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0:00:00
Ben Radford; Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:10
BR: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 101, the big one zero one, one after a hundred for those who are keeping track of the numerology of the last episode.

Celestia Ward: Today we’re going to be talking about diploma mills and other types of paranormal qualifications to be an academic in the occult and other type subjects. And Ben, as I understand it, you’ve got a particular story, a personal story in your history about that, correct?

0:01:05
BR: Yes, a curious, odd investigation I did about 10-12 years ago on a pseudo professor at a college in Canada. So we’ll be talking about that.

0:01:17
Excellent. And it’s not just you and me. Who else is with us? We got Pascual.

0:01:21
Pascual Romero: Hey, I am here today. Mostly.

0:01:23
BR: He says in his low key voice.

0:01:27
CW: OK. And we have an additional guest, a very special guest for the first part of the show. Normally, we would go right into a Swayso. So what are you skeptical of this week? But this is something that none of us are skeptical of, and that’s vaccines. However, there are people that are skeptical of vaccines, and we have Dr. Hans Haus with us. Dr. House, hello.

0:01:51
Hans House: Well, hello, thank you so much for having me.

0:01:53
CW: Thank you for giving us some of your very valuable time. Can you tell our listeners who you are and what you do to bring knowledge of infectious diseases to the world?

0:02:01
HH: Well, thank you very much. I am a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Iowa, where I practice emergency medicine, working in the ER on a daily basis. And my academic interest is in emerging infectious diseases and travel-related diseases. And vaccine and vaccine-preventable diseases are definitely part of my thing and something that I take an interest in and the medical community in general is certainly very aware of the anti-vaccine sentiment and we need to do everything we can to counter it.

CW:Yes, yes. Well, living in Las Vegas, I’m very glad that there are doctors studying travel-related diseases because we get hit with a lot of those here.

0:02:43
HH: Yes, I imagine you would.

BR: You’re the nexus of vice and disease, a pit of despair.

0:02:51
CW: Well, we have some questions for you, Dr. House. And I have to giggle up my sleeve that we have Dr. House with us. He’s one of my favorite skeptical fictional characters, but.

0:03:02
HH: I am a lot nicer than the guy on TV. I’m just not nearly as smart.

0:03:08
CW: Oh, well, if you think of any like house like zingers, we will totally accept them.

HH: It’s not lupus.

0:03:15
CW: Okay.

0:03:15
BR: It’s a great trade off, I like them already.

0:03:19
CW: Okay, well, we do have some questions for you. Pascual, you had the first question for Dr. House, correct?

0:03:25
PR: Sure, yeah. I actually was curious, this anti-vax sentiment is getting, I would say in some places, it seems to be growing, you know, according to reports. And I’m just kind of curious how much of the population we can get away with not vaccinating before it might result in a loss of herd immunity or just ineffectiveness of the whole public health effort?

0:03:47
HH: That’s a really great question. And it turns out for the measles vaccine, that is actually a very well-known number. To maintain appropriate herd immunity, meaning having enough people in the population that are immune to the disease so that they prevent it from being transmitted to people. For measles, it’s actually very, very high. It’s 95%, meaning you need to have 95% of your population vaccinated to really prevent kind of significant recurrences or many outbreaks of measles. So that’s hard to do.

0:04:24
PR: Yeah.

0:04:25
CW: It’s like an A plus, 95%. I don’t really trust most of the American public to get an A plus.

0:04:31
HH: In general, the United States is pretty good about the vaccination rate. The vaccination rate overall is in the 90% area. In some parts of Europe, it has dropped below 90% and you’re seeing a lot more measles in those cases. The problem in the United States, as Pascual has identified, is that it is very much spotty. It’s very much area dependent. There are certain enclaves in the United States that have a relatively higher proportion of anti-vaccine sentiment and low vaccination rates. And those are the places in the country where you’re going to see more outbreaks. We’ve also seen it in parts of New York, specifically Brooklyn and Queens.

CW: I was reading about that. It seems to correlate pretty well with former Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s travel schedule.

HH: Another example of travel-related disease.

CW: Well, so now the vaccine hesitancy, the trend over the past dozen years or so, has it gone far beyond what you or your colleagues have expected? Or is it just something that that those in the field just kind of come to accept as collateral losses or something, you know, something you just have to deal with, like noise? And how do you fight that noise?  I mean, what what what can you really do about it? It is so frustrating.

0:05:51
HH: It is so frustrating to have vaccines questioned and people be skeptical about it and having to really fight against anti-vaccine sentiment. And it’s just not scientific. And it boggles our minds that this is still a battle we still need to fight. And it certainly is definitely persisting. When I see patients who are skeptical about vaccines or chosen not to vaccinate their kids. I would say that generally the whole anti-vaccine sentiment falls into one of three categories. One is the true shills that are just, that know perfectly well that vaccines are necessary and are willing to make money on those who are skeptical and will provide alternate vaccinated regimens or provide essential oils to try to replace vaccines. And that just doesn’t, that doesn’t work. And that’s, and unfortunately there are providers and physicians that fall into that category. And that’s really, I think that, I find that very frustrating. The second category is the conspiracy theorists who just, no matter what you tell them, it’s only gonna reinforce their belief that vaccines are harmful in some way or that the risk outweighs the benefit, which is not the case. You just really can’t convince that category. But the third category and the ones that I see the most, and fortunately in Iowa, we don’t have a lot of anti-vaccine sentiment, but the category that I see the most are just the confused parents. Parents that really love their children and really want to do the best for their children. And they go on the internet and they use their favorite search engine and they look up vaccines. And if you just type in vaccine, you’re going to get within the third or fourth hit, you’re going to get you know some counter information or some inaccurate information about vaccines. And these parents want to do the best for the kids, they want to make sure the kids is healthy and they’re going to look into it and they’re get confused by what they read. And when I’ve met with these parents in the ER late at night, one o’clock in the morning and the child has a fever, I can see that. And I can see that they really do love their children and they just don’t have a good understanding of the pros and cons. I remember one case I had, there was this child who was like maybe eight months old or something like that and didn’t have her vaccines and came into the ER late at night with a fever. And for most patients, for most children, that is a no big deal. That is like, I’m gonna make sure you’re okay. I’m gonna make sure you don’t have meningitis. I’m gonna look in your ears. You might have an ear infection. You’re gonna be fine. Here’s how you treat a fever. Well, because this kid was unvaccinated, I had to do a full workup, including putting an IV in, drawing blood, and unfortunately, even doing a spinal tap. And this kid, as they lie screaming on the gurney while they’re being poked with needles. I had apologized to the parents saying, if you’d vaccinated, this wouldn’t be necessary. And she was just horrified, and she horrified about her decision, and she just didn’t know better. And that’s the kind of patient that we need to get to, and pediatricians really need to clearly understand, clearly explain to them why vaccines are important.

0:09:11
BR: A lot of times when I talk to anti-vaxxers, it’s this sort of abstract theoretical thing. Well, you know, they get into, you know, thimerosal, mercury, and this and that, but, you know, they’re not in the ER with you at 1 a.m. When you’re explaining to a mother why you’re having to go through this is because they chose not to vaccinate their kid. And it’s just, I think that’s really emotionally compelling and I think it’s something that people can really latch on to.

0:09:34
HH: Yes, I agree.

0:09:35
BR: But I want to ask you about the role of folklore in epidemiology. One of my interests is of course in urban legends and lore and stuff. And also, of course, fear-mongering online. And I’ve written about, for example, in Pakistan, there’s been many cases where polio vaccinators have been attacked. You know, they go from village to village and they’re trying to vaccinate the children and there are conspiracy theories going around that, for example, they’re working for the US government or they’re working for someone else. And there’s this really unnerving, scary rumor, legend, conspiracy wrapped up in this. And you also see the same, for example, in West Africa in the efforts to contain Ebola. People who are flying in, you’ve got CDC volunteers and you’ve got doctors, everybody there, and they’re trying their best to contain this outbreak, and yet there’s murmurs talking about, oh, what are they really doing here? Are they manufacturing this disease for their benefit somehow?

0:10:37
HH: Yeah, and I’m familiar with the situation in the Congo, Timbaland, part of Congo, where there is a significant Ebola outbreak that’s been persisting. Unlike the really big outbreak that we had a few years ago, this outbreak has been in mostly rural, mostly remote areas of the eastern part of the country, really hard to get to and really hard to travel around. And there’s an insurgency in the area, a rebellion, so it’s physically dangerous for the health care workers to go there. So it becomes very difficult to control. And the difference, the big difference between this year’s outbreak and previous outbreaks is that this year we actually have a vaccine. There actually is an Ebola vaccine, which seems to be maybe as high as 90% effective. That’s really great. We should be able to control this. And they’re doing something called ring vaccination. And the idea of ring vaccination is you identify a contact, you identify someone who has the disease, and then you identify everyone sort of around them who had contact with that person, or the family members in a ring around them. And you vaccinate around them, and you try to contain the virus to spread that way. And one of the challenges that they’ve run into exactly as Ben described is that there is a belief, a rumor, a folklore, a legend that just transmitted around that the health care workers in fact are causing the disease, that those shots that they’re giving are the trench mending the bull in the first place. And it’s easy to see how this rumor would take hold and then would be very hard to dispute because well, who’s getting the vaccine? Who’s getting the vaccine? Those who are sick. So every time the health care workers show up, it means that someone in the village is sick and then there’s more people sick when they leave because, well, that’s what happens to viruses. It certainly spreads. So, the rumor gets sort of reinforced by people’s own experiences. Furthermore, the whole origin of Ebola in the first place, the very first time it appeared in 1976, basically showed up in a remote mission hospital in the middle of the Congo near the Ebola River. That’s where the name comes from. And someone showed up and was very sick and bled everywhere. And everybody in the hospital and all the nurses and all the health care workers there got sick from that person’s exposure. A lot of it because needles were reused. So the fact the hospital itself, this is well before the AIDS epidemic and it was practiced at the time. And so the hospital itself became basically where the infection was spread and was given to other people. So there is an origin, originally for the virus, that you can see where this legend might come from, and people’s own experiences would reinforce what they observe.

0:13:25
BR: Interesting.

0:13:26
CW: That’s always struck me as such a catch-22 there, where doctors and nurses and healthcare workers are blamed for the illness, but they’re the ones on the front lines and they’re coming down with the illness themselves. If it was a simple matter of injecting people with an illness, you’d think they wouldn’t do it to themselves, but.

