“Mars Effect” and anti-astrologer cheats

“More or less avowed, scientism implies the following postulates: that the world is a given whole, that the phenomenal game is included in a closed circuit, that everything is therefore calculable, that the scientific mind must not despair of capturing in its formulate the apparent enigma of the universe, that there is no unknowable” (Jules de Gaultier, philosopher).

“A champion is made to be beaten. Someone who is at the top is made to fall. This is the myth of Icarus” (Louis Hamelin, writer).

“You can pass for an honest man and cheat at the game without anyone suspecting you” (Tristan Bernard, writer & iconoclastic playwright).

Warning: almost all the links allowing to source the information of this section lead to English-speaking sites. Most of these sites are scientific, therefore unlikely to be pro-astrology. Indeed, French-speaking anti-astrology sites dealing with astro-statistics are almost all lacking in serious information. On the other hand, they are very rich in disinformation and lies, since they almost all avoid reporting on the cheating and falsifications systematic and proven of which we will now tell the edifying story. So sorry for non-English speaking readers. In addition, the rare quotations whose source is not indicated or is not the subject of a link are taken from Michel Gauquelin’s book La Vérité sur l’astrologie.

Cheatings of the PARA Committee

The publication of the first works of Michel Gauquelin had the effect of a bomb in the scientific community, which was scandalized. Their author had to treat “astrologer” or of the “para-astrologer” (among the worst insults favored by scientists) and their results were screened by specialists with a criticism all the more pitiless as it was nothing less than a possible influence of the stars, that the official science considers it a biophysical impossibility. Despite the aggressiveness, contempt and incomprehension of which he was the object for his research with heretical results, Michel Gauquelin agreed in 1960 to collaborate with the statisticians of the Belgian PARA Committee, an Areopagus of rationalist scientists dedicated to ruthless criticism and rejection of any manifestation of what they saw as “paranormal”. These controlled for years the validity of his calculations, methods and results concerning exclusively the “Mars effect” which thus became an emblem. These experts in anti-astrology were forced to recognize, after having multiplied the counter-experiments, that the results obtained by Michel Gauquelin were correct: they obtained substantially the same, and consequently the PARA Committee had to confirm and endorse the correlation between the angularities of Mars and the profession of sports champion!

Anti-astrologism not being a science, these scientists could not admit that Mars opens a combative and realistic breach in the wall of their blindness and prejudices. For not recognizing the reality of the “Mars effect”, they went so far as to question the statistical formulas in use and were careful not to publish the conclusions of their counter-expertise. There were nevertheless leaks: some members of the PARA Committee, more intellectually honest than the majority of their colleagues, were revolted by this desperate attempt to hide these facts. Rémy Chauvin, renowned biologist and entomologist, director of the Animal Psychology Laboratory at the Sorbonne and very open to those unknown to official science, got wind of these leaks. In the section devoted to “the Gauquelin affair” from his book Certaines choses que je ne m’explique pas (ed. Retz) published in 1976, he mentions with amazement the response he received from André Koenigsfeld, then president of the PARA Committee, when he asked him for explanations about this censorship. Here is the surreal text of that answer: “We have indeed checked M. Gauquelin’s calculations and we agree with them… But where we do not agree, it is on his conclusions that we cannot accept.” About the same “Gauquelin case”, the biologist Jean Rostand, a rabid rationalist, was even more ubiquitous in a declaration published in the Nouvelles Littéraires of 27/11/1969: “If statistics now start to prove astrology, then I no longer believe in statistics.” which could be translated as “When you want to kill your dog, you say he has rabies”… and which is not scientific reasoning at all, and proves once again that anti-astrologism is not a science, but a vulgar opinion.

Faced with this refusal to publish the results of this counter-expertise, Michel Gauquelin took the decision to reveal them himself at a scientific congress, thus provoking an almost general outcry among the members of the PARA Committee, whose delaying maneuvers thus broke out. in broad daylight. One of them, the astronomer Jean Dommanget, then wrote to Gauquelin that “since it is so, we want nothing more to do with you”. But suddenly, the PARA Committee, for fear of the scandal that its attitude could cause, ended up reluctantly by setting up a report of the second opinions where it tried to drown the marsian fish in a thick fog of sentences hollow and mathematical formulas agitated like child’s rattles. It came out roughly speaking that the Gauquelin calculations were right but wrong, and that the positive results obtained independently by the PARA Committee itself would be the result of Gauquelin’s errors, which is the height of bad faith and irrationalism.

Revolted by these anti-scientific and irrational behaviors and reactions (weird attitudes when one claims, like the PARA Committee, to fight false sciences and the paranormal in the name of scientisto-rationalist ideology…), the professor of statistics and statistician Luc de Marré, who was part of the PARA, resigned. The shenanigans of the PARA Committee about the “Mars effect” made him pass from the camp of the skeptics to that of the pro-astrology. In 1982 he published an article entitled “Comments on research on Mars effect by P. Curry” (“Comments on P. Curry’s Mars Effect Research”) in the review Zetetic Scholars, which aims to rationally criticize the pseudo-skepticism of rationalist scientism. The Fr. Curry referred to in the title is Patrick Curry, a philosopher of science who carried out an exhaustive and very critical investigation of the treatment that scientists had reserved for astro-statistics. Luc de Marré, who was heavily involved in the counter-expertise of the “Mars effect” of the PARA Committee, delivers in this text the following testimony:

“In reality, the Committee was unable to discover the slightest error in M. Gauquelin’s calculations, any more than in all the results he puts forward […]. The results of all the counter-experiments tend to confirm M. Gauquelin’s hypothesis. In particular, a shift in birth times, according to the alphabetical order of champions, unquestionably revealed that Gauquelin’s calculated theoretical frequencies were correct. In September 1976, the Committee published a 17-page report of its work on this research. Surprisingly, he does not mention any of these counter-experiments; on the contrary, he accuses M. Gauquelin of imaginary demographic errors. This last point is all the more surprising since it was M. Gauquelin himself who had drawn the attention of Mr. Dommanget, a member of the Committee, to the existence of a demographic problem; he had, moreover, furnished the latter with the means of resolving it.”

Not only is anti-astrologism not a science, and the PARA Committee composed of scientists or pretending to be such has proven it experimentally, but also the pseudo-skeptical and pseudo-rational scientists who indulge in this pseudo-science do not hesitate to resort to the worst intellectual villainy so as not to have to question their anti-astrological prejudices.

The cheating of the astronomer Paul Couderc

“The Mars effect” also produced a certain effect on Paul Couderc, astronomer, science popularizer, member of the Rationalist Union and fierce militant anti-astrologer. He is the author of the first editions of the volume L’astrologie from the collection Que sais-je (ed. P.U.F.). These booklets were of course poor works of propaganda and disinformation scientist anti-astrologer. The first edition dated back to 1951: Michel Gauquelin having not yet published his work, Couderc was content to break the adulterated sugar on the back of traditional astrology without getting tired. But after 1955–56 he was made aware of Gauquelin’s statistical studies. As no reissue of his book was planned in the short term, he had to content himself with publishing in 1968, just to mark the occasion, a short text in an obscure booklet entitled “Catholics of today and the occult sciences”, which is not lacking in salt for a scientist, in which he declared that “M. Gauquelin’s results have no value, his methods are confused, no scientist worthy of the name endorses them”. None, except the scientists of the PARA Committee who indeed endorsed them reluctantly, but refusing to draw from them, like Michel Gauquelin, the major and heretical conclusion, namely that there was a small probability of planetary influences.

