Going to the dogs

Well, the Rapture happened again, and just like every other damn time, I got left behind.

At this point, I've kind of given up.  There's been, what?  Like two dozen Raptures in the past five years?  I beginning to think I'm not invited to the party.

Of course, it shouldn't be a shock, given my history.  I doubt I'll be headed to heaven unless I can somehow get there under cover of darkness via helicopter.  And even then, there's a 50/50 chance that God will smite the crap out of the chopper before we can land at the Holy Heliport.

So since I'm still stuck here on Earth and likely to be for a while, I suppose I should proceed on to looking at today's topic, which is: Dogman.

In one of those funny coincidences that would make some people think there's a Glitch in the Matrix, a couple of days ago a friend of mine (who is also a cryptid enthusiast) asked me if I'd ever heard of Dogman, and I said I had -- a long time ago -- but didn't know much of anything about him, and then the following day a post showed up on the delightfully weird JAMZA Online Forum talking about recent Dogman sightings in California.  The writer, Paul Dale Roberts, says he's an "Esoteric Detective" with Halo Paranormal Investigations, which is certainly an impressive job title.

Roberts explains that Dogman isn't a werewolf, because of the obvious dog vs. wolf distinction, but also because werewolves transform back into ordinary humans when the Moon isn't full, but Dogman is kinda stuck that way.  He talks as if Dogman is pretty terrifying, but the problem for me is, my experience of dogs is this:

This is Jethro, and the only things that would be justifiably afraid of Jethro are squeaky toys.  In his presence, squeaky toys labeled "Completely Indestructible!" last about three minutes, because that fuzzy little muzzle conceals the Jaws of Death.  But other than that, he's about as dangerous as a plush toy.  A cryptid with a human body and Jethro's head would elicit more laughter than fear.

Plus, Roberts also says that "all you have to do is clap, and Dogman runs away," which doesn't sound very threatening to me.

Still, a seven-foot-tall human/dog hybrid could be kind of alarming to run across unexpectedly.  Some of them, he says, have "glowing red eyes."  This phenomenon of glowing eyes is a pretty common trait in cryptids, which is something I've never understood.  I mean, reflective eyes, sure; a lot of animals have a tapetum, which is a reflective membrane at the back of the eyeball that is why deer's eyes shine in headlights.  But actually glowing?  Eyes receive light, they don't emit it.  What, are there little guys with flashlights in there, shining the beams out through the pupils whenever anyone comes close?

Be that as it may, Roberts proceeds to relate a number of incidents where people have seen Dogman.  Here's his own encounter:

I once saw a strange hunched-back dark green bi-pedal figure in Elk Grove [California, where several other sightings have taken place].  From the distance from where I was observing this strange sight, I was unable to make out what I was seeing.  I had to drive up closer, so I can identify this mysterious figure.  I discovered I was looking at a homeless person that was covered in a blanket.

Who, he admits rather reluctantly, had an ordinary human head. 

But other people have insisted they saw a giant guy with a dog's shaggy head, and from the sound of it they weren't anywhere near a convention of Furries at the time.  Apparently Dogman isn't a recent invention, either; the legend seems to have started in Wexford County, Michigan, where a report in 1887 describes a sighting by two lumberjacks.  This Dogman apparently had blue eyes, so that's kind of cool.

Because forewarned is forearmed, it's important to have a plan for if you ever run into Dogman.  (I mean, you can try clapping, but my guess is that won't work.)  So here's what you should do:

• Stare straight into his eyes, to establish dominance.
• Say, "Whoozagoodboy?"
• When Dogman, not knowing who the Good Boy is, looks confused, say, "YOU are!"
• Dogman will be so elated by this unexpected revelation that he will wag his tail excitedly.
• Reward him for being a Good Boy with ear skritches, and if you have any, a puppy biscuit.
• Dogman will then be your friend for life.

At least this technique works with Jethro.

Anyhow, that's our excursion into the World of the Weird for today.  On the other hand, the word "weird" describes the world as a whole pretty well, given the news lately, and Dogman is no more peculiar than, for example, Donald Trump claiming that the reason California has droughts is that people in Canada were incosiderate enough to turn off a giant faucet.  ("It's so big it takes a whole day to turn once!" he said.  And no, I didn't make any of that up.)  May as well have a look around the place, since I (and, I presume, you) missed the Rapture and are stuck here for the time being. 

At least until the next helicopter leaves for heaven.

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Atmospheric rivers

If I asked you to name the deadliest single-event natural disaster to strike the western half of the United States in recorded history, what would you answer?

