Out-of-Body Experiences and Near-Death Experiences Long Before 1975

Near-death experiences first started to become well-known around 1975, with the popularity of Raymond Moody's book on the concept (entitled Life After Life). But we have very good reason to believe that such experiences have been a fact of human experience long before Moody's book.  The 1973 book Glimpses of the Beyond: The Extraordinary Experiences of People Who Crossed the Brinks of Death and Returned by Jean-Baptiste Delacour preceded by several years the much more famous Life After Life book by Raymond Moody.  You can read some of the Delacour book's many accounts of near-death experiences by reading my post "The Evidence for Out-of-Body Experiences," which also cites many accounts of out-of-body experiences collected by Robert Crookall in the 1960's (such accounts typically containing one of the main elements of near-death experiences).  In my previous post "Four Near-Death Experiences of the Nineteenth Century," I described four near-death experiences that had been written before the year 1900. In the post here I describe two other near-death experiences of the nineteenth century. Page 476 of the nineteenth century work "Man and His Relations" by Dr. Paul Joire gives another account of a near-death experience. 

The pages here and here describe out-of-body experiences of the nineteenth century. The page here lists a nineteenth century near-death experience involving the "life review" so often reported in near-death experiences. On page 385 of the long and very interesting paper here, we read of a gravely ill man who was "conscious of something like a fleecy ball releasing itself from his physical form," with the man reporting he "distinctly saw my dead body lying upon the bed."  On page 386 we read this:

"While waiting for the return of his companions, Mr. Bertrand apparently began to freeze to death, such that he was unable to rouse himself. After a brief moment of acute pain, he suddenly found himself  'a ball of air in the air, a captive balloon still attached to earth by a kind of elastic string and going up and always up. How strange! I see better than ever, and I am dead.... Looking down, I was astounded to recognise my own envelope.' "

The passage below was narrated in 1927 and quoted in the 1954 book The Personality of Man by G.N.M. Tyrrell:

"By ten o'clock I had developed all the symptoms of very acute poisoning; intense gastrointestinal pain, diarrhea; pulse and respirations became quite impossible to count, I wanted to ring for assistance, but found I could not, and so quite placidly gave up the attempt...I realised that I could see, not only my body and the bed in which it was, but everything in the whole house and garden, and then I realised that I was seeing, not only 'things' at home but in London and in Scotland, in fact wherever my attention was directed, it seemed to me; and the explanation which I received, from what source I do not know, but which I found myself calling to myself my mentor, was that I was free in a time-dimension of space, wherein 'now' was in some way equivalent to 'here' in the ordinary three-dimensional space of everyday life....I saw 'A' enter my bedroom; I realised she got a terrible shock and I saw her hurry to the telephone. I saw my doctor leave his patients and come very quickly, and heard him say, or saw him think, 'He is nearly gone.' I heard him quite clearly speaking to me on the bed, but I was not in touch with my body and could not answer him. I was really cross when he took a syringe and rapidly injected my body with something which I afterwards learned was camphor. As the heart began to beat more strongly, I was drawn back, and I was intensely annoyed, because I was so interested and just beginning to understand where I was and what I was 'seeing.' I came back into the body really angry at being pulled back, and once I was back, all the clarity of vision of anything and everything disappeared and I was just possessed of a glimmer of consciousness, which was suffused with pain." 

We have here some of the main elements typically found in near-death experiences, including (1) an out-of-body experience including seeing the body from above; (2) a sense of heightened cognition and perception;  and (3) disappointment at being brought back into the body.  The account was taken down in shorthand by a secretary soon after the event. 

Another near-death experience of the first half of the twentieth century is found in the interesting book The Imprisoned Splendour.  We read the account of a man who was thrown twenty feet after his armored scout car got struck by a German anti-tank shell in 1944. We read this:

"I was conscious of being two persons -- one, lying on the ground in a field where I had fallen from the blast, my clothes, etc., on fire ...The other 'me' was floating up in the air, about twenty feet from my body, from which position I could see not only my other self on the ground, but also the hedge, the road, and the car, which was surrounded by smoke and burning fiercely."

The person reported telling himself to roll to put out the fire, and then once he did,  his perception returned to normal. The account originally appeared on page 207 of the March-April 1948 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, which can be read here. 

Andrew Jackson Davis was a famous American visionary and prodigy whose experiences are told in his long 1867 autobiography The Magic Staff. On page 133 of his book Harmonial Philosophy,  Davis gives a description of a person's soul or astral body becoming visible at the time of someone's death. A footnote tells us the account is based on observations Davis had of dying people. He states this:

"A human being lies on the bed of death, and is indeed actually dying. It is to be a rapid death. The physical body grows negative and cold, in proportion as the elements of the spiritual body become warm and positive. The feet become cold first. The clairvoyant sees right over the head what may be called a magnetic halo — an ethereal emanation, golden in appearance and throbbing as though conscious. Now the body is cold up to the knees and elbows. The legs are then cold to the hips and the arms to the shoulders. The emanation is more expanded, though it has not risen higher in the room. The death-coldness steals over the breast and around on either side. The emanation has attained a position nearer the ceiling. The person has ceased to breathe, the pulse is still. The emanation is elongated and fashioned in the outline of the human form. It is connected beneath with the brain. The head of the person throbs internally — a slow, deep throb, not painful, but like the beat of the sea. The thinking faculties are rational, while nearly every part of the person is dead. The golden emanation is connected with the brain by a very fine life-thread. On the body of the emanation there appears something white and shining, like a human head ; next comes a faint outline of the face divine ; the fair neck and beautiful shoulders manifest, and then in rapid succession all parts of the new body down to the feet — a bright shining image, somewhat smaller than the physical but a perfect prototype in all except disfigurements. The fine life-thread continues attached to the old brain. The next thing is the withdrawal of this electrical principle. When the thread snaps the spiritual body is free and is prepared to accompany its guardians to the Summer Land."

