Prayer and Pregnancy; Shooting UFO Photos

Prayer and Pregnancy

We have welcome news from Dr. Bruce L. Flamm, M.D., who for the last eight years has been battling the ridiculous report that prayers intoned for infertility patients in Korea could result in a 100% increase in pregnancy rates among the subjects. We’ve followed this for some time now (search Swift at www.randi.org for Flamm). Now, the Los Angeles Superior Court has finally thrown out the major defamation lawsuit that Korean fertility specialist Kwang Yul Cha filed against Dr. Flamm, a California physician who had published several articles questioning the validity of the report. That lawsuit, first filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in August 2007, was thrown out last November but then reinstated in January. Now it’s finally dismissed.

In 2001, a study was published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine which claimed that prayers from the USA, Canada, and Australia produced a 100% pregnancy rate in the subjects of those prayers—an incredible claim, indeed. Kwang Cha and his associates were widely reported in the news media, including on the ABC news program Good Morning America, whose staff should have known better than to perpetuate this nonsense. The following year, the study’s credibility was undermined when one of the co-authors, Daniel Wirth, was arrested by the FBI and later pled guilty to fraud. Cha’s other co-author, Columbia University’s Rogerio Lobo, later revealed that he had not participated in the research and he withdrew his name from the published findings. As Dr. Flamm says: 

This ruling is a victory for science and freedom of speech. Scientists must be allowed to question bizarre claims and correct errors. Cha’s mysterious study was designed and allegedly conducted by a man who turned out to be a criminal with a 20-year history of fraud; a criminal who steals the identities of dead children to obtain bank loans and passports is not a trustworthy source of research data. Cha could have simply admitted this obvious fact, but instead he hired Beverly Hills lawyers to punish me for voicing my opinions. 

We’re struck by the fact that the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, which capriciously published the original report and then dug in its heels and refused to react to the very obvious fact that this was a spurious, quack, non-scientific action—refused to withdraw the article! This journal should be taken to task for flying in the face of medical science and so blatantly deceiving its readers. 

Dr. Flamm is a partner physician with Kaiser Permanente and a Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of California. He has been the senior investigator on numerous medical studies and has written several books and book chapters. We congratulate Dr. Flamm on his definitive victory, and toss him kudos for his valorous fight against spurious science! 

How to Fake Your Own UFO Photograph 

UFO sightings have many explanations, including actual flying objects that are eventually identified (such as the stealth bomber). But if you want to easily fake your own genuine UFO photograph you can do so with a 35mm camera with a typical compound-lens system that will give rise to many different types of “image folding” effects, with varied axes. There are all sorts of examples of this available. 

I present here the results of a simple experiment that took about 30 minutes to do in the JREF library. I first snapped an off-center photo of a ceiling light (Figure 1). This shot produced a very basic, fuzzy, lens flare. 

Then I completely darkened the room to approximate a night sky. I set up a digital camera on a tripod and pointed it at a simple flashlight with the lens masked to provide a strong-but-small source of light (Figures 2a and 2b). I made 15 exposures, varying the aperture, distance from the target, and the time.

Figure 3 shows a set of some of these side-by-side arrays, with a variety of different “UFOs” to excite the imagination. 

The shape and other variations of “UFOs” will of course vary according to the camera used. These were done with a Minolta Dimage 7i. Figure 4 shows one frame, with a string of lens flares very evident.