Debunking a case that is widely accepted by the scientific community is like seeing a piece of a movie set fall over: You realize in a moment that the saloon in the spaghetti western is not a two-story building but a painted two-dimensional prop made of plywood. You have the illusion of solidity in one moment, an incredulous feeling of having been tricked in the next, and after a stunned second you begin looking at the entire street thinking, “I bet that brothel’s made of cardboard.”
I had this feeling on a regular basis once I began investigating the world’s oldest people.
Read more: “The Longevity Skeptic”
Some cases required no effort at all. At one point, for example, the oldest woman in the United States was Adele Dunlap, a former smoker and occasional drinker. Adele kept insisting that the records had her age wrong. In a farcical, tragicomically weird end to her life, nobody believed her, and she was collectively rubbished for being unable to remember her real age. Despite consistently claiming for almost a decade that her paperwork was wrong, and that she was a decade younger than her documents suggested, Adele was duly informed by newspapers that she was mistaken about herself.
The academics knew better. A typical exchange ran thus: “Asked how it felt to be 113, Dunlap… looked her questioner in the eye and answered: ‘I’m 104.’” The reporter shot her down: “She’s not. The Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group [GRG], which tracks supercentenarians, or people 110 and older, has validated her age.” Faced with a contradiction, Robert Young—director of the GRG, who certifies age records for the Guinness World Records—told this woman on her deathbed that she was wrong and that she was certified as the oldest woman in the country.
The logic was bizarre. It also made a lie of the idea that errors in age records will be discarded if, under cross-examination, any flaws are found in the biography of extremely old people. This woman spent her terminal years repeating on a loop that she was not the oldest woman in America. Nobody listened. The Obamas even sent her a birthday card to congratulate her on being 113. Adele Dunlap was a supercentenarian whether she liked it or not. She still is, on paper.
It’s worth pausing to look at the man behind the validation of cases like Dunlap’s before moving on.
Robert Young’s capacity for fair judgment—the thing that case validations rest on—should be unimpeachable. Instead, he holds some irregular opinions. His master’s thesis alone is enlightening. Some problems are simple, like the observation that “people who look young for their age live longer (citation needed)” [sic]. Others are more problematic. Young promotes resurrecting race science using what he calls the “biological superiority hypothesis,” which he supports despite it being not “politically correct,” because he “gained a better understanding of the myth of African-American longevity, mainly from the movies and P.T. Barnum.” He quotes Eddie Murphy’s comedy “Coming to America” as source material. He then suggests he can sense the thickness of Black people’s skin. Young goes on to surmise that African Americans may survive to remarkable ages because their “thick skin” protects their “internal organs.” His primary evidence is that there is “a saying in the black community, ‘black don’t crack.’”
Young even does some Olympics watching and finds that in the 2008 sprinting events,
blacks took not just first, second, and third—no non-Africans can be seen on the track. . . . But so far, no research has demonstrated that the ability to run fast is greater for one race of people than another due to genetics. This is something that, perhaps due to political correctness, has not been studied.
Ignoring, of course, the studies of the Third Reich, which clung to similar reasoning when Jesse Owens destroyed them in athletics. Young then concludes that Africans may run faster because they had “to escape from wild animals but also other humans,” which also mixes in his constant confusion between physical fitness and Darwinian fitness.
This would all just constitute a lousy thesis that should never have passed examination—I am looking at you, Georgia State University—if it were not for Young’s ongoing importance in longevity research.
Young has validated roughly half of all extreme-age data, but his reach extends further. For example, he was also responsible for assembling the New England Centenarian Study, the “gold standard” clinical study on centenarians in the United States. To establish the study, Young decided who was and was not 100 years old. He then screened cases and played “key roles in subject recruitment, ascertainment of demographic data, and age validation.” His method was to gather cases by scrolling the internet for news stories and waiting for emails—unsolicited emails—about old people. Despite having no way of establishing the level of bias introduced, the study authors concluded that “ascertainment bias is likely minimal.” All of which boded poorly for the role of hidden biases in the GRG, where Young’s “preferences” might creep into the data he was assembling.
