The Black Monk of Pontefract

One of the difficulties with discouraging bogus claims of the paranormal is the profit motive.

A lot of it, of course, is that the money that stands to be made can be significant.  There's not only the possibility of writing about alleged supernatural encounters, and/or making films about them, there's also paranormal tourism -- and I'm not just talking about the "ghost walks" that happen pretty much every night in every big city the world over.

I ran into a good example of this just yesterday when I happened upon a link to the story of the "Black Monk of Pontefract."  This apparition has been called "the most violent poltergeist in Britain," and is seen at 30 East Drive, Chequerfield Estate, Pontefract, West Yorkshire.

The story began when a couple named Jean and Joe Pritchard, and their children Phillip and Diane, moved into the house in 1966.  Shortly afterward, the entire family -- along with Jean's mother Mrs. Scholes, and a neighbor named Marie Kelly -- started experiencing bizarre occurrences.  Sometimes when the kitchen tap was turned on, green foam came out instead of water.  A wardrobe in Phillip's room suddenly started swaying back and forth, thumping on the floor.  Puddles of water appeared in various locations around the house.  Scariest of all, Marie Kelly was locking up the house -- she was looking after it while the Pritchards were away -- and found that Joe and Jean's wedding photograph had been slashed.

There was a lull for a while, but soon events picked up again, and in fact got way worse.  Food left on counters showed bite marks.  Light switches flickered on and off with no one there.  The family members heard footsteps, and saw objects thrown through the air.  Worst of all was when the local vicar came and tried to talk to the culprit -- and a candlestick floated up into the air, followed by the entire china closet falling over, smashing everything inside.

The haunting had numerous witnesses.  Joe Pritchard's sister Maude Peerce, a vocal disbeliever in paranormal phenomena, said as much while in the house -- and the next thing she knew, an unseen hand had dumped an entire pitcher of milk on her.  René Holden, Jean Pritchard's sister-in-law, saw a whole carton of eggs fly through the air and smash against the kitchen wall.

It was only after this had been going on for some time that the Pritchards actually saw the entity itself.  It was, they said, a figure wearing a dark robe and cowl, like a monk's habit.  This was the point that the paranormal investigators got involved, in the person of Tom Cuniff of the Doncaster Psychical Research Group.  He got made contact with the perpetrator, he said -- it was the ghost of a monk who had been hanged during the reign of Henry VIII for the rape and murder of a teenage girl, and whose angry spirit still resided there.  It even got the attention of novelist Colin Wilson, who visited the house in 1980.  "The ground itself contains some peculiar force that favours 'manifestations,'" Wilson wrote.  "The early haunting was triggered by Phillip and by his psychological tension.  The 'entity' remained in the area until Diane – who herself seems to possess undeveloped mediumistic powers – could provide the energy it needed to manifest itself."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The house has figured prominently in books and at least one film.  But here's where the profit motive comes in; shortly after the film (When the Lights Went Out) was released, producer Bill Bungay bought the house for £80,000 -- and rents it out to thrill-seekers and paranormal investigators for a cool £300 per person per night.

It's currently booked up two years ahead, with a waiting list as long as your arm, despite the fact that you have to sign a hold-harmless waiver before you can stay there.

Okay, so what's going on here?

As I've said many times before, I'm not saying the paranormal is impossible.  Thus far, the evidence I've seen does not meet the minimum standard that would be required to convince a rationalist skeptic, but that's as far as I'll go.  Present me with better quality evidence, and I'll have no choice but to change my mind.

Here, though... I see very little that couldn't be accomplished by fakery.  If it is a hoax, which of the eyewitnesses were dupes and which were in cahoots with the perpetrators is anyone's guess; I'm not going to point any fingers.  I've just seen too many examples of "True Tales of the Supernatural" that turned out to be some mix of trickery and gullibility to dismiss the possibility out of hand.  And considering how many honest-to-goodness skeptics are out there, willing to investigate, you'd think if there really was a honest-to-goodness haunting that was this blatant and in-your-face, it'd be a shoo-in to win someone James Randi's million-dollar prize for proving a paranormal claim under scientifically-acceptable conditions.

