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!]

Lovecraft, tentacles, and Area 51

I participate in a rather amusing motivational technique to keep me running regularly.  It's called "virtual racing" (the particular version of this I play is over at the site YesFit), and the idea is that you choose a location where you'd like to be running, then log your miles however you prefer -- running, walking, cycling, swimming, whatever -- and the site shows you where you are on a map, sends you pictures from Google StreetView, and every once in a while will give you a clickable link to find out more about the place you're "visiting."  Then, when you finish the race, you get a prize -- a medal or a t-shirt.

I know it's a little silly, but I love seeing my little place marker move across the map, and it's great fun to see pictures of where my avatar is.  Well, usually it is -- my most recent race was along the infamous Area 51 in Nevada, and to say the scenery is monotonous is like saying that the terrain around Mount Everest is "a little hilly."

Even so, I completed the race (a total of 97.7 miles), and yesterday, I got my reward t-shirt, with a silhouette of an alien saying, "Thanks For Believing In Me."  And in a nice little synchronicity, I had shortly after I opened the package, I found a link over at Mysterious Universe claiming that Google Earth caught photographs of the bombing range at Groom Lake (part of Area 51) showing bomb craters...

... with tentacles coming out of them.

The problem with Mysterious Universe is that I can never tell when they're kidding.  Some of their authors, notably Nick Redfern and Brent Swancer, seem like True Believers.  Others, like Paul Seaburn, tend to take a more skeptical view of things.  The jury's still out about the one who wrote the article about the tentacles, Sequoyah Kennedy, because he says that the tentacles are signs that the Lovecraftian Elder Gods are returning to Earth.

Without further ado, here's one of the photographs:

And here's a bit of what Kennedy has to say:

There’s a weird almost-symmetry to a lot of these “tentacles,” and it definitely has an organic sort of shape.  I wonder if it’s slightly differently programmed ballistics tests leaving char marks on the ground, or perhaps captured mid-flight, but I’m completely unqualified to make any judgments on that so I’m sticking with what I know—Elder Gods.

Which seems like a solid logical chain to me.  If you can rule out char marks from ballistic tests, any weird thing captured on Google Earth must be Great Cthulhu returning to subjugate humanity.

However, he does seem to realize that he's on shaky ground:

There appears to be a small hole with long eldritch tendrils reaching out of it, like tree roots or black mycelium.  It’s weird.  It could be absolutely anything, but it’s weird.

Which puts me in mind of the wonderful quote from Carl Sagan's Cosmos:

I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus.  Why not?  Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds.  Well, what are clouds made of?  Water, of course.  Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.  Therefore, the surface must be wet.  Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp.  If there's a swamp, there's ferns.  If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs. 

Observation: I can't see a thing.  Conclusion: dinosaurs.

Ironically, one of Lovecraft's best stories, "In the Walls of Eryx," is about an Earth man on Venus, slogging around in a swamp, while fighting -- you guessed it -- super-intelligent dinosaurs.

Myself, I doubt the tentacles in Area 51 have anything to do with Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Tsathoggua, and the rest of the gang.  Nor, as one of my friends suggested, does the sinkhole that opened up last week in front of the White House, despite the fact that casting Donald Trump in the role of an evil, depraved Elder God actually has some appeal.  (Maybe he'd be Yuck-Sothoth, or something.)

So chances are, this is another one of those things that has a completely ordinary explanation, even if (because it's Area 51, after all) we never find out what it is.  I'm certainly not going over there to find out; besides it being the most boring terrain in the world, there are signs all over the place saying "KEEP OUT: THE USE OF DEADLY FORCE IS AUTHORIZED," which is a little off-putting.  Now y'all will have to excuse me, because I'm going to go for a run.  I'm currently ten miles into the Yeti Trail in Nepal, and the t-shirt for this one is wicked cool.

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This week's recommended book is one that blew me away when I first read it, upon the urging of a student.  By groundbreaking neuroscientist David Eagleman, Incognito is a brilliant and often astonishing analysis of how our brains work.  In clear, lucid prose, Eagleman probes the innermost workings of our nervous systems -- and you'll learn not only how sophisticated it is, but how easy it can be to fool.

Elements of style

When scientists this week at Lund University in Sweden confirmed the production of an atom of element 115, I thought it was just a story that would be of interest to physicists, chemists, and assorted science nerds.

