The printer's demon

Two days ago, I finished the draft of my historical novel Nightingale. 

I checked the document to see when I created it -- October 21, 2025.  Ten weeks and 96,600 words later, I've got a complete story, about a man in the thirteenth century who unwittingly becomes involved in treachery and double-dealing between the kings of France and Scotland, ends up cornered into committing an act that leads to chaos, and undertakes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone.

Oh, and there's a ghost and a curse and a guy who may or may not be an angel.

It was an interesting tale to tell, and for sure the fastest I've ever written a whole novel.  I love the main character, Simon de Montbard, because he's complex and multi-layered, and also because he's a very unlikely hero.  I'm actually sad to say goodbye to him.

I'm doubly sad, though, because this propels me into my second-least-favorite part of being a novelist, which is:

Editing.

My first-least-favorite, of course, is marketing.  Most authors dislike it as well, but I have a special loathing for it, because I have a fundamental, reflexive hatred for self-promotion, coming from a childhood where I had beaten into me that Talking About Yourself Is Conceited And That's Bad.  When I was little, any time I mentioned anything I had accomplished, or even was interested in, it was met with "No one wants to hear about that," with the result that even now I come close to being physiologically incapable of bringing up creative stuff I'm doing in conversation.  (It's a little easier to write about it, obvs.  But even the mild level of self-aggrandizement I'm doing here is kind of uncomfortable.  Childhood trauma never quite goes away.)

This is why even doing stuff like posting a link on social media to my website or to one of my books on Amazon makes me immediately afterward run and hide under a blanket.  Probably explaining why my sales figures are so low.  It's hard to sell any books when I self-promote so seldom that it's met with "Oh, I didn't know you'd written a book!" when in fact I've written twenty-four of them.

Well, twenty-five, now.

In any case, now Nightingale goes into the editing stage of things, which is not anxiety-producing so much as it is tedious and a little maddening.  As my friend, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, put it, "Editing is difficult because it's so easy to see what you meant to write and not what you actually did write."  I've had errors slip through multiple readings by multiple people -- not just simple typos or grammatical errors, but the bane of my existence, continuity errors:

Roses are red, Steve's eyes are blue
But you said they were brown back on page 52.

I can't tell you the number of times that I've caught stuff like a character opening a window that she just opened two pages earlier, or going down the stairs to the first floor when she started out in the basement.  I sincerely hope I have caught all of those sorts of things, because nothing yanks a reader out of the world of the story quite as quickly as that "... wait, what?" response when there's a problem with continuity.

However, I did learn something yesterday that should be a comfort to my fellow writers who have been reading this while nodding their heads in sympathy; errors, all the way from typos to major plot snafus, aren't your fault.  They're the fault of a demon named Titivillus who is in charge of making writers fuck things up.  Then when they do, Titivillus keeps track of all the mistakes, and when it comes time for God to judge the writers' souls, he reads out all the errors they've made so the writers will end up in hell.

Apparently people back then honestly thought Titivillus was real.  A fifteenth-century English devotional called Myroure of Oure Ladye has the lines, "I am a poure dyuel, and my name ys Tytyvyllus...  I muste eche day ... brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, and of neglygences in syllables and wordes."

Judging by the spelling, it looks like Titivillus has already racked up a few points just on that passage alone.

A fourteenth-century illustration of Titivillus trying to induce a scribe to screw up his manuscript [Image is in the Public Domain]

I must say, though, the whole thing strikes me as unfair.  If Titivillus is responsible for my errors, they're not really my fault.  Maybe the logic is that I should have concentrated harder, and not listened to him whispering, "What you mean to write is 'The man pulled on his trousers, then slipped on his shit.'"

What amazes me is how tenacious some of these errors can be.  As K. D. pointed out, our brains often see what we think is there and not what actually is there, with the result that we breeze right past goofs that you'd think would stand out like sore thumbs.  It's why all writers need good editors; you're not going to catch everything, no matter how carefully you think you're reading.  (And that's not even counting the fact that I seem to have a genetic condition that renders me incapable of using commas correctly.)

