Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
I remember a few years ago noticing something odd. While eating breakfast on work days, I'd finish, and always give a quick glance up at the digital clock that sits on the counter. Three times in a row, the clock said 6:19.
I know there's a perfectly rational explanation; I'm a total creature of habit, and I did the same series of actions in the same order every single work morning, so the fact that I finished breakfast three days in a row at exactly the same time only points up the fact that I need to relax a little. But once I noticed the (seeming) pattern, I kept checking each morning. And there were other days when I finished at exactly 6:19. After a few weeks of this, it was becoming a bit of an obsession.
So being a rationalist, as well as needing a hobby, I started to keep track. And very quickly a few things became obvious:
I almost always finished breakfast (and checked the clock) between 6:16 and 6:22.
6:19 is the exact middle of that range, so it would be understandable if that time occurred more often.
Even considering #2, 6:19 turned out to be no more likely than other times. The distribution was, within that six minute range, fairly random.
So I had fallen for dart-thrower's bias, the perfectly natural human tendency to notice the unusual, and to give it more weight in our attention and memory. The point is, once you start noticing this stuff, you're more likely to notice it again, and to overestimate the number of times such coincidences occur.
The whole thing comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia called, "Angel Numbers Guide: Why You Keep Seeing Angel Number Sequences." I'm not going to recommend your going to the site, because it's pretty obviously clickbait, but I thought the content was interesting from the standpoint of our determination that the patterns we notice mean something.
The site is an attempt to convince us that when we see certain numbers over and over, it's an angel attempting to give us a message. If you notice the number 1212, for example, this is an angel encouraging us to "release our fears and apprehensions, and get on with pursuing our passions and purpose... [asking you to] stay on a positive path and to use your natural skills, talents, and abilities to their utmost for the benefit of yourself and others."
Which is good advice without all of the woo-woo trappings.
Some numbers apparently appeal not only to our desire for meaningful patterns, but for being special. If you see 999 everywhere, "you are amongst an elite few... 999 is sometimes confrontative, and literally means, 'Get to work on your priorities. Now. No more procrastinating, no more excuses or worries. Get to work now."
The angels, apparently, don't mind getting a little bossy sometimes.
Since a lot of the "angel numbers" involve repeated digits, I had to check to see what 666 means. I was hoping it would say something like, "If you see 666, you are about to be dragged screaming into the maw of hell."
But no. 666 apparently is "a sign from the angels that it's time to wake up to your higher spiritual truth." Which is not only boring, but sounds like it could come from a talk by Deepak Chopra.
So the whole thing turns out to be interesting mostly from the standpoint of our desperation to impose some sense on the chaos of life. Because face it; a lot of what does happen is simply random noise, a conclusion that is a bit of a downer. I suspect that many religions give solace precisely because they ascribe meaning to everything; the Bible, after all, says that even a sparrow doesn't fall from the sky without the hand of God being involved.
Me, I think it's more likely that a lot of stuff (including birds dying) happens for no particularly identifiable or relevant reason. Science can explain at least some of the proximal causes, but as far as ultimate causes? I think we're thrown back on the not very satisfying non-explanation of the universe simply being a chaotic place. I understand the appeal of it all having meaning and purpose, but it seems to me that most of what occurs is no more interesting than my finishing breakfast at 6:19.
In H. P. Lovecraft's wildly creepy story "The Shadow Out of Time," we meet a superintelligent alien race called the Yith who have a unique way of gathering information.
The Yith, who lived in what is now Australia's Great Sandy Desert some 250 million years ago, are capable of temporarily switching personalities with other intelligent beings throughout the cosmos and from any time period. While the consciousness of the kidnapped individual is residing in its temporary Yith body, it enjoys the freedom to learn anything it wants from the extensive library of information the Yith have gleaned -- as long as the individual is willing to contribute his/her own knowledge to the library. The main character, early twentieth century professor Nathaniel Peaslee, is switched, and while he is living with the Yith he meets a number of luminaries whose personalities have also been swiped, including:
Titus Sempronius Blaesus: a Roman official from 80 B.C.E.