So I'm still dubious.  Especially -- to return to my original point -- considering how much money there is to be made from the Black Monk's existence.

Anyhow, that's our creepy tale for the day.  Even if I'm not convinced by it.  And if I end up getting pelted by eggs or having my china closet fall over today, I guess it's no more than I deserve.

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No boys allowed

Sexual reproduction may be a gamble -- requiring two willing participants being in the same place at the same time -- but its advantages outweigh the risk.

And I'm not just talking about the fact that it's kind of fun.

Asexually-reproducing organisms, like many bacteria and protists, some plants and fungi, and a handful of animals, have the advantages that it's fast, and only requires one parent.  There's a major downside, however; a genetic phenomenon called Muller's ratchet.  Muller's ratchet has to do with the fact that the copying of DNA, and the passing of those copies on to offspring, is not mistake-proof.  Errors -- called mutations -- do happen.  Fortunately, they're infrequent, and we even have enzymatic systems that do what amounts to proofreading and error-correction to take care of most of them.  A (very) few mutations actually lead to a code that works better than the original did, but the majority of the ones that slip by the safeguards cause the genetic message to malfunction.

It's called a "ratchet" because, like the handy tool, it only turns one way -- in this case, from order to chaos.  Consider a sentence in English -- space and punctuation removed:

TOBEORNOTTOBETHATISTHEQUESTION

Now, let's say there's a random mutation on the letter in the fourth position, which converts it to:

TOBGORNOTTOBETHATISTHEQUESTION

The message is still pretty much readable, although the second word is now spelled wrong.  But most of us would have been able to figure out what it was supposed to say.

Now, suppose a second mutation strikes.  There is a chance that it would affect the fourth position again, and purely by accident convert the erroneous g back to an e, but that likelihood is vanishingly small.  This is called a back mutation, and is more likely in DNA -- which, of course, is what this is an analogy to -- because there are only four letters (A, T, C, and G) in DNA's "alphabet," as compared to the 26 English letters.  But it's still unlikely, even so.  You can see that at each "generation," the mutations build up, every new one further corrupting the message, until you end up with a string of garbled letters from which not even a cryptographer could puzzle out what the original sentence had been.

Sexual reproduction is a step toward remedying Muller's ratchet.  Having two copies of each gene (a condition known as diploidy) makes it more likely that at least one of them still works.  Many genetic diseases -- especially the ones inherited as recessives -- are losses of function, where copying errors have caused that stretch of the DNA to malfunction.  But if you inherited a good copy from your other parent, then lucky you, you're healthy (although you can still pass your "hidden" faulty copy on to your children).

This, incidentally, is why inbreeding -- both parents coming from the same genetic stock -- is a bad idea.  It doesn't cause problems in brain development, which a lot of people used to think.  But what it does mean is that if both parents have a recent common ancestor, the faulty genes one of them carries are very likely the same ones the other does, and the offspring has a higher chance of inheriting both damaged copies and thus showing the effects of the loss of function.  It's this mechanism that explains why a lot of human recessive genetic disorders are characteristic of particular ethnic groups, such as cystic fibrosis in northern Europeans, Tay-Sachs disease in Ashkenazic Jews, and malignant hyperthermia in French Canadians.  It only shows up in the children when both parents are from the same heritage -- which is why "miscegenation laws," preventing intermarriage between people of different races or ethnic backgrounds, are exactly backwards.  Mixed-race children are actually less likely to suffer from recessive genetic disorders -- the mom and dad each had their own "genetic load" of faulty genes, but there was no overlap between the two sets of errors.  Result: healthy kid.

So, how do asexual species get away with it?