Andrew Jackson Davis

On page 41 of Muldoon's The Case for Astral Projection, he cites testimony by a Dr. Riblet Brisbane Hout in which he claims to have seen the astral bodies of patients under anesthesia undergoing surgery.  He reports seeing spirit bodies of the patients hovering near their physical bodies, connected to the bodies by a silvery shaft of light. 

On the next page Muldoon states this:

"In this connection I might mention at this juncture that only a few weeks ago an orthodox Methodist minister of irreproachable character, who has been well known in my neighborhood for years, confided in me that while at the bedside of a dying friend, early this spring, he saw a cloudlike light rise up out of the body of his friend just as the latter expired. The light, he stated, floated up into the air and disappeared."

On page 49 we hear an account by a Dr. Ostby who in 1904 reported finding himself out of his body, looking down on his body in bed. He thought he was dead, but willed himself back into his body. 

On page 65 we read this:

"M. Hymans states that his next experience took place in a London hotel. He was suffering with heart-weakness when he awoke in the morning. In a short time he fainted and says: 'To my great surprise I found myself high up in the room from where, to my terror, I saw my body in the bed, eyes closed. I tried to re-enter my body, but without success and concluded that I was dead. I could not leave the room and felt chained to it, immobilized in the corner where I found myself.' "

On page 67 we read of a New Jersey woman who reported an out-of-body experience during an operation. She recalls meeting a deceased grandmother who took her on a little flying tour that ended with the woman returning to her body. 

On page 75 Muldoon tells us of an account he received from a woman who reported being out of her body viewing it from above during an operation.  On pages 77-78 Muldoon quotes various accounts of out-of-body experiences of the medium Gladys Osborne Leonard. 

On page 93 we read an account by  Caroline D. Larsen:

"Next thing I knew was that I, I myself, was standing on the floor beside my bed looking down attentively at my own physical body lying in it. I recognized every line in the familiar face, pale and still as in death, the features drawn, the eyes tightly closed and the mouth partly open. The arms and hands rested limp and lifeless beside the body. I gazed at that material form of mine for a few minutes while mingled feelings passed over me. Strangely enough, they were not feelings of great surprise. I experienced no shock at finding myself in this peculiar position. It was chiefly curiosity that possessed my mind. I was perfectly calm and composed as I viewed that mortal form I had just previously inhabited."

On page 95 we read this account by Cromwell Anderson:

"One night I awoke to find myself floating over my body, a few feet from the ceiling and could see my physical body on the bed beneath me. I appeared to be in an utterly cataleptic state, yet my consciousness was greatly intensified.  This was not my first projection as I had several times been observed by others, in the astral body, many miles away; but this time I awakened while yet over my body. Panic seized me as I realized what had occurred and I wondered how to get back before anyone discovered my ‘corpse’ and this fear instantly made me recoil into my form with a great shock."

On page 103 we read of a novelist named William Gerhardi who had an out-of-body experience, one in which he seemed to experience the "silver cord" often reported in out-of-body experiences:

"At the back of me was a coil of light, like a luminous garden hose resembling the strong broad ray of dusty light at the back of a dark cinema projecting on the screen in front. To my utter astonishment, that broad cable of light at the back of me illuminated the very face on the pillows I recognized as my own, as if attached to the brow of the sleeper. It was myself, not dead, but breathing peacefully, my mouth slightly open."

On pages 116-117 Muldoon describes his first out-of-body experience:

"Slowly ...I was moving toward the ceiling, all the while lying horizontal and powerless. Naturally I believed that this was my physical body as I had always known it, but that it had mysteriously begun to defy gravity...Involuntarily, at about six feet above the bed, as if the movement had been conducted by an invisible intelligent force, present in the very air, I was uprighted from the horizontal position, to the perpendicular, and placed standing upon the floor of the room... where I remained for two or three minutes, still unable to move of my own accord... I managed to turn around. There were two of me! In the name of common sense — there were two of me! There was another 'me' lying quietly upon the bed. It was difficult to conceive of this being real — but there I was, fully conscious, fully able to reason and know what I saw was actual. The next thing which caught my eye, explained the curious sensation in the back of my head — for my two identical bodies were joined by means of an elastic-like cord, one end of which was fastened to the medulla oblongata region of my phantom counterpart, while the other end centered between the eyes of my physical counterpart. This cord extended across the space of probably six feet which separated us."

We have here a description of an observer existing horizontally above his own body. In one of his works on out-of-body experiences, Robert Crookall noted quite a few observers who reported this:

"A number described their newly released 'doubles' as occupying a remarkable position, namely horizontal, just above the vacated body. They were J. McCormack (who noted 'this rather odd position'), Miss Bazett (about three feet above), Mrs. C. H. Smith (about a foot above), Mulvey (about three feet above), Dennis, Mr. 'H,' Mrs. Boorman, Dr. Gilbert, Mrs. Hibberd, Miss Douglas, Nurse Normanby, Mrs. 'Horam,' Miss Dean, G. Lester, and Mrs. Folson ( when she was a child of five or six years). More than a score of others, who did not describe the horizontal position, did note that their 'doubles' were above their bodies."

