Doug's Darkworld

For the past several weeks rumours of an amazing biological discovery near the ruins of the Chernobyl reactor have been circulating in Russia and Ukraine. Today at a press conference scientists revealed that the the rumours were true. Russian and Ukrainian scientists studying the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster and its effects on local wildlife have discovered the world’s first known radioactive cat. Despite emitting dangerous levels of gamma radiation and X-Rays, the cat appears large and healthy, and does not seem adversely effected by his bizarre condition. A team of  expert Veterinarians from the international group Collies Without Borders examined him at great length and concluded he was a perfectly normal cat in almost every respect, if possibly a little overweight. This may be a normal situation for a radioactive cat though, as his appetite is described as “without end.”

Scientists studying the cat at the prestigious Жертва первоапрельской шутки Institute in Ukraine are as yet baffled as to the cause of his condition, but are limited in that scientists can only be exposed to him a  few minutes each day due to his lethal emission of radioactivity. Not only does he appear immune to his own radiation, scientists have observed that it actually aids him in hunting, as small birds and mammals that get too close to him are weakened by radiation poisoning, thus becoming easy prey for “Dr Sinclair” as researchers have named this remarkable moggie. The radiation also offers him complete protection against fleas, and at least partial protection against dogs as they too are stunned and weakened if they approach too close. And not only can he see in the dark, he glows in the dark.

Scientists are hoping they can breed Dr. Sinclair and create a whole breed of mutant moggies.  Already cat lovers from around the world have inquired about getting a “Dr Sinclair” of their own. One might think that having a pet whose litter box droppings are classified as middle level radioactive waste would be a deterrent, but it’s a little known fact that under  current international law all cat waste is already classified as middle level radioactive waste. Novelty value aside, when asked of what practical use a race of radioactive mutant cats would be, Ukrainian scientists helpfully pointed out that no one has ever found a practical use for regular cats and that hasn’t hurt their popularity one bit.

The press conference had to be ended early as reporters in the front row were getting nausea and experiencing hair loss, so further news about Dr. Sinclair will be released in future press conferences promised chief researcher Dr. Джеффри Д. Повысился.

(The above image is used with the permission of the copyright holder. Dr. Sinclair is a real cat.  He likes naps in the Sun, salmon truffles, and belly rubs. This entire post is under copyright protection: Credit and copyright © Doug Stych, all rights reserved. Have a great week everyone!)

This is probably one of the least known mysteries in history. Even calling it an historical mystery is a bit of a stretch, since nothing of an historical nature happened. It’s probably more accurate to call it  a fortean historical mystery. And in any event, it’s an interesting little story, so I’m sharing it. The story starts with a letter. A letter dated to the early nineteenth century. In this letter, a man recounted an event that had happened in his childhood, some decades earlier. It was a memorable event, that’s why he wrote it down, and that’s why someone saved the letter no doubt. Well, who knows, old stuff gets saved all the time for no apparent reason. My apartment is proof of that.

When our story teller was a child, he and his family were staying at a shepherd’s shelter high in the Scottish Highlands. And not for the fresh air and ambience, back then if one was in a cabin in the mountains, one had a practical reason for being there. In this case, I assume it involved sheep, but that’s not germane to our story. And one night there was a terrible storm. At the height of the storm, the people in the shelter witnessed large boulders being pushed uphill by the wind on the slope next to the shelter! Numerous people witnessed it, the boulders were still there in the morning, and no one had an explanation for it. It would have been an incredible thing to witness no doubt.

So, 200 yeas later, how would this mystery be solved? Fortunately the long lost letter writer had included enough details in his description that it seemed like the actual location could be found. And in the remote Scottish Highlands, it likely was still more or less undisturbed since the event in question, there not being a whole lot of highways or suburbs built in said location. So an informal expedition was mounted, including such specialists as could be enticed to spend a day or two tramping around in the hills, a geologist being one such. The expedition set out, and with little difficulty located the scene. The site of the shelter was still visible, and the boulders still littered the hillside beside it. Mystery solved!

OK, that was a little joke. The experts investigated, especially the geologist. The boulders were on the same side of the valley as the shelter. On the other side of the valley, cliffs. And more importantly cliffs from which it was obvious that rockfalls must happen from time to time. And thus, now the mystery was solved. At the height of the storm, there had been a rockfall. Boulders had rolled down the far side of the valley, across the valley, and partway up the opposite slope. And since it was storming and night, only the end of the boulder’s journey across the valley had been witnessed. And a sight it must have been, that’s for sure.

