The ancient immigrant

It's sometimes hard to fathom that only a hundred years ago, there was still a spirited argument going on in the astronomical community over whether the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe -- and that the other "nebulae" might be merely small-ish features lying in the outskirts.

The center of the "Milky Way is all there is" faction was the famous astronomer Harlow Shapley, who was their spokesperson in the 1920 "Great Debate" with Heber Doust Curtis, who believed the "nebulae" (or at least some of them) were very distant galaxies more or less like our own.  Neither man came away from the Debate convinced of the other's reasoning, but the whole affair was conclusively settled a few years later when Edwin Hubble discovered Cepheid variables in the Andromeda Galaxy.  Cepheid variables are a curious type of star that experience a regular periodicity in brightness, and the brilliant astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt had showed that their periods of variability were related in a straightforward way to their intrinsic brightness.  Because of this, they can be used as standard candles -- just as you can estimate how far away a motorcycle is at night if you compare how bright the headlight appears to be with how bright you know it actually is.

So the discovery of Cepheids in Andromeda gave Hubble a way of figuring out how far away it is from us, and it turns out not to be a small cloud in the fringes of our own galaxy, but an "island universe" of its own that's actually slightly larger than the Milky Way, and 2.5 million light years away.  And of course, Hubble and others went on to discover red shift and the expanding universe, and better telescopes showed that there are billions of galaxies out there, some of them so far away that the light they emit has been traveling for most of the age of the known universe in order to get here.

A cool postscript is that Shapley, confronted with this evidence, admitted defeat, and went on to make major contributions to galactic astronomy.  It's what I love about science; it self-corrects, and the best scientists look on these reversals as opportunities rather than embarrassments.  (Although Shapley did allow himself a moment of rueful laughter at his own error, calling Hubble's paper on Cepheids in Andromeda as "the letter that destroyed my universe."

In any case, we now live in a cosmos so much vaster and richer and stranger than the one they knew a century ago -- one can only imagine what more we'll know a hundred years from now.

These musings come up because of a wonderful piece of research out of the University of Chicago, where a group of undergraduate astronomy students were assigned by their teacher, Alex Ji of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, to analyze recent SDSS data for anything anomalous, and they found something astonishing; an ancient star that not only appears to date from the very early universe, but has migrated here from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a star cluster than neighbors the Milky Way.

Astronomers can make a shrewd guess about how old a star is based upon its metallicity -- what proportion of its makeup is anything other than hydrogen and helium.  (Astronomers confusingly call all other elements metals, which must annoy the hell out of the chemists.)  Since all of the hydrogen, and a good fraction of the helium, were formed during the Big Bang -- and virtually all of the other elements have been created since then through nuclear fusion and energetic events like supernovae and neutron star collisions -- the quantity of metals in a star tells you how many cycles of birth and death occurred prior to the star's formation.  The Sun, for example, is fairly metal-rich, and is probably a third- or fourth-generation star; its contents were enriched from the activity of previous generations of stars.  (It's still not as high in metals as the bizarre Przybylski's Star, which is so anomalously high in rare heavy elements that there's a credible case to be made that it was seeded by technological aliens.)

The newly-discovered star, however is the opposite; it's called SDSS-J0715-7334, and from its spectrum it appear to be almost entirely hydrogen and helium.  Even relatively lightweight elements like carbon are so rare in it that they're well-nigh undetectable.  In fact, its total metallicity is 0.005% of the Sun's -- making it by far the most metal-poor star ever detected.

Me, I wonder how this star lived as long as it has.  Most of the universe's first-generation stars have long since exhausted their fuel and either collapsed into white dwarfs or else flared out as supernovae.  How has this one persisted all this time?

Weirder still, the star didn't start out in the Milky Way.  Using its current motion, the students calculated that it originated from outside of our galaxy, and backtracked its path to the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Okay, I'm super impressed.  These are a bunch of undergraduates, for cryin' out loud.  As an undergraduate, I was mostly focused on eating pizza and hanging out with my friends and earning grades that were at least high enough not to get me kicked out of the university.  These young people?

They're getting their names in the author line on papers in Nature Astronomy.

