Doug sticks to his guns: aliens don’t exist!
My last post ended with this paragraph:
“Sooner or later the world always gets a war though. This, this is why the aliens haven’t contacted us yet. Well, and the fact that they don’t exist. Details.”
An esteemed reader commented:
“Again, I will point out this isn’t accurate. I agree with you that aliens are NOT visiting earth in flying saucers, but to say “they don’t exist” is to VERY much overstate the case. We don’t know, one way or the other, and we don’t have enough info to even REALLY assess the likelihood that they exist in a scientific way.
BUT, and this is the key … given that earth supports life, and is one planet orbiting a relatively non-special star in a non-special galaxy, what are the odds that in all the trillions and trillions of stars out there, our sun is the ONLY one to have developed a planet with life around it? Strikes me, that would make us amazingly, unbelievably unique in the universe, and that sort o claim MUST have some backing to it.
Sagan said it best IMO. “If we are alone in the universe, what a tremendous waste of space.” Aliens aren’t visiting us in flying saucers, but I really don’t think it’s appropriate to say NO aliens exist. Given what we know today, if we ARE the only life in the universe, then we occupy a special position that needs to be explained. Until someone shows why earth is the only planet among TRILLIONS of stars to develop life, the logical assumption SHOULD be that life occurs anywhere that conditions allow it.”
OK, for starters I’m not saying that it’s impossible for a a language using, tool using, intelligent alien race to exist somewhere else in the Universe, in fact it’s entirely possible that a UFO will land on the White House lawn tomorrow. In the same sense that it’s possible for a chimp at a typewriter to randomly type Hamlet. And with the size of the Universe, and you put a chimp on every planet, it’s practically guaranteed, right? Well, no, it’s not, but I’ll get back to the chimps in a second. What I arguing is that “There’s no such thing as aliens” is the logical equivalent of saying “There’s no such thing as Santa Claus.” And please note that I am not talking about life, I think the Universe is permeated with life, I’m talking about other civilization-creating beings that would get most of our jokes, understand the concept of taxes, and probably blow each other up for equally inane reasons as we do. Yes, our brothers among the stars.
Well, first, let’s look at the evidence. (I have a theory that evidence is a good place to start.) And here we have a problem. The evidence for aliens is exactly the same as the evidence for ghosts, angels, fairies, God, Sherlock Holmes, Superman, etc. IE there may be people out there convinced they have met any and all of the above, and a whole host of imaginary beings that humans have conjured up throughout history, but none of them passes the first bar when looked at scientifically, because there’s nothing to look at. In fact the ubiquity of fictional beings throughout human history and across human culture argues pretty strongly that these fantasies fulfil powerful human needs. And whatever need they fulfil, no matter how much or how many people believe in them, from God to Santa Claus to aliens, there is no empirical evidence that they exist. In fact sociologists and historians have already noted how quickly belief in aliens is morphing into religion, there were UFO cults in the fifties for God’s sake. For all practical purposes, aliens are demonstrably no more real than Santa Claus.
So I think I’m pretty safe in putting aliens in the category of myth, since at the current time, that’s all the only category they fit in. Now what about arguments that with all that space out there, there have to be aliens? I mean, there’s 30 billion trillion (3×10²²) stars in the observable Universe, surely the odds say there have to be aliens? Well, let’s look at some long odds. Going back to our monkeys, what are the odds that a monkey will type Hamlet by typing at random? The probability is one in 3.4 × 10183,946 that the monkey will type Hamlet on his first try. Note that this number dwarfs the number of stars in the Universe, so it doesn’t help to have a monkey on each planet typing away. In fact, if the entire Universe were converted into typing monkeys, the odds of them typing Hamlet in the expected lifetime of the Universe are still less than less than one in 10183,800.
My point here is that there’s no reason to believe that humans are anything other than a really unlikely fluke. Life in fact seems to evolve into virtually infinite variability, it’s only our narcissism and conceit that we think it’s “natural” it evolve into something like us. Let me repeat that, just on Earth there are near infinite possibilities for life to evolve into, and no matter how many stars there are, they don’t approach infinity. Or another example, no two snowflakes are alike (well, maybe a few are,) but snowflakes seem to have an almost infinite number of very organized shapes they can form in. Well, snowflakes are simple compared to the evolution of DNA, there’s every reason the believe that life may exist in near infinite variety … with creatures like us just being one of endless possibilities. In fact I make the argument that the mere existence of us means that arguing there are going to be be others like us is like arguing that the monkeys are going to type Hamlet twice!
In any event, no disrespect is meant to Mr Bateman or anyone else who believes in the possibility of aliens. I also believe in the possibility of aliens, I’m just saying it’s the people who claim aliens are likely to exist are the ones making the unsupported claim. As another person put it, the chance of there being aliens in space is the same as the chance we will find a MacDonald’s® on Mars. Well, there’s basically no chance of that, right? My point here is that aliens are just as much a creation of the (limited) human imagination as Macdonald’s … so expecting to find them out there in the stars is about as likely.
I don’t know what we will find when we start to explore the stars, but I’m willing to bet that whatever it is … it won’t be what we expected in any way, shape, or form.
“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
Sir Arthur Eddington, English astronomer (1882 – 1944)
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It is not being used for profit, it is central to illustrating the post, and it’s use here in no way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. I’m a little unclear on who holds the copyright, but I got it from this fine Slovak web site, here is the picture’s caption translated into English: “UFOs may collide with Santa Klaus only at a single location. The PF channel Sci-Fi TV by agency BETC euroRSCG.” Yes, there really is an infinite monkey theorem. And coming soon, my idea for SETI, since I seem to be lost in space these days.)
Still Standing on a Chair in my Kitchen to Access the Internet
Dammit though, I’m still going to post. It’s annoying this had to happen when I was getting my muse back, but such is life. On the plus side, several of my favourite TV channels also went out (I don’t think the neighbours had anything to do with that) so at least I’m not wasting time watching TV anymore. My apartment is as clean as a whistle as a result. It’s really nice staggering to the kitchen in the morning and not having to scrounge for a clean coffee mug and counter space. I should have done this years ago.
