the woman who died of TB, whose body was left in that cabin for a month. Stephanie is confused about why she saw the body until she discovers, just around a bank of trees, the cemetery where Fern is buried.

Jake Warga

Patricia's taking photos at the other end of the small cemetery.

Jake Warga

This is Patricia.

Jake Warga

I've been startled awake before. But having a psychic sleeping on the sofa next to me in a haunted cabin bolt up at 3:00 AM crying, there's someone coming, well, that's just scary. People grab whatever gear they fell asleep with. Somehow, I remember to put on my headphones and start stabbing at buttons on my recorder.

Jake Warga

We all shuffle around together in a tight bunch. She guides us to the kitchen.

Jake Warga

In their panic, no one had strapped on their tape recorder. They look at me and my big mike. I'm pushed into the dark kitchen. They can see me and my trembling microphone in the night vision camera. But I can't see a thing.

Jake Warga

I feel my left side lift, all the hairs standing up. Is this a seizure? Wow, they say. What? I say. There's an orb near your left side. Point the microphone at the floor.

Jake Warga

We go into the main room. Stephanie points at the ceiling. Upstairs, video cameras and a computer monitoring system are running. Everyone is leaving, afraid, she says. I point my mike up to the ceiling. Everyone listens closely. Then we hear it, a mouse. I hit pause on my recorder. Kendra's walking towards the front door taking EMF readings. Then Stephanie, in a frightened and direct voice, tells her to, stop, someone's coming. This is when the front door blows open. I hit record.

Jake Warga

By this point, Ross and I have told Stephanie about the history of the cabin. And she thinks, maybe this is the man who was here 70 years ago, the one who people think abused the children at Bible camp, a spirit stuck in a routine.

Jake Warga

In the diffused light of morning, all is well. I'm woken up to giggles. Stephanie is having a really fun time tapping on Steph's sleeping head.

Jake Warga

We all stumble upstairs to see what clues the ghosts left us. The scrabble pieces we lined up in the attic had not been moved. They've had luck in the past. Once the pieces were moved to spell cat. The EMF detectors never went off. There were no unexplained voices on my tapes. The strangest thing to happen was that the video recorders and computerized motion and temperature detectors we had running in the empty attic shut off an hour into the two the batteries were supposed to last. And I did see a lot of orbs on the video monitors, plus a couple in my photos.

Jake Warga

The week before this trip, my mom's best friend-- my Auntie Mame as I called her, she even called me Patrick-- died. I was shocked, still am. This is the first time I lost someone close to me and wasn't unable to say a proper goodbye. When each of my parents died, I was with them. I want to believe in ghosts. I want to say goodbye to my Auntie Mame. And I want to believe that my parents and grandparents, who said they'd always be there for me, in fact, are.

I'm going to join Amateur Ghost Hunters of Seattle-Tacoma, pay my $30 and get my badge and T-shirt. So maybe someday, during some investigation with AGHOST, chasing around a haunted place, or after midnight in some cemetery, I'll see or hear something that will make me believe that there is life after death, that ghosts do exist.

Ira Glass

Jake Warga. His story got some support from hearingvoices.com and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[MUSIC - "FADED FROM THE WINTER" BY IRON & WINE]

Ira Glass

Act Two, Government Science. A couple months ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a report condemning the Bush administration for what it called "distorting and censoring" scientific findings which contradict administration policies. One of the cases cited in the report involved something called the Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning. This committee is one of about two dozen in the Centers for Disease Control. Its mission is to advise the CDC how best to deal with the threat of childhood lead poisoning. The advisory committee has existed, in one form or another, for 30 years, starting in the '70s when the battle was to get the lead out of gasoline. Alex Blumberg has been following the recent fights over who's going to serve in this committee. Each side in the fight thinks the other is practicing a kind of fake science. Here's Alex.

Alex Blumberg

Dr. Bruce Lanphear is exactly the type of person you'd expect to find on something called an Advisory Committee for Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention. He's been the lead researcher on numerous studies investigating the effects of lead on children. He's a scientific consultant to the National Center for Lead-Safe Housing. And he's the author of a whole stack of scientific articles with titles like, "The effect of soil abatement on blood lead levels in children living near a former smelting and milling operation." So it's no surprise that the CDC got in touch with him.