Wait, so how come these people didn’t notice the following morning that a rockfall had occurred on the other side of the valley, and such must have been the origin of the boulders they witnessed during the night? Easy, back then people generally (and still are) unaware of how far boulders can roll when they fall off a cliff. It wasn’t till the century that geologists really got a handle on this, a mile or more in some cases. I remember in one of my geologic hazards classes seeing pictures of a popular campground in Lassen that was closed in the 1960s because a visiting geologist pointed out that the big boulders scattered through the campsite had come from an unstable cliff a mile away and barely even visible through the trees from the campsite. And that, well, it would be happening again.

Fun story, if one likes that sort of thing. The only point here (there’s always a point,) is that people in the past observe things through the filter of what they knew about the world. The people who witnessed this event weren’t stupid, and one of them was articulate enough to decades later write down an accurate description of the event. Just at the time “common sense” told them that the boulders couldn’t have come from the other side of the valley, so the only explanation was that the wind was indeed blowing them up a hill. So one has to be a little careful about historical descriptions of event, one can see stuff today that science can’t yet explain, imagine how it must have been for people a few centuries ago.

Fodder for another blog post I suppose.

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit, and is arguably an historically important image. OK, that’s a stretch. Credit and copyright: AP. It’s a house in Lytteton, New Zealand struck by a car size boulder during the recent earthquake. Notice the hole in the lawn where it bounced, and it went through the house like it was made of paper. No one was killed by it at at least. Looking at this though, the fellow who wrote the letter above, was lucky he lived to write the letter.)

Yes, there it is, the Peruvian Stargate. It’s known as “La Puerta de Hayu Marka.” Or “The Gateway To The Gods”, “Aramu Muru”, and “The Doorway of the Amaru Meru.” I know, I said Bolivian Stargate in yesterday’s post. That was to throw off people who might be tempted to cheat and google it. (You know who you are.) I found out about it on the Ancient Aliens program. ”La Puerta de Hayu Marka” was reportedly located in a remote area of Peru, and was only discovered by westerners in 1996. The local natives have all sorts of colourful stories about it, and the Ancient Alien theorists have even more colourful stories about it. There is a small depression in the centre of the doorway (which is about 5 feet high by the way) that reputedly was the place where a “key” was inserted to activate the doorway.

Well, I thought, this is curious. I began a search online to see what else I could find out about “La Puerta de Hayu Marka”, and well, pretty much nothing but the various Ancient Alien sites happily copying and pasting the exact same story a million times. I was a little surprised, I would have guessed that a new and mysterious carved structure in the mountains of Peru would have merited a least some archaeological interest, even if to just point out that it is a known Inca structure of no interest. Even the skeptic sites didn’t mention it, how could this be? Is it so mysterious that they can’t explain it and are even afraid to try? Queue Twilight Zone music.

Alas, after way too much time wading through various sites, I finally stumbled upon the truth. And was profoundly disappointed. In this case, a picture speaks a thousand words, here is another image of “La Puerta de Hayu Marka:”

OK, it’s not the best photograph, but the “stargate” is visible in the shadowed area at the lower right. Note the stunning remoteness of the location. That’s Lake Titicaca at the upper left. Not visible are the locals hanging around the site to sell trinkets to credulous westerners. Buying trinkets is optional, paying the local in the hard hat who will show up to collect “admission” is not. For more money one can even see locals perform some sort of magical rite. Just don’t listen too closely to what they are chanting, because it’s likely something along the lines of “More money from gringo suckers, ha ha ha.”

Sigh. In conclusion, there’s nothing remote about this gateway at all, the conquistadors no doubt saw it. The idea that westerners first saw it in the nineties doesn’t pass the laugh test. And it’s no wonder no archaeologist has paid much attention to it, it was no doubt picked clean and destroyed by looters before there even was a science of archaeology. (Grave robbing is the world’s second oldest profession.) In fact, I would bet the farm that this was a little known Inca ruin until some guy in the nineties noticed its superficial similarity to … drumroll… a certain prop in a certain science fiction show. And the rest is history, if made-up turista trap tripe from the nineties can really be called history.

I’m really pretty disgusted by this one. At least with the things like the Nuremberg UFO woodcut, there is at least some mystery. This is just a previously unremarkable Inca ruin dressed up with story for the modern UFO crowd, no more mysterious than the various “Mystery Spots” along roadsides in the USA. And this was hyped on the History Channel? For shame.

(The top image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and is the best darn picture of the stargate I could find. Credit and copyright: Erin Irkun. The second picture is also claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit. Credit and copyright Darren Alff. The fine travelogue of his journey to the Peruvian Stargate, with many other photos, can be viewed here.)

