The hidden fault

Between December 16, 1811 and February 7, 1812, a series of four earthquakes -- each estimated to be above magnitude 7 -- hit what you might think is one of the most unlikely places on Earth; southeastern Missouri.

The fault (named the New Madrid Seismic Zone for the county right in the center of it) is located in the middle of the North American craton, an enormous block of what should be old, stable, geologically inactive rock.  But even so, the biggest (and final) earthquake of the four was powerful enough that it was felt thousands of kilometers away, and allegedly rang church bells in Charleston, South Carolina.  The shift in terrain changed the course of the Mississippi River, cutting off a meander and creating horseshoe-shaped Reelfoot Lake.

It's well known that most of the world's earthquakes take place along the "Ring of Fire" and other junctions between tectonic plates, but it's not always so.  The New Madrid Fault is thought to be either a failed rift zone -- when a convection current in the mantle tried, but failed, to split the continent, but created a weakness in the middle of the plate -- or else the rebound of the crust from the passage of the Bermuda Hotspot, which is also one possible explanation for the process that created the Ozark Mountains.

The point is, earthquakes don't always occur where you might expect, and sometimes fault lines can stay hidden until suddenly they slip and catch everyone off-guard.  This is the situation much closer to where I live; the Saint Lawrence Rift System, aligned (as you'd expect) with the Saint Lawrence River, is an active seismic zone in northern New York and southern Canada, and like New Madrid, is very far away from any plate margins.  Here, the weakness is very old -- geologists believe the fault actually dates to the early Paleozoic, and may be related to the Charlevoix Asteroid Impact 450 million years ago -- and has been reactivated by something that is causing super slow convergence on opposite sides of the fault (on the order of 0.5 millimeters a year).

What that something might be, no one is certain.

The reason the topic comes up is a paper in the journal Tectonics this week that I found out about because of my friend, the wonderful author Andrew Butters, who is an avid science buff and a frequent contributor of topics for Skeptophilia.  It describes a newly-discovered 72-kilometer-long fault that runs right down the middle of Vancouver Island -- passing just northeast of the city of Victoria.

To be fair, British Columbia isn't exactly seismically inactive; as I described last month, it's in the bullseye (along with the rest of the coastal Pacific Northwest) of the horrifyingly huge Cascadia Subduction Zone.  But even so, the discovery of a hitherto-unknown fault right near a major city is a little alarming, especially since the southeast corner of Vancouver Island is actually pretty far away from Cascadia.  The authors write:

Subduction forearcs are subject to seismic hazard from upper plate faults that are often invisible to instrumental monitoring networks.  Identifying active faults in forearcs therefore requires integration of geomorphic, geologic, and paleoseismic data.  We demonstrate the utility of a combined approach in a densely populated region of Vancouver Island, Canada, by combining remote sensing, historical imagery, field investigations, and shallow geophysical surveys to identify a previously unrecognized active fault, the XEOLXELEK-Elk Lake fault, in the northern Cascadia forearc, ∼10 km north of the city of Victoria...  Fault scaling relations suggest a M 6.1–7.6 earthquake with a 13 to 73-km-long surface rupture and 2.3–3.2 m of dip slip may be responsible for the deformation observed in the paleoseismic trench.  An earthquake near this magnitude in Greater Victoria could result in major damage, and our results highlight the importance of augmenting instrumental monitoring networks with remote sensing and field studies to identify and characterize active faults in similarly challenging environments.

So that's a little alarming.  Another thing to file under "You Think You're Safe, But..."  I've frequently given thanks for the fact that I live in a relatively calm part of the world.  Upstate New York gets snowstorms sometimes, but nothing like the howling blizzards of the upper Midwest; and we're very far away from the target areas for hurricanes, mudslides, wildfires, and volcanoes.

But the scary truth is that nowhere is natural-disaster-proof.  As New Madrid, the Saint Lawrence Rift System, and -- now -- Victoria, British Columbia show, we live on an active, turbulent planet that is constantly in motion.  And sometimes that motion makes it a little dangerous for us fragile humans.