"These students have discovered more than just the most pristine star." said Juna Kollmeier, the Director of SDSS.  "They have discovered their inalienable right to physics.  Surveys like SDSS and Gaia make that possible for students of all ages everywhere on Earth and this example shows that there is still plenty of room for discovery."

So that's our cool story for the day.  An ancient immigrant from another star cluster.  Further evidence of Carl Sagan's evocative words: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

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Losing the plot

What strikes me about the last ten years isn't just the slow slide into fascism, the grift, the corruption, the attempted codification into law of misogyny and bigotry and homophobia and transphobia, but just how fucking weird these people are.

I swear, if I time-traveled back a decade and presented a manuscript to my publisher that was a verbatim transcript of everything that has happened since 2016, he would reject it out of hand on the basis of being ridiculously implausible.

Let's start with disgraced former Representative Matt Gaetz, who this week came out with the announcement that the United States government is forcibly mating humans with aliens to produce "beings capable of communicating with extraterrestrials."  

"I had someone come and brief me who was in a military uniform, worked for the United States Army, that was briefing me on the locations of hybrid breeding programs where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication," Gaetz said. "An actual uniformed member of the United States Army briefed me on that."

There are six of these breeding programs scattered across the country, Gaetz said.

And the person who was interviewing him, ultra-conservative talk show host Benny Johnson, nodded sagely instead of saying what I would have, which is, "Maybe you should consider getting back on your meds, Matt."

Gaetz has said some outrageous things before, but this one has to take the prize.  On the other hand, considering the fact that he has about three acres of forehead, perhaps he knows about all this from first-hand experience:

Then we had the Vice President himself, J. D. Vance, blathering on about aliens as well, but explaining that they're not visitations from intelligent extraterrestrials, they're actually demons from hell.

Because that makes ever so much more sense.

"I don’t think they’re aliens," Vance said, once again apparently in complete seriousness.  "I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a long discussion.  When I came in, I was obsessed with the UFO files, and you start getting really busy worrying about the economy and national security, and things like that.  But I’ve still got three years left as vice president.  I have not been able to spend enough time on this to really understand it, but I am going to.  Trust me, I’m obsessed with this.  I’m more curious than anybody, and I’ve got three years of the very tippy top of the classification."

Sure, J. D.!  Whatever you say!  I bet you have a whole filing cabinet full of stuff labeled "Tippy-Top Secret"!

If all that weren't enough, enter Gregg Phillips, who has been tapped to lead FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery, claiming that he was once teleported to a Waffle House.

"I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House," Phillips said.  "And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like fifty miles away from where I was.  And they said, ‘where are you?’ and I said, ‘a Waffle House.’  And: ‘a Waffle House where?’  And I said: ‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’  And they said: ‘That’s not possible, how can you be at a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia, you just left here a moment ago.’  But it was possible.  It was real."

Or maybe he was just trying to beat a record for the number of times someone said "Waffle House" in one conversation.

I'll admit I've often wished we had Star Trek-style transporters, so I could do stuff like beam over to Tokyo for a nice sushi lunch every so often, but according to Phillips, it's not the joyride you might think.  "Teleporting is no fun," he said.  "You know it’s happening, but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride.  And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was."

Yeah, I'm sure it was, Gregg!  *backs slowly away, keeping my eyes on him at all times*  I hope you really enjoyed your waffles in the Waffle House in Rome, Georgia!  Waffle House Waffle House Waffle House!

*once there's enough distance between us, turns and runs like hell*

You know, this stuff would all be high comedy if these weren't the people currently influencing policy in the United States, people who have held (or are still holding) public office, and who have the amazingly-regenerated ear of Donald Trump.  And the scary part is that Trump, who is not exactly Rhodes Scholar material himself, is remarkably easy to sway as long as you stroke his bloated ego, which explains how certifiable wingnuts like RFK Jr. ended up in cabinet-level positions.

But it's not just him, of course.  The entire administration, and their hangers-on and cheerleaders and sycophants, appear to have completely lost the plot.