A famous UFO case from 1561, illustrated above. And the text below it, the best translation I could find:

In the year 1561 on the 14th day of April in the morning between … [difficult special time phrase] … and … [difficult special time phrase], that is in the morning between 4 and 5 on the little clock, a very horrible vision showed at the sun when she rised and was seen at Nuremberg in the town and in front of the gate and at the countryside by alot of male and female persons. First the sun showed and was seen with two bloodcolored, halfround strokes like the diminishing moon right through the sun, and in the sun, above, under and on both sides stood bloodcolored and partly blueish or ironcolored, also blackcolored round orbs. The same on both sides and in circled plates around the sun – there were such bloodcolored and the other orbs in great numbers, standing three in a row, sometimes four in a quadruple, also alot as singles. And between such orbs alot of bloodcolored crosses have been seen, and between such crosses and orbs were bloodcolored strips, thick behind ["streyme hinden dick"] and to the front a bit smoother than … [ ? "hocken rho[?]“]. Mixed in between together with others stood two big tubes, one to the right and the other to the left [hand's side], in those little and big tubes were three, four and more orbs. This alltogether began to fight ["streyten"], the orbs first in the sun moved towards the ones standing at both sides, so the ones, which were outside, moved together with the orbs out of the small and large tubes into the sun.
Also the tubes moved towards each other like the orbs and everything fought and battled ["gestritten und gefochten"] with each other nearly one hour long. And after the battle, which moved for a while into and again out of the sun from one side to the other most violently, exhausted itself by each other, everything (as drawn above) fell from the sun and the sky down to the earth like burning alltogether and vanished ["vergangen"] down on the earth gradually [? "allgemach"] in a big smoke. After such events something like a black spear, the shaft from sunrise [east] and the head towards sundawn [west], has been seen with big thickness and length.

[It follows a lengthy phrasal standard passage from a typical christian viewpoint of that time, about warning signs of Godfather, the sin of the non-believers and the awaited day of judgement etc. Not very related to the event as such, but there is a hint by Hans Glaser, that the "signs" in the sky were significant in quality and numbers in the recent time.]

And that’s that. What to make of this? Well, Ancient Alien theorists have all sorts of ideas about it, all revolving around UFOs battling it out in the skies. Google “Nuremberg UFO” and any number of theories pop up. Some sort of time slip and people witnessing a WW2 aerial battle have also been proposed.

What do I think? Granted I didn’t have time to fly to Germany and comb local archives, but from what I can tell the material is believed to be authentic. IE it really was a broadsheet from the times, and the woodcut made by Hans Glaser does depict the event in question, although it was made some four or five years after the fact. There also exists a second woodcut by an unknown artist apparently depicting the same event:

It doesn’t really add much to the story. And that’s the first problem, there isn’t much of a story. From two images and a broadsheet (newspapers hadn’t been invented in 1561) there isn’t enough information to come to any firm conclusions. Speculation is all well and good, but it’s just speculation.

Which brings me to my first point. Since it’s not much of a story, the first thing that needs to be done if for an archivist who specializes in the era to start going through records and see what else they can find. 1561 was awhile ago, but it wasn’t the Middle Ages, and there are buildings full of contemporary archival material. And there most definitely are Ancient Alien Theorists, Däniken comes to mind, with the money to hire someone to do just this. An event this spectacular should have left other records, and even one more contemporary account might shed light on the matter. That no one has done this is both a shame, and a sign that people like Däniken are only interested in making money off the topic, not actually researching it.

So in conclusion, no real conclusion can be reached. 1561 was not exactly an educated age, in fact it was very much an age of credulity and faith. “Miracles” such as this were not uncommon, this was by no means a one-off event. Only the fact that someone made a woodcut of this particular event is why it is so big in current Ancient Aliens theorizing. There are any number of spectacular and unusual atmospheric/weather/optical phenomena that could have inspired this sighting, confounded by the fact that people had no clue what they were seeing and thus interpreted it as they did. The fact that the second half of the broadsheet is a Christian warning very much leads one to suspect that people’s faith and belief in miracles may have influenced what they saw, and very much influenced how they remembered it. (It should also be noted that modern Ancient Alien theorists are clearly influenced by their beliefs as as to how they interpret this event.)

I keep hoping for an Ancient Alien or UFO story that is more than just anecdotal, but this one wasn’t it. An interesting story, I would love to know what people saw in the sky that day, but I suspect we will never know.

(The above images are still Public Domain under US copyright law, their creators having been dead some four centuries. Hans Glaser doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry, though some of his other woodcuts can be viewed here. Coming next, the Bolivian Stargate. Yes, it’s real.)

