Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
It's easy to get beaten down by the constant barrage of bad news.
This effect is amplified if you, like me, suffer from anxiety and depression on good days. All I have to do is spend a while reading the headlines, or (worse) hanging out on social media, and I start catastrophizing. Everything is awful. The bad guys always win. We're all doomed.
I can spiral down that whirlpool really quickly, while at the same time knowing that it's not true. A wise friend once told me, "The biggest lie that depression tells you is that the lows are permanent." Yes, there are some very bad things happening right now. But it is possible to hold that in your mind at the same time as believing there's still hope for the future. I can agree with Martin Luther King Jr.'s eloquent line, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," and still wish it would bend a hell of a lot faster.
It's why I post here every day, and (mostly) focus on the positive, or at least the intriguing, rather than writing about the current political horror show day after day. I do believe in speaking up for truth, fairness, and compassion, and decrying their opposites -- and I have done. But I've found that it's equally important to find things that give us hope. There is good news out there, and people are still doing lovely, kind, interesting, important, and wonderful things.
Sometimes those little sparks of hope come from odd quarters. Which brings us to the Dover Twist.
It sounds like some sort of obscure English country dance, but it's not. It's a species of moth native to southern England, Periclepsis cinctana, a little brown-and-white creature with a wingspan of only a bit over a centimeter.
It's an extreme habitat specialist, requiring chalk grasslands, which have largely been cleared for building. And as we've seen over and over, when conditions change -- especially with human disturbance -- the specialists always get hit first and hardest.
So it was with the Dover Twist. Although related populations still persist in mainland Europe, and a small relic on the island of Tiree off the northwest coast of Scotland, the last individual in its original habitat of southeastern England was seen in 1953. Attempts to relocate it failed, and it was declared extirpated.
"I was absolutely blown away," Levey said. "It's the kind of discovery you dream of making, but you never expect it to actually happen. With so many butterflies and moths in trouble across the UK, it’s fantastic to find this tiny little species bucking the trend. After a 73 year gap in sightings, I'm so pleased to share that we now know it is still in Kent and I'm sure it'll be keeping me busy in the near future as we begin the task of uncovering the exact habitat it needs as part of Butterfly Conservation's work helping to save our most threatened moths."
The unexpected renaissance of this species is not only lovely news in general, but gives hope that some other species thought extinct -- especially ones like the Thylacine and Ivory-billed Woodpecker, that live(d) in remote and poorly-explored regions -- might still persist. (Both of those, in fact, have been the subject of repeated sighting reports, but thus far, nothing that convinces the skeptics. The search continues.)
I'm not sure why this story cheered me up as much as it did. The Dover Twist is certainly not what my ecology professor called one of the "charismatic megafauna," something that'd be likely to end up featured in a calendar entitled "Majestic Wildlife." But that this little insect survived undetected, virtually under our noses, is a symbol that things can turn out well.
The good guys do win sometimes. Even if in this case, the good guys are a British ecologist and a minuscule brown-and-white moth. Maybe it's not a dramatic victory, the kind that would make headlines, but it does give me a little boost of hope.
I'm currently reading Michael Novacek's fascinating book Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, which is about the expeditions led by Novacek into the backcountry of the Mongolian Gobi Desert in search of late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils.
And they found 'em. In abundance. The remains that Novacek's team unearthed changed our understanding of the evolution of dinosaurs and early mammals in central Asia -- I've already lost count of the number of new species his group found, and I'm only about a third of the way through the book.
What struck me, though, is the combination of physical and personal hardship that the team members were willing to tolerate to achieve their goals. The Gobi Desert is, even today, largely untraveled and unmapped; the nomadic groups that live in its arid wastes have to keep moving to survive in a climate that is broiling hot in the summer and viciously cold in the winter, has little in the way of drinkable fresh water, and is thin pasturage for domestic animals even at the best of times. These scientists launched into the arid badlands in old, Soviet-era trucks that broke down every time someone sneezed hard, with carefully-rationed food, water, and gasoline, and exactly zero margin for error.