If I had to hazard a guess, most people are going to suggest the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.  This was a bad one, no doubt about it; an estimated three thousand people died, and most of the city was destroyed by the quake and the fires that followed it.  Another one that might come to mind is the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980, but that one comes in a distant follower at fifty-seven casualties.

The worst natural disaster in the western United States -- by a significant margin -- is one a lot of people haven't heard of.  In the winter of 1861-1862, an atmospheric river event turned the entire Central Valley of California into an enormous lake, submerging once dry land under as much as ten meters of water.  Over a period of forty-five days, a hard-even-to-imagine three meters of rain fell in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the surrounding area, draining down into the lowlands far too fast to run off.  Rivers overflowed their banks; some simply vanished under the expanding lake.  Although the middle part of the state bore the worst of it, devastating floods were recorded that year from northern Oregon all the way down to Los Angeles.

The exact death toll will probably never be known, but it's well over four thousand.  That's about one percent of the entire population of the state at the time.

A man named John Carr, writing in his memoir thirty years later, had this to say:

From November until the latter part of March there was a succession of storms and floods... The ground was covered with snow a foot deep, and on the mountains much deeper...  The water in the river ... seemed like some mighty uncontrollable monster of destruction broken away from its bonds, rushing uncontrollably on, and everywhere carrying ruin and destruction in its course.  When rising, the river seemed highest in the middle...  From the head settlement to the mouth of the Trinity River, for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, everything was swept to destruction.  Not a bridge was left, or a mining-wheel or a sluice-box.  Parts of ranches and miners cabins met the same fate.  The labor of hundreds of men, and their savings of years, invested in bridges, mines and ranches, were all swept away.  In forty-eight hours the valley of the Trinity was left desolate.  The county never recovered from that disastrous flood.  Many of the mining-wheels and bridges were never rebuilt.

Many of the smaller towns never were, either.

Lithograph of K Street, Sacramento, California, in January of 1862 [Image is in the Public Domain]

What seems to have happened is that in rapid succession, a series of narrow plumes of moist tropical air were carried in off the Pacific.  These "atmospheric rivers" can carry an astonishing amount of water -- some of them have a greater flow rate than the Amazon River.  When they cross over land, sometimes they dissipate, raining out over a wide geographical area.  But the West Coast's odd geography -- two mountain ranges, the Coast Range/Cascades and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, running parallel to each other with a broad valley in between -- meant that as those plumes of moisture moved inland, they were forced upward in altitude (twice).  The drop in pressure and temperature as the air rose caused the water to condense, triggering a month-and-a-half-long rain event that drowned nearly the entire middle of the state.

The reason I bring this up is because the geological record indicates the Great Flood of 1861-62 was not a one-off.  These kinds of floods hit the region on the order of once every century or so.

Only now, the Central Valley is home to 6.5 million people.  And one of the predictions of our best models of climate change is that the warm-up will make atmospheric river events more common.

When people think of deadly disasters, they usually come up with obvious and violent ones like earthquakes and volcanoes.  Certainly, those can be horrific; the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan, China killed an estimated three hundred thousand people.  But the two most dangerous kinds of natural disasters, both in terms of human lives lost and property damage, are flooding and droughts -- two opposite sides of the climatic coin, and both of which are predicted to get dramatically worse if we don't somehow get a handle on the scale of fossil fuel burning.

I saw a quip making its way around social media a while back, that every disaster movie and horror flick starts with someone in charge ignoring a scientist.  There's some truth to that.  Unfortunately, we've not been very good at taking that message to heart.  We need to start listening -- and fast -- and learning from the lessons of the past.  Disasters like the Great California Flood will happen again, and now that we've stomped on the climatic accelerator, it will likely be sooner rather than later.

Let's hope we don't close our eyes to the potential for a catastrophe that will dwarf the one of 170 years ago by several orders of magnitude.

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Dry times

Okay, just yesterday I said that I was gonna try to keep it light and stop focusing on dismal developments like pandemics and climate catastrophe.  But a paper released just yesterday in the journal Science has forced my attention away from cheerful topics back into the more serious realm of how our short-sightedness is driving large parts of the planet toward being completely uninhabitable.