Yes, I am deliberately writing a fluff piece because I don’t want to write about the nightmare that is Libya. OK, fluff piece is a bit unfair, let’s just say this is a fun post. In the spirit of “any topic should be taken seriously,” some people are convinced that aliens have visited Earth in the past, and claim there is evidence purporting to support said conjecture. What are we to make of this? In no particular order …

First off, the theory is not absurd. Humans exist, therefor it’s undeniable that tool-using interstellar travelling aliens are a possibility. IE if tomorrow someone found the equivalent of an alien Viking lander sitting in the Gobi desert, it wouldn’t overturn any current scientific theories. At least there’s no extent theory I am aware of that precludes that possibility. OK, so the concept of ancient aliens passes the laugh test. It goes mostly downhill from here though. Sigh. And I loved “Chariots of the Gods” as a kid.

For one thing, there is no known artifact of alien origin extent or in the historical record. There are a few hints here and there in the historical record, none of which rises above anecdotal hearsay level in terms of empirical veracity.  If aliens have visited Earth, they were few and far between, and they were careful not to leave anything behind.

Secondly, there are no mysteries in the historical and archaeological record that require an unknown alien contribution to explain. In the nineteenth century things like the Egyptian pyramids and Easter Island statues were head scratchers, those days are long gone. There is no need for nor is there any evidence of non-human intelligence in any ancient construction, archaeologists are agreed on this. And modern archaeology is an amazing thing.

As a codicil to the first two, it should be noted that it would be relatively easy for aliens to leave more or less unmistakable traces of themselves if they so desired.  Artifacts  made out of alloys only modern technology could produce for example. In the information realm it’s even easier. A map of the far side of the Moon, or a map of the Solar System showing Neptune and Uranus would do the trick in spades. No such item exists to the best of my knowledge.

Now I could take a look at a lot of the purported evidence for alien visitation in more detail, but frankly none of it is really much to get excited about. Some rock drawings of people with what could be construed as space helmets on. (As illustrated above.) Some figurines and such that bear a superficial resemblance to jet aircraft. Nothing that rises above the “well, it sorta looks like” level.

Well, almost nothing. There are three items that bear a little more comment. The first is the Tunguska Event in 1908. This was a nuclear sized explosion in remote Siberian, I’ve blogged about it. At one point it was somewhat mysterious, and it has been half seriously proposed that it might have been an exploding alien spaceship of some kind. As with the pyramids and Easter Island, that was then, this is now. Modern science, while it doesn’t understand everything about the Tunguska event, is now sure it was caused by a large rocky asteroid that overheated and exploded when it plunged into Earth’s atmosphere. Poot.

Secondly, the Dogon people Sirius mystery. The Dogon people are a people that live in Africa, Mali to be exact. It is claimed by some that the Dogon possess astronomical knowledge that wasn’t known until the modern era, to wit that the star Sirius has an invisible (to the naked eye) companion. Sadly, what the Dogon don’t possess is a written language. So even if we believe that some Dogon wise man told a western anthropologist about Sirius’s invisible companion star in the 1930s (and even this is subject to a lot of doubt,) that’s still nearly a century after modern astronomers discovered Sirius’s companion star. That’s a lot of time for the information to have made it to the Dogon people long before the anthropologist got there in the1930s, the Dogon are not some obscure tribe living in the hinterlands, they are a large tribe in well travelled areas that have had contact with westerners for centuries.

Lastly, the author Johnathon Swift in his satire Gulliver’s Travels written in 1726 mentions Mars as having two small moons similar in size and orbit to the Moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos … which weren’t discovered until 1877! Pretty amazing coincidence, eh? This has led some to suggest that Swift had access to information that had to have come from aliens. Alas, the reality is more prosaic. For some time before Swift it had been conjectured that Mars might have two small moons. Small because they couldn’t be seen with the telescopes of the day. It seems more than likely that Swift was just using an astronomical theory of his day when he wrote about the two moons of Mars. Poot again.

So basically, when it comes to ancient astronauts, there’s no there there. It’s a nifty idea, it’s not impossible, but none of the evidence so far lacks alternative prosaic explanations. Personally I think that the people who believe in alien visitation should take a more scientific approach to the problem instead of searching for evidence that supports their belief. Any moron with a theory can find evidence that supports their theory. The scientific method was invented to weed people like this out of serious discussion. It needs to be appled more rigorously.

(The above image is public domain under most copyright law since the artist has been dead some 10,000 years. It’s a rock drawing in Italy, one among hundreds of thousands. Yes, it could represent people wearing space helmets. It could represent idle stylized graffiti. It could represent whatever one wants. What it doesn’t represent is proof of anything.)