Failures like Dunlap’s were not isolated. They were part of a broader pattern that became impossible to ignore. Irma Borgoglio was one. She lived to 103 in the speck-sized and pleasant Italian village of Bellavista di Trivero with her unemployed son, 63-year-old Pierangelo Bussolera. The pair had been quiet enough, though Borgoglio was a bit of a shut-in, almost certainly as a result of her being over 100 and living at the top of several flights of stairs. The neighbors often saw her waving from her balcony at the top of the apartments. Some visitors had popped by, but Irma was in bed. After this happened a few times, and because everyone loved Irma, the local police decided to check on her.
When they arrived, Irma Borgoglio was upright in her kitchen. Pierangelo claimed she was unwell, but the 103-year-old was as solid as ever. Indeed, she was even more solid than ever. She was frozen. Pierangelo had extracted his mother from the freezer and managed to get her “propped up in the kitchen” but had stumbled when he apparently tried to explain that she had just died minutes earlier.
It hardly took Inspector Holmes to deduce why she was frozen next to an empty freezer. Pierangelo had been unemployed and under financial pressure, and when his mother died, he seemingly panicked. Some arguing about money had been overheard by the neighbors, but it had “suddenly stopped in March.” Pierangelo, now over 60, had told people, “She’s not well, she needs to stay in bed for now,” which was sort of true, and then bought a chest freezer and dragged it to the top-floor apartment by himself. Later, visitors had noticed how strange it seemed to have a massive freezer for just two people, with so much stuff piled on the lid. Pierangelo collected his mother’s pension the whole time.
Cases like this are easy to dismiss as desperate, local, and faintly absurd outliers. But the same willingness to accept implausible stories scales remarkably well.
In 1979, the oldest person in the Guinness World Records was the validated 137-year-old Charlie Smith, who had been “verified by Social Security officials who said they had turned up documents that showed Mr. Smith had been sold into slavery in New Orleans in 1859.” Opportunity had leaped on Charlie when he was picking fruit, and his employer told him he had to get some kind of ID. The Social Security Administration found him an ID on file, promptly informed him he was 113 years old, and then lost the file. The old gasbag just went along with it and, hilariously, the entire nation bought the jibber-jabber.
People believed Charlie no matter how big the tale. He said he was the last surviving American slave, last Union soldier of the American Civil War, and the first African American to be made a Freemason. (This was actually Prince Hall and 14 other anonymous African Americans in 1774, followed by literally thousands of other people, well before Charlie was said to have entered the United States in 1854.) He came from “Galina, Africa”: a port in Liberia that doesn’t exist, where he was apparently lured onto a slave ship by a “syrup tree” and an enslaver named Legree. He said he shot an innocent preacher in a packed church and the judge just let him go. Charlie also had many ever-changing jobs, always more glamorous than fruit-picking, like lawman, bounty hunter, train robber, and honkytonk owner. He said he was a Texas cowboy who shot “bears and panthers… and lions,” an unusual addition to the local wildlife, and claimed he had ridden with Billy the Kid to successfully arrest the man who shot President Garfield. (He did not.)
Charlie had other troubles with anachronisms too, like in 1975 when he said he was 144 but was supposed to be 132. Nobody seemed to care. Instead of criticism, Charlie was invited to the launch of Apollo 17 as a VIP, where he loudly informed Neil Armstrong, Dick Gordon, and everyone else in the shelter, “Ain’t nobody goin’ t’ no moon, you, me, or anybody else.” He was certain that the moon launch stuff was (ironically) all fake. As the rockets took off, he crossed to a studio audience with CBS and told Walter Cronkite “they ain’t goin’ there . . . ain’t nobody runnin’ on the moon” before confidently saying he arrested President Garfield’s assassin.
After seeing Charlie’s charisma, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! put him on national television and the BBC shot a documentary, with an amazingly posh British presenter throwing upper-class shade at all his tall tales. Charlie’s life was then dramatized in a PBS film that uncritically supported his claim that he rode with Jesse James, worked as a circus sideshow attraction, and chased Billy the Kid. Like Billy and Jesse James, they never took him alive, and Charlie Smith was memorialized in The New York Times as “perhaps” age 137. The entire nation loved it. It was all pure bullshit. 
This story is reprinted with permission from MIT Press Reader. It is adapted from Saul Justin Newman’s book Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science.
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