Benjamin Radford's Blog: Ben Radford's Blog of Booky Things

I was recently quoted in "USA Today" on the subject of scary clowns!

Here's an excerpt:
Not so fast, argues Benjamin Radford, an author and editor at Skeptical Inquirer magazine who literally wrote the book on the subject, 2016’s Bad Clowns. Not to throw a pie in anyone’s face, but he argues that evil clowns have always been among us.

“It’s a mistake to ask when clowns turned bad because historically they were never really good. They’ve always had this deeply ambiguous character,” he said.

“Sometimes they’re good; sometimes they’re bad. Sometimes they’re making you laugh. Other times, they’re laughing at your expense.”

Radford traces bad clowns all the way to ancient Greece and connects them to court jesters and the Harlequin figure. He notes that Punch, an evil puppet who frequently smacks his partner Judy with a stick, made his first appearance in London in the 1500s. “You have this mass-murdering, baby-killing clown that’s beloved by Britons everywhere of all ages,” he said.

Clowns in America had their roots in circuses and they were at first meant to amuse adults, but clowning history took a detour in the 1950s and ‘60s when the squeaky-clean Bozo and Ronald McDonald became the “quintessentially American default clowns” for kids, Radford said.

The more sinister clown waited patiently for his day to shine. “Stephen King didn’t invent the evil clown. That was long before his time. But what he did was turn the coin over, if you will,” Radford said.

Even if there’s debate on the issue, Radford paid homage to Avruch, the first nationally syndicated incarnation of the iconic Bozo. Without virtuous clowns like him to lay the foundation, the bad ones make no sense.

If you like folklore and legends (and have even a passing interest in ghosts or ghost investigation) check out my appearance on Mark Norman's always-excellent "Folklore Podcast!" We discuss the (often unrecognized) role of ghostlore in modern ghost hunting, where ghost hunters go wrong, and much more!

You can listen HERE!

I'm pleased to announce that my new book, Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits, is now out! It is available as an ebook now and will be available in paperback by the end of January.

Here's a look at the book:

Ghosts have fascinated and haunted us for millennia. They appear in our campfire tales, films, books, and television shows as well as in our dreams and nightmares. Despite widespread belief in spirits—and the popularity of television ghost hunting shows—scientific evidence for them remains elusive.

INVESTIGATING GHOSTS is the first book to examine the history and techniques of ghost hunting from folkloric, scientific, and sociocultural perpectives. No mere armchair scholar, author Benjamin Radford’s book is based on nearly twenty years of first-hand, science-based investigations and research. INVESTIGATING GHOSTS will entertain and educate skeptics and true believers alike, separating fact from fiction about this timeless mystery.

Topics include:
• Guidelines for scientifically investigating ghost reports
• Analyzing photographic, audio, and video evidence
• Ghost hunting equipment: What works, what doesn’t, and why
• In-depth case studies of solved ghost investigations
• Understanding the psychology of ghost experiences

Next week I'll share some blurbs and early reviews. Please check it out!

A decades-old murder in one of the strangest clown-related mysteries in history may have been solved....

Here's a recap of this odd case, adapted from my book "Bad Clowns."

It happened in West Palm Beach in the spring of 1990 when a woman named Marlene Warren heard a knock on her door at 10:45 in the morning on May 26. She opened the door to find a whitefaced clown wearing a bright red nose and an orange wig. The clown greeted Warren with a wordless nod and handed her a basket of red and white carnations, along with two silver balloons. As Warren looked down at the gifts she was receiving, the clown pulled out a gun and shot her once point-blank in the mouth with either a .38 or a .357.

According to Warren’s son Joseph, who saw the shooting, the clown had brown eyes and wore Army boots. The clown escaped in a white Chrysler LeBaron, which was later reported stolen and discovered abandoned. Warren died two days later in the hospital. Detectives at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office suspected her estranged husband Michael Warren of plotting the murder, along with a brown-eyed, brown-haired woman who worked for him repossessing cars for Mr. Warren’s auto dealership.