One of the criticisms of Joe Biden was that he appeared bland and boring -- people called him a "do-nothing" because most of what he accomplished wasn't accompanied by horns blaring and all-caps self-congratulatory posts on Truth Social.  But you know what?  I liked bland and boring.  I liked not having to worry when I turn on my laptop over my morning coffee what the latest lunatic pronouncements from Washington D. C. were going to be.  I would love it if we had leaders who just calmly, quietly, and intelligently did their jobs, instead of violent nutcakes like Pete Hegseth, who appears to believe it's his sacred duty to usher us into the End Times so that Jesus will come back, presumably wearing camo and toting an AR-15.

Deus vult, baby.

On the other hand, to go back to my starting point, I have to wonder... is any of this believable?  There's an element of surreality to the entire world right now that brings back to mind a comment I've made before; that maybe we're all in a computer simulation, and the aliens in charge have gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us. 

Or as Mark Twain put it, "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable."

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The lost temple

The history of ancient Rome is replete with strange characters, but one of the strangest is the ultimately pathetic figure of Elagabalus, who reigned for only four years (May 218 to March 222 C. E.) before being assassinated at the age of eighteen by the Praetorian Guard on the instigation of his own grandmother, the formidable and ruthless Julia Maesa.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carole Raddato, Marble bust of Roman emperor Elagabalus, ca. 221 AD, Capitoline Museums (20814003112), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Elagabalus, born Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus (so you can see why he's usually known by his single sobriquet), has been the subject of dubiously accurate lauds by the LGBTQ+ community because he was clearly queer; contemporaneous records describe his penchant for dressing as a woman and taking male lovers.  The problem is, his sexual orientation notwithstanding, he was a dreadful choice for ruler, preferring to throw lavish festivities than to pay any attention to affairs of state.  Perhaps unsurprising given that he landed on the throne at the age of fourteen; I don't know many fourteen-year-old boys who, given a choice between unlimited parties and sex and dealing with the responsibilities of governing an empire, would choose the latter.

In any case, if you want a queer Roman icon to admire, a much better choice is the Emperor Hadrian, who fell headlong in love with a Greek man named Antinous, but was also a pretty decent ruler.

And actually, given the (many) stunningly beautiful depictions of Antinous Hadrian had commissioned, I can understand why the emperor went goggle-eyed over him.  I would have, too.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Marie-Lan Nguyen, Antinous Farnese MAN Napoli Inv6030 n02, CC BY 2.5]

Poor Elagabalus, on the other hand, shouldn't have been on the throne in the first place, which would still have been true if he were one hundred percent straight.  Not only was he a completely incompetent ruler, he also made the cardinal error of trying to change Roman religious beliefs by decree, tossing out Jupiter and Juno and Vesta and all the rest in favor of a Sun-god called Elagabal he'd swiped from a Middle Eastern cult (thus his nickname of "Elagabalus").  This went over about as well as the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten's similar attempt fifteen hundred years earlier.  People were pissed, and he quickly made himself a number of powerful enemies amongst the Senate, aristocracy, and Praetorian Guard, which in ancient Rome was generally a short road toward a messy demise.  Elagabalus got wind of what was coming, and his mother, Julia Soaemias, hid him inside a chest, but the Praetorians found them and killed them both, cut off their heads, stripped the corpses naked, dragged them around Rome, and threw what was left into the Tiber River.

So much for Elagabalus.  But the story doesn't end there, because -- according to writings from shortly after his death -- the unfortunate young Emperor had during his short reign built an enormous temple to Elagabal that was demolished following his fall from power.  Modern archaeologists tried to locate the site without success.  Even after hints that it had been somewhere in Syria, archaeological investigations didn't identify for certain where it had once stood -- or if, perhaps, it never existed, and was a post-assassination fabrication.

The search was complicated by the fact that (1) "somewhere in Syria" is a big place, and (2) until very recently, Syria hasn't exactly been a safe region wherein to conduct archaeological research.  But now that things have settled down (a little), a team from the University of Sharjah started investigating a site that was long rumored to have been the location of Elagabal's temple -- the Great Mosque of Homs.  Homs, originally Emesa, is a city of immense antiquity, ruled by the Seleucids, Romans, Byzantine Greeks, Arabs, and Ottoman Turks in succession, each culture leaving its stamp on the buildings and the people.  It was known as a site for the worship of Elagabal, so the idea that Elagabalus's grand temple was somewhere in the vicinity was a decent guess.  And given that people all over the world have the habit of building and rebuilding places of worship on the same sacred sites, the Great Mosque was a good starting point.