Bartolomeo Corsi: a twelfth-century Florentine monk
Crom-Ya: a Cimmerian chief who lived circa 15,000 B.C.E.
Khephnes: a Fourteenth Dynasty (circa 1700 B.C.E.) Egyptian pharaoh
Nevil Kingston-Brown: an Australian physicist who would die in 2518 C.E.
Pierre-Louis Montagny: an elderly Frenchman from the time of Louis XIII (early seventeenth century)
Nug-Soth: a magician from a race of conquerors in16,000 C.E,
S'gg'ha: a member of the star-headed "Great Race" of Antarctica, from a hundred million years ago
Theodotides: a Greco-Bactrian official of 200 B.C.E.
James Woodville: a Suffolk gentleman from the mid-seventeenth century
Yiang-Li: a philosopher from the empire of Tsan-Chan, circa 5000 C.E.
Compared to most of the gory dismemberments other Lovecraftians entities were fond of, the Yith are remarkably genteel in their approach. Of course, it's not without its downside for the kidnapped individual; not only do they lose control over their own bodies for a period up to a couple of years, they experience serious disorientation (bordering on insanity in some cases) upon their return to their own bodies.
Nevertheless, it's a fantastic concept for a story, and I remember when I first read it (at about age sixteen) how taken I was with the idea of being able to meet and talk with individuals from both past and future, not to mention other species. But what struck me most viscerally when I read it was when Peaslee, in the Yith's body, describes what he sees surrounding the library.
It's a tropical rain forest. What now is a barren desert, with barely a scrap of vegetation, was a lush jungle:
The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the Sun -- which looked abnormally large -- and the Moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never fathom. When -- very rarely -- the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition. Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognize, I felt I must be in the Earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn.
The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree ferns, Calamites, Lepidodendron, and Sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic fronds waving mockingly in the shifting vapors... I saw constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark I could tell but little of their towering, moist vegetation.
I think it's the first time I'd really gotten hit square between the eyes with how different the Earth is now than it had been, and that those changes haven't halted. In the time of Lovecraft's Yith, 250 million years ago, where I am now (upstate New York) was underneath a shallow saltwater ocean. Only a hundred thousand years ago, where my house stands was covered with a thick layer of ice, near the southern terminus of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet. (In fact, the long, narrow lakes that give the Finger Lakes Region its name were carved out by that very glacier.)
I was immediately reminded of that moment of realization when I read a paper in Nature called "Temperate Rainforests Near the South Pole During Peak Cretaceous Warmth," by a huge team led by Johann Klages of the Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar und Meeresforschung, of Bremerhaven, Germany. Klages's team made a spectacular find that demonstrates that a hundred million years ago, Antarctica wasn't the windswept polar desert it currently is, but something more like Lovecraft's vision of the site of the prehistoric library of Yith. The authors write:
The mid-Cretaceous period was one of the warmest intervals of the past 140 million years, driven by atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of around 1,000 parts per million by volume. In the near absence of proximal geological records from south of the Antarctic Circle, it is disputed whether polar ice could exist under such environmental conditions. Here we use a sedimentary sequence recovered from the West Antarctic shelf—the southernmost Cretaceous record reported so far—and show that a temperate lowland rainforest environment existed at a palaeolatitude of about 82° S during the Turonian–Santonian age (92 to 83 million years ago). This record contains an intact 3-metre-long network of in situ fossil roots embedded in a mudstone matrix containing diverse pollen and spores. A climate model simulation shows that the reconstructed temperate climate at this high latitude requires a combination of both atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 1,120–1,680 parts per million by volume and a vegetated land surface without major Antarctic glaciation, highlighting the important cooling effect exerted by ice albedo under high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
It's a stunning discovery from a number of perspectives. First, just the wonderment of realizing that the climate could change so drastically. Note that this wasn't, or at least wasn't entirely, because of tectonic movement; the site of the find was still only eight degrees shy of the South Pole even back then. Despite that, the warmth supported a tremendous assemblage of life, including hypsilophodontid dinosaurs, labyrinthodontid amphibians, and a diverse flora including conifers, cycads, and ferns. (And given that at this point Antarctica and Australia were still connected, Lovecraft's vision of the home of the Yith was remarkably accurate.)