The paper, "Large Contribution from Anthropogenic Warming to an Emerging North American Megadrought," by a team led by A. Park Williams of Columbia University, has an alarming enough title, but when you read the paper itself, you find that "alarming" is kind of the understatement of the century.  Here's a sampler:

Severe and persistent 21st-century drought in southwestern North America (SWNA) motivates comparisons to medieval megadroughts and questions about the role of anthropogenic climate change.  We use hydrological modeling and new 1200-year tree-ring reconstructions of summer soil moisture to demonstrate that the 2000–2018 SWNA drought was the second driest 19-year period since 800 CE, exceeded only by a late-1500s megadrought.  The megadrought-like trajectory of 2000–2018 soil moisture was driven by natural variability superimposed on drying due to anthropogenic warming.  Anthropogenic trends in temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation estimated from 31 climate models account for 47% (model interquartiles of 35 to 105%) of the 2000–2018 drought severity, pushing an otherwise moderate drought onto a trajectory comparable to the worst SWNA megadroughts since 800 CE.

There's a lot to unpack here.  First, not only is the southwestern quarter of the United States heading toward a drought worse than any in recorded history, close to 50% of its severity is directly due to human activity.  On top of that is another thing the study uncovered -- that we were misled (as it were) by the fact that the twentieth century was unusually wet, encouraging widespread settlement by humans and huge investments into agriculture in the region.  "The twentieth century gave us an overly optimistic view of how much water is potentially available," said study co-author Benjamin Cook, also of Columbia University, in a press release.  "It goes to show that studies like this are not just about ancient history.  They’re about problems that are already here."

"Earlier studies were largely model projections of the future," added study lead author Williams. "We’re no longer looking at projections, but at where we are now.  We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts."

[Image courtesy of Science, Williams et al.]

Drought always brings to mind the struggles faced by farmers confronted with the vagaries of weather, but in this case, the problem is orders of magnitude worse than that.  The press release from Columbia University (linked above) mentioned that Lake Mead and Lake Powell -- two of the largest reservoirs in the southwestern United States -- are already seeing a dramatic drop in the water levels.  These provide a significant proportion of the agricultural and drinking water to a broad swath of the Southwest.  What happens when these and others are functionally dry -- too low to allow for withdrawing water for any purpose?

A combination of short-sightedness, Pollyanna-style optimism, and a stretch of unusually wet years in the twentieth century led to coastal California and sun-belt cities like Phoenix and Tucson being some of the most heavily-settled areas in the United States, and now they're in the situation that if there's a true megadrought -- something far worse and longer-lasting than the piece of it we've already seen -- there could be millions of people without adequate drinking water.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to state that the federal and state governments are simply not equipped to face a disaster on that scale.

I hate to focus on negative shit, I really do, but in this case it's too important to ignore.  I'm back to the James Burke quote I mentioned in the post two days ago -- about how we pay for insurance for other much less likely eventualities without batting an eyelash, but when it comes to insurance against climate collapse, for some reason this is considered ridiculous.  The media hasn't helped, especially disinformation specialists like Fox News who have been hammering on climate change being some kind of evil liberal hoax for at least twenty years.  Now, however, we're paying the price, which will only get steeper the longer we pretend it isn't happening.

Consider, for example, the impact of Donald Trump's firing the pandemic response team because he didn't want to spend money on something that hadn't happened yet.

So we need to sound the alarm.  Loudly.  Studies like this one should be on the desk of every lawmaker in the United States.  Yeah, some of them are likely to ignore it -- I don't think a two-by-four to the head would wake up someone as catastrophically dense as James "Snowball" Inhofe, for example -- but the tide has to turn.

Because if you think things are bad now, my sense is you ain't seen nothin' yet.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.

Very early Californians

Yesterday's post about self-correction and reframing in science prompted a friend of mine, the phenomenal author, blogger, and all-around polymath Gil Miller, to send me an interesting link about an archaeological site in California.

The striking thing about this link is its alleged age.  There are mastodon bones showing signs of butchering dating to 130,000 years ago -- which is 115,000 years older than the oldest recording human-occupied site in North America.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dantheman9758 at the English Wikipedia, Mastodon+Human, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Accepting this would require a major retooling of our understanding of the human colonization of the continent.  Were there other hominids living here, who then died out prior to the ancestors of the Native Americans crossing her from Asia?  If so, why aren't there more fossils and other relics?  Was this an early wave of colonization from Siberia, which made it to California but ultimately was unsuccessful?  Is the damage to the bones caused by something other than butchering?  Are the dates of the bones in error?

The answer to the last-asked question, at least, seems to be no.  If a site shows anomalous dates, the first thing you do is... check the dates.  Which was done, and it seems like the radioisotope dating of the mastodon bones is correct.