According to The Gainesville Sun, “A woman matching the description of Sheila Keen, 27, bought a clown costume, makeup, an orange wig and a red clown nose two days before the murder, according to two West Palm Beach costume store clerks who tentatively identified Keen’s photo from police files. Then, on the morning of the murder, a woman fitting Keen’s description purchased two balloons and a floral arrangement at a Publix supermarket less than a mile from Keen’s apartment, according to sheriff’s documents... The balloons and flowers match those left at the scene of the murder, according to the documents. Neighbors at Keen’s apartment complex in suburban West Palm Beach said they frequently spotted Michael Warren, the dead woman’s husband, at the complex, according to police reports.”

Both Mr. Warren and Keen denied any involvement, either romantically with each other or in the death of Warren’s wife. Keen claimed that she was out looking for cars to repossess at the time Mrs. Warren was shot. News of the killer clown shook the West Palm Beach community, and a news report dated a month after the shooting noted that “local adults and children are now apprehensive of businesses that employ [clowns]. ‘Unfortunately, children are only hearing the negative side,’ said Yvonne (Sunshine the Clown) Zarza, owner of Balloons Above the Palm Beaches. ‘Normally, it’s Don’t go near a stranger. Now parents are saying, Don’t go near clowns.’”

Warren stood trial in 1992 on 66 criminal counts of fraud, racketeering, and grand theft related to his business; on August 8 of that year he was convicted on over three dozen counts of fraud, grand theft, and petty theft.

For decades no one was arrested or charged in the death, but earlier this week that changed: According to CBS News, “Police in Florida say they've arrested a woman accused of dressing up like a clown 27 years ago and fatally shooting the wife of her future husband.

A Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office news release says 54-year-old Sheila Keen Warren was arrested Tuesday in Virginia. A Florida grand jury recently indicted her on a first-degree murder charge.”

News reports suggest that DNA evidence led to Mrs. Warren’s arrest, though it’s not clear what items were recovered at the crime scene that would implicate Warren.

Q: Your most recent book "Bad Clowns" explores our cultural love/hate relationship with clowns. What do you think it is about these performers that has spawned such an increasing amount of negative iconography and folklore?

A: Clowns make people uncomfortable for several reasons, among them that they straddle categories and boundaries: We know there’s a real human under all that loud clothing, greasepaint and mask—yet they look and act distinctly inhuman. They can do magic tricks, they have flowers that squirt water, they may carry around a rubber chicken—who does that? Clowns do!

Everything about clowns is exaggerated, from their primary-color clothing palette to their props. They wear shoes and eyeglasses many times too big and may accentuate their thin necks by wearing collars several sizes too large. The exaggeration almost always extends toward the greater extremes for the simple reason that they mostly perform in front of crowds, who need to see and hear their props. So clowns aren’t trying to be scary with their appearance, it’s just a function of how they typically perform.

Of course on a subconscious level any unknown person in disguise who stands near us or interacts with us might freak us out. Masks hide almost all of the non-verbal communication we ordinarily get from others. There’s so much information contained in facial expressions, vocal tones, and so on that help us understand the person who’s in front of us. But a mask quite literally masks all that, and it makes us uneasy.

Clowns may be scary to many people, but they are not inherently threatening the way a coiled rattlesnake or knife-wielding mugger is. The fear of clowns stems from a latent, potential harm, a suspicion that the seemingly silly and harmless pratfalling fool before us may in fact not be so silly, so foolish, or so harmless. Most of us understand that the clown is an act—a fake and fantastical persona adopted for a short time as part of a social event. It can be cute and funny at the time, though we may not want to be around when he decides to stop acting. The clown character, historically and culturally, has always been an ambiguous person—neither good nor bad, but sometimes either or both. The clown is a trickster figure, as is the Devil, of course, so there has always been an element of the unexpected, the scary or threatening in the clown. They will always be with us, good and bad.

You know, it is kind of funny and strange to realize that two of my best-known investigations involve chupacabra and evil clowns. I guess two lines of my obituary are pretty well written at this point, and I’ll always be known in association with vampires and clowns. Could be worse.

I was recently interviewed for a site called ParanormalBucket and answered several questions about my work and books. This week and in following weeks I'll be posting some of them here.

