The film biography Renoir (directed by Gilles Bourdos) focuses on the artist in his old age (played by Michel Bouquet). Set in 1915, it tells about his earlier robust life—not with flashbacks, but by comments from himself and members of his household. The narrative opens just after the death of his wife with the arrival of a new model, Andrée Heuschling (Christa Théret), who charms “the boss” with her naked beauty and joie de vivre. She also charms his middle son Jean (Vincent Rottiers) who is convalescing from a war wound. A much younger son (Thomas Doret), lurks about the estate and skulks throughout the story.

The selection of this slice of Renoir’s life is a wise one—both for its focus on the painter’s late work and for its poignancy. Although horribly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and trapped in a wheelchair, he not only retained his love of beautiful scenes rendered in luminous hues, but he showed in his work even greater vitality, freedom, and originality than before.

Several times we are treated to convincing closeups of his deformed hand—taped so he could hold his brush—painting with masterful dabs. (Impressionists forsook traditional painting with continuous brush strokes, instead breaking light into its component colors and using these, intermingled in separate dabs of paint, to create vibrancy.) “I refuse to paint the world black,” the old artist declares revealingly. “A painting should be something pleasant and cheerful. There are enough disagreeable things in life. I don’t need to paint more.”

We do not know whether Renoir would have been satisfied with the movie’s recreation of himself and his world, but he would have loved the cinematography. Beautifully done by Taiwanese photographer Mark Ping Bing Lee, it does with film what Impressionism did with canvas. Not entirely coincidentally, the movie has brief depictions of Jean’s early cinematic interests. (Jean Renoir [1894–1979] went on in life to become one of the world’s great filmmakers, and until they parted in 1931, Andrée—as “Catherine Hessling”—was his wife and frequent leading lady.)

As to Renoir’s working canvases in the film, they were rendered by a famous art forger named Guy Ribes—and are among the many brilliant efforts that went into the making of Renoir. Although a somewhat sedate film to modern taste, it will appeal to thoughtful people who care to understand and appreciate the work of masters like Renoir.

Rating: Three wooden nickels (out of four)

It is therefore through that lens that I watched 42—the story of Jackie Robinson becoming the first to integrate major league baseball. On April 15, 1947, he took the field as no. 42 with the Brooklyn Dodgers (against the Philadelphia Phillies) and changed American history. So the film’s harrowing scenes of racial hatred did not come to me as re-creations of a different time, as they necessarily must for young viewers, but instead recalled my own later experiences in situations not so far removed.

I attribute much of the film’s success to the direction of Brian Helgeland who effectively mixed historical background material (such as scenes involving “white” and “colored” restrooms), marvelous baseball action, sidelights on Robinson’s personal life, various behind-the-scenes business considerations (including racist personnel), and much more, shaping it into an artistic whole—if even with a dollop of what some critics have labeled outright sentimentality. The result is a convincing American biography and a genuinely inspiring film.

Robinson, as one of civil rights’ noblest heroes, is brought to life with some skill by Chadwick Boseman. He is joined by other effective actors, notably Harrison Ford, who plays the Dodgers’ boss—a visionary and homespun American character named Branch Rickey. Rickey, too, is something of a hero, and at times, not surprisingly, manages to upstage Robinson.

At one point in 42, there is a brief vignette of Rickey idly holding a baseball with the thumb-and-two-fingered grip that bespeaks his own nostalgia for playing the game. It sets up for me a metaphor for the story: Rickey tosses the ball to Robinson, and Robinson knocks it out of the park.

Rating: Three and a half wooden nickels (out of four)

When I attended Bigfoot School April 27 at Chautauqua Lake, New York, among the six signing my diploma was a man named Bob Gimlin, an 82-year-old horse trainer from Yakima Valley, Washington.

While Gimlin’s name is largely unknown to the public, he represents something of a living legend to Bigfoot aficionados everywhere. You see, it was Gimlin who accompanied Roger Patterson that October day in 1967, when the pair rode out on horseback in northern California’s Bluff Creek area to make what would prove to be an incredible film. Patterson had rented a 16-mm camera for the purpose and announced he was going to film Bigfoot. Within a week (on October 20) he had done just that—becoming one of the luckiest men alive—or else had produced an outlandish hoax.

The female creature’s general appearance, pendulous breasts, and bent-knee walk were just as Patterson, an artist, had illustrated in his book the year before. Smithsonian primate expert John Napier spoke for many when he quipped, “I could not see the zipper.” Early in the next millennium a costumer named Phil Morris came forward to say that it was he who had sold Patterson a six-piece gorilla suit, together with extra fake fur which the hoaxer used to modify the face and add breasts. A Patterson acquaintance, Bob Heironimus confessed to having been the man wearing the suit, which his family and friends had seen in the trunk of his mother’s Buick in late 1967.