On page 138 of the Muldoon book, we read of an Arthur J. Wills who reported to Muldoon in 1929 an out-of-the-body experience:

"Then I saw that it was not my physical body in which I was consciously propped up (by my right arm) ; for, looking downward, I saw my body still sleeping on the seat! For a few moments I enjoyed and admired this new and beautiful body (the astral), which was rosy pink, glowing like a luminous pearl. Something which looked like an ‘arm’ seemed to run down and merge into the brain of the physical body. In a short time I was back in my physical body again."

In the 1907 book The Psychic Riddle by Isaac Kaufmann Funk (the same Funk of the famous Funk and Wagnall's dictionary) the author relays an account given him by a man who he says was well-known and very successful:

"I became conscious of being in a room and looking down on a body propt up in bed, which I recognized as my own. I can not tell what strange feelings came over me. This body, to all intents and purposes, looked to be dead. There was no indication of life about it, and yet here I was apart from the body, with my mind thoroughly clear and alert, and the consciousness of another body to which matter of any kind offered no resistance."

The medium Daniel Dunglas Home was the most noted of all physical mediums, and was successfully tested by the leading scientist Sir William Crookes, who documented many an astounding paranormal event related to Home. In his 1864 biography Incidents in My Life, Daniel Dunglas Home related an out-of-body experience. After hearing a mysterious voice that seemed to be that of his late wife, he had an experience he described below:

"I was at this instant brought to a consciousness of light, by seeing the whole of my nervous system, as it were, composed of thousands of electrical scintillations, which here and there, as in the created nerve, took the form of currents, darting their rayons over the whole body in a manner most marvellous ; still this was but a cold electrical light and besides, it was external. Gradually, however, I saw that the extremities were less luminous, and the finer membranes' surrounding the brain became as it were glowing, and I felt that thought and action were no longer connected with the earthly tenement, but that they were in a spirit-body in every respect similar to the body which I knew to have been mine, and which I now saw lying motionless before me on the bed. The only link which held the two forms together seemed to be a silvery-like light, which proceeded from the brain ; and, as if it were a response to my earlier waking thoughts, the same voice, only that it was now more musical than before, said,  'Death is but a second birth, corresponding in every respect to the natural birth, and should the uniting link now be severed, you could never again enter the body.' "

Again, we have what is reported often in accounts of out-of-body experiences, the idea of a "silver cord" connecting a physical body and a kind of spirit body. In a 1918 book we read an account of just such a thing, and then a female named Beryl Hinton tells of an out-body-experience:

"Years ago, when only seventeen, I was, in Calcutta, put under chloroform to have a number of teeth out. I presently felt I, myself, was in space above my body, round which were the doctors, dentists, and my mother, and I remember wondering why I was not being judged, since I was obviously dead. I had been brought up as a strict Roman Catholic and taught that individual judgment followed death. I had never read any psychical books or experiences. I was afterwards told that my condition caused alarm, as I would not come back to consciousness."

At the end of his book More Astral Projections, Robert Crookall has some interesting summary statistics regarding how often such accounts had recurring characteristics. He used the term "the double" for a kind of spirit body that was a double of the human body. For what he called "single-type cases" the statistics included the following:

• "The fact that, the newly-released ‘double’, often took up a horizontal position (usually not far above its physical counterpart), was noted in 50 natural and 7 enforced cases (i.e. 23.3 per cent and 18.9 per cent respectively)."
• The percentage of people reporting a "silver cord" or "shining cord" connecting the human body and a spirit body (or something like that) was "43 (20.0 per cent) natural cases, 6 (16.2 per cent) enforced cases." 

The similarities in out-of-body experiences are far too great to be explained by any hypothesis of hallucination.  We find in accounts of out-of-body experiences:

(1) A huge number of observers reporting observing their body from above, with very many reporting being near the ceiling.

(2) Many observers (at least 57) reporting they were floating in a horizontal position above their bodies.

(3) Many observers (at least 49) reporting that there was a kind of cord or thread  or string or arm connecting the physical body and a kind of spiritual or astral body (sometimes called "the double"), with this cord often being described as having a silvery or glowing appearance, and often reported as being elastic, and often reported as being attached to the head or brain. 

(4) Very many observers reporting that after viewing their body from above, they had some type of enhanced cognition, and could then perceive scenes in other rooms, other homes, or some place (perhaps heavenly or spiritual) that seemed to be not an earthly location.  

The probability of random hallucinations producing so many accounts so similar seems as small as the probability that many people all over the world in many different countries would all report (purely because of coincidentally similar random hallucinations) that they all saw a pink elephant smoking a cigar. In general, hallucinations are not a credible explanation for any very specific and distinctive observational report repeated with great similarity by many witnesses in different places. For example, if many people in different places reported seeing a large green glowing streak in the sky one night, then in all probability they were not hallucinating: because hallucinations (having infinite possible forms) would never produce content so similar to so many people. 

A Leading Science Journal's Senseless UFO Scolding

A long article in the leading US science journal Science is a senseless piece of scolding. It seems that Science is very, very concerned that an astronomer trying to study UFOs is actually talking to a few people who are scholars of UFOs.  The article discusses an astronomer (Avi Loeb) who plans to set up fancy new telescopic cameras looking for UFOs. 

