A point I've made before, but one I think is absolutely critical to skeptics, is that sometimes we simply don't have answers -- and are forced to admit that unless further information turns up, we might never have.
I get that it's intensely frustrating. It seems to be hardwired into our brains that some conclusion, any conclusion, is better than remaining in doubt. I recall once being asked by a student if I thought there was an afterlife. My answer was, "I don't know."
"But what do you think?" the student said.
"I don't think anything. The information we have from phenomena like near-death experiences is inconclusive. And no one comes back to report from an actual death experience. I'll find out for sure eventually, but at the moment, I don't have enough evidence to decide one way or the other. So the answer is 'I don't know.'"
This obviously irritated the hell out of the student, and he said, "But you must have an opinion."
"Why?" I answered. "If you want my opinion, it's that the world could do with a great many fewer opinions and a great many more facts."
The problem is, of course, that the intolerance for frustration stemming from a desperation to have the matter settled often drives us to unsupported speculation -- and these meanderings often end up passed along as fact. (How many different The Jack the Ripper Mystery Solved! books have been written? All equally confident, but all with different solutions?) As a less-known but equally fascinating (and, reassuringly, less violent) example, let's consider the strange case of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.
In 1797, near the town of Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance in Aveyron département in southern France, three hunters came upon a boy of about nine. He was completely naked, and ran from them, but they trapped him when he climbed a tree. After capturing him -- and finding he couldn't (or wouldn't) speak, but didn't seem dangerous -- they brought him into the town, where he was taken in by an elderly widow who fed and clothed him.
Within a week, he disappeared -- leaving his clothes behind.
Over the next two years, he was spotted periodically in the woods, but always eluded capture. Then -- in January of 1800 -- he came out of the forest on his own. He eventually ended up in an orphanage in Rodez. Upon examination, psychiatrist Philippe Pinel suggested he was mentally disabled, probably from birth; scars on his body suggested he'd spent most of his childhood in the wilderness.
Of course, the question arose of how a small child could survive in the forest, even in the relatively temperate south of France. How he didn't die of exposure, from starvation, or from being attacked and eaten by wild animals, was a significant mystery. Were his scars from the cuts and scrapes of living outdoors naked -- or were they from early abuse? The physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who worked extensively with the boy (whom he christened "Victor") believed that the evidence supported that Victor had "lived in an absolute solitude from his fourth or fifth almost to his twelfth year, which is the age he may have been when he was taken in the Caune woods."
At this period, France was just emerging from the chaos and horror of the Reign of Terror, and the question was raised of whether he was a child whose parents had been imprisoned or executed. Several couples were located in the region who had sons of the right age that had gone missing while they (the parents) were in jail -- but none of them recognized Victor.
Another curious twist is that one prominent philosophy amongst the intelligentsia at the time was the idea of the "Noble Savage" -- that taken away from the noise and filth and crowds of the city, placed in the tranquility of the forests and glades, humans would revert to some sort of pre-Adam-and-Eve-eating-the-apple blissful state of oneness with nature. People like the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau tended to have a rather optimistic -- some might say unwarrantedly optimistic -- view of the potential of humanity and the natural world. (Alfred Lord Tennyson's observation that "Nature is red in tooth and claw" came later.) So Victor was studied intensively to see if he showed any signs of Edenic grace and innocence.
Not so much, it turned out. He still didn't like wearing clothes -- although consented to do so when it was cold -- and was fond of doing what just about all teenage boys do at least once a day. Other than being mute, and having peculiar eating habits (raw vegetables were by far his favorite food), he didn't seem to exhibit any sort of before-the-Fall chastity and sinlessness. He did show some signs of what we would now probably classify as autistic behavior -- rocking back and forth or hugging himself when stressed -- and there's been speculation that this, along with his lack of speech, may have been why he was abandoned in the first place.
Victor never learned to speak, other than the words lait ("milk") and oh, Dieu ("oh, God"). But he was never violent, and in fact seemed predisposed to being gentle and caring. When he was around eighteen, he went to stay with a Madame Guérin, with whom he lived for the rest of his life. And when Madame Guérin's husband died, and she was sitting at her dinner table weeping, Victor startled her by going up and putting his arms around her and holding her while she cried.
Victor of Aveyron died in 1828 of pneumonia, at the age of somewhere around forty, and took to his grave whatever he knew about his origins.
The lack of information here is what facilitates wild speculation. Much has been written about Victor -- some claiming that he was below average intelligence, others that he was of ordinary intelligence but autistic, others still that he was basically a normal young man and his early childhood trauma led him to hide the fact that he understood everything people were saying (and, perhaps, could speak as well, but simply refused to do so).
The truth, of course, is that we don't know who Victor was, what his mental capacity was, or where he came from. There just isn't enough in the way of hard data, despite the extensive studies of the young man done by Itard and others. So the correct conclusion is not to come to a conclusion at all.
It's frustrating, especially given such an intriguing story, but that's where we have to leave it.
Like I said, I get the human drive to understand, and how a mystery can nibble at your brain, keeping you puzzling over it. And this can be a very good thing; two examples I can think of, from my own field of linguistics, that were finally solved due to someone's dogged tenacity and absolute refusal to give up are Jean-François Champollion's decoding of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the decipherment of the Linear B script of Crete by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.
But sometimes -- there simply isn't enough information. And at that point, we have to let it go, and hope that more turns up.
In the case of Victor of Aveyron, though, that's pretty unlikely. So we're left with a mystery: a feral child showed up in late eighteenth-century France, eventually joined society (more or less), grew up, and finally died, and there is probably no way we'll ever know more. Victor is, and shall almost certainly remain, a cipher.
However confounding that is to our natural intellectual curiosity.
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