As far as the others, here's what the authors have to say (from their 2017 paper on the topic in Nature).  The passage is a bit long, but it gives you the scope of their argument:

The earliest dispersal of humans into North America is a contentious subject, and proposed early sites are required to meet the following criteria for acceptance: (1) archaeological evidence is found in a clearly defined and undisturbed geologic context; (2) age is determined by reliable radiometric dating; (3) multiple lines of evidence from interdisciplinary studies provide consistent results; and (4) unquestionable artefacts are found in primary context.  Here we describe the Cerutti Mastodon (CM) site, an archaeological site from the early late Pleistocene epoch, where in situ hammerstones and stone anvils occur in spatio-temporal association with fragmentary remains of a single mastodon (Mammut americanum).  The CM site contains spiral-fractured bone and molar fragments, indicating that breakage occured while fresh.  Several of these fragments also preserve evidence of percussion.  The occurrence and distribution of bone, molar and stone refits suggest that breakage occurred at the site of burial.  Five large cobbles (hammerstones and anvils) in the CM bone bed display use-wear and impact marks, and are hydraulically anomalous relative to the low-energy context of the enclosing sandy silt stratum.  230Th/U radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicates a burial date of 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years ago.  These findings confirm the presence of an unidentified species of Homo at the CM site during the last interglacial period (MIS 5e; early late Pleistocene), indicating that humans with manual dexterity and the experiential knowledge to use hammerstones and anvils processed mastodon limb bones for marrow extraction and/or raw material for tool production.  Systematic proboscidean bone reduction, evident at the CM site, fits within a broader pattern of Palaeolithic bone percussion technology in Africa, Eurasia, and North America.  The CM site is, to our knowledge, the oldest in situ, well-documented archaeological site in North America and, as such, substantially revises the timing of arrival of Homo into the Americas.

As I discussed yesterday, the process of science is that when someone makes a claim, his/her fellow scientists immediately jump in and tear it apart, looking at it from every angle, asking if there are other explanations that account for all the evidence, and in general trying to refute it.  They don't do this to be mean.  The idea is to see if the proposed model can withstand scrutiny -- to see, in scientific parlance, if it is "robust."

And this claim had an additional caveat; to accept it meant to undo our entire previous understanding of how the Americas were colonized by humans.  Carl Sagan's "ECREE Principle" applies here -- "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence."  So the cross-checking and verification was especially intense.

Most archaeologists were unconvinced.  In an article in BBC Online by BBC science editor Paul Rincon, David Meltzer, professor of archaeology at the Southern Methodist University of Dallas, Texas, put it most succinctly: "Nature is mischievous and can break bones and modify stones in a myriad of ways.  With evidence as inherently ambiguous as the broken bones and nondescript broken stones described in the paper, it is not enough to demonstrate they could have been broken/modified by humans; one has to demonstrate they could not have been broken by nature.  This is an equifinality problem: multiple processes can cause the same product."

Which is the problem in all of science.  In order to demonstrate your claim, you have not only to provide evidence, but to show that there is no other explanation that explains it equally well.  Especially here, when to accept the claim requires rewriting everything we know about Western Hemisphere archaeology -- invoking another good rule of thumb, Ockham's Razor.

Usually framed as, "if there are competing explanations, the one that requires the fewest ad hoc assumptions is most likely to be correct."

So at the moment, the consensus about the Cerutti Mastondon Site claim is "maybe, but probably not."  The Holen et al. paper has not stood the test of scientific scrutiny.  Which doesn't mean the claim is wrong; plenty of weird claims have later been shown, by virtue of additional evidence, to have been correct.  But in the absence of that evidence, we have to be able to say, "We don't know."

As an extraordinary claim, thus far it seems not to have reached the bar of support we expect in science.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is a dark one, but absolutely gripping: the brilliant novelist Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Most of you probably know about the sarin attack in the subways of Tokyo in 1995, perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult under the leadership of Shoko Asahara.  Asahara, acting through five Aum members, set off nerve gas containers during rush hour, killing fifty people outright and injuring over a thousand others.  All six of them were hanged in 2018 for the crimes, along with a seventh who acted as a getaway driver.

Murakami does an amazing job in recounting the events leading up to the attack, and getting into the psyches of the perpetrators.  Amazingly, most of them were from completely ordinary backgrounds and had no criminal records at all, nor any other signs of the horrors they had planned.  Murakami interviewed commuters who were injured by the poison and also a number of first responders, and draws a grim but fascinating picture of one of the darkest days in Japanese history.

You won't be able to put it down.