So, if it wasn't latitude that caused the warm climate, what was it? The other thing that jumps out at me is the high carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere back then -- 1,000 parts per million. Our current levels are 410 parts per million, and going up a steady 2.5 ppm per year. I know I've rung the changes on this topic often enough, but I'll say again -- this is not a natural warm-up, like the Earth experienced during the mid-Cretaceous. This is due to our out-of-control fossil fuel use, returning to the atmosphere carbon dioxide that has been locked up underground for hundreds of millions of years. When the tipping point will occur, when we can no longer stop the warm up from continuing, is still a matter of debate. Some scientists think we may already have passed it, that a catastrophic increase in temperature is inevitable, leading to a complete melting of the polar ice caps and a consequent rise in sea level of ten meters or more.
What no informed and responsible person doubts any more is that the warm-up is happening, and that we are the cause. People who are still "global warming doubters" (I'm not going to dignify them by calling them skeptics; a skeptic respects facts and evidence) are either woefully uninformed or else in the pockets of the fossil fuel interests.
I don't mean to end on a depressing note. The Klages et al. paper is wonderful, and gives us a vision of an Earth that was a very different place than the one we now inhabit, and highlights that what we have now is different yet from what the Earth will look like a hundred million years in the future. It brings home the evocative lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's wonderful poem "In Memoriam:"
There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O Earth, what changes hast thou seen? There where the long road roars hath been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds, they shape themselves and go.
Coming right on the heels of yesterday's post about a star so large the astrophysicists are at a loss to explain how it even exists, today we have...
... a supermassive black hole moving so fast it seems to be exceeding the escape velocity of the entire galactic cluster.
The paper about the discovery, by Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum et al., appeared last week in Astrophysical Journal Letters, and its findings are hard to summarize without lapsing into superlatives. Data from the James Webb Space Telescope identified a large, rapidly-moving object from its bow shock -- the compression waves surrounding a projectile as it moves through a medium (picture the pile-up of water and resulting waves preceding a boat as it moves across the surface of a lake). But an analysis of this particular bow shock demonstrated something incredible; the object creating it was ten million times the mass of the Sun -- thus, a supermassive black hole -- and it was moving at an estimated three hundred kilometers a second.
For reference, this is over two hundred times faster than the muzzle velocity of a rifle bullet.
A map of the JWST data that led to the discovery [Image credit van Dokkum et al.]
Amongst the many cool things about this discovery is that there is a higher-than-expected number of very young stars in the wake of this thing. Apparently, the compression caused by the black hole is triggering gas cloud collapse and star formation as it passes.
What could give something this massive that much momentum? The quick answer is "no one knows for sure," but a good candidate is a galactic merger. Two colliding galaxies represent a quantity known to astrophysicists as "a shitload of kinetic energy," and the slingshot effect -- where two moving objects pass close enough to each other that there's a transfer of momentum, causing one to slow down and the other to accelerate -- could be responsible. It might be that this was once the black hole at the center of a galaxy, but the collision caused it to swing around an even more massive black hole from the other galaxy, resulting in its being jettisoned -- not just from the combined mass of the merger, but from the entire galactic cluster.
The question that naturally comes up is "what if it was headed toward us?" Well, to start with, it's not; just a glance at the map of the bow shock should tell you that. Second, its light has a red shift of 0.96, putting it at about a billion light years away, so even if it was, it wouldn't be anything you or I would have to fret about in our lifetimes.
On the other hand, what if there was a black hole like this headed our way? Being black (as advertised), would we see it coming before the Earth was messily devoured? The answer is "almost certainly;" not only would there be the effects of the compression waves heating up the gas ahead of it, causing it to emit radiation, there'd be the fact that massive black holes cause gravitational lensing -- they bend and distort the light of objects behind them. If we were looking down the barrel of a black hole headed our way, we'd see this as an optical effect called an Einstein-Chwolson ring:
[Nota bene: black holes that are not moving toward us also cause gravitational lensing and Einstein-Chwolson rings; it'd be the combination of the lensing effect and the heating of the gas in front of the black hole that would tell us it was heading in our direction.]