It must be said, to his public discharge, that when Paul Couderc wrote these nonsense, uh, sorry, this creed anti-astrological in this Catholic booklet (it can not be invented!), the PARA Committee had not yet completed its counter-expertise. Couderc ended up taking note of the first version of these, which was content to expose the experimental confirmation of the validity of Gauquelin’s work, cautiously refusing to draw the slightest conclusion that could appear as any guarantee of a fact. astrological. The Sainte Chapelle scientiste du Comité having given his anointing, Couderc behaved as a good clerk of his church during the reissue, in 1974, of his booklet from the collection Que sais-je ?. While reiterating, imperturbable, his enterprise of propaganda and anti-astrological disinformation, he dared to evoke the “case M. G.” (it is better not to call the devil by his name, it could bring bad luck even to a so-called rationalist). He recognized in Michel Gauquelin “a sincere researcher, cultured, of great activity” and mentioned the verification of the “Mars effect” by the PARA Committee as “a success for M. G.”

Has the notorious anti-astrologer Paul Couderc suddenly been hit by the virus of intellectual honesty? No way. He had quite simply not been informed of the late non-conclusions of the PARA Committee, which had finally decided that, despite its own second opinions which all confirmed the results obtained by Gauquelin, the latter was wrong given that his conclusions were not anti-astrological. It was obviously reasoning “rational” difficult to understand, but when you love anti-astrology, you do not count or more. It’s kind of “credo quia absurdum” for the use of pseudo-skeptics.

In defense (always public of course) of Paul Couderc, you should know that the final report of the PARA Committee on the “Mars effect” was not the subject of a confidential publication until 16 years after the counter-expertise, i.e. in 1976, so that this forfeiture is revealed as little as possible. It was a text of 17 abstruse pages from which it emerged that “The Committee disputes the validity of the various formulas adopted by M. G… They do not correctly take into account the theoretical probability of arrival of the configurations […]. The Committee cannot therefore accept M. G.’s conclusions as long as they are based on the methods and formulas he recommends.” This criticism was really only about minor secular irregularities in the movements of Mars, which in no way called into question Gauquelin’s statistics. But we had to find something to relieve “all those whom M. G.’s proposals have alarmed”. It will be noted in the following paragraph that Couderc, as an obedient, servile and zealous cleric, contented himself with flatly paraphrasing and even copying and pasting the false conclusions of the Committee. Gauquelin of course rejected the biased and bad faith conclusions of this buffoonish Committee.

One can easily imagine the face that Couderc made when he realized that in the reissue of his lying booklet, he had missed a meager scrap of truth, which is moreover condemned by the PARA Committee! A stroke of luck, in 1978 a new reissue of L’astrologie, still in the collection Que sais-je ?. Without fearing to pass for an ignoramus, an imbecile and a vulgar sheep, Couderc made a 180° turn on the wing, writing this time that “M. G. certainly underestimated the complexity of the astronomical questions that he believed to represent by elementary formulas. The astronomers and statisticians of the PARA Committee, after careful study, declared these formulas inadequate. This conclusion will relieve all those who have been alarmed by M. G.’s proposals.”

Note that you will have no knowledge of these opportunistic and pseudo-rational volte-faces of Couderc by consulting on this subject the site of the AFIS (French Association for Scientific Information), an agency of the Union Rationalist. Not a word of these jacket reversals from one edition to another under the pen of Jean-Paul Krivine, a madman of primary anti-astrologism. Rationalism has unreasons that real reason ignores… We can however assume that he has read the different editions. Otherwise, we cannot explain this pious pseudo-zetetic silence. The book L’astrologie of Que sais-je ? later experienced other tribulations, according to the changes of authors of this opuscule, which it is useless to expose here.

The anti-astrologer manifesto of ignorant Nobel laureates

After this brief expedition in 1978, let us return to 1975, a year before the confidential publication of the false report of the PARA Committee. That year saw the sensationalist publication, in the American magazine The Humanist, of a anti-astrological manifesto countersigned by 192 “scholars” including 19 Nobel Prize winners. This mediocre piece of propaganda and disinformation was accompanied by the article of an obscure “science writer”, Lawrence Jerome who, with the blessing of an astronomer, demolished the work of the Gauquelins there in such a simplistic and ridiculous way that it was absolutely obvious that he was nothing but an ignoramus. But in doing so, he made them known across the Atlantic, which aroused controversies and public debates thanks to which Michel Gauquelin obtained a right of reply in the following issue of The Humanist. He had no difficulty in tearing down Lawrence Jerome’s arguments.

The editor of the journal was Paul Kurtz, a so-called skeptical philosopher at the boot of scientisto-rationalist ideology. Following Gauquelin’s reply in the columns of his review, he contacted the PARA Committee, which told him its canards, but without daring to ignore the fact that its own counter-expertise had validated the Gauquelins’ results: if they did, they risked being the subject of a worldwide scandal. Perplexed, Kurtz then asked his opinion of Marvin Zelen, professor of statistics at Harvard. The latter confirmed to him that Lawrence Jerome’s arguments were worthless, but that he could neither confirm nor invalidate the opinion of the PARA Committee since he did not have the knowledge of demography and astronomy to decide. Zelen’s curiosity was piqued, however, and he offered Gauquelin to lead a new statistical experiment.

The cheats of “the Zelen experience”

Zelen’s hypothesis was as follows: if it is a demographic law, and not an astronomical law of which the “Mars effect” is a consequence, then it suffices to collect the birth data of all sports champions and non-champions born on the same date, at the same time and in the same place. If the angularities of Mars appear as statistically significant only in sports champions, experience will show that no demographic law can justify this result, which will therefore necessarily be the effect of an astronomical law… and therefore astrological. Otherwise, that is, if no difference is observed between the frequency of Mars angularities in champions and non-champions, the “Mars effect” will be statistically invalidated. The PARA Committee was informed of this new experiment. Far from being enthusiastic, its members preferred to maintain a prudent, wait-and-see and embarrassed silence. They could not fail to know that the results of this new test would probably once again validate the previous results of the Gauquelins.

Sure of their facts, the Gauquelins accepted Zelen’s proposal without hesitation. They managed to collect 16,000 natal horoscopes of champions and non-champions, and the test was carried out. The results of this were unambiguous: only champions were affected by the “Mars effect”, with frequencies such that there was no doubt. The report of the experiment was published in The Humanist in 1977. His positive results had the effect of an icy shower on Zelen and Kurtz: they were convinced that the test would fail and definitively close, they thought, the awkward chapter of the “Mars effect”. They also did not want to see their reputation as academic rationalists witch hunters tarnished by what would come dangerously close to an acknowledgment of an astrological fact that would have received their endorsement. They then added the collaboration of an anti-astrologer astronomer, George Abell, and engaged in base maneuvers of tampering with the data in order to eliminate as many individuals as possible considered to be “champions”… when obviously the test was about “non-champions”. They thus succeeded in seriously lowering the frequency of the “Mars effect”… but not to the point of making it disappear by this villainous sleight of hand.

The conclusions they drew from this obvious cheating were published by the three thieves in 1977, still in the columns of The Humanist under the title “Is there a Mars effect?” Here they are: “What should we believe? If we believed a priori in the existence of the Mars effect, Gauquelin’s data would tend to confirm this a priori. On the other hand, if this a priori belief in a Mars effect is weak, these data would be likely to generate an a posteriori belief but not enough for us to accept the existence of the Mars effect.” It’s great nonsense goat-cabbage and faux-ass to the last degree. You really have to be of boundless bad faith and unfathomable intellectual villainy (the two can be combined) to talk about “belief” when it comes to experimental validation of a phenomenon, certainly very disturbing for the establishment scientist.

