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This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.

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The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily

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the only ones to the mysteries we will examine.

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In January 1974, the full moon moved unusually close to the Earth.

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In search of has found that a strange wave of violent crimes seemed to affect many large cities.

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Moon madness has long been a persistent myth, which scientists are now investigating with

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computer technology.

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And the full moon drive men mad.

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We've always feared the night and strange creatures that prowl by the light of the moon.

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Shakespeare said it best.

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It is the very error of the moon.

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She comes more near the Earth than is her won't and drives men mad.

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The Latin word for moon is luna, which is the root for our word lunatic, meaning moonstruck.

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And we've tried to contain our fear of the moon's powers in old legends.

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Many of these myths tell of the moon changing men into animals.

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One story in particular seems to haunt the collective unconscious of all humanity.

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The story is so persistent, it must resonate with our basic biological drives.

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Found all over Europe, Asia, and among many American Indian tribes, the tale is best told

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in an old German nursery rhyme.

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My child, take heed, be pure at heart, and say your prayers by night.

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For you may become a cursed wolf when the moon is full and bright.

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Of course there never was a recorded case of a human changing into a wolf.

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But thousands of tormented souls have been locked away in asylums howling at the moon.

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This transformation from man to monster has been a favorite theme of storytellers.

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Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

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In the classic film, John Barrymore was praised for his spare use of makeup and strong acting.

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In the novel, of course, the transformation was affected by a secret potion.

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But Stevenson's story was based on a true report of moon madness.

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In the 19th century, Edinburgh was plagued by a wave of senseless, brutal burglaries.

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Clues led police to suspect a single man was behind the crimes.

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But who could it be?

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The last person to suspect was William Brody, a deacon of the cabinet makers guild, a church

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elder and stalwart community leader.

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Police hesitated to even bother this respected hardworking man.

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They reminded him to be on the lookout at the next full moon.

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The unknown Edinburgh criminals seemed to favor those knights.

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William Brody was a classic case of multiple personality.

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In one body, two souls seemed to compete for dominance.

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The decent hardworking artisan could normally maintain control, except at nights of the full moon.

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Brody later said, it was not me.

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I insist it was not.

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There was another person in the room with me.

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The crime wave continued.

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A reward for the unknown predator was doubled.

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And only the foolish walked alone at night.

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Finally, acting on an anonymous tip, police staked out Brody's shop.

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At his trial, Deacon Brody was to base his defense on lunacy, blaming the full moon.

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The jury was not sympathetic.

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He was promptly hanged.

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Miami psychiatrist Arnold Lieber is author of the book The Lunar Effect.

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His investigations into moon madness have stirred an ongoing scientific controversy.

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As a medical student, when I was doing my rotation on the psychiatric wards at the University of Miami Medical School,

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I noticed a rather interesting situation.

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I walked into the nursing station and said, hey, look what's going on out there.

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The natives are really restless tonight.

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What's happening?

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The nurses in attendance laughed and jokingly told me, well, it's time of full moon.

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They always go crazy when it's like this.

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It was at that point that I decided, hey, we ought to take a look at this.

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Maybe there's something to it and maybe there's not.

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If there isn't anything to it, why don't we design a study that will prove that it's malarkey?

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If there is something to it, then we may be able to make a valuable contribution to preventive psychiatry and criminology.

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So I set out to design such a study.

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The Dade County Medical Examiner's office was Dr. Lieber's prime source of data.

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There, tens of thousands of murders had been meticulously catalogued and cross-referenced.

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What we did was to examine the murders in Dade County, Florida over a 15-year period in relation to the moon phase cycle.

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This study was the first time that adequate computer methodology using data samples over a long period of time

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and from different geographical areas were used in order to obtain our results.

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The strength of the peaks in our data were quite a surprise to us.

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What we found was a highly statistically significant increased frequency of murders,

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both at the full of the moon and the new of the moon in Dade County over a 15-year period.

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Miami was the first of several cities Dr. Lieber investigated.

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In each, he found evidence that violence waxed and waned with the moon.

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These peaks of violence at the full moon and again at new moon correspond to the times of highest tide.

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Could it be that some human beings go insane at high tide?

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Although everyone's affected by cosmic forces or geophysical forces to some extent,

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some people are in fact more susceptible to the triggering effects of these geophysical stresses than other people.

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I'm talking about emotionally unstable people, people in precarious balance with reality anyhow.

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These are people who are tiptoeing on the edge of reality, borderline personalities, manic depressives,

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borderline schizophrenics, emotionally unstable individuals.