The fact that they not only survived, but achieved their scientific goals (and then some), is downright astonishing. And every other page, I've shaken my head and thought, "I would never have the courage to do something like this. Not in a million years."
Keep in mind, too, that this is coming from someone who did his share of backcountry camping, mostly in the Cascades and Olympics of Washington State. Being a teacher has its perks -- June, July, and August being top of the list -- and when I was in my twenties I frequently disappeared into the fir-shrouded forests during the summer for weeks at a time. So I'm no stranger to sleeping outdoors and hiking with a heavy pack. (Or at least I was. Now that I am Of A Certain Age, I'm afraid my appreciation of the creature comforts has done nothing but increase.)
But still: I would never have been brave enough to take off into the wilds of Mongolia the way Novacek et al. did (repeatedly). Which probably would have scotched any intent I might have had to become a paleontologist.
On the other hand, sometimes -- admittedly, it's probably rare -- great paleontological discoveries can come from merely opening the right drawer in a museum. The reason the topic comes up (besides my current reading-in-progress) is the chance find by paleontologist Georgios Georgalis of the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow, who was doing some research in London's Natural History Museum and stumbled across the bones of a very unusual fossil snake that had been overlooked for forty years.
Dubbed Paradoxophidion richardoweni -- "Richard Owen's paradoxical snake" -- it lived in England during the Eocene Epoch, something like 37 million years ago. At that point, England was a great deal warmer than it is now. The world was just exiting the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, at eight degrees Celsius higher than today one of the highest global average temperatures ever recorded. The hot times favored diversification of ectothermic animals -- such as snakes -- in what are now regions with much cooler climates.
"It was my childhood dream to be able to visit the Natural History Museum, let alone do research there," said study lead author Georgalis. "So, when I saw these very weird vertebrae in the collection and knew that they were something new, it was a fantastic feeling. It's especially exciting to have described an early diverging caenophidian snake, as there's not that much evidence about how they emerged. Paradoxophidion brings us closer to understanding how this happened."
The snake species, Georgalis said, seems to be related to a group called acrochordids now found only in southeast Asia and Australia -- although more study is needed to be certain. And it also brought up the tantalizing question of what else might be hiding in museum drawers and cabinets.
"I'm planning to study a variety of snake fossils in the collection, including those originally studied by Richard Owen" Georgalis said. "These include the remains of the giant aquatic snake Palaeophis, which were first found in England in the nineteenth century. There are also several bones with differing morphology that haven't been investigated before that I'm interested in looking at. These might represent new taxa and offer additional clues about snake evolution."
So I guess you don't need to endure sandstorms and blistering heat and terrible food to make significant contributions to the field.
This also highlights the critical importance of museums in the entire scientific enterprise. I found out yesterday the amazing news that one of our best local museums, the Paleontological Research Institution/Museum of the Earth, has received enough donations to remain open -- funding cuts were looking likely to shutter it permanently. On the one hand, I'm thrilled that enough people were willing to donate to keep this wonderful place going (and if you're willing, I encourage you to go to their website and do so as well -- even if they met their goal, they can still put every penny to good use). On the other, though, isn't it sad that we never seem to run out of money for stuff like funding war and paying kickbacks to corporate billionaires, but cutting-edge scientific establishments that are inspirations to thousands basically have to hold a bake sale to stay in business?
In any case, here's another puzzle piece adding to the picture of what the Earth was like tens of millions of years ago, that had been hidden away in a museum cabinet for four decades. I find the whole thing endlessly fascinating, which probably explains why the topic of paleontology is such a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia.
But as interested as I am, I still don't think I'd be brave enough to venture into the Gobi Desert to study it.
Just about everyone has heard about the Roswell Incident, the 1947 discovery of military balloon debris near Roswell, New Mexico that gave rise to a million (and counting) conspiracy theories suggesting that the crash site had actually been pieces of a downed spacecraft, complete with the corpses of the alien crew. But have you heard about the Warminster Thing?