An esteemed commenter suggested I write a post about the Frederick Valentich disappearance. It’s an interesting case in its own right, and I realized there are a number of historical aeronautical mysteries I could write about. So enough of current events for the moment, dreadful though they may be. A few posts on aeronautical mysteries, followed by a few posts on nautical mysteries. Heck, maybe even some train or automobile mysteries. And by the time I’m done, we’ll no doubt be at war with a few more countries, and I will have fresh horrors to rant about.

OK, the mysterious disappearance of Frederick Valentich, an unsolved mystery of the air. And beloved of UFO theorists. And, unlike so many things beloved of UFO theorists, and like the Kecksburg case, there’s actually a there there. The story itself is very simple. In 1978 a 20 year old man took off in a small plane to pick up some friends on an island south of Australia. During the flight he called air traffic control and claimed he was having a strange encounter with a mysterious aircraft. There were 17 seconds of unexplained background sounds on his last call. Neither he nor any part of his plane was ever seen again.

The beauty of this case is that the information is so limited that a good logical and comprehensive analysis can be made. And the first point to establish is that there is nothing unexplainable in this case. By that I mean that many planes, small and large, have disappeared without a trace. This is especially true about planes flying over oceans. “He became disoriented somehow and flew his plane into the sea” is not only a perfectly reasonable explanation, its the most likely explanation.

That being said, the most likely explanation being the correct one doesn’t always pan out. There is more to this case. The UFO sightings. Mr Valentich himself reported a harrowing encounter with an unknown flying vehicle with green lights. Air traffic control saw nothing on radar, in fact they couldn’t even pick up Mr Valentich’s plane on radar. Many people reported seeing green UFOs around the time of the disappearance. A few even reported witnessing the plane’s encounter with a mysterious flying thing. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell from my limited investigation of this case, these reports were collected after the plane’s publicized disappearance. There’s no polite way to say it, this means the UFO reports are garbage data. It doesn’t mean they are necessarily wrong, what I am saying is that cases like this will generate all sorts of false positives so-to-speak, after the fact. There is as yet no scientific way to separate the credible reports from the not credible ones, so they have to all be discounted.

Next we come to the seventeen seconds of mysterious sounds. And here, who the hell knows. They are described as a metallic scraping sound. Few have heard them apparently. Maybe the plane was suffering some sort of mechanical failure. Maybe it was some strange audio/electrophonic event. Maybe an alien probe was cutting through the skin of the plane to acquire a big juicy biological sample.

One last thing to discount, is Mr. Valentich’s testimony. I haven’t gone into it in detail, because it doesn’t really matter. He was clearly disoriented. We don’t know what was happening. There is no evidence to examine. Whatever he was experiencing before he vanished, we simply no way to corroborate it. Any analysis of it is guesswork at best.

So where does this leave us? Well, it leaves us with a disappearance that has reasonable explanations,  plus some perplexing facts and testimony that are as yet unexplained. It’s entirely possible that he simply became disoriented somehow, electrical and/or mechanical problems on his plane possibly contributing, and he simply flew his plane into the ocean. After that, it’s all speculation. Maybe he staged his own disappearance. Maybe he committed suicide. It’s a single incident, which means that there might have been some really unlikely explanation.

What the Valentich case is not, is proof of UFOs. It’s interesting anecdotal evidence that there might be something to the idea that some UFO reports are indeed reporting unknown phenomena. I suspect Mr Valentich is a few bones on the seabed. Maybe he started a new life somewhere in Australia and is living happily ever after. I hope he’s not pickled alive forever in a  jar on Gliese 581 g.

(The above image is a public domain image so long as it is credited to NASA. NASA: Good job. It’s a new improved picture of Hanny’s Voorwerp. It’s green, it’s in space, and it’s still a mystery. Clearly, it’s a suspect in the Valentich case.)

“OK, I’m an atheist, and I’m offended by this. It’s a masterful compendium  of logical fallacies, and little more than an ad hominem attack on people who believe in an afterlife. This is why I am distancing myself from mainstream atheism, there are plenty of reasonable avenues to attack fundies of all stripes, but insulting everyone who believes in an afterlife strikes me as being a really counterproductive approach.”

I posted the image and comment above on Facebook last night, and boy, the fellow who originally posted it gave me endless grief. Apparently I am a “weak atheist” because I don’t countenance insulting everyone who believes in an afterlife. And between his various insults and straw man arguments, he never  addressed my main point, which is that the logic in the illustration is badly flawed. It starts off with “The only reason people believe in an afterlife … ” Um, saying that there is only one reason that people believe in an afterlife is a pretty sweeping declaration of fact, unless it’s supported by data, saying it doesn’t make it true. And while I suppose a case can be made that there is a narcissistic component to believing in an afterlife, that doesn’t mean that people who believe such are necessarily narcissists. It’s like saying someone who likes to watch football or hockey is a sadist.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I don’t care what other people believe as long as they don’t scare the horses. People believe all sorts of silly things, best to judge them (if one is going to judge them at all) by how they live their lives, not by their beliefs. In fact, it’s fundamentalists who judge people by what they believe, company I do not care to join. And now I know, there are fundamentalist atheists as well, quel surprise. Company I also do not care to join. I like having friends all or the spectrum, that’s both how I know they are my friends, and it means I get feedback from all perspectives.

