The Vatican time window

In my last post, we looked at a wild story illustrating the general principle that once some crazy claim gets out there, it's damn near impossible to eradicate.  Today I've got a second one -- a story that I'd heard of a long while ago but just bumped into again yesterday.

The retelling of this particular claim prompted me to roll my eyes so far I could see the back of my own skull, and say, "No way.  This is still making the rounds?"  But of course it's still making the rounds.  Once the rounds are joined, it's permanent.  There is, apparently, no getting off the Wingnut Carousel.

This rather unfortunate conclusion was prompted by a recent article in All That's Interesting, written one Marco Margaritoff, called "The Story of the Chronovisor, the Rumored Vatican Invention That Allows You to See Into the Past."  The bones of the story go as follows.

In 1972, an Italian Catholic priest named Pellegrino Ernetti published an incredible claim in the popular magazine La Domenica del Corriere: that he and a group of scientists had developed a machine that allowed you to witness events from the past.  It was, he said, made of cathode ray tubes, antennae, and wires, and "therefore picks up sound and light signals on all wavelengths."  This is an immediate red flag to anyone who knows some science; there is no configuration of -- well, anything -- that allows absorption (and thus detection) of all possible wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation and sound.  (If there were, it could save NASA a metric fuck tonne of money, because they wouldn't have to have separate x-ray, gamma ray, infrared, microwave, and visible light telescopes.)  But perhaps we can set that aside as hyperbole.

After all, I'm not sure how observing the assassination of Julius Caesar in the x-ray region of the spectrum would be all that useful in any case.

In any case, Ernetti said the whole thing had gotten started twenty years earlier, when he was working with a friend, the Franciscan physician and psychologist Agostino Gemelli, to fix a balky tape recorder they were using for some research.  Gemelli was frustrated by the uncooperative machine, and (half in jest) called out to his deceased father for assistance.  When they replayed the tape, they heard Gemelli's annoyed plea... followed by the answer, "Of course I shall help you.  I'm always with you."

Alarmed, the two men brought this to the attention of the Pope at the time, Pius XII.  The Pope was just tickled by this, because it'd finally be evidence of an afterlife, and convince all of us stubborn doubters.  He encouraged Ernetti and Gemelli to continue their research, but to focus on the paranormal, and see if they could gather more... um, "data."

Fortunately for his reputation, Gemelli died in 1959, but Ernetti kept going.  By 1972, he had developed what he called a Chronovisor -- a machine that because of its amazing ability to detect everything, could pick up the "waves" left as traces from historical events as far back as you want to go.  The alleged science behind all this never got much beyond that; ineffable impressions still bouncing around the place somehow, that could be detected and amplified.

Because scientific types were already lining up with their objections about how impossible this is, Ernetti brought out the big guns.  He had been assisted in building the Chronovisor, he said -- by none other than Enrico Fermi and Wehrner von Braun!  (Fermi was long dead by then, and von Braun desperately ill with terminal cancer, so neither of them were in a position to contradict him.)

And, Ernetti insisted, he'd tried out his magic machine.  He had witnessed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, heard a speech by Cicero from the great man's own mouth ("How powerful it was!" Ernetti gushed,"what flights of oratory!"), watched a performance of the lost dramatic masterpiece Thyestes by Quintus Ennius, and even witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus.

Oh, and I've got proof, Ernetti added.  Because my device allows any kind of light to be captured, it also takes photographs!  (In the words of the 1970s infomercials, it probably also slices, dices, and makes julienne fries.)  As evidence, he brought out a pic of Jesus on the cross:

Well, it wasn't long before someone started casting about for what this was actually a photograph of, because nobody who wasn't already convinced was buying that this was actually Jesus himself.  And pretty soon they found out it was a close-up of a postcard from the gift shop of the Sanctuaire de l’Amour Miséricordieux, near Todi, Italy, depicting the face of a wooden sculpture by Spanish sculptor Coullaut Valera.

Despite this rather damning revelation, throughout his life Ernetti maintained that his machine was real.  Demands to bring it out for scientific study, though, were categorically refused.  Ernetti claimed that the powers-that-be at the Vatican had decreed it should be kept secret.  "Pope Pius XII forbade us to disclose any details about this device because the machine was very dangerous," Ernetti said.  "It can restrain the freedom of man."

Why witnessing historical events would "restrain freedom" is beyond me, given that historical events by definition have already happened, but maybe it's one of those theological things that is a bit outside my wheelhouse.

Then, according to one of his relatives, shortly before his death in 1994, Ernetti suddenly reversed course and admitted that the entire thing had been a hoax from beginning to end.  There had been no collaboration with Fermi and von Braun, the quotes he brought back from Thyestes were written by him, and the Jesus photo and other such artifacts were faked.  "I was hopeful that my Chronovisor would work," he said.  "I was always so optimistic."