OK, so Wednesday is science day or weird science day. Since I’m not a scientist I don’t have any science stories, and without reliable Internet access I can’t really research and write one. So we’re stuck with weird science, and fortunately I have a few of those. And what could be weirder than UFOs? So here, published for the first time, my one and only UFO encounter.
This was in the late eighties when I lived in a big old flat roofed house in the Berkeley hills. I was doing some remodelling in the house to defray my rent costs, and this one night I had my crew of two sleeping over in the spare bedroom. (They didn’t have a car so this was very convenient for them, plus it meant I could get them working at a good early hour.) Couple of young girls, 18 or 19 I think. In any event, I went to sleep in my room and they in theirs.
Well, during the night I was awakened by a police helicopter flying around the neighbourhood using a searchlight. This happened sometimes in the hills, looking for a burglar no doubt. The noise and the light woke me up, but sometimes when I’m awakened in the night I’m just so damn tired that I simply can’t get up to investigate. So I just lay there awhile while the helicopter circled, then I fell back asleep. The next morning passed without incident and I pretty much forgot what I thought was basically a non-event.
Well, a month or so later something reminded me of it, and I mentioned the night the helicopter circled the house to the girls, the two who had been sleeping up on the hill with me that night. Well, they got real quiet and looked at me funny. Turns out they most definitely remembered that night, but not the way I remembered it.
In their version they were awakened in the middle of the night by a bright light shining in the window. They had no idea what it was, but it definitely wasn’t a police helicopter. They spent the night cowering under the covers, afraid to even venture forth and investigate. Even worse, when morning came, they ventured downstairs and met me. And what did I reportedly say when they talked about the bright light in the window and being terrified. I allegedly said to them “Don’t worry about it, a UFO landed on the roof during the night.” They were so freaked by my nonchalant reply that they dropped the subject, at least until I brought it up some weeks later.
The problem of course is that I remember nothing of a UFO nor do I remember saying any such thing. It’s not really the sort of joke I would make, at least off-the-cuff like that. And the girls knew nothing of me or my interests, so it seems unlikely that they made the story up. I mean, something did happen that night, I do remember laying in bed more or less too tired or paralysed to investigate the lights, but that’s all I remember.
So what happened that night? Beats me, it’s still one of the great mysteries of my life. It has many of the elements of a classic UFO abduction story, so it’s a common human experience, many other people have similar stories. Some combination of suggestibility, cultural conditioning, unreliable memory, and police helicopter flying around the neighbourhood I suppose. Or the girls had a more wicked sense of humour than I gave them credit for? There of course was no empirical evidence, so this is just another UFO anecdote.
On the other hand, maybe a UFO did land on the roof and conduct nefarious experiments on me. My favourite UFO conspiracy theory goes like this … The USA government was contacted by aliens in the forties. (Roswell, etc.) And they made a deal with the US government. In exchange for permission to conduct a few secret experiments on US citizens, they would give the USA advanced technology. The US government eagerly accepted the deal. Hell, the government of the time was conducting germ warfare experiments on US citizens, what would a few more alien experiments matter?
It did matter. The aliens double-crossed the US government. The technology they gave the USA proved to be almost worthless in application, and they proceeded to conduct bizarre nocturnal experiments on millions of unsuspecting Americans, experiments that continue to this day. It’s a beautiful theory becasue it explains everything. UFO abductions, Roswell, why the B-52 is still in service 60 years later … and most of all why the USA government is so adamant in their denial of any knowledge of aliens. I mean, Americans may be sheep, but if we found out that the government had given aliens permission to experiment on us in our sleep … well, things could get ugly.
Sleep tight.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit, it’s a low resolution version of the original, and it is an historically important image. Credit: George Adamski (1891-1965). It is a photo of a UFO taken by Adamski on December 13 1952. He was one of the original alien contactees, and had many stories of meeting with aliens and travelling to nearby planets with them. Some considered him a great man, others considered him deluded or an outright fraud. His stories have not stood the test of time well, and few regard Adamski terribly seriously today.)
My Ten Favourite Cryptids
What the hell is a cryptid? A cryptid is an animal unknown to science, unknown in the sense that their existence has not been proved. The study of cryptids is the science of cryptozoology. As a kid I thought cryptozoology was fascinating … Nessie, Bigfoot, sea monsters, the list is endless. As an older and wider fellow, the subject has lost some of its luster. While I still find cryptozoology fascinating, and there’s no doubt that there are animals out there still to be discovered … I find the average cryptozoologist is a little too undisciplined for my tastes. And the evidence for most cryptids is at best, anecdotal. Not to mention the endless hoaxes, some of them so obvious they couldn’t fool a fourth grader. You’d think. Nonetheless, it’s an still interesting topic from a number of perspectives, not the least of which, is that the skeptics are often even more illogical and emotion driven than the cryptozoologists. What’s that all about?
In any event, just for grins, in no particular order, my ten favourite cryptids. And for even more fun, I’ve rated them on a one to ten scale. One being a cryptid that frankly I don’t think exists, to ten being a cryptid that deserves a lot more investigation because there might actually be a real unknown creature, however prosaic, lurking out there somewhere behind the folklore and the tall tales. The last reason I like cryptozoology though is the most important, it’s lots of fun. Enjoy!