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

Bats in the belfry

Over at the site Pararational I ran into an article describing a cryptid I'd never heard of.  Huge, brawny, with pointed ears and enormous, leathery wings, this character haunts the forests of the Pacific Northwest.  As if they didn't already have enough problems with their Sasquatch infestation.

And despite living for ten years in Seattle, I'd never heard of him. So, dear readers, meet...

... Batsquatch.

The first thing I notice, being a biologist, is that Batsquatch seems to have no... equipment.  If you get my drift.  Above the waist, he's built like a bodybuilder, and below the waist he's built like a Ken doll.  So you have to wonder how there'd be more than one of them.  Maybe they reproduce from spores, or something.

The other thing is that he's got kind of a small head in comparison to his body, and a rather derpish expression.  Low cranial capacity, you know?  A knuckle-dragger type.  The overall impression is of a demon from the redneck part of hell, where instead of stealing your soul, they just down a six-pack of Miller Lite and then take a baseball bat to your mailbox.

Beelzebubba, is kind of how I think of him.

Be that as it may, Batsquatch has apparently been seen a number of times, starting back in 1980, and has generated reports with some regularity since then.  Here's one from 2009:

Me and my friend were hiking around Mt. Shasta and out of one of the crevices, flew out this big creature.  I mean this thing was huge.  It was as tall as a man, as stocky as Hulk Hogan and had leathery wings.  I believe the wing span was at least 50 feet from one end to the other.  I was holding up my camera, but was paralyzed with fear as this thing flew by.  I didn’t get a picture, sorry.  What do you think this might be?  Could it have been a pterodactyl?  It was flying or gliding fast, it seemed to have a head of a bat.  Thinking about it, it doesn’t have the head of a pterodactyl,  I just saw a picture of a pterodactyl and the heads are not similar.  I would think it had the head of a bat or maybe more like a fox.  The damn thing finally flew into a clump of trees and vanished.  I heard you guys might be going back to Mt. Shasta, if you do, please look out for this thing.  If you see it, you will piss all over yourself, I kid you not.

Well, yeah, I guess that'd be a natural enough reaction to seeing Hulk Hogan with fifty-foot wings.

Then, we're told of several "fake" reports of Batsquatch.  I'm not entirely sure how one vague story with no proof differs from another vague story with no proof, but the author of the website says that some of the accounts are real and some are not, so there you are.

Because the fact remains that there isn't a scrap of hard evidence that Batsquatch exists, just a lot of anecdotal reports and a sketch of a sketch.  That didn't stop the folks over at Pararational from coming up with what may be the all-time silliest explanation for a cryptid sighting that I've ever read:

(Perhaps) Batsquatch is an extra-dimensional creature that dropped through a rift and got stuck here.  If the first sighting really was in close proximity to the Mt. St. Helens eruption, it seems probably that the force of the blast may have ruptured time/space allowing something to get sucked through. In that case, it may have flown around for a while and died in some remote location, or else found a way home.

Because, of course, "rupturing space-time" is what happens when a volcano erupts.  Probably also happens during earthquakes, thunderstorms, and early cold snaps.  You know how fragile space-time is, at least if Star Trek: The Next Generation is to be believed.

So anyway.  If you're in the Northwest, look out for Batsquatch.  Given how big he supposedly is, I don't see how you could miss him, frankly.  If you see him, maybe he won't hurt you if you offer him a Miller Lite.

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Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

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

Rising tide

The current administration's approach to facts they don't like seems to have three parts:

1. Lie about them.
2. Get all the members of your administration, and any other cronies you can convince, to avoid mentioning them.
3. If the facts come out anyway, blame "Fake News."

If you needed any further proof of this, all you have to do is to look at the recent news release from the United States Geological Survey regarding improving infrastructure on the California coast.  The news release was based on a paper published earlier this year in the journal Scientific Reports, and focused on methodology -- ways to mitigate flood damage and damage from mudslides, for example.

The problem is, if you read the paper itself, you'll see that the press release neglected mention of the study's major conclusion -- that California is in dire danger of catastrophic flooding, with property damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars -- and that the cause is anthropogenic climate change.

Worse still, it wasn't a simple omission.  An earlier version of the press release included facts and figures from the study, including the alarming conclusion that between three and seven times more people and businesses will be at risk than estimated in earlier projections, but the Trump administration "sanitized" the press release by removing every single reference to climate change, and making it sound like the entire study was about thinking ahead and shoring everything up and making everyone safe.

"It's been made clear to us that we're not supposed to use climate change in press releases anymore," one federal researcher said, under conditions of anonymity for fear of reprisal.  "They will not be authorized."