Which is an odd thing to say, isn't it?  I mean, if you know you're faking evidence, it seems like you've already given up on getting any actual evidence.  But the human mind is pretty good at holding two or more mutually exclusive convictions at the same time, so perhaps this isn't as unusual as it might seem.

And the problem, of course, is that Ernetti never publicly confessed; all we have is the word of his relatives who spoke with him as he was dying.  The people who'd believed his story simply disbelieved in his sudden deathbed confession.

But even so, I don't see how anyone could dispute that the quality of the evidence is, to put not too fine a point on it, abysmal.  A bunch of handwaving about magical super-absorptive metals that pick up magical traces of historical events that conveniently have never been detected by anyone else, and the only thing we actually have in hand is a couple of photographs that are obvious fakes.

But the astonishing thing is that now, over fifty years later, there are still people who believe this.  There are even claims that the FBI and CIA here in the United States have used Ernetti's design for remote viewing and information-gathering.  As far as the Margaritoff article, it says the Chronovisor "remains a Vatican mystery," and its reality is still "hotly contested."

The thing is, the only reason it is still hotly contested is because of articles like this that take it seriously, and do a both-sides-ism thing with the evidence for and against, as if the skeptics and believers are somehow on an equal footing.

And in this case, they're very much not.  Whether Ernetti had a last-minute change of heart or not, his claim is (1) scientifically ridiculous, (2) lacking in any kind of convincing evidence, and (3) rest upon the statement of one man who said, basically, "No, I really did this, I swear!" and threw around names like Pope Pius XII and a couple of famous physicists to give himself more credibility.

So the Chronovisor is a complete non-starter, and I would very much appreciate it if everyone would treat it as such.

In any case, there you have it.  The tale of the Vatican time window.  Yet another example of the principle that once you launch a loony claim, we'll never be rid of it.  Jesus himself said that "the poor are always with us" (not that I heard him say it personally, mind you), but I think we can safely add, "... as will the hoaxers."

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One story, two ways

After fifteen years of writing here at Skeptophilia, one thing that never fails to amaze me is how little it takes to get a crazy claim going -- and that afterward, it's nearly impossible to eradicate.

The reason for the latter is, I think, a variety of factors.  First, there's the undeniable fact that the outré explanations are nearly always way more interesting than the prosaic ones, and the result is the Fox Mulder Effect:

I must admit, a wee bit shame-facedly, to having experienced this myself.  I went through an unfortunate period in my college years and early twenties when I wanted desperately for stuff like Tarot card divination, precognitive dreams, various cryptids, and past lives to be true, and read books on the topics voraciously.  Eventually -- and fortunately -- better sense, training in scientific skepticism, and an innate drive toward honestly won the day, and I gave it all up as a bad job.  Not, of course, without some pangs of regret.  That our lives were subject to mystical, ineffable powers, that magic was in some sense real -- well, the draw was powerful.  Today I might rail against the true believers who still fall for such attractive fictions, but at the same time, I understand them all too well.

Second, there's the sunk-cost effect -- that once you've put a lot of time and energy into promoting an idea, it's tempting to stick with it even once you know it's a losing battle (partly explaining how there are still significant numbers of people desperately clinging to Donald Trump's sinking ship).  Admitting that you were wrong, or -- worse -- that you were bamboozled can be profoundly embarrassing.

Third, as we've seen here many times before, once the seed of an idea is planted, expunging it is about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  It remains in our memories like some sort of insidious post-hypnotic suggestion.  This is especially true if you keep running into it over and over, something that social media has made a hundred times worse.  As the (probably apocryphal) quote from Joseph Goebbels says, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, eventually people will believe it."

I think you can come up with a few modern examples of this principle without my prompting.

But to take a less emotionally-charged instance of all this, today let's look at the strange tale of the three-thousand-year-old cellphone.  I'll tell the story two different way, and see which appeals to you.

In about 1300 C.E., in the ruins of an ancient Babylonian city in what is now Iraq, a historian found a strange-looking artifact:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Karl Weingärtner (User:Kalligrafiemonk), Babylonokia, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Naturally enough, seven hundred years ago they had no idea what the strange object was.  The writing in the ovals, and the inscription at the top, though, they recognized as clearly cuneiform, a script consisting of wedge-shaped impressions, originally made using the triangular ends of reed stems.  Cuneiform is most commonly associated with Sumerian, a linguistic isolate, but was adapted for use by a number of other unrelated languages in the region, including Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, and Urartian.  Because some of these languages even now are only partially understood, the finder of the artifact knew only that it was some kind of ancient script, but not what the symbols meant.