1. Lake Monsters: Champ, Nessie, and Ogopogo would be the big three, but lake monsters have been reported in dozens of lakes around the world. In fact the above image, part of a recent video purportedly taken of Champ, is what inspired this post. Click on the image to see the video. What’s does it look like to you? If you said it looks like a swimming deer or moose, grats, you’re probably as old and wise as I am. While Nessie and such may make fun stories, the idea that some sort of large animal could be living in comparatively small lakes without the odd carcass washing ashore or a good photograph being taken, well, doesn’t float. Doug’s believability rating: Zero
2. Bigfoot: I’ve blogged about Bigfoot before. There’s also Alma and Yeti. In fact like Lake Monsters, it seems that people see wild hairy men in woods all over the planet. Again, the lack of corpses, the lack of photographs taken by wildlife trap cameras, and just plain lack of anything other than anecdotal evidence makes this one hard to swallow. Still, the world is a big place, if such near-humans did exist they might be pretty smart and even bury their own dead, so this one at least is worth investigating. Barely. Doug’s believability rating: Two
3. ABCs: This stands for Alien Big Cat, and no, not that kind of alien. While primarily an English phenomena, ABCs have been sighted all over the world. This is the one that answers the age old question: “Can someone mistake a big house cat for a huge beast?” Apparently the answer at least sometimes is, yes. Moggies gone wild. While some of these in remote areas of the world might actually be yet undiscovered species of wild cat, for the most part, I find this one difficult to believe. Especially the sightings in Britain and such. My believability rating: One
4. Thunder bird: An American cryptid, sometimes enormously large birds have been reported throughout the west. One even purportedly tried to carry away a child in Illinois in 1977! This one is a favourite because there was a small spate of such sightings in my part of Illinois during my halcyon youth, it made a big impression on me. Granted the existence of a large unknown bird in North America defies credulity, and while these sightings can be explained away as hysteria, hoax, or misidentification … it’s not completely impossible that some small relict population of ancient giant birds went extinct in the nineteenth century before it could be observed and identified by naturalists. Believability rating: One
5. Buru: Did Indian settlers wipe out a species of unknown crocodile or giant monitor lizards in a valley in the Himalayas? Possibly, the Buru is another favourite from my childhood. It’s pretty clear they wiped out something in the last few centuries, what it is remains to be discovered. It’s pretty clear that we won’t find any alive, a shame really. The most recent guess, prosaic as it may be, is that the buru was a species of giant lungfish. This one gets a ten, while it may indeed turn out to be a myth, this one is reasonable enough to look into far more carefully. Rating: Ten
6. Lewis and Clark’s Lion Cat: A subset of number three, this historical mystery from Lewis and Clark’s journals has never been identified. In late March, early April of 1805 a large lion like maned cat was seen to be circling their camp at night. It was much larger than a puma, with which the expedition members were very familiar. There have been suggestions that it was an American lion, possibly part of a now extinct relic population? There have also been suggestions they made the whole thing up, since references to the lion sightings do not appear in the final report on their expedition, published in 1814. Believability rating: Zero
7. Tatzelwurm: Does a big worm-like lizard exist in the Alps? Probably not. However, at one point there were a lot of sightings of an unknown lizard-like animal in the Alps and other European mountains. While many of the details are contradictory or ridiculous, it’s not impossible that these sightings were inspired by any number of possible lizards or giant salamanders. The Tatzelwurm is probably a myth, but if a cave full of their skeletons is found, we won’t have to rewrite and textbooks. Believability: Six.
8. Ropen: This one is curious, there are reports of a mysterious flying animal from deep in the New Guinea jungles. An unidentified large species of flying fox, a type of bat? A spiritual animal misidentified as real by credulous western explorers? Some have even claimed it is an extinct pterosaur. This ones claim to fame: Creationists have mounted several expeditions to search for the ropen, hoping to find a living pterosaur to bolster their claims that dinosaurs were only recently wiped out in Noah’s Flood. Pseudoscience meets pseudoreligion, OK then. Doug’s believability rating: Flying Fox: Nine. Living pterosaur: Zero
9. Mokele-mbembe: Another favourite of my youth, or the cryptozoology books of my youth to be more precise. This is a large dinosaur-like animal reported by the pygmies deep in the African jungle. This one is interesting in that there have been literally dozens of expeditions into this incredibly remote and inaccessible part of Africa in search of Mokele-mbembe. None of the recent ones found a damn thing, and even the older expeditions never found more than purported footprints and anecdotal accounts from natives. I’m with the people who think this is a mythical animal that locals reported as real because the silly white people were so damn easy to fool. Doug’s believability rating: One
10. Nandi Bear: Africa’s biggest and baddest cryptid, this one has been reported for a long time and is known by many names. It has a habit of eating the brains of its victims, so this is a cryptid that one might not want to famous for discovering. It is described as a huge black hyena or bear-like creature, it hunts at night. There are currently no bears in Africa, what could this be? Well, a hyena or some form of mad brain-eating hyena is a good bet. This one bears more investigation: Eight
During the course of research for this article, I discovered that there are a number of cases where people suppose that an extinct animal may not be extinct after all. Marsupial tigers, giant ground sloths, woolly mammoths, and a whole host of supposedly extinct beasts have been reported in the odd corners of the globe. So coming someday, my ten favourite possibly non-extinct animals.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit, is central to illustrating the post, and only one frame of the clip has been reproduced. Credit: YouTube. The film clip is actually a classic example of a hoax in my opinion, I’ve seen hundreds. The creature is just far enough away that no real detail can be discerned, and the film ends just before the creature would have reached shore. It’s inconvenient details like this that add up to misidentification at best, hoax at worst.)
Happy Halloween! Here be Monsters…
Ever been afraid of the dark? I have, as a kid I used to try to get under the covers while there was still “light” even after I had turned off the switch. I’m not afraid of the dark anymore, and was recently tickled to learn that as a child I had noticed something that science now confirms…we retain a fraction of a second of useful vision after the light goes out, IE the brain holds the last thing it saw for a brief moment in sudden darkness. Not really enough time to dive under the covers, but enough to get a head start. And as all kids know, the monsters under the bed can’t get you under the covers.