It's a tale that's even weirder than Roswell, because (1) there were multiple witnesses who seem to have had no particular reason to lie, and (2) there's no good rational/non-alien-based explanation that I've ever heard. This event got its start in December of 1964, near the town of Warminster, in Wiltshire, England.
Here are the basics of the claim.
In the wee hours of Christmas morning, a woman named Mildred Head was awakened by a strange noise coming from above. It sounded like something was striking and/or dragging across her roof tiles. "The night came alive with strange sounds lashing at [the] roof," she later reported. "It sounded like twigs brushing against the tiles and got louder and louder until it reverberated like giant hailstones." Alarmed, she got out of bed and went to the window, pulled the curtains, and looked outside. There was no sign of hail (or any other form of precipitation). But as she stood there, she heard another sound -- a "humming sound that grew louder, then faded to a faint whisper -- a low whistling or wheezing."
Her husband, who was deaf, slept through the entire thing.
At six o'clock that same morning, another woman, Marjorie Bye, was walking to the early Christmas service at Christ Church in Warminster when she also heard odd sounds. At first it sounded like crackling, and she thought it might be a truck spreading grit on icy spots on the road. But as she listened, the sound got nearer, passed over her head, and continued in the direction of Ludlow Close. Like Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye heard a humming noise and a sound like "branches being pulled across gravel." The night was clear and starlit, and she saw nothing even when the sounds seemed to be at their nearest.
But the incident wasn't over yet. As she neared the church, she experienced what she later characterized as a "sonic attack." "Sudden vibrations came overhead... Shockwaves pounded at my head, neck and shoulders. I felt I was being pinned down by invisible fingers of sound."
A similar report came from Warminster's postmaster, the unfortunately-named Roger Rump. He heard "a terrific clatter, as though the roof tiles were being pulled off by some tremendous force. Then came a scrambling sound as if they were being loudly slammed back into place. I could hear an odd humming tone. It was most unusual. It lasted no more than a minute."
All told, over thirty people in or near Warminster heard the noises, and the accounts all substantially agreed with each other.
Then, in March of the following year, the events started up again -- and intensified.
There were more reports of noises like rushing wind, something scraping against roof tiles, and loud booming sounds. People reported flocks of birds being found dead. "There was a great bouncing and bumping noise over our heads," one man reported. "As though a load of stones was being tipped against the roof and the back wall of the bungalow. It seemed like a tonne of coal were being emptied from sacks and sent tumbling over all the place."
This time, though, people began seeing things as well.
Patricia Philips, the wife of the vicar of Heytesbury, a village near Warminster, saw a "cigar-shaped object" in the sky that was visible long enough for her husband and all three children to watch it through binoculars. Two months later, a woman named Kathleen Penton saw "a shining thing going along sideways in the sky. Porthole-type windows ran the entire length of it. It glided slowly in front of the downs…it was the size of a whole bedroom wall. It was very much like a train carriage, only with rounded ends to it. It did not travel lengthways but was gliding sideways."
By the end of summer, the incidents seemed to taper off, but not before one man -- Gordon Faulkner -- was able to photograph what he claimed was a UFO near Colloway Clump, north of Warminster:
By this time, a journalist named Arthur Shuttlewood had become obsessed with figuring out the answer to the mystery, and interviewed dozens of people who had strange experiences between December 1964 and August 1965. He ended up with eight notebooks filled with accounts -- and no answers.
So, what's going on here?
There are a few possibilities, but I have to admit there's no particularly good reason to subscribe to any of them. The first is that the noises were military equipment tests from the Land Warfare Center, a British Army training and development base near Warminster. The military, of course, denied all knowledge of the source of the noises and (later) sightings, but if they were testing sonic weapons that were classified, there could well be another reason for that.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine why the military would choose Christmas morning to test a sonic weapon near a town where fifteen thousand people live.