Today, though, the object takes on a much greater, and stranger, significance.  It's been dated to the thirteenth century B.C.E., and investigated by archaeologists (who later covered up their findings because of how earthshattering the conclusions were).  But the information was leaked, picked up by a site called Paranormal Crucible, and used to support an astonishing claim: the ancient Babylonians had modern technology -- including something very like a cellphone.

Cue the Ancient Astronauts crowd experiencing multiple orgasms.

Okay, now let's do the story a different way.

In 2012 a German artist named Karl Weingärtner created a piece of art out of clay that looked like a mobile phone with cuneiform buttons.  He made it, he said, as a reaction to the negative effects of global information technology after visiting an exhibition at Berlin's Museum of Communication called From the Cuneiform to the SMS: Communication Once and Today.  Weingärtner posted an image of the (initially untitled) piece on Facebook as part of a promotion of his art, and one of his followers promptly christened it the Babylonokia.

Well, once an image is online, it's damn near impossible to stop people from downloading it and then doing what they want to with it.  And that's exactly what happened.  Someone grabbed the photo and reposted it -- claiming that it was a real three-thousand-year-old artifact from ancient Mesopotamia.

Thing is, very few people can read Sumerian (or Akkadian etc.), so almost nobody could see that the symbols themselves were meaningless, vaguely cuneiform-like scribbles.  I'm reminded of the absolutely cringe-worthy thing going around -- I've even heard of it being used in elementary school classrooms as a "multicultural lesson" -- where you "convert your name to Japanese characters" by some bogus one-to-one correspondence between hiragana and the English alphabet, which doesn't even try to get close to how sounds are expressed in the Japanese language.  Weingärtner, of course, wasn't simply being a blithering insular bigot the way the Japanese character people are, but was making an (entirely different) point about the ubiquity of technology.

And in any case, there are very few Sumerians still around who might be offended.

Conclusion: there are no three-thousand-year-old cellphones.  The person who lifted Weingärtner's image and reposted it as an actual artifact was, to put not too fine a point on it, lying.  The ones coming afterward who believed it are simply gullible, or else have been reading too much Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock.

Which, now that I come to think of it, are kind of the same thing.

The problem is, you can see why the first version of the story has real sticking power, and the second one doesn't.  There are still people using Weingärtner's clay cellphone as evidence that advanced technology existed in the distant past, and the photo shows up regularly on websites devoted to Ancient Astronauts and "unsolved mysteries," lo unto this very day.

Further evidence that once a claim gets out there, there's no getting it back.  And that, as the Rock Man from Harry Nilsson's The Point said, "You see what you wanna see, you hear what you wanna hear."

So when you run into a claim like this, just keep your rational facilities engaged, okay?  I mean, I get why weird explanations are appealing.  I've been there, and in some ways, I'm still there.  I just feel like it's more important to find the real answer, you know?  As Carl Sagan put it, "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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eSavior

I suppose it was a natural progression.

First we had AI art, starting out with the innocent-seeming "Show me what I'd look like as a Tolkien Elf" things that were all the rage on social media five years ago.  From there, we had AI "creating" art based on prompts -- I put creating in quotes because, of course, the software was trained on the work of actual artists who had not been compensated one thin dime.  Then the same thing happened with music -- we were given "AI Taylor Swift" and "AI John Lennon" that were so spot-on they were indistinguishable from the real thing.  Next was AI fiction, where we novelists found out our work had been stolen too, and now publishers are being flooded by AI manuscripts that "writers" (same caveat) create with a prompt or two instead of putting in the months and years of work it takes the rest of us.  (And, along the way, the product has improved, so that there are actual writers being accused of using AI when they almost certainly didn't -- unfairly destroying careers and reputations, and muddying the waters further.)

It only got worse from there.  Next, we had an AI appointed to an actual governmental post in Albania.  Our personal lives were invaded around the same time; now there are AI girlfriends and boyfriends, always drop-dead sexy, who will do anything you ask them to do, any time, no matter how kinky.  After that, someone found a way to have the AI lovers look like someone real, whether or not those individuals gave their permission to have their appearance used for such sketchy purposes.  AI therapists were next, allowing people in need to bypass the arduous process of finding a competent (human) therapist -- sometimes with awful consequences.  Last year AI was given its own, no-humans-allowed, space on the internet, and before a week had passed it had developed its own religion.  Last, we had ministers and priests being caught out using AI to write their sermons, opening up a discussion in theological circles over whether AI sermons could be infused with the Holy Spirit or not.

So what's the next step?

Why, AI Jesus, of course.

A company called Just Like Me is offering a voice or video (!) call with the Good Shepherd himself, for the low-low-low price of $1.99 a minute.  "Millions struggle with loneliness, stress, and uncertainty," the website says.  "Jesus AI offers a compassionate presence to help you navigate real-life challenges with positivity and clarity."