If Gimlin was in on Roger’s hoax, it would have made the whole affair less complicated. But if he was not, he was the hoax’s first victim. Bob Heironimus insists it was Gimlin himself, in July or August 1967, who approached him about the costume. He stated that Gimlin, a small man, told him, “He [Roger] needs someone pretty good size to get in the suit.” Heironimus was the right size. (See Greg Long, The Making of Bigfoot, 2004.)

At Bigfoot School, I was delighted to meet Bob Gimlin. He is a charming fellow, and he prepaid the compliment by telling me how pleased he was to meet me, posing with me for photos, autographing others, signing my diploma, and so on. He enjoyed receiving my wooden-nickel business card, and we chatted between activities. He told me how he had seen Bigfoot on that fateful day, a muscular figure with female breasts, and did not know at the time what to make of it, he said, not knowing what Bigfoot actually looked like.

He keeps a perfectly straight face while relating this, which—whether it is true or false—is no surprise, because he has told the story countless times. Curiously for a man who supposedly had such a momentous encounter, he seems rather ambivalent. “I’ve been asked, ‘How many do you think exist?’” he tells a reporter. “And I say, ‘At least one, because I saw one.’”

Although I had to miss the conference the next day, CSI executive director Barry Karr was there and mischievously obtained a gift for me. As shown here, it is a photo of my charming friend, who gets the last word with his inscription: “To Joe Nickell / You are wrong / Love / Bob.”

As it happens, not only were the nation’s so-called psychic sleuths obviously unhelpful in any of these three missing-person cases, but one high-profile psychic was a noteworthy failure. I refer to the notorious Sylvia Browne, who for years appeared on The Montel Williams Show and shamelessly fooled unsuspecting, unsophisticated people into believing she could do what she of course could not.

In 2004, the distraught mother of one of the three missing girls, Amanda Berry (who had gone missing the day before her seventeenth birthday) appeared on Montel. Browne told her, “She’s not alive, honey.” When the mother replied, “So you don’t think I’ll ever see her again,” Browne responded, “Yeah, in Heaven, on the other side.”

Nor is this the first time that Browne so terribly erred in telling grieving parents that hope for their child was gone. In 2003, also on The Montel Williams Show, Browne had told the parents of Shawn Hornbeck, missing for four months, that the boy was dead. She said Shawn “is no longer with us,” and claimed that his body was near two jagged boulders in a wooded area some twenty miles southwest of their Missouri home. In fact, Browne was simply describing a general area that had been searched several times. Almost four years later, Shawn was found alive, having been held with another boy, by a kidnapper in St. Louis.

Subsequently, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 show devoted a segment to Browne’s many psychic failures. Titled Dead Wrong, it aired January 19, 2007. While Browne provided the show with a list of her alleged successes, Cooper and his staff scrutinized the cases and found them seriously wanting, including claims that were unverifiable and others that were only documented after the fact.

Interested persons may wish to read more about Sylvia Browne—including her unforeseen felony conviction, exposure for plagiarism, and other missed visions—in my The Science of Ghosts. Recently, she canceled an appearance in Niagara Falls due to “an unforeseen illness.”

Life is continuing education, and in that spirit I keep seeking new experiences, tutelage, and personas. I achieved all of these on Saturday, April 27, 2013, by becoming a Bigfoot School Graduate and receiving my handsome Chautauqua Lake Bigfoot School Diploma—signed by several of the field’s luminaries. It now has an honored place next to my Ph.D. diploma and various forensics certificates.

The school was part of The 2nd Chautauqua Lake Bigfoot Weekend & Expo. Tipped to the convention by colleague Mandi (Ward) Shepp, I hastened to send in my application and modest fee. Early on the appointed day, I set out for the site and, after a hearty breakfast in a village restaurant, I found the location on the shores of one of New York’s beautiful lakes. Scarcely had I taken my seat than “Squatch Detective” Steve Kulls came by with a friendly recognition and welcome—one of many I received despite my infamy as a skeptic (having been something of a regular on TV shows like National Geographic’s Is It Real? History Channel’s Monster Quest, and Animal Planet’s Lost Tape Series).

The day’s workshop featured information useful to cryptozoologists and skeptical cryptozoologists alike. Melissa Hovey started things off with detailed instruction in making track casts—from selecting equipment, cleaning away debris, and making photographs, to mixing plaster of paris, pouring, adding reinforcing rods for strength, and removing and cleaning the cast. She provided many tips and pointers and even allowed the several children in attendance to come up and help out.