A second possibility is that Arthur Shuttlewood, the journalist who brought the whole story to light -- and who popularized it thereafter, eventually writing a book about the incidents -- exaggerated, or (perhaps) even spun from whole cloth, the lion's share of the "personal accounts." Shuttlewood was never accused outright of falsifying evidence, but his colleagues at The Wiltshire Times said he was not above embellishing reports of local events "for dramatic effect." It bears mention here that even if Shuttlewood started out fairly reliable, he kind of went off the rails later in life. He reported telepathic communications, and even telephone calls, from "natives from the planet Aenstria" who were behind the whole thing. They warned Shuttlewood of various dangers we were facing as a species, but said not to worry, because Christ would return in 1975 and fix everything.
Well, I was fifteen years old in 1975, and what stands out about that particular year is that there was no sign of the Second Coming, and everything is still as unfixed as it ever was.
In any case, Shuttlewood lived until 1996, swearing to the end that what he'd said was nothing less than the unvarnished truth. (If you want to read Shuttlewood's own account of his interactions with the Aenstrians, you can check it out here. I'll warn you, though -- don't expect to come away from it with an improved opinion of his veracity.)
So what we have here is another unfortunate case of a curious unexplained incident getting into the hands of someone who was either an obsessed attention seeker or completely unhinged, or both -- similar to what happened with the famous case of the haunting of Borley Rectory. When this occurs, any evidence we may have had becomes tainted with misrepresentations and dubious additions from people who also want their fifteen minutes of fame, to the point that it becomes difficult to tell what is true, what is due to human suggestibility, and what is an outright fabrication.
Myself, I'm most inclined to credit the first few accounts as being the most credible, and the most in need of an explanation. Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye, and Roger Rump, all of whom made their reports before the furor started, had no particular reason to make their stories up; in fact, Bye initially didn't want her name attached to it, until so many other people came forward that she figured it was safe.
The later accounts, though -- and especially the infamous photograph taken by Gordon Faulkner -- are all too likely to be the result of people eager to jump on the bandwagon of what had by then become a nationally-reported incident. That's not proof, I realize -- "they could be hoaxes" is a long way from "they are hoaxes" -- but at the very least, those later reports should be looked at through a (really) skeptical lens.
The "Warminster Thing" taken as a whole, though -- it's a curious story, but there's honestly not enough hard evidence there to make a certain determination about anything. We have to leave it in the "unknown, and we probably will never know" category. Maybe aliens did visit Wiltshire in 1964 and 1965. Maybe they were even from "the planet Aenstria." But at the moment, I'm much more confident that the incident -- whatever it was -- had some purely rational, and terrestrial, explanation.
A point I've made here at Skeptophilia more than once is that I don't automatically disbelieve in anyone's claim of having a paranormal or religious experience, it's just that I'm doubtful. The reason for my doubt is that having a decent background in neurobiology, I know for a fact that our brains are (in astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's pithy phrase) "poor data-taking devices." We are swayed by our own biases -- put simply, what we expect to see or hear -- and are often overwhelmed by our own emotions, especially when they're powerful ones like fear or excitement.
What's alarming about this is that it doesn't honestly matter whether you're a skeptic or not; we're all prone to this. I heard a loud noise downstairs one evening -- it was, unfortunately, shortly after I'd been watching an episode of The X Files -- and as the Man of the House bravely volunteered to go investigate. I looked around for something with which to arm myself, and picked up a pair of fireplace tongs (prompting my wife to ask, "What're you gonna do, pinch the monster's belly fat?") By the time I actually went downstairs, I had worked myself up into a lather imagining what fearful denizens of the netherworld might have invaded our basement.
Turned out our cat had jumped up on the counter and knocked a ceramic mug onto the floor. I did not, for the record, pinch her belly fat with the tongs, although I certainly felt like she deserved it.
The thing is, we're all suggestible, and our imaginations make us prone both to seeing things that aren't there and misinterpreting the things that are there. It's why we have science; scientific tools don't get freaked out and imagine they've seen a ghost.