Q: You’ve carried out field research on hundreds of paranormal claims. What are your three favorite investigations and what made them memorable?

A: I’d have to say that my top three favorite cases are probably:

1) My chupacabra research, because it was a global mystery and I ended up solving it. It was a very complex case, involving vampire folklore, medical research, rumors, and much more. I traveled to Texas, Puerto Rico, and the jungles of Nicaragua looking for the monster, and in the end I was able to identify the very first sighting of the creature, and definitively link it to a 1995 science fiction film. It took me five years, but I solved the mystery, and I’m the one who did it—not because I’m particularly brilliant, but mostly because I put in the time and effort to do the research.

2) My research into the Pokemon mystery illness in 1997, where thousands of Japanese children went to the hospital with seizures after watching the cartoon Pokemon. It’s not a paranormal claim at all, but instead a modern medical mystery. Through careful analysis I figured out what happened, and my research was published in a prestigious medical journal—can the "Ghost Hunters" guys say that? :-) This is the twentieth anniversary of the incident, and I was recently interviewed by Motherboard about it: see https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/ar....

3) I also really liked my investigation into the Ogopogo lake monster in British Columbia; it was published in two of my books (Lake Monster Mysteries and Scientific Paranormal Investigation). I collaborated with two other researchers, John Kirk and Joe Nickell, and a crew from the National Geographic TV show "Is It Real?" We did some field experiments to investigate a famous Ogopogo video, and found that what was recorded could not have been the size it was originally estimated. It was a fun blend of monster hunting and scientific experiment.

I was recently interviewed for a site called ParanormalBucket and answered several questions about my work and books. This week and in following weeks I'll be posting some of them here.

Q: From your perspective, what’s the difference between a “skeptic” and a “debunker?”

A: My job is not to doubt, nor debunk; it is to investigate. I have no vested interest in proving or disproving any unexplained phenomena; I get paid the same either way. But the cardinal rule is that an investigator must eliminate all the natural explanations before accepting supernatural ones, and must use sound science.

A debunker is often thought of as someone who sets out to disprove or debunk a claim. The problem with debunking is that it begins with, or assumes, a specific (negative) answer or conclusion and works backward to try and prove that conclusion. But that’s not how science works, nor how skeptical investigation works. You must gather and analyze the evidence through a logical and critical thinking process, and follow the evidence wherever it leads. If the answer is that there really is a ghost in a home—or there really is a monster in a lake, or psychics really can find missing persons—then that’s great! That is wonderful and interesting and important to understand and accept. No one would be happier to prove these things exist than I do.

But I’m not willing to lower the standard of evidence so that any sound in the dark is a ghost, or any unknown thing photographed in the distance is Bigfoot or Nessie. Skeptics—not debunkers—take the subjects seriously, and often spend considerable time and effort investigating these claims. Debunkers often don’t bother to investigate or look at the evidence, instead just dismissing the claims as silly or impossible without doing any research. Often of course the skeptical investigation does end up debunking a claim if it’s false, but only after diligent research—not before it.

I was recently interviewed for a site called ParanormalBucket and answered several questions about my work and books. This week and in following weeks I'll be posting some of them here.

Q: Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky has said that “[s]cience is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.” Do you think the scientific method can be used to reinvent/reinvigorate a person’s interest in supernatural topics, or are science and the paranormal fundamentally incompatible?

A: The process of science is about solving mysteries, and when you do that, you find more mysteries, so it’s often the case that, as Sopolsky says, scientific breakthroughs lead to more mysteries. Not only should mysteries be investigated scientifically, but in fact many mysteries cannot be solved without scientific methods.

My skeptical colleagues and I, using scientific methods, have solved hundreds of mysteries. We have found answers and solutions to everything from astrology to zombies, ESP to ghosts. Yet non-scientific paranormal investigators rarely if ever find conclusive evidence; theirs is an open-ended quest fueled by evidence that is marginal at best. Look for yourself at the mountains of non-skeptical books on paranormal topics; see for yourself if their investigations find any conclusive evidence for the phenomenon. Ghost Hunters has been on television for a decade; what hard evidence have they found for ghosts? What definitive knowledge have we gained about the nature of ghosts over the past 10 or 20 years? Nothing; it’s all just speculation and theory. I have a book coming out later this year titled "Investigating Ghosts," that discusses this in depth.