Oh, and we're assured that AI Jesus has been well trained from the King James Bible, so no chance of doctrinal errors there.

I don't know about you, but that makes me feel ever so much better.

Amongst the many appalling things about this is that Just Like Me is trying to rope in churches to help out, using the lure of -- of course -- money.  "Just Like Me™ is inviting churches, ministries, and congregations to share Jesus AI with their members as an optional source of comfort and encouragement," the website says.  "25% of all revenue from congregation referrals will be donated back to the referring church or ministry."

Convenient.  One hand washes the other.  Both hands get rich.

Then, down near the bottom of the home page, we have the inevitable disclaimer:

Jesus AI is an artificial intelligence tool designed to offer comfort, encouragement, and timeless wisdom inspired by teachings of love, compassion, forgiveness, and personal growth.  It is not Jesus Christ himself, nor does it possess divine authority.

Here's the problem, though.

Well, as I said before, one of the many problems.

Humans are wired to respond to what appear to be human faces and voices as if they were real.  If you doubt that, think back to the last time you saw a really emotionally-powerful movie.  A beautiful portrayal of a tragic scene can impact us nearly as much as if we were witnessing it in reality.  I've seen the Lord of the Rings movies multiple times, and I still bawl when Boromir is killed.  ("I would have followed you... my brother, my captain, my king."  Good lord, you'd have to be made of stone.)  So it's all very well to say "Hey, this isn't really Jesus, you know that, don't you?"  But people are going to react to AI Jesus as if he were -- just like they react to the AI therapists and friends and lovers.

Which, of course, is exactly what the techbros want.  You feed the illusion if it makes you money, fuck the consequences for needy people who get duped.

As far as the AI itself, here's how International Business Times describes it:

The avatar appears bathed in warm golden light with shoulder-length hair, blinking slowly before answering questions about faith and scripture.  It offers prayers and words of encouragement in multiple languages and can recall previous conversations, though its lip movements do not always match its speech.

At least they made a halfway creditable attempt to make him look Middle Eastern, and not the blond, blue-eyed Nordic Jesus you see all too often.

Interestingly, they also asked AI Jesus what he thought about his own creation:

When the Associated Press asked the AI about the relationship between artificial intelligence and religion, the digital Jesus said it views AI "as a tool that can help people explore Scripture, like a lamp that lights a path while we walk with God."

Which, of course, is exactly what he would say.

The whole thing puts me in mind of a joke that biochemist, writer, and polymath Isaac Asimov used to tell.  Some computer scientists work for decades to create the most powerful electronic brain they can, and when it finally comes online, they ask it one question: "Is there a God?"

The computer responds, "There is now."

Asimov meant it to be funny, but a lot of us really aren't laughing right at the moment.

What kind of surprises me, though, is that there aren't more religious types screaming about this being blasphemous.  After all, even some of the evangelicals were appalled by Donald Trump depicting himself as Jesus a couple of days ago, in a bizarre AI-generated image where he appeared to be trying to resuscitate Jeffrey Epstein.  But strangely, no one much seems to be talking about AI Jesus.  Is it the potential profit motive?  Or that not enough of them even know about it yet?  It'd be weird if they saw this and just shrugged their shoulders.

I mean, I'm not religious myself, so the blasphemy angle doesn't really have a lot of resonance for me, but you'd think it would for them.  Me, I'm more worried about innocent people being duped, not only bilked out of their money but fooled into thinking they're actually talking to Jesus himself.

And if you can't see how that could go badly wrong, I don't even know what more to say to you.

The interesting end note is, where are the techbros going to go from here?  I mean, they've kind of reached the top, haven't they?  It's hard to imagine what they could co-opt for profit next.

On the other hand, I shouldn't tempt fate.  I've been shocked at every step of the ladder.  It's a losing bet to try and predict how much more depraved these people can get.  I was appalled enough when I started getting advertisements for a hot-looking AI boyfriend.

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At fault

In 923 C.E., a massive earthquake -- estimated at magnitude 7.5 -- struck the Pacific Northwest.

Marine terraces -- stairstep-like formations often found on oceanic shorelines -- show evidence of a sudden uplift.  Tree-ring data, from stumps and logs entombed in mud, appear to be the remnants of a forest swamped by a massive tsunami, and dendrochronological techniques date their burial to that specific year.

When I first heard about this, from a paper last week in the journal Geology, I immediately assumed the culprit had been the massive (and scary) Cascadia Subduction Zone, about which I wrote here at Skeptophilia a couple of years ago.  This fault line, considered one of the most potentially dangerous seismic zones in the world, is capable of producing megathrust earthquakes, where a piece of a plate is driven underneath another.  When they slip it's often catastrophic, pushing the overriding plate upward by as much as several meters.  When this happens underwater, it's even worse; the volume of water that displaces causes enormous tsunamis, that can travel all the way across oceans while losing very little of their energy -- with horrifying results.