Given astronomical distances, though, we still wouldn't have to worry about anything in our lifetimes. It might be bad news for our possible descendants a hundred million years from now, but there are way worse problems to concern ourselves with in the interim. And in any case, even if there was a supermassive black hole headed our way that was due to arrive either a hundred million years from now or a week from next Tuesday, there'd be absolutely nothing we could do about it. Altering the trajectory of a something with ten million times the mass of the Sun, traveling at three hundred kilometers per second, gives new meaning to the word "unfeasible." The only option, really, would be to stick your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.
But like I said, the one van Dokkum et al. discovered isn't going to be a problem, even millions of years from now. It's something we can goggle at from a safe distance. A massive bullet flying through space, leaving a spangle of new stars in its wake. Yet another example of how endlessly awe-inspiring the universe is -- and the more we find out about it, the more wonderful it gets.
Way back around 1910, Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung and American astronomer Henry Norris Russell independently found a curious pattern when they did a scatterplot correlation between stars' luminosities and temperatures.
The graph, now called the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram in their honor, looks like this:
Most stars fall on the bright swatch running from the hot, bright stars in the upper left to the cool, dim stars in the lower right; the overall trend for these stars is that the lower the temperature, the lower the luminosity. Stars like this are called main-sequence stars. (If you're curious, the letter designations along the top -- O, B, A, F, G, K, and M -- refer to the spectral class the star belongs to. These classifications were the invention of the brilliant astronomer Antonia Maury, whose work in spectrography revolutionized our understanding of stellar evolution.)
There is also a sizable cluster of stars off to the upper right -- relatively low temperatures but very high luminosities. These are giants and supergiants. In the other corner are white dwarfs, the exposed cores of dead stars, with very high temperatures but low luminosity, which as they gradually cool slip downward to the right and finally go dark.
So there you have it; just about every star in the universe is either a main-sequence star, in the cluster with the giants and supergiants, or in the curved streak of dwarf stars at the bottom of the diagram.
Emphasis on the words "just about."
One star that challenges what we know about how stars evolve is the bizarre Stephenson 2-18, which is in the small, dim constellation Scutum ("the shield"), between Aquila and Sagittarius. At an apparent magnitude of +15, it is only visible through a powerful telescope; it wasn't even discovered until 1990, by American astronomer Charles Bruce Stephenson, after whom it is named.
Its appearance, a dim red point of light, hides how weird this thing actually is.
When Stephenson first analyzed it, he initially thought what he was coming up with couldn't possibly be correct. For one thing, it is insanely bright, estimated at a hundred thousand times the Sun's luminosity. Only its distance (19,000 light years) and some intervening dust clouds make it look dim. Secondly, it's enormous. No, really, you have no idea how big it is. If you put Stephenson 2-18 where the Sun is, its outer edge would be somewhere near the orbit of Saturn. You, right now, would be inside the star. Ten billion Suns would fit inside Stephenson 2-18.
If a photon of light circumnavigated the surface of the Sun, it would take a bit less than fifteen seconds. To circle Stephenson 2-18 would take nine hours.
This puts Stephenson 2-18 almost off the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram -- it's in the extreme upper right corner. In fact, it's larger than what what stellar evolution says should be possible; the current model predicts the largest stars to have radii of no more than 1,500 times that of the Sun, and this behemoth is over 2,000 times larger.
Astronomers admit that this could have a simple explanation -- it's possible that the measurements of Stephenson 2-18 are overestimates. But if not, there's something significant about stellar evolution we're not understanding.
Either way, this is one interesting object.
There's also a question about what Stephenson 2-18 will do next. Astrophysicists suspect it might be about to blow off its outer layers and turn either into a luminous blue variable or a Wolf-Rayet star (the latter are so weird and violent I wrote about them here a while back). So it may not be done astonishing us.