I’m digressing though, this list is about bogeymen. There have been bogymen throughout history, here is the story of four of them. People claimed to have seen these beasts, some caused and still cause alarm. A few select monsters that haunt the boundary between what is real and what isn’t real. Fortunately there’s little to be really afraid of here, I mean, only one of these has actually killed anyone…
The Mad Gasser of Matoon. In 1944 a woman in the USA was awakened by an intruder in her bedroom, he had placed a rag with some sort of chemical in it over his face. She fought him off and called the police. It was big local news the next day, and soon other women reported attacks. The mad gasser of Matoon was born. The fear grew for days as attacks continued, people locked their doors and patrolled the streets. Eventually the police noticed that no evidence of an intruder had been found at any of the attack sites, and that descriptions of the attacker varied widely. A psychologist was called in to investigate, and he concluded that the first woman had a nightmare, and mass hysteria had caused the subsequent reports. It was wartime and there was anxiety because so many husbands were serving overseas, so people were already on edge. Some still claim that the Mad Gasser was a real person though, but I don’t think so.
Orange Eyed Giant Bird. This is one from my own childhood in northern Illinois. A giant bird, I seem to remember nine feet tall with glowing orange eyes was reported by several people. At least one report was of it chasing a car. It made a big impression on me as a kid, though I don’t recall my parents being too concerned. My parents often tried to scare me, but this one they didn’t make up. I still find this story curious, because in the mid seventies there was a better documented flurry of giant bird sightings in Illinois…
Beast of Gévaudan. OK, this one is rather disturbing. Between 1764 and 1767 a large unknown animal attacked a number of people in southern France. While there are a number of details and embellishments that are clearly more folklore than real, the basic story appears to be a true. A large unknown animal attacked a number of people, and unusual for a predator, it attacked people’s heads. It also had a preference for attacking people (usually women and children) instead of farm animals. 60-100 of the attacks were fatal.
Um, yikes. This was a bogeyman that not only was real, it killed. What was the Beast of Gévaudan, no one knows. Some speculate a wolf, but the people of the time were familiar with wolves, and the many witnesses didn’t describe a wolf. They describe a huge wolf-like creature with a broad chest, tufted lion like tail, greyhound like head with protruding fangs, with red fur and a black stripe down it’s back. A hyena is one possibility, most subscribe to the theory that it was a wild dog or wolf/dog hybrid. Even a serial killer has been speculated, but that seems to be a reach.
Jersey Devil. Honestly, this is the one that scares me. I don’t know why. It’s been reported in the Pine Barrens area of New Jersey since colonial times. Most authorities believe it to be colonial folklore combined with active imaginations, the consistency of the descriptions is a little disturbing. Most witnesses report something like the illustration above. There was a classic scare that lasted for a week in 1909, businesses even closed. I particularly like this account by a couple who saw it in their garden:
“It was about eight feet and a half high, with a head like a collie dog and a face like a horse. It had a long neck, wings about two feet long, and its back legs were like those of a crane, and it had horse’s hooves. It walked on its back legs and held up two short front legs with paws on them. It didn’t use the front legs at all while we were watching. My wife and I were scared, I tell you, but I managed to open the window and say, ‘Shoo!’ and it turned around, barked at me, and flew away.”
The everyday banality of it is what gives me the creeps, what would I think if I looked out my window and saw something like that in my yard?
Happy Halloween everyone.
(The above drawing of the Jersey devil is public domain under US copyright law. The power of suggestion, or a warning about genetic research?)
The Other Georgia in the News
Could this be the real deal?
Enough about the recent war in Georgia, today other news including breaking news from the other Georgia, where some bigfoot hunters claim they have located a living group of bigfoot, and even obtained a corpse. The story has been bouncing around the cryptozoology circuit for weeks, and has now gotten into the mainstream news. So at this point, whether it be a hoax or the greatest scientific discovery in decades…it’s already made the history books one way or the other. The smart money says hoax, but there is an outside chance (very outside) that this is the real thing, and biological history will be made. A den of bigfoot living in Georgia, I’m sure there’s some cheap shot jokes in there somewhere, but I’ll leave those to others. Suffice it to say, I will follow up on this story in another post after the truth is revealed.
There’s been another terrorist attack in the USA, the Chair of the Arkansas Democratic Party was shot to death by a man who blamed liberals for the loss of his job. This is following the Church shooting some weeks back, where a Unitarian Church was attacked for its liberal views. While attacks like this aren’t a pattern, yet, it’s still disturbing. For one thing, these are clearly acts of terrorism and would be labelled and trumpeted as such if the perpetrator had been Muslim and he had attacked conservatives for their political views. That alone is food for thought. And while I defend the right of people to express their views, I think a case can be made that some of the anti-liberal hate speech in America goes over the top. For some choice examples click here. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I’m pretty sure telling people to wish their fellow Americans were dead because of their politics is about as un-American as it gets.
Bush has gone ahead and signed a deal to build a missile defence system in Poland, purportedly to defend against missiles from “rogue states” like Iran. That’s like building a missile defence system in Canada to defend the USA from missiles from Mexico. That Bush can say “We’re building military bases in Poland to defend Europe against Iran” with a straight face is remarkable. It means he is either a really good actor, or he’s truly as dumb as some say. This missile “defence” system has nothing to do with Iran and everything to do with threatening and pressuring and surrounding Russia with hostile intent. Yes, like some zombie that can’t die, the American Cold War military industrial complex continues to shamble on. On the plus side, this is mostly about shovelling ever more money into the ever widening maw of the American arms industry, so there’s little chance these weapons will ever be used. They’ve already performed their intended use once the check clears.
In the Beijing Olympics Michael Phelps has won record numbers of Gold Medals. Good for him, go team. I hope they were legit, some incredibly expensive and sophisticated machines are being used to examine his blood in minute detail. It’s a shame that doping has become such an issue, but the megabucks the top tier people can make in endorsements must be an awful temptation, so it’s no wonder that some cheat. Speaking of cheating, there’s fairly credible claims that some of the Chinese gymnastic stars are underage. Sadly in the case of nations, and certainly in China’s case this year, the political benefits of a high medal count can be astronomical, and it would be a wonder if they didn’t cheat. I hope this particular allegation isn’t true, because it would be a terrible thing to do to little girls. They would be heroines for their entire lives, always knowing that they cheated to get their laurels. In some positive Olympic news, India won their first Gold Medal ever. Go India.