Alex Blumberg

Serving on a CDC scientific advisory committee is the elite, scientific version of serving on a task force at your local school board. Committee members aren't paid a salary. They keep their old jobs. They're just private citizens who meet a couple of times a year and offer their expertise and energy to help solve problems. They have no regulatory authority. They don't even set policy. But because they are some of the leading experts in the field, their recommendations carry weight. The CDC told Dr. Lanphear that he should expect to begin work on the committee in a couple months, after the largely pro forma approval of his nomination was complete. But this was an election year. The Bush administration took power. And it took roughly a year and a half after he was first contacted for Dr. Lanphear to get another call from a CDC official.

Alex Blumberg

Dr. William Banner is the man who was appointed to the committee instead of Dr. Lanphear. And if you've ever wondered about that scientist industry trots out to say, all this research is wrong, smoking doesn't cause cancer, the climate is not changing, and lead paint isn't dangerous for kids, here he is. A liberal pediatrician in Oklahoma. Dr. Banner runs a children's hospital and is the medical director for the Oklahoma Poison Control Center. He doesn't want to loosen the current CDC recommendations about how much lead in kids' blood is safe. From my hour-long conversation with him, he seems to care deeply about the welfare of children in this state. He's an ardent supporter of Head Start. And he told me that the greatest threat to children that he saw was a recent change in the welfare law which kicks families off of government assistance. But he has also, on many occasions, been an expert witness for the lead industry, that is, companies like paint manufacturers who are being sued over the lead content in their products. They hire him because he's willing to say on the witness stand that none of the studies connecting lead and children's cognitive development are conclusive.

Alex Blumberg

Dr. Banner went to his boss, the director of the hospital where he works, said, hey, the government wants someone to nominate me for this committee. And his boss said, sure, we'll send a letter. And so now, when you call the government, as I did, and ask about Bill Banner, he sounds great.

Alex Blumberg

This is Bill Pierce, the media relations guy for Tommy Thompson, the man appointed by George Bush to run the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, which runs the CDC. Bill Pierce assured me that, contrary to what everybody I talked to told me, it was very common to overrule specific CDC nominations and appoint different people.

Alex Blumberg

The question of whether Dr. Banner is qualified to serve on this committee is an interesting one. On the one hand, he has some very sensible opinions about government policies on lead. For instance, he didn't agree with the federal recommendations in the early '90s that said every child in the country should be tested for lead. In his rural state of Oklahoma, far away from old, deteriorating housing stock and big industrial smelters, lead wasn't the problem for children, he thought. Poor nutrition and a low immunization rate were. He didn't like having to spend what little money he had on a problem that, in his view, didn't exist.

On the other hand, he hasn't done any research on the effects of lead exposure on children. And his opinions of other people's research run counter to what pretty much every scientist in the field would say.

Alex Blumberg

What he's talking about is this. Over the last 10 or 20 years, many researchers working in many different countries with many different populations, have done studies investigating the link between elevated amounts of lead in children's blood and loss of IQ. They take a sample of children, measure their lead levels, give them an intelligence test, use a bunch of fancy statistical techniques to control for other factors, like parents' IQ. And in every study, they show a link between higher blood lead levels and lower IQ. But Dr. Banner says, they prove nothing. They can't, he says, by their very nature. They're statistical studies. Even when they show a correlation between lead and IQ loss, it could be coincidental. They tell us nothing about cells in the brain and what lead does to those cells.

Alex Blumberg

Dr. Banner presents a compelling portrait of himself, a maverick scientist with common sense bravely telling the emperor, in this case multiple regression analysis, that it has no clothes. But to most experts in public health, to deny this research is basically denying the mathematical basis of all modern epidemiology which studies the spread of disease by applying the same techniques in the blood lead studies to hundreds of other health areas. Dr. Michael Weitzman has worked for 30 years doing field epidemiological research on children's health issues. For him, it's like denying that the earth is round.

Alex Blumberg

Especially, he says, when epidemiology gets results. Using only mathematics, epidemiologists have eradicated a number of diseases without any understanding of the basic biology. For instance, Reye's Syndrome, which killed a lot of school-aged children in the 1970s.

Alex Blumberg

Bill Pierce, the spokesman for HHS, didn't want to talk to me about any of this initially. He was convinced that I, like every other reporter, had an agenda. I'd been spun by the Union of Concerned Scientists and by a webpage put up by Representative Henry Waxman, which attacks Bush administration policies regarding science. He said that these things all made mountains out of molehills and ignored something much more fundamental.