So now I need to go back through my own manuscript looking for faylynges and neglygences in syllables and wordes, before I turn it over to my actual editor, who no doubt will find plenty more.  As hard as the writing process can sometimes be, at least it's creative, whereas editing seems to me to be more like doing the laundry.  It's critical, and you can't get by without doing it, but hardly anyone would call it fun.

The whole thing reminds me of Dorothy Parker's quip.  "If you have a young friend who wants to become a writer, the second best thing you can do for them is to give them a copy of Elements of Style.  The first best, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're still happy."

Be that as it may, I still prefer editing over marketing.  So I'll just end by saying "Please buy my books, there are links to some of them in the sidebar."  Now y'all'll have to excuse me.  I'll be hiding under a blanket.

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All that glitters

If you own anything made of gold, take a look at it now.

I'm looking at my wedding ring, made of three narrow interlocked gold bands.  It's a little scratched up after twenty-three years, but still shines.

Have you ever wondered where gold comes from?  Not just "a gold mine," but before that.  If you know a little bit of physics, it's kind of weird that the periodic table doesn't end at 26.  The reason is a subtle but fascinating one, and has to do with the binding energy curve.

The vertical axis is a measure of how tightly the atom's nucleus is held together.  More specifically, it's the amount of energy (in millions of electron-volts) that it would take to completely disassemble the nucleus into its component protons and neutrons.  From hydrogen (atomic number = 1) up to iron (atomic number = 26), there is a relatively steady increase in binding energy.  So in that part of the graph, fusion is an energy-releasing process (moves upward on the graph) and fission is an energy-consuming process (moves downward on the graph).  This, in fact, is what powers the Sun; going from hydrogen to helium is a jump of seven million electron-volts per proton or neutron, and that energy release is what produces the light and heat that keeps us all alive.

After iron, though -- specifically after an isotope of iron, Fe-56, with 26 protons and 30 neutrons -- there's a slow downward slope in the graph.  So after iron, the situation is reversed; fusion would consume energy, and fission would release it.  This is why the fission of uranium-235 generates energy, which is how a nuclear power plant works.

It does generate a question, though.  If fusion in stars is energetically favorable, increasing stability and releasing energy, up to but not past iron -- how do the heavier elements form in the first place?  Going from iron to anywhere would require a consumption of energy, meaning those will not be spontaneous reactions.  They need a (powerful) energy driver.  And yet, some higher-atomic-number elements are quite common -- zinc, iodine, and lead come to mind.

Well, it turns out that there are two ways this can happen, and they both require a humongous energy source.  Like, one that makes the core of the Sun look like a wet firecracker.  Those are supernova explosions, and neutron star collisions.  And two astrophysicists -- Szabolcs Marka of Columbia University and Imre Bartos of the University of Florida -- have found evidence that the heavy elements on the Earth were produced in a collision between two neutron stars, on the order of a hundred million years before the Solar System formed.

This is an event of staggering magnitude.  "If you look up at the sky and you see a neutron-star merger a thousand light-years away," Marka said, "it would outshine the entire night sky."

What apparently happens is when two neutron stars -- the ridiculously dense remnants of massive stellar cores -- run into each other, it is such a high-energy event that even thermodynamically unfavorable (energy-consuming) reactions can pick up enough energy from the surroundings to occur.  Then some of the debris blasted away from the collision gets incorporated into forming stars and planets -- and here we are, with tons of lightweight elements, but a surprisingly high amount of heavier ones, too.

But how do they know it wasn't a nearby supernova?  Those are far more common in the universe than neutron star collisions.  Well, the theoretical yield of heavy elements is known for each, and the composition of the Solar System is far more consistent with a neutron star collision than with a supernova.  And as for the timing, a chunk of the heavy isotopes produced are naturally unstable, so decaying into lighter nuclei is favored (which is why heavy elements are often radioactive; the products of decay are higher on the binding energy curve than the original element was).  Since this happens at a set rate -- most often calculated as a half-life -- radioactive isotopes act like a nuclear stopwatch, analogous to the way radioisotope decay is used to calculate the ages of artifacts, fossils, and rocks.  Backtracking that stopwatch to t = 0 gives an origin of about 4.7 billion years ago, or a hundred million years before the Solar System coalesced.