As far as the scientists, they love peculiar puzzles like this. Contrary to the picture many people have, of scientists being stick-in-the-mud conservatives who do nothing but prop up the current dominant paradigm, the vast majority of scientists absolutely live for having their prior notions being challenged, because that's when new avenues for understanding open up.
As the brilliant polymath Isaac Asimov put it, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but '... that's funny.'"
Here's a direct quote, from his propaganda outlet Truth Untruth Social:
Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters. GOD BLESS AMERICA!
And the timing of this announcement, I am certain, has nothing to do with a bunch of moving walls labeled "Epstein Files" closing in around Trump and his cronies. Sure sure. Nothing whatsoever.
Guess Pam Bondi got a hold of the UFO files first
In fact, what's so intensely infuriating about this nonsense is exactly the same thing that's intensely infuriating about how the Epstein files are being handled; there's all this talk, and then nothing happens. I'm reminded of a college friend whose uncle had at the time three small children. The children were apparently very badly behaved and the uncle completely permissive. His strategy was the "I'm going to count to three" method of parenting. So when the kids were acting up, the following happened:
Uncle: "Don't make me count to three... I mean it... I'm gonna count to three... One, two... Seriously, kids, I mean it... One, two... You need to stop it right this instant or I'll count to three... One, two... I'm serious... One, two..." etc. etc. etc.
The entire time, the kids kept doing whatever they'd been doing, ignoring the uncle completely. My friend told me that none of his kids ever had a clue what would happen if their father did get to three, because he never got there, and the youngest didn't know there was a number beyond two until he got to third grade.
Same here, isn't it? "If there isn't a serious investigation into the vicious pedophilia Trump et al. have been accused of, I'm gonna (choose one): read the unredacted Epstein files on the floor of Congress, release them online, make public some damning photographs and/or videos of Trump raping children, provide incontrovertible evidence of what Trump did during visits to Epstein's Island." And then... it never happens.
UFOs have been handled the same way. The next hearing is gonna be the blockbuster revelation where we find out that the government has been hiding alien tech, maybe entire alien spacecraft, or alien bodies! Even the skeptics will be convinced!
Really, it'll happen at the next hearing.
One, two...
I'm gonna make a prediction right here. The "Secretary of War" will release a few files, because Dear Leader told him Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter, and it will turn out to be the same fucking grainy photographs and "I swear it really happened this way" first-hand accounts from Sources That Would Prefer To Remain Anonymous that we've seen over and over.
And over.
So I don't think any of us are fooled, either about Epstein or about the upcoming UFO revelations. At least nobody who wasn't already fooled by *waves hands vaguely around at everything*. I don't know if Trump is going to go into it at tonight's State of the Union address -- lately, any time you put a mic in the man's hand, it's anyone's guess what batshit lunacy is going to come out of his mouth -- but I wouldn't be surprised. Chances are, it'll go something like what happened in Berke Breathed's brilliant Bloom County when a creationist sued to get creationism declared as scientific, and put the director of the "Institute of Scientific Penguinism" on the witness stand:
It's the problem with the message delivery being put in the hands of someone who is, not to put too fine a point on it, a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
But whatever. Since we're condemned to live in "interesting times," I suppose it'll be "interesting." And it'll at least take our minds off the rising tide of fascism, the headlong rush toward worldwide environmental degradation, and the impending economic collapse.
An evolutionary misfire occurs when a trait evolved in one context, where it was an advantage to the organism, but then circumstances change -- and it becomes a significant disadvantage.
One common example is the way moths circle point sources of light, like streetlights and candle flames, and often get incinerated if they fly too close. Why on earth would they do something that foolish?
The whole thing has to do with the way moths navigate. They evolved for millions of years in a context where the only point sources of light at night were (very distant) stars, and they used them for navigation. If there's an extremely distant light source, and you keep it in the same position with respect to you as you move, you'll travel in a straight line. (Remember how in the movie Apollo 13, the astronauts kept a particular star dead center in their window when their navigational system failed?)
The problem is, if the point source is much closer, the whole strategy falls apart. If you keep a light source in the same position in your visual field and it's only a few feet away, you don't travel in a straight line, you travel in a circle around it. So what started out as a perfectly reasonable way for moths to navigate at night has now made them commit suicide around streetlights.
