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:
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:
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inscription at the top, though, they recognized as clearly cuneiform, a script consisting of wedge-shaped impressions, originally made using the triangular ends of reed stems.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."