The reason I don’t believe in an afterlife is very simple. There’s no evidence for an afterlife and no logical or scientific reason to believe there should be one. And there not only are no good scientific cases of people in the afterlife contacting the living, even the anecdotal cases are singularly unconvincing. If there is an afterlife, it apparently is one where people simply have no way to contact the living. In other words, the evidence for an afterlife is the same as the evidence for God, there isn’t any. Although to be fair, the two are unrelated, even if they are commonly conflated by some people.

I am open minded enough that if anyone knows of any good stories about contact with someone in the afterlife, I’d love to hear them. Heck, if I come across anything interesting, I’ll blog about it.

(The above image is posted all over Facebook, so it’s either public domain or no one cares. And since I don’t have anything to say about it I haven’t already said, a joke: Three buddies die in a car and go to heaven for an orientation. They are all asked, “When you are in your casket and friends and family are mourning over you, what would you like to hear them say about you?” The first guy says, “I would like to hear them say that I was a great doctor of my time, and a great family man.” The second guy says, “I would like to hear that I was a wonderful husband and school teacher which made a huge difference in our children of tomorrow.” The last guy replies, “I would like to hear them say, ‘Look, he’s moving!!!!!’”)

I recently promised that I would revisit the topic of crop circles, in response to comments left on a previous post on the topic. Many comments. Long comments. Too long to read even. Sigh. I did more research. I gave the topic more thought.  At least as much as I have time for. And while I have not exactly changed my mind, I can say I am slightly less skeptical now. And I’ve expanded on my thinking a bit. Crop circles are an exercise in logic at least.

First thought bit. I was wrong, crop circles have illustrated “new” mathematical theorems. Proof they were generated by non-human intelligence? Sadly, no. In fact for a modest fee one can go to a web site where their computers will generate a new theorem named after you. In other words, I guess there’s basically an infinite permutation of theorems. However, there are classic unsolved problems in mathematics. So I restate my original conjecture, if crop circles are created by beings more advanced than humans, it wouldn’t be that hard for them to incorporate knowledge in the circles that would be amazing and new to humans. To the best of my knowledge this hasn’t happened yet.

Secondly, much is made of the physical characteristics of the broken stalks, with claims that various things are “impossible” to explain. Sadly, other than a lot of allegations along this line, repeated ad infinitum, I couldn’t find any reference to actual scientists studying the bent stalks etc to confirm this. If there really were impossible to explain effects in the bent grains, I’m pretty sure real scientists would have perked up their ears and investigated. I’m thinking that these unexplained effects are in the same category as cattle mutilations. IE, they may sound weird and bizarre and unexplained, but if actual experts investigated them, there would be nothing unusual found. Every cattle mutilation case that was examined by an actual forensic pathologist familiar with scavengers and decomposition … turned out to be completely natural. There was no there there.

Lastly, one of the main claims for the reality of crop circles is the claim that humans couldn’t have created them, and have no motive for doing so. This claim makes me get stabby. Humans are very clever. Modern humans have awesome technology to boot. (GPS devices, night vision gear.) And saying, “Well, how did they do it then?” is a cheap shot. I don’t know how they do it. I couldn’t tell anyone the details of how humans accomplish all sorts of things. So what? If someone starts transmogrifying crop circles into solid gold or some such then the crop circle proponents have a point. Right now though we have complicated patterns in bent grain. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb claiming that clever people might be able to accomplish this.

This in fact is one of the reasons I have a really hard time taking seriously the claims of crop circle proponents. I’m perfectly able to admit the possibility that crop circles, at least some of them, might possibly be of non-human genesis. Are crop circle proponents able to admit that just maybe they are of perfectly prosaic human origin? This says to me that crop circle proponents are true believers, not objective researchers.

Then there’s the, well, pathetic attempts to claim that the crop circle phenomena has been around for centuries. No, it hasn’t, it started in the 1970s. Attempts to shoehorn previous events into the crop circle phenomena are, well, classic cherry picking or retrofitting. What are the odds that somewhere in the historical record there would be something vaguely resembling cop circles? 100%. This is why things like the “Mowing Devil” pamphlet illustrated above are silly. This is no more proof of historical crop circles than the various “hits” that Nostradamus proponents get excited about. If crop circles really were  a historical phenomena, there would be a lot more of a record than a 17th century pamphlet.

