© Paul Cooijmans
This article is a generic answer to questions that regularly reach me and can be summed up as: "Why is not Mr X. or Mrs Y. a member of your Giga (or Grail) Society? It is well known he/she has an I.Q. of (whatever astronomical number)".
The truth is there are people, well known in and sometimes outside high-I.Q. circles, who have based their reputation on certain high test scores they claim. They use those scores for publicity, mention them in interviews, have them listed in biographical reference works, put themselves on self-published lists of "high I.Q. scores" with their own score on top as the god-king with the world's highest I.Q., and so on. The scores help them to become and stay famous, sell books, and make money.
But not all that people claim in public, no matter how convincingly, is true. Astronomical scores may be self-assumed; That is, the person says in a very convincing way, "I have this I.Q.", and "proves" it with forged or deliberately misinterpreted evidence. Such scores may be the result of fraud, for instance retesting under a false name, lying about one's score, or norming or renorming the test in question oneself after having taken it. They may have been fraudulently assigned by a friended psychometrician who is riding along on the publicity thus generated, or the the score may have been achieved after having been given correct answers to the test. They may even be scores on a (partly) self-designed test.
All these things have actually occurred and are going on at this very moment. Good-natured as I am, I will not reveal the names to protect the guilty. I wish them well and do not intend to harm their business (Yes, that sentence contains irony). But I have to provide an answer when asked "Why is ... not a member of ...?"