0:13:43
HH: Yeah, that’s true. And that actually reminds me of one of the important ironies of vaccinations. The more effective the vaccine is, the less people want it. If a vaccine is extremely effective and basically eliminates the disease, almost eliminates the disease, like polio, for example, in the United States, then people don’t think that’s an important vaccine to get. But in the middle of a measles epidemic in Los Angeles, people are like banging on pediatricians’ doors, begging for the vaccine, even the people that previously didn’t want the vaccine say that they need to have it. So it’s like, it’s having the disease around really gets people to actually want the vaccine. So vaccines are basically self-defeating in a way, the more effective they are.

CW: Wow. I’ve heard the term historical amnesia described to play that plays into the vaccine hesitancy that we see today because people simply don’t have an awareness of what it was like when these diseases were rampant 80 or 100 years ago. I highly recommend a documentary on YouTube that was actually put out by our friend Richard Saunders of the Skeptic Zone called the called The Vaccine Chronicles. And it’s a short, like, 25-minute, just sort of a storytelling episode where he talks to people about polio and other childhood diseases. He talks to the elder generations about it. And you get to hear about iron lungs and all sorts of polio paralyzed children and all sorts of smallpox and all sorts of diseases that really aren’t in the historical memory nowadays. And yeah, it’s a fantastic tool for teachers and anybody else who wants to sort of show their children or themselves, hey, you should really remember this, it’s important. The other type of amnesia that I was reading about was something apparently a Harvard doctor is looking into called immune amnesia, and specifically related to measles, in that if you catch measles, not only do you have to worry about fighting off measles, but apparently having measles causes your immune system to forget how to battle a bunch of other stuff? Is that true?

0:15:47
HH: Yes, it is. So, measles is a bitch. It is a really nasty disease. And historical amnesia is a great description in that people don’t remember what measles was like because most of modern America most of modern world in fact has lived without measles and and doesn’t doesn’t know what what it did and there’s a belief that Measles is relatively harmless. Well for most patients especially children from about 4 to about 12 tend to tolerate it pretty well. So there’s a there’s a reason why they might think that the problem is it has a lot of little Potential complications that are really nasty Obviously if you’re older you can get really sick from measles, especially like pneumonia. You think about what you hear about maybe with with chickenpox if like an adult’s good chicken box they can get really really sick same kind of thing happens with measles but almost uniquely to measles that it has this other phenomenon, which is really weird and that it literally suppresses the CD4 cells, or basically the T cells. So the cells that are used in the body to form new antibodies, to form immune memory, measles will actually suppress the production of T cells. It’s kind of like what HIV does. So if you get measles, then for like basically two years afterwards, vaccines will be less effective if you try to take them. It’s really amazing. Crazy.

0:17:20
CW: Wow. Yeah, it was a frightening side effect I was reading about. I’m hearing suggestions that a person who gets measles should actually get all their childhood vaccines all over again. And, well, not so much in our country, but in other parts of the world, kids are dying from other illnesses that they had built up a tolerance to that no longer is there?

0:17:40
HH: Yes, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, measles is a huge problem in terms of, especially on a population basis, and you just get that, those places where the measles is more prevalent, you just have a higher rate of death from diarrheal illnesses and other related infections.

0:17:57
BR: I was just going to add that, you know, in terms of sort of cultural amnesia. You know, when I was a kid, I remember thinking of diseases as sort of these archaic things that happened to like Europe in 1700s. It’s like, you know, well, it didn’t occur to me until I was a bit older, probably my later teens, that, you know, just because I didn’t see it as sort of a privileged, you know, American does not mean that they’re not out there. And, of course, to this day, there’s leprosy. And, in fact, in my home state, in New Mexico, people still die of the plague. I remember watching this on the news. There’s been several outbreaks. And I’m watching this on my local news, and they’re saying, somebody died of the plague. I’m like, no, no, people died of the plague like 200 years ago. And I’m like, no, no, wake up. And it’s especially prevalent, it’s spread by the urine from deer mice, primarily in the Four Corners area and Navajo Reservations.

HH: By rodent.

0:18:57
BR: Yeah. It was just a sort of a wake-up call, a little slap in the face, that no, these diseases, even if we don’t think about them every day and the sorts of horrific diseases that are largely gone, in corners of the world, in some cases, corners of our states, it’s a very real thing.

0:19:13
CW: It’s a boogeyman that does exist.

0:19:15
PR: Yeah, you know, you kind of hit on something there, Ben, when you’re talking about sort of the cultural element of it. The other thing is that when you’re in these modern developed nations where we have medical intervention to keep these diseases from being population threatening on like a major scale, by forgetting that it is a threat, you know, we’re also kind of forgetting that there are vulnerable populations, not only here but also abroad, that if we’re not doing our part to control our side of things, it can complicate things for those more vulnerable populations. That’s basically the point of herd immunity, but I think the cultural element can even go a little further in terms of being sort of first world privileged people who have the privilege of even being able to shrug off vaccines.

0:20:07
HH: And Ben, the example that you cited about plague in New Mexico is an example of a re-emerging disease, basically a disease that was there before. And it’s an old disease and in the right situations you can get cases of it. Basically, plague is endemic to the Western United States and rodents, there are sporadic cases in California and Nevada and Mexico and other places occasionally throughout the year. In New Mexico specifically was the origin of a brand new disease, which is Hanta virus. That’s an emerging disease that is basically a novel virus, a virus that basically showed up out of nowhere.

0:20:43
BR: Yes.

HH: And that’s the one that is classically associated with the urine of mice. And so that’s an example of a completely emerging infectious disease. And that’s where viruses, you know, new viruses will develop. And that’s an excellent example of one.

0:20:54
PR: What sorts of worries does the infectious disease community have regarding viruses mutating, making old vaccines ineffective against the new strains? How much of a danger is that?

0:21:05
HH: As I mentioned, new viruses show up all the time, you know, and there are new strains of Ebola that we have to counter in Africa, there are new strains that may be a potavirus that might show up in the future. Generally, we don’t worry too much about new strains making vaccines ineffective. For example, the measles virus, the wild type, the viruses out there, it hasn’t changed much and the vaccine is still relatively effective. The really big exception is the flu vaccine. Influenza has this nasty way of changing its shape on the surface, what’s we call the antigenic drift. Basically, the antigen is the, what the, the chemical that the, that the body sees and forms antibodies against. And on the surface of that virus, the flu virus changes every year and it shifts a little bit. That’s why every year you get a new vaccine. And that vaccine is based on guesses, literally, on what is out there, what types of antigens are on this year’s version of the flu virus, which is floating around. And sometimes we guess pretty well, and sometimes we don’t guess very well at all. And so the effectiveness of the flu vaccine really varies from year to year, as low as 25% or as high as 60 or 70%. Bottom line is the flu vaccine is not a great vaccine. It’s not a measles vaccine. It doesn’t provide total immunity to the disease, but it does reduce your chance of getting sick. And if everybody in the population gets the vaccine, if you have a large number of people who get the vaccine, the total disease burden from influenza is gonna be significantly less. You might get 10, 50,000 deaths from influenza every year in the United States. That’s a normal flu season. If you basically then reduce the number of deaths by let’s say 25%, that’s a lot less ER visits, that’s a lot less hospitalizations, that’s a lot less healthcare costs. So on a population basis, it makes perfect sense for everybody to get the flu vaccine. People don’t necessarily see that benefit personally. I think that’s why it kind of leads to like, well, I got the flu vaccine and then I got sick. Well, yeah, you didn’t get the flu. You got some other illness, but OK, fine. Where it really makes a huge difference, and this is something I want your listeners to really know, is that the flu vaccine really does prevent deaths in children very significantly. Probably cuts it by half or two thirds, the risk of death in kids, especially from ages two to five. And that group really should get the flu vaccine. They should really get two doses and it really makes an individual level difference.

0:23:56
CW: Yeah, I’m very glad you brought that up, Dr. Huss. Thank you for letting listeners know how important it is for children that we as a population get our flu vaccines. That brings me to something that now we try not to get too political on the podcast, but occasionally things with a political taint come up. And I do think this is something that people from both sides of the aisle are concerned about, is that I’m hearing there is a higher than usual instance of children dying in the concentrated amount of people that are in some of the border migrant camps. And I remember hearing in the news that flu vaccines are not going to be distributed there. Have you or any of your colleagues talked about this? Do you have any opinion on that? Is the media representation of the flu danger a bit overblown or is it not as emphasized as it should be? Do you have any opinion on that?

0:24:48
HH: Okay, a couple of quick caveats. I have not actually visited the camps and I don’t know the situation on the ground, specifically. I have read press articles, popular press articles that flu vaccines would not be distributed there. Also, I think there’s a lot of concern about imported diseases brought in by migrants. I’m not going to get into that. That’s kind of a whole another issue. But basically, if people are in the camps, there’s certainly that’s something not something people need to worry about. What is absolutely true, there is no question, that when you have a bunch of people packed into a small space and are inside because it’s cold, flu viruses are gonna get transmitted. That’s why the flu season is in the winter, because that’s when people are together and they are transmitted to each other. So if you pack a bunch of people into a camp on the border of Texas, you are going to get a higher instance of flu cases. And the best way to counter that by far, especially for the children that are there, is to give flu vaccines. And I’m sure that public health officials know that, and I’m sure they will reconsider whatever announcement that was in the press that said that flu vaccines are not going to be distributed. I cannot believe that that will persist. That is a really, really dumb idea.

0:26:08
CW: I’m hoping you’re correct on that. I’m sure there’s legal caveats being pulled in, like for the same reason why they were arguing they don’t need to give any soap and toothbrushes out, is because people are supposed to be there for 72 hours or less. And yes, I can understand if somebody is there for only 72 hours and a vaccine takes, how long does the flu vaccine take before it’s actually effective in your system? Is it two weeks?

0:26:32
HH: Yeah, about that.

0:26:33
CW: Okay, so I can understand legal authorities making that argument, but if people are being held there for months at a time, we got to get some vaccines down there.

HH: Yes.