Speaking of the Olympics and politics in the same breath though, it’s been pointed out that this may be the most heavily politicized Olympics since the 1936 Berlin Olympics, certainly in terms of the host country going whole hog to make the games a reflection of the glory of their great nation. There were no 1940 Olympics, so I hope 2008 isn’t a harbinger of things to come. And on that note, next week I will get back to practical advice on how best to skewer post-apocalypse mutants with common garden implements and other practical topics. Unless another war breaks out somewhere.
Have a great weekend everyone.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit, and one way or the other it’s already an historically important image. Credit and Copyright: Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. The fact that this discovery is being brought to us by a group devoted to making a profit from such discoveries pretty much says it all…I’m going with the thing in the freezer is latex and buffalo fur.)
Tunguska, June 30 1908: “…the sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest.”
One sad thing about the paranormal wonders of my youth is that under the bright light of adult analysis…many fade away like dew in the sun. The Bermuda Triangle, Ghosts, Nessie, UFOs and a host of others are little more than shadows when it comes to empirical evidence. There are exceptions though. Exactly 100 years ago today, there was a 5-30 megaton explosion in a remote spot in central Siberia.
Did that register? This isn’t a rumour, fuzzy film, or footprint in the mud. This is fact, in 1908 there was an explosion some 1000 times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb in the sky above uninhabited wilderness near the Tunguska River in remote Siberia. It knocked over some 80 million trees and would have registered as a 5.0 earthquake had the Richter Scale existed. Windows hundreds of miles away were broken, and people thrown to the ground. Had this event happened over a major metropolitan area, it would have been completely destroyed with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands.
This was a remote part of the world, and it took awhile for news to filter out. Europeans knew something had happened. The primitive seismographic stations of the time registered the event, and fluctuations in air pressure were noted as far away as England. Most noticeable was the fact that in Europe there was enough dust kicked into the high atmosphere to glow and make reading at night possible for some days; while astronomers noted that the skies were dimmed for some months by this dust. Some Russian newspapers carried reports of distant eyewitnesses to the explosion, but this was a hard to reach part of the world at the time so scientists soon lost interest. Then World War One and the Russian revolution made Russia virtually inaccessible to western science, and the mysterious event was basically forgotten.
It wasn’t until 1927, nearly two decades after the event, that a Russian scientific expedition led by Leonid Kulik reached the site. He made several expeditions over the next decade, mapping the downed trees and collecting eyewitness accounts. Kulik had the area photographed from the air, showing the downed trees formed a huge “butterfly” pattern radiating outwards from the centre, while the trees at the very centre remained standing, though sheared of their branches. While he theorized that the explosion was caused by a meteor event, he was frustrated by not being able to find either a crater nor fragments of the meteor.
Later expeditions discovered microscopic glass beads in the soil and downed/dead trees at the site that are consistent with asteroidal material. While the site is still being studied and there is much left to learn, today’s science thinks it has the basic answer. It’s conjectured that a stony asteroid 50-60m in diameter exploded in the air 4-6 miles above the ground, such explosion caused by the huge amount of heat generated when the extremely fast moving rock entered the Earth’s atmosphere. The Russians have even been able to replicate the butterfly pattern of fallen trees by experimenting with explosives sliding down wires amid matchstick forests, showing the original object struck earth at about a 30% angle.
We know now in fact that explosions in the atmosphere are surprisingly common, with small nuclear sized explosions occurring regularly. Usually in remote areas and high altitudes, so they go unnoticed. Mostly unnoticed, scientists are catching more of them with modern instruments and satellites. There was a 25 kiloton event over the Mediterranean Sea in 2002 fo example. Events the size of Tunguska probably only happen every few centuries on average. These events are all believed to be caused by chunks of rock and comet striking the Earth, and are considered impact events even though all that makes it to the ground is pulverized microscopic dust.
Of course with such a fascinating and not fully understood event, some folks have engaged in enthusiastic speculation. One theory is that it was an exploding alien spaceship…but nuclear powered anythings shouldn’t explode, and we find microscopic asteroid dust, not pulverized alien spaceship dust. A black hole can be ruled out because there was no exit event on the opposite side of the Earth. And so on. Currently all of the exotic possibilities are ruled out by serious inconsistencies between their conjecture and scientific understanding of the physics involved. There’s at least a bit more realistic scientific conjecture that Tunguska was some sort of volcanic or otherwise Earth generated event, but even that seems to mostly involve a lot of creative interpretation of eyewitness accounts. There’s even a rumour that Nikolaus Tesla was testing a “death ray” and that this device misfiring is what caused the Tunguska event. Right. It doesn’t seem particularly supported by contemporary evidence, the story doesn’t appear until long after the fact, and scientists (and me) are not impressed with Tesla’s death ray theories.
In any event, there is one clear thing that we can learn from the study of eyewitness accounts to the Tunguska event. If one should happen to see a bright light or column of light (as bright as the sun) slowly heading toward the ground…Take Cover! This advice provided as a public service by Doug’s Darkworld.
(The image above is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It is not being used for profit and is a heavily modified grey scale version of the original image. Credit and copyright: William K Hartman. It’s a hypothetical view of the Tunguska event from 400k (250 miles) away about 2 seconds before the explosion. The title quote is from the testimony of Testimony of S. Semenov, collected by the Kulik expeditions. For You-Tube footage that includes much original Kulik footage, and a lot of other nonsense, click here. For the University of Bologna’s Tunguska page, click here. They are at the centre of modern Tunguska research.)
Chariots of the Gods?
