WATERLOO - Many who have heard Willard Daggett in person praise his talents as a motivational speaker. Many of his inspirational anecdotes, however, do not withstand close scrutiny.

Among Daggett's speeches and papers - the oldest from 1998, the most recent in May 2007 - The Courier found many questionable statements.

Tim Ott, a vice president with Daggett's center, addressed the issue of Daggett's credibility without commenting on specific discrepancies in his presentations.

"Dr. Daggett challenges the status quo, and he does so daily," Ott wrote in an e-mail message to The Courier in 2007. "And because he pushes for powerful changes for kids, the status quo often pushes back."

Representatives of Daggett's center did not respond to multiple requests by the newspaper to talk to Daggett.

Some examples:

In December 2006 in Iowa, Daggett described a growing trend to outsource U.S. tax returns.

"This year there will be more income tax forms completed for Americans in India than in America because, see, that's digitized information. I can send it worldwide instantaneous," he said during the third annual Iowa High School Summit.

Mary-Jo Kranacher rejects the claim. A certified public accountant and fraud examiner, she is editor-in-chief of the CPA Journal, a periodical and Web site designed "by CPAs for CPAs."

"According to the IRS Web site, there were a total of 134.5 million U.S. individual income tax returns filed in 2005," Kranacher said. "The number of U.S. tax returns that were prepared in India, as reported by multiple sources on the Web, was a fraction of that - less than 500,000."

On multiple occasions, Daggett said a Frenchman created the World Wide Web, making e-mail possible. In fact, Timothy Berners-Lee was born in London, and Berners-Lee on his Web site says electronic mail was available a decade before his invention.

On multiple occasions, Daggett claimed two of his children would have faced "drug-induced death" had they been born in China. One has autism; the other suffered permanent brain damage in an accident. While people with disabilities likely face additional burdens in China, government policy does not include euthanasia, and Chinese officials rejected a call to legalize the practice in recent years, according to the BBC.

"I'm a former university professor. I'm a former university president," Daggett once told an audience.

Daggett's resume - available on his Web site - lists the following: assistant professor and director of business administration at Russell Sage College in Troy, N.Y.; assistant professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and assistant professor at State University of New York at Alfred, N.Y.

In that same address, Daggett claimed researchers were using genes from fish to grow tomatoes near the South Pole.

"A Stanford University professor discovered the gene in May, extracted it, and as we speak at this moment in the Antarctic, Stanford University has a laboratory where they are growing tomatoes in 20 degree below zero temperatures outside. And they're growing to full flavor and texture without freezing," Daggett said.

Researchers at DNA Plant Technology in Oakland, Calif., in the early 1990s gave up on the idea of inserting genetic codes derived from fish into tomatoes, according to Cornell University. Scientists found the concept for creating frost-resistant tomatoes did not work. The myth, however, continues to circulate on the Internet.

In a paper available online, Daggett described square watermelons genetically engineered by Japanese scientists to grow in that unusual shape. However, the watermelons turn out square because producers grow the fruit in tempered glass cases, according to CNN and the BBC.

The largest college in the United States is not Western Virtual University, as Daggett once claimed. It does not have 600,000 students, nor is that the school's correct name.

Western Governors University had 7,200 enrolled students in 2007, according to its public relations office. By comparison, the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls has about 12,000 students. Ohio State University, the largest U.S. college in 2006, enrolled 51,818 students.

A photo Daggett used at least as recently 2006 shows a human ear attached to a mouse's back. He claims scientists at Stanford University "genetically altered" the mouse's DNA. The concept - called scaffolding - is genuine, but most of Daggett's facts are incorrect. Robert Langer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Joseph Vacanti at Harvard University developed the technique, which has nothing to do with genetic engineering, according to the BBC and PBS.

Contact Dennis Magee at (319) 291-1451 or dennis.magee@wcfcourier.com.