And they found what they were looking for -- a Greek inscription that talks about a being associated with the Sun, likening him to the wind, storms, and the power of the leopard, all descriptors known to have been used by Elagabalus to honor his favorite deity (and, by reflected glory, himself).

It's not proof, of course.  That this was a site where Elagabal was worshiped doesn't mean this was the site that Elagabalus himself commissioned.  But it does at least lend credence to the claim, and gives the archaeologists a reason to keep looking for more clues.

So now we have at least a little more in the way of hard evidence about the short, pitiful reign of an inept teenager who is yet another in the long list of examples illustrating why "royal blood" is a completely fucked-up concept.  I can't help but feel sorry for the kid, and it brings back to mind an earlier musing about why the hell people were so eager to be on the throne in the first place, given how few emperors died of old age.  Doesn't seem like four years of partying and sex were worth the end result, frankly.

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The shaggy one

After a recent post about the "Beast of Gévaudan," an undeniably real creature that slaughtered between sixty and a hundred of the inhabitants of Lozère département in south-central France during a three-year period in the middle of the eighteenth century, a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the message, "What is it with French people getting eaten by monsters?  It's a wonder any of your ancestors survived."

My initial reaction was that plenty of other cultures have legends of human-eating monstrosities -- the Algonquian Wendigo, the Jötunns of Scandinavia, and the Japanese Yama-Uba are three that come to mind.  But I hadn't heard about any French ones other than the aforementioned Beast, so I decided to check out the source he sent.

The link was to a reference in a book by Carol Rose about creatures of legend, and was about La Velue de la Ferté-Bernard.  La Velue translates to "the shaggy one," but if you're thinking about some friendly, sheepdog-like animal, you'll need to revise your mental image.  La Velue haunted the region around the River Huisne, in northwestern France -- so at least it picked on a different bunch of peasants to terrorize than the Beast of Gévaudan did -- and is described as being the size of an ox, with an egg-shaped body, and having long green fur through which poison-tipped quills protruded.

Oh, and it could either cause floods, or shoot fire from its mouth.  Possibly both.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons PixelML, La Velue, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Folklorist Paul Cordonnier-Détrie did a great deal of research into people's beliefs about La Velue, and published a book on it in 1954.  Apparently the consensus is that it rampaged throughout the region in the fifteenth century, eating people and livestock and causing fires and/or floods (whichever version you went for earlier).  Like the Beast of Gévaudan, the thing proved remarkably difficult to kill.  It even made its way into the city of La Ferthé-Bernard, and when challenged, retreated into the River Huisne, but arrows and other weapons had little effect on it.  La Velue, says Cordonnier-Détrie, is "of the same family as the Tarasque of Provence," another human-eating monster, this one resembling the unholy offspring of a lion and a snapping turtle.

So okay, maybe French people did have more problems than most with being eaten by monsters. 

In any case, like the Beast of Gévaudan, eventually La Velue met its match.  It made the mistake of grabbing a "virtuous young woman" called l'Agnelle ("Little Lamb"), and her fiancé understandably objected to this, so he drew his sword and struck the monster in the tail.  Whether he knew this would work or it was just dumb luck isn't certain, but either way he hit the one vulnerable part of the monster, and it "writhed in agony and then died."  The victory over La Velue was the cause of much rejoicing, and the site where it supposedly happened -- near the old Roman bridge in the village of Yvré-l'Évêque in Sarthe département -- hosted a yearly festival commemorating the young man's bravery that persisted well into the eighteenth century.

The bridge in Yvré-l'Évêque where La Velue met its doom [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Le Mans, Pont Roman d'Yvré l'évêque, CC BY 3.0]

So, what are we to make of this?