So where does the less skepticism part come in? Well, if we are really being open minded about the possibility that some sort of alien intelligence might try to communicate with us, then it’s possible they might choose this bizarre to us method. An alien intelligence would be truly alien, and it might have a very hard time understanding us as well. IE aliens might think crop circles are the most perfectly natural means in the universe to communicate with us. Yes, ET scientists at this very moment might by scratching their, well, whatever it is that they scratch,  at our utter inability to interpret and answer their ever more clever and sophisticated messages in our rain fields.

Let’s hope they don’t decide to sterilize the petri dish and start over.

(The above image being made some hundreds of years ago is still considered Public Domain under US copyright law. That might change someday, but for now it’s cool. It’s an old illustration that some claim shows that crop circles have been around for centuries. So have snowmen.)

In 1977 a giant bird attacked and tried to carry away a ten year old boy in central Illinois in front of multiple witnesses. Actually, two giant birds attacked, but only one tried to carry the kid away. The mother witnessed the attack and chased after the bird yelling, the bird released the boy and the two birds flew away. The birds were described as:

“It had a white ring around it’s half foot long neck. The rest of the body was very black. The birds bill was six inches in length and hooked at the end. The claws on the feet were arranged with three front, one in the back. Each wing, less the body, was four feet at the very least. The entire length of the birds body, from beak to tail feather was approximately four and one half feet.”

The family reported the attack to police, and suffered ridicule and abuse for some time afterwards. And that’s the gist of it, read all the details here. The only other details I think are salient is that the dog reportedly didn’t bark at the birds, and this particular dog barked at everything. And the family went to some trouble to prove their case, even going so far as to hire some hunters to track the birds down. The hunters were said to have found and destroyed a giant bird’s nest. Curious, nu?

When all is said, I don’t think the details of the attack are terribly important in this case. At least for the type of analysis I am going to do. For starters I’m going to rule out hoax. The multiple witnesses and the fact that the perpetrators of the hoax didn’t try to profit from it also lends support to the idea that it wasn’t a hoax. It’s entirely possible it was a hoax, I’m not saying it isn’t a hoax, I’m just saying let’s look at other possibilities first. I also not fond of the typical skeptical analysis: “Well, it must be a hoax, what else could it be?” That’s neither a logical nor a productive approach.

So if it wasn’t a hoax, what was it? Well, a giant bird attack seems unlikely. It’s just really hard to imagine how a species of giant bird could remain undetected by legions of birdwatchers in the USA, among other problems. Maybe some local eccentric had giant birds that temporarily escaped, or maybe the birds were just eagles or hawks or some such and the witnesses panicked and “saw” much larger birds. The former seems really unlikely, and the later even less so since some of the witnesses saw the birds before the attack and noted their unusual size even then.

Hallucination? Too many witnesses. Mass hysteria? Well that certainly may explain subsequent sightings, but isn’t a particularly satisfying explanation for this particular incident. Aliens? Demons? Ghosts? Suffice to to say that while we can’t rule out exotic explanations like that, until we have some actual empirical evidence for same, they also fare poorly as an explanation for this event.

So what the hell is left? Is there anything that could explain why Mrs Lowe and her son, pictured above, are adamant about the attack taking place? And continuing to insist so even when they were getting pilloried for it by their friends and schoolmates? Well, yes, I have an idea. My suspicion is that Mrs Lowe (or possibly the son) suffered from some sort of Factitious Disorder. A factitious disorder is where someone feigns something is wrong with them in order to get attention basically. Munchausen syndrome is the old name for these disorders, they are now known to cover a  very broad range of behaviours. And people who have a serious factitious disorder can sometimes be both extremely manipulative and extremely effective in their manipulation.

In other words, the mother or the son imagined the attack and insisted that everyone else believe them. And for whatever reasons, the other “witnesses” decided that going along with the story was the path of least resistance. I can almost hear the husband saying “Of course I believe you dear, I hired two hunters to kill the bird, doesn’t that prove I believe you?”

Is this the explanation? Damned if I know. It’s a possible explanation though, and one that bears further examination. I’ve lately begun to suspect that psychology, and unfortunately disordered psychology, plays  a much bigger role in a lot of paranormal events than people have been willing to recognize. And not so much in that they weren’t willing to recognize them, more that the role psychology plays in people’s perceptions of the world is still very much underappreciated and understudied. The mind is an amazing thing, and the processes it goes through to “create” the world we perceive around us is amazingly complex, still poorly understood … and subject to myriad fail states.

And the Illinois Thunderbird attack may be evidence of one of these failed states. Does anyone have a better idea?