I was recently interviewed for a site called ParanormalBucket and answered several questions about my work and books. This week and in following weeks I'll be posting some of them here.

Q: You have described yourself as a “science-based” paranormal investigator. Would you explain a bit about what that designation means in practice and how you go about your work?

A: I use “science-based” to contrast with other types of investigation, most of which are subjective. There are many ways humans find out about the world around us. The most common is through personal experience; we see or hear something, learn from it, and move on. For the most part personal experience works well for everyday things like learning not to lock your keys in the car. But personal experience can sometimes mislead us, especially when dealing with things that we don’t encounter every day—such as the paranormal.

Personal perception and experience tells us that our planet revolves around us. The sun moves across the sky from east to west, while we don’t appear to be moving at all. But personal experience is of course wrong; it is instead the Earth that revolves around the sun. Science reveals that the earth we walk on is also revolving at over 1,000 miles per hour (at the equator)—contrary to personal experience. So science is very useful in offering objective analysis. Though science doesn’t have all the details, it has many of them, and those parts that scientists still don’t understand won’t be filled by the earlier “mysterious” explanations. Science is simply a way of examining the world, a very effective method of analysis and investigation. You don’t need to be a scientist to investigate unexplained mysteries, but you do need to understand the principles involved.

Science has proven itself incredibly successful in explaining and finding out about the world. If we wish to know why a certain disease strikes one person and not another, we turn to medicine instead of a witch doctor. If we wish to know how to build a bridge that can span a river, we turn to physics instead of psychics. Paranormal or “unexplained” topics are testable by science: either a psychic’s prediction comes true or it doesn’t; either ghosts exist in the real world or they don’t.

Soon after my recent appearance discussing folklore of the chupacabra (the topic of my book Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore), I got the following e-mail from a listener named James:

“I thought your appearance on the The Folklore Podcast was very interesting and informative. It inspired me to search about chupacabras. One thing I came up with was about ‘Goat suckers’ and chotacabras. Too bad that I only have the 1997 version of the 1985 book The Jealous Potter by Claude Lévi-Strauss, but it sounds like there were a lot of myths/folklore about goat suckers in the folklore. Is there a reason you did not reference this in your book?”

I replied, “Thanks for reaching out to me, it’s good to hear from you. I’m glad you liked the Folklore Podcast interview, it was fun! Your question is a good one. I actually do briefly discuss the goatsucker bird in the first chapter of my book Tracking the Chupacabra (see page 4).

The chupacabra monster is very specifically a vampire: it sucks blood from its victims. The "goat sucker" bird that shares its name instead sucks milk from goats, which is a very different theme (there are few if any reports of surviving chupacabra victims, as the monster's actions are said to be lethal). Also the word chupacabra (as specifically describing the subject of my book) was, from all indications, coined in 1995 and referred specifically to rumors of goats being killed and drained of blood in rural Puerto Rico, not to the milk-drinking whippoorwill bird.

The main reason I didn’t go into much discussion about it is that as Levi-Strauss notes, stories about the bird are very diverse and difficult to classify (involving deities, marital jealousy, etc.). Other than one passing reference to a Tunuka Indian myth, there’s little or no vampiric aspect to it. As far as I know that’s the only reference to such blood sucking in The Jealous Potter , and in the quoted passage the attack is done by ghosts (souls of the dead), not the flesh-and-blood animal said to live on the island. Ghost folklore is interesting but not really relevant to the chupacabra I researched.

The coining of the word is, from my research, almost certainly a coincidence (chupacabra is an obvious coinage to describe anything said to prey on goats, regardless of its origin or nature). I suppose I could have added a few more sentences about the goat milk-drinking bird myths but since it wasn’t directly relevant to the chupacabra I was writing about (a supposedly real terrifying blood-sucking monster), I didn't want to take the reader too far off track. I hope that answers your question, and I appreciate The Jealous Potter reference, which I missed!”