Well, my series on crackpot thinking has reached four posts now. And we conclude with another favourite of my youthful years. Chariots of the Gods. This was a book published in 1968 by one Erich von Däniken. It made a fairly big splash at the time, and I still remember watching the TV specials it inspired. The basic premise of the book was that alien visitors in ancient times had visited Earth, both giving us advanced technology and explaining various historical myths and legends. Ezekiel’s revelation in the bible for example is claimed to be a description of a landing spacecraft. Our ancestors of course thought these alien visitors were Gods, hence the title of the book.
The book listed many other things besides as Ezekiel to support Von Däniken’s theory. The pyramids. Easter Island. Inca gold figures said to represent aircraft. The Nazca lines, said to be an ancient astronaut “airfield.” A Mayan astronaut in a rocket, pictured above. Yes, in fact it can safely be said that Von Däniken created a whole new genre with this groundbreaking book, since a whole cornucopia of similar nonsense has followed. Or as Tim Callahan so aptly put it, a new genre has been created:
“It is a genre in which idiosyncratic interpretation of myth, bad history, and questionable science have been melded to create a new paradigm, one that has the potential to challenge reason and science to the same degree as Bible-based creationism.”
Yerp. Idiosyncratic interpretation of myth, bad history, and questionable science. That pretty much covers what I call crackpot thinking. Von Däniken went on to write all sorts of sequels to Chariots of the Gods but alas I was sixteen and thus older and wiser by the time I came across them. They were pretty ambitious in their scope, but I found them pretty hard to swallow.
I suppose I could talk about the various proofs that Von Däniken offers, and I may blog upon them sometime. The Nazca Lines, the Pyramids, etc. However, I don’t have space for that and it’s not really germane to the topic on hand. Suffice it to say that Von Däniken scoured Earth’s history for anything that supported his contention, and all sorts of stuff that experts hardly find puzzling at all was shoehorned into the theory. I suspect that this is one of the big attractions of theories like this, people who believe in them can take great pride that the experts are wrong and that Von Däniken and his believers are keepers of the true faith so to speak.
Which leads to the speculation that this sort of theory has at least some psychological/sociological components in common with religions and cults. Including furious defence of the “faith.” In fact if one ever wants to see how fervent these sorts of people can be, just join a chat room or discussion group they run…and politely suggest there might be some prosaic explanation to some aspect of their theory. The reaction would be about the same if one went to an Evangelical seminary and suggested that Jesus might have been a normal human being just like the rest of us. It likely won’t be very polite and likely your invitation will be revoked. And they definitely will not want to discuss your prosaic explanation.
All that aside, the main point I want to make about Von Däniken’s theory is that in essence it’s the theory of Atlantis repackaged for modern sensibilities. And that in essence it’s a truly racist, xenophobic, imperialistic, and Eurocentric theory. Yes, people who believe in Von Däniken are basically believing that white people are the keepers of civilization and the only “true” human beings, without having to explicitly acknowledge that, even to themselves. I know, it sounds like a stretch. Bear with me. Over the past millennium Europe conquered the world, driven by a belief in the inherent superiority of Christian European (read: white) culture and civilization. The Greeks and Romans had invented civilization, the Christians had perfected it, and it was European’s mission to spread the benefits of same to the primitive brown people the world over. Of course stealing their resources when not actually enslaving them was a big part of the picture, but, you see, it was for their own good!
Well, by the nineteenth century or so archaeological evidence had pretty much dethroned the idea that the Greeks and Romans invented civilization, they were in fact Johnny-come-latelys. The world over, red, brown, and yellow people had thriving cities and civilizations while the Romans and Greeks were living in hide covered huts. This was unacceptable, and it was much easier to believe that these people had all gotten the original knowledge needed to create civilization from the original white civilization: Atlantis. And of course by the mid twentieth century, the Atlantis theory was pretty much dead, so a new theory substituting aliens for Atlanteans was born and thrived.
Yes, insecure white people can rest assured that all those brown people aren’t truly their equals, since they had civilization given to them by ancient astronauts. Granted I am simplifying a very complex situation here, but the point I am trying to get to is that I think people chose a belief system that best supports/masks their flaws and insecurities. If one asks themselves why people might believe in alternate theories like Von Däniken’s, Velikovski, and the rest…there is a lot going on.
Which is why I have tried to be at least somewhat diplomatic in discussing various crackpot theories the past few posts. For good or for ill, these sorts of theories and the people who believe in them are far more mainstream in their thinking than might be supposed superficially. And studying these theories and the people who believe in them can indeed lead to insight and discussion about the very nature of what it means to be human. Not to mention insight into the psychology driving certain foreign military adventures going on even now, I’ll leave the gentle reader to connect those dots as they may.
(The above image of the Mayan ruler Pacal is clearly public domain under US copyright law, since the artist has been dead for centuries. Credit: Unknown. Von Däniken claims this image shows an astronaut in a rocket. Archaeologists find nothing strange in this image, it’s a standard depiction of a Mayan ruler and various symbols in a manner consistent with other Mayan depictions. Contending this image is proof of ancient astronauts makes about as much sense as saying a depiction of superman is proof that humans can fly.)
1421
Ah, another wondrous map. This is from Gavin Menzies’ 2002 book “1421: The Year China Discovered the World.” I looked forward to reading this book when it came out, even going so far as to reserve a copy at the library, something I’ve done like twice in my life. I have an interest in history, especially alternate history, and a book that purported to show that the Chinese had engaged in world exploration before Columbus had to be something. I mean, the Chinese routinely discovered all sorts of things a thousand years before the west, so the idea that Chinese explorers might have discovered America before Columbus wasn’t too far fetched.
So I get the book, open it up, and see the map above printed in the inside cover. This map purports to show the voyages of several Chinese exploration fleets around 1421. Oh my, those Chinese admirals really got around. I couldn’t help but notice the voyage highlighted in red. Yes, according to Gavin Menzies, a 15th century Chinese fleet sailed along the north coast of Greenland and Russia. I was a little dismayed, to say the least. This is pretty much the same as claiming the Chinese landed a man on the Moon in 1421. Greenland wasn’t circumnavigated until the early 20th century for God’s sake. The vast majority of modern ships couldn’t safely navigate that route, let alone medieval wooden hulled Chinese junks.