CW: Now, lastly, do you have any suggestions, any really great tricks to convince a non-vaccinating or vaccine-hesitant family to consider vaccines. I remember you did mention just the look in the parents’ eye when you told them that, you know, none of this spinal tap or all this other invasive testing would be necessary on a two-year-old if she had just been vaccinated. But before you get to that point, are there any good strategies? I remember reading, there was a 2011 Washington state law that required parents to talk with a doctor before getting a vaccine exemption and that reduced exemptions by 40 percent. Is it just a matter of spending time with patients or are there any other strategies?

0:27:23
HH: It is absolutely a matter of spending time with patients being able to counter some of the questions they’re going to get. A lot of their misconceptions are not based on scientific fact and the doctor can try to counter that. Again, there’s a segment of the population that anything you say is really not going to be heard. However, most patients really are just confused and they probably will listen. I did hear of a colleague who had a very unique solution. They had a patient who was very very much anti-vaccine, very much in the conspiracy theory camps. And basically in the matter of the 15-minute interview in the ER, started off about four or five different conspiracy theories, everything from chemtrails to stuff in the tap water, Florida tap water. And the doctor said, well, maybe the anti-vaccine sentiment on the internet is actually state sponsored hacking by China or Russia to weaken the American public, which actually there’s actually evidence that that’s true.

0:28:33
CW: Oh wow.

0:28:34
HH: At that point the patient said, that’s great, I want the vaccine, absolutely, and then they go it.

0:28:42
CW: Know your audience, yeah.

0:28:44
HH: Know your audience, there you go.

0:28:47
BR: I have to say I applaud doctors and people who have the patience for that. I think it’s just because you’re trying to help people out and you know I would probably at some point just get pissed off. I’d say well if you don’t believe that I’m here to help you out why are you here? If you don’t believe that the medical profession and me as a doctor are trying to help you out and give you good advice then why are you showing up in my office? That would just frustrate me. That just This pretty much describes my everyday job.

0:29:14
HH: Well, I’m finishing it on your behalf.

0:29:18
CW: Dr. House, thank you very much for giving us more time than we expected. We appreciate it.

0:29:24
HH: Well, thank you very much for having me today. It’s been fun and I hope to come back sometime.

0:29:30
CW: All right. Continue to fight the good fight.

0:29:33
BR: Thanks, bye.

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0:29:33
This is Richard Saunders from the Skeptic Zone podcast, wishing my colleagues Ben, Celestia and Pascual a happy 101st episode of Squaring the Strange. Squaring the Strange, the only skeptical podcast I always listen to, apart from the Skeptic Zone and Skeptoid and ESP and the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe and there’s probably some others. Congratulations, Squaring the Strange.

(MUSIC)

CW: We’re back. We all ran out and got our flu shots, but now we’re back.

0:30:16
And we have not Pascual. Pascual had other prior obligations, but we have what we call friend of the show. That is, he keeps begging to come on, and we keep letting him come on. That would be Kenny Biddle!

KB: That’s right. Every week I beg and beg, please, please put me back on the show.

0:30:36
CW: Yes, Kenny.

BR: He’s embarrassing us both, so all right, fine.

CW: Investigator, writer, enthusiast of learning and strange things about the paranormal.

0:30:45
BR: What officially is your job title, Kenny?

0:30:53
KB: I have no clue. I don’t know. I write, I solve a mystery, I send it to Ben and he tells me what I did wrong and then boom.

CW: Ben has a way of doing that. He tells me every time I do something wrong too.

BR: Well, I think that’s entirely fair, but we’ll go with that.

KB: I guess officially I am a columnist, right?

0:31:15
BR: You are all sorts of, you’re apparently an ASE certified technician. I didn’t even know that.

KB: I am ASE certified. I am-

BR: You’re certifiable, but-

0:31:22
KB: I have a degree for automotive repair. I have this and that. I have certifications out my butt.

CW: I did not realize that you were a certified mechanic. I mean, when you come to Vegas for SciCon, I’m going to have you look at my truck. There’s a couple of rattles I want you to diagnose for me.

0:31:43
KB: Because that’s what I want to do when I go to Vegas.

0:31:45
BR: Kenny’s a wild man. Anybody have any transmissions I can look at?

0:31:50
KB: Yeah.

0:31:51
CW: All right.

0:31:52
BR: Well, the reason we’re talking about credentials and those sorts of things is because we want to talk about the sad state of affairs when it comes to a lot of the topics that skeptics investigate, everything from alternative medicine to ghost hunting to psychics and this and that, and some of the sketchy credentials, if you will, that are often associated with that.

CW: Ah, the proliferation of fake parchment and such.

KB: Yes. I have a piece of paper that I printed out. I’m good to go.

BR: Well, yeah, so I mean, let’s just sort of open up the discussion. So, you know, as I mentioned, that’s one of the interesting things about the topics that we often investigate, you know, cryptozoology, ghosts, psychic, whatever else, is that in some ways there are no experts on it. I mean, there are experts in so far as there’s people that have studied it and said the folklore and this and that. But I mean, the fact is there are no official formal experts on Bigfoot or ghosts. There are people who have studied reports, but in terms of, you know, if you’re talking about the actual creature or the actual ghost of the actual, whatever else, ain’t no such thing because we haven’t found one yet. And so you can of course, be an expert in the folklore of these things, which, which I am and Ken uses as well. And this is unlike, of course, medicine, like real medicine or accounting or engineering where there are identifiable credentials. In her book, Scientifical Americans, of course, Sharon Hill wrote about that and the pseudo-credentialization, if you will, of the field.

0:33:30
CW: Now, this very much reminds me of how people are getting married these days a lot by having having one of their good buddies spend five minutes and ten dollars on the internet to become a certified pastor of some church of the Holy Internet so that they can officially marry somebody.

0:33:50
KB: That’s right I am I’m a minister universal life church baby!

BR: My mom is too, how cool!

CW: So in the same way can you can you also become an official I don’t know what you would call yourself, a PhD of ghostology or metaphysics or astral projection or I got my decoder ring and it means I’m a super secret agent. What exactly have you learned about these places online that grant such things?

0:34:15
KB: Well, there’s a ton of them. I mean, it’s a problem like Ben was mentioning. It’s a problem because I guess when you get these certifications, people feel a sense of authority, you know, they feel higher up and put on this pedestal above the rest of the community. So there’s an opportunity there and we’ve seen it, I’ve seen it for the last 20 years or so with ghost hunting groups in particular because that’s the community I’m more involved with than like say UFOs or Bigfoot, although I do dabble in those. But with the ghost hunting community, I see a lot of these groups offering ghost hunting 101 classes. There was actually one of the places I wrote about was they certified you as a ghost hunter.

BR: And I’m sorry, I just I have a hard time not just go ahead. I hey, I totally understand. I agree.

0:35:08
CW: How many ghost pelts did you have to provide the instructor with to get your ghost hunter certification?

0:35:16
KB: Ghost pelt?

0:35:17
CW: And, yes, did you have to trap them in a cage and show that you are a successfully hunted one?

0:35:22
KB: This particular ghost hunting certification course, I believe it was only a few hours that you spent on like a Saturday. You signed up, you spent a few hours, you had a mini ghost hunt at the end of the course, which was that night at some allegedly haunted place, and you became a certified ghost hunter.

0:35:42
CW: That has to be a novelty. There have got to be some. Some of these have got to be strictly in a novelty sense. Like, you can go out on, like, a booze walk out here and drink a bunch of different alcohols and get a certificate stating you’re a bourbon expert or something. How many of these are seriously legitimate things or trying to be seriously legitimate things that are offered? And how many are just jokes, you think?

0:36:08
KB: Well, I haven’t surveyed all of them because there’s just so many, but for the most part, there’s a difference between how they promote it. Sometimes you get these tours that they supply a certificate of completion, which is just that. All you did was, you know, you took the tour and leave.

0:36:27
BR: You weren’t so disgusted with the tour of the you said screw this this is a waste of my time I’m walking out of here. You you stuck it out.

KB: But there’s others that actually offer you a certification. They charge you money One one in particular charges to $65, and it’s a three-hour retreat I don’t know what qualifies it as a retreat, but that’s what they call it.

0:36:53
CW: That’s weird to have a retreat where you don’t actually stay overnight anywhere.

0:36:57
KB: Right. And that’s basically all it was. It was three hours, you did a mini ghost hunt, and you got your certification. And the reason I discovered this certification course is that there’s a ghost hunter, and I won’t name him, but he’s on Facebook, and his Facebook name is so-and-so certified ghost hunter like that’s his full Facebook name. And he promotes himself like that and he-

BR: That takes some stones man. That’s like you know you just put it out there.

0:37:26
KB: I know I mean three hours That’s and it was $65. $65!

0:37:32
BR: Yeah, I was looking my files earlier in one of my filing cabinets and I came across my file of sketchy diplomas. And I have an order form from the Progressive Universal Life Church. It offers about 20 or 30 here. You can be a certified tarot advisor, their most popular diploma, for $195. You can be – you can have a doctor of biblical studies for $175, a doctor of religion awarded for life experience, no course. If you’ve reached the point in your life where you’re an adult and you’re able to send money, that is your life experience. That’s all you need is to be able to write a check. There’s a registered tariff advisor certificate for $55. Now, this sheet here is probably 30 years old, so it’s probably… It doesn’t even have a website. That’s all it is. So I’m guessing that by now, inflation, if you want to be a registered alchemist.

0:38:30
CW: An alchemist?

0:38:32
BR: A registered alchemist certificate, $55.

CW: Wow!

0:38:35
BR: Get it while they’re hot. Oh my gosh. Oh no, no, this is even better. Hold on. I didn’t mean to throw you off on the alchemist. You can be a registered sorcerer for $55.

0:38:46
CW: Oh, no.

0:38:47
KB: Sign me up.

0:38:48
BR: A registered sorcerer. So anyway, so

0:38:51
CW: Can you also be a bard and a barbarian and a tank or?

0:38:54
BR: No, you can be a monk here. Here we go. You can get a title certificate for 30 dollars This is this is a bargain 30 bucks. You can be a rabbi a priest a deacon a pastor a priestess a missionary Doesn’t say what position or a monk.

CW: And then you get all those degrees you can just walk into a bar by yourself and tell your own joke.

BR: Exactly. So Kenny, tell us, I know that you’ve done quite a few in-depth investigations because you know in the course of what we do we occasionally come across, what’s the word, sketchy people who shake your hand, look you in the eye and tell you all about their Dr. Divinity. What’s a case that you looked into?

