Skeptic

In August of 1977, the world got a glimpse at the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, under arrest and on parade, claiming he killed six people and wounded seven. The demon of the decade had turned out to be a humble looking, chubby smiling man, a postal worker. This lone gunman was behind a whole city's reign of terror, and the city could now move on -- unless of course, the New York Police Department's lone gunman was just a theory, and wrong. What most don't know about the Son of Sam case is that from the beginning, not everyone bought the idea that Berkowitz acted alone. On the list of skeptics, police who worked the case, even theprosecutor from Queens, where five of the shootings took place.

In addition, Berkowitz himself, in a little known interview done years after the killings, claimed there were other shooters, naming names. But perhaps most surprising is what Dateline recently learned, that the arrest of David Berkowitz didn't actually close the Son of Sam case. In Berkowitz's home town it is still not officially closed. The official storyIt was back in the 1970s, the best of times and the worst of times, full of wisdom and foolishness. The city's season of disco lights would give way to darkness. It all started early on the morning of July 29, 1976, outside a Bronx apartment building. In what seemed like an isolated killing, an18-year-old woman was shot dead as she sat in a car with a girlfriend.On Oct. 23, eight miles away, in different part of New York City, the borough of Queens, Carl Denero was riding with his date, looking for a place to park. The shooter crept up behind the car. Carl Denero: “And next thing you know there was glass all over. I felt the car exploded. Later on I found out I was shot.”There was no apparent relationship between the shootings. A month later, on the night of Nov. 27, 1976, again in Queens, two young girls were sitting on a front porch. A man approached, asked for directions, then pulled out a gun and fired. Both girls were seriously wounded.Still, with three shootings in two different parts of the city, no connection wasmade by. ...

Mount Weather is a top-security underground installation an hour's drive from Washington DC. It has its own leaders, police, fire department - and laws. A cold war relic, it has been given a new lease of life since 9/11. And no one who's been inside has ever talked. 'Actually, you may want to just put those down a minute," Tim Brown is telling me, as I peer through binoculars at a cluster of buildings and antennae on a distant ridge. "The locals might get a bit nervous." A Ford F-150 cruises by, and the two men inside regard us casually as they pass. We are sitting, hazards blinking, in Brown's BMW on a rural road in Virginia'sFacquier County, a horsey enclave an hour west of Washington DC.

The object of our attention is Mount Weather, officially the Emergency Operations Centre of the Federal Emergency Management Authority (Fema); and, less officially, a massive underground complex originally built to house governmental officials in the event of a full-scale nuclear exchange. Today, as the Bush administration wages its war on terror, Mount Weather is believed to house a "shadow government" made up of senior Washington officials on temporary assignment. Following the collapse of the USSR, Mount Weather seemed like an expensive cold-war relic. Then came September 11. News reports noted that "top leaders of Congress were taken to the safety of a secure governmentfacility 75 miles west of Washington"; another reported "a traffic jam of limos carrying Washington and government license plates." As the phrase "undisclosed location" entered the vernacular, Mount Weather, and a handful of similar installations, flickered back to life. Just two months ago, a disaster-simulation exercise called Forward Challenge '06 sent thousands of federal workers to Mount Weather and other sites.Mount Weather is not hard to find. From the White House, we take Route 66 west until it meets Highway 50. Fifty miles later, we turn off on Route 601, a small two-lane rural feeder that snakes up a ridge. That road seems to be going nowhere until suddenly, at the crest, we come into a clearing, bounded by two. ...

Is health, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder? If that's the case, thousands of people every year, from all over the world, find healing relief from a variety of ailments - from cataracts and emphysema to arthritis and migraine headaches - at Montana's most unusual health facilities, the radon health mines of Boulder and Basin. Those two small towns, located a few miles apart between Butte and Helena on Interstate 15, are the only places in North America where people come and pay to breathe the radioactive radon gas that occurs naturally in the mines Š for their health. The concept, even the name - "radon health mines,"seems contradictory.

Radon is a gaseous radioactive element that is derived from the radioactive decay of uranium, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The Montana public health agency "doesn't encourage (the mines') use," said Dr. Todd Damrow of the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Service. "But people are free to use them." And they do, by the thousands every year. Many people make annual pilgrimages to the Merry Widow and the Earth Angel mines in Basin, and the Free Enterprise and Lone Tree mines in Boulder. Owners of the mines dismiss the EPA warnings about radon as "government propaganda." "It's not harmful at all," said Patricia Lewis, owner of theFree Enterprise Mine. Dwayne Knutzen, owner of the Merry Widow, was visiting the Basin area from Washington four years ago and found the mine and its associated campground for sale. "I was like everybody else," he said. "Radon? That can't be good for you."But the more he researched the health benefits of radon, he said, the more he was convinced of them."The only reason I bought the place," said Knutzen, "is it's so fascinating. You hear all these bad things. But you can't ever find anybody who died from it. And there are all these benefits."Arthritis is the most common malady of people seeking relief in the radon mines, according to Knutzen."Arthritis is the big one, butanything. ...

Gloria Fino led a devout but uneventful life - until several months ago, when she experienced something her Catholic priest could not explain. The 34-year-old woman from Robstown, outside Corpus Christi, said she saw an oil-like substance streaming from the eyes of a portrait of Jesus. That was all it took for the world to come to her door. And for her name to be added to the list of those who say they've seen weeping portraits of Jesus, images of the Virgin Mary on a variety of surfaces, rosaries turned to gold, holy statutes that suddenly start bleeding or developing heartbeats. But is seeing actually believing? What happens whenmiracles are subjected to scientific scrutiny? Religious experts are skeptical of many claims of miraculous sightings.

Still, they say, those claims can strengthen faith, even if they can't be scientifically verified. Reports of spiritual apparitions abound, even in these modern, rationalistic times. Thousands are drawn to the sites of such claims, hungry, it seems, for a direct encounter with the divine. Also among those attracted to such sightings are the so-called "miracle detectives," scientific investigators who seek explanations grounded in physical laws. "I really wish I would come across something that confounds science. I really do," said Joe Nickell, who has investigated paranormal claims – fromhaunted houses to extraterrestrials – for more than 30 years. The professional magician, with a doctorate in English literature, specializes in looking into reports of religious phenomena. He said he has never come across a "miracle" for which there wasn't a rational explanation. Mr. Nickell noted that such sightings far more often than not involve Catholics. ("Why don't Baptists report seeing visions?" he asked). The church, in his view, doesn't do enough to debunk such claims. But some scholars of Catholicism said that's not the church's job. "The Catholic Church is very hesitant to make statements about such events," said Timothy Matovina, director of the Cushwa Center for the Study ofAmerican. ...