Sigh. I read the book anyhow. Well, skimmed the book. Lots of pictures, lots of footnotes. Lots of evidence supporting Mr Menzies’ theory. Or what he claimed was evidence. Most of it sounded pretty suspicious. Like his claim that Chinese stone anchors had been found off the coast of California. True enough, they have. What he fails to mention is that every one ever found was made out of native California rock, and were thus made and used by well documented nineteenth century Chinese/American fishermen, not 15th century explorers from China. In fact there are web sites devoted to chronicling the endless sloppy scholarship and just plain errors in Mr Menzies’ book: 1421exposed.
All in all it is clear that Mr Menzies came up with his hypothesis, and then diligently searched for evidence that supports it. And his standards for “evidence” were laughably low. Is Mr Menzies serious, or is he laughing all the way to the bank? I don’t know, the human capacity for self-deception seems almost as unlimited as the human capacity for greed, so it could go either way. And either way, the damage has been done. This is the sort of thing that legitimizes the most outlandish claims, and muddies the waters of historical research to no end. And obscures the many very real and well documented accomplishments of the Chinese people. Zheng He was already one of the great navigators in history, now he’s going to be most remembered for voyages he didn’t take?
On the one hand I suppose getting upset about stuff like this is pointless, but as in my railing against the history channel, this sort of thing really lowers the general level of public education and understanding. And frankly, the general level of public understanding about science and history is abysmal. So of course it’s no wonder that politicians and pundits are able to make the most absurd claims about history and the world…and huge numbers of people take them at face value. It annoys me that in this day of almost limitless potential to expand human knowledge and understanding, instead it seems like we are entering an age of almost limitless expansion of ignorance and false beliefs. Sigh.
This situation is so out of control that fake maps purporting to support Mr Menzies’ theory have shown up in the antiquities trade. So we’ve got a fake map based on false history. Two layers of deception, impressive in a demented sort of way. And we can add another layer of nonsense. People have even tried to use the above map as proof that the world was much warmer in the early 1400s in order to refute claims made about global warming. I mean, I have no problems with people trying to refute global warming, but citing a book that is considered nonsense by all serious scholars and archaeologists is not a tactic I would use in a scientific debate.
Still, I suppose it could be worse. Someone could write a book claiming the ancient Chinese explored the Moon as well. No one has done that yet (I expect royalties if anyone runs with this idea) but they have come close. Yes, in 1968 one Erich von Däniken wrote a book titled Chariots of the Gods wherein claims are made that Earth was repeatedly visited by aliens. While a theory like this shouldn’t pass the laugh test, it instead is an amazingly popular book and has inspired all sorts of nonsense. On the plus side it inspired things like the movie and TV show Stargate. And tomorrow’s post.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It is not being used for profit, is a low resolution modified copy of the original, and is central to illustrating the post. And worst of all, it’s use here does not interfere with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image, though I suppose I wish it did. Credit and copyright: Gavin Menzies. Sigh. Again.)
In the Wake of the Sea Serpents
Ah, another wonder of my youth, “In the Wake of the Sea Serpents.” This was a book first published in English in 1968 by Bernard Heuvelmans, one of the first modern cryptozoologists. He is in fact called the “founder of cryptozoology.” Cryptowhatnow? Cryptozoology is the scientific study of unknown or undiscovered animals. To Heuvelmans’ credit, he tried to make the study of things such as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, etc into more than just collections of anecdotes and stories. Sadly the field is still rife with hoaxes and the remorselessly credulous, but it still never hurts to study something.
My parents must have bought “In the Wake of the Sea Serpents” when it first came out, because I remember it fondly from my youth. I mean, this was a book about sea serpents, and it was dreadfully serious and filled with the details of various historical sightings, like the 1848 HMS Daedalus encounter illustrated above. It had footnotes, illustrations, an index…proof positive to a ten year old boy that the world was indeed full of wonders.
And what most impressed my young scientific mind was that Mr Heuvelmans had not only collected hundreds of sea serpent sightings, he had catalogued them by type and plotted them on a map of the world, all helpfully printed on the inside cover of this remarkable book. And lo and behold, the types of sea serpent sightings showed definite clusters. Giant eels would be seen in one ocean, giant turtles in another, and so on. This was the clincher, this showed beyond any doubt that sea serpents were real, otherwise why would ships from all over the world see the same types of monsters while sailing in certain parts of the world?
The innocence of youth, what can I say. Now that I’m older and marginally wiser, I’ve discovered the awful truth about Heuvelmans’ wondrous map. It turns out that when people went back and looked at the individual cases, Heuvelmans consciously or unconsciously had taken wide latitude with how he had classified sightings, in many cases clearly shoehorning them into classifications where they did not belong. Heuvelmans’ sea serpent map was at best an exercise in self deception, at worst an outright fraud.
Still, the map does serve its purpose, because this map is a classic example of what I was referring to as crackpot thinking. It seems clear that our esteemed Mr Heuvelmans had convinced himself that sea serpents were real, and carefully collected and interpreted the data needed to support his contention. So even though the topic of sea serpents is not an example of a crackpot theory, new large sea animals are still being discovered and more almost certainly remain to be discovered, the map is an example of crackpot logic.
There’s several things going on here. It should be noted that “counting the hits and ignoring the misses” has been a recognized logical fallacy for a long time, referred to as confirmation bias. And it’s a good bet that most people engage in it to some extent, scientists are certainly not immune. And I suspect there’s a bit of something akin to pareidolia going on here, Mr Heuvelmans really really wanted to see some sort of pattern in the data he had painstakingly collected. Alas his wonderful map was no more scientifically significant than the Face on Mars, and not nearly as much fun.