Alex Blumberg

He's right. Even experts who got rejected from the committee agree that they probably wouldn't have done much different from the current committee members. But there is something at stake. And that is, how do we view science? Bill Pierce said to me, listen, there's Democratic scientific experts, and there's Republican scientific experts. Democrats appoint the Democratic experts. And when Republicans come in, they appoint the Republican experts, Dr. Banner notwithstanding. But this is actually a fundamental shift. Consider J. Routt Reigart, a professor of pediatrics in South Carolina. He drafted the very first document the CDC ever issued about lead poisoning back in the 1970s. He's been involved with the CDC on one committee or another ever since, from Nixon to Clinton. And he says, in the past, appointments were not political.

Alex Blumberg

The Bush administration suggests that science is just like politics. Dr. Banner has his opinion, Dr. Lanphear has his, and they're both valid. But that's not actually how science works. Science is based on the premise that there are not two equally valid points of view on all issues, that there's a verifiable truth to things. That one side is right, and one side is wrong. And science has a process in place to figure that out. And so, Dr. Reigart says, there is an objective difference between Dr. Banner and Dr. Lanphear.

Alex Blumberg

In other words, Dr. Banner can raise his concerns about experimental methodology in courtrooms all over the country and to reporters on the radio and at public advisory meetings for the CDC. But science has already settled those questions long ago. Of the 12 members in the current Lead Advisory Committee, only one could be considered a leading researcher on the effects of lead on children. And he's rotating off at the end of the month. It'll be a science advisory committee without any scientific expertise. In the case of lead, this might not be so dangerous. The science concerning lead has been settled, more or less, for years. But on dozens of other committees appointed this way, committees which investigate global climate change, for example, or the effects of pesticides on human health, committees where the issues are much less clear, we need every expert we can find.

Ira Glass

Alex Blumberg is one of the producers of our show. Coming up. I hear dead people, part two, more real recordings. And how to determine whether you, yes you, are objectively as beautiful as the stars. Facts, details, analyses. That is in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme. We bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Fake Science, stories of people employing scientific logic, scientific analyses wrongly. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Beauty Science. There's a whole-- I don't even know the word-- there's a whole tendency in certain people to try to apply objective standards, find objective standards, pseudo-scientific standards, to things that, frankly, are never going to be objective. You know what I'm talking about? You've seen those scholars who write books explaining why comedy is funny. That's what I'm talking about. Some things are really better off left unexamined, far from the groping, sweating, parsing, greedy hands of fake scientists of all kinds. And for an example of this, all you need to do is look at this article that's on the website Fametracker.com. It points out a recent attempt by a famous magazine, one that is on newsstands right now, to dive into this area. Adam Sternbergh is the co-founder and co-editor of Fametracker, and he has the story here.

Adam Sternbergh

Yes. It's that time of year. People magazine has once again graciously taken on the task of whittling down the hundreds of blindingly brilliant, gaspingly gorgeous, eye-searingly spectacular celebrities to a final, chart-topping 50. How do they do this? Can you imagine the arguments? Benjamin Bratt. Rodrigo Santoro. Benjamin Bratt. Rodrigo Santoro. Benjamin Bratt. Rodrigo Santoro. Then some poor, unfortunate associate editor gets a letter opener to the eye. And Rodrigo Santoro, the quote Brazilian actor and health-buff, gets page 142.

This annual culling of the perfect may seem an arduous and arbitrary task. This year, though, People's given us a peek into the process. These selections aren't just the ephemeral whims of overworked editors, their eyes blearied by beauty. No, these selections are made based on the rigorous rules of science. Science, damn it, science. It's about 2/3 the width of his mouth and a perfect 1/3 of the length of his face, and his wide cheekbones and square jaw balance the width. No, this isn't Keats writing another ode, this is Dr. Steven Pearlman, a Manhattan-based plastic surgeon quoted in People. And he's lovingly describing Orlando Bloom's nose. Oh yes, let us see that perfect 1/3 baby.

Bloom's nose is featured in a section titled, "Most Wanted," which details the most wanted lips, eyes, nose, or cheekbones of the stars. The possessor of each perfect feature is described with a snappy, verb-centric sentence. For example, of Nicole Kidman's skin it says, "She glows." Of Johnny Depp's cheekbones, "He smolders." Of Bloom's coveted nose, "He commands." That's right. Orlando Bloom's nose commands. To do what? It's not entirely clear. It turns out, beauty is not, in fact, in the eye of the beholder, as some olden days person wanted us to believe, whoever that was. Caesar or Jesus. Beauty can be reduced to a mathematical formula. And it's fun to try at home.