The Earth is awe-inspiring and beautiful, but also has little regard for our day-to-day affairs.  You can do what is possible to minimize your risk; forewarned is forearmed, as the old saying goes.  But the reality is that the natural world is full of surprises -- and some of those surprises can be downright dangerous.

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Glimpse of the dawn

A pair of words biologists (and interested laypeople) have to be careful with are primitive and advanced.

They're often used in place of the generally more appropriate simple and complex.  By that usage, an amoeba is primitive and an aardvark is advanced.  But where it gets confusing is that primitive and advanced are also sometimes used to mean "like something that evolved earlier" and "like something that evolved more recently," respectively -- so they use primitive to describe a stegosaurus and advanced to describe a spider monkey, when in fact both of those are about equally complex.  (It gets even murkier when you throw in questions of relative intelligence.)

It bears keeping in mind that while modern organisms vary greatly on the simple/complex spectrum, they all have lineages that have been around exactly the same amount of time -- 4.3 billion years, give or take a day or two.  All known lineages of terrestrial life converge on a single life form nicknamed LUCA -- the Last Universal Common Ancestor -- around four billion years ago.  To our eyes, LUCA probably wouldn't have looked like much.  It probably resembled species we now classify as bacteria.

But all life on Earth descends from it.  And as far as the primitive/advanced bit, the only difference is in that time, some of the lineages changed a great deal more than others did.

The reason this comes up is because of a link sent to me by a friend and frequent contributor of topics for Skeptophilia, about a species of fairly modern-looking jellyfish that was found in rock strata that are 505 million years old.

The species, named Burgessomedua phasmiformis, was a free-swimming, tentacle-laden predator with a bell on the order of twenty centimeters in diameter.  It, like many of the Cambrian explosion fauna, were found in the exceptionally well-preserved Burgess Shale Formation of the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia.

Artist's impression of live Burgessomedusa in the Cambrian seas [courtesy of artist Christian McCall]

Jellyfish and most of the other members of Phylum Cnidaria are generally scarce in the fossil record, because their bodies are primarily water.  If you've ever seen a dried-up jellyfish on the beach, you know what I'm talking about; there's barely anything left.  (Don't assume that this means they're harmless, though.  Even the dried tentacles of a Portuguese man-o'-war can pack a dangerous sting.)  But you can see how astonishing it is not only to have one create an impression in sedimentary rocks, but to have that impression last for 505 million years.

So the exceptional preservation of this extremely rare fossil animal is amazing enough.  But what I find even more mind-boggling when I think about the life back then is the bigger picture of what the Cambrian Period was like.  At that point, all life was in the water.  There was (more or less) the same amount of land as there is now, albeit configured completely differently -- but on that land was not a single living thing.  No plants, no fungi, no animals.  Nothing.  It was a vast expanse of empty rock, sand, and dust.

At this point, the first terrestrial plants wouldn't make their appearance for another fifty million years, and even then, they were highly water-dependent and very likely clustered along shorelines.  The first vascular plant -- one with the internal plumbing most plants have today -- that appears in the fossil record is Cooksonia, which appeared during the mid-Silurian Period (about 430 million years ago).  It was a strange, rather Dr. Seussian thing:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smith609 Ground texture from Image:Mud closeup.jpg, Cooksonia pertoni, CC BY 3.0]

But when Burgessomedusa was swimming in the Cambrian oceans, all that lay millions of years in the future.  This glimpse of the dawn of time gives us a picture so alien to our current mental image of the Earth it's hard to believe it's the same planet.

What this tells paleontologists, though, is that even in the early Cambrian, there were relatively modern-looking jellyfish -- and that even though today's cnidarians are advanced in the sense of "length of their lineage on Earth," they haven't changed much at all during all those hundreds of millions of years.  The general reason for such stability is that the body plan works; there's little selective pressure to favor alterations in a system that does fine as is, however "primitive" it may look to us.