0:39:33
KB: I have two cases and I’ll go over both of them briefly. I don’t want to take up the entire show, but I did come across somebody about four years ago. This was a group effort. It wasn’t just me that was looking into it, but there was a gentleman, I use that term loosely.

0:39:54
BR: A male.

0:39:55
KB: He wasn’t an asshole. But the guy was a very popular lecturer in the paranormal community. I mean, he traveled all over, he did all the conferences. He basically was on the conference circuit. So he got his free hotels and free rooms and meals and whatever. And his background was very interesting. It really impressed people because he said he had a physics degree. He had all this training.

0:40:31
CW: Quantum physics is perfect because everything, woo, revolves around quantum energy in some way or another. Was this Deepak Chopra? Did you investigate Deepak Chopra?

0:40:42
KB: No, no. I wish. That would have been fun. But in addition to this, I mean, he had various other claims. He had this long and decorated military career, and he also had ties with Native Americans. And I mean, just this huge, huge background, list of credentials that were just like, wow, this is amazing. And when he would lecture, he talked very sciencey. And I use that term specifically for what he was doing, because it was very sciencey. It wasn’t scientific, it was sciencey. But he did all this stuff and there was, I don’t remember exactly how it went down, but I was on a podcast with him. I was a guest, he was a guest, and there was another guy there, and we were all talking about research and investigating. And for some reason, it came up about his physics degree. And I, just a simple question, I asked where he got it from. Like, where did you study? What university? And he would not tell me. He wouldn’t reveal it. So yeah, that’s a red flag to me.

0:41:47
BR: I’m not telling you, Mr. Skeptic.

0:41:50
KB: Exactly. So going back and forth, he finally settled on this statement that if I wanted to know about him, then I should Google him. Being the professional investigator that I was, with a lot of friends that are into various research skills, we Googled the sh** out of him. Yes, we found out a lot of stuff. Most of his military career he had embellished, like severely.

0:42:17
CW: Ooh, stolen valor as well as stolen credentials.

0:42:21
KB: Like saying that he went to Vietnam, that he got a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, that he was a captain, he was in special forces. All not true.

CW: Wow.

KB: Not true. I have a copy of his DD-214, and I know exactly what he did and did not do.

0:42:37
CW: Wow. Isn’t that a little bit illegal?

KB: Yes, it’s a lot illegal.

0:42:42
CW: Yes.

0:42:42
KB: Especially in New Jersey.

0:42:43
BR: Note to self, if you’re trying to hide things, do not encourage Kenny Biddle to look into you. That’s the opposite of what you want. That is really sound advice.

0:42:53
KB: And I had a lot of help. My friend Melanie, she helped me a lot. She’s also with research, but, and she was, she is retired military. So she had a very vested interest in this. So besides the military career that was highly embellished, his ties to Native Americans, he had claimed to be a Native American shaman, which he was not, because we contacted the tribes and found out that no, they had no idea who he was. But getting to the degrees, he had claimed that he had a, let’s see, he had a doctorate in quantum physics, particle physics, and a PhD. And I have to note this, instead of doing, Like, I’m used to seeing PhD written as a capital P, little h, capital D. His is capital P, period, capital H, period, capital D, period.

0:43:45
CW: Maybe he literally meant piled higher and deeper.

KB: That was on his LinkedIn account.

BR: Wow.

0:43:50
KB: He claimed to have a PhD in quantum mechanics from Princeton.

0:43:55
CW: Oh.

0:43:55
KB: And yeah, we checked on that. And no, he did not. He did not have any doctorate. And then there was a point where he did a podcast. And I’m sure most of the people that know me and are listening, they know exactly who I’m talking about. But he did a podcast where he was asked about his academic background. His reply was, ah, yes, physics, master’s in physics, a master’s in electrical engineering, and I would have had a PhD, but my advisors and I had a disagreement over the subject matter of my thesis. So I don’t have it, but I do have the education. I just don’t have the piece of paper.

0:44:39
CW: Well, that’s one way to sort of get out of anything. Okay.

0:44:43
BR: Unless, of course, you’re already on the record as saying you have a PhD, which is a different matter.

0:44:48
KB: Exactly. And I have a like I have a timeline printed out that for his LinkedIn, his Facebook profile, his YouTube profile all say that he’s a physicist. And yeah, he doesn’t. He doesn’t have it at all. And he went for years with this and it really impressed people. He got he got jobs. He was on a TV show called Ghost Stalkers, which only lasted for one season because it was terrible. But besides that, I mean, his background got him the job and title as technical advisor for that show. Until they found out, you know, he didn’t have this background.

0:45:27
CW: Now, you exposed him through, I’m assuming, an article? Or how exactly did you rain down terror upon his lies?

0:45:35
KB: Well, all the information, really, I mean, we thoroughly researched to make sure because this is touchy, you know, this is especially when you’re dealing with stolen valor, you’re dealing with the background, the credentials in education that are false, the academic credentials, and then especially the Native American ties. So everything went on to a military blog called NoBlueFalcons.com. If you go there, you can read all about it and you’ll see all the pictures, all the documents that we have that were posted on there and it shows everything. And we went through a few months where he was, his retaliation, instead of addressing the issues, he did nothing but say, you know, we faked federal documents, we faked this, we faked that.

0:46:23
BR: Oh, so turn the conspiracy back on you.

0:46:27
KB: Yes, yes. But we did have the documentation. We all had it. Under the Freedom of Information Act, you can get these public records, including his DD-214, which clearly shows that he did not receive medals that he claimed that he got, he didn’t receive the rank that he claimed he got, nothing.

0:46:44
BR: Wow.

0:46:45
KB: So, since then, yes, his paranormal career has gone in the toilet.

0:46:51
CW: That’s good to hear. I mean, so often you hear of somebody being exposed and then they just kind of keep skipping along because nobody cares, but you made a difference.

0:47:00
KB: Yes, yeah, and it was a combined effort. I mean, there was a lot of people involved, not just me. And we came together and fact-checked each other and we presented the information, here it is. And it was nice because usually when you do that, you get backlash because he was basically a paranormal celebrity. We were exposing him, we were showing that he wasn’t the man he said he was, and we’re used to getting backlash from that, but this time around, we didn’t get any, you know, except from him, but that’s understandable. But the community responded by saying, yes, this looks legit. This guy won’t answer. He won’t answer the questions, the accusations. He won’t defend himself. I mean, basically this was a matter of showing your DD-14, which any military person that I’ve talked to said that they have no problem doing that.

0:47:54
BR: Right, why would you?

0:47:55
KB: Yeah, exactly. If you have a question about their career, boom, they whip it out, you know, figuratively, and show you right away. But this guy, nope, would not do it. So we had to do it for him. So that was about four years ago.

0:48:10
CW: Now that’s, it’s almost a stroke of luck that he was lying about so much. I mean, he wasn’t claiming, oh, I have a degree in parapsychology. He was claiming that he had medals that he didn’t have from the U.S. armed forces, that he had a shaman status from a Native American tribe. All these things are easily checked and it’s not like you can say, oh, well, I didn’t get my medals from that US armed forces. I got it from this other shady, unaccredited armed forces. You can check. There’s a record you can check.

BR: The University of Eastern Croatia. It’s not in business anymore, but it was when I was there.

0:48:50
CW: Yeah, now with universities and schools and certificates you can get online, you have the problem of this ambiguous sort of like… Ben, why don’t you explain for listeners the differences between an accredited school and something that’s not?

0:49:07
BR: So basically, you can open up a school and teach anybody anything you want. That’s perfectly legitimate. I can, I can go out and teach somebody how to give massages or to fix a car, although they’re not going to do this car very well. The question is not, can you do it? The question is, are you getting a quality education? Is there some mechanism by which you are at least ostensibly assured a quality education by an accrediting institution? And so that’s why, for example, if you go to QuackWatch, for example, quackwatch.org, they have a section on consumer education and they have lots of examples of schools that are accredited or not accredited, some are accredited but not recommended and so on. And so, depending on what field you’re in, the field will have certain accreditation forms. So for example, if you’re a plumber, if you’re an auto mechanic, if you’re a psychologist, what have you, the professional degrees and careers, it’s to their benefit that the people that are representing them and representing themselves as experts in this community can actually do what the hell they’re claiming to do, because otherwise it looks bad if you can’t do what you’re claiming to do. So again, there’s health care accreditation, there’s education accreditations, there’s investors, for example, engineering certifications, there’s a wide range of things. And again, that’s not to say that you might not get a reasonable education from a non-accredited source or university. I mean, you can go to a library or spend weeks online and learn a lot about a topic. The information is out there, but the accreditation is one layer of protection so you can have some confidence you’re actually getting a quality education.

0:51:02
CW: You can indeed, just like that guy said, you can get the equivalent of a PhD on your own, just not have the piece of paper. But if you want people to believe that you have that education, you should get it from a U.S. accredited school.

0:51:16
KB: Yeah, I think the difference is that the quality of the education and the quality of the program that’s providing that education. I know Ben probably has the same thing, but I have thousands of books here. I can read up on dozens and dozens of topics and become very familiar and almost consider an expert sometimes. But it’s not formal training. It’s not recognized by a government agency or an overseeing agency. And that’s pretty much the big deal. You have to demonstrate your work. When I was an auto mechanic, I became ASC certified, which is for the National Institute of Automotive Excellence. I had to demonstrate that I had learned the skills and the knowledge necessary to actually fix cars and fix them right. And same with medical. I was an EMT for a while. So I was an emergency medical technician. I had to demonstrate, I had to go to the Pennsylvania Department of Health and demonstrate my skills and pass the test to get my license in order to work. So, and you can also have these manufacturers, like when I worked on aircraft, I went for manufacturer training, which is certifications by the manufacturer. So it’s not an accrediting agency per se, but it’s the manufacturer of the product. So I can be certified because they make the product, they know everything about the product, and if they say I can work on it, I’m certified. It’s a big difference when you say, oh, well, you know what, I’m gonna go online to this, again, universal like church, and I’m gonna fill out this form that takes me 30 seconds, and boom, I am a minister.

0:52:51
CW: And the government does get involved, depending on the importance of the education involved, because you were just talking about fixing cars as an accredited mechanic and working on aircraft and in the medical field, obviously things where people’s lives are at stake. You don’t want somebody pulling out a little handmade certificate. Oh, see, this says I’m a doctor. You need somebody that’s legitimately a doctor. You need somebody that legitimately knows how to fix brakes so that you don’t have people, you know, driving on brakes that have been fixed by somebody who thinks he knows how, but really doesn’t.