The article has a subtitle of "Why is Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb working with ardent UFO believers?"  It seems that anyone who believes in UFOs is part of a very large group of people kind of deemed "untouchables" by the journal Science:  a vast group of "thought deviants" who have ideas differing from some alleged academia norm of "orthodox thinking" advocated by the journal.  And just as many in India still encourage a caste system in which those in a particular caste are deemed "untouchables" who must be avoided, it seems that the journal Science wants to enforce some system by which contact with heretical "thought deviants" must be avoided, lest the "orthodox minds" of the pure be sullied by contrarian opinions and upsetting evidence.  

Of course, once some group of people have been branded and stigmatized as thought deviants, there are all kinds of gaslighting techniques and mudslinging techniques that can be used to smear them and marginalize them.  The Science article uses such techniques in several ways:

• It uses the term "ardent believers" for people suspecting UFOs exists, thereby suggesting some element of fanaticism. 
• It quotes one person referring to UFO believers or UFO scholars as "fringy people."
• It refers to "UFO zealots."
• It quotes another person referring to UFO believers or UFO scholars as "these fringe people" who you "lose far more" by contacting. 
• It uses the term "notorious" for UFO believers or UFO scholars, thereby trying to insinuate they are scoundrels.
• It approvingly quotes a scientist saying that those who are looking for UFO's are like "those who are hoping to find mermaids or unicorns." 

These are standard tactics for those trying to sweep the paranormal under the rug.  The playbook is basically: shame, blame and defame the witnesses, and shame, blame and defame anyone who becomes a scholar of the phenomena under investigation.  None of the statements above is supported by any facts in the Science article, and we have no quotes showing zealotry in any of the UFO experts mentioned (some of whom I have watched on TV at length without detecting zealotry or ardent dogmatism).  

The underlying principle that seems to be advocated in the article is: when studying some anomalous phenomena, avoid contact with anyone who believes in the phenomena. This is an unscholarly and unscientific principle that no science journal should be promoting. In general, the best evidence for any phenomena will tend to be found in the testimony of those who witnessed something compelling enough to persuade them to believe that the phenomena is real and not illusory.  By avoiding contact with such people, you are in effect establishing a principle of "investigate the phenomena but avoid the best evidence for it." Such a principle makes no sense at all.  For example, if it were 1968 in America and you were  investigating then-unconfirmed reports that some American soldiers had committed war crimes in Vietnam, it would make no sense at all to follow a principle of "avoid contact with those who believe that some Americans have committed war crimes in Vietnam."

Here are some good principles of investigating claims of an anomalous phenomena, principles quite the opposite of the faulty principle discussed above:

(1) Study all of the most important works previously written on the topic, focusing as much as possible on original source material and first-hand accounts. 

(2) Try to get direct testimony (either in person or video testimony) from witnesses who publicly identify themselves. 

(3) Study carefully all existing photographic and video evidence for the alleged phenomenon. 

(4) If possible, try to get new photographic or eyewitness testimony for the alleged phenomenon, ideally under conditions that rule out fraud or error. 

Unfortunately,  Avi Loeb's new project (which he has christened the Galileo Project) won't be following any of these principles, except  that it will half-follow the last one.  Loeb has made it clear that he won't look into any eyewitness accounts of UFOs, and won't look at previously gathered photographic evidence for UFOs.  Loeb is only interested in evidence that appears in some fancy new machines that his project will set up.  So it rather seems his Galileo Project will be kind of mainly an Avi Loeb glory show, perhaps so that Loeb can be crowned as the new Galileo who first proved that UFOs are real.  I wish him luck, but I don't rank his odds of success as being very high.  But at least he has enough sense to be in contact with some people who have spent many years studying UFOs, rather than senselessly ignoring them, as the journal Science would have him do. 

Scientists do not in general follow any principle such as "do not become involved with people who believe in some phenomena when investigating whether that phenomenon is real."  To the contrary, the scientists who investigate unproven claims popular in academia very often tend to be enthusiastic believers in such claims. So, for example, the physicists who write papers on string theory or supersymmetry or primordial cosmic inflation tend to be believers in such unproven ideas; and biologists investigating unproven ideas about brains or unproven claims of natural abiogenesis tend to believe in such ideas; and astronomers looking for signs of distant extraterrestrial life tend to believe such life exists.  There is no evidence that UFO believers are more ardent believers of the unproven than mainstream theoretical scientists are ardent believers of the unproven. 

It is puzzling that so many scientists treat UFO witnesses or UFO photographers or UFO believers as pariahs. We can understand why such professors might hate people who report out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences, or hate scholars of psychic phenomena. Such people often report things that contradict or discredit the core belief dogmas of many a science professor.  But a UFO witness does not do such a thing. A believer in UFOs may think that intelligent life appeared on some other planet through some Darwinian process, and eventually got around to traveling to Earth. There's nothing in such an idea that challenges any core belief dogmas of the modern science professor.  So why all the hostility? We can only speculate. One possible reason is that the science professor establishment wishes to keep people thinking that no one shall learn important truths of nature except through their elite priesthood.  Maybe their thinking is: we cannot learn important truths about space from billions of people holding smartphone cameras; we can only learn important space truths from the world's 10,000 professional astronomers.  So they senselessly ignore the observations of the billions, and pay attention only to the observations of the 10,000.  

