Have fun storming the castle!

It started out as a joke.

Ten months ago, community college student Matty Roberts, of Bakersfield, California, thought it'd be entertaining to start a webpage suggesting that there was going to be a massive gathering to storm the gates of Area 51, the military training site in the Nevada desert that has long been associated with aliens and conspiracies.  Called "Storm Area 51: They Can't Stop All of Us," the webpage turned into an internet sensation, and two million people made noises about showing up to rush into the not-so-secret facility on September 20 and demand the truth about how the military has been covering up hard evidence of extraterrestrial visitation.

Roberts soon learned the truth of the adage "be careful what you wish for, you may get it."  Every bored computer geek would love to have one of their creations go viral, but when that happened here, Roberts panicked.  His panic became worse when the FBI showed up at his door demanding an explanation, and increased again when the Air Force put out a memo saying that they would not hesitate to stop anyone trying to enter Area 51 illegally, including by using deadly force.

But by this time, the "Storm Area 51" phenomenon had taken on a life of its own, and Roberts was unable to stop the juggernaut he'd created.  He wasn't the only one who was freaking out, either.  The elected officials of the town of Rachel, Nevada, near the border of Area 51, were in crisis mode trying to figure out how they would cope with a sudden influx of (potentially) millions of people.  "Law enforcement will be overwhelmed and local residents will step up to protect their property," said a post on the city website.  "It will get ugly."  The commissioners of Lincoln County, where Rachel is located, agreed to declare a state of emergency if they were descended upon by the Storm Area 51 horde.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Made by X51 (Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/x51/  Web: http://x51.org/), Wfm x51 area51 warningsign, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As September 20 approached, the phenomenon showed no sign of abating.  Officials were prepared for the worst.  Guards were placed -- well, even more guards than usual were placed -- around the perimeter of Area 51 to cope with the crowds of people rushing the gates shouting "The Truth Is Out There."

Then the big day dawned...

... and 150 people showed up.

Well, 150 people traveled within sight of the fence, which isn't illegal anyhow, and only half of those decided to go up to the main gates.  The guards told the 75 who made it to the gates that they couldn't come in, and as befits a bunch of Fearless Conspiracy-Destroying Stormers, all but two of them said, "Oh.  Okay.  Never mind, then."  Of the two who were actually arrested, one of them got caught trying to duck under the fence, and the other was nabbed for pissing on a fence post.

The upshot is that of the millions of Truth Seekers who pledged to get into Area 51 by whatever means necessary, the number who got one foot inside the fence was... one.  And "one foot inside" was apparently all she got before she was cuffed by the authorities.

So... that's kind of underwhelming.  Makes me glad I didn't fork over money for a plane ticket and rental car.  I'm not exactly the lawbreaking type anyhow, so I expect if a guard had told me, "If you try to get in here, I'm going to shoot you so many times your torso will look like a block of Swiss cheese," I'd have looked like one of those Looney Tunes characters who's running away so fast his feet are just a circular blur.

Because that's how brave I am.

In any case, I'm glad no one got hurt, which would have sucked.  And I bet Matty Roberts is breathing a sigh of relief.  Me, I'm still curious about what's in there, although I think the chance that they actually do have evidence of extraterrestrials is slim to none, whatever Fox Mulder would have you believe.  But the fact that this was a big flop says something interesting about human nature, doesn't it?  We have a remarkably short attention span, as a species, and when push comes to shove, most of us will choose to stay home eating potato chips and watching reruns of Dr. Who rather than putting ourselves in an uncomfortable situation.  Which explains a lot about some of the quandaries we've ended up in, and why it's so hard to get people to take action.  I mean, if you can't even get two million people to rush the gates of a military facility to get probably-nonexistent evidence of aliens, you have to wonder what it would take to get people mobilized.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Booms and glitches

There's a pair of stories that to my eyes don't seem to have much to do with one another, but which put together are inducing multiple orgasms in the conspiracy theory crowd.