So next time you look at anything made of heavier elements -- gold or silver or platinum, or (more prosaically) the zinc plating on a galvanized steel pipe -- ponder for a moment that it was formed in a catastrophically huge collision between two neutron stars, an event that released more energy in a few seconds than the Sun will produce over its entire lifetime.  Sometimes the most ordinary things have a truly extraordinary origin -- something that never fails to fascinate me.

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Notes on a supercluster

Today I'm going to focus on outer space, because if I don't I'll be forced to deal with events down here on Earth, and it's a little early to start drinking.

The James Webb Space Telescope just posted information on a structure called the Saraswati Supercluster,  which at a diameter of 650 million light years and a mass of twenty quadrillion times the mass of the Sun, is one of the largest gravitationally-bound structures known.  If you look toward the constellation Pisces, visible in the Northern Hemisphere from August to early January, you're staring right at the Saraswati Supercluster.

Not that you can see it with the naked eye.  Its center is about four billion light years away, meaning not only that it's extremely faint, the light from it has taken about a third of the age of the universe to get here, so it's really red-shifted.  Here's the rather mind-blowing image the JWST team just posted on their site:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Pablo Carlos Budassi, Extended universe logarithmic illustration (English annotated), CC BY-SA 4.0]

On this diagram, the Sun and Solar System are at the center, and as you move outward the scale increases exponentially, allowing us to visualize -- or at least imagine -- the astonishing vastness of the universe.  (Saraswati is just slightly to the left of top center on the diagram.)

The name of the supercluster is from a Sanskrit word meaning "ever-flowing stream with many pools," which is appropriate.  It's made of forty-three galaxy clusters -- not galaxies, mind you, but galaxy clusters -- of which the largest, Abell 2631, is thought to be made up of over a thousand galaxies (and something on the order of a hundred trillion stars).

If your mind is not boggling yet, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

Because of its distance and faintness, we haven't known about Saraswati for all that long.  It was discovered in 2017 by a team of Indian astronomers led by Joydeep Bagchi from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, India, and since has been the object of intense study by astrophysicists for two main reasons.  First -- although it's phenomenally massive, its vast diameter makes it remarkable that it hangs together gravitationally.  (Remember that gravitational attraction falls off as the square of the distance; it never goes to zero, but it does get really weak.)  The fact that it does seem to be acting as a single structure could give us valuable information about the role of the elusive dark matter in making large objects stick together over time.

Second, it might provide some insight into solving another mystery, the question of how (or if) dark energy, the strange force that seems to be making the expansion of the universe speed up, is changing over time.  You may recall that just this past August, a pair of papers came out suggesting that the strength of this peculiar phenomenon might be decreasing; that instead of heading toward the rather ghastly prospect of a "Big Rip," where dark energy overpowers every other known force and tears matter apart into a soup of subatomic particles, the expansion might eventually stop or even reverse.  The old "oscillating universe" idea, that the universe goes through an endless series of expansions and collapses -- popularized by such brilliant luminaries of physics as Paul Steinhardt and Roger Penrose -- might have legs after all.  Studying Saraswati might give us more information about how the strength of dark energy has changed in the four-billion-odd years it's taken the light from the supercluster to arrive here.

So next time you look up into a clear night sky, think of what lies beyond the bit you can actually see.  Every individual star visible to the naked eye lives in a (relatively) tiny sphere in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.  The few bits that visible but are farther away -- the smear of light that is all we can discern of the rest of our own galaxy, as well as the few other galaxies we can see without a telescope (like Andromeda and the two Magellanic Clouds) are so distant that individual stars can't be resolved without magnification.  What we think of as the impressive grandeur of the night sky is, basically, like thinking you're a world traveler because you drove around your own neighborhood once or twice.

But I guess I need to come back down to Earth.  Unfortunately.  On the whole, I'm much happier looking up.  It makes the current horror show we're living through at least seem a little less overwhelming, and puts our own place in the universe into perspective.

Maybe if our so-called leaders spent more time stargazing, it might provide them with some much-needed humility.

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The necessity of representation

It's a weird time for queer representation in fiction.