There's another evolutionary phenomenon called heterozygote advantage. This is when heterozygous individuals -- those who have two different alleles at a particular gene locus -- have a distinct advantage over homozygotes. Two commonly-cited examples are sickle-cell anemia, where heterozygotes not only seldom have serious symptoms but are resistant to malaria, and cystic fibrosis, a devastating lung disease for homozygotes, that in heterozygotes results in few respiratory symptoms -- and a lower risk for diarrheal disease, still a major killer of infants in parts of the world with poor medical care.
These two phenomena are often the explanation for what might seem like an evolutionary puzzle; if the fittest survive, why do maladaptive traits persist in populations? This becomes less puzzling if the maladaptive trait used to be beneficial -- or if having a single copy of the gene confers a benefit over being homozygous for either of the alleles.
But put those two together, and you've got serious trouble. Which brings us to the odd situation of the "Celtic curse."
It's been known for years that people of Celtic ancestry, particularly those from western Scotland and northern Ireland, have a much higher risk for a genetic disease called hemochromatosis. People with this disorder absorb iron too quickly, so the iron content of their blood builds up to toxic levels, resulting in eventual liver failure. Fortunately, the treatment is simple; regular blood donation reduces the red blood cell count and thus the iron levels, and significantly lowers the risk of liver damage. But why is such a damaging disease so common? A study this week in Nature Communications mapped out the frequency of the allele, and found three hotspots for the gene -- County Donegal, in the northern part of the Republic of Ireland, the region around Glasgow, and the Outer Hebrides -- where the frequency of the high-risk gene is one in sixty.
That seems really high for a condition that can kill you.
[Image is in the Public Domain]
It turns out that the "Celtic curse" is the result of a combination of a misfire with heterozygote advantage. Having one copy of the high-risk variant of the gene makes you scavenge iron really efficiently from your food, preventing anemia if you have a poor diet. And for centuries, people in these regions did have iron-poor diets, largely consisting of cereal grains with little in the way of meat. So having one copy of this gene did give you a selective advantage, as long as you were living on short commons.
Now that just about everyone in the region has access to much better-quality food, the allele's ability to turbo-charge iron uptake backfires, causing iron loading to the point of illness.
And of course, there's the fact that even if you do have two copies of the gene, the more serious side effects usually don't strike until you're in your forties or fifties -- at which time you've probably already had whatever children you're going to have, and passed the gene on. So honestly, it's not a double-whammy, it's a triple-whammy.
So there's our genetic curiosity of the day. Interestingly, I have ancestry from Paisley (near Glasgow), but apparently I lucked out and don't have the hemochromatosis gene. Good thing, because despite my relative good health, I have serious doctor phobia. If I had a condition that required people to come at me regularly with stethoscopes and needles -- irrational though it certainly is -- I might just take my chances with being on the receiving end of natural selection.
My thought process is like a giant game of free association at the best of times, and there have been occasions when I've tried to figure out how I got (for example) from thinking about a news story from Istanbul, Turkey to pondering nettle plants' dependency on phosphorus in the soil, and reconstructing the chain by which I got from one to the other has proven impossible.
But even considering the labyrinthine recesses of my brain, I think I'm to be excused if a link sent to me by a friend immediately reminded me of a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. My dear friend, the brilliant author K. D. McCrite, messaged me saying "this immediately made me think of you," along with a link to a YouTube video called "Five Strange Disappearances in Vermont's Bennington Triangle." The video, which is well-researched and pretty damn creepy, is about five unsolved disappearances in rural southwestern Vermont between 1945 and 1950, and despite my decades of interest in the paranormal, of which I had never heard. The victims all were seen by multiple witnesses shortly before they vanished, and in fact one of them reputedly evaporated while on a public bus -- at stop A, he was there in his seat, and by stop B he was gone, despite the bus being in continuous motion the entire time and no one noticing his moving, much less leaping out of an open window or something.