The problem goes all the way to the top.  James Reilly, director of the USGS, authorized the scrubbing of the press release, despite his statement at his 2018 confirmation hearing that he was "fully committed to scientific integrity."

Which, at this point, appears to have been a blatant lie.

Flooding on Assateague Island, Virginia [Image is in the Public Domain]

Trump has been (rightly) criticized for his blatant disregard for scientific research and his overturning of dozens of environmental protections -- loosening standards for pollution, removing corporate oversight, making it more difficult for industry to be sued for cleanup.  Despite this, in a rant earlier this week that was bizarre even by his standards, Trump portrayed himself as an environmental leader, skewing facts (such as his claim that the United States has been a leader in reduction of carbon emissions, when in fact we're the second highest in the world) and rambling on with nearly incoherent bits like this:

You don't have to have any forest fires.  It's interesting.  I spoke to certain countries, and they said, "Sir, we're a forest nation."  I never thought of a country -- well-known countries; "we're a forest nation."  I never heard of the term "forest nation."  They live in forests.  And they don't have problems...  Remember, management.  It's called forest management.  So it's a very important term.  When I went to California, they sort of scoffed at me for the first two weeks and maybe three weeks and not so much four weeks, and after about five weeks they said, "You know, he's right.  He's right."

It's almost a guarantee that if Donald Trump said "I was told..." the next thing that comes out of his mouth will be a lie.  And for what it's worth, elected officials and policy leaders in California have all denied (some of them, after laughing uproariously) that they agreed with anything Trump said about environmental policy.

Remember, this is the guy who said that Finland avoids forest fires because they spend a lot of time raking.

For fuck's sake.

"Don't trust what the government says" has become almost a cliché regarding every resistance movement ever organized, but in this case, it seems like it's not an overgeneralization.  This administration has made a policy of deceit, coverup, corruption, and subterfuge that makes Watergate and Teapot Dome look like kids staging a play for their parents.  The problem here is that in this case, what they're lying about is the long-term habitability of the planet.

Which moves this whole issue from "immoral" to "unconscionable."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun for anyone who (like me) appreciates both plants and an occasional nice cocktail -- The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart.  Most of the things we drink (both alcohol-containing and not) come from plants, and Stewart takes a look at some of the plants that have provided us with bar staples -- from the obvious, like grapes (wine), barley (beer), and agave (tequila), to the obscure, like gentian (angostura bitters) and hyssop (Bénédictine).

It's not a scientific tome, more a bit of light reading for anyone who wants to know more about what they're imbibing.  So learn a little about what's behind the bar -- and along the way, a little history and botany as well.

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

Dog days

Yesterday, we found out that the president of the United States ordered his lawyer to commit perjury before Congress, and has taken his "Oh, yeah, well you're a great big poopyhead!" style of interaction to new levels with revealing the details of a (formerly) secure visit to the troops in Afghanistan by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, presumably to get back at her for denying him the opportunity to deliver his State of the Union speech.

Oh, and there's another "caravan" on the way.  And Ivanka Trump has been tapped to help select the next leader of the World Bank.

*looks around desperately for something, anything, else to think about*

Okay, folks, today we're going to consider: why have sightings of "dogmen" been on the rise lately?

Yesterday we considered eyewitness accounts of seeing pterodactyl-like flying creatures, which is weird enough.  But now we're having to contend with scary visitations by bipedal canines.

As if the quadrupedal kind weren't enough trouble.  Our rescue dog, Guinness, is a truly wonderful guy, but his nickname of "El Destructo" is well earned.  In the past two weeks, he's chewed up a bottle of red ceramic underglaze, a visitor's shoe, a magazine, a pillow, and a single piece from a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.  About the latter, I'd almost have preferred if he'd eaten the whole puzzle; having one piece gnawed is just maddening.

Oh, and he swiped a chunk of gourmet cheese off the counter and ate the entire thing.

Do NOT let this innocent expression fool you.

So the idea that there might be intelligent bipedal dogs, perhaps even with opposable thumbs, is kind of alarming.  But that's just what people have been seeing.

Starting with an anonymous (of course) eyewitness in northern Arkansas, who two months ago saw a fearsome doglike creature while driving home from his job as a roofing worker.

"I came across this evil-looking wolf creature," he said.  "It was carrying something in its hands, like a leash or a rope.  It was standing on two feet on the left side of the road.  It was gray, maybe seven feet tall, three hundred pounds."

That, in the words of a friend of mine, is "a big bow-wow."