0:53:25
KB: I have here, this is the definition of a diploma mill, and I think this is important, from the Higher Education Opportunity Act. And it defines a diploma mill as an entity that offers for a fee degrees, diplomas, and certifications that may be used to represent to the general public that the individual possessing such a degree, diploma, or certificate has completed a program of post-secondary education or training and requires such individual to complete little or no education or coursework to obtain such a degree, diploma, or certificate.

BR: So, for example, if you have life experience and that qualifies you to have a doctor of ministry, then maybe not.

0:54:08
CW: Or if you go on a three-hour retreat.

KB: Yeah.

CW: Well, Kenny, while you’re pulling some useful information for us all here, are there any accredited colleges or universities that have offered degrees in the paranormal or parapsychology as people tend to claim that they have?

0:54:26
KB: Well, no, that came up because one of the focuses of my article was about somebody claiming to be a parapsychologist. And I actually reached out to Lloyd Arobach, who is well known in the paranormal community. He’s been on various TV shows and he is a parapsychologist. He has an actual degree and he got his degree. Let me see. I got to look at my notes because I have so many notes here. He got his from the John F. Kennedy University, and that was a Master of Science in parapsychology. And that was back in the 70s and 80s. He actually got his in 81. According to him, and he’s part of the Parapsychological Association, let’s see, there was a one-off PhD from Jeffrey Mishlove. I’m hoping I’m saying that right.

0:55:19
BR: You are. I’ve heard the name.

0:55:22
KB: Okay. He got in the 70s from UC Berkeley and the only other U.S. university was John F. Kennedy that offered this. That’s it. And that stopped at 1986, 87.

0:55:35
CW: So there’s one guy who got a degree from Berkeley and that’s the only time Berkeley has issued a degree in that. And then there’s a handful of people from the 70s and early 80s who got their degrees from JFK University, you said?

0:55:49
KB: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

CW: OK.

KB: And that’s it. Besides that, the only one that I knew, there’s a few over in the UK, most notably the University of Edinburgh, that offers a degree that specializes in parapsychology and that’s about it. And furthermore, what I learned is that you usually need an advanced degreebefore you even try to get that. So the number one degree that people have is a PhD in psychology, and then behind that is physics. But you have to have the advanced degree first, and then you can apply for the parapsychology class.

0:56:27
CW: Now, the matter of whether or not parapsychology is a real thing that has ever been proven is a whole different kettle of fish. But since we’re talking about academic credentials, we’re focusing on just what is accredited and what is not. And the vast amount of people in the paranormal business, I guess I should say, are flashing credentials that are about as good as the back of your average cereal box, if I’m understanding correctly?

0:56:53
KB: Yes. There’s a few out there, and in the article that I wrote, there’s a guy that, he was on one of the TV shows, it was a TV show called The Haunted Collector, and he also had a video series that he did himself. And again, I’m not mentioning names, I don’t want to get you guys in trouble, but read the article. It’s on Skeptical Inquirer, you can read all about it. But this guy had done this video series and you know like when you do these paranormal shows or any kind of reality shows, they have those segments where it’s like an interview segment and they on the bottom third of the screen they put their name and then the title. In this case they put his name and then underneath it of it it said parapsychologist. And that really got me thinking because I attend a lot of paranormal conventions, almost like two or three a month I visit. And his name kept coming up a lot when I started questioning groups about their equipment and this and that. And they’re like, oh, you should talk to this guy. He’s a parapsychologist. And it got me thinking, like, is he really?

0:57:52
BR: Is he? Is he really?

0:57:54
CW: Is he really? Do we really know that?

0:57:57
KB: Let’s find out.

0:57:58
BR: It’s easy to say, isn’t it? We can all say it.

0:58:02
KB: Yes.

0:58:03
BR: But is it true?

KB: So I looked, I started looking into this guy and I saw some interviews where he actually claimed, let me get the quote right here, that he had a, let’s see, he was asked about his academic credentials, what his background was for investigating paranormal, and he said, I have a diploma in astrology and parapsychology. It shows that I am serious. I consider myself a parapsychologist. I mean, I mean, f***.

0:58:31
BR: It shows that I am serious.

0:58:33
KB: Why not?

0:58:35
CW: I can consider myself a lot of things. It doesn’t necessarily mean I am.

0:58:39
BR: It shows I’m a sucker to buy a $200 diploma, but go ahead.

0:58:42
KB: So, yeah, I mean, I really, I started digging into it a little more. And I did contact Lloyd and asked him about this. And he, I mean, his first thought was, yeah, there’s a lot of diploma mills and ghost hunters are using this like crazy. They love this kind of stuff. But I actually reached out to the gentleman claiming to be a parapsychologist. And we had a very, very, very long discussion, which honestly, it spanned about, I have six pages here that is nothing but us going back and forth.

0:59:19
BR: Mostly polite and diplomatically, I imagine.

0:59:21
KB: Yes, actually, yes. It is very polite, diplomatic, except towards the end when I had enough. Oh, good. Because, I mean, it just – it was a lot of smoke up my butt. I mean, that’s really what it came down to.

0:59:34
BR: Fair enough. We all have our breaking points.

0:59:36
KB: Yes.

CW: Now, this guy sounded like he really wanted it to be true. He wanted to be a parapsychologist. He put in the effort of finding a diploma mill that would get him something with that title on it. How much do you think is just sort of a wishful thinking, hopeful, like, well, I have no other way I can get accredited in this, so, I mean, what other choice do I have? I’m going to just claim to be self-educated here and get myself some papers that claim I’m something. And until mainstream academia recognizes us, this is our only way. What do you say to that sort of hopeful, hopeful, I don’t know what to call it, hopeful misled desire for legitimacy there?

1:00:24
KB: To be perfectly blunt, it’s f***ing lazy. That’s what it is. I know you’re going to have to bleep me out a lot on this show, but it’s lazy. One of the problems with the paranormal community as a whole, like with everyone, like monsters and ghosts and UFOs, everyone together, is that hardly any of them question each other. They just accept their spiels, their credentials, their, you know, backgrounds. They just accept it at face value. No one questions it.

1:00:54
BR: And part of the reason, just to add, part of the reason, from my experience, is that they’re afraid people are gonna look at their own credentials, right? So it’s this whole sort of like, I won’t look too closely at your master’s or PhD in ghostology if you don’t look at mine.

1:01:12
KB: Right.

1:01:12
CW: This is really reminiscent of homeopaths getting together and talking about their degrees in naturopathy.

1:01:18
KB: And it’s not all of them. I really should make that clear, because most of the subjects that are brought to me, brought to my attention to to look into, like like this guy saying he’s a parapsychologist. They’re from ghost hunters that are coming up to me and saying, hey, you know, this this person said this or this person said they had a device that detects ghosts. And I don’t really believe it. Do you think you could look into this? So it’s not the community just all being gullible or ignorant of this stuff. But a lot of them are. And they don’t question and they let it go. They there’s some kind of like, you know, I’ll watch your back, you watch mine. We’re not gonna question each other. We’re just gonna, everybody do their own thing and we’re gonna get along.

1:02:07
BR: But I mean, it’s the same, it’s not just credentials, it’s everything. It’s, you know, it’s, and we’ve talked about this on the show and off the show, you know, where this is a big part of the problem is that in the Bigfoot community, you don’t have the experts questioning each other’s scientific methods. And, you know, occasionally there’ll be, if it’s an obvious hoax, they might, they might, you know, get together and kick him out. But even then, and I was talking to Ken Gerhard, the cryptozoologist guy, a couple, a couple weeks back, and he and I were talking about that. And I said, why is it that people in the cryptozoology community are so reluctant to call out bad research? I said, look, don’t blame the skeptics if you guys can’t get your s*** together. It’s not our fault. It’s like the same with the ghost hunters. Kenny sees this all the time and so do I where you’re just like, guys, come on, man. You can tell that they’re not doing quality research because you’re over 10. You can figure this out. You’ve read what Kenny’s written. You’ve read my books. But instead there’s this wall of silence where no one wants to say, well, hold on here. What makes you think that EVP is something?But if somebody questions that, then obviously, well, then people are looking at your EVP evidence. And so everybody has to keep up this sort of emperor’s new clothes illusion about it, and nothing gets done.

1:03:26
KB: I’m wondering if there’s a lot of, maybe fear of backlash. They don’t want to start trouble. I mean, social media, you’ve seen how social media is once somebody gets a bad rap They get a lot of crap and it comes all over the place and I’m I’m wondering if that’s part of the problem where people were just afraid to speak up and Challenge something so I guess so boldly.

CW: It seems like they kind of took the tattletale route and just talk to you. I know they went to the mr. Ask a skeptic at the Paranormal Conference and said, I have a suspicion this guy is full of crap, but could you do the work for me and publicize it?

1:04:10
KB: And you know what? Sometimes that’s what it is. Sometimes that is what it is. But other times it’s, I think just, I demonstrated the skills that I can dig deep and there’s not a lot of, this is gonna sound really conceited and toot my own horn. I don’t really mean to, but I don’t think they understand the depth that you can go to in investigating things or people. It is time consuming. And I think that’s a big part of it. It’s time consuming. Someone that’s writing about a ghost just on their opinion, it takes them 15 minutes or a half hour, where if I’m investigating a haunted object, it takes me weeks in order to tie up all the loose ends and contact all the people I need to. So there’s a lot of work involved.

1:04:54
CW: And you’ve just actually come up with the perfect metaphor comparison to getting a an online degree in ghostology versus getting an actual academic PhD. There’s a lot more work involved.

1:05:06
BR: Another aspect to it is a lot of times, again, the credentials are obviously ancillary, right? I mean, so someone’s like, well, what are your credentials for ghost hunting? Well, I have a doctorate in astrology. Let me ask that again more slowly. What are your credentials for ghost hunting? Well, astrology, no, I’m not talking about the sun signs. It’s all just sort of lumped together. So like, for example, as you guys know, I mean, I have two degrees. I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of New Mexico, 1993. Look it up if you want. I have a master’s degree in education from the University of Buffalo, 2013. Look it up if you want. And I don’t throw them around and say, oh, look, I have a master’s degree. I mention it when it’s relevant. So, for example, my background in folklore, urban legends, being a folklorist in the American Folklore Society. And my background in psychology helps me understand the psychology by witnesses and false memories and abductions. I mean, so there’s my academic backgrounds very much influence and I think improve the quality of my investigation research because it’s relevant. It’s not, I’m not touting my degree in archaeology. I mean, I might if I was, you know, Josh Gates or somebody, but the subject that I’m interested in, I mean, I’m using that knowledge and applying that to investigations and that’s why it’s relevant. That’s why I sometimes bring it up.