Some of them -- like many bacteria -- just do a copy-and-paste job and create multiple copies of important genes.  That way, if Muller's ratchet knocks out one copy, they still have backups.  But I learned about another method, one I didn't know about, from an alert reader, who asked me if I'd ever heard of bdelloid rotifers -- which I had, although not much more than the name.  They're little microscopic animals that live in freshwater ponds, and seem entirely unremarkable.

Turns out they're extremely remarkable.

Scanning electron micrograph of bdelloid rotifers, along with close-ups of their jaws [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Diego Fontaneto, Bdelloid, CC BY 2.5]

The first new thing I learned was recent research has shown that rotifers are a paraphyletic group -- they don't form a clade, i.e. a group containing all the descendants of a particular branch point on the tree of life.  What used to be Phylum Rotifera has been rearranged because the thorny-headed worms -- formerly Phylum Acanthocephala -- were found through genetic studies to be more closely related to bdelloids than the bdelloids are to other rotifers, so either you'd have to lump the acanthocephalans in with the rotifers, or else split the entire group up.  Taxonomists mostly are leaning toward the former, creating a new Phylum Syndermata which contains all the rotifers and the spiny-headed worms.

But the bdelloids have another feature that's flat-out weird.  The species in this entire group are made up only of females, and they're parthenogenetic -- producing offspring without sexual reproduction.  There has never been a male bdelloid observed in nature.  So how do they not end up getting clobbered by the genetic Game of Telephone that is Muller's ratchet?

Turns out they get away with it by swiping genes from other organisms -- including not only other rotifers, but bacteria, fungi, and even plants!

Called horizontal gene transfer, this is something that is pretty routine in bacteria, but almost unheard of in animals.  Here's a quote from the paper by Evgeniy Gladyshev (of Harvard University) et al. I linked above, that first documented this.  Gladyshev sounds as astonished as the rest of us, doesn't he?

Horizontal gene transfer in metazoans has been documented in only a few species and is usually associated with endosymbiosis or parasitism.  By contrast, in bdelloid rotifers we found many genes that appear to have originated in bacteria, fungi, and plants, concentrated in telomeric regions along with diverse mobile genetic elements.  Bdelloid proximal gene-rich regions, however, appeared to lack foreign genes, thereby resembling those of model metazoan organisms.  Some of the foreign genes were defective, whereas others were intact and transcribed; some of the latter contained functional spliceosomal introns.  One such gene, apparently of bacterial origin, was overexpressed in Escherichia coli and yielded an active enzyme.  The capture and functional assimilation of exogenous genes may represent an important force in bdelloid evolution.

What shocks me most about this is how the hell this doesn't muck things up further.  I mean, it's a little like finding some typos in a book you're reading, and trying to solve the problem by tearing pages out of other books and inserting them into your book in random places.  Okay, maybe you now have fewer overall typos in the book than you did before, but what's the chance you picked up something you can actually use?

Apparently this point is still being studied.

So a peculiar little pond creature somehow makes no-boys-allowed parthenogenesis work by pilfering genes from all and sundry.  Which I have to admit is ingenious, but it's also just strange.  Darwin didn't know how right he was when he talked about "many forms most beautiful and most wonderful."  Can you imagine how gobsmacked he'd be if he could see what we know about biology today?

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It's a bird! It's a plane! No...

Thanks to my friend, the ever-sharp-eyed author Gil Miller, I now have a giant bruise in the middle of my forehead from doing facepalms.

Gil's contribution to my ongoing struggle against brain damage came about because of a website called The Living Sky, wherein we're told that there is a "new scientific answer to the mystery of UFOs."  Naturally eager to find out what this "scientific answer" might be, I started poking around the site, figuring I'd find that despite the word "new," it'd turn out to be the usual stuff about alien visitations and spaceships and faster-than-light travel.

Nope.

UFOs, we are told, aren't super-high-tech crafts that have crossed interstellar space to visit a planet that, frankly, more resembles a cosmic lunatic asylum than anywhere I'd want to visit.  UFOs aren't, in fact, crafts of any kind.