This incredible story does not end there, not yet. Several very high-level statisticians participated in the control commission of the Zelen experiment. None of them could ignore that Zelen, Kurtz and Abell had subsequently fiddled with the data to substantially alter the results. With one exception, all observed a perfect and zealous silence. The exception was called Elisabeth L. Scott, professor of statistics at UC Berkeley. Worse still, she was among those who had signed the “anti-astrological manifesto” of 1975. This honest rationalist, scandalized by the denial of reality that characterized the cheating of the three thieves and their stringy conclusion, addressed to them in 1978 a letter in a diplomatic but very firm tone. Here is the content related by Michel Gauquelin in his book La Vérité sur l’astrologie:

“Michel Gauquelin came to Berkeley last week and we had several interesting discussions. One was about your recent article in The Humanist. You had sent me a copy before publication and I telephoned each of you, having had the feeling that your analysis could be misleading. It looks like your article was published without major edits. I would therefore like to issue a brief note, or even a letter, in which I would clearly state what I consider to be your error. Is it possible? Would you post such a note?” That in moderate terms these things are said… Result: Kurtz refused any publication and asked Scott to take care of something other than the “Mars effect”. The curtain falls on the first act of this sinister comedy.

CSICOP Cheats

If Kurtz threw Scott, his criticisms, his indignation and his scruples for a ride, it’s for an excellent reason: he wants to open the second act with a bang. For that, he needs statisticians at his heels, that is to say pure executors of his base anti-astrological works. Kurtz has just created in 1976 the CSICOP (“Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Paranormal Claims”), an American thing that looks like two drops of water to the Belgian PARA Committee, and he announced that one of his first jobs will be to take care of the “Mars effect” to tear it down.

Without asking Gauquelin for his opinion, Kurtz collected data on the birth of sports champions in the USA. Their statistical processing was completed in 1978. He communicated the results to the Gauquelins, who observed with satisfaction that the “Mars effect” is evident in the great champions but disappears in the others. Not at all, retort Kurtz and his gang: all champions are great champions, so there is no “Mars effect”. Michel Gauquelin must show them that there are perfectly objective criteria that make it possible to make a difference, such as celebrity in relation to the high frequency of great sporting exploits. He also points out to them that the collection of large numbers of reliable birth data is extremely difficult in the USA given the absence of a central and reliable Civil Registry service, and that the sample collected by the anti-astrological committee of the CSICOP was too small. He proposed to increase it by using data from European athletes and gave them the necessary sources to obtain them.

Waste of time: Kurtz and his gang argued this proposal to accuse Gauquelin of wanting to tamper with the data, which is a shame when you know what they had been capable of and were going to be guilty of again. Indeed, Gauquelin had then made it clear to them from the start that his theory did not apply to certain types of athletes, in particular to basketball players who, at the time, were chosen only for their large size and not for their sporting prowess. Kurtz’s gang walked past in full knowledge of the facts and incorporated a maximum of data from known and unknown basketball players into those of Gauquelin, which obviously caused the marsian frequencies to drop very sharply in the “key sectors”.

For good measure (if one can say so), Kurtz and his gang of cheaters took such great care in selecting sports champions who did not conform to Gauquelin’s European results that the result of their own statistics was that the angular frequencies of Mars were very often very much lower than the expected theoretical average, therefore statistically significant. This fraudulent manipulation of data to eliminate the “Mars effect” thus paradoxically leads to a negative confirmation of it. Kurtz and his gang of cheaters were therefore very poor. These enormous cheatings did not prevent the CSICOP from deciding that its conclusions were final: the “Mars effect” had been invalidated for its greater glory, and in spite of results which validated it! Curtain on the second act.

Kurtz and his gang of cheaters believed they had finally buried the “Mars effect” in the catacombs of doctored statistical data. The astrological demon was slain. They could savor their victory which they announced in a great media uproar. Elisabeth L. Scott having been excluded from this experiment and keeping silent on this affair, they believed themselves to be quiet and already saw themselves embarking on new quixotic adventures against the real or illusory windmills of the paranormal. They could ignore the few rare criticisms that spoke out against their rogue methods, and in any case afford not to publish them in The Humanist, Kurtz’s journal entirely devoted to his devotion and that of the most narrow-minded scientism. Their satisfaction, however, was short-lived.

“A group of falsifying pseudo-vigilantes”

It was astronomer Dennis Rawlins who triggered the opening of the 3rd deed in an article he published in 1981. Rawlins was a hardened skeptic and an extremely outspoken rationalist who cannot be suspected of pro-astrologism. As such, he served on CSICOP’s executive board from its founding until 1979, when he was expelled from it by Kurtz and his gang because he refused to condone their cheating and scheming in the counter- expertise on the “Mars effect”. Like Elisabeth L. Scott, her critical rationalism was incompatible with intellectual dishonesty and the manipulation of experimental results for the “good cause” scientist. But unlike Scott, Rawlins did not use euphemisms to qualify the scandalously fraudulent methods of CSICOP.

This is how his rant began: “They called themselves the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Paranormal Claims. It’s actually a group of pseudo-vigilantes who erred in their main investigation, who falsified the results, covered up their errors and chased away a colleague who threatened to reveal the truth”. The colleague in question was obviously Rawlins, and his text was not the result of bitterness or a desire to avenge his brutal expulsion from CSICOP. Indeed, it was from the beginning of the Zelen experiment that Rawlins expressed his disagreement with the methods of Kurtz and his gang. And at first, Rawlins only thought they were wrong, especially since he had been the only one to take care of the astronomical calculations necessary for the experiment, Kurtz and his gang being unable to do so. The only area he had no control over was that of data collection and selection, over which Kurtz exercised complete control and shared nothing. Faced with this attitude, Rawlins began to suspect Kurtz of shameful tampering.

His suspicions turned to near certainty when Kurtz sent him “the first set of data in secret, explaining that he wanted a private look beforehand at how the results would turn out”. You don’t need to be the most shrewd of detectives to deduce that Kurtz did not want to see data made public that risked validating the “Mars effect”… and that such recommendations had absolutely nothing to do with an authentic scientific approach. After statistical processing, Rawlins informed Kurtz that these data confirmed the “Mars effect”, which strongly displeased Kurtz, who very quickly sent Rawlins, and this time without any recommendation of discretion, the same set of data to which he had added new ones. Obviously, this added data ad hoc dramatically dropped the frequencies of Mars.

Kurtz tried to convince Rawlins that it was a simple mistake on his part, that he had simply forgotten to transmit this data to him in his first transmission. But Rawlins was not fooled: he was indeed the unwitting accomplice of a huge cheating carried out in the sacred name of Science. Refusing to comply, he ends up being expelled from CSICOP by Kurtz and his gang. If the latter believed for a moment that this exclusion would finally leave them alone to continue cheating, they were seriously mistaken: the criticisms of which they were the object were until now the work of scientists outside CSICOP and others who were part of it but had not directly participated in the fraudulent manipulation of data about the “Mars effect”. This time they came from someone who had unknowingly been inside their cheat machine and refused to be an accomplice.

“The greatest scandal in the history of rationalism”

Rawlins’ revelations hit home. A few scientists suffering from sickly intellectual honesty or simply fearing for their reputation resigned with a bang from CSICOP, such as Persi Diaconis, professor of statistics at Stanford. Others, who were not part of Kurtz’s evil group, did not spare their criticisms, such as R. A. Mac Connell, professor of biophysics at the University of Pittsburgh, who addressed an open letter to CSICOP members in which he wrote that “Based on personal acquaintance with present and past members of the Executive Council of the Committee, I am satisfied that the Rawlins report is certainly truthful in broad outline, and probably truthful in every detail. Rawlins’ account leaves little to the imagination. He created a key document for the history and philosophy of science […]. A scientist summed it up in these words: ‘Rawlins unveiled the biggest scandal in the history of rationalism’”. This in no way prevented Kurtz from continuing to pass for a great secular humanist and a skeptic with a skull crowned with a halo of scientific majesty until his death in 2012, nor CSICOP from continuing its existence with the blessing of a majority of so-called skeptical scientists, as it is true that anti-astrologism is not a science.