The atom, like those of all "superheavy" elements, disintegrated almost instantaneously.  All of the high-atomic-weight atoms -- those on the bottom tiers of the periodic table -- are extremely unstable, and undergo radioactive decay within a fraction of a second after they're created in the lab.  None of them occur naturally.

This confirms a claim made by Russian scientists in 2004, and completes another row of the periodic table, bringing to 118 the number of confirmed elements.  Like its near neighbors with atomic numbers of 113, 117, and 118, it doesn't have an official permanent name yet, so it is called "ununpentium" (a placeholder name that simply means "115").

So far, only a story that would interest people who are fond of esoteric chemistry.  Thus my surprise when stories started popping up all over woo-woo websites with headlines like, "Element 115 proven to be real!  Bob Lazar was right!"

My first reaction was, "Who the hell is Bob Lazar?"  So I looked him up, and found that he's a pretty famous guy, even though I had never heard of him.  He even has a Wikipedia page.  And his story turned out to be quite interesting.

Lazar is (appropriate for our unofficial theme-of-the-week) a conspiracy theorist of the first water.  He claims to be a physicist with degrees from both the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; attempts to confirm this have turned up nothing, although he did once take an electronics course at Pierce Junior College.  Lazar says this is because the government tampered with his academic records to discredit him.

Why would the government do that?  Because Lazar worked at Area 51, of course.  And while at Area 51, he was allegedly the leader of a group of physicists who studied some downed extraterrestrial spaceships.  And guess what he claimed was the fuel that powered said flying saucers?

Got it in one.  Element 115.

Ununpentium, Lazar said, created "antigravity effects" when bombarded with protons.  Antimatter was also somehow involved.  Put 'em all together, says Lazar, and the "intense strong nuclear force of element 115's nucleus" would warp space and time, creating a way to cross interstellar space.

Oh, and he knows where these aliens came from.  Zeta Reticuli, the favorite star of conspiracy theorists everywhere, alleged home to both the Reptilians and the Greys.  Which ties in neatly with stories of government collaboration with extraterrestrials, and the replacement of various world figures by shapeshifting evil aliens.  This last allegation might be true, of course.  I myself am suspicious about recently-disgraced San Diego mayor Bob Filner.  Doesn't he look like someone trying to mimic a human, but who can't quite make it look authentic yet?

I think that is exactly the expression you'd see on the face of an alien who had just learned the rule, "When you smile, retract the lips and expose the teeth."

But I digress.  Let's return to our consideration of Bob #1.

Bob Lazar's ideas have achieved considerable buzz in the UFO community, and also in the world of the conspiracy theorists, being that his ideas combine the best from both.  And he was taken at least seriously enough to have an actual physicist, Dr. David L. Morgan, give a close look to his ideas.  And after careful consideration, Morgan has concluded that Lazar is a raving wingnut.

"After reading an account by Bob Lazar of the 'physics' of his Area 51 UFO propulsion system," Morgan stated, "my conclusion is this: Mr. Lazar presents a scenario which, if it is correct, violates a whole handful of currently accepted physical theories...  The presentation of the scenario by Lazar is troubling from a scientific standpoint.  Mr. Lazar on many occasions demonstrates an obvious lack of understanding of current physical theories."

Which is much nicer than I would have put it, but amounts to the same thing.

Any time someone comes up with a "theory" that will "destroy all of physics as we know it," I'm always inclined to give him the raspberry and walk away.  It might be narrow-minded of me, but think about it; what's the chance that the best brains the Earth has produced -- people like Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Lise Meitner, Murray Gell-Mann, and Peter Higgs -- are all wrong?  That they've missed the boat completely, and some new guy, with no particular access to research facilities or technical equipment, or possibly even a college degree, has figured it all out?  Okay, I guess it's possible, but I need more than just his word for it, especially when that word contains mention of "the Grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli."

The bottom line is: if you think that you've got a revolutionary idea, turn it over to peer review like the rest of the scientific world.  If it stands, I'll be happy to eat my words.

Anyway, this explains why the woo-woos all started jumping up and down and making excited little squeaking noises about element 115, in spite of the fact that the Swedish scientists only succeeded in making one atom of it, which would hardly be enough to power a spacecraft.  And the atom in question (1) decayed in less than a tenth of a second, and (2) showed no signs of generating an "anti-gravity field."

But I guess when you are resting your claims on no evidence, then any evidence is an improvement.