What would make more sense than Loeb's scheme would be a scientific effort to organize, classify and analyze anomalous sky videos and sky photos produced by ordinary people, with some web site encouraging people to upload any photos or videos that might show a UFO, and requiring them to fill out a "give all the relevant details" form preventing anonymity, with the videos and photos being quality-ranked by expert judges. Rather than trying to build a few fancy automated cameras and hope they find something that isn't showing up in the photos and videos of billions of smartphone owners, the idea would be: let's get the most out of the sky photography from all of those billions of smartphones. But you won't hear astronomers proposing that. Their attitude seems to be rather like this: "no one shall learn important space truths but through our instruments." 

One of the many unsound statements in the article is when Loeb states, "We will not entertain fringe ideas that are outside the boundaries of the standard model of physics."  There are two reasons why this statement is rather laughable. The first is that theoretical physicists and cosmologists nowadays are almost constantly asserting "ideas that are outside the boundaries of the standard model of physics." Such scientists are constantly talking about dark matter, dark energy, supersymmetry, string theory, and a primordial "inflaton" field, none of which has any place in what is called the Standard Model of Physics. The second reason the statement makes no sense is that if extraterrestrials are visiting us (beings that might be millions of years more advanced than us), we can reasonably suspect they will make use of principles far beyond the standard model of today's physicists. So it makes no sense to expect that such beings would conform to physics-as-we-know-it.   

People involved in this Galileo Project seem to think that AI can be used to take the human element out of sky photography analysis, and to improve such analysis so that UFOs can be found. Although AI stands for artificial intelligence, AI systems have no actual intelligence. AI  is just a hype term for fancy computer programming. All computer programming (including AI) reflects the values and assumptions of human computer programmers.  So you don't really get humans out of the picture by using automated AI systems. 

AI systems have had some success training on large data sets. So, for example, if you let an AI system train on 100,000 male faces and 100,000 female faces, the system might be able to later tell whether a random face is male or female.  But there's no way to train an AI system using lots of examples of actual extraterrestrial spacecraft appearing in our skies.  So the idea that some AI system will be able to automatically distinguish a real extraterrestrial spaceship from a meteor or a satellite or an aircraft is not very sound. 

Dubious "Solved It!" Boasts Mar Science Literature

In the widely-read online science magazine Quanta we recently had a story claiming that some scientists have finally solved a problem that has long baffled them: what is called the faint young sun paradox. The story is an example of what we may call a "Solved It!" story.  Such triumphal-sounding stories tend to have the characteristics listed below:

The origin of life seems to require liquid water. Geological evidence indicates that our planet was warm enough for liquid water to have existed about 3.5 billion years ago, around the time when scientists claim the first earthly life appeared. But models of solar evolution lead scientists to conclude that the sun gave off much less heat billions of years ago, only about 70% of the heat that the sun now emits. Judging only from the sun's evolution, our planet should have been completely frozen three billion years ago. This discrepancy is known as the faint young sun paradox.

The Quanta article claiming a solution to this paradox is entitled "A Solution to the Faint-Sun Paradox Reveals a Narrow Window for Life." It touts an idea of scientist James Kasting, who claims that 4.5 billion years ago the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 10,000 times greater than today. Kasting claims that the amount of carbon dioxide has been steadily falling since the time Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. He claims that there was so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere about 3.5 billion years ago that Earth would have been warm, because of the well-known greenhouse effect by which carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to higher temperatures. 

To try to support these claims, the Quanta article uses a staple of speculative science literature: the Guess Graph.  Graphs are usually used to present in a chart form some factual data that has been measured.  A Guess Graph is when we have some chart (such as a line graph or a bar graph or a pie chart) that uses data that was never measured, but merely speculatively imagined. Guess Graphs tend to  fool us into thinking we are seeing something factual when what we are seeing is speculative never-measured data that is not factual at all.  Guess Graphs fail to include the labeling they should have, to let us know that we are looking at mere speculations, rather than measured data.  One of the most notorious examples of a Guess Graph in scientific literature is the "composition of the universe" pie chart, which makes it sound like scientists have figured out what the universe is mainly made of. They have not done any such thing, and the "dark matter" and "dark energy" listed in such a pie chart has never actually been detected.   

The Guess Graph that appears in the Quanta article is a line graph showing the concentration of carbon in Earth's atmosphere falling steadily over 4.5 billion years, from a concentration of 10,000 times its present level to the concentration it now has. The graph is supposed to increase our confidence that James Kasting and his colleagues have solved the faint young sun paradox. But when we look at the very small print below the graph, we find that the source of the graph is listed as "Catling and Kasting."  So the article is trying to show that Kasting is on the right track by showing us some Guess Graph that Kasting himself created.  As a way of providing substantiation for a claim, this is as dubious as trying to back up Joe Smith's claims that he saw 5 flying saucers closeup by showing some bar chart made by Joe Smith, a chart indicating 2 flying saucers seen in 2019, 1 flying saucer seen in 2020, and 2 flying saucers seen in 2021. 