There's some good news, for sure.  The surprise breakout hit Heated Rivalry, a steamy series about two closeted hockey superstars (played by Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams), got stunningly high viewership and ratings, with episode five ("I'll Believe in Anything") becoming the second-highest IMDb-rated television episode ever.  (Beaten only by the Breaking Bad episode "Ozymandias.")  The two leads, and costars François Arnaud and Robbie G. K., have been signed for two more seasons of the show.

Likewise, the extremely popular (and well-received by the critics) series Heartstopper, and the rom-com movie Red, White, and Royal Blue, have much-anticipated sequels coming out in 2026.

At the same time, though, the Stranger Things season five episode "The Bridge," where the character Will Byers came out to his friends as gay, got review-bombed, with 104,000 people weighing in (more than twice the average).  While some reviewers cited poor writing and too many extraneous plot lines -- not new criticisms of the series -- a good many railed against the coming-out scene as "jarring," as well as (I can't even say this word without clenching my jaw) "woke."  And of course, it wouldn't be complete without Elon Musk contributing some additional bigotry by tweeting, "It's completely unnecessary and forced on audiences who just want to watch some basic sci-fi."

Netflix also chose to cancel -- after one season, and high ratings -- the queer-inclusive shows Olympo and Boots, the latter after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called it "woke garbage."

Apparently us queer people simply existing is now "woke."

You hear from the homophobes that they're upset that "you can't turn the television on without seeing queer people."  Well, y'know what?  Given that recent surveys found that around ten percent of people in the United States self-identify as LGBTQ+, you kind of should expect that.  (And keep in mind that's only the people who were willing to admit to it.  Chances are, the number is significantly higher than that, considering the continuing stigma.)  

But you know what else?  If you don't want to watch queer-inclusive shows, there's a simple solution:

Don't.  Watch.  Them.

If you were caught off guard by Will Byers being gay, you weren't paying attention to the eight million clues that had been dropped along the way.  And as for Olympo and Boots, those were advertised as dramas about queer athletes and military men, respectively.  Judging by the ratings, neither of these shows was unpopular, or lacked viewers; they were axed simply because Netflix chose to kiss the asses of rich bigots who complained.

You homophobes honestly don't need to watch those shows and then whine, or (worse) brigade them.  There are plenty of one hundred percent straight television, movies, and books out there for you to enjoy.

And always have been.  One of the weirdest comments you hear about queer representation is that exposure to such content "turns people gay," as if some straight fourteen-year-old boy sees a single gay character on a television show and suddenly gets this dazed look and says, "I know!  I shall run out and kiss a boy right now."  Funny, though, that it doesn't seem to work the other way.  I grew up in the 1970s, and damn near every television show and movie I watched featured only straight people in straight relationships, and I came out queer anyhow.

It's almost like it doesn't matter what you watch.

Nota bene: bear in mind that I'm not talking about age-appropriateness, here.  That's an entirely different conversation.  Heated Rivalry has some scenes that aren't appropriate for people under eighteen, whatever their sexual orientation.  Too many people conflate these two entirely separate issues -- often deliberately, to muddy the waters.

But mere representation?  Yeah, it should be there, in all kinds of media.

We exist, dammit.  I spent four decades feeling invisible because society taught me that I should be ashamed of what I was and who I was.  Don't expect me and others like me to vanish again.

So yeah, we've got a way to go.  There's still way too much "When will there be a Straight Pride Month, hurr hurr hurr" bullshit whenever Pride rolls around.  (My stock answer is "Be glad you don't need one.")  And judging by the combination of accolades and condemnations we've seen just in the last month, our culture's attitudes toward queer people are still in a considerable state of ferment.

Let me end by saying what it means to queer people just to see themselves reflected in the fiction they read, watch, and hear.  We live in a society where a significant portion of our neighbors would like very much to pretend we don't exist, and where a vocal minority want to see us dead.  As for us, we just want to be who we are, openly and without shame or fear.  A friend of mine posted the following a few weeks ago:

As someone who was a queer kid who almost did turn into a dead kid (twice), I can say with some assurance that this strikes at the heart of the entire issue.  My suicide attempts, at ages 17 and 20, were not solely because I was closeted -- there's more to that story than I have the space or the inclination to go into right now -- but if I had honestly understood back then that I wasn't broken or in need of redemption, the effect on me would have been huge.  Just having one trusted mentor say, "I know, and it's okay" could have made all the difference.

