On The Exorcist
As a very serious forty-years-plus scholar of all things related to both the classic novel and film The Exorcist (most specifically relating to the writings and work of award-winning novelist and screenwriter William Peter Blatty), I greatly enjoyed your November/December 2021 issue featuring the article “Demoniac: Who Is Roland Doe, the Boy Who Inspired The Exorcist?” by JD Sword.
In his impressively researched article in which Mr. Sword ends with his comment, “Should a reboot of The Exorcist follow the ‘chilling true story?’ My answer is ‘No,’ because the true story is neither chilling nor likely true,” I was sadly disappointed that he never once mentioned Blatty’s own personal nonfiction account of the entire subject in his book William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist: From Novel To Film, published by Bantam in 1974. I highly recommend Mr. Sword seek it out to get what is still, in my opinion, the final word on the entire subject.
I would also like to kindly point out one discrepancy in the photo that appears on page 45, captioned “Linda Blair played a possessed girl in 1973’s The Exorcist.” The photo is not of actress Linda Blair; in fact, it’s not even an actual person but rather Special Effects Artist Marcel Vercoutere’s highly realistic animatronic figure used for the “spinning head” sequences in the film. The swivel seam is clearly visible right below the jaw line.
Kevin Fellman
Phoenix, Arizona
JD Sword replies:
I am familiar with William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist: From Novel to Film, although I confess, I have not read it. I discussed Blatty’s own account of how he obtained the case study, which is contained in the book, on my podcast, The Devil in the Details. Unfortunately, I simply didn’t have the space in the article to go into that amount of detail.
I respectfully disagree with Mr. Fellman regarding the “final word on the entire subject.” Unless there’s a remarkable piece of evidence in William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist: From Novel to Film, a smoking gun that no other source seems to mention, there’s simply no good reason to believe that Ronald Hunkeler was possessed. The evidence just isn’t there. Furthermore, since the article ran in Skeptical Inquirer, a “29-year-old companion” of Ronald Hunkeler came forward and revealed to the New York Post “He said he wasn’t possessed, it was all concocted. He said ‘I was just a bad boy.’”
I would say that is the final word on the subject.
Your article on the real-life Exorcist boy mentioned Father Walter Halloran, one of the Jesuits who performed the ritual (November/December 2021). As a Campion student in 1960–1962, I served mass for Halloran and had him as a teacher. He was a typical Jesuit: highly intelligent and knowledgeable in worldly subjects but also a strong believer in far-fetched Catholic doctrines. We nicknamed him “Batman” for the cape that he wore in the Mississippi Valley fog. We students were unaware of the exorcism, which had occurred years earlier.
When Halloran was interviewed in a documentary about the exorcism, he convincingly reported anomalous events—such as objects inexplicably flying through the air and writing that appeared on the boy’s chest—but did not offer any conclusions about them or about the entire matter.
The exorcism was not the most interesting part of Halloran’s life. He was a handsome, reputedly rich “man’s man,” an athlete, and a coach. Wikipedia tells how, in his forties, Halloran enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve the troops in Vietnam. Forced to become an officer, he volunteered for and passed the grueling paratrooper training usually taken by nineteen year olds. In Vietnam, he spent so much time on helicopters going to minister as a chaplain to the troops that his superiors had to order him to take breaks. He was an extraordinary person.
George M. Reardon
Houston, Texas
Evolution Acceptance
It is of course a bit of good news that the recent poll reported by Glenn Branch now shows a U.S. acceptance of evolution above 50 percent (News & Comment, November/December 2021). I am however troubled that this poll question has consistently used the word developed in place of the word evolved. Technically, development is what happens between the time an egg is fertilized and the time the animal is born or hatched. This is obviously not the same thing as organic evolution.