They're...

... lord have mercy, I'm having a hard time even writing this...

... they're sky jellyfish.

Well, that is new, I have to admit.

I wish I was making this up.  But wait... they have proof!  Here it is:

Welp, I dunno about you, but I'm convinced.

Oh, but not all of them are sky jellyfish.  Some of them are flying squid.

The... um, logic... goes something like this.

Marine invertebrates are some of the most common life forms on Earth.  They come in all shapes and sizes, and are "ideally suited to move in a fluid habitat."  Which, I think we can all agree, is lucky for them.

Many marine invertebrates have appendages like flaps, tentacles, and tails.  Some are bioluminescent.  Some are venomous, and encounters with them can cause injury or (in extreme cases) death.

The atmosphere is sometimes called "an ocean of air."

Okay, how about UFOs?

UFOs have been spotted in all shapes and sizes, move around quickly, and often have lights and what appear to be appendages.  Some people who have had close encounters with UFOs have sustained injuries.  The parallels are obvious

Also, one mustn't forget that crop circles are circular (as advertised), as are jellyfish.

So q.e.d., as far as I can see.

I should also mention that the site includes pages about "aerobiology" and "aerial plankton."

The whole thing reminded me (rather reluctantly) of the first episode of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Encounter at Farpoint."  I have to admit it had its moments -- notably, introducing John de Lancie as Q -- but the downside was the rather ridiculous premise of a base on a planet that turned out to be an unlimited energy source because it was actually alive.  When Jean-Luc Picard et al. figure this out, and stop the evil base administrator from taking advantage of the creature's powers, it lifts off, and reveals itself as...

... you guessed it...

a Sky Jellyfish.

Me, I thought this was fiction, but what the hell do I know.

What strikes me about all this is that apparently the Living Sky people took a look at the aliens-and-spaceships claims, and said, "Nope.  That's not nearly loony enough.  Let's jettison the whole idea of technology entirely, and blame the whole phenomenon on flying squid."

I dunno, dude.  I've yet to see a crazy idea that becomes more plausible when you add stuff to it that makes it even crazier.

Anyhow, that's our dip into the deep end for today.  Just keep yourself alert, okay?  If you see any suspicious tentacles coming out of the sky toward you, seek shelter immediately.  I hear those things can pack a nasty sting.

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Bridging the Great Divide

One of the main things that separates scientists from the rest of us is that they notice things we very likely just take for granted.

Gregor Mendel started in the research that eventually would uncover the four fundamental laws of inheritance when he noticed that some traits in pea plants seemed to skip a generation.  Percy Spencer was messing around with vacuum tubes, and noticed that in a certain configuration, they caused a chocolate bar in his pocket to melt -- further inquiry led to the invention of the microwave oven.  French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity when he accidentally ruined some photographic plates with what turned out to be a chunk of uranium ore.  Alexander Fleming saved countless lives with the discovery of penicillin -- found because he wondered why a colony of mold on one of his culture plates seemed to be killing the bacteria near it.

I consider myself at least a little above average, savvy-wise, but I don't have that ability -- to look at the world and think, "Hmm, I wonder why that happened?"  Mostly I just assume "that's the way it is" and don't consider it much further, a characteristic I suspect I share with a lot of people.  In this vein, here's some research about something I've known about since I first started reading junior books on astronomy, when I was maybe ten years old, and never thought was odd -- or even worth giving any thought to.

There's a strange gap, something astronomers call "The Great Divide," between Mars and Jupiter.  The distance between Mars and Jupiter is over twice as great as the diameter of the entire inner Solar System.  In that gap is a narrow band called the Asteroid Belt -- and not a hell of a lot else.