Next, the personable Steve Kulls gave a Power Point presentation on interviewing eyewitnesses—or perhaps I should say alleged witnesses, since Steve’s talk included more skepticism of people’s claims than some might have expected. If he seemed a bit overconfident about the possibility of detecting deception (especially via “body language”), he nevertheless presented many cautionary tales and much useful advice.

The final major segment of the workshop was Billy Willard’s show-and-tell presentation of Bigfooters’ equipment. He began with such essentials as a notepad and pen, camera, binoculars, first-aid kit, flashlight, GPS device, and a fishing vest worn to contain it all (similar to what Vaughn Rees and I carried on our expedition to Bluff Creek, California—many miles back into the wilderness overlooking the site where in 1967 Roger Patterson made his historic “Bigsuit” film). Willard then presented more exotic items—parabolic microphones, hat-mounted video cameras, night-vision cameras and thermal-imaging devices, audio recorders, and so on, and on, including walkie-talkies—none of which, alas, has ever resulted in proof of Bigfoot’s existence.

My diploma also earned me the autographs of six instructors. In addition to Hovey, Kulls, and Willard, there were Larry Battson, Tom Yamarone, and no less a figure than Bob Gimlin himself—about whom I devote a subsequent blog. All in all, this was a useful and enjoyable experience.

Known as “the junkyard ghost” case, it involves an Oklahoma wrecker-service lot’s surveillance cameras. In 2002, it recorded a sequence of video images that—some believe—depict the ghost of a woman who died in a truck accident some weeks before. Various debunkers have attempted to recreate what they feel must have been a hoax, by jiggling a small figurine or doll on a string in front of a low-light camera. But is it really necessary to make accusations of deception?

Early on, I had consulted with colleague Vaughn Rees, formerly of CFI–West, who actually visited the Oklahoma site and came away convinced that an insect was instead the culprit. When NBC contacted me about the case, I enlisted CFI video expert Tom Flynn, and Vaughn Rees not only provided his input but also donated a video camera he had purchased, the same model used in the auto lot security system. Tom Flynn subsequently concluded:

“The anomalous object in the video is highly consistent with a flying insect hovering very close to the camera. On close inspection one can detect a segmented body that hangs vertically. Wings are essentially invisible, as you’d expect given their rapid motion and the image latency typical of low-light video cameras of the period. It also makes sense that the anomalous object is bright yet indistinct; the security cameras were mounted on the same poles as the parking lot lights, so there was plenty of spill light where the cameras were. And an object hovering just inches from the lens would be seriously out of focus when the lens was focused at infinity, as it would be to cover a parking lot. Finally, the cameras were mounted inside enclosures, each shooting through a glass cover plate. The glass would reflect other lights, perhaps even an image of the insect itself, which might well cause a passing bug to hover for a moment and check things out.

“Some might object that the anomalous object is too large in frame. If it were on the plane of the car lot, it would be the size of a person. It seems larger than even a sizeable insect should appear when hovering a few inches from the lens. But security cameras of this sort are usually fitted with wide-angle lenses, to maximize their coverage, and one of the characteristics of a wide-angle lens is that objects tend to grow rapidly in size as they approach the lens—far more so than they would with a ‘normal’ lens. Everyone has seen pictures taken with long telephoto lenses, such as pictures looking down a street where objects blocks away seem almost the same size as objects nearer the camera. It’s exactly the reverse with a wide-angle lens: close objects read far larger than they appear when further away. So it makes sense that a largish flying insect hovering just inches from a wide-angle lens would appear far larger than intuition would lead a viewer to expect.”

Just as light reflects off of particles of dust close to a camera to produce “orbs” that so mystify ghost hunters, photographs of insects—given the vagaries of their different flight stages and other variables like blurred motion (which would render an exact replication difficult)—can produce a great variety of mysterious white shapes. These include even humanoid ones which, in the eye of the beholder, can be seen as “spirits,” “angels,” or other entities. The “junkyard ghost” images appear to represent just such a phenomenon.

Around the world, girls (each with the help of a local writer) tell their true stories of heartbreak and triumph. In post-earthquake Haiti, for instance, a girl without the money to continue her schooling persists with a sit-in in a classroom until the teacher acquiesces. In Nepal, an indentured girl composes songs to get her through difficulties (singing about being “a slave at a master’s house”), until a teacher helps free her from bondage as the practice becomes illegal. In Egypt a girl of twelve is first the victim of rape and then of early marriage, but a policeman asks her to share her story as a cautionary one for his own daughter. And in Ethiopia, a young man intervenes as his little sister is about to be sold into an early marriage. He promises their impoverished, widowed mother that he will find a way to pay for her to go to school instead. She realizes, “This life is mine to make.”

