  The distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) has long been of key
importance for the distance ladder and the distances to all galaxies, and as
such many groups have provided measurements of its distance modulus (\mu) with
many methods and various means of calibrating each method. Before the year
2001, the many measures spanned a wide range (roughly 18.1 < \mu < 18.8) with
the quoted error bars being substantially smaller than the spread, and hence
the consensus conclusion being that many of the measures had their
uncertainties being dominated by unrecognized systematic problems. In 2001, the
Hubble Space Telescope Key Project (HSTKP) on the distance scale made an
extensive analysis of earlier results and adopted the reasonable conclusion
that the distance modulus is 18.50+-0.10 mag, and the community has generally
accepted this widely popularized value. After 2002, 31 independent papers have
reported new distance measures to the LMC, and these cluster tightly around
\mu=18.50 mag. Indeed, these measures cluster too tightly around the HSTKP
value, with 68% of the measures being within 0.5-sigma of 18.50 mag. A
Kolmogorov-Smirnov test proves that this concentration deviates from the
expected Gaussian distribution at a >3-sigma probability level. This
concentration is a symptom of a worrisome problem. Interpretations considered
include correlations between papers, widespread over-estimation of error bars,
and band-wagon effects. This note is to alert workers in the field that this is
a serious problem that should be addressed.