Even more peculiar, when you think about it (which as I said, I didn't), is why inside of the Great Divide all the planets are small, dense, and rocky, and outside of it the planets are low-density gas giants (I do remember being shocked by the density thing as a kid, when I read that Saturn's overall density is lower than that of water -- so if you had a swimming pool big enough, Saturn would float).

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The problem with these sorts of observations, though -- even if you stop to wonder about them -- is that until very recently, we pretty much had a sample size of one Solar System to work with, so there was no way to tell if any particular feature of ours was odd or commonplace.  Even now, with the discovery of so many exoplanets that it's estimated there are a billion in our galaxy alone, we only have tentative information about the arrangement of planets around stars, to determine if there's any sort of pattern there, such as the apparent one in our neck of the woods.

Well, it looks like the physicists may have explained the Great Divide in our own Solar System and the compositional difference of the planets on either side of it in one fell swoop.  A team from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Colorado University has found that the Great Divide may be a relic of a ring of material that formed around the early Sun, and then was pulled apart and essentially "sorted" by the gravitational pulls of the coalescing planets.

The authors write:

We propose... that the dichotomy was caused by a pressure maximum in the disk near Jupiter’s location... One or multiple such—potentially mobile—long-lived pressure maxima almost completely prevented pebbles from the Jovian region reaching the terrestrial zone, maintaining a compositional partition between the two regions. We thus suggest that our young Solar System’s protoplanetary disk developed at least one and probably multiple rings, which potentially triggered the formation of the giant planets.

And once the process started, it accelerated, pulling dense, rocky material inward and lightweight, organic-chemical-rich material outward, resulting in a gap -- and an outer Solar System with gas giants surrounding an inner Solar System with small, terrestrial worlds.

"Young stellar systems were often surrounded by disks of gas and dust," said Stephen Mojzsis of Colorado University, who co-authored the paper, which appeared in Nature.  "If a similar ring existed in our own Solar System billions of years ago, it could theoretically be responsible for the Great Divide, because such a ring would create alternating bands of high- and low-pressure gas and dust.  Those bands, in turn, might pull the Solar System's earliest building blocks into several distinct sinks -- one that would have given rise to Jupiter and Saturn, and another Earth and Mars.

"It is analogous to the way the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains causes water to drain one way or another.  That's similar to how this pressure bump would have divided material in the early Solar System...  But that barrier in space was not perfect.  Some outer Solar System material still climbed across the divide.  And those fugitives could have been important for the evolution of our own world...  Those materials that might go to the Earth would be those volatile, carbon-rich materials.  And that gives you water.  It gives you organics."

And ultimately, it gives the Earth life.

Now, it bears keeping in mind that we can't generalize from this to other star systems.  There have already been dozens of "hot Jupiters" discovered, gas giants that orbit close in to their host star; the wonderful astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst mentioned just last week in her monthly "Night Sky News" video the discovery of an ultra-low-density "super-puff planet" that orbits so close that the physicists are scratching their heads trying to explain how the planet's light, fluffy atmosphere doesn't get blown away entirely.  But the Mojzsis et al. paper seems to have taken a big step forward in explaining the configuration of planets in our own immediate neighborhood.

All based on an observation most of us knew about, and very likely few of us had ever thought to question.

All of which brings to mind the wonderful quote by Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi -- "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought."

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Wibbly-wobbly...

Have I told you my favorite joke?

Heisenberg and Schrödinger are out for a drive, and a cop pulls them over.

The cop says to Heisenberg, who was driving, "Hey, buddy, do you know how fast you were going?"

Heisenberg says, "No, but I know exactly where I am."

The cop says, "You were doing 70 miles per hour!"

Heisenberg throws his hands up in annoyance and says, "Great!  Now I'm lost."

The cop scowls and says, "Okay, if you're going to be a wiseguy, I'm gonna search your car."  So he opens the trunk, and there's a dead cat inside.

The cop says, "Did you know there's a dead cat in your trunk?"

Schrödinger says, "Well, there is now."