As a writer friend of mine posted yesterday:

The details might be off a little, but the gist is accurate enough.

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Bear talk

As Randall Munroe (writer of the amazing comic xkcd) said, "Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing, 'Look over there.'"

I immediately thought of that quote when I bumped into a fascinating study that appeared in Ecology and Society last week, about grizzly bears.  Turns out that grizzlies, which are native to the northern continental United States, western Canada, and Alaska, have been spreading lately into territory in British Columbia where they hadn't been seen before, so some zoologists decided to do genetic testing and see where those bears were coming from, and what their relationship was to other bears in the area.

So they created bear bait from a fish slurry, which is as nasty as it sounds (as researcher Lauren Henson of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation put it, "it smells really really terrible to us, but is intriguing to bears").  They put the bait in the middle of a low tangle of barbed wire, which was intended not to hurt the bears but to catch and pull out bits of their fur.  The scientists then did genetic analysis on the bear fur thus collected.

What they found was that there are three distinct populations of grizzlies in British Columbia, which seem not to have a lot of overlap.  This by itself isn't unusual -- a lot of animals have isolated sub-populations and regional variation not only in genetics, but in color, size, even behaviors like vocalization patterns -- but where it got interested was discovered because the RCF's study involved cooperation with five indigenous groups, the Nuxalk, Haíɫzaqv, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Gitga’at, and Wuikinuxv, primarily because a lot of the traps needed to be set on Native-owned land.

And when the scientists and the representatives of the indigenous groups took a look at the results, they discovered something really perplexing: the boundaries of the populations of genetically-distinct grizzly bears followed the boundaries of the indigenous language groups in the area.

What's more perplexing still is that neither the grizzlies' range boundaries nor the regional language families coincide with any obvious geographical barriers -- large rivers, rugged terrain, areas with permanent snow cover or glacial ice.  Jenn Walkus, who coauthored the paper and is part of the Wuikinuxv Nation, wasn't that surprised.  "Growing up in a remote community called Rivers Inlet, I saw firsthand that humans and bears have a lot of the same needs in terms of space, food, and other resources," she said.  "It would make sense for them to settle in the same areas—ones with a steady supply of salmon, for instance.  This historic interrelatedness means Canada should manage key resources with both bears and people in mind."

While I don't doubt that she's right, it still is very weird to me that the settlement and dispersion patterns in humans and grizzlies would coincide like that, without there being a specific genetic barrier establishing and maintaining the boundaries.  It's hard to imagine why two human territories abutting each other, which have different indigenous ethnic background, would have any impact on where the bears are going.

Most of these kinds of regional variations in genetic makeup follow one of two patterns -- known to biologists as allopatry and sympatry.  The former is where there is a geographical barrier keeping the two populations apart; the ranges don't overlap, so the members of the two population don't mate because they don't meet.  My favorite example of this are the cute little tufty-eared Kaibab and Abert squirrels, which live (respectively) on the North and South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Azhikerdude, Kaibab Squirrel, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Sympatry can be a little harder to explain, because the ranges overlap -- so there has to be something other than geography keeping the populations separate.  One of the more curious examples of sympatry is the pink salmon of western North America, which has a strict two-year life cycle.  The eggs are laid in freshwater rivers, hatch, and the young make it out to the ocean, where they spend a year -- then in the second year, the adults come back to the river where they were spawned, reproduce, and die.  But what this means is that there is an odd-year and even-year population of pink salmon.  This year, the ones spawning are odd-year salmon, and their even-year cousins are out at sea (but will return to spawn themselves in 2022).  So even though they may inhabit the same range, the odd-year and even-year salmon never mate.

The grizzlies, though, show an odder pattern; it's called parapatry, where the ranges share a border but don't overlap.  True parapatry is rare, because something's got to keep the border relatively impermeable to migration.  While in some cases it's a geographical barrier of some kind, here there's no such easy explanation.  The grizzlies are maintaining genetically-distinct populations that show no obvious reason, but -- bizarrely -- coincide with the linguistically-distinct populations of people who inhabit the same area.