Then there's the guy in Colorado who was driving home with his own dog, and saw Fido's scary cousin.  He'd stopped the car and let his dog out to pee, but evidently that was the last thing on her mind.  "She wouldn’t do her business," he said.  "She started barking.  At first I thought she was barking at the traffic, but there was no traffic."

The fact that he even considered the explanation that she was barking at traffic that wasn't there makes me wonder about his reliability as a witness, but let's hear the rest of his testimony.

"I noticed five lights hovering in the sky in the distance...  I quickly put the dog in the car and went to investigate.  The lights rose higher and then got smaller and zigzagged, then vanished."

This did not calm his dog down, and in fact, she seemed even more scared than before.  Then...

"I tried comforting her, and that’s when I noticed something moving in the corner of my eye.  I looked up and saw something running behind my car, through the taillights... It had red fur and a tail, but it also had a human face...  It's hard to describe."

Understandably, the guy hauled ass back out onto the road, but he adds that his dog was still terrified when they arrived home, and he had nightmares for several nights thereafter.

There were other sightings in the last couple of months in Michigan and California, the latter by a retired Air Force security officer who was in a park with her daughter and saw "a large male dogman," six-and-a-half to seven feet tall, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, long arms, dog-like legs, a tail, and amber eyes.  She pulled a gun on it, and started speaking to the thing in her native language (she is Shoshone), and that stopped it from advancing on them.  She and her daughter hightailed it back to their car, and got home safely.  She decided to return the next day with her husband, and see if she could find more evidence (or possibly see it again), and there was no certain trace of the dogman, but they did find a cat skeleton "stripped clean down to the bones."

Skeptic though I am, if I'd seen something like that, I don't think you could pay me enough to return to the same spot.  So major props to her for doing this, and I'm glad that the Shoshone-speaking cat-eating dogman of California didn't harm any of them.

But as far as our initial question -- to wit, why there have been more sightings of dogmen lately -- the only thing I can come up with is that the dogmen have decided we humans had our shot at running the world, but we've fucked things up so royally that they're going to take matters into their own, um, paws.  Maybe they'll team up with yesterday's pterodactyls to form a really New World Order.  Myself, I say let 'em.  Can't be any worse than what we have now.

Of course, if the dogmen are anything like Guinness, they will stubbornly refuse to even consider running the government until you throw the ball for them 459 times, and follow it up by saying "whoozagooboy?" and giving them a dog cookie.

So that's today's cryptozoological news.  And now, sad to say, I've dithered around long enough, and I should probably gird my loins and check the news.  Who knows what might have happened in my absence?  Maybe Donald Trump threw a mud pie at Nancy Pelosi.  Maybe Mitch McConnell finally decided that his title of "Senate Majority Leader" means he should actually lead the Senate.  Maybe Ivanka Trump will be appointed to replace Sarah Huckabee Sanders as White House Spokesperson, given that Sanders is allegedly resigning, probably because she's used up her quota of egregious lies, so now has no option other than telling the truth.

And we can't have that.

But in any case, be on the lookout for dogmen, but play it safe.  A seven-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound dog could do a lot of damage to shoes and jigsaw puzzles.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

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

Invasion of the Nightcrawlers

After eight years of Skeptophilia, it's hard for me to run into a paranormal or cryptozoological claim I haven't heard of before.  But that's exactly what happened yesterday, when I visited the delightfully loopy feature on Ranker called "Graveyard Shift."

The article tells us about a creature that got its start in California, but apparently is gaining ground all over the United States.  They're called the "Fresno Nightcrawlers," which would make an outstanding name for a sports team.  In an article called "Fresno Nightcrawlers Are Terrorizing the Dark, and They're Spreading Far From California," Laura Allan tells us about these strange beings, a "few feet tall," that appear to be nothing much more than a pair of legs and a head.

Here's a still from a YouTube video that purports to be a pair of Fresno Nightcrawlers:

As usual, this video was taken using the videocamera's "AutoBlur" function, also useful when filming ghosts, Bigfoot, aliens, and the Loch Ness Monster.  Here's one of the videos that is supposedly of Nightcrawlers:

Laura Allan says that they've never been encountered in person -- they've only been seen on video footage (the one the still came from was a CCTV that a homeowner had set up in an attempt to catch a thief).  She writes:

Much video footage of cryptids is easily debunked by video analysis, but the weird thing about the nightcrawlers is that the videos seem to be legit.  As goofy and awkward as these mysterious creatures may appear, faking them would prove to be a difficult task. So, then, what exactly are we seeing here?... 