*brief pause so you can all stop chortling*

The indeterminate nature of reality at the smallest scales always tends to make people shake their head in wonderment at how completely weird the universe is, if they don't simply disbelieve it entirely.  The Uncertainty Principle, peculiar as it sounds, is a fact.  It isn't a limitation of our measurement technique, as if you were trying to find the size of something small and had a poorly-marked ruler, so you could get a more accurate number if you found a better one.  This is something fundamental and built-in about reality.  There are pairs of measurements for which precision is mutually exclusive, such as velocity and position -- the more accurate your information is about one of them, the less you can even theoretically know about the other.

Likewise, the collapse of the wave function, which gave rise to the story of the famous (but ill-fated) cat, is an equally counterintuitive part of how reality is put together.  Outcomes of purely physical questions -- such as where a particular electron is at a given time -- are probabilities, and only become certainties when you measure them.  Again, this isn't a problem with measurement; it's not that the electron really is in a specific location, and you just don't know for sure where until you look.  Before you measure it, the electron's reality is that it's a spread-out field of probabilities.  Something about interacting with it using a measuring device makes that field of probabilities collapse into a specific location -- and no one knows exactly why.

But if you want your mind blown further -- consider in a paper in Physical Review Letters in which we found out how long it takes.

It turns out the wave function collapse isn't instantaneous.  In "Tracking the Dynamics of an Ideal Quantum Measurement," by a team led by Fabian Pokorny of Stockholm University, the researchers describe a set of experiments involving "nudging" a strontium atom with a laser to induce the electrons to switch orbits (i.e. making them assume a particular energy, which is one of those quantum-indeterminate things like position).  The fidelity of the measurement goes down to the millionths of a second, so the scientists were able to keep track of what happened in fantastically short time intervals.

And the more they homed in on what the electron was doing, the fuzzier things got.  The theory is that as you get down on those scales, time itself becomes blurred -- so the shorter the time interval, the less certain you are about when exactly something happened.

"People assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear non-subjective viewpoint, it's more of a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey... stuff." -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"

I don't know about you, but I thought I had kinda sorta wrapped my brain around the quantum indeterminacy of position thing, but this just blew my mind all over again.  Even time is fuzzy?  I shouldn't be surprised; for something so damn familiar, time itself is really poorly understood.  With all of the spatial dimensions, you can move any direction you want; why is time one-way?  It's been explained using the Second Law of Thermodynamics, looking at ordered states and disordered states -- the explanation goes something like this:

Start with an ordered state, such as a hundred pennies all heads-up.  Give them a quick shake.  A few will flip, but not many.  Now you might have 83 heads and 17 tails.  There are a great many possible ways you could have 83 heads and 17 tails as long as you don't care which pennies are which.  Another shake, and it might be 74/26, a configuration that there are even more possibilities for.  And so on.  Since at each turn there are a huge number of possible disordered states and a smaller number of ordered ones, each time you perturb the system, you are much more likely to decrease orderliness than to increase it.  You might shake a 50/50 distribution of pennies and end up with all heads -- but it's so fantastically unlikely that the probability might as well be zero.  This push toward disorder gives an arrow to the direction of time.

Well, that's all well and good, but there's the problem that physical processes are nearly all symmetrical -- most known physics is completely time-reversible.  Consider, for example, watching a ten-second clip of a single billiard ball bouncing off the bumper of a pool table.  Could you tell if you were watching the clip backward or forwards?  It's unlikely.  Such interactions look as sensible physically in real time or time-reversed.

So what time actually is, and why there's an arrow of time, is still a mystery.  Because we certainly feel the passage of time, don't we?  And not from any probabilistic perception of "well, I guess it's more likely time's flowing this way today because things have gotten more disorderly."  It feels completely real -- and completely fixed and invariable.

As Einstein put it, "The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, but it is a stubbornly persistent one."

Anyhow, that's our bizarre scientific discovery of the day.  But I better get this post finished up.  Time's a wasting.

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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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