The story does not end there. We have already mentioned the epistemological study of Patrick Curry about the testimony of Luc de Marré, the former member of the PARA Committee who had denounced the dishonest methods in his article entitled “Comments on research on Mars effect by P. Curry” (“Comments on P. Curry’s Mars Effect Research”) in the review Zetetic Scholars, whose creator and director is Marcello Truzzi (his case will be discussed later). Here is what Patrick Curry wrote a few months before the publication of Rawlins’ article on the treatment of the “Mars effect” by CSICOP: “It seems to me pointless to insist on the fact that the Committee misconducted the investigation into the Mars effect; […] His work can at best serve as a model and a warning as to how not to conduct such an investigation. Given the many internal (Rawlins) and external (Gauquelin) warnings that were suppressed or ignored, it is even difficult to accept the protestations of “good faith” and naivety (Abell). Rawlins and Gauquelin are in fact the only two main characters whose scientific credibility emerges intact from this affair. It seems to me that this situation must prohibit any subsequent involvement of CISCOP in research relating to the Mars effect, or even in any other sector relating to the ‘paranormal’”.

Patrick Curry is as moderate, unctuous and understatement user as Elisabeth L. Scott. It is obvious that he evokes cheating, that he does not believe in the belated regrets of the professional astronomer Abell, who evoked his “sincerity” and his “naivete” to clear himself of his complicity in this enterprise of falsification. Perry’s conclusion is indisputable. For fun, we can translate it into a more direct and less polite language: The Committee conducted this investigation with a total and inexcusable lack of rigor and probity by falsifying or ignoring data in order to obtain the result it desired, without heeding the warnings of the experts. The Committee is in the hands of a clique of dishonest buffoons who have no competence to carry out investigations on subjects concerning facts that escape the reading grid of official science.

The director of Zetetic Scholars sent a copy of this article to Kurtz’s gang six months before it was published so they could respond to Curry’s criticisms, justify themselves, and possibly contradict him if they felt the facts he was reporting were untrue. Neither Kurtz, nor Zelen, nor Abell responded, and that silence spoke volumes about the indefensibility of their methods and practices.

The Mars effect leads rationalists into the irrational

The pseudo-skeptics and falsifiers of CSICOP were not yet finished with criticism. The dive attack came this time from Richard Kammann, professor of psychology at a New Zealand university and incidentally… scientific consultant to CSICOP. He had not participated in the experiment hacked on the “Mars effect”. He was obviously a skeptical scientist a priori against astrology in particular and the paranormal in general (otherwise he would not have been a member of CSICOP). Out of pure curiosity, he decided to look into the Gauquelin file and quickly noticed “more or less innocent errors” committed by Kurtz’s gang. He pointed them out, thinking they might be in good faith. He quickly realized he was wrong when he saw that Kurtz’s gang disregarded his warnings.

Not wanting to be complicit in this masquerade, Kammann then resigned his title of scientific consultant and published in 1982 (as Perry) a summary of his study on this matter entitled “Those Who Don’t Believe the Truth: How the Mars Effect Leads Rationalists to the Irrational” in Zetetic Scholars. He too is not kind to the falsifying gang and he is much less diplomatic than Scott and Perry: “Faced with irrefutable proof of a relationship between the position of the planet Mars at birth and athletic success, the skeptical professors Kurtz, Abell, and Zelen repeatedly published spurious remarks to deny even a ray of hope to astrology. They suppressed the results most favorable to the Mars effect, divided the birth groups into very small pieces, used erroneous statistical tests. But all this is not enough to get rid of the Mars effect. They then gave as a final argument that the discovery of Michel Gauquelin could only be explained by cheating or incompetence in the choice of birth data.” Kammann rejects these accusations against Gauquelin and attests that the “Mars effect” is irrefutable.

The outcome of this case is rather strange. Also in 1982, Kammann, Abell and Gauquelin met briefly at an airport while waiting for their planes to depart. There followed a very frank explanation during which Abell, seeming to recover some scraps of scientific spirit and intellectual honesty, admitted that the CSICOP had failed in its second opinion of the “Mars effect”. Did he feel remorse? We’ll never know. Given his total involvement in the falsification of data, the assumption of his innocence, the “sincerity” and some “naivete” which he would have demonstrated did not hold water. As a seasoned professional astronomer, he could only know what he was doing.

The most likely hypothesis explaining this reversal was his involvement in a scientific scandal that smeared his reputation and from which he had the possibility of getting out, if not from above, at least by limiting the damage by making this pitiful confession. But you should also know that Abell had written the preface to Gauquelin’s book Dreams and Illusions of Astrology, published in 1979, so probably written in 1976–1977 at the start of the Kurtz-Zelen test case. Here is what he wrote: “I cannot imagine a mechanism to produce the Gauquelin effect. If it were real, it would be an exciting new frontier for science.” Abell, native of the west coast of the USA, would he have found the frontier myth after years of wanderings?

The end of this sinister comedy has all of a “happy end” like those loved by American cinema against a backdrop of mythology of Christian redemption, very American too. Abell the repentant convinced Kurtz and Zelen that they had no other solution but to recognize, not their crimes (must not exaggerate, anyway!), but their “errors”. Caught as they were under the merciless fire of criticism from multiple scientists and damning testimonies, they had no alternative to this choice to try to salvage what was left of their reputations. And this is how the falsifying trio was forced in 1983 in its own magazine, the Skeptical Inquirer (“”), to publish a very short article entitled “The Mars effect according to Abell-Kurtz-Zelen: a reassessment”. After some nonsense like “scientific research is a constant questioning, blah blah” intended to pitifully justify themselves at least, they wrote in full that finally, after careful consideration, they felt that “Gauquelin was able to correctly calculate the frequencies of Mars at birth taking into account the demographic and astronomical factors of the ‘problem’.” End of 3rd act of this tragicomedy… which will be followed 14 years later by a very discreet 4th act when Kurz will return one last time to the charge, with a monster nerve, to try to make people forget his confession from 1983… to which he is careful not to make the slightest allusion.

Let’s take advantage of this lowering of the curtain to take stock of these tribulations of astro-statistics in the country of official science. This one likes to to give of itself the image of a majestic, austere, rigorous, humble, objective knowledge, above human passions and having for purpose only the discovery of the Truth. We see here that the reality of science is quite different as soon as it is confronted with facts that disturb or question its a priori, prejudices and certainties. It can then display a completely different face, that of contempt, of intolerant rejection and show that a large number of scientists are ready to do anything to maintain the status quo of their knowledge, including cheating, defrauding, lying, misrepresenting the facts. And at the same time, most scientists who do not go that far, prisoners of the cognitive consensus which is theirs, do not react to these shameful practices and objectively make themselves their accomplices — because in this kind of field as in other others, who does not say a word consent.

The scandal within the scandal

Did you find this story extraordinary, incredible, scandalous? Wait, it’s not over. If we take a step back and height from these events and if we scratch to see what is hidden under their unappetizing crust, we realize that what happened is even more extraordinary, unbelievable and outrageous.