Let's turn to Dr. Francis Palmer, founder of the Beverly Hills International Center for Aesthetic Surgery and co-director of Facial Plastic Surgery at University of Southern California School of Medicine. And with each paragraph-hogging list of professional credentials, you can picture that poor People fact-checker, phone stuck to her ear as the aesthetic surgery doctor in question reads his resume very slowly over the phone, as though speaking to someone who is developmentally delayed, "Beverly Hills Internat-- yes. Aesthetic. OK. A-E-S--"

Dr. Palmer has quote devised the following point system to determine true beauty. You get 75% of the points for your cheekbones, 10% for eyes and eyebrows, 7% for lips, and 2% each for jaw, chin, and neck, sleek nose, clear skin, and quote general harmony of features. So who scores the highest among, say, recent reality TV babes? Why, it's Survivor's newly minted millionaire, Amber Brkich, with 97%.

But where do we, the regular folk, fit in? It's easy to find out. Here's the formula, as printed in People magazine. To do a self-analysis, draw an imaginary line from the pupil of your eye down toward your jaw. Draw a second line from the nostrils across your cheeks. The bottom of your cheek bone should fall at or below the intersection of these lines. If it is higher, your face may appear flat and masculine. So she glows. She sparkles. He smolders. You suck. Hey, that's not our opinion. That's science talking.

Ira Glass

Adam Sternbergh. Read his analyses of both the famous and the very famous at Fametracker.com, where this story first appeared.

[MUSIC - "I AM THE BODY BEAUTIFUL" BY SALT 'N PEPA]

Ira Glass

Act Four, Radio Science. Fake science can be fun, and it can bring people together. Brent Runyon has heard it happen himself in the middle of the night.

Brent Runyon

Most nights I have a hard time going to sleep. I worry a lot when I go to bed. I worry about money and if I should go and work at the movie theater again. I worry that we're not going to be able to stay in this house. And I worry that if we do move, everyone will be miserable. After that, I worry that the Red Sox will never win a World Series, and that Nomar's Achilles is going to require surgery, and that the Yankees will always win no matter what the Red Sox do. I know a lot of people who have trouble going to sleep. Walker, who is 12, needs to have the dishwasher on to go to sleep and the dryer. Grandpa Jim used to count upwards through the prime numbers. I remember when I was a little kid, I used to lie in bed and listen to my parents talking through the wall. Their voices sounded muffled, and I couldn't make out the words. But I liked listening to the sounds.

Now at night, I turn on the radio, so I can hear voices when I'm going to sleep. It's tuned to the same station the Red Sox games are on, an all-talk station. They have some local guys in the morning and Rush Limbaugh in the afternoon. But at night, they have this program called Coast to Coast AM. I remember the first time I heard the show. It was 1:00 in the morning, and I couldn't sleep. So I turned on the radio. And there were people talking about recordings from beyond the grave. And then they played the recordings. And at first, there was just a lot of tape hiss and a kind of angry grumbling. I was laughing at how silly it was. And then a voice seemed to say, I found the link. Except that instead of saying it in a normal voice, the voice said it in a creepy, David Lynch, Twin Peaks, little man in the red room backward, kind of voice. I sat up in bed and turned the light on. It freaked me out. I was freaked out by some weird voice on a radio show in the middle of the night. And still, I would rather listen to that than worry about money. So I turned the light out and closed my eyes and listened until I fell asleep.

Since then, I've barely missed a night. It's hard for me to fall asleep without it. I travel with an AM radio. I wait to go to bed until 1:00 AM when the opening music kicks in. And when it does, I don't want to go to sleep anymore.

Brent Runyon

That's Art Bell, the weekend host of Coast to Coast. He's a ham radio operator in his spare time. He's got a bad back, and he does the show out of his house. The whole program runs like an amateur scientific society from the dawn of the Enlightenment. There's a sense that there's this stuff out there that's barely been studied, and we don't even have good procedures for studying it yet. But if we all sit down and reason together, we can probably make some sense out of it. Aliens, Mars, time travel. Listeners call up to talk about shadow people and this ghoulish figure called the old hag who sits on their chest while they sleep.