So here we have a really intriguing correlation that is definitely waggling its eyebrows suggestively, but admits of no evident causation.  I'm pretty certain there is one; it's hard to imagine this being chance.  But in the absence of an explanation, it's just another of those intriguing mysteries -- and fertile ground for zoologists and ethnologists to tackle in future studies.

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I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

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

Monster detectives

With all of the anxiety over what's happening in the government, panic about climate change and its role in the horrible weather we've had lately, and crises of various kinds all around the world, I'm sure what you're all thinking is, "Yes, but what about all the monster sightings?"

Just as I mentioned last week with UFOs, it seems like cryptid sightings are on the rise.  First, let's look at a huge winged creature that was spotted in New Boston, Michigan (near Detroit), and reported to the Singular Fortean Society:

I have seen the winged creature. Location is near New Boston, Michigan.  About 25 miles southwest of Detroit.  I was driving to work at 3:10 am the Sunday before Thanksgiving 2018. I was going east on Sibley Rd.  All of a sudden this black winged creature comes up from the ditch on the right side of the road and takes off straight up.  No flapping.  Wing span looked to be 10 ft.  It had a smooth leather look on the wings.  I didn’t see a face because it happened so quick and I was focused on how big the wings were.  This happened in a matter of 3 seconds and then it was gone.  I tried to wrap my mind around what I just saw.  Also the location was near 2 metro parks.  If you google map New Boston and zoom into Sibley Rd and I-275 then scroll east and that was my path I was driving.  And questions or additional information please text me first because I don’t answer numbers I don’t know.

The individual left her phone number (obviously), but when a member of the SFS contacted her, she didn't answer -- and has steadfastly refused to respond to messages left for her inquiring about further information.

Apparently, Michiganders have been seeing a lot of winged cryptids lately (collectively called "Mothmen" after the seminal tale from West Virginia that gave rise to the phenomenally weird book The Mothman Prophecies, by John Keel, which has nothing whatsoever to do with prophecies and appears to have been written by free association.)  The SFS article linked above, by Tobias Wayland, gives more information:

[Sightings] generally take place in the evening or at night, often in or near a park, and around water.  Witnesses consistently describe a large, gray or black, bat or bird-like creature—although in a small number of cases the creature was described as insect-like—sometimes with glowing or reflective red, yellow, or orange eyes, and humanoid features such as arms and legs are often reported.  Some witnesses have reported feeling intense fear and an aura of evil emanating from the creature they encountered.

Speaking of monsters near water, next we have a group in British Columbia which is trying to locate a cryptid a bit like a sea-going version of Nessie, called "Cadborosaurus."

When I first saw "Cadborosaurus," my first thought was that it must be a cryptid that hatches from chocolate candy eggs, but it turns out it's named for Cadboro Bay, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island.  A group called the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club is hot on Cadborosaurus's trail, and says that the animal they're looking for is "between thirty and seventy feet long" and has a "head like a horse."  Which you'd think would be hard to miss.

The BCSCC, however, admits that the evidence thus far is pretty tenuous.  "The only [actual remains] we’ve ever had possession of, including the 1937 Naden Harbour, Haida Gwaii carcass, has [sic] tended to look more mammal even though it’s rather serpentine in aspect," said John Kirk, BCSCC's founder.  "Cadborosaurus is a generic title that applies to all of them, but in recent years we’ve felt the mammal type found at Naden Harbour is what we’re going to call Cadborosaurus because it by far matches the description of the majority of witnesses."

Despite the previous lack of success in finding this beast, the members of BCSCC aren't giving up.  "We don’t want to prove this to anybody except for our own personal satisfaction, to ensure they are catalogued and their habitats are conserved," Kirk said.  "We certainly wouldn’t want the Cadborosaurus species to die off."