Why should we be very doubtful that this Guess Graph is correct? There are several reasons:

• One of the papers the Quanta article links to tells us that "the atmospheric CO2 concentration of the Archean [very early] Earth is highly uncertain."  A NASA page says, "“Atmospheric and surface conditions during the first billion years of Earth’s history are poorly understood due to the scarcity of geological and geochemical evidence."
• When you do a Google image search for "evolution of earth's atmosphere," you get a large variety of graphs from scientific publications, and quite a few of them tell a very different story than told by the Guess Graph in the Quanta Magazine article.  Some of these graphs show carbon dioxide reaching a peak about three billion years ago, and then steadily declining (rather than steadily declining over the past 4.5 billion years). 
• The main evidence given in the Quanta article to back up the Kasting claim that the early Earth may have been 70% carbon dioxide is a reference to a speculative paper that presents a speculative model. You don't substantiate one speculative model by appealing to another speculative model. 
• In a 2013 article Kasting stated that the faint young sun paradox is "one of those problems that will never really be 'solved,' because the parameters for early Earth — particularly the surface temperature — will always be negotiable."
• After stating this about the faint young sun paradox: "To resolve the paradox, Kasting (1993) suggested that high concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases, either CO2 or perhaps methane, prevented the oceans from freezing over," a scientific paper stated this: "In contrast, Rosing et al. (2010) have argued that the prevalence of magnetite (iron oxide) in Archean sediments and paleosols and the absence of siderite (iron carbonate) indicate that CO2 levels in the Archean atmosphere were little greater than those of today."
• A scientific paper published in 2018 gave reasons why the claims of extremely high carbon dioxide levels in the early Earth (as imagined by Kasting) are doubtful. 

The paper I refer to is the one here, which states the following:

"While several arguments have been advanced to resolve the Faint Young Sun Paradox , none is problem-free. For instance, one might try to compensate for the diminished sunlight by assuming that Earth’s early atmosphere had a far greater concentration of greenhouse gases, such as CO₂, than at present. However this hypothesis runs into difficulties. In order to maintain the Earth’s temperature above the freezing point of water during the early Archean, the abundance of CO₂ in Earth’s primeval atmosphere should have been a thousand times its present value....While CO₂ can be removed from the atmosphere by bacteria and plants during photosynthesis and also by the weathering of rock, the enormous concentrations referred to earlier seem difficult to account for. Indeed, large amounts of CO₂ in the early atmosphere would have led to the formation of the iron carbonate based compound siderite (FeCO₃). However, analysis of billion year old paleosols challenges this picture by finding no FeCO₃. Found instead are iron silicates which support a much more moderate presence of CO₂ in the early atmosphere. Moreover, it would be difficult to make CO₂ disappear almost entirely from the Earth’s atmosphere since much of it, after reacting with rocks and being used by shell-forming organisms to form CaCO₃ shells, gets deposited on the ocean floor and makes its way back into the atmosphere via volcanic activity and plate tectonics. The presence of other greenhouse gases is equally problematic."

Another doubtful example of a "Solved It!" story in the news was a story that appeard a few days on the Vice web site (www.vice.com).  The story had this two-sentence headline:

"A Billion Years of Time Are Mysteriously Missing. Scientists Think They Know Why."

This was followed by this subtitle, suggesting a "now they've finally solved it" story line:

"The Great Unconformity has baffled geologists for a century. New research points to glaciers being the culprit."

We read this explanation of the Great Unconformity:

"Sometimes, the absence of geological records is just as telling as their presence. The Great Unconformity, a missing chunk of time that appears in rocks across the world, is the ultimate example of this phenomenon. This giant lapse in Earth’s memory exceeds one billion years in some places, resulting in 550 million-year-old rocks sitting atop ancient layers that date back 1.7 billion years, with no trace of the many lost epochs in between."

You've probably never heard of this Great Unconformity. The impression we've got from geologists is that geological strata show a nice continuous record in which you can trace back time gradually, like someone backwardly flipping the pages of a big diary, without any big gaps.  Clearly this Great Unconformity is a big embarrassment to geologists, who seem to have pretty much swept it under the rug, and have mentioned it so infrequently that the average person has never heard of such a thing. 

The vice.com story mentions a very dubious idea of how all of these eons disappeared from the fossil record: "the glaciers did it." It's another dubious "solved it!" boast. The vice.com story refers to a scientific paper that refers to " the oft-held perception that continental ice sheets cannot deeply erode the upper crust," while trying to argue that continental ice sheets did deeply erode the upper crust. 

Hard-To-Explain Observational Reality	Dubious Professor Explanation of This
Sun's heat was 70% less billions of years ago, but Earth was apparently warm at that time	Billions of years ago there was 10,000 times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which kept Earth warm
Every organism has in its body thousands of very complex inventions: thousands of types of functional protein molecules, each having amino acids arranged in just the right way to be functional	It was all just lucky copying errors in DNA
Galaxies don't rotate as they should, given how much regular matter we observe	For every matter particle, there are many dark matter particles, all invisible (please ignore the fact that such particles do not exist in the Standard Model of physics)
The expansion of the universe is accelerating	Most of the universe's mass-energy must be some mysterious dark energy (please ignore the fact that dark energy particles have no place in the Standard Model of physics)
The universe's earliest expansion rate seems to have incredibly fine-tuned, with the expansion rate exactly matching a "critical density" to one part in a billion trillion quadrillion	This was merely caused by a  wondrous instantaneous cosmic transmogrification, produced by a never-discovered "inflaton field" (please ignore the fact that such a field has no place in the Standard Model of physics)
Old-World monkeys closely resemble New-World monkeys, too closely to explain by convergent evolution	Monkeys rafted across the Atlantic ocean millions of years ago
All or almost all of the animal phyla appeared rather suddenly in the Cambrian Explosion	It was just higher oxygen levels that caused such a huge flood of information-rich innovation. Haven't you heard of the vast creative intelligence of oxygen molecules?
The type of cells used by mammals (eukaryotic cells) are vastly more complicated than the simplest types of cells (prokaryotic cells), with the difference being like the difference between a billionaire's mansion and a little wooden shack	Endosymbiosis: eukaryotic cells originated in a wondrous sudden leap when one cell kind of gobbled up lots of other cells, with its offspring inheriting the ingestion,  kind of like some monkey species turning into a tiger-bird-monkey species because the monkey ate a tiger and a bird.
Contrary to the predictions of quantum field theory, interstellar space is almost empty, rather than being extremely dense and heavy because of a super-abundance of virtual particles	It was just “lucky cancellations” caused by very high physics numbers that coincidentally canceled each other out in a fantastically improbable coincidence
Thousands of years ago, humans suddenly developed a host of intellectual capabilities far beyond those of any other species, such as language abilities and philosophical reasoning	Meat-eating is the reason – we needed wise, communicative  minds so we could  hunt animals. It takes a subtle literate reasoner to club an animal on the head.
For decades massive numbers of people have reported floating out of their bodies and observing them from below, while at the same time having heightened cognition	It's just vast numbers of people coincidentally having a similar hallucination, kind of like millions of people all having a hallucination of seeing a pink elephant.
When a person suffering from severe seizures has half of his brain removed to stop the seizures, there is a good preservation of memories and intelligence	Maybe your brain makes backup copies of each memory (one on the left side, and another on the right side), and maybe your brain is “super-plastic” so that the remaining half does all the work of the removed half, like some computer that keeps working well  when sawed in two
Defying odds far greater than a quadrillion-to-one, our universe has just the right fundamental constants allowing it to be habitable for life	The multiverse did it -- didn't you know we can explain our universe by referring to imaginary other universes?
A billion years are missing in geological strata	The glaciers ate up all the missing strata
We cannot find much of any evidence of the vast number of transitional fossils that should exist if there occurred the gradual evolutionary progressions assumed by the dogma of common descent	Maybe the glaciers ate up all the missing fossils