Or -- failing that -- seeing consistent, positive LGBTQ+ representation in films, television, and books, reassurance that queer people didn't have to be nothing more than the punchlines of jokes, or (worse) damaged, loveless, hopeless, or dead.

It's one reason I have LGBTQ+ representation in my own books.  Maybe someone reading them will be like I was back then -- afraid, alone, and closeted.  If my writing can console one of those folks, reassure them that they're just fine as they are, maybe even pry open the closet door a little and let some light in -- well, I don't know that I could ask for anything more as an author.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about wondering how the trajectory of my life would have been different had I made different choices -- amongst them, coming out when I was a teenager.  Of course, you can't ever know the answer to that, so all the regrets I sometimes wrestle with are the very definition of fruitless.  But I do know that we can demand a better world now.  For everyone, including the marginalized and stigmatized.

And if that's "woke," I proudly accept the label.

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Lost and found

I'm currently reading Michael Novacek's fascinating book Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, which is about the expeditions led by Novacek into the backcountry of the Mongolian Gobi Desert in search of late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils.

And they found 'em.  In abundance.  The remains that Novacek's team unearthed changed our understanding of the evolution of dinosaurs and early mammals in central Asia -- I've already lost count of the number of new species his group found, and I'm only about a third of the way through the book.

What struck me, though, is the combination of physical and personal hardship that the team members were willing to tolerate to achieve their goals.  The Gobi Desert is, even today, largely untraveled and unmapped; the nomadic groups that live in its arid wastes have to keep moving to survive in a climate that is broiling hot in the summer and viciously cold in the winter, has little in the way of drinkable fresh water, and is thin pasturage for domestic animals even at the best of times.  These scientists launched into the arid badlands in old, Soviet-era trucks that broke down every time someone sneezed hard, with carefully-rationed food, water, and gasoline, and exactly zero margin for error.

The fact that they not only survived, but achieved their scientific goals (and then some), is downright astonishing.  And every other page, I've shaken my head and thought, "I would never have the courage to do something like this.  Not in a million years."

Keep in mind, too, that this is coming from someone who did his share of backcountry camping, mostly in the Cascades and Olympics of Washington State.  Being a teacher has its perks -- June, July, and August being top of the list -- and when I was in my twenties I frequently disappeared into the fir-shrouded forests during the summer for weeks at a time.  So I'm no stranger to sleeping outdoors and hiking with a heavy pack.  (Or at least I was.  Now that I am Of A Certain Age, I'm afraid my appreciation of the creature comforts has done nothing but increase.)

But still: I would never have been brave enough to take off into the wilds of Mongolia the way Novacek et al. did (repeatedly).  Which probably would have scotched any intent I might have had to become a paleontologist.

On the other hand, sometimes -- admittedly, it's probably rare -- great paleontological discoveries can come from merely opening the right drawer in a museum.  The reason the topic comes up (besides my current reading-in-progress) is the chance find by paleontologist Georgios Georgalis of the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow, who was doing some research in London's Natural History Museum and stumbled across the bones of a very unusual fossil snake that had been overlooked for forty years.

Dubbed Paradoxophidion richardoweni -- "Richard Owen's paradoxical snake" -- it lived in England during the Eocene Epoch, something like 37 million years ago.  At that point, England was a great deal warmer than it is now.  The world was just exiting the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, at eight degrees Celsius higher than today one of the highest global average temperatures ever recorded.  The hot times favored diversification of ectothermic animals -- such as snakes -- in what are now regions with much cooler climates.

"It was my childhood dream to be able to visit the Natural History Museum, let alone do research there," said study lead author Georgalis.  "So, when I saw these very weird vertebrae in the collection and knew that they were something new, it was a fantastic feeling.  It's especially exciting to have described an early diverging caenophidian snake, as there's not that much evidence about how they emerged. Paradoxophidion brings us closer to understanding how this happened."

The snake species, Georgalis said, seems to be related to a group called acrochordids now found only in southeast Asia and Australia -- although more study is needed to be certain.  And it also brought up the tantalizing question of what else might be hiding in museum drawers and cabinets.