Last, we have a student named Sophie Jones at the Chicago Art Institute who is regretting choosing a project that involved making "Wanted, Dead or Alive" posters for various cryptids, and posting them all over -- along with her phone number.  She did it with the best of motives, she said, only intending for people to find it amusing.  "Being in a fine arts environment, a lot of the art you see is very heavy duty and painful or traumatic or political," Jones said.  "I wanted to do something that felt accessible and fun and friendly and engaged with an interest that I found really fascinating."

Predictably, a lot of the calls she got were tongue-in-cheek.  She even got one from someone claiming to be Mothman, but asking her out on a date.  (She politely declined.)  But some of the calls, Jones said, were serious, from people who really believe they've seen something otherworldly.  "I didn’t really ever consider that [the posters] would get noticed," she said.  "I didn’t expect that people would be seeing Mothman all over the city, for some reason."

She's tried to respond to the serious ones with helpful suggestions.  "I just don’t think the story should end there — you see a poster, you text it, no one responds," she said.  "That’s kind of a bummer.  They were so interested and willing to participate that I didn’t want to let them down."

So there you have it.  Mothman in Detroit, dinosaurs in Canada, and a well-meaning cryptid collector in Chicago.  The unfortunate part is now that I'm done here, I guess it's back to reality.  Which means reading the news.  And lately, my desire to stay well-informed has been at odds with my desire to stay sane.  All things considered, I'll stick with the monsters.

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In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

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

Deadly pseudoscience

In 2012, a 19-month-old boy named Ezekiel Stephan spiked a fever and was obviously in distress.  His parents, a British Columbian couple named David and Collet Stephan, decided not to seek medical attention for their child, instead treating him with "natural" and "alternative" treatments such as extracts of hot pepper, garlic, onion, and horseradish.

The little boy had bacterial meningitis.  By the time they decided to get the boy to the emergency room, he had lapsed into a coma, and hours later he died.

The Stephans were arrested and tried for "failing to provide necessities of life for their child."  David Stephan was said to be "completely unremorseful" and was sentenced to four months in jail.  Collet was put under house arrest for three months.  Both were ordered to perform 240 hours of community service.

And now, the Stephans have gone to Prince George, British Columbia to promote "natural remedies" for Truehope Nutritional Support, Inc., a company founded by his father.  Truehope's EMPowerPlus is one of the "remedies" that "assists with brain function" that they gave to their child shortly before he died.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Dave Fuller, owner of Ave Maria Specialties, a "holistic health" store that carries Truehope products, seems to give nothing but a shoulder shrug with respect to the Stephans' actions.  "Who am I to say that just because something happened that was an accident the guy regrets — his son died — that he shouldn't have a job?" Fuller said.

Let's be clear here.  This was not an accident.  Bacterial meningitis is a horrible disease, but caught early enough, is treatable.  This couple deliberately ignored their little boy's increasingly severe symptoms in favor of quack "remedies," rejecting modern medicine for alt-med bullshit.  And as a result, their child died.

Unfortunately, this abandonment of science in favor of pseudoscience is becoming increasingly common.  The medical researchers are labeled as shills for "Big Pharma," and their data is rejected as inaccurate or outright fabrication, designed to "keep us buying drugs" or "keep us sick," and any information about low efficacy or side effects is allegedly covered up.

In fact, we're one of the healthiest societies the world has ever seen.  Most of the diseases that killed our great-grandparents' generation are now unheard of (how many people do you know have had diphtheria?).  And yet there are people who want to reject everything that modern medical research has given us in favor of the same kinds of remedies our ancestors used -- that didn't work very well back then, and still don't work now.

It's this same idea that is driving Donald Trump's links to the anti-vaxx movement, most recently his request of a meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an anti-vaxxer who hides behind the "we just want safe vaccines" half-truth -- and Kennedy is now apparently going to head up a "vaccine safety board" to further investigate such nonsense as the link between vaccines and autism, which has been studied every which way from Sunday and always results in no correlation whatsoever.

