Dangerous moonlight

Press, 10 May 1979, Page 17

Dangerous moonlight

A Miami psychiatrist says he has found scientific evidence for one of the oldest of old wives' tales: that human behaviour follows the phases of the moon.

He is in good company. Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and doctors up to comparatively recent times believed the moon could make men mad. But the rise of rations,! man has relegated such beliefs to the fiction shelves.

Dr Arnold Lieber wants to make these beliefs respectable. He was in Britain last week to promote his book, “The Lunar Effect,” published by Corgi, which presents the evidence he has collected and previously published in academic journals of unimpeachable respectability, such as the “American Journal of Psychiatry.”

He has found what he says is a significant correlation between violent acts like murder or grievious bodily harm and the waxing and waning of the moon. The danger periods are when the moon is full, or when it is new; times when the earth, sun and moon lie in a straight line, producing maximum gravitational pull.

If the times at which murders or violent attacks are committed are known accurately enough and are plotted as a curve, their rise and fall matches with fair accuracy the phases of the moon. Examining almost 2000 murders committed in Dade County. Florida, between 1956 and 1970, Dr Lieber found they tended to cluster in the period after the new moon and before and after the full moon..

The degree of clustering is such that most scientists would deem it “statistically significant” — that is, the odds against it arising by chance are greater than 20 to 1 against. (Some more cautious scientists would call such a result “probably significant”). More impressive results were extracted from an examination of cases of aggravated assault, which in Britain would probably be defined as grievous bodily harm or assault with a deadly weapon. Again using Dade County figures, Dr Lieber shows

that such assaults cluster around the time of the full moon with a frequency which scientists would call “highly significant.” (The odds against, such a clustering arising by chance are greater than 100 to 1 against). Oddly, in this case there was no significant correlation with the new moon. Dr Lieber’s results have been criticised in the scientific literature, but they have also found sup-

port. A study supported by the United States National Institute for Mental Health, and carried out by Dr Edward Malm.strom of the Wright Institute at Berkeley, did find a significant correlation between homicide and the lunar cycle, while two doctors in Houston failed. This failure, says Dr Lieber, arose because the Houston doctors used the time of death of the murder victims in their study, instead of the time of injury, introducing a distortion into the statistics. Some murder victims do not die until some time

after they have been attacked, so no significant correlations would be expected with time of death.

This is indeed why the correlation is stronger with assaults, he says, since the time at which assaults occur is known much more accurately than that of murders. But his results, he admits, “are displeasing to the rational scientific mind. I risked the derision of my colleagues by doing these studies.”

Dr Lieber's theory of how the moon exerts its effects is not yet much developed, but he suggests that the gravitational fields act on the material of the human body in some yet undiscovered fashion. In those near the edge of a breakdown, he says, the effect can push them over into violence or suicide.

Doctors, psychiatrists and policemen should be aware of the lunar calendar, he says, and prepared for an increase in their work-load near full moon and new moon. Individuals who feel they may be susceptible should stay out of bars, lock up their W’eapons and stay away from people they feel like arguing with.

By

NIGEL HAWKES

Science correspondent of “The Observer”