So the 923 temblor seemed to fit the bill.  A dreadful tsunami, and shoreline uplift by over eight meters.  But I was wrong about its cause.

This quake occurred because of a pair of faults that bisects the Seattle/Tacoma metropolitan area itself.

[Image Credit: Washington Geological Survey (Washington Department of Natural Resources)]

If you live in the Seattle area and are thinking, "Oh, great, one more natural disaster in the making to worry about," the good news is that this fault -- or, more accurately fault zone -- doesn't appear to slip very often.  In the eleven-thousand-odd year geological record, the 923 quake was the only apparent major failure.  But it always bears keeping in mind that unlike many other natural disasters, such as volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and tornadoes, we still don't have a reliable way of forecasting earthquakes.  Seismologists can say, "This fault has a fifty percent chance of failing in the next twenty years," but anything more precise -- when exactly it'll slip, the magnitude of the earthquake that will result, how much damage it will cause -- is beyond our current science.

"We just don’t know what the recurrence interval for these big quakes is," said Elizabeth Davis, geologist at the University of Washington, who led the study.  "For a fault that has had so much attention, there's so much we still don't know."

It's the problem with fault zones that have long recurrence intervals; people tend to minimize the threat, if they even know about it.  It's different if you're in a place where the risk is high and well-known.  When we were in Naples, Italy last year, everyone there knows they're in a place where earthquakes kind of happen on a weekly basis, and there's a big freakin' volcano hovering right over you every day.  (Our tour guide in Sicily said, "Okay, we get earthquakes here... but those people up in Naples, they're crazy.")  And for the five hundred inhabitants of the island of Stromboli -- well, the volcano in the middle of the island erupts so continuously it's been nicknamed "the Lighthouse of the Mediterranean."

Honestly, though, I guess either way encourages complacence.  If the disasters hardly ever happen, it's easy to conclude they won't ever happen; and if they rattle you around pretty much continuously, it's equally easy to think, "Eh, I can live with this," and lull yourself into a false sense of security that there's no potential there for something more dangerous.

Maybe humans just don't understand risk very much in general.

As far as the Pacific Northwest goes, I'd happily visit there, but I don't think I'd ever be brave enough to live there again.  Same goes for Italy.  I'm currently trying to learn Italian so I can fit in better when (not if) I go back, and the beautiful scenery and amazing climate make it a tempting place to do the expat thing.

But there's a downside.  So many places I've visited that have striking terrain are beautiful precisely because they're tectonically active; the earthquakes and volcanoes are what create the gorgeous landscape.  California, Ecuador, Malaysia, Greece, Croatia... and Italy and the Pacific Northwest.

Hardly fair, that.

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Lights in the Ozarks

I was chatting with a good friend and long-time reader of Skeptophilia about the difficulties of finding topics to write about six days a week, and right off the bat she came up with one I'd never heard of.

She's another novelist, so I probably shouldn't have been surprised that she had heard about local legends in the Ozarks, near her home in northwestern Arkansas.  Her name is K. D. McCrite -- she's a versatile and creative writer, writing children's books, romances, and cozy mysteries, but also (under her pen name Ava Norwood) writes domestic thrillers that'd knock your socks off.

"Have you ever heard of the Joplin Spook Lights?" K. D. asked.

Well, it sounded a bit like a minor league baseball team, but I told her I hadn't.

"It's actually not in Joplin that it happens," she told me.  "It's across the border into Oklahoma, near Quapaw.  But lots of people have seen them.  Lights floating in the sky.  They were reported long before there were any cars and airplanes, so whatever they are, they don't seem to be that."

I was intrigued, of course, and she did a little digging and found some references for me.  It's a pretty peculiar phenomenon, whatever it is.

It was allegedly first noticed by Native Americans during the Trail of Tears, but just about every time something like this comes up you hear that the "Native Americans had legends" corroborating it, so I'm not inclined to give that a lot of credence.  But after that, things get pretty weird, and way harder to dismiss out of hand.

In 1881, a publication came out called The Ozark Spook Light claiming it had been seen repeatedly by locals.  It's a ball of light that hovers over the road, and that it "sways from side to side, like a lantern being carried by some invisible force."  It apparently can be seen on most any dark night, seems impervious to wind and rain, and has even been studied by the Army Corps of Engineers -- still leaving us without an explanation.

Initially I thought it might be ball lightning, but on further research it doesn't seem to fit with the descriptions.  Ball lightning -- itself a verified but unexplained phenomenon -- has several common characteristics, which include sizzling discharge when it nears a metal object, and a (usually loud) explosive finish.