Unfortunately, the answer is "probably not much."  Unlike the Beast of Gévaudan, whose existence and murderous tendencies are extremely well-documented in primary sources from the time, La Velue seems to be a lot more tenuous.  There isn't much in the way of contemporaneous source material to go by; most of it is in the realm of "back in the day there was this terrifying monster...", which honestly doesn't carry much weight.

On the other hand, it's curious how specific the legend is about the places it lived and died.  It makes you wonder if there was some kind of creature attacking people back then, that later got embellished and inflated (and equipped with fiery breath and poisonous quills), and became La Velue by a process of accretion.

We'll probably never know.  But it does make for an interesting story.  Good enough that a version of it ended up in Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings (although under the Spanish name of "La Peluda").

In any case, if you live in France, I can only hope you're not still having to deal with monsters.  The world's crazy enough these days without worrying that you're going to be eaten by a shaggy green thing, or a giant crazed wolf, or a lion-turtle hybrid, or whatnot.  Me, if I thought those things were still around, I probably wouldn't ever leave my house.

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A monster of a problem

Apparently, it's easier than I thought to give your soul to Satan.

You don't have to attend a Black Mass, or hold a séance, or even wear an upside-down crucifix.  Nothing that flashy, or even deliberate, is necessary.

All you have to do is drink the wrong energy drink.

I am referring, of course, to "Monster," that whiz-bang combination of sugar, vitamins, various herbal extracts of dubious health effect, and truly staggering amounts of caffeine, which misleadingly does not include "demons" on the ingredients list.

At least that's the contention of the also-misleadingly named site Discerning the World, which would be more accurately called Everything Is Trying To Eat Your Soul.  This site claims that the "Monster" logo, with its familiar trio of green claw marks on a black background, is actually a symbol for "666" because the individual claw marks look a little like the Hebrew symbol for the number six:

Which, of course, is way more plausible than the idea that it's a stylized letter "M."  You know, "M" as in "Monster."

But no.  Every time you consume a Monster energy drink, you are swallowing...

... pure evil.

Now lest you think that these people are just making some kind of metaphorical claim -- that the Monster brand has symbolism that isn't wholesome, and that it might inure the unwary with respect to secular, or even satanic, imagery -- the website itself puts that to rest pretty quickly.  It's a literal threat, they say, ingested with every swallow:

The Energy Drink contains ‘demonic’ energy and if you drink this drink you are drinking a satanic brew that will give you a boost...  People who are not saved, who are not covered by the Previous [sic] Blood of Jesus Christ are susceptible to their attacks.  Witchcraft is being used against the world on a scale so broad that it encompasses everything you see on a daily basis – right down to children’s clothing at your local clothing store.

So that's pretty unequivocal.  Never mind that if you'll consult the Hebrew numeral chart above, the logo looks just as much like "777" as it does like "666."

Or, maybe, just like a capital "M."  Back to the obvious answer.

Unfortunately, though, there are people who think that the threat is real, which is a pretty terrifying worldview to espouse.  Not only did I confirm this by looking at the comments on the website (my favorite one: "It is truly SCARY that all the little kids who play their Pokemon and video games are being GROOMED to enter this gateway to hell.  Satan wants to devour our young and he will do it any way he can."), a guy posted on the r/atheism subreddit that he'd been enjoying a Monster drink on a train, and some woman came up to him and snarled, "I hope you enjoy your drink IN HELL," and then stalked away.

What, exactly, are you supposed to say to something like that?  "Thank you, I will?"  "Here, would you like a sip?"  "Yes, it fills me with everlasting fire?"  Since quick thinking is not really my forte, I'm guessing that I'd probably just have given her a goggle-eyed stare as she walked off, and thought of many clever retorts afterward.

"It's damned good."  That's what I'd like to say to her.

Not, of course, that it would be the truth, since my opinion is that Monster tastes like someone took the effluent from a nuclear power plant, added about twenty pounds of sugar, and let it ferment in the sun all day long.  But that's just me.

And of course, there's my suspicion that the owner of the Monster trademark is probably thrilled by this notoriety -- they pride themselves on being edgy, and their target advertising demographic is young, athletic, iconoclastic rebel types, or those who fancy themselves as such.  So no doubt this whole demonic-entity thing fits right into Monster's marketing strategy.