Let’s briefly summarize the situation. A couple of researchers in astro-statistics obtain results which show that at least three planets of the solar system most likely exert an influence on human behavior through the criterion of occupation. These results scandalize skeptical and rationalist scientists who see in them a rehabilitation of astrology, which for them is a crime against reason. The researchers in question agree to submit their results to a counter-expertise which they propose to a committee of Belgian scientists to carry out themselves. One of the two researchers, who is an athlete and has therefore among other things studied the correlations between Mars and the horoscopes of champions, and who also has a certain sense of advertising and self-promotion, features his Mars stats. Without looking any further, scientists agree to test what then becomes the “Mars effect”, without being the least interested in Jupiter and Saturn, planets for which the statistical correlations are also positive. All they want by replicating the experiences of the two researchers is to demonstrate their shortcomings and errors to reaffirm learnedly at little cost the inanity of astrology.

Bad luck for them, the result of their counter-expertise is to confirm this “Mars effect”. They cheat and then manipulate the data to do it magically, uh sorry, “scientifically” disappear. But their shenanigans prove ineffective. Other scientists as pseudo-skeptical, pseudo-rationalist and as intellectually dishonest as them, but this time Americans, take over from them and proceed exactly in the same way. But this time, many honest scientists are denouncing the scandal of these data manipulations, frauds, lies and overt cheating. Draped in his outraged dignity as a scientist above suspicion, one of them goes so far as to declare that these anti-astrological maneuvers are nothing but “the greatest scandal in the history of rationalism”.

And he’s right. But this scandal masks another, which is a corollary to it and which is perhaps even greater from the point of view of epistemology and the study of knowledge. This other scandal is the absolute, distressing lack of curiosity that all these over-qualified university scientists who represent in principle the elite of science have shown in this affair for the fundamental object of these controversies: astrology. What they have focused on to the point of being blinded by it is not on the planet Mars, and certainly not all the complexity of the problem posed by its possible if not probable astrological influence incompatible with the current state of the laws. and physico-biological knowledge, and even less the conditional, contextual extra-astrological framework within which this influence could be exercised and modified. What they focused on was not Mars, but the “Mars effect”, Jupiter and Saturn having left them unmoved. “The Mars effect” was enough for them. It was a dragon incongruously emerging from the prehistory of science that had to be defeated by all possible means to safeguard current official knowledge, and not an object of curiosity.

The observation is obvious: the few intellectually honest scientists who rebelled against the turpitudes of their colleagues did so only for reasons internal to official science. None of them showed any interest, any exploratory curiosity, any desire for experimental or fundamental research for the hypothesis and the astrological facts which were however the objects which were at the heart of these controversies, which were the very objective reason. No: for them, the treatment of the “Mars effect” by their colleagues was only a huge and cruel revealer of what science should never do, should never be allowed to do in order to remain worthy of itself and of professional conduct, ethics and of the morality of which it considers itself the depository by definition.

In the fraudulent maneuvers in which their scientific colleagues have engaged in order to ward off the “Mars effect”, they did not see a denial of reality, they saw a denial of science. When R. A. Mac Connel writes of Rawlins’ testimony that this is a “key document for the history and philosophy of science” — and it is indeed one — he pays tribute to a fellow who had the audacity to bring to light fraudulent practices of a considerable scale which dishonor science, he does not allude to the fact that these practices were intended to disguise facts which, by validating the reality of planetary influences, jeopardized the foundations of biophysical knowledge on which the edifice of science is built. “The Mars effect” was just an absurd and unwanted pawn suddenly appearing in a scientific game which R. A. MacConnel or Rawlins thought was only played between honest competitors and which made it appear that among them there were cheaters of the worst species.

None of the scientists who criticized the despicable practices of their colleagues in the PARA Committee or CSICOP showed the slightest curiosity for the object Mars, the planet Mars, the marsian function in astrology with the notable exception of Luc de Marré. If they found themselves forced to defend the “Mars effect”, it was not to open up new and revolutionary research perspectives that would validate the astrological fact while at the same time enriching the field of biophysical knowledge ; it was because they didn’t want to find themselves sitting on the same bench of infamy next to cheaters belonging to the same side as them. For them it was an internal affair of science closed in on itself, contracted around its dogmatic certainties, prisoner of its a priori. And this is where the biggest scandal lies, even worse than these cheatings which are after all part of the sad common lot of humanity, scientific or not. Unlike the other, the “Mars effect” did not cause this scandal to burst, and for good reason: it was simply not possible and out of the question that it burst. If he had, “the greatest scandal in the history of rationalism” What was CSICOP’s actions would have seemed like a peaceful tornado compared to the unleashed hurricane that the irruption of astrological reality into the field of official science would have constituted. Fortunately for her, the virtuous despisers of scientific fraud relating to the “Mars effect” consciously or unconsciously took care of the grain by not looking any further.

“The show must go on”

Moreover, as soon as the dust settled after the passage of the bad wind from the “Mars effect”, everything is in order. Sinners and cheaters got scolded, not excommunicated and continued to go about their business “scientists” now avoiding like the plague “Mars effects”. Imperturbable science has taken its course in the majestic bed of its blindnesses. We ended temporarily, and with relief, by forgetting the horrible misfortune caused by this pesky “Mars effect”. We have forgotten or pretended to forget the marsian body of the crime, which was after all only a pretext for the stuffing between vice and virtue that disturbed the studious silence of laboratories, observatories and academies. And then after a while, as time passed, we even ended up not remembering that there had been controversies about a “Mars effect”. The show must go on. Science can’t afford to waste its time too much on nonsense like “the greatest scandal in the history of rationalism” or to draw all the consequences of a “key document for the history and philosophy of science”. It must be available for new discoveries that make advance Progress, because it must at all costs prevent it from retreating. That would be foolish, and science abhors foolishness. And astrology in all this? Well what, astrology? That’s not the problem. We narrowly avoided getting caught in the teeth with this business of the “Mars effect”. We were hot on that one. Fingers crossed that it doesn’t happen again.

Moreover, it is thanks to the controversies surrounding this “Mars effect” which had started in France, then spread to Belgium and the USA, that the cheater Paul Kurtz was able to give an international dimension to “contemporary skeptical movement” by recreating the “Committee for Skeptical Inquiry” (formerly CSICOP!) which enjoys a very high reputation among pseudo-rationalist anti-astrologer scientists of all stripes. We wonder why, and we salute their intellectual benevolence: it is not given to everyone to know how to pretend to ignore the actions of a crook and to grant him blind confidence to defend scientistic rationalism.

But back to CSICOP. So it just had a bit of a problem after Rawlins was expelled and a few of its most prominent members resigned. Its co-founder with Kurtz, the professor of sociology Marcello Truzzi, ended up excluding himself from it and being excluded from it after the scandal of the “Mars effect”. Not only because he disapproved of Kurtz’s cheating, but also and above all because he felt that the rationalists who claim to be “skeptics” are actually fake skeptics (and not septic tanks, though…). Truzzi wanted CSICOP to have the role of a true investigator of the “paranormal”, while Kurtz was of the opinion that his vocation was only to refute the speeches qualified as “parascientists”, which is easily understood coming from an honest man like him. Truzzi’s scathing criticism of pseudo-skeptics and outright fraudsters like Kurtz earned him the label of “skeptic of skeptics” by Kurtz.