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s central to illustrating the post, it’s not being used for profit, and its use here in no way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. And who that copyright holder is escapes me, this picture is all over the web without attribution that I could find. I am also wondering what was popular in the movies and news and such the summer of this incident, that might shed some light onto this mystery. Alas I am but one overworked and underpaid blogger, and don’t have the time and energy to do more research on this case.)

OK, maybe that’s not quite literally what has been discovered, but close enough. A set of careful experiments has shown that the human brain can be influenced by events that haven’t happened yet! Let me repeat that just so it sinks in, scientists have discovered scientific proof that the human brain is somehow influenced by future events. There were a number of experiments, for our purposes here I will describe just one. Experimental subjects were given a list of words to read, without being told anything more. Then the list was taken away and they were given a surprise quiz: to recall as many of the words as they could. With me so far, people being tested on how many words they can recall from a list of words they just read, simple enough, right? Then for each participant, a computer randomly chose a few of the words on the list, and the test subjects were asked to type each of them  several times.

Now, the question here is, will there be any relation between the words the subjects were asked to study after the recall quiz and the words they actually recalled on the test? And the surprising answer is, yes, yes there was. People were slightly more likely to recall words that they had retyped multiple times in the future. The effect was very small, but it was significant. And very small effects are common in science, if they are repeatable, they are real. And if they are real, they need to be explained. In some as yet unknown fashion it appears that people’s brains are somehow primed to more easily recognize words they will study in the future.

Now this wasn’t some whackjob study done in someone’s basement, this was a study by a respected social psychologist, Dr Daryl Bem, at Cornell University. He conducted a number of similar tests, which were basically just a set of well known tests, but changed the chronology of them. IE if one is asked to type a few words multiple times, then shown a  list of words, and then be asked to recall as many of them as they could, test subjects were more likely to recall words they had previously typed. That’s how studying and memory works, and this is one of the ways these are studied.

Now, before getting too excited, yes, we need to wait and see if other researchers will get the same results. And one can be sure that studies trying to replicate these tests results will no doubt be underway soon. The good Dr. Bem may be above reproach, but trickery by lab assistants is not unknown in the realm of science. Nor is people unconsciously massaging the data to get the result they were looking for. Basically there’s a number of possible ways these results may turn out to be, well, non-existent.

If they do turn to to be repeatable, well, that’s going to trigger a lot of new research, that’s for sure. More on point, while to the layman the idea that our brains can somehow see into the future may seem logically impossible, there is a branch of science where such effects are standard fare. This would be quantum physics, the science of the tiniest particles in existence. In the quantum realm, that of photons and electrons, the “blurring” between both time and distance is already well known. IE there are plenty of experiments that show that particles can be influenced by factors that physically or temporally are “impossible.” This is the so called “spooky action at  a distance.” It may not make sense, but it’s very real.

My point here is that while these new experiments are very intriguing, they aren’t as unexpected as one might think. Basically the idea that there is this thing we call “now” that neatly bifurcates reality into “past and “future” is an ideal, not necessarily a reality. It’s a perfectly useful and handy way to understand and view the universe, in fact it’s what makes things like clocks and train schedules so handy. The actual reality appears to be a little fuzzy around the edges, and “now” may be connected to the past and the future in subtle ways that science is just starting to appreciate.

What are the possible consequences of this discovery? It could turn out to be a meaningless quirk with no actual application, just an example of how quantum events can influence the big picture in subtle ways. On the other extreme, it could lead to machines or devices that could peer seconds or minutes into the future. I will let the gentle reader ponder the implications of that. In any case, this is yet another example that shows that reality conforms to its own rules, and is under no obligation to conform to our idea of what “makes sense.” It’s up to humans to understand reality as it really is,  because on some level it will make sense, but maybe not the one we’re used too.

And thinking about this discovery is making me appreciate the difference between fundamentalist religions and science. Science seeks to understand the world as it really is, the fundamentalists try to make their observations fit their preconceptions. I mean there appear to be large numbers of people who literally believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and they have even gone so far as to build a “museum” to foster this belief. To me it would be as if millions of grown ups literally believed in Santa Claus. It doesn’t make sense to me, but there must be some powerful sociological or psychological reasons why millions of humans never really grow up and literally believe in Santa Claus all their lives. I’m sure psychologists and sociologists are studying this phenomenon carefully.

More on that tomorrow as I get around to my promised post about “what’s on  the other side?”

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and is central to illustrating the post. It’s posted in hundreds of places on line with no attribution, so I have no idea where it originated. It just looked kinda cool and expressed the ideas in the post in a visual way. The source material for this post, and lots of references and links can be found at: Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!)