The stories continue: In India a struggling street vendor charmingly buys his little girl an art tablet so she can use her school notebook solely for math assignments. In Peru, in a gold-mining town high in the Andes, a girl struggles even harder after her father dies, but then she happens upon a poem that is “Like coming upon a cache of buried treasure”; in time, she too becomes a poet, finding that a fortune has always been lodged inside herself.

A girl in Sierre Leone, the first in her family to attend school, is inspired by science’s method of asking questions and solving problems. Overcoming her well-meaning father’s objections, she becomes host of a radio program that enables her to talk to other girls and help them stay in school and solve other problems.

Among the worst situations are those in Afghanistan where, at one girl’s birth her mother cried when she learned her baby was a female. Nevertheless, the girl learns to read and write, until Taliban fanatics oust girls from schools and she, too, is sold into marriage. There, where more women die giving birth than anywhere else in the world, she is still a clandestine voice for other young girls who are “masked and muted” by the burka. “If you kill me,” she says, “there will be other girls who rise up. I am the beginning of another story.”

In its quest to awaken, horrify, and inspire, Girl Rising is necessarily polemical. But it holds attention also with some fine cinematography, photo/art animation sequences, interesting voice performances, and even the powerful use of statistics: for example, 66 million girls are out of school worldwide. If you cannot see the documentary, you can still go to the website, www.girlrising.com. Remember, “Educating girls works.”

Rating: Three wooden nickels (out of four)

1.  *The Oklahoma junkyard ghost case—investigated by Vaughn Reese, Tom Flynn, and I—got rather short treatment, but I devote a future blog to the case.


2.  The Oliver’s Castle video purports to be the Holy Grail of cereology (after Ceres the Roman goddess of vegetation)—as the field of crop-circle studies is known. The 1996 video shows two orbs of light circling an English grain field when, suddenly, a crop-circle formation magically appears. Alas the video has “hoax” written all over it. (See, for example http://www.robertschoch.net/ accessed April 22, 2013.) 


3.  The 1997 Phoenix Lights phenomenon is celebrated widely by UFOlogists, even though the event turned out to have been caused by flares—dangling from parachutes—that were released during a confirmed military exercise. This case is an example of eyewitnesses who cling to a belief long after the event has been credibly explained.


4. *As to the 1995 “alien autopsy” film, this was the case that launched my “Investigative Files” column in Skeptical Inquirer (November/December 1995). The film caused a stir at the time, but the evidence clearly established it as a hoax, which has since been admitted to. Its creator Ray Santilli, however, now claims the 1995 film was a re-creation of genuine footage that had become damaged. Only the most pathologically credulous, I think, will believe him. 


5. Tim Dinsdale filmed his 1960 controversial Loch Ness Monster encounter from a distance of about a mile. Although “Mysteries and Monsters” featured Steve Feltham, the world’s only full-time Loch Ness Monster hunter, and Adrian Shine, naturalist and monster skeptic who hails from The Loch Ness Exhibition Center in Drumnadrochit, the show treated Dinsdale’s “creature” with some ambivalence. In fact, it was identified by film analysts from the Royal Air Force’s Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Center as a probable motorboat. (See my Entities, 1995, 242.)


6. *Finally, having saved the best for last, the show focused on the infamous 1967 Roger Patterson Bigfoot film. The segment featured Phil Morris, magician and costumer, who told how he had sold Patterson a gorilla suit (which the hoaxer subsequently modified using extra faux fur he purchased from Morris). Bob Heironimus has identified himself as the man inside the costume. I pointed out that family and friends of Heironimus saw the Bigsuit in the trunk of his mother’s Buick in late 1967. (See my Tracking the Man-Beasts, 2011, 68–73.) The segment (and show) ended with my reference to Smithsonian primate biologist Dr. John Napier’s famous comment on the creature, “I could not see the zipper.”

When his father left the oil business, “Rattlesnake Pete,” as he was now known, joined him in his new venture, operating a restaurant and saloon. Soon, Pete began to create a museum in the emporium. He displayed caged rattlers, then added a miniature oil well display—hand-whittled, painted, and assembled by Pete and his dentist friend “Doc” Reynolds. When a flood and fire struck Oil City in June 1892, Pete removed to Rochester where he established his own combined saloon and museum of curiosities (see second picture, a 1907 postcard).