Truzzi was not not tender either towards the actions of Kurtz and his gang of fraudsters: “For me”, he wrote, “they tend to block honest investigation. Most of them are not agnostic to paranormal claims; they are there to destroy them. […] When a paranormal experience meets its objectives, they redefine them. And afterwards, if the experiment is reliable, they will say that it is a simple anomaly.” Which is still a little better than cheating… The same Truzzi also described in 1987 the scientistic pseudo-skeptics (when they’re not just fakers like Kurtz and his gang):

“In science, the burden of proof rests with the person who affirms and the more extraordinary a claim, the greater the burden of proof required. The true skeptic has an agnostic attitude, i.e. he considers an affirmation unproven rather than proven false. He claims that the claim has not been proven and that science must continue to construct its cognitive concept maps of reality analysis regardless of the claim. Until the true skeptic makes a claim, he has nothing to prove. It just continues to use the scientific theories established by conventional science. However, if the critic asserts that the claim has been shown to be false, that he has a negative hypothesis — say, for example, that a result of a psi test is due to an artifact, he makes a claim and must then provide proof of his assertion.”

In the case of the “Mars effect” the statement was extraordinary (nothing less than the rehabilitation of astrology and its reintegration into the field of science), the burden of proof requested had been provided, and it was great, and nothing happened. It has been proven that the scientific world is overcrowded with pseudo-skeptics who don’t give a damn about “burden of proof”.

Pseudo-skeptics and zeteticians

By the way, a clarification is in order. The worst French anti-astrologer scientist-rationalists call themselves the “zeteticians” and the zetetic translates according to Henri Broch, who is their guru, by “the art of doubt”. It should be noted that the term “zetetic” was first used by Kurtz and Truzzi. The title of the CSICOP review was The Zetetic. During the rift between Kurtz and Truzzi over the Gauquelin affair, Truzzi challenged Kurtz’s right to refer to himself as “zetetician”, given that he did not practice an open and systematic doubt, but that on the contrary Kurtz, his gang and their epigones were barricaded behind a wall of scientistic certainties which for them were the object of no doubt, this which made them, not zeteticians, but pseudo-skeptics.

For the purpose of semantic clarification, Truzzi decided that the real “zeteticians”, defined as researchers without any a priori, should not be confused with “pseudo-skeptics”. It should therefore be known that the anti-astrologer pseudo-zeteticians who are rampant in France are usurpers: they are in fact vulgar pseudo-skeptics whose rabbit-skinned skepticism is never exercised against scientism and official science, of which they are zealous zealots. The real zetetician therefore differs from the pseudo-skeptic by his total openness to the unknown (which includes the “paranormal”) and its manifestations. The pseudo-skeptic (that is to say the Frenchman who claims to be a zetetician for example, if you follow correctly) is, himself, a being full of certainties and a false demystifier who only criticizes knowledge that does not come within the framework of dominant scientific dogmas. I hope I was clear enough…

The miraculous dissolution of the CFEPP

Let us return to the misadventures of the Gauquelins in the fraudulent lands of pseudo-skeptical anti-astrologism. The CSICOP episode being close to its end, the intrepid Michel Gauquelin, neither disgusted nor discouraged, decided in 1981 to submit his astro-statistics to the criticisms of the CFEPP (French Committee for the Study of Paranormal Phenomena). Burned by the CSICOP affair, the anti-astrologers of the CFEPP publicly accepted the experimental protocol proposed by the Gauquelins and the idea of a control of the “Mars effect”, while criticizing the fact that the data on which it was based lacked objective criteria for selection as to the difference between famous sports great champions and little known lesser champions.

The memorandum of understanding between the Gauquelins and the CFEPP was published in 1982 in the journal Science & Vie. He mentions that the results of the experiment will be published in the same journal as soon as the statistical checks have been carried out. One can imagine that the French anti-astrologers of this Committee were burning to prove themselves as pseudo-skeptics like those of the American CSICOP and the Belgian PARA Committee and that they were therefore going to get to work without delay. Well, not at all. For 3 years Gauquelin tried in vain to contact them to find out how the experiment was going. He never knew if it had happened. If it was done, it is likely that its results confirmed the “Mars effect”. Indeed, Gauquelin ended up learning in 1984, and through roundabout ways, that the CFEPP no longer existed. The announcement of this unpublished dissolution was made at an astrophysical congress by the astronomer Evry Schatzman, a rabid anti-astrologer who was a member of both CSICOP and CFEPP. “The CFEPP no longer exists. As for the Mars effect, it has been shown that it is only significantly observed for athletes born on the 14th district of Paris”, Schatzman reportedly said in a desperate humorous attempt. He was lying, of course: he could not ignore the epistemological-moral hurricane that had descended on CSICOP, forced to piteously recognize the reality of the “Mars effect”. This very… paranormal evaporation of the CFEPP was an admission.

This strategic disappearance did not last. The CFEPP was miraculously reborn from its ashes in 1990 and Gauquelin was asked to try again the experience of confirming the “Mars effect”. Michel Gauquelin having died shortly afterwards, in 1991, we do not know his version of what happened. According to the assertions of the CFEPP (which one can only doubt, given the total lack of impartiality of its members and the lies of the principal among them, Evry Schatzman), this test which always related to sports champions would have miraculously invalidated the “Mars effect”, but very little. We only know that Gauquelin intervened several times to contest the selection of the data made by the CFEPP, which did not respect the protocols of the agreement signed in 1982 concerning the selection criteria allowing to differentiate the super-champions from the hypo-champions. In short, we can rightly suspect the CFEPP, like the other anti-astrologer committees before it, of having manipulated the data itself.

The CFEPP accused Gauquelin of having done so… which is unlikely, given that the counter-investigations carried out following the CSICOP affair have amply demonstrated that he was not playing that game, unlike his opponents. All those who have seriously studied the file have concluded that Gauquelin’s attitude in this area was irreproachable and fundamentally honest. “The Mars effect” Having ended up being recognized by the CSICOP, Gauquelin had no valid reason to cheat, quite the contrary: this new test could only confirm the previous results. We are therefore entitled to wonder if the anti-astrologers of the CFEPP would not themselves have manipulated the data to achieve their ends, which would be absolutely nothing surprising if we consider the precedents of the PARA Committee and CSICOP. Of this case, we will only ever know the version that the CFEPP gave of it, and of which we can notice that it did not try to give it any publicity, which is strange as its satisfaction should have been great. having succeeded in slaying the astrological dragon after the other committees broke their teeth on it.

At the end of this festival of pseudo-skeptical cheating, the “Mars effect”, which has only a distant relationship with the astrological fact, ended up temporarily shutting down. The earthquake it caused among scientists has since had only a few rare and very weak replications.

Carlson’s experience, a “case of scientific misconduct” major

In 1980, scalded by the scandal that the revelation of its cheating had caused in the scientific world and even in its own ranks, the CSICOP decided to abandon its own anti-astrological tests. But Kurtz and his gang still had to find a way to counter the positive impact of confirming the “Mars effect” and therefore to continue by other means to discredit astrology, without the CSICOP appearing to be associated with this approach. The gang of pseudoskeptical cheaters slyly delegated this task to a young physics student at the University of California, Shawn Carlson, whose mentor was physicist Richard Muller, himself a CSICOP member. Thus was born what was called “Carlson’s experiment”, a superb example of pure anti-astrologer quackery which was published in 1985 in the scientific journal Natural and immediately won great success among pseudoskeptics and in the media sphere. We can know the summary and the official version on the French Wikipedia.

Shawn Carlson, who led this “experience” in 1980–1981, was then only 21 years old, and just like Kurtz no serious skills or knowledge in astrology, psychology and statistics. As a teenager, he was passionate about junk occultism, witches and devoted himself as a street expert to hat game. That is to say if he had the profile of the ideal candidate to imagine and pilot with a mastery sabbatical this fool’s game and this witch hunt in the shape of intellectual fraud.

