Very nice, honest people – some of my friends, even – believe that the full moon causes strangeness in the minds of human beings and peculiar happenings in the world as a whole. After all (they say), it isn’t just a coincidence that the words “lunar” and “lunacy” come from the same root (so does “lynx”). With the best will in the world, there doesn’t appear to be anything to this pervasive myth. There is no “full moon madness.”

Every so often, someone comes up with a new study to show evidence of increased lunacy as measured by such disparate statistics as: homicides in Dade County, Florida and in Cleveland, Ohio; fights during professional hockey games; suicides and traffic accidents nationwide. Then someone else does the analysis rather more scrupulously, and the effect seems to vanish. This has happened so frequently that the question, Why do some people act strangely? should, perhaps, be changed to, Why do 50 percent of us believe that some people act strangely when the moon is full?

The answer is probably our tendency to selectively notice and recall unusual incidents. I don’t tell my friends about not meeting anyone I knew when I went to New York, but I must have told a hundred people about the time my wife recognized her old school friend as we walked off a ferry in Belize. “No strange behavior during full moon!” just doesn’t make it as a headline. (Unless it’s one of our favorite daily paper’s “nothing-happened” ledes.)

“But what about the tides?” I’ve been asked, in my astronomy-teacher era. Since the moon causes 70 percent of ocean tides (with the sun accounting for the rest), and we’re 70 percent water, wouldn’t the moon affect us, physically – and perhaps mentally? It would, but just barely, and you’d be stretching the point. Compare, for instance, the tidal effect of a book you’re holding with that of the moon when it’s overhead. If the book weighs one pound and it’s one foot away from you, its tidal effect will be about 12 thousand times that of the moon. (Tidal effects are proportional to the mass of the body causing them divided by the cube of the distance.)

Well OK, skip tides, how about just gravity, wouldn’t that do it? Well, no. Astronomer George Abell once pointed out that a mosquito sitting on your arm exerts more gravitation force than the full moon.

None of which is going to persuade you, I realize, if you’re in the 50 percent group of believers. The Farmers’ Almanac recently ran a skeptical piece on full-moon-madness, which garnered hundreds of comments, virtually all of them letting the writer know how wrong she is. Wrong, wrong, wrong: “Anyone who doesn’t think there is a difference in people’s behavior has obviously never worked in a nursing home.” “More babies are born on the full moon.” “Come spend one full moon night with me in the Emergency Department – you will believe!” “I so disagree, I’ve been in customer service 40+ years, and…” “Without a doubt there is a correlation…” “I have no idea what causes it, and it doesn’t matter. As a nurse for almost 30 years…”

The Full “Buck” Moon occurs this Wednesday evening, July 1, so named because July is when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads. (See what they do with those new antlers in my Usal Beach video here.) Wednesday night, I’ll be listening for werewolves.

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Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.

EDITOR’S POSTSCRIPT:

CORRECTION!

— Hank Sims