When I taught Critical Thinking, one of my assignments was for students to use PhotoShop (or an equivalent software) to create the best fake ghost, cryptid, or UFO photo they could. This was that year's winner. Pretty good, isn't it? [Image credit: Nathan Brewer, used with permission]
The reason this topic comes up is a pair of unrelated links I happened across within minutes of each other, that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.
The first one is by "paranormal explorer, investigator, and researcher" Ashley Knibb. Knibb is a UK-based writer and ghost hunter who spends his time visiting sites of alleged hauntings with his team, then writing up their experiences. The one I stumbled across yesterday was about their recent investigation of Royal Gunpowder Mills, Waltham Abbey, Essex. The building, now a "Historical Site of Special Interest" maintained by the government, was (as you might guess from the name) originally an industrial complex for the manufacture of explosives. "Hundreds of lives had passed through these grounds; some of them cut short by the very materials that gave Britain its military edge," Knibb writes. "It’s no wonder the place has a reputation for being haunted... Nothing stirred, but there was an eerie sense that the building’s history had left an imprint. This was a place where weapons of war had been made, where accidents had claimed lives. Sometimes you don’t need voices; the atmosphere says enough."
The rest of the article, which is evocative and creepy, describes what Knibb and his assistants felt, saw, and heard during the night they spent in the Mills. One of them heard the name "Cooper" being spoken; another heard a faint "hello." They saw the sparkle of flashing lights that, upon arrival in the room where they seemed to originate, had no material source. More prosaic, one of their videocamera lights itself began to strobe. There were areas where the visitors experienced chills, and one of them had a profound experience of vertigo and nausea at one point. (To Knibb's credit, he recounts hearing a loud thud, which turned out to be the movement of a very-much-living staff member retrieving something from an upper room. "Ruling out," Knibb observes correctly, "is as important as ruling in.")
The second link is a paper in The Journal of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion, and is called "Sensing the Darkness: Dark Therapy, Authority, and Spiritual Experience." The gist of the paper is that there is a new trend called "Dark Therapy" where volunteers agree to spend a given amount of time in complete darkness, in search of numinous or otherwise enlightening experiences. Other senses are allowed; in fact, one of the purposes of being in the dark, proponents say, is to heighten your other sensory experiences. Some of these episodes are guided, and others not. The paper recounts the experiences of twelve participants who agreed to spend a block of time between seven and fourteen days in a well-furnished room that was completely dark.
Their responses are intriguing. The researchers (to their credit) do not weigh in on whether the experiences of the participants reflected an external truth, or were simply artifacts of the sensory deprivation and the workings of their minds. I would encourage you to read the original paper, but just to give you the flavor, here's what one person said after her stay in the dark room:
For the first time [in the dark] there was a lot of fear. Somehow like manifestation of fear that was coming, well, differently and sometimes it was like... sometimes sounds, sometimes some images, (. . .) some demonic visions (. . .) were appearing and finally I understood that this is all me, my projection, but that you have to go through it, but it was such realistic experiences, very realistic. (. . .) sometimes I heard something, or I had the feeling that somebody is there with me, and I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all.
What strikes me here is that like with ghost hunting, how much of what you experience is what you expected to experience? I don't doubt that Dark Therapy might be an interesting way to learn about your own mind, and how you cope with being deprived of one of your senses, and might even result in profound enlightenment. But there's a real danger with someone crossing over into believing that something like the "demonic visions" the volunteer experienced are manifestations of an external physical reality. We all come primed with our preconceived notions of what's out there; when in an unfamiliar situation where our emotions are ramped up, it'd be all to easy for those mental models to magnify into something that seems convincingly real.
Like I said, it's not that I'm saying I'm certain that Ashley Knibb's scary night at Royal Gunpowder Mills, or anyone else's experiences of the holy or the demonic or the supernatural, are one hundred percent imaginary. It's just that my generally skeptical outlook, and (especially) my training in neuroscience, makes me hesitant to accept personal anecdote as reality without any hard evidence. I'm convincible, but it takes more than "I saw it" (or, in the dark room, "I heard/felt it").