The five -- Middle Rivers, Paula Welden, James Tedford, Paul Jephson, and Frieda Langer -- varied in age from eight to seventy-four, and their personal lives had nothing particular in common. They all disappeared in the late fall or early winter in the region of Glastenbury [sic] Mountain, and with the exception of Langer, no trace of them was ever found despite extensive searching. Langer's badly-decomposed body was found seven months later, but there was no apparent cause of death. (The strangest part is that Langer's body was found very close to the last reported sighting of Paula Weldon.)
One of the last known photographs of Paula Welden
Interestingly, even though these five are considered the canonical Bennington Triangle cases, there are at least four other unexplained disappearances in the area -- one in 1942 and three in 1949 -- that some people think are related. Additionally, the Bennington Banner did a piece on the topic back in 2008, starting with the much more recent account of a local man, an experienced hiker, who got lost for almost a day on a straightforward three-mile hike in the area, and upon finding his way back, reported that he had become disoriented and dizzy. He ended up stopping for the night, and when the morning came he was six miles away from where he thought he was -- and on the walk back passed landmarks that included "stuff that [he didn't recognize, but] couldn't have missed."
Immediately I was reminded of Lovecraft's wildly terrifying short story "The Whisperer in Darkness," not only because it's about strange disappearances, but because it is set in the same part of Vermont. The main character, Henry Akeley, writes a panicked letter to a friend that he's been hearing "voices in the air," and has become convinced that there are invisible creatures in the woods stalking and abducting the unwary, and that he's doomed for sure but wanted to let someone know what had happened to him because he's going to go missing very soon, and that the friend should under no circumstances interfere or attempt to help him. Of course, being that this is a Lovecraft story, the friend says, basically, "Okay, be right over, bro," and it doesn't end well for either of them.
The disappearances -- the real ones, not the ones in Lovecraft -- are well enough documented that they merit a Wikipedia page, and more details (although less in the way of rigor) can be found on a page over at All That's Interesting. Apparently the area has a bad reputation, at least amongst aficionados of the paranormal; it's supposedly a hotspot for Bigfoot and UFO sightings, and was feared and avoided by the local Native Americans (that bit seems to be an almost compulsory filigree to these kinds of stories). I also saw more than one reference to alleged cases of "voices being heard on dead-air radio," but I wasn't able to find any independent corroboration of the claim.
But "voices in the air," amirite? I think I'm to be excused for thinking of Lovecraft's dark tale.
The more pragmatic people approaching this story -- I'm one, which is probably unsurprising -- suspect that if the five canonical cases weren't the work of a serial killer, then it's simply a case of people going off into wilderness and doing something stupid that kills them. The southern part of Vermont is largely trackless forest, and even though I'm an experienced back-country hiker and camper, I would make plenty sure to have survival gear, water, and food if I went off by myself into those mountains. I know first-hand how big the wilderness is and how easy it is to get lost or have a mishap. (Didn't stop me from solo camping in the Cascades and Olympics when I was young and reckless; that I survived unscathed is more a testimony to my luck than my brains.)
Still, there's something about both of those explanations that is unsatisfying, largely because of the completely different circumstances of each disappearance. Tedford, as I mentioned, vanished from a public bus. Eight-year-old Paul Jephson was accompanying his mother in a pickup truck as she drove around her family's acreage -- she stopped to do some chores, was gone a short time, and when she came back, the little boy was nowhere to be found. Langer disappeared while hiking with a friend; she'd gotten wet and decided to make the quick half-mile return to camp to change her clothes, but never got there. Her body was found near a reservoir several miles away the following year -- in an area that had been searched extensively after her disappearance.
So all in all: pretty freakin' creepy. Thanks to K. D. for cluing me in to a story that, all paranormal trappings aside, you have to admit is a curious one, and which admits of no obvious explanation.
Oh, and if you're wondering: Istanbul > Byzantine Empire > the Plague of Justinian (mid-sixth century) > the problems with burial of disease victims during an epidemic > bones enrich soil phosphorus > a proposal to use distribution of nettle plants in England to identify mass burial sites of people who died during the Black Death. See? Makes perfect sense.
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