"I'm planning to study a variety of snake fossils in the collection, including those originally studied by Richard Owen" Georgalis said.  "These include the remains of the giant aquatic snake Palaeophis, which were first found in England in the nineteenth century.  There are also several bones with differing morphology that haven't been investigated before that I'm interested in looking at.  These might represent new taxa and offer additional clues about snake evolution."

So I guess you don't need to endure sandstorms and blistering heat and terrible food to make significant contributions to the field.

This also highlights the critical importance of museums in the entire scientific enterprise.  I found out yesterday the amazing news that one of our best local museums, the Paleontological Research Institution/Museum of the Earth, has received enough donations to remain open -- funding cuts were looking likely to shutter it permanently.  On the one hand, I'm thrilled that enough people were willing to donate to keep this wonderful place going (and if you're willing, I encourage you to go to their website and do so as well -- even if they met their goal, they can still put every penny to good use).  On the other, though, isn't it sad that we never seem to run out of money for stuff like funding war and paying kickbacks to corporate billionaires, but cutting-edge scientific establishments that are inspirations to thousands basically have to hold a bake sale to stay in business?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matt Wedel, Yale brontosaurus, CC BY 4.0]

In any case, here's another puzzle piece adding to the picture of what the Earth was like tens of millions of years ago, that had been hidden away in a museum cabinet for four decades.  I find the whole thing endlessly fascinating, which probably explains why the topic of paleontology is such a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia. 

But as interested as I am, I still don't think I'd be brave enough to venture into the Gobi Desert to study it.

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High strangeness in Warminster

Just about everyone has heard about the Roswell Incident, the 1947 discovery of military balloon debris near Roswell, New Mexico that gave rise to a million (and counting) conspiracy theories suggesting that the crash site had actually been pieces of a downed spacecraft, complete with the corpses of the alien crew.  But have you heard about the Warminster Thing?

It's a tale that's even weirder than Roswell, because (1) there were multiple witnesses who seem to have had no particular reason to lie, and (2) there's no good rational/non-alien-based explanation that I've ever heard.  This event got its start in December of 1964, near the town of Warminster, in Wiltshire, England.

Here are the basics of the claim.

In the wee hours of Christmas morning, a woman named Mildred Head was awakened by a strange noise coming from above.  It sounded like something was striking and/or dragging across her roof tiles.  "The night came alive with strange sounds lashing at [the] roof," she later reported.  "It sounded like twigs brushing against the tiles and got louder and louder until it reverberated like giant hailstones."  Alarmed, she got out of bed and went to the window, pulled the curtains, and looked outside.  There was no sign of hail (or any other form of precipitation).  But as she stood there, she heard another sound -- a "humming sound that grew louder, then faded to a faint whisper -- a low whistling or wheezing."

Her husband, who was deaf, slept through the entire thing.

At six o'clock that same morning, another woman, Marjorie Bye, was walking to the early Christmas service at Christ Church in Warminster when she also heard odd sounds.  At first it sounded like crackling, and she thought it might be a truck spreading grit on icy spots on the road.  But as she listened, the sound got nearer, passed over her head, and continued in the direction of Ludlow Close.  Like Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye heard a humming noise and a sound like "branches being pulled across gravel."  The night was clear and starlit, and she saw nothing even when the sounds seemed to be at their nearest.

But the incident wasn't over yet.  As she neared the church, she experienced what she later characterized as a "sonic attack."  "Sudden vibrations came overhead... Shockwaves pounded at my head, neck and shoulders. I felt I was being pinned down by invisible fingers of sound."

A similar report came from Warminster's postmaster, the unfortunately-named Roger Rump. He heard "a terrific clatter, as though the roof tiles were being pulled off by some tremendous force.  Then came a scrambling sound as if they were being loudly slammed back into place.  I could hear an odd humming tone.  It was most unusual.  It lasted no more than a minute."

All told, over thirty people in or near Warminster heard the noises, and the accounts all substantially agreed with each other.

Then, in March of the following year, the events started up again -- and intensified.

There were more reports of noises like rushing wind, something scraping against roof tiles, and loud booming sounds.  People reported flocks of birds being found dead.  "There was a great bouncing and bumping noise over our heads," one man reported.  "As though a load of stones was being tipped against the roof and the back wall of the bungalow.  It seemed like a tonne of coal were being emptied from sacks and sent tumbling over all the place."