This mistake is often made when bacteria are said to have developed resistance to antibiotics—no they did not, they evolved resistance to antibiotics. I would also point out that even if the “E-word” were used, there are many in the intelligent design community who would agree with the statement because they do believe in evolution by “supernatural selection” rather than by natural selection, so they are in no way in agreement with the scientific community in their views on evolution. So while this news is certainly good, there could be complications not revealed by the results on this one simple statement.
David Zeigler
Wimberley, Texas
Piltdown Hoaxer
Matthew C. Nisbet’s Piltdown Hoax article (November/December 2021) was engaging, but it may give the impression that de Groote and her collaborators were the first to conclude that Dawson was the lone perpetrator of the fraud. In reality, Joe Weine already came to that conclusion in his 1955 book The Piltdown Forgery.
Using the evidence and techniques available at that time, he determined that the only plausible conclusion was that Dawson was the perpetrator. De Groote et al. have only confirmed his finding by updating it with more modern techniques.
Don Martin
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
Piltdown Painting
I hope this letter will elicit a sigh of thanks from those of your attentive readers who (like me) were bewildered by the painting and caption that accompanied “The Piltdown Hoax Revisited” column. John Cooke is the artist of this painting, not the man in the white coat examining the Piltdown skull. The man in the white coat is Arthur Keith. Sir Ray Lankester, mentioned in the caption, does not appear in this illustration, although his right hand can be glimpsed on the tabletop at the far right. Other than that, Sir Ray (who does appear front row right in the original painting) has been cropped out.
Maxwell E. Siegel
Kennett Square, Pennsylvania
Homeopathy Volume?
In “A Design for a Definitive Experiment to Test Homeopathy” (November/December 2021), Richard Dawkins cites James Randi’s statement that a C30 homeopathic concentration would require a volume equal to that of the solar system to contain one molecule. I have done this exercise from time to time, with a much different volume, as follows:
If the solar system’s radius is 4.5 to 144 billion km, depending on which outer limit is chosen, its disk area is 6.4 x 1019 to 6.5 x 1022 km2. If the solar system’s thickness is 92.5 to 286 million km, depending on limits chosen, its volume would be about 5.9 x 1027 to 1.9 x 1031 km3. Choosing conservatively takes the value 5.9 x 1027 km3. It’s true that this calculation is rough, but the great differences in volumes, and the conservative choice, make high accuracy less of a concern.
Avogadro’s Number, 6.022 x 1023 molecules per mole, represents the number of molecules in a 1-molar solution. A homeopathic C30 concentration, with 1 x 10-60 moles, would therefore contain 6.022 x 10-37 molecules per liter. A liter is 1 x 10-12 km3, so a 1 x 10-60 molar solution would have 6.022 x 10-25 molecules per km3, that is, 1.67 x 1024 km3 per molecule. A spherical volume this big has a radius of 7.36 x 107 km. For reference, the orbits of Mercury and Venus have average radii of 4.95 x107 and 1.08 x108 km, respectively.
It is obvious that the C30 volume of 1.67 x 1024 km3 is very much smaller than a conservative solar system volume of 5.9 x 1027 km3.
Of course, either volume solidly makes the point against homeopathy.
Joan MacNeill
Portland, Oregon
A Grave Custom
Did anybody notice all the rocks strewn on top of the grave of Emile Durkheim? This was shown in a photo of the grave in the article “A Skeptic’s Tour of Paris” by Stuart Vyse (November/December 2021). No, the maintenance crew was not lax. Leaving a rock on the grave in memory of the deceased is an ancient Jewish custom. Durkheim and his family were Jewish. The origins of the custom are lost in the mists of time.
Alan Feingold
Atlanta, Georgia
Overpopulation
It was refreshing to find, in your November/December 2021 issue, three letters openly discussing the taboo topic of world overpopulation. I have puzzled over the generalized silence in the media on this issue—the root cause of climate change, environmental degradation, and now zoonotic pandemics. The religious Right argues that their deity wants more babies. The fringe Left argues that providing contraceptives to the third world is cultural genocide. People who understand the crisis avoid the issue for fear of offending someone. In fact, unrestrained procreation is a basic evolved instinct in all organisms. I would hope that we would not continue to multiply mindlessly in our petri dish until all the medium is consumed and we go extinct.