I might find your personal anecdote intriguing, or suggestive, or even worthy of further investigation. But to move from there into believing that some odd claim is true, I need more than that. The human mind is simply too frail, biased, and suggestible to trust without something more to back it up.
I'll end with a quote from John Adams, then a lawyer, later President of the United States: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
There's a peculiar twist on confirmation bias -- which is the tendency to accept without question poor or faulty evidence in favor of a claim we already believed in -- that is just as insidious. I call it the bandwagon effect. The gist is that once a sensational or outlandish claim has been made, there'll be a veritable tsunami of people offering up their own version of "yeah, I saw it, too!", often supported by factual evidence that (to borrow a line from the inimitable Dorothy Parker) "to call it wafer-thin is a grievous insult to wafer-makers."
The best example of this I've ever seen is the "Rendlesham Forest Incident," which has sometimes been called "Britain's Roswell." It occurred in December of 1980 in a forested area between Woodbridge and Orford, Suffolk, England, and UFO aficionados are still discussing it lo unto this very day.
On 26 December 1980, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, working as part of an American unit stationed at the Royal Air Force Base at Woodbridge, saw lights descending into Rendlesham Forest. He took some of his men to investigate the site where it appeared to land, and upon arrival saw "a glowing orb that was metallic in appearance with colored lights" that moved through the trees as they approached it. Simultaneously, some animals on a nearby farm "went into a frenzy." One of the servicemen who was with Halt called it "a craft of unknown origin."
Police were called in at around four A.M., and they found some burned and broken tree branches, and three small indentations in approximately an equilateral triangle. They also found an increased radiation level, on the order of 0.03 milliroentgen per hour (for reference, that's a little more than the total from a typical dental x-ray, spread over an hour's time).
Halt revisited the site in the early hours of 28 December, and reported that he'd seen three point sources of light, two to the south and one to the north, that hovered about ten degrees above the horizon. The brightest of these, he said, "beamed down a stream of light from time to time."
The incident was reported in the news -- and then the bandwagon effect kicked in.
There were several reports of domestic animals acting oddly, and one witness said he heard "a sound like a woman screaming." Multiple people reported that they, too, had seen lights in the sky that night, and one person said what he'd seen "was so bright it could have been a lighthouse." The USAF and RAF people at Woodbridge had their hands full over the next few weeks trying to figure out which of these accounts were true (if, perhaps, misinterpreted) and which were made up by folks who were simply trying to get in on the fun.
In the end, there was no further evidence uncovered. So for something touted as "Britain's Roswell," we're left with... not much.
But what about Halt's testimony?
It seems likely that Halt himself was caught up on the bandwagon. He did undoubtedly see something -- probably a meteor -- and after that, each subsequent piece of "evidence" simply added to his conviction that he'd witnessed something otherworldly. The colored lights Halt and his men saw were probably the flashing warning lights of a distant police car; in fact, a U.S. security policeman working at Woodbridge, Kevin Conde, later confessed that he'd contributed his own bit to the confusion by driving through the forest in a police vehicle with modified lights. The indentations in the ground were found to be scrapes dug by rabbits. The agitated domestic animals were simply because that happens when you have a lot of frightened people running around through farm pastures at night with flashlights. The "hovering point sources of light" Halt saw when he revisited the site were almost certainly stars; the position of the brightest one he reported, in fact, corresponds to the location of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.
As far as the flashing light "so bright it could have been a lighthouse" -- that's because it was a lighthouse. Specifically Orfordness Lighthouse, which is only about eight kilometers away and is easily visible from any high ground in the forest.
Colonel Halt's thoroughness was commendable, but even he can be mistaken. Without exception, everything he reported on his audiotape and in his written memo has a perfectly rational and unremarkable explanation... All that remains is the tale that the men were debriefed and ordered never to mention the event, and warned that "bullets are cheap." Well, as we've seen on television, the men all talk quite freely about it, and even Colonel Halt says that to this day nobody has ever debriefed him. So this appears to be just another dramatic invention for television, perhaps from one of the men who have expanded their stories over the years. When you examine each piece of evidence separately on its own merit, you avoid the trap of pattern matching and finding correlations where none exist. The meteors had nothing to do with the lighthouse or the rabbit diggings, but when you hear all three stories told together, it's easy to conclude (as did the airmen) that the light overhead became an alien spacecraft in the forest. Always remember: Separate pieces of poor evidence don't aggregate together into a single piece of good evidence.