This time, though, people began seeing things as well.

Patricia Philips, the wife of the vicar of Heytesbury, a village near Warminster, saw a "cigar-shaped object" in the sky that was visible long enough for her husband and all three children to watch it through binoculars.  Two months later, a woman named Kathleen Penton saw "a shining thing going along sideways in the sky.  Porthole-type windows ran the entire length of it.  It glided slowly in front of the downs…it was the size of a whole bedroom wall.  It was very much like a train carriage, only with rounded ends to it.  It did not travel lengthways but was gliding sideways."

By the end of summer, the incidents seemed to taper off, but not before one man -- Gordon Faulkner -- was able to photograph what he claimed was a UFO near Colloway Clump, north of Warminster:

By this time, a journalist named Arthur Shuttlewood had become obsessed with figuring out the answer to the mystery, and interviewed dozens of people who had strange experiences between December 1964 and August 1965.  He ended up with eight notebooks filled with accounts -- and no answers.

So, what's going on here?

There are a few possibilities, but I have to admit there's no particularly good reason to subscribe to any of them.  The first is that the noises were military equipment tests from the Land Warfare Center, a British Army training and development base near Warminster.  The military, of course, denied all knowledge of the source of the noises and (later) sightings, but if they were testing sonic weapons that were classified, there could well be another reason for that.

On the other hand, it's hard to imagine why the military would choose Christmas morning to test a sonic weapon near a town where fifteen thousand people live.

A second possibility is that Arthur Shuttlewood, the journalist who brought the whole story to light -- and who popularized it thereafter, eventually writing a book about the incidents -- exaggerated, or (perhaps) even spun from whole cloth, the lion's share of the "personal accounts."  Shuttlewood was never accused outright of falsifying evidence, but his colleagues at The Wiltshire Times said he was not above embellishing reports of local events "for dramatic effect."  It bears mention here that even if Shuttlewood started out fairly reliable, he kind of went off the rails later in life.  He reported telepathic communications, and even telephone calls, from "natives from the planet Aenstria" who were behind the whole thing.  They warned Shuttlewood of various dangers we were facing as a species, but said not to worry, because Christ would return in 1975 and fix everything.

Well, I was fifteen years old in 1975, and what stands out about that particular year is that there was no sign of the Second Coming, and everything is still as unfixed as it ever was.

In any case, Shuttlewood lived until 1996, swearing to the end that what he'd said was nothing less than the unvarnished truth.  (If you want to read Shuttlewood's own account of his interactions with the Aenstrians, you can check it out here.  I'll warn you, though -- don't expect to come away from it with an improved opinion of his veracity.)

So what we have here is another unfortunate case of a curious unexplained incident getting into the hands of someone who was either an obsessed attention seeker or completely unhinged, or both -- similar to what happened with the famous case of the haunting of Borley Rectory.  When this occurs, any evidence we may have had becomes tainted with misrepresentations and dubious additions from people who also want their fifteen minutes of fame, to the point that it becomes difficult to tell what is true, what is due to human suggestibility, and what is an outright fabrication.

Myself, I'm most inclined to credit the first few accounts as being the most credible, and the most in need of an explanation.  Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye, and Roger Rump, all of whom made their reports before the furor started, had no particular reason to make their stories up; in fact, Bye initially didn't want her name attached to it, until so many other people came forward that she figured it was safe.  

The later accounts, though -- and especially the infamous photograph taken by Gordon Faulkner -- are all too likely to be the result of people eager to jump on the bandwagon of what had by then become a nationally-reported incident.  That's not proof, I realize -- "they could be hoaxes" is a long way from "they are hoaxes" -- but at the very least, those later reports should be looked at through a (really) skeptical lens.

The "Warminster Thing" taken as a whole, though -- it's a curious story, but there's honestly not enough hard evidence there to make a certain determination about anything.  We have to leave it in the "unknown, and we probably will never know" category.  Maybe aliens did visit Wiltshire in 1964 and 1965.  Maybe they were even from "the planet Aenstria."  But at the moment, I'm much more confident that the incident -- whatever it was -- had some purely rational, and terrestrial, explanation.