First, we have reports of a series of booming noises that have been heard in three locations in eastern North America in the last few weeks.  The first one, which occurred late in December, found residents of Scranton, Pennsylvania being jolted out of bed by noises "like fighter jets flying overhead."  The noises continued off and on for about an hour.  Spokespeople for the Lackawanna Energy Center, a gas-powered electrical plant near Scranton, were quick to claim responsibility, saying it was a steam release from an emergency pressure valve, and that it generated "the loudest noise we've ever heard" but was not an indication of anything malfunctioning, nor was it a cause for safety concerns.

Two weeks later, residents on Davis Island, near Tampa, Florida, were awakened at four AM by the same sort of noises.  The cause, apparently, was...

... steam venting from an emergency pressure valve, this time at the TECO Bayside Power Station.  Nothing to be concerned about, officials said, sorry for waking y'all up.

Then, just a few days ago, the town of Salisbury, North Carolina experienced much the same thing, with a sound like a combination of "a locomotive and a space shuttle taking off."  Dogs and coyotes went nuts barking, and -- thus far -- no local power plants or other agencies have admitted responsibility for the uproar.

So this already had conspiracy theorists raising their eyebrows in a meaningful manner and saying, "this can't be a coincidence."  Which, of course, is exactly what you call it when events coincide, but we can overlook the semantics for the time being.  Because said conspiracy theorists started jumping up and down, making excited little squeaking noises, when another series of stories started making the rounds, once again from three different locations.

This series of odd occurrences weren't anomalous noises, but anomalous radar traces.  First, in early December, National Weather Service meteorological radars picked up a strong signal from a broad area in Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana, which looked like a massive thunderstorm -- on a completely clear night.  Two days later, similar (but smaller) oddball signals were recorded on weather radar stations in Maine and Florida.

Brett Tingley, over at Mysterious Universe, said the most reasonable explanation is that it was chaff -- particulate aluminum that is released by military aircraft when they want to confuse enemy radar.  The difficulty with this hypothesis is that from the radar traces, it was released at a greater height (10,000 feet) than is typical for chaff tests.  Also, the chaff cloud (if that's what it was) held together for ten hours, far longer than usual, and no one has reported any trace of the stuff on the ground.

Of course, the military is neither confirming nor denying these reports.  Which is fuel to the fire for the aforementioned conspiracy theorists.

So these stories were bad enough independently, but when people started putting them together, in the fashion of a kid adding two and two and getting twenty-two, things got out of hand.  All of this stuff cannot be a coincidence.  It's got to Mean Something.  What exactly it's supposed to Mean is not all that clear, but here are a few explanations I've seen, if I can dignify them by that name:

• The military is using hypersonic aircraft (thus the loud booms) to create chemtrails to kill us all.
• Saboteurs are screwing with our radar and our power stations in an attempt to bring down the American government.  My feeling about this one is that at present, saboteurs are kind of unnecessary, because the American government is already doing a pretty good job of bringing down the American government.
• It's the End Times.  Admit it, you knew the hyper-Christians would get involved somehow.  Their argument seems to go something like, "Blah blah blah seven trumpets of doom in the Book of Revelation."  (I paraphrase slightly.)
• The Air Force is testing a super weapon that will cause systematic malfunctions in our power grid, and simultaneously spread toxins over the entire landscape.  Why they thought it was a good idea to test this over suburban areas, I have no idea.
• And, of course: Aliens.

My hunch is that none of these things have any connection.  Power plants make loud noises sometimes, and it doesn't mean they're about to blow up, or any of the other panicked ideas I've heard.  Radar anomalies also occur, sometimes because of meteorological events, sometimes from natural or man-made causes (the first recorded radar glitch occurred back during World War II, when technicians monitoring the skies for aerial invasions from Germany freaked out over what turned out to be a flock of migrating birds).

So anyhow, I'm not ready to ascribe all this to nefarious causes, much less link together the loud noises with the radar glitches.  I mean, if they are connected, why did they happen so far apart?  The only state that had both was Florida, and they didn't happen at the same time.  Otherwise, we have Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, and Maine on the one hand, and Pennsylvania and North Carolina on the other.

Pretty uncoordinated aliens, seems to me.

Of course, I'm saying all this without much in the way of actual information over what was reported by eyewitnesses, so maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe this is a sign of the American military trying to destroy civilization, or an alien invasion, or the End Times, or whatnot.  I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.  I figure if it turns out to be the end of the world as we know it, I'll find out eventually.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]