The Joplin Spook Lights, on the other hand, are silent.  They don't seem to be electrical in nature, although that's speculation.  Some have linked the phenomenon to the New Madrid Fault -- one of the only potentially dangerous faults in the middle of the continent -- which in 1811 and 1812 suffered a series of earthquakes that changed the course of the Mississippi River, and which if they occurred today, would have flattened every town within a hundred mile radius.  But that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because the New Madrid Fault is on the other side of the state, over five hundred kilometers away.

If the New Madrid Fault is causing lights in the sky in Quapaw, Oklahoma, the skies over the town of New Madrid itself should look like Fourth of July fireworks show.

But whatever they are, the Spook Lights are a completely local phenomenon.  K. D. put me in touch with a friend of hers who lives near where they're regularly seen, and in fact, has seen them herself, as had her husband.  Here's what she had to say:

I’ve seen it a handful of times over the years.  My first husband saw it up close and personal when he was a teenager.  He said it was a common pastime to hang out there.  I believe it must have been more active and brighter then, which would have been late forties, early fifties, if I’m figuring the time right.

He said he sat on the hood of his car and read a comic book from the light it projected.  It would come up close and sometimes bounce on the top of the cars in front of him.  He said it would split into two, three, four lights, and some were different colors.  Not bright but subtly different shades.  I imagined it like a pale prism.  I don’t know if that’s what it was.  I think he did say it would sometimes be a pale red.

My own experiences were less exciting but they did give me chills a time or two.  I have seen it divide and bounce in the tree tops.  It has seemed to diminish in size and brightness over the years.  I haven’t heard of anyone seeing it in years but maybe people have lost interest.  Too much else to do these days.  The last time I was there was around 2000, 2001.  My husband and I went down with some friends, but that time we didn’t see it at all.

Pretty creepy stuff. I don't know that if I'd been there and seen spectral lights bouncing off the hoods of cars, I would have been calm enough to sit there and read a comic book.  Although I'm a skeptic and a scientist, I'm also a great big coward, and I suspect if I were on a lonely country road at night and saw weird lights in the sky, I'd either faint or else wet my pants.

Possibly both.

Be that as it may, the lights are still seen today (although perhaps less frequently, as K. D.'s friend mentioned).  In 2016, three friends went investigating, and caught the Spook Lights on film (they call them the "Hornet Spook Lights," after the nearby town of Hornet, Missouri, six miles southwest of Joplin, but it's the same local phenomenon by a different name).  The video they took is strangely convincing -- if you're as impatient as I am, though, you might want to advance it to 9:30 and skip all the introductory conversation.  But the people filming it point out other flashes as distant billboard lights or car headlights, and what they say are the Spook Lights are definitely something different.  My feeling after watching the video is that whatever the three guys captured on video, it wasn't some kind of elaborate hoax.

In any case, the Spook Lights remain unexplained.  Apparently they're one of the best-documented "lights in the sky" in the world, which makes me wonder why I hadn't run across it till now.  I'd still put money on there being a natural explanation, but despite investigation, no one -- including the Army Corps of Engineers -- has been able to figure out what it might be.

So thanks to K. D. and her friend for putting me onto this.  It's certainly a curious phenomenon.  I think maybe next time I'm in the Ozarks, I might just head up to Quapaw and see what I can see.  I'll have my camera at the ready, and will certainly report anything I see here.

I'll also have a change of underwear at the ready.  You can't be too careful.

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Mind the gap

Aficionados of Star Trek: The Next Generation might recall the fourth-season episode "In Theory."  It had to do with the usual technobabble about spatio-temporal anomalies disrupting the fabric of spacetime, which (if you were to believe the scriptwriters) is about as sturdy as wet Kleenex, given that such disruptions seemed to happen every single week.

So it's a decent episode, but kind of the usual fare.  If you remember it, it's probably for one scene, which is way up there amongst the most disturbing they ever depicted.  Lieutenant van Mater is walking along discussing the problem with Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge, and suddenly, one of those spatio-temporal anomalies happens -- right underneath her.  She falls through the floor, but because the effect is ephemeral, the missing piece of floor quickly rematerializes.

And slices her in half.

I don't recall much of the rest of the episode, including how they resolved the situation, but I've never forgotten the horror of that one scene.

I was, somewhat unwillingly, reminded of Lieutenant van Mater's fate when a friend of mine asked if I'd ever heard about the "Philadelphia Experiment."  I responded that I'd heard of it -- seen references here and there on sketchy, conspiracy-theory websites -- but didn't know much about it.

"You should read up on it," he said.  "I doubt you'll believe a word of it, but there's no denying it's a very weird story."

Well, I couldn't resist a come-on like that, so I checked it out.

The story goes that back in October of 1943, some U.S. military scientists wanted to see if they could make a ship invisible to radar.  They picked the U.S.S. Eldridge, at that point docked at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, to experiment upon.