In addition to rattlesnakes, copperheads, adders, and other serpents and reptiles, Pete exhibited alleged relics of notorious criminals like John Wilkes Booth and the James boys, including the ax used by a wife murderer. According to Mechanical Music Digest (http://www.mmdigest.com/), his collection also featured the “stony corpse of a petrified female,” the “first” electric chair, and the “first” nickelodeon piano (which Gruber claimed to have invented). Merrill mentions another device that promised to show “dancing girls,” but, after a man dropped a coin in the slot, a padded fist instead shot out to take a punch at him!

There are too many stories about Pete to tell here, but he devised his own method of extracting venom, once saved a circus clown from a rattlesnake bite, and treated his own numerous snake bites, 29 from rattlers and another 4 from copperheads. He was once bitten in an artery that left him unconscious for days and took nine months for him to fully recover. As well, writes Merrill, “Whenever any strange animals showed up in Rochester, Pete was sent for—to pick sinister looking lizards from banana shipments in the railroad yards, to capture monkeys escaped from a carnival, to kill snakes, invariably harmless ones, that householders found in their cellars.” He hunted snakes in the Bristol Hills and—for rattlers—returned to the mountains of his native Pennsylvania. Dressed head-to-toe in rattlesnake-skin clothes, Pete set off on his excursions in an open red Rambler which sported great brass-snake hood ornaments, accompanied by his big dogs (see last picture, another postcard, gift of Ken Andrews).

As far as I have learned, Pete never marketed a bottled snake-oil cure-all. However, he did sell both snake venom and snake oil—the latter to doctors, or perhaps “doctors.” He marketed snake skins, to be made into handbags and other items, while he himself used the tissue-like outer layer for poultices to treat boils and “blood poison.” He reportedly treated hundreds of goiter cases, wrapping a harmless variety of serpent about the sufferer’s neck, the massage from the writhings supposedly bringing relief.

When Prohibition came, Rattlesnake Pete “ignored it,” says Merrill. But on October 11, 1932, the old showman died. His collection of curios was sold at auction, and—as happens eventually to each of us—he became pure story.

The previous samples that were radiocarbon dated in 1988 were taken directly from the shroud in a documented manner by a textile expert for the British Museum and transferred in a “blind” fashion to no fewer than three laboratories—all selected for their expertise and impartiality. The tests also utilized swatches of ancient cloths of known dates as controls. In contrast, the new samples—only tiny fibers—allegedly came from the “shroud” in 1988 and were allegedly obtained from pro-shroud researcher Giovanni Riggi di Numana who died in 2008. If the samples cannot be legally certified as unquestionably authentic, they are inadmissible as evidence.

The scientific objectivity, if any, of either the new claimants or their protocol was not mentioned in media reports. In the past, such pre-Easter claims—published first in the media instead of scientific journals—have been made by pro-shroud religious zealots, and they have often later proved to be scientifically doubtful, to say the least.

As to the new tests themselves, they involve three different procedures—each with its own problems—which are then averaged together to produce the result. In contrast stands the accuracy of the 1988 accelerator mass spectrometry method of radiocarbon testing which yielded a date range of circa 1260–1390 C.E. Shroud advocates have been creative in trying to undermine those devastating tests, suggesting that the scientists tested a medieval patch (they did not), or that the carbon ratio was altered by a burst of miraculous energy from Christ’s resurrection (pseudoscientific nonsense), or any of several other “theories.”

In fact, the accuracy of the 1988 tests was confirmed by three laboratories who obtained dates in such close agreement as to be like three arrows hitting a bullseye. Moreover, the date obtained was fully consistent with the shroud’s lack of provenance (historical record) before the mid-fourteenth century. Further corroborative evidence comes from a bishop’s report of 1389 to Pope Clement VII stating that the shroud was being used as part of a faith-healing scam and that it had been “cunningly painted” by an artist who had confessed.

Still other evidence of medieval artistry comes from iconography—the image on the cloth bearing striking similarities to French gothic art of the period. And that an artist was indeed responsible is clear from sophisticated forensic tests by world-famous microanalyst Walter McCrone. He discovered that on the image—but not background areas—were significant amounts of red ocher pigment and that the suspiciously still-red and “picturelike” stains of “blood” consisted of red ocher and vermilion tempera paint.

It is unfortunate that we must yet again recall the words of Canon Ulysse Chevalier, the Catholic historian who brought to light the documentary evidence of the Shroud’s medieval origin. He lamented, “The history of the shroud constitutes a protracted violation of the two virtues so often commended by our holy books: justice and truth.”

UPDATE:

The Archbishop of Turin—quoted in an article in the Vatican Insider—has stated that, because there is no certainty as to the authenticity of the purported shroud fibers that were used for the experiments, the custodians of the shroud “cannot recognize any serious value to the results of those alleged experiments.”