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These people seem to be uniquely susceptible to the triggering effects of geophysical or cosmic stresses.

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Anything may be enough to push them off.

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These people ought to know about this because there are certain ways that they can protect themselves from the effects.

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For example, if someone knows that they are uniquely triggered by the phases of the moon or by some sunspot activity,

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they may want to stay out of crowded places, they may want to avoid the bars,

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they may want to lock up their weapons at home.

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With this knowledge, police, fire rescue and hospital emergency room people can prepare themselves for especially heavy loads during these times.

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They can lay on more people, they can expect heavier patient loads,

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and they can be prepared and therefore be in a position to protect life and limb.

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Based on his theory of biological tides, Dr. Lieber suspected that January 1974 should be a period of extreme danger.

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He issued a warning to authorities.

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We're having an interesting coincidence of cosmic cycles coming up in about two weeks.

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There's going to be a full moon, a lunar perigee and an eclipse.

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And this would be one of the times that we would predict an increase in the murder frequency and also in the qualitative nature,

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the bizarre type of sex-related murders that we've been having and the other two times that we've pegged this.

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The first week in January, Austin went on the upswing.

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Several cities reported a strange wave of fires and accidents.

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Emergency rooms were jammed, far beyond the usual Saturday night syndrome.

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By day, a mood of tension seemed to hang over the cities.

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The weather was hot and still.

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Reports began to come in from around the country.

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Orlando, two police patrolmen were slain on duty.

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Police switchboards reported an unusual number of calls.

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Then came the time of full moon.

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For police on patrol, it was a night to remember.

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A 45-year-old man stabbed his 25-year-old son to death after an argument over a car.

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Wichita, Kansas, four members of a family were shot in their home.

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Jackson Memorial Hospital, a medical resident was bound, beaten and strangled.

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In Miami alone, the murder rate jumped to three times normal.

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A 57-year-old drifter was beaten with a board and his throat was slashed.

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No apparent motive.

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The car was unloaded.

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For three weeks, violent outbreaks continued across the nation.

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This was more than enough proof for Dr. Lever.

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He considered his theory valid.

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Certain extreme tides occur once every 2,000 years.

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The next is due in December 1990.

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Is there any defense against the madness that may strike again?

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Twice a day, the ocean rises and falls about four feet,

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pulled by the gravitational force of the moon.

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Many scientists think that life began down in the depths of the sea.

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Ancestors of these creatures were lured to the shore and stranded there at low tide.

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Most died.

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A handful evolved into amphibians, into animals, ultimately into us.

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Is it possible we can feel that time a billion years ago

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when we moved from the water up to the land and the air?

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Our bodies are still 75% water, the same salt water.

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If the vast ocean could be pulled toward the beckoning moon,

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could we also be at the mercy of her gravity?

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This theory of biotides has been received with skepticism by many scientists.

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Chief amongst them, George Abel, professor of astronomy at UCLA.

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The moon is the Earth's nearest astronomical neighbor.

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Its distance is only 30 times its own diameter.

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And it's because the moon is so near

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that it can have an important effect on producing tides.

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The moon pulls on the side of the Earth nearest it,

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more strongly than it pulls on the side away from the moon,

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and that tries to stretch the Earth a bit into a football shape.

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The Earth actually distorts about eight inches.

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But I emphasize that tides are only important

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because they're acting over the entire 8,000-mile diameter of the Earth.

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It depends on the distance over which they act.

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A six-foot man is nothing in comparison.

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The moon can lower a man's weight by at most a hundredth of a gram,

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like a mosquito on his shoulder.

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And the effect of tides on the fluids of a person's body

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are 30 trillion times less than the weight of those same fluids.

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It's absolutely impossible that the biological tides

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could have any effect on human beings.

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Indeed, the tidal force exerted on me by this globe of the Earth

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is thousands of times stronger than the tides exerted on me by the moon.

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If tidal forces are too weak to influence human behavior,

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why then have we always felt the moon could affect us so strongly?

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For thousands of years, ancient peoples tried to solve that mystery.

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Many temples have been found to be computers in stone,

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designed to predict lunar phases and eclipses.

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Is it possible we remember a time when the moon may have triggered

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another step in evolution, the emergence of the first humans?

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In small family groups, they roamed the belt,

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eking out a bare existence.

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It was a night of full moon,

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and they felt an instinct to take to the hunt.

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That moment is recreated here.

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They had moved down from the trees,

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they had given up grubbing for roots,

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and were beginning to hunt other animals, rich in protein.