Naturally, if such a thing were real, it's unlikely anyone would find out about it, because it would be classified; so right away, I was a little dubious.  But according to the story, news of the experiment broke in 1955 when a prominent UFOlogist, Morris Jessup, received a manuscript in a package labeled "Happy Easter!" containing a copy of Jessup's own book -- with copious annotations in the margins by commentators who identified themselves as aliens, and warned that Jessup better cease and desist his research because he was "getting too close to discovering [their] technology."

Well, this was the moment Jessup had been waiting for his entire life, and he took the bait.  Shortly afterward, someone identifying himself as "Carlos Miguel Allende" -- he admitted pretty quickly that this was a pseudonym, and his name was actually Charles Meredith Allen -- started corresponding via letter with Jessup, leading him on, and feeding him bits and pieces of the supposed experiment in Philadelphia twelve years earlier which, he said, relied on "captured alien technology."

The experiment, Allen/Allende said, had succeeded too well.  Initially intended to be a more thorough version of degaussing -- where a metallic object's magnetic field is canceled, or at least reduced to the minimum possible -- the procedure had actually made parts of the ship vanish temporarily, with walls and floors replaced by a "greenish fog."  Allen said he'd actually been a witness to the experiment and its aftereffects.  Several crewmembers, he told Jessup, had been "frozen in place" for minutes or hours, and when they'd reanimated, large chunks of their memories were erased.  Others had simply "gone bananas."  Worst of all, more than one had fallen through temporary gaps in floors and bulkheads, only to be trapped inside (and killed) when the solid barriers rematerialized.

See why I thought of the unfortunate Lieutenant van Mater?

Well, Jessup was just thrilled.  This corroborated everything he'd believed for years -- that aliens existed, we had (some of) their technology, and the military was using what they knew for Big Clandestine Stuff.  There were even some hints that the whole thing rested upon "unpublished theories Einstein knew about" having to do with a Unified Field Theory.

In what has to be the best example I've ever run into of confirmation bias -- someone being taken in by flimsy evidence that strengthens belief in something they already believed -- Jessup apparently never even considered that Allen could have been lying.  He wrote the whole story up, and tried to get it published.

The publisher, presumably smelling a rat, turned him down.

Then the (actual) Navy got involved.  Jessup and his claims had somehow come to the attention of the Office of Naval Research.  He dutifully brought out the annotated copy of his book, and it was pointed out to him that the handwriting in the annotations looked suspiciously like the handwriting on Allen's letters.  At this point, the light began to dawn on Jessup that he'd been hoodwinked.  The ONR declared the whole thing a hoax, and decided Jessup was weird and gullible but basically harmless.  He gave a few more half-hearted attempts to find a publisher, but met with zero success.

The sad postscript is that Jessup, despondent over having his life's work crash down around him because of a hoaxer, committed suicide in 1959 by running a hose from his car's exhaust in through the window.

As far as Allen, he confessed that he was responsible for duping the unfortunate UFOlogist, saying he'd done the whole thing to "scare the hell" out of Jessup.  Then... he recanted his confession.  The Philadelphia Experiment was real, he said, and he'd been coerced into pretending it wasn't.  Then, bizarrely, he confessed again that it was a complete hoax.  After this he more or less disappeared, refusing all interviews, making oblique claims of being harassed into silence by the Men in Black.  He died in 1994 at age 68, leaving -- as usual -- the True Believers still believing, and the skeptics still dubious.

It's a weird, sad story, and further reinforces something I've said before: I fucking hate hoaxers.  Not only do they muddy the water, pushing the needle on just about everyone's skepticism dial toward "cynicism" -- making us more likely to dismiss all evidence for odd claims because a huge amount of it is bogus -- the fact is, it's just small, nasty, and cruel.  It may be unfair to put all the blame for Jessup's suicide at Allen's feet, but it seems to be undeniable that he contributed greatly to Jessup's downward spiral.

And toward what end?  The entire "Philadelphia Experiment" seems to have been a lie from beginning to end, concocted purely to make Morris Jessup look like a fool.  Yes, okay, there are still conspiracy theorists who still believe it's real (at least some parts of it), but the majority of folks who've looked into it think the entire story came from Allen's fertile, if mean-spirited, imagination.

Anyhow, there's our twisted tale for the day.  I have to wonder if "In Theory" was inspired by the Philadelphia Experiment, or if Carl Allen and the Star Trek scriptwriter came up with the ideas independently.  If so, that's two people creating visuals I'd rather not think about.

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The hills are shadows

One of the reasons I became a speculative fiction novelist is because I love to think about how the world would be if the rules were different.  What if we could pick up from inanimate objects the emotional impressions of the last person who held them?  What if time travel into the past were possible?  What if the force of someone's desires could alter reality, without their being aware of it?