Of course, the biggest prevailing theory is that all of this is just some sort of hoax.  The creatures do look rather silly and awkward, and like they may be some sort of puppet rather than actually alive.  While it's never been proven either way, the videos were weird enough to get the attention of one TV show called Fact or Faked, and they set out to examine the video.

First, they examined the creatures themselves, and soon figured out that they were indeed only a few feet tall, as had been previously reported.  Then they went out looking for the creatures, but were unable to find them.  Then they tried to recreate the video with many different known hoax techniques.  All their attempts to recreate the footage was met with failure.  In the end, they decided that the footage would be very difficult to fake, if not impossible, and that the video footage was authentic.

I have to admit that the video gave me a bit of a chill, but that's only because I was reminded of M. R. James's incredibly scary short story "O, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad."  (The link provided has the entire story, which I will suggest you not read at night when you're alone in the house.  You have been warned.)  So despite the fact that the Nightcrawlers look like walking bedsheets -- in fact, because they do -- it gave me a visceral shudder when I watched the video.

Even so, I'm a little doubtful about all of this.  In this day of digital video editing software, "impossible to fake" has almost become a contradiction in terms.  And as far as the creepiness factor, for me that was at least partly offset by the fact that besides M. R. James's terrifying monster, I was also reminded of the Wrong Trousers from Wallace & Gromit.

Okay, the Nightcrawlers are taller and skinnier, but the principle is the same.

Anyhow, it was fun running into a cryptid -- or whatever they're claiming it is -- that I'd never heard of before, but it's perhaps unsurprising that I'm less than impressed.  I keep hoping one of these will turn out to be true -- just because I'm a skeptic doesn't mean I'm blind to the coolness factor of there being some weird, unexplained entity out there, beyond what science has yet encountered.

But what looks like an old bedsheet really isn't doing it for me.


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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

Flerfs in space

At the time of this writing, I have been sent five times a link to a story about a Flat-Earther who wants to prove his case by taking a ride in a home-made rocket ship.

I know I say "I wish I was making this up" a lot, but honestly?  There's something kind of awesome about how earnest this guy is.  Most Flat-Earthers -- who were recently christened "Flerfs" by some wag on Twitter, an appellation that I think carries exactly the right amount of gravitas -- are so full of themselves and self-righteous that all they elicit from me is an eyeroll.  But this guy?

He's got a strange sort of moxie.

His name is Mike Hughes, and he's a 61-year-old retired limo driver from California.  He has spent over $20,000 to build his rocket, which includes (the article says) the bright yellow and red Rust-O-Leum paint that he used to letter "RESEARCH FLAT EARTH" on the side.  He bought an old motor home, took it apart, and converted it into a firing ramp.  The rocket runs on steam power, and the idea is to launch it over the town of Amboy, California today.

Hughes and his rocket ship

The rocket, Hughes says, will travel at a maximum speed of 500 miles per hour, something that does give him some trepidation despite his enthusiasm for the project.  "If you’re not scared to death, you’re an idiot," Hughes said.  "It’s scary as hell, but none of us are getting out of this world alive.  I like to do extraordinary things that no one else can do, and no one in the history of mankind has designed, built and launched himself in his own rocket.  I’m a walking reality show."

What exactly his launch will prove, Hughes doesn't seem exactly clear about.  "I don’t believe in science," he said, rather unnecessarily, in my opinion.  "I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust.  But that’s not science, that’s just a formula.  There’s no difference between science and science fiction."

Which explains how much overlap there is between NASA and Lost in Space.

Danger, Will Robinson.

Hughes has big plans, if the outcome of today's launch is different from what I expect, which is that he will leave a large impact crater surrounded by gaily-painted red and yellow shrapnel, rather like the times Wile E. Coyote strapped an Acme Jet Pack to his back and proceeded to fly directly into a cliff side.  If he survives, Hughes says, he's going to launch himself right into a new project, which is the California governor's race.

I wonder what his campaign slogan will be?  I think "Vote Flerf!  We're down to Earth!" would be a good choice.

What I'm wondering is why he thinks launching himself in a rocket will prove that the Earth is flat.  Does he think that a spherical Earth would mean that his ship would take off in a tangent line and end up in space?  Or that from up there, he'll be able to see the entire flat disc?  You can see how a different perspective could clear things up:

Anyhow, I wish him luck.  Despite the fact that I think he has a single Froot Loop where most of us have a brain, I have no desire to see him end up winning the Darwin Award for 2017.  So keep your eye skyward today.  Who knows?  You might see a red and yellow rocket streak overhead, unless his trajectory takes him out over the edge of the world, which would be unfortunate.