Convenient for both sides.  The perennially-fearful hell-avoiders have something else to worry about, and the Monster people have an extra cachet for their product.  One hand washes the other, even if one of them belongs to Satan, who (if he were real) would probably approve wholeheartedly of capitalism and the profit motive.

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View of a cataclysm

As an example of what I wrote about yesterday -- that the universe is amazing enough without having to make shit up to embellish it -- today I want to tell you about one of the latest discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.

First, a bit of background.

I've written here before about gamma-ray bursters -- the phenomenon that one astronomer described as "second only to the Big Bang as the most energetic phenomenon known."  They ordinarily last between a few seconds and a couple of minutes, and during that time release more energy than the Sun will in its entire ten-billion-odd-year-long life.  Interestingly, the cause is unknown.  Various models have suggested the phenomenon might result from two neutron stars spiraling into one another, a stellar hypergiant undergoing core collapse, or energy release from a magnetar.  Or, possibly, more than one of the above.

We simply don't know.

Whichever it turns out to be, you would not want to be looking down the gun barrel of one of these things when it went off.  It's thought that a hundred or so light years would be what is terrifyingly known as the "kill zone."  Farther off, though, it could still be catastrophic; there's some suspicion that the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction -- one of the "Big Five" mass extinctions, and second only to the Permian-Triassic "Great Dying" event in terms of magnitude -- was caused by a nearby gamma ray burst.

Fortunately, there's nothing close to us that looks capable of doing this.  All of the ones we've observed have been in other galaxies, where they register as blips in the gamma ray region of the spectrum on powerful telescopes, and pose no threat to us here.  Which is a good thing, because heaven knows we have enough else to worry about at the moment.

Anyhow, that's all background.  An astrophysicist at Rutgers University was analyzing data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope last July, and discovered something mind-boggling -- a gamma-ray burster called GRB 250702B, located in a galaxy eight billion light years away.  But its distance, and the fact that we could see it from that far away, isn't the wildest thing about it.  You remember how I said that most gamma-ray bursters have a duration of between a few seconds and a minute or two?  And during that time they exceed the Sun's entire lifetime energy output?

This one lasted for seven hours.

That, my friends, is what the astrophysics community refers to as "a metric fucktonne of energy."  I can't even wrap my brain around how humongous this thing was, and I have a bachelor's degree in physics, so you'd think I'd be able to handle big numbers.

In my defense, neither, apparently, can the astrophysicists.  Eliza Neights, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said it was like "nothing we've ever seen before."  And whatever it was, it's left behind nothing much visible to study.  "In such vibrant and unprecedented detail, we see just one very large galaxy with a dust lane," said Huei Sears of Rutgers, who led the study.  "The galaxy has such complex structure that it's not a hundred percent clear if there's anything left to see of the explosion, but if there is, it's really faint."

Artists' conception of GRB 250702B [Image credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick]

One suggestion is that this outburst was the result of a tidal disruption event -- a massive star, or possibly a neutron star, being ripped to shreds as it spirals into a black hole.

Because that's not a terrifying scenario to think about.

But the fact is, the scientists are struggling to explain what could have caused a cataclysm of this magnitude.  It doesn't fit with known models, and there's the exciting possibility that in order to account for it, we might be in the realm of "new physics."

In any case, here's a nice example of the fact that we don't need to add anything fringe-y to the universe to make it weird and scary and astonishing.  Real science does that just fine on its own.

I mean, I don't know how you could even dream up something wilder than a seven-hour-long energetic burst that makes the Sun look like a wet firecracker.  All I can say is that when Shakespeare talked about "there are more things in Heaven and Earth... than are dreamt of in your philosophy," he was not engaging in hyperbole.

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Beneath the labyrinth

One of the things that bothers me most about the woo-woo mindset is the apparent need they feel to superimpose some kind of paranormal frisson on top of damn near everything, as if what we know from science and rational inquiry isn't fascinating enough.

I mean, really.  Do you need to add any Tao of Physics nonsense to make quantum theory mind-blowingly cool?  Do we need to have the apparent positions of the planets against the backdrop of stars somehow controlling our lives to make astronomy awe-inspiring?  Why is there this bizarre drive to look at the universe around us, with all of its real marvels, and say, "Nope, that's not sufficient"?