1:06:32
CW: That’s again, that could be a whole other episode is whether or not a degree in, like you mentioned, astrology is relevant to ghost hunting. To me, the only thing that would legitimately qualify you is like, okay, I see your credentials, you are a good ghost hunter. Like I said, show me a truckload of ghost pelts.

1:06:49
BR: Or a wheelbarrow. It doesn’t need to be a truckload, just a wheelbarrow.

1:06:53
CW: A couple. Show me one on your wall.

1:06:56
KB: When I get questioned about this, because when the topic comes up, I talk about this often, the question comes back onto me. What are my credentials for doing this? I explain that, hey, I’ve been trained to work on cars. I’ve been trained to work on people. I’ve been trained to work on helicopters. I’ve been trained to work on x-ray machines. And all of that training, like this is 30 years worth of training, is all about diagnosing a problem, figuring out what’s wrong and how to fix it. My entire career has been figuring out what the problem is. It translates really well into mysteries because a mystery is basically a problem to me.

1:07:35
CW: Yeah, I’d imagine disassembling one of those ghost boxes is a lot less complicated than a helicopter.

1:07:41
KB: Oh my God. Yeah. So I just want to show, I just want to explain how easy it is to get one of these parapsychology diplomas. I went on a road trip and I had listened to another podcast, Ono, Ross and Carey. I really liked them. And they were talking about getting diplomas and certified in different things from the center for excellence. And it’s an online thing. You sign up, you take the tests and you get a diploma. So they had a parapsychology one. And it promised to have 150 hours worth of coursework over six modules where I’d learn about ESP reincarnation, near death experiences, mediumship, telepathy, and ghost hunting all for the price of $178. Luckily I had a coupon, so it only cost me $68 and instead of 150 hours, it took me five hours to read all the modules and basically skin them because I knew most of the stuff. I took all six tests like in a day. Oh man, banged it out. I am sitting here. That noise is the frame that my diploma is in. But it says Kenneth Biddle Parapsychology Diploma with a distinction because I have 98.9 percentile for my ending grade.

1:09:06
CW: So it took you like longer to frame that than earn it.

1:09:10
KB: Basically. Oh and I also did it over happy hour.

1:09:14
CW: Oh yeah.

1:09:15
BR: Wow. That is hardcore.

1:09:17
CW: Wow.

1:09:18
KB: I was definitely feeling good when I took it.

1:09:21
BR: And I have to say, Kenny, probably of all the people that might take that course, you are probably one of the few who actually could apply so-called life experience. Because you know this. You’ve done this for years. You’re like, no, I know this stuff.

1:09:38
KB: Yep.

1:09:38
CW: Yeah.

1:09:39
KB: Went through it. Easy.

1:09:40
BR: Well, we’re talking about people who have gotten various online diploma mill type certificates, but occasionally, Ben, somebody sneaks in through the cracks and makes it into an accredited university that should not be there. And you have a very interesting story about somebody who did that. Correct?

BR: I do.

CW: I just breezed through the top of what you discovered and it was jaw-dropping. I can’t wait for you to share this with listeners.

1:10:10
BR: Okay, so I’ll try and set the stage. It’s kind of a complicated story, but I’ll try and keep it tight. So this investigation that I did was, I think it was about 2003, give or take. So it’s been quite about 15 years. At the time I was living in Buffalo, New York, where of course the Center for Inquiry is located. I was five, six years into my working there and being the deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer and doing investigations and learning from Joe Nickell and Randi and others. And I was dating a Canadian woman at the time. Her name was Jennifer and she was attending Niagara College.

CW: So you literally had one of those quote Canadian girlfriends.

1:10:50
BR: I literally had a Canadian girlfriend. Yeah, I have photos to prove it. And she mentioned that one of her professors was teaching a course on psychology of the paranormal. Interesting. This is at Niagara College. It’s in Welland, Ontario. It’s a respected college because, of course, she knew what I did. And she’s like, yeah, you know, it’s just your kind of thing. Psychology, the paranormal. Like, all right, well, you know,  I’m curious. You have piqued my interest. So I went online and I’m not going to give the guys full name. I’ll just go by his first name, which is Peter. So Dr. Peter, by the way, he went by Dr. Peter, blah, blah, blah. Ph.D. So he had he had doctors on both ends of his name, which to me was a bit of a red flag.

1:11:42
KB: Was that all capital letters?

1:11:45
BR: Exactly.

1:11:46
CW: Capital B, capital H, capital H.

1:11:48
BR: So I went online and I looked at the Niagara College website. You know, it was, again, apparently it’s a legitimate course. I mean it was not a community college elective, this is for fun. This is an actual psychology course. It was psychology 1133, understanding the paranormal. From reading the course description, it sounded kind of woo, but I was like, I don’t really know. And so I decided I would go what one might call undercover. I decided to attend as a student. The very first class was in a couple of weeks. And I decided that in order to really know what he was saying, I needed to be there. I needed to actually listen and if I could record what he was saying so I could have something to work from.

1:12:33
CW: Now, did you actually pay money to sign up or did you just audit the class?

1:12:37
BR: Well, it’s an open campus.

1:12:41
CW: So you could audit the class silently.

1:12:42
KB: So you just walked in and sat there.

1:12:44
BR: So here’s what I did. So again, I’d never been to Niagara College before. I’d driven past it on the way to Toronto a couple times, but never stopped in. So it’s actually a nice little campus up there. And so I went there and I tried to dress like as the kids do. Now again, this was 15 years ago.

1:13:05
KB: I don’t even know how to respond to that.

1:13:08
BR: So we’re talking like, you know, had the hat on backwards, had a gold chain. I was like, I was like, “Yeah, dude, yo, yo,” I was trying to do like the, like a really bad Ice-T mixed with, it was, it was, God, retroactively, it’s kind of embarrassing. I’m just kidding. It wasn’t quite like that.

CW: Ben I, I have seen photos of you 20 years ago. You, you, you looked like a narc back then too.

BR: I’ve been called that. I went in there and as I walked in, I saw a man in a sequined sparkly vest sitting down looking at something. I didn’t pay much attention other than he stood out as being way overdressed. I asked around, I followed the crowd, I went into the classroom and sat down sort of towards the back. I didn’t really talk to anybody because I didn’t know anybody. I was just one of 20 or so students. Then he walks in. So the teacher, the teacher is the guy in the gold LeMay sparkly vest thing. And I sat in the back and I was taking notes and it was, you know, I think an hour long class to start out. And so they didn’t do roll call, which I was pleased about. I was trying to think of how I was going to get around that, right? But again, it was open campus. I just walked in, sat down, didn’t ask anybody. And I listened to what he had to say and I took notes and I got a copy of the syllabus. And I could tell from his demeanor and what he said that he was a believer. He was basically saying that, well, ghosts are real, psychic powers are real. And he mentioned, again, he gave a syllabus, and it mentioned a couple of different things, including the fact that, as everyone knows, humans only use 5 to 10 percent of their brains.

1:14:48
KB: Oh, my God.

1:14:50
BR: Now, this was a problem for me because I’ve actually written and researched that, and I’ve written a couple of articles about it. I did one for Snopes. I did one for Discovery News. So I knew right off that this was flat out not true. It’s a popular misconception, and it’s one that’s sometimes used to justify psychic abilities, but there’s no truth to it whatsoever. I’m like, well, hold on here. If this guy is going to say something that I know for a fact is not true in this accredited course, then what else is he going to say? So I didn’t confront him. You know, I just sat there and listened to him and walked out and nodded to him on the way out and all that. So then I went I went back home and I looked over his info and I saw I saw an odd word, biointroscopy.

CW: Biointroscopy, that sounds like an invasive medical procedure.

1:15:40
BR: It kind of does. And it was interesting because, you know, a lot of the material it’s, I mean, he was covering all sorts of stuff. It was on, you know, psychic powers and telepathy, you know, ghosts and auras. I mean, all this, the usual stuff. And you know, having done this for quite a while, even back then, I’m familiar with a lot of this sort of odd words, you know, like, like psi, PSI, and just a lot of the slang of the paranormal I’m used to hearing because, you know, it’s, you hear about it, but not this word. So I, I did an internet search just wondering where this word came from because it wasn’t one that I was familiar with, but whatever. I found out that in fact he had plagiarized the entire course.

1:16:25
CW: Oh, damn.

1:16:26
BR: Yeah, so this is where things started going south. So again, there was the course title, Understand the Paranormal, and it had been entirely plagiarized from another person’s work. It was a guy named Paul Phillips, who ran something called the American Association for Parapsychology. And there was a $49.95 course available on audio cassette tapes.

1:16:51
CW: Oh, back in the day.

1:16:54
BR: It was titled, quote, A Complete Course in Parapsychology. And I compared Paul Phillips’ course in parapsychology to Peter’s outline, and it was verbatim.

CW: Wow.

BR: It was the exact order of the Phillips cassette tapes, telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, dermal optical perception, which is basically seeing with your skin, hypnosis, psychometry, the aura, radiothesia, spiritual healing, mediumship.

1:17:24
CW: Like in the same order and everything?

1:17:26
BR: Yes.

1:17:27
KB: Wow.

1:17:28
CW: Wow.

1:17:29
BR: Identical.

CW: The first rule of plagiarism is you change up any identifying words, like bioentroscopy, and you mix it up a little bit. He didn’t do even those basic steps.

1:17:41
BR: He did not do that. So it was interesting. So literally, out of the entire internet, this word appeared in two places. It appeared in Peter’s curriculum and Paul Phillips’ Complete Course in Parapsychology. So there’s a big red flag here. I’m like, well, he’s saying stuff that’s not true. This is a legitimate college. And he apparently plagiarized, from what I can tell, the entire course. Now, again, I didn’t go to future courses. I didn’t sit through the rest of them. All I need to do is to go to the first one and get that.