But there are ground rules. Art lets the callers discuss whatever they want as long as they follow some system of logic and can back up their claims with a little evidence, with some kind of facts, or at the very least, a coherent story. If not, well, there's going to be trouble.

Brent Runyon

In the Coast to Coast universe, nearly everyone shares some basic assumptions. We know that aliens exist because so many people call up and talk about seeing them. And if aliens exist, then there has to be a shadow government covering up the aliens. And if the shadow government exists, who is controlling it? Well, that's what we're trying to find out. Ghosts exist too. Also, life after death and reincarnation and time travel and prophecy.

One night, a truck driver called in and said he'd eaten at a '50s style truck stop in Ohio that was filled with pretty waitresses and good food. And then when he tried to go back a few weeks later, it was gone. Not torn down, it had never existed. Art sounded like he'd heard that one before. All he said was, phantom truck stop-- the way you'd say the Eiffel Tower, like we all know what that is-- and then went on to the next caller.

Much of the data presented on the show falls into the category of experiments that would be difficult for other scientists to reproduce. For example, the recording of hell. Someone sent Art this tape, which was supposedly recorded by scientists who were mining in Siberia. They drilled down nine miles until they smashed through into earth's hollow core. They measured the temperature at 2,000 degrees. And then they dropped down a super-sensitive microphone to listen to the tectonic movements. But they accidentally recorded the moanings of souls in hell. In case you've ever wondered what that sounds like, here it is.

[SOUND OF MOANINGS]

So Art plays this tape on the air, and people call in to discuss the breakthrough because there are questions of methodology to be discussed. They're not saying, well, maybe hell doesn't exist, or even if hell exists, it's probably not in the center of the earth, or it would be easy for anyone to fake this. They're discussing the logistics of drilling a nine-mile hole and then dangling a microphone into it. The sound quality of this next clip isn't the greatest.

Brent Runyon

When I think about it, one of the really surprising things about Coast to Coast is how little disagreement there is. You turn on the radio any time of day, and people are arguing about politics or sports or whatever. When there are disagreements on Coast to Coast, they're about whether aliens are truly from another world or are simply human beings traveling through time to harvest our DNA. Or whether the pyramids were built by people from other planets or if they were built by giants.

I think, just from listening every night, the sheer volume of it, four hours of Coast to Coast whether I'm awake or asleep, I've totally stopped being skeptical about it. Now I just let the ideas wash over me like chemtrails.

You know when jets fly over and you can see the vapor trail, the misty exhaust line that goes away after a few minutes? Those are called contrails. Well, chemtrails look the same, but they hang in the atmosphere for much longer. According to a Canadian journalist, chemtrails are a government-sponsored climate modification experiment. Basically, military jets are spraying large amounts of microscopic particles into the atmosphere to counteract global warming.

When I first heard about chemtrails, I thought, quartz particles suspended in midair to reflect light and heal the ozone layer? That sounds pretty far-fetched. But then guests and callers kept bringing it up, and I heard about it so much, it just became part of my normal life. Then NASA just released a study saying that contrails may be affecting climate change. And now, I can't look up into the blue sky without thinking about chemtrails.

On Fridays, George Noory, the other host of Coast to Coast, does open lines. And sometimes he asks for stories from people around a particular theme. Last week, the theme was "I was cursed," and he got calls from all over. One guy talked for a long time about these creatures that were following him. A woman called and said she'd been cursed for over 20 years by a former roommate, and that everything had gone terribly for her until she'd hired a good witch to remove the curse. And then George got this call from Bob, east of the Rockies. On any other radio show, Bob would just be another sad story about depression, and the toll it takes on you. But on Coast to Coast, if you're depressed and have had a hard time, then you must have been cursed.

Brent Runyon

At 1:00 in the morning, I understand what he means. We're all up in the middle of the night, we can't sleep. We're worried about things we can't really do anything about. It's all just so much easier to deal with if there's a reason. We're cursed, or it's the shadow people, or demons, or chemtrails. If there's some bigger, powerful, controlling force, then everything makes sense. It's easier to stop worrying. It's easier to go to sleep.

Ira Glass

Brent Runyon lives in Cape Cod and is the author of the memoir, The Burn Journals, which will come out this September.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Will Reichel.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

You know you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have Public Radio programs, best-selling books, even The New York Times all at audible.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight by Mr. Torey Malatia. Every time he wanders by my office or I pass him in the hall, I can hear him mumbling to himself.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI, Public Radio International.