It is impossible to find a well-argued critical academic study elsewhere than in English-language publications. Suitbert Ertel, pro-Gauquelin but anti-astrologer, made one relentless criticism statistically and factually argued in 2009 in the Journal of Scientific Exploration: “The results are considered insufficient to consider astrology empirically verified, but they are sufficient to consider Carlson’s negative verdict on astrology untenable.” Joseph E. Vidmar, professor of psychology (McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana, USA) like Ertel, but he is a pro-astrologist, is equally ruthless in its criticism of this pitiful pseudo-experiment: “The Carlson study is not the first case of scientific misconduct in history, but it is unique in that, contrary to mainstream scientific belief, it involved far more than a single individual. It involved an organization with powerful influence claiming to speak on behalf of the body politic of science. This was, for the first known time, the scientific journal in which it was published. [Review] Natural is as responsible as the author. The publicity impact of this article was based on the prestige and power of the newspaper in which it was printed, not on the merit of the experience”.

It was only 19 years later, in the September 2006 edition celebrating the 30th anniversary of Skeptical Inquirer, the review at his boot, that the cheater Kurtz “admitted” officially that CSICOP had encouraged Carlson to embark on this project.

In 1997 and in shameless bad faith, cheater Kurtz officially repeated once again that the Gauquelins had skewed their samples by playing on the notion of celebrity, acting as if his own shenanigans had not been exposed, dissected and denounced even within the CSICOP itself. Paul Kurtz died nine years later, and French pseudo-skeptics joined their American colleagues in paying a glowing tribute to his work, without of course mentioning his anti-marsian cheats.

The astronomer Dommanget, whose lackluster role we have seen in endorsing the deceptions of the PARA Committee, immediately disagreed with Kurtz’s false assertion and attempted a pitiful conclusion by made of Solomon’s judgment: “All those who believe in the phenomenon offer samples which apparently lead to the existence of a ‘Mars effect’. All those who don’t believe it offer samples which apparently lead to the absence of any ‘Mars effect’”. Jean Dommanget died in his turn in 2014, which was the occasion for the CSI, successor to the CSICOP, to to pay such a vibrant tribute than the one Kurtz had been entitled to… not to mention of course his role as an endorser of pseudo-skeptical cheats.

Then in 2000, it was Suitbert Ertel, who considered himself the successor of Michel Gauquelin, who re-intervenes rejecting the new lie of Kurtz and his gang and Dommanget’s final cunning conclusion, reaffirming that the “Mars effect” is a real statistical fact deserving of further in-depth research.

Let us recall here that the English-speaking site Planetos gives a wealth of near-exhaustive information on Gauquelin statistics and on controversies and cheating about the “Mars effect” who followed them.

Pseudo-skeptic scavengers and the suicide

It remains to deal with the episode of Michel Gauquelin’s suicide on 20th May 1991. Because it is far from being just a private matter, given the shameful use made of this tragic event by anti-astrologers scavengers. One of them is Laurent Puech, “Social worker” and “Trainer in professional secrecy and information sharing: legislation, deontology, ethics” if we are to believe his C.V., but also and above all author of a pseudo-skeptical work of propaganda and anti-astrological disinformation entitled Astrology: behind the words appeared in 2004 in the misnamed collection Zététique led by a rabid anti-astrologer, Henri Broch. In this book, the pseudo-zetetician Puech proves his talents as an objective informant by writing in black and white that the CSICOP had “broken one by one all the arguments of M. Gauquelin” (p. 136), which is an outright lie and blatant misinformation. This example is enough to show how little consideration should be given to what this disinformator may write or think.

These misinformation are not the most serious. After all, misinforming is only ever the usual way of operating for a crusading anti-astrologer. No, what is serious is the filthy little scavenging insinuation that he maliciously slips into page 137 of his book, at the end of a paragraph where he suggests that Gauquelin may have cheated on his data. I quote Puech: “Before his suicide, Michel Gauquelin left instructions to one of his friends for all his data to be destroyed…” It’s all in the deliberately elliptical suspension points which this sentence ends. Puech is only repeating a vulgar disgusting rumor peddled by anti-astrologists from the CFEPP or elsewhere: Michel Gauquelin would have committed suicide because his frauds on the data would have been about to be revealed in broad daylight. No reliable source has ever confirmed this insinuation worthy of the worst paranormal plotters. And furthermore the various pseudo-skeptical committees which have dealt with the “Mars effect” themselves used these sources, which Gauquelin had made available to them. Such an insinuation is therefore not only scavenger, but also quack.

A destructive rumor

The only proven source of this rumor is in a publication by Kurtz, Nienhuys & Ranjit Sandhu published in 1997 in the Journal of Scientific Exploration:

“The information about the ‘last wishes’ by Gauquelin are just a story from a friend of a friend: ‘One of Gauquelin’s friends told me that he had contacted relatives who told him that Michel wanted the data burned’ (14th November 1994 email from Suitbert Ertel to Jan Willem Nienhuys). The only thing that seems certain is that Gauquelin’s files have disappeared. They may have been destroyed by people who were unaware of their value and later talked about it. There seems to be little evidence to justify the big picture of a desperate last act directed at scientists who had not played fair. All genuine researchers hope that after their death their results, or at least their honor, will survive. Ertel credits Gauquelin with an unusual little pettiness. If Gauquelin thought his data was useful, shouldn’t he have made it available to an interested friend or colleague? If Gauquelin had indeed left instructions to destroy his entire data file, that could only raise the most serious questions about the integrity of his research.”

Note here that Kurtz attributes the rumor to Suitbert Ertel (rather favorable to the work of Gauquelin, of which he confirmed certain results but also invalidated others!), while the latter is content to report the existence of this rumor in an email, which once again says a lot about Kurtz’s reliability as an informant. The fact that this information comes from Kurtz therefore triggers in itself a reflex of… absolute skepticism, but it has not yet been denied by Ertel. In the publication that contains this text, Kurtz also again engages in maneuvers to discredit the work of Gauquelin, maneuvers denounced 3 years later by Suitbert Ertel and Kenneth Irving in an article published in the same journal. And if Kurtz writes that “Ertel credits Gauquelin with an unusual pettiness”, which is a lie (Ertel does not attribute anything, he simply echoes unverifiable second-hand information), it is only to try to discredit Ertel, who was an adversary. Note also the convoluted turn of his last two sentences. If Kurtz pretends not to adhere to the rumor, he nevertheless welcomes it with an unmistakable bitter greed. Kurtz was decidedly, if the pseudo-skeptics are to be believed, a pseudo-very great humanist.

The possibility of data fraud has been formally invalidated in 1987 by Geoffrey Dean and Suitbert Ertel, yet on opposite sides. Dean writes: “I personally visited Gauquelin’s laboratory in Paris for a few days in 1981 and again in 1983 and was very impressed with the excellence and organization of his records.” Ertel writes: “The author [i.e. Ertel himself] spent three days and nights in the Paris laboratory. Gauquelin was absent half the time. All data files were accessible. Additional data was sought in Gauquelin’s absence, as he himself could not recall their location at all times. None were found. The circumstances were regarded as sufficiently susceptible to the discovery of fraud or bias if anything of the sort had occurred.”

Finally, Kurtz himself (it’s a shame!) was forced to admit that all the data files were accessible and credible at the end of an inspection he carried out in 1983 with his companions from CSICOP Abell and Zelen: “One of us (Kurtz) checked the Gauquelin data presented for the champions. Kurtz found Gauquelin’s files to be meticulous and well organized, and on 24th June 1977 Gauquelin and Kurtz signed a statement stating that the files had been reviewed and found to be in good order” (Abell, Kurtz, & Zelen, 1983).