1:18:15
CW: So not only was it bullsh**, it was from a whole different bull.

1:18:19
It recycled bullsh**. And that was really what was offensive to me, was that it wasn’t just bad information, it was recycled bad information. So I’m like, all right, so let me find out more about this guy. So Peter has been a guest on Coast to Coast AM. He is a actor slash film producer of several short films. He is a self-described horror crime detective author. He’s a ghost hunter and he does some podcasts and he also, at least as of today, when I looked, he had a profile on a Psychology Today website, which I think was sort of basically an ad. So Psychology Today, the magazine, wasn’t officially endorsing him, but he had a little, you know, contact provider type thing on that.

1:19:08
CW: So he’s still, he’s still pretty active, but I’m assuming he’s no longer teaching at that university.

1:19:14
BR: I’ll get to that.

1:19:15
CW: Okay.

1:19:16
KB: Dun, dun, dun.

1:19:16
BR: So, according to the information that was available at the time, apparently he said that he, quote, developed the criminal psychology program at Niagara College.

1:19:25
CW: Did he set emphasis on criminal there?

1:19:31
BR: It was not in italic, but it should have been. And it apparently designed a certificate program around his courses. And he did a couple of courses. He did cult and terrorism, criminal psychology, sexual violence, codependency as addiction, and a couple of other ones. He claimed to have six university degrees and five diplomas. It wasn’t clear exactly where they were from. So I’m looking through this stuff, and I’m like, well, what’s, again, what’s the credentials here? So he was, at the time, he was author of two books. He’s now the author of I think last time I looked I think 15 or 16 books. So he’s been he’s been busy in the last 15 years. At the time that this investigated him he had two books. One was titled Fear Factors which is a self-published collection of fictional ghost stories and the other one which is very conveniently a required text for his course was titled Why Women Want What They Can’t Have.

1:20:28
CW: That doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with parapsychology.

1:20:31
BR: It kind of does and does it, yes. So it’s actually about dating and relationships.

1:20:35
KB: Well that is paranormal. I mean, come on now.

1:20:39
CW: I already hate him because he’s one of these uppity dudes who’s decided he’s going to write about what women want and get into the female mind and write a book about it.

1:20:51
BR: So already he’s on your shit list.

1:20:54
CW: Yeah.

1:20:55
BR: So I’m curious, okay, well, he’s written two books. Let me take a look at them. So I decided to Google his publisher. Apparently, if you go to his publisher’s website, which is sunset-publications.com, you’ll find it is a hardcore porn site.

1:21:15
KB: Yes!

1:21:16
BR: Yes!

1:21:17
KB: All right!

1:21:18
CW: Is it still? Does it still exist? Is it still out there, producing hardcore porn?

1:21:25
BR: Funny you should ask, Celestia, because right in front of me, I’m looking at this.

1:21:30
KB: He’s looking at hardcore porn.

1:21:32
BR: I kind of am. So here’s what I’m going to do.

CW: Hands above the desk, mister.

BR: I’m going to read just a selection of this, and you may need to bleep some out, you may not.

1:21:45
KB: Oh, yes.

1:21:46
BR: Yes. So, this is the publisher of Dr. Peter, PhD. Let’s see. Looking for porn, you get everything below and more. It gets you all you could ever want in a hardcore porn site. Every category of triple X pictures you could possibly imagine. This site will send you to Wackaholics Anonymous.

1:22:04
CW: Wackaholics?

1:22:05
BR: Sex is our business and business is very good. You won’t find any more explicit or hardcore anywhere. Freshman teens will rock your ass with the youngest teen p***y allowable by law.

1:22:17
CW: Oh my god.

1:22:18
BR: Tons of s***. Teen babes, teen hardcore, tiny t***s, puffy nipples, shaved p***y and more. But wait, it gets better. This site gives the ladies, gay men, and bi-curious dudes a look at some long d*** studs with hard bodies, as well as live interactive chat with men that would pound a lady’s t***y into submission.

1:22:41
CW: Okay, okay, okay.

1:22:43
BR: All that’s in caps.

1:22:44
CW: You’ve gotta stop, I can’t bleep all of this.

1:22:47
KB: You’re getting cut.

1:22:49
BR: I’m just, I’m just, in all fairness, I’m just, I’m doing a public service here.

1:22:54
CW: So this is this guy’s publisher. Does it mention his book anywhere on that site or, or did you get to start?

1:23:00
BR: Funny you should ask. So if you, if you scroll past the probably legal porn all the way down to the bottom, in the bottom left hand corner, and I’m guessing Kenny’s already on this. If you look in the bottom, it says Babcock Publishing. You can go through, it’s basically a subsidy publisher. You can even get this, Celestia, you’ll appreciate this from your background as an editor. You can submit single-spaced or handwritten copy of your book.

1:23:27
CW: So it’s a transcription service. It’s not a publisher, it’s a vanity press and a transcription service.

1:23:35
BR: Yes, basically. And yeah, and I, so I looked, so as of the time that I originally researched this, it literally said on this webpage, it doesn’t anymore as far as I can tell, it literally said we publish anything. That was the quote, I have a printout copy somewhere, it literally said we publish anything. And as it happens, currently, as of today, as we’re speaking, I see the name of his book, Why Women Want What They Can’t Have, and his name on that website, as of today, 15 years later. So, getting back to the non-hardcore porn. So, there’s something sketchy here. Am I right, guys? Am I…

1:24:17
CW: Oh, this is very…

1:24:18
KB: I see nothing wrong.

1:24:19
CW: This is full of sketch. This is super, super sketchy.

1:24:24
BR: Okay. I’m glad it’s not just me. So, yeah, so there’s this course and it was actually being offered for three academic credits towards a legitimate psychology certificate. So again, this is not just for fun, this is for a legitimate certificate. By the way, he also mentioned that he had worked with psychologist Albert Ellis, who’s a famous psychologist. As it happens, Albert Ellis was actually a member of our organization.

1:24:48
CW: Well, that’s convenient. I contacted Albert Ellis, who I didn’t meet in person, but I did have his email and he said he had no idea who this guy was. So I dug into this along with the help of a colleague by the name of Andrew Skolnick, who was working with me at the time. And he dug into this. We were just this awesome team. We’re like, okay, what are we going to do about this?

CW: You said, hey, do you want to come look at some porn with me?

1:25:14
BR: Well, let’s not go there.

1:25:16
CW: You’ve got to do some research.

1:25:21
BR: Well, you never know when they’re going to update it, right? So you have to keep abreast of these things. But still, OK, there are self-published books. That by itself isn’t a problem. There’s lots of red flags everywhere, but so I did contact him and I noticed that nowhere in his bio, in his various bios, did he say where he got his alleged six university degrees and five diplomas from.

CW: Well, you know, he has so many there’s probably just never any room to put them all.

1:25:55
BR: Yes, so I emailed him and I asked him and he didn’t, but I did ask somebody else who said that he said that he had received his doctorate in psychology from American Pacific University.

1:26:08
CW: American Pacific University, that sounds familiar.

1:26:11
BR: Yeah, one reason it might sound familiar is because it’s widely considered to be a diploma mill.

1:26:17
CW: Oh, okay.

1:26:18
BR: Yeah, so there’s that. So earlier in the show I mentioned quackwatch.org. It’s listed under schools, accredited but not recommended. So here’s the distinction. American Pacific University was accredited in 2009. That was actually after my investigation of this and after he claimed that he, you know, he got his degree. So it may be true that there may be some accreditation for American Pacific University as of today, but as of when all this happened, there was absolutely no accreditation whatsoever.

1:26:49
CW: They cleaned up their act, but not while this guy was there.

1:26:53
BR: A little bit. So I contacted the Dean of Academic Studies at American Pacific University, a guy named Alex Docker. I’m looking into the credentials of a teacher at Niagara College, and he says he has a degree in psychology from APU, and he says they don’t offer degrees in psychology.

1:27:11
CW: Oh! Oh, God. How backwards do you have to be to lie about having a degree from a diploma mill? Just say you got one from Princeton like that other guy.

1:27:25
BR: If you’re going to make this up, then make this up, right? So at this point, I’d gathered enough information to think there’s something seriously sketchy about this. So I talked to Andrew about it. We decided to confront not just the teacher, but also the university about it. So Andrew and I went up there and went up to Niagara College and it was, I remember very clearly it was a snowy day, as many Ontario days are. It’s a nice little drive. And we specifically wanted to meet with the president, who unfortunately was not available. And Peter, I’m sorry, Dr. Peter, PhD, was also not available because apparently he wasn’t interested in what we had to say about his possibly sketchy background. But we did go there and we met with three people, two officials of some sort and I think probably a lawyer. We were very polite, very diplomatic and we said, you know, we’re, you know, this is how I got interested in it and I actually, there was a complaint raised by one of your students. I mean, we’re not just, you know, I’m not picking on you, this is what we did. And I said, I went into one of the classes, and I was very upfront about it. I mean, I wasn’t registered for the course. I didn’t need to be. I was an open campus and I walked in and I said, look, you know, there’s a couple of problems. Number one, he does not have a degree from an accredited university. It’s apparently diploma mill or certainly was at the time. His publisher is a porn site. I don’t know if this is a problem for you all. I remember very clearly, we laid it out. And so I’d made three copies for everybody. And so as I unfolded the investigation, and then we looked into his publisher, and I handed this paperclip packet to all three of them that had a big porn thing on it. This is Peter’s publisher. Notice the hardcore porn at the bottom.

1:29:05
CW: See, I must register my complaint here that the issue isn’t that he was published by somebody who also makes money in porn. The issue is that, in addition to a porn site, it is a mere transcription service and vanity press.

1:29:22
BR: Yeah, that’s the problem.

1:29:24
CW: That’s the problem.

1:29:25
BR: That’s the problem. Yeah, that’s the issue. The issue is not, I mean, look, you know, if you’re Oxford University Press and you want to publish a book on porn, I don’t care. That’s more power to you.

1:29:34
CW: If it’s published by Playboy, that’s fine.

1:29:37
KB: I wish I could have been there just when Ben handed out that packet.

1:29:41
CW: But for shock effect, I think you played the right hand.