That was my reaction to the rather overwrought article I read over at Substack a couple of days ago, entitled, "The Labyrinth at Hawara: What the Scans Found and Why Egypt Won't Let Anyone Dig."  Hawara, it turns out, is a recently-excavated archaeological site in Egypt, near the pyramid of Amenemhet III, and is about 380 by 160 meters -- so, a pretty sizable structure -- that once was made up of hundreds of rooms separated by walls and rows of columns.  Now, it's a ruin, and in fact much of the stone that was used to build it was scavenged for other uses in the intervening four millennia.  Its original purpose is unknown, but it may have been a temple complex.  The historian Herodotus, who visited it in around 430 B.C.E. while it was still standing, described it as follows:

[The Egyptians] made a labyrinth [... which] surpasses even the pyramids.  It has twelve roofed courts with doors facing each other: six face north and six south, in two continuous lines, all within one outer wall.  There are also double sets of chambers, three thousand altogether, fifteen hundred above and the same number under ground. ...  We learned through conversation about [the labyrinth's] underground chambers; the Egyptian caretakers would by no means show them, as they were, they said, the burial vaults of the kings who first built this labyrinth, and of the sacred crocodiles. ...  The upper we saw for ourselves, and they are creations greater than human.  The exits of the chambers and the mazy passages hither and thither through the courts were an unending marvel to us ...  Over all this is a roof, made of stone like the walls, and the walls are covered with cut figures, and every court is set around with pillars of white stone very precisely fitted together.  Near the corner where the labyrinth ends stands a pyramid two hundred and forty feet high, on which great figures are cut.  A passage to this has been made underground.

Which, I think we can all agree, is pretty freakin' cool.

But apparently not cool enough, because the fringe got a hold of this story and began to embellish it.  The Egyptian government has halted deep excavation of the site; the official reason given was the high water table in the area, making digging a fraught endeavor, both from the standpoint of safety and of potentially damaging the site irreversibly.  But we all know what "official reason" means to woo-woos:

It means "lie."

So in came Joe Rogan (because of course he did) and interviewed someone who said that the real reason was a "magnetic anomaly" that scans had discovered in the area, that was evidence of a "thirty- or forty-meter-wide metallic sphere" buried underneath the labyrinth, and the Egyptian government didn't want us finding out anything more about it.  Well, that could only mean one thing, right?

Of course right.  Aliens.  What else?

The Substack article was accompanied by the following, obviously AI-generated image:

This has about as much credibility as a pic that someone claims is "a real photograph of Mordor," but no one comes right out and says that.  The article, and Rogan, and (now) many other fringe-y sources, strongly imply that's really what's under there, and the Egyptian government is stopping anyone from looking into it further because, um, reasons.

Oh, and if that wasn't enough, Rogan also said that in order to prove all this, we need to "occupy Egypt, and just fucking get this done."

*brief pause to stop screaming and throwing heavy objects*

Well, actual archaeologist Flint Dibble (with a name like "Flint Dibble," what other profession could he have gone into?) had some choice words for Rogan et al. about his penchant for "pseudoarchaeological crap," and calls out the "metallic sphere" claim for the nonsense it is.  There was no anomalous magnetic scan, and there is zero evidence of a metallic sphere (or a metallic anything) buried at Hawara, much less what Rogan says is there (a spaceship, natch).

C'mon, people.  Ancient Egypt is cool.  Hawara is a site that was already almost two thousand years old when Jesus was born.  This temple complex -- or whatever it was -- is amazing, astonishing, fascinating.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO ADD A FUCKING SPACESHIP TO MAKE IT COOLER.

Sorry.  I said I was going to stop screaming. 

I'm really done now.

Anyhow, that's today's maddening visit to the fringe.  The upshot is that you should go to actual sources by actual archaeologists (such as this one) for your information, and stop listening to Joe Rogan, whose grasp of the truth is such that if he said the sky was blue and the grass was green, the chance of their being some other color is close to a hundred percent.

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