White House Releases a Long Report on Scientific Integrity, One Blind to Its Main Threats

The White House Office of Science and Technology has just released a long 53-page report on the topic of protecting scientific integrity. The report is entitled "Protecting the Integrity of Government Science."  Nowadays in the United States "government science"  means almost the same as "American science," because such a large fraction of research depends on grants from the Federal government. 

The report uses the term "scientific integrity" very many times. But the authors of the report seem to be unaware of the main things undermining scientific integrity these days.  The report focuses mainly on threats to scientific activity such as government interference in scientific activity, such as when an administration or federal agency might try to pressure scientists into reporting something more agreeable to the administration or agency.  The authors of the report make little or no mention of the main things threatening scientific integrity these days. 

Below is a list of the main things threatening scientific integrity these days:

(1) There has arose in scientific journals a tendency called publication bias, a habit of not publishing negative experimental papers reporting only a null result. 

(2) There has arose in academia an incentive system and scoring system in which scientists are judged numerically by the number of scientific papers they have written and the number of citations such papers have received. 

(3) Under such a system there is an incentive for scientists to  produce low-quality papers or low-value papers in high numbers, for the sake of increasing the count of papers they have published, rather than producing papers of much higher quality in smaller numbers. 

(4) Under such a reward system there is also a strong incentive for scientists to run experiments following poor design standards and using inadequate sample sizes, because such easier-to-produce and poorly designed experiments will be more likely to create false alarms that will be reported as some positive result, thereby increasing the chance that the resulting scientific paper will be published, and not be rejected because of publication bias that excludes null results.  

(5) Under such a reward system there is also a strong incentive for scientists to not use proper blinding protocols, and to interpret and analyze experimental data in a biased way, to maximize the chance that some positive result can be reported, rather than a null result (which may cause the resulting paper not to be published because of publication bias). 

(6) Under such a reward system (in which citation counts are a key metric under which scientists are judged) there is also a strong incentive for scientists to exaggerate or misstate their experimental findings or analytic findings, claiming that they showed some important result that was not actually found by the research.  

(7) Wishing to create an aura of research success that increases their institutional prestige, universities and colleges have a strong incentive to write press releases that exaggerate or misstate the research results of scientists at their institutions, making minor or unimportant research sound like some very important result. 

(8) Not wishing to have any scandal that might decrease their institutional prestige, universities and colleges have a strong incentive to not investigate or penalize scientists at their institution who engage in fraud or poor research practices or misstatements about their research. 

(9) Wishing to create additional web traffic that results in more revenue because of online ads that generate revenue proportional to the number of page visitors, science web sites and other web sites have a strong incentive to produce hype-filled misleading pages that inaccurately summarize scientific research, making dubious or unimportant research sound like some important result.  

(10) These incentives are producing exactly the results we should expect them to produce. A large fraction of scientists are producing mainly low-quality or unimportant papers, as if they were more interested in their paper count than in the quality of their papers. In some fields such as experimental neuroscience, very poor research practices are more the norm than the exception, with inadequate sample sizes, a lack of a needed sample size calculation, and nonexistent or inadequate blinding protocols seeming to occur in the majority of experiments.  Very large numbers of scientists are making inaccurate claims in the abstracts or titles of their papers, claiming the research shows things it did not actually show. With great regularity colleges and universities are producing press releases that make inaccurate or exaggerated claims about some research result at their institution that is being announced.  Science news sites and science magazines habitually make unwarranted hype-filled claims about scientific research.  There is a huge replication crisis that has been documented by scientists.  Attempts to replicate experimental results typically show that far fewer than 50% of reported experimental results can be successfully reproduced.  Research surveys of experimental scientists (such as this one and this one) show that a large fraction of them either confess to poor research practices or suspect very many of their colleagues of such conduct.   