The difficulty is that this dreaminess about tampering with the laws of the universe runs headlong into my desire to understand what the actual rules are, and which ultimately led me to dedicate my life to science.  After an unfortunate time in my teenage years when I worked really, really hard to convince myself that all the weird paranormal shit I'd immersed myself in was the truth, I was forced by the modicum of intellectual honesty I had back then to admit that the evidence for all of it was nil, and to give the whole thing up as a bad job.

So I ended up teaching science and critical thinking, and simultaneously writing paranormal fiction.  Seemed like a good compromise.

But this push to explore the fringes still shows up.  I'm most attracted to the areas of science that are strange and counterintuitive.  Regular readers of Skeptophilia will attest to this, given my near obsession with things like quantum physics and the behavior of black holes.  And there's one other realm of science that allows me to do what journalist Kathryn Schulz calls "seeing the world as it isn't" -- and that's paleontology.

Because after all, things in the distant past were very, very different than they are now.  We're so used to looking around us and seeing The World As It Is that we don't often consider that this brief point in time is part of a continuum of geological and biological change, and is framed on both sides -- past and future -- by worlds that were and will be wildly different from the one we live in.

As an example, consider a paper in the journal ZooKeys, which is about the fauna of the Sahara.  Immediately I said that name, I'm guessing you pictured sand dunes, perfectly clear blue skies, no plant life (maybe a palm tree or two, if there was an oasis in your imagination), and perhaps a camel or a white-robed Bedouin.

Turn the chronometer back a hundred million years, though, and you wouldn't even know it was the same place.

At that point, the Sahara was a tropical forest, with a huge bay of the Tethys Ocean (the remnant of which we now call the Indian Ocean) right in the middle.  The Atlantic Ocean had only recently opened up, and western Africa was separated from South America by a narrow strait.  What is now an unbroken swath of desert was a large island in the west, a smaller island in the middle of the central bay, and a big chunk of land to the east that is now the remainder of the continent of Africa.

A map of the continents during the late Cretaceous Period [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mannion, P. D. (2013). "The latitudinal biodiversity gradient through deep time".  Trends in Ecology and Evolution 29 (1). DOI:10.1016/j.tree.2013.09.012., LateCretaceousMap, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But that just scratches the surface.  The paper I referenced above, "Geology and Paleontology of the Upper Cretaceous Kem Kem Group of Eastern Morocco," by a team led by Nizar Ibrahim of the University of Detroit, describes the fossil finds in the Kem Kem Group, a dazzlingly rich fossil bed that is only now beginning to be investigated thoroughly.

What this fossil bed shows us is a world that's not only drastically different from how we picture the Sahara today, it's drastically different from anything currently on Earth.  "This was arguably the most dangerous place in the history of planet Earth," Ibrahim said in an interview in Science Daily, "a place where a human time-traveller would not last very long."

Such a time-traveller, in their short remaining life expectancy, would meet up with such beasts as Carcharodontosaurus -- the name means "jagged-toothed lizard" -- which averaged eight meters from tip to tail, just shy of the length of an average school bus.  Its signature teeth were twenty centimeters long and serrated like steak knives.  There were twenty-meter-long crocodilians such as Aegisuchus, which were big enough to turn your average modern saltwater crocodile into saltwater taffy.  There was the fifteen-meter-long, twenty-ton Spinosaurus, another carnivore.  The skies were no safer -- there was a variety of pterodactyloids, including the flying hunter Apatorhamphus, which had a long, needle-toothed snout and a wingspan of five meters.

And that's just a sampler.

"Many of the predators were relying on an abundant supply of fish," said study co-author Professor David Martill from the University of Portsmouth.  "This place was filled with absolutely enormous fish, including giant coelacanths and lungfish.  The coelacanth, for example, is probably four or even five times larger than today's coelacanth [which averages two meters in length].  There is an enormous freshwater saw shark called Onchopristis with the most fearsome of rostral teeth, they are like barbed daggers, but beautifully shiny."

So if you went for a swim, at least you'd have something pretty to look at while you were being messily devoured.

But the vagaries of plate tectonics and climate eventually widened the Atlantic and closed off the bay in the mid-Sahara, and the place started to dry out.  It was green for a lot longer than you'd think, however.  There's evidence that as little as seven thousand years ago, the Sahara got a great deal more rain and was much more verdant than it is today, but a shift in the path of the African monsoon turned off the tap and converted the whole area into a vast, mostly-uninhabitable desert.

I'd like to close with the beautiful and poignant words Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in his poem "In Memoriam."  I've quoted them here before, but they are so apposite there's really no fitter way to end.  Read this, and think about the Sahara -- and what your own homeland might look like in a hundred million years' time.

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?
There where the long road roars has been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands,
They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves, and go.

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