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The mystery of the Travellers

Monday's post, about the difficulty of defining the term race, prompted a loyal reader of Skeptophilia to ask if I'd ever heard of the Irish Travellers.

I asked if they were Romani (colloquially referred to as Gypsies, although that term is now usually considered a slur) who live in Ireland.  She said no -- the story is more interesting than that.

And indeed it is.

The Travellers, or Mincéirí, are a generally nomadic group of people whose origins are shrouded in mystery, but who by some accounts have lived on the island as an identifiable group since at least the twelfth century C.E.  In the Irish language they're called An Lucht Siúil -- "the walking people."  They have a distinct style of dress, including emphasis on beadwork and embroidery, and their own sets of tunes and songs.  They even speak a separate language -- Shelta -- which contains words from Irish and English, as well as a number of what appear to be neologisms.  It's not been well-studied, because as a group with a history of persecution, the Travellers are (understandably) reluctant to share their knowledge with outsiders.  What's known of it, though, seems to be mutually unintelligible to both speakers of Irish and English, and to qualify as an actual separate language (i.e., not a dialect or a pidgin).

Despite the fact that they've experienced discrimination, and the difficulty of maintaining their lifestyle in the face of an increasingly homogenized, technological world, there are still over thirty thousand people in Ireland who self-identify as Travellers.

A Traveller caravan in July 1954 [Image credit: National Library of Ireland]

Their origins are a mystery.  There are Romani in Ireland, just as there are in most European countries; although they occupy a similar societal niche as the Travellers, they seem to be unrelated.  (Genetic studies of Romani have shown fairly conclusively that they are an Indo-Aryan people who made their way into Europe something like a thousand years ago from what is now the Indian state of Rajasthan.)  An analysis of the genetics of the Travellers has found that they are essentially Irish in origin, although have been reproductively isolated from the rest of the population since at least the eleventh century C.E., and possibly before.  This study concluded that while related, the Travellers are as distinct from the rest of the Irish as the Icelanders are from the Norwegians.

How could this have happened?  One hypothesis -- and it's no more than that -- is that the ancestors of the Travellers belonged to an itinerant profession that was looked down upon and segregated not because of genetic unrelatedness, but because of social stigma (similar to the Dalits of India).  Like many people with a history of oppression, they are struggling to maintain their language, culture, and identity, and have finally achieved recognition by the Irish government as a distinct ethnic group worthy of protection.

Logo of the All-Travellers Forum (Mincéir Whiden is Shelta for "Travellers talking")

This group highlights once again the difficulty of defining what we mean by race or ethnicity.  Genetically, the Travellers are very similar to the Irish, and seem to share a common origin some time in the last millennium.  Their language, Shelta, probably started out being a pidgin of Old Gaelic and Middle English, but now (like the Kreyòl language of Haiti) has evolved and strengthened into an actual complex and complete language.  Culturally, they're distinct enough to warrant governmental recognition and at least some efforts toward protection and support.

This is hardly the only such case known.  Here in the United States, we've got the Melungeons of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, the Brass Ankles of South Carolina, and the Redbones of southwestern Louisiana, all of which seem from genetic studies to be "tri-racial isolates" descended from a combination of sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, and western European ancestors, but who -- like the Travellers -- have been separate long enough to develop their own distinct cultures.  My mother's people, the Cajuns, are another such case; they're predominantly of Nova Scotian French ancestry, but have a good admixture of Indigenous Canadian, French Creole, Spanish, and German ancestry, and by virtue of being isolated for a good two centuries, have developed a unique culture and language.  My having learned French as a child from my older relatives means I have a strong Cajun accent when I speak it.  When I've visited Québec, I've often found it difficult to understand and be understood -- another example, to pilfer a quip from Oscar Wilde, of two countries separated by the same language.

So there you have it.  Thank you to the reader who suggested the topic; I always love it when my research for this blog results in my learning something I hadn't known about.  I find human genetics, ethnicity, language, and migration patterns endlessly fascinating -- explaining my choice of a field for my master's degree, and the frequency with which the topic shows up here at Skeptophilia.  And I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the truth is more complex than our desire to pigeonhole reality would suggest.  As Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a time or a life looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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