The real letter that buries the false rumor

Moreover, we have proof that this rumor is completely unfounded. This proof is given by Philippe Guillemant, who was from 1988 to 1991 a very close friend and confidant of Michel Gauquelin. Philippe Guillemant is a physicist engineer, a graduate of the Ecole Centrale de Paris and of the Institut de Physique du Globe, doctor in Radiation Physics, specialist in artificial intelligence, CNRS gold medalist, inventor of an automatic detector of forest fires based on smoke image recognition and visual recognition software allowing mobile robots to inspect and identify images in real time. He therefore has the profile of an irreproachable, inventive and creative scientist.

Guillemant happens to have received a last letter from Gauquelin on 14/05/1991, i.e. 6 days before his suicide, letter in which the latter informed him of his disputes with the CFEPP. Here is the full text of this letter: “Dear Philippe, As promised, photocopies of the main elements of the CFEPP/Mars effect file. To be read in chronological order to better savor… You will judge if I was too patient and conciliatory with these guys — or if I maneuvered well at the risk — probable — of having myself rolled in flour, final, by them. Anyway, thank you for your help! Friendships. Michael.” This is followed by 12 pages of photocopies in which Gauquelin recounts his disputes with the CFEPP and his revolt against their systematic attempts to manipulate data. The last photocopy is dated 6/12/1990. It is that of a letter sent by Gauquelin to Claude Benski, secretary of the CFEPP. Gauquelin wrote this: he is “sorry that the CFEPP did not believe it had to comply with the fundamental rule of our experimental protocol, namely the establishment above all of the list of champions to be retained, a list having received my agreement. […] This so that the misadventure of the American experience does not happen again. This mishap can happen again, I’m afraid.”

This text is clear: Michel Gauquelin suspects tampering with data on the part of the CFEPP, and he shares this with one of his best friends a few days before committing suicide. Nowhere is there any question of destroying data, quite the contrary: it is absolutely essential, obviously, that they be preserved so that the experience can take place in the best conditions. Conclusion: through his allusive dotted lines, the ignorant anti-astrologist Laurent Puech is the peddler of a disgusting rumor whose source he does not know. He does not deserve this title, just like all the other pseudo-zetetic anti-astrologists who have they too greedily spread this rumor, that the deep contempt of astrologers and all those revolted by this kind of filthy behavior.

Worn down by the polemics and base manipulations of anti-astrologers but also probably hurt in his narcissism for not having been recognized and praised academically as the founder of a “neo-astrology” Statistical-scientist (it was his greatest ambition), Michel Gauquelin ended up committing suicide on 20/05/1991. Neo-astrology: a copernican revolution was also the title of his last book written shortly before his death and published in 1992. He wrote there among other things that: “At the end of the 20th century, two dreams must come true: to go to the planets [space exploration], but also to know what the planets ‘do to us’, so that, as the Emerald Table, ‘the miracle of unity’ can be perpetuated.” Such a vision is nothing like that of a shameful cheater ready to burn his ships (spaceships of course) behind him to avoid being unmasked.

It should be noted that his old anti-astrologer adversary Geoffrey Dean did not take part in the concert of scavengers, just as he had not made himself an accomplice of the various cheating committees. He brings to the file of Gauquelin’s suicide a decisive piece in the form of a personal testimony: “Four months before his suicide, Gauquelin, Ertel and I spent two days with [publisher] Rudolf Smit at his House in the Netherlands. Rudolf and I were aware of Gauquelin’s private and personal affairs and it was therefore clear to us that there were more plausible reasons for Gauquelin’s suicide than the accusations of cheating made by skeptics.”

It is therefore not because of the disloyal maneuvers of the ultimate anti-astrologer committee with which he was confronted that he put an end to his life, the content and the tone of his last letter to Guillemant testifying to this, and the recent failure of his second marriage is probably also in the game. The causes of suicide are almost always multiple and for some forever mysterious. His wife Françoise continued their common work after their divorce in 1982 until her death in 2007.

Here is the very beautiful text of tribute that Geoffrey Dean wrote when he learned of the death of Michel Gauquelin: “As befits his peak Jupiter, he was philosophical about his results, confident with a smile that he might or might not be right, and never sure he lived long enough to see the puzzles solved, but always hoping he would. But that’s not what happened. When the sad news reached Australia, it was in the early evening, after a hot winter day. The gum-scented air was calm and distinctly clear. To the west, abandoned by the waning echoes of a golden sunset, hung a rare triangle of planets spread a fingertip apart, an arrowhead pointing beyond the bright Moon bent to the east, where Saturn would rise. The five Gauquelin planets in the key sectors opening up this new beginning. If angels have registries, they better watch out.” How even frenzied pseudo-rationalist anti-astrologists can sometimes have the soul of a poet. This observation obviously remains to be verified statistically in order to be certain that it is not the effect of a social artefact.

Pseudo-significant coincidence for pseudo-skeptics?

Most anti-astrologers (Geoffrey Dean is a rare exception) like to make believe that astrologers and astrologers are not only compulsive cheaters like vulgar anti-astrologer statisticians, but also followers of all-out quackery to better discredit astrology. In order not to give them this kind of foul grain to grind and to avoid having to spread new unfounded rumours, it should be added here that Philippe Guillemant, such as the god Janus of roman mythology, has a well-made head but also two opposite faces.

Since 2005, in fact, 14 years after the suicide of Michel Gauquelin (the precision is important), what he describes as a “great collapse”. Following this major turning point in his personal life, he had a kind of illumination that made him a new man, connected to the “synchronicities”, that is to say the coincidences which are not coincidences but which appear as “manifestations of potentialized futures”. He goes so far as to claim that it is possible for human beings to bring about these synchronicities thanks to a cocktail of will, past that has been wiped clean, self-sacrifice and, icing on this cake, love. To achieve this, he proposes nothing less than “to energize this future so that non-causal paths and bridges to reach it appear”, “dancing with chaos” and overcome our too rational fears to “let the magic appear”.

Since 2005, therefore, the life of Philippe Guillemant has therefore swung to the dark side of the force of reason. Like a post-modern techno-prophet, he teaches in his new life a “double causality theory, model of creation of reality based on free will”, which he presented in his books La Route du Temps (ed. Le Temps Present, 2010 & 2014) and La Physique de la Conscience (ed. Trédaniel, 2015). This model leads according to him, “among other things, to a rational explanation of synchronicity which leads to a real ‘bridge’ between Science and Spirituality”. Hmm…

Guillemant’s irrationalist fork came 14 years after the last letter Gauquelin sent him. It therefore has nothing to do with astrology or with the life and death of Gauquelin, and moreover Guillemant does not believe in a causal and physical explanation (including quantum) of astrology, and even less to the determinism that it would suppose, even if at the time of his friendship with Gauquelin he devoted himself to research in this area which he has since abandoned. This did not, however, prevent him from giving a glowing preface in 2008 to a astrology book of the most smoky spiritualist species. But since there is no doubt that the anti-astrologists who are followers of unfounded rumors will base themselves on this escape from Guillemant into quantico-spiritualism to make retroactive pseudo-zetetics on a small weekday, I prefer here to take the lead in serving them directly this soup, whose recipe we may or may not like (personally, I find it inedible) but which has the merit of being true.

And I’m sure these rabid scientists will be pathetically led to think that in this matter, “there’s no hazard” as Guillemant now proclaims. They will argue that if the latter was the receiver of Gauquelin’s last letter, it was because 14 years later he would emerge from the rut of reasoning reason to listen without restraint to the siren song of the irrational, which proves that 14 years earlier he was no longer a credible witness, even with supporting evidence. These genuine revelations are my personal gift to conspiratorial pseudo-skeptics of all stripes. Thank you who?

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