All of this gives the impression that we need oversight because at the moment vaccines and other medications are simply thrown out willy-nilly by the medical researchers with no vetting at all, and that now we'll finally have someone making sure we're protected from the evils of Big Pharma.  Of course, nothing could be further from the truth; there is already the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (which has been around for fifty years) which oversees the testing and evaluation of vaccines and provides data to the CDC regarding efficacy and potential side effects.  The same is true for other medications; there is a rigorous set of tests each drug has to undergo, first on animal models and then (if they look promising) on human volunteers, before they are approved by the FDA.

That doesn't mean the process is foolproof.  Humans are fallible, data can be misinterpreted, experiments can fall prey to unintended sample bias.  There's no doubt that the profit motive in the pharmaceuticals and health insurance industries has led to price inflation for medications.  But the drugs themselves are, by and large, safe and effective, and sure as hell are better than horseradish extract for treating meningitis.

But the step from "the system has some flaws and could use reform" to "reject all modern medicine in favor of roots and berries" is all too easy a step for some people, and in the case of the Stephans, it resulted in their son's death.  And, more appallingly, they're still hawking the same stuff despite a very real test case establishing that it's worthless.

The bottom line: science isn't perfect, but as a means of determining the truth, it's the best thing on the market.  And also, the trenchant comment from Tim Minchin's performance piece "Storm:"  "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

Squatch of the day

In yesterday's post, we took a look at the latest from the world of extraterrestrial enthusiasts; today, we'll do the same for another topic we haven't visited in a while:

Bigfoot.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Yup, Skeptophilia has been quiet for a while on the subject of our giant hairy cousins.  Which is a shame, because cryptozoology was kind of how I got into all of this skepticism stuff.  I've had a thing for creepy cryptids since I was a kid.  All I can say is, however cheesy Finding Bigfoot is, if that show had been on when I was a teenager, I would not have missed an episode.

Of course, the same would have been true for Ghost Hunters and Scariest Places on Earth and Most Haunted and The Unexplained and probably even Destination: Truth.

Let's just say that I have learned some discernment as I have matured.

Be that as it may, we've had a busy couple of weeks in the field of Yetiology.  So let's take a look at what we've missed while we were focusing on such trivia as educational policy and the role of religion in the public sphere.

First, from British Columbia, we have a story about a hiker who took a video of an alleged Sasquatch.  The video, which is available from YouTube, I append here:

The hiker, who narrates the video, comments, "This is the middle of absolutely nowhere...  If that's human why would you walk up that ridge or that snow line?  Why would he not just go straight down?...  Good thing we brought beers.  Maybe we can lure him over here. I don't know how high we are, but we're probably close to 7,000 feet and this guy's just scampering up snow lines like it's no big deal."

He goes to significant lengths to point out that it is absolutely, totally remote, the middle of nowhere, but doesn't seem to recognize that it can't be all that remote, because after all, they're there.  And brought along beer.  I used to backcountry camp -- and I know from experience that if you are heading to a really remote place, that requires a long, arduous hike, you don't bring along unnecessary weight.  If they brought beer, then they were clearly close enough to civilization there could have been other hikers out there.

Or bears.  Or whatever.  Because the biggest problem is, this image is so tiny that there's no way to tell what it is.  It's not even a Blobsquatch.  It's a Dotsquatch.  Maybe this is the fabled wild hominid of the Northwest, but you certainly couldn't be sure from this video.


Even further out in left field is something from the Discovery channel, which has joined the History channel and Animal Planet in devoting themselves almost entirely to pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But they outdid themselves last week with a press release announcing an upcoming two-hour special about the infamous Dyatlov Pass Incident.

Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may remember that I did a post about this about two years ago, to which I direct you if you're curious about details.  But for our purposes here, it suffices to say that it centers around the mysterious deaths of nine experienced backcountry skiers in the Ural Mountains of Russia back in 1959.

It's an odd set of circumstances, and in my mind has never been adequately explained, although there are some compelling hypotheses about what may have caused their deaths.  But Discovery has added a hypothesis of their own to the list, although instead of "compelling" it is more "ridiculous:"

The Dyatlov Pass skiers were killed by wild Yetis.