The solution is evident. The experiment has already been run in industrialized secular democracies. Enforced restrictions on fertility are unnecessary, as well as impossible. Education, opportunity, and access to contraception, as outlined in Marian Starkey’s letter, automatically result in birthrates declining to sustainable levels.
Peter Wyble
Chicago, Illinois
Nuclear Energy Has Advanced
I’m not sure that the John Orr letter taking issue with the content of the earlier Fukushima article was properly answered (Letters, November/December 2021). As I see it, the biggest problem is with the word nuclear and using it to describe a much smaller and more primitive class of technologies than is consistent with reality. A similar problem with language exists with the term steam power. The earliest use of steam as a propellant or power source that we currently know about was documented by Hero of Alexandria in the first century of the current era. The first somewhat efficient use of steam is generally attributed to several inventers in both the Islamic and European areas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet even those bear almost no resemblance to the technologies that powered ships, locomotives, and electrical power plants in the first half of the twentieth century. To class them together is meaningless, other than to say that steam was present in all their cycles, someplace. The variances in technologies for tapping the power of nuclear fission and fusion are quite dramatically greater than what we have thus far used for steam.
Both the TerraPower and GE Hitachi projects promise to produce power with near zero contaminated waste byproducts. And both use mechanical systems that would not be at risk from catastrophic disturbances such as tidal waves, externally powered explosions, or whatever. While it is obviously a good thing to not set aside our SI approach—which demands adequate supporting evidence—it is equally important that we not be blinded to the possible by what we think we know about radically different and significantly more primitive progenitor technical approaches. That would be comparable to evaluating the feasibility of modern aviation by looking only at pre-WWI aircraft.
That nuclear energy would face similar challenges of development and trust is neither surprising nor bad. And as is the case with aviation, we should never let down our guard and become too complacent about its safety. But just because the primitive is not yet refined, we should not assert that it should not be pursued.
Skepticism is warranted. Declaring nuclear power too fraught with challenges to pursue is being blind to the need and the opportunity.
Craig Dupler
Lopez Island, Washington
The Nonbinary Bible
Robert Saunders (Letters, September/October 2021) raises some interesting points in his response to my comments. I admit to not having thought about existential versus universal statements. However, I must reiterate that all science is empirical and hence not provable, in the sense of proof in mathematics. To be clear, I do not question the massive amount of evidence supporting evolution!
I do have to point out that his statement “the Bible is many things—but factual is not one of them” completely misses the point I made in my letter. There are many kinds of literature in the Bible. Some of it purports to be history, and some of that history has been verified. King Hezekiah existed; Sennacherib attacked Judah and destroyed many cities there. So there is factual material in the Bible. There is also material that is contrary to facts as we know them. This ranges from major errors—such as the assertions about Joshua and Jericho or the sun standing still—to trivial as in the statement that the large basin in the temple courtyard was 10 cubits across and 30 cubits around its rim.
My main point and objection is that using true/false or fact/non-fact for the entire Bible is beside the point and inappropriate. There are many “books” in the Bible that make no pretense to being factual: poetry, songs, sermons, letters, and the like. It makes no sense to say that the whole is not factual when there is no internal intent for these items to be factual. Would one say that the library of Alexandria was true or false? Or that Shakespeare or Homer were true or false? The problem here, of course, is that fundamentalists and other conservative Christians hold that the Bible is inerrant, i.e., factual. The “errancy” of that position is manifest and can be demonstrated in myriad ways. But inerrancy is way beside the point; it is not what these documents are about and never was, except in the minds of some (many?) theologians.
Charles E. Hawkins
Fort Thomas, Kentucky
For the Record
In “The Psychology of Vaccine Hesitancy” (November/December 2021) on page 56, the end date for World War I should of course have been given as 1918, not 1914.