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With a hungry family waiting, the hunter knew this was no game.

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It was life or death.

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When the moon was full, he could see to track the skittish prey.

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In a way, at a crucial time in our past, we did turn into wolves.

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The women who waited found that they too seemed linked to the moon.

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While the men hunted, they closely watched the night sky to time their own fertility.

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They seemed to become fertile every 29 days, with the full moon.

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Legends grew that women were made pregnant, not by men, but by the moon.

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In modern obstetrics wards, an old belief is shared by many women.

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The belief that more babies are born at full moon.

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Nurse Sherry Shaw.

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It's an old wives tale, and we definitely go along and tell the patients

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that it's not a good thing to do,

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and we definitely go along and tell the patients that it's an old wives tale only.

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But we really see a big influence when the moon is full, patients just seem to come in.

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And it's not only here, it's seen in a lot of wards.

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Every place that I've worked, it's been the way it is.

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But it's been handed down through the years, because my great-grandmother was a midwife.

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And the story has perpetuated through our family, clear back from her.

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I have been hearing for years that all kinds of strange things happened at full moon.

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And one of the things that's supposed to happen, according to legend, is that more babies are born at full moon.

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This seemed a surprising thing to me, so a colleague of mine, a man at the medical center at UCLA hospital, Dr. Bennett Greenspan,

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and I collaborated on the study of some 12,000 live births at the UCLA hospital over a 51 lunar month period.

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Now it would have been very exciting if we'd found some positive effect, but we found absolutely nothing.

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No effect whatsoever, absolutely random during the lunar cycle.

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Well, I must say this was quite a surprise to the nurses, because the nurses were all certain we were going to find a very strong positive correlation.

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I think what happens is that if there's a busy night and the nurses look outside and notice a bright moon,

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and the moon is bright roughly a third of the time, then they say, aha, full moon, that's why we have all this activity.

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But if there's not a bright moon, they forget it.

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It may be a bit like dreams that come true. If a dream does come true, you remember it.

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But the vast majority of times where it doesn't, you tend to forget.

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What then of the flurries of violence and insanity reported at full moon correlated by statistical studies.

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Among scientists, widely varying claims have been made.

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In any data sample, there are always a random fluctuations.

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For example, if you study homicides against the lunar cycle, you're going to get peaks at certain dates, always.

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And sometimes they may just happen to occur near full or new moon.

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But that doesn't mean anything. One has to replicate such a result by many repeated experiments.

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In the case of Lieber's experiments, he found peaks in one case at full and new moon, or near new moon.

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But he found slightly different peaks in a different sample and a larger peak at third quarter than at new moon.

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Other people who have tried to replicate this observations find it impossible to do so.

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Alex Bacourny at Baylor College, Texas, for example, has studied over 7,000 homicides and murders and suicides

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and finds no correlation whatsoever with phase of the moon or with even the distance of the moon.

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We examined aggravated assaults, suicides, failed traffic accidents, and psychiatric emergency room visits over long periods of time in Dade County.

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Each of these data samples likewise showed a distinct and statistically significant lunar periodicity.

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These results have been confirmed and extended by 16 other independent investigators

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since the appearance of our original paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1972.

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You know, I could predict that, say, two weeks from Tuesday, that all kinds of terrible things would happen.

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And I dare say that we could search through newspapers from around the world and easily confirm it.

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Obviously, this subject is highly controversial and, in effect, we're dealing with a scientific hot potato.

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In this century, we began to dream of actually visiting the moon.

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A humorous film from 1902 by Georges Mellier, based on the novel by Jules Verne, shows a spaceship shot from a giant cannon.

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Mellier predicted that such a journey could have dire consequences, and he showed the moon as a demonic face.

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Mellier's vision came true in 1968, when we visited our closest neighbor in space.

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For one brief moment, we learned to fly through the heavens like angels.

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Leaving behind on Earth our violence, our irrational impulses,

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leaving behind stubborn territorial instincts we inherited from the apes.

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It's ironic. Those few times we walked on the surface of the moon, the legendary source of madness, were the times we became most sane.

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The Greeks and Romans worshiped Diana as the goddess of the moon.

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Beautiful, silvery, chaste Diana was the huntress.

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In the legends, however, Diana could change into hekkity, the goddess of witches, of evil, insanity, and terror.

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We've always feared that dark side of the moon. Perhaps we feel that we are really looking into the dark side of ourselves.

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Macho May. All this month on the History Channel.