1:29:44
BR: It was gold. So I would say they were non-committal. They were kind of annoyed. It was interesting. They were kind of defensive. And I got the distinct impression, they were like, what are these American skeptics doing coming up from Buffalo and talking to us. I mean, they didn’t say that outright, but both Andrew and I got the distinct impression they were more annoyed that we were interfering with their educational offerings, if you will, than that Dr. Peter probably didn’t have a doctorate and was four ways of Sunday from sketchy. On the drive up to Ontario, we talked about this and we said, okay, what are we trying to do here? And we were very careful not to try and get them fired. At no point did we say or imply or suggest anything about what they should do. We didn’t say, oh, well, you wouldn’t want to keep this guy. We were intentionally steering well away from that because we did not want to be accused of trying to interfere with anybody’s career or hurt. I mean, it was not. We were just there to give them information. And what they did with that information was up to them. We’re just trying to say, you apparently don’t know about this, or if you do, then you’ve got problems. I mean, if this particular professor represents the quality of educator at Niagara College, you need to look into this.

1:31:11
CW: Well, yeah, the underlying implication is pretty clear. If this guy is working here, it is a stain upon the university or college, whichever one it was.

BR: Yes, a college. So anyway, but just, you know, we went there and we made our case and we were just, again, we were very clear, we’re not telling you what to do, we’re just letting you know. And we hope to hear from you. We expect to hear back from you, but just FYI. And I’m, it’s been a while, I don’t, I don’t think we ever got a really substantive reply response from them. I did email once or twice and I did send a letter to, I think they pretty much ignored me slash us, except in so far as the next semester, Peter was still teaching at Niagara College, but somehow his PhD had vanished. So somehow the the doctorate had evaporated between the time that we discussed it with the college and the time it was offered, but he was still teaching there.

CW: Wow, that’s frustrating. So they kind of protected the university from fraudulent advertising of a PhD that didn’t really exist, but I mean what was he teaching? Had he been relegated to basket weaving or how to publish your softcore porn, or I mean, what was he teaching?

1:32:28
BR: I believe he was no longer teaching the paranormal class, the one that was, I should add, clearly plagiarized, which would be, let me just add that little part to it. I don’t think he was still teaching the obviously plagiarized, academically dishonest…

CW: But they kept him on.

1:32:48
BR: They kept it on and I think, as I recall, he was teaching something on police tactics or psychology or something. That was pretty much it. So, again, this was about 15 years ago. Every now and then, just out of curiosity, I would Google his name just to see whatever happened to him. As of today, last time I checked, he was not actively teaching it at Niagara College. He may have been as of a few years ago, but as of today, he’s not. But I did go to his website to see. He has a Facebook page and he has, as I mentioned, he’s written, I think, 15 books or so. And he has an Amazon page. And so both of those list the same personal website. Let me read to you, if I may, the first thing you see on his site. Now I want to be very clear, what I’m about to read is not referring to me. This is, I’m quoting someone else, okay? Just want to be crystal clear. “At just over six inches, I’ve never been happy with the size of my wiener. I’ve never felt like I’ve been able to satisfy a woman with it.” Before I go on, let me just say once again, this is just an introduction. I’m not speaking as myself. I’m quoting someone else. Just to be crystal clear.

1:34:01
CW: Oh, boy.

1:34:02
KB: That’s a tagline for the show.

1:34:04
CW: So this guy…

1:34:05
BR: Let me finish. “I know six inches is above average, but I can’t lie, I wanted more.” This is officially, I’m not making this up, this is what’s on Peter’s official website, and Kenny can verify this, he’s seen this.

1:34:18
KB: I can.

1:34:19
CW: Is he selling penis enlargement pills now?

1:34:24
KB: Okay, so… Exactly.

1:34:28
BR: So this is where things get weird. In case you’re wondering.

1:34:32
CW: Oh, okay.

1:34:34
BR: So, I looked into this and I’m like, surely it’s an expired domain and some porn site that I mean, seriously, I find it hard to believe that this is officially on his website. However, his name does in fact appear at the top of the page. And I took another look at one of his most recent books, and it is an article on penis envy. It’s about small penises.

1:35:02
CW: I don’t think that doesn’t mean what he thinks it means.

1:35:07
BR: So I don’t know. I’m not saying that that his site hasn’t been hacked. All I can tell you is the same site that appears on his Facebook page and on his Amazon author page is that site and it has his name on it and it’s an ad for penis enlargement. And he’s written a book recently on penis size.

1:35:26
CW: So Dr. Peter is now trying to doctor his Peter.

1:35:29
KB: Yes, up to an inch and a half. I read it. I couldn’t help it. Ben sent me the link and asked me to look into it. I got curious. I couldn’t stop. He’s like, can you, he asked me to verify, you know, does this look strange to you?

1:35:45
CW: Oh wow.

1:35:45
KB: All right, let me look into it.

1:35:46
CW: Oh my goodness.

1:35:47
KB: And then, damn it, Ben, I got interested. So I started looking more.

1:35:50
BR: So I will, I will, I will end with this. I will end this strange story with this. So, as I mentioned, uh, he does a lot of things. He’s a novelist, he’s a ghost hunter, he’s an actor, he’s a producer, he’s this, he’s that, the other.

CW: Anything there’s a fast buck in, this guy is okay putting his name on.

1:36:08
BR: I did not say that, you didn’t. But he has an IMDB listing. His personal quote, it’s right there, you can look it up if you can figure out who it is.

CW: Does it have the word weiner in it?

BR: It does not. Oh good, okay. But it sums up my experience with him. This is Peter’s personal quote “business is always better when people mind their own.”

1:36:30
CW: Yes, that is a perfect quote for it. How did you put it? The whole industry is academic snake oil Kenny I think that was from your article. That is the perfect quote for an academic snake oil salesman.

BR: Exactly.

CW: Well, thank you very much Kenny for joining us Ben I want to thank you for bringing what you brought, but man, it’s hard to thank you for that last part of that. That was painful, painful to get through.

1:36:56
KB: I thoroughly enjoyed it. What a great…

1:37:02
BR: Yeah, I am proud of that investigation. You know, when Andrew and I did it, it was one of those, like, I wasn’t trying to catch anybody. I mean, it wasn’t a trap, it’s just I stumbled across this guy that was teaching at an accredited university college who apparently faked one or more degrees and is sketchy through and through.

1:37:24
CW: Yeah, and this is, you know, for listeners everywhere, this episode is a cautionary tale. When you see letters next to somebody, somebody’s name, unless you have an obvious, like it’s a capital P, capital H, capital D, you never know. You never know until you do a little bit of background checking, find out exactly why they call themselves what they call themselves, and see if it holds water.

1:37:47
KB: Yeah, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, you should be able to look into who’s teaching a course or lecturing. You know, that’s part of it. You need to understand who’s giving you information.

1:37:59
CW: Until next time, thank you very much, Kenny, for joining us, and we’ll have you back again soon, I’m sure.

1:38:05
KB: Awesome.

1:38:06
CW: All right.

1:38:07
BR: Good having you on, buddy.

1:38:08
KB: See you later. See you later.

(MUSIC)

1:38:10
CW: Well, that was a cool conversation we got to have with two people, both experts in their respective fields, Dr. Hans House, that was very nice of him to join us, and of course, Kenny Biddle, a paranormal investigator extraordinaire.

1:38:36
BR: Yes, indeed. I do want to mention there was a brief flub. I had confused the plague with the hantavirus.

CW: I hate when I do that.

BR: Yes, Dr. House very diplomatically corrected me when I was talking about the disease spread by deer mice droppings, that’s the Hantavirus, not the plague. Anyway, I had a brain fart and he caught it and I’m glad.

1:39:04
CW: Yes, exactly. Well, I wanted to mention some interesting goings on potentially here in Las Vegas. Did you hear that the Alienstock Festival has been moved?

1:39:17
BR: I heard something about that. This is the one that we had all predicted was going to be a flaming fiasco. Is that the one?

1:39:24
CW: Yes, well, it’s flaming even before it happens. It’s scheduled for the 19th, which is the date that this episode will drop. It’s going to be in a couple of days here. And they have just, like as of yesterday or the day before, announced that due to a lot of internal conflict and absolutely no preparations being done.

1:39:44
BR: What?

1:39:45
It looked like they had it all coming together. Apparently the organizers are now suing each other and one of them, I believe the organization that Matty Roberts put together is taking his ball and refusing to play and they’re going to go to Las Vegas instead They’re gonna put on something at the downtown Arts Center Which is kind of by the Fremont Street District of Las Vegas and it’s happening tonight If you’re listening on Thursday, and I’m gonna try and go check it out. We’ll see if I can actually make it there safely.

BR: Well. Good luck watch out for watch out for weirdos and anal probes.

1:40:24
CW: Well, it seems like this one might be fairly disorganized too. I’ve been looking at the Facebook thing and people in the comments section are just saying, Hey, I registered. Where’s my email? What? You still haven’t sent me a confirmation email. Blah, blah, blah. So, yeah. Who are the bands? Nobody’s listing to the bands. So we’ll see exactly how real this moved celebration is. But apparently there’s something in Boulder City too. There’s little ones cropping up all over.

1:40:52
BR: Well, if the whole thing folds, it will just be this sort of beautiful, full circle of irony because, of course, it was originally the Storm Area 51, which then collapsed. And then it was AlienStock in Rachel, Nevada, which then collapsed. So there’s like…

CW: So, yeah, I’m going to show up. I’ll have to show up a little late because I’ve got other stuff I must attend to until about 10 p.m. But I’m going to sort of poke around, see if there’s a flaming rubble to look at or if there’s a raging party still going on. We’ll see what happens.

BR: Cool.

CW: OK, and what is what is our episode 102 going to be about? We’ve got that on the boilerplate soon here, don’t we?

1:41:30
BR: Yeah. So episode 102 is going to be on what are called the Ica Stones.

1:41:35
CW: The Ica Stones. I think they’re booked to play alien stock.

1:41:39
BR: No, no, that’s, you’re thinking of, it’s not a Rolling Stones cover band. These are, yeah, these are, these are some unusual stones found in the small coastal town of Ica, Peru. Actually not far from Nazca, the famous Nazca lines, in fact. And they have a, they’re, they were considered very mysterious for a while, and by some people they’re still considered mysterious because they allegedly depict such things as dinosaurs coexisting with humans.

1:42:12
CW: Always interesting. I like me some Jesus riding on dinosaurs. We’ll see what happens when Ben takes a deeper dive into the Ika stones.

1:42:22
BR: Good enough.

1:42:23
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1:43:33
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