In any event these two columns started out as a “ten crackpot theories” column but has expanded into quite a bit more. And since I’m on a roll, tomorrow I will look at Gavin Menzie’s book: “1421, The Year China Discovered the World.” It too is a wonderful example of crackpot science, in fact it also has an amazing map on its inside cover that is enthralling ten year olds the world over as I type.
I am also open to suggestion about what odd conspiracy and crackpot theories to write about in the future, I find them fascinating from so many perspectives, and much can certainly be learnt from them. Plus, they are fun! I believe all men still have that ten year old kid in them somewhere. That’s my theory at least.
(The above image of the sea serpent seen by the crew of the HMS Daedalus is public domain under US copyright law because the copyright long ago expired. The Daedalus was a minor British warship notable in history only for the sea serpent sighting of 1848, which inspired much discussion in the Times of London and was the beginning of modern cryptozoology. What they saw has never been identified, an overturned canoe or a dead/dying giant squid are the two best prosaic explanations.)
The Dyatlov Pass Accident
Creepiness warning. This is about the Dyatlov Pass Accident, the mysterious deaths of nine young skiers in Russia in 1959. I’d never heard of this until recently, but it was big news in Russia at the time. Then it was covered up, possibly by the KGB, and more or less forgotten about until the collapse of the Soviet Union. That brought out new records and new witnesses, but by no means solved the case. What happened to the nine skiers that long past dark February on the slopes of Kholat-Syakhl mountain?
The basics of the story are simple. Nine experienced cross country skiers went out on a two week cross country ski trek. Actually eight men and two women set out, one of the men got sick and left the trek very early. They set out January 27th 1959. After a few days travel they got delayed or sidetracked by bad weather crossing Dyatlov pass, and set up camp on the slopes of Kholat-Syakhl mountain. This much was reconstructed at the scene and by reading their diaries and developing film found in their cameras (shades of Blair Witch!)
And that was that. They were supposed to return no later than February 12th. When they didn’t return on time, it took awhile to get a search underway. (Being a few days late was normal for a trek like that.) However, as the time went by and there was no sign of them, the search got more and more serious. On February 26th, nearly a month after their departure, their abandoned camp was found. What had happened? They had cut or torn their way out of the tents, and run downhill toward a wooded area some 1.5 kilometres away. They were wearing few if any clothes, and all of them apparently died of hypothermia. What in the name of God would make experienced winter campers flee their tents almost naked and die in the 25-30 C below zero weather?
It gets weirder. While six of them died of hypothermia, three of them had crushing injuries consistent with being struck by a car. One of them was missing her tongue. None of their belongings were gone, and there was no evidence that anyone else had been at the scene. Those are the basic facts. It’s also alleged that Russian military helicopter crews refused to transport the bodies, and that a civilian helicopter was eventually hired by the families for that purpose. Some of the bodies may have been radioactive, and some family members reported the victim’s skin was orange or burned and that all of their hair had turned grey. A group camping to the south of them reported seeing strange orange spheres in the sky over the doomed group the night they died.
And as previously mentioned, the government clamped down on all discussion of the accident. The formal inquest concluded that they had fled their tents because of some “unknown compelling force” and died of hypothermia. All of them fled their tents, the three injured ones were injured after they had fled. The injuries were so severe it was concluded they could not have been inflicted by human beings.
What the hell? I mean, this isn’t some Twilight Zone episode…this really happened. There are a lot of theories, none very convincing. Some have suggested that other humans were involved: local tribesmen, security troops for a secret installation, escaped convicts from a gulag. The local tribesmen are basically pretty mellow, there was no evidence of other people, and all of their possessions were intact. Some sort of secret weapon testing? Normally stuff like that is tested in secure military areas, not out in public. And there’s no evidence of any sort of weapons testing.
An avalanche made them panic and run out in the night? Some sort of weird ultrasound effect drove them into a frenzy? A botched alien abduction? What do you think? I have an idea, but here are more details if the reader wants to come to their own conclusion before reading my brilliant analysis. For a quick overview of the case check out this SF Chronicle article. For a more detailed overview and some pictures, read this article from the MoscowTimes.com. And as always, there’s a wikipedia article.
I think this can be explained as a case of hypothermia and paradoxical undressing. Basically when people start to die from hypothermia, their brains don’t work right, and they do weird things like get undressed even though it is deadly cold. They had the poor judgement to camp on the windswept side of a mountain in ferocious weather. This was 1959 remember, they may have been well equipped for the time, but basically camping in the open during sub zero weather meant that the wind and cold sucked the heat right out of their bones. And while these were experienced trekkers, they were also college students and may not have had the wisdom of older trekkers. Why did they camp on the mountainside when they could have hiked 1.5 kilometres down into the shelter of the woods? The overconfidence of youth? Possibly the beginning stages of hypothermia were setting in and their judgement was already impaired?
This explains the panicked flight and undressing. Running around in the dark half crazed and running into rocks etc could explain the injuries. A scavenger could explain the missing tongue. Typical Soviet paranoia could explain the secrecy. Details about radioactivity, burned skin, grey hair, and orange spheres aren’t necessarily true. They don’t seem to appear in the original inquest. And remember, the scene wasn’t found until weeks after the deaths, plenty of time for the elements to obscure details and make it look more mysterious than it was. And I can see why the families would want to search for some other explanation, who would want to believe their kids did something really dumb and died naked in the snow as a result? I’m sure more than one group of people has frozen to death in Russia, these things happen.
Still, whatever happened to these lost kids, a sad and curious case. They’d likely be old folks with families and lives today, instead of a few old snapshots posted in the backwaters of the Internet.
(The above images are claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. They are not being used for profit and are central to illustrating the post. They are arguably historically important images. The top is a picture of Yury Yudin, the soul survivor, hugging Lyudmila Dubinina as he leaves the group. Igor Dyatlov, the group’s leader, watches. This picture was recovered from film found at the death site. The second picture is of their grave site. God rest their souls.)