I'm not making this up.  Here's the relevant paragraph of the press release:

RUSSIAN YETI: THE KILLER LIVES, a 2-hour special airing Sunday, June 1 at 9 PM ET/PT on the Discovery Channel, follows Mike [Libecki] as he traces the clues and gathers compelling evidence that suggests the students’ deaths could be the work of a creature thought only to exist in folklore.

Oh, hell, if you're going to make shit up, why not go all the way?  I think they should make a two-hour special about how the Dyatlov Pass skiers were killed by the Lovecraftian Elder Gods because some Russian necromancer wannabe opened up a gateway to Yog Sothoth.  The one hiker with the major chest injuries had had his heart sucked out by a Shoggoth.

Makes about as much sense.


Speaking of "not making sense," just last week we had a new proposal out there to explain why Bigfoot photos are all blurry.  It's not because they're fakes, or vague images of something sort-of-Bigfoot-like (i.e. an example of cryptozoological pareidolia).

It's because Bigfoot himself is blurry.

You probably think I'm making this up, but over at Occult View, this has been thrown out there as a serious suggestion in a post called "Bigfoot as a Blurry Vibration That Lives in the Forest."  A short passage should suffice to give you the flavor:

These sightings are not hominids, but something all together different. These Bigfoot are vibrations that live in the forest. Call them blurry beings. 

When these blurry vibrations are spotted, we see something that really doesn’t make sense. Our brains then fill in the blanks; our minds complete the details. We see a creature that looks natural, but if we took a picture of it at the same time it would appear only as a blur or a fuzzy image. 

There really hasn’t been a clear photo of Bigfoot (that I assume wasn’t a hoax). But there have been photos of these blurs, these dark shapes. If I am correct, we’ll never get a clear picture of the semi-rural Bigfoot. Yet it might be worth studying these images of dark shapes and see if we can learn something from them. These blurry images might provide clues to the true nature of the vibrations that live in the forest.

What does it even mean to say that something is a "living vibration?"  I'm assuming that the author is using the term in the usual hand-waving way that woo-woos do -- like the mystics saying that humans are "energy field vibrations," even though I doubt they could define the words "energy" and "field" if I held them at gunpoint.  So we won't press any further with this, except to say that anyone who thinks this is a rational explanation is a little blurry around the edges himself.

To end on an entertaining note, we have another video clip, this one from a gentleman named Larry Surface, that he claims is a recording of Bigfoot vocalizations from Ohio.  Take a listen:

My favorite part of this is the way Surface tries to transliterate what they're saying into English spelling, thusly:  "Hamit mahamit whoop whoop hamit wa wa wa wahit mahamit hondabay hondabay hondabay kaoo mahamit whoh hamit fusayo oa getmuh whoop ma oh."

Okay, I know that there's a possibility (slim, in my opinion) that these are really Bigfoot sounds.  But human perception being what it is, if someone tells you what you're hearing -- subtitles it, even -- you are way more likely to hear "hondabay hondabay hondabay" than you are to hear random animal vocalizations.  Consider how the whole "backmasking" thing works -- the conspiracy guys always tell you ahead of time what message has been inserted backwards into the song or speech you're listening to.  Then, when you listen to it backwards... lo and behold... there it is.

So me, I'm not convinced.  I've heard enough bizarre vocalizations from perfectly ordinary non-cryptids -- animals like foxes and raccoons and skunks and barred owls can make some really peculiar, unearthly noises.  (So if you really want to find out what the fox says, you can listen to hundreds of examples on YouTube.  You will not, for the record, find one recording of a fox saying "gering-a-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.")

Anyway, that's the news from the cryptozoology world.  Dotsquatch, Blursquatch, Russian Skier-Killers, and the strange language of the Ohio Bigfoot.  All in all, about what we'd expect, given the level of evidence that has been heretofore amassed.  So until next time, I'll sign off with a cheerful "Hamit mahamit whoop ma oh," and I hope you feel likewise.