(11) In addition to all these problems that have nothing to do with belief traditions among scientists, there are a host of scientific integrity problems resulting from belief traditions that have arisen in scientific communities, cases in which scientists are socially pressured to support or conform to far-from-proven theories that have become popular within scientific communities.  Such theories include the dogma of abiogenesis (that the first living thing arose accidentally), the dogma of common descent (that all species evolved from a common ancestor), the dogma that memories are stored in brains (despite no one ever finding a stored memory in a brain), the dogma that all mental phenomena are caused by brains, the dogma of dark matter, the dogma of dark energy, the dogma of primordial cosmic inflation, the dogma of the nonexistence of spooky psychic phenomena, the dogma that genetically modifying food is safe, the dogma that pesticides are relatively safe (pushed by sites such as www.realclearscience.com), the dogma that gene-splicing is not risky, the doctrine that COVID-19 had a purely natural origin, and many others. When some unproven theory gains ascendancy in a scientific community, and becomes a belief tradition in that community, its members will tend to interpret all observations in a way that conforms to such a theory, rejecting all observations inconsistent with such a theory.  Dogma-driven interpretations of observational results threaten objective scientific inquiry in many ways.   

(12) Because of some of these problems,  a significant fraction of the billions of dollars that the US government spends each year on scientific research is wasted, going to unworthy projects or poorly designed experiments or poorly conducted research.  Moreover, there is a gigantic amount of misinformation being spread about federally funded projects, misinformation such as claims that experiments or projects showed things they did not show. 

The recent White House report on scientific integrity ("Protecting the Integrity of Government Science") seems to be almost entirely blind to such problems.  The authors show no real signs of understanding the problems listed above. Instead of focusing on such problems, which are the main threats these days to scientific integrity, the report focuses on things of lesser significance such as rare cases when some administration attempts to interfere with scientific analysis.  Any report such as this should have said very much about the very widely discussed problem known as the replication crisis, the fact that most scientific research does not seem to be reproducible, and that attempts to reproduce experimental results are failing most of the time. But the 53-page report does not even use the words "replicate" or "replication" or "reproduce" or "reproducible" or "reproducibility."  The report has lots of glittering generalities, but fails to deliver an effective algorithm for how to beef up scientific integrity.  The report has no mention of sample sizes or blinding protocols, two of the main things that should come up in a thorough discussion of scientific integrity. Inadequate sample sizes and a lack of thorough blinding protocols are two of the chief current threats to the integrity of experimental science.  

The report seems to have been carefully worded so that no specific mention would be made of any ongoing shortfall of today's scientists.  It is as if the authors were terrified of offending anyone in the science community or academic community or journalism community.  As a result, the report is a kind of bowl of bland bureaucratic mush, rather than the kind of sharp, incisive thing that might really help beef up scientific integrity.

What might an effective White House report on scientific integrity look like? It might be one that thoroughly documented all the problems threatening the integrity of scientific research.  It might be one that proposed specific measures to substantially reduce such problems.  The report might include a proposal for enforcing quality standards on federally funded research.  Rather than vague bland mush, the report might have included specific recommendations rather like this:

(1) No federal funding of any research project that has its published results available only behind a paywall. Taxpayers should be able to easily read all the research they paid for, except for classified research. 

(2) Some mechanism guaranteeing the publication of all federally funded observational results (including null results). 

(3) Some mechanism (such as public weekly research logs) depriving federally funded researchers from cherry-picking the experimental results that will be published, something that often occurs so that only results conforming to prevailing belief traditions appears. 

(4) No federal funding of any experimental research project unless it first published a detailed research plan precisely describing how data will be gathered and analyzed, and also followed such a plan.  This would mean no more federal funding of "fishing expedition" projects which allow researchers to slice and dice data a hundred ways until they find some result they were hoping to get, and which allow researchers to "torture the data until it makes the desired confession." 

(5) No federal funding of any experimental research project that did not declare before data was gathered a thorough blinding protocol that will be followed, and also adhered to such a protocol.

(6) No federal funding of any experimental research project that did not use at least 15 subjects for each of its study groups. 

(7) A mechanism by which federal money granted for research could be "ungranted," with a refund demanded whenever the standards above were not met. 

If such standards existed for granting federal funding, the US government could stop wasting so many billions on poorly designed experiments producing unreliable or unreproducible results. 

An example of the timidity of the report is the fact that it brings up the topic of what is the definition of scientific integrity, but timidly fails to even define such a thing. We have on page 3 of the report a shaded box labeled "Box 1.1 Defining Scientific Integrity," and we have in that box some vacuous "go around in circles" language:

 

"The 2021 Presidential Memorandum does not define the term 'scientific integrity.' Rather it reaffirms and builds on the 2009 Presidential Memorandum and 2010 OSTP Memorandum, which establish principles and guidance, respectively, for protecting scientific integrity, without explicitly defining the term. The Task Force has taken a similar approach, focusing its initial efforts on assessing agency scientific integrity policies against the principles and guidelines articulated in the memoranda and identifying practices for improving policies and their implementation as called for in the 2021 Presidential Memorandum. The Task Force notes that some, but not all, agencies provide definitions of scientific integrity in their scientific integrity policies. These definitions vary across agencies and would benefit from greater harmonization. The Task Force intends to produce a definition of scientific integrity for adoption by Federal agencies as it develops a framework for assessing scientific integrity policies. The definition will be informed by the insight gained in preparing this report."

This is classic bureaucratic "use lots of words to say nothing" talk.