Which is it exactly. But unfortunately, human nature is such that once the ball starts rolling, it's hard to stop -- and there are all too many people who are eager to contribute their own little push to keep it accelerating.
As I've said many times before, no one would be happier than me if we got unequivocal evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, at least until one of them decides to vaporize me with their laser pistol. But unfortunately, Rendlesham just isn't doing it for me. I tend to be very much in Neil deGrasse Tyson's camp when he says that as good skeptics, we need something more than "you saw it." "Next time you're abducted," he said, "grab something from the spaceship and bring it back. Then we can talk. Because anything of extraterrestrial manufacture, that has crossed interstellar space, is gonna be interesting."
But until then, we'll just have to keep waiting. And always, guard as well as we can against the inevitable biases that all humans are prone to. Because sometimes -- unfortunately -- a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.
I went into historical linguistics because of my fascination with origins.
It's manifested in other realms of study. My primary interest in biology, a subject I taught for over three decades, is evolutionary genetics; I'm endlessly interested in the family tree of life, and its connections to species migration, adaptation, paleontology, and extinction. More personally, I've been a devoted genealogist since I was a teenager, and although my hoped-for noble lineage never showed up (my ancestry is virtually all French, Scottish, and English peasants, rogues, ne'er-do-wells, and petty criminals), I still periodically add to my database of ancestors and cousins of varying degrees, which now contains over 150,000 names.
It's why when I find a curious origin story, it just makes my little nerdy heart happy. Like when I discovered something strange about a rather terrifying legend from northern England -- the tale of Jenny Greenteeth.
Jenny Greenteeth is a story that seems to be most common in Lancashire, Cumbria, and the western parts of Yorkshire, and is about a "river hag" -- a female water spirit that specializes in grabbing people, especially children, who have strayed too close to the water, and drowning them. She shares a lot in common with the Slavic Rusalka and French Melusine, which makes me wonder why people kept dreaming up stories about strange women lying in ponds. (Certainly it's no basis for a system of government.)
Well, like just about everything, the legend of Jenny Greenteeth didn't come out of nowhere; even folk tales have their origin stories. (I've written here about the absolutely charming piece of research by anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani, wherein he developed a cladistic tree for the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood.") And Jenny Greenteeth has a bit of a surprise in store, because her name isn't because her teeth, or anything else about her, are green.
The hint comes from the fact that in some areas of Cumbria, she's still called "Ginny Grendith" -- and the last bit has nothing to do with teeth, either. That the story evolved that way is like a folkloric version of convergent evolution; once people noticed the chance similarity between her original name and "green teeth," her last name morphed in that direction, probably because it gave her alleged appearance an extra little frisson of nastiness.
So where does "Greenteeth" come from? It turns out the name -- and its alternative form, Grendith -- are cousins to that of another creature from the English bestiary, the grindylow. Like Jenny, the grindylow was a water-dweller, a small humanoid with scaly skin, big nasty pointy teeth, and long arms ending in broad hands with grasping fingers. They, too, were said to be fond of drowning children.
It's a wonder any surviving kids in northern England who lived near water didn't become permanently phobic.
What's fascinating, though, is that the story doesn't stop there, because grindylow itself has even deeper roots. The name is thought to have evolved from yet another mythological monster, this one much more famous: Grendel.
Grendel by J. R. Skelton (1908) [Image is in the Public Domain]
Grendel, of course, was the Big Bad in the pre-Norman English epic Beowulf, who was eventually killed by the titular hero. In a translation by none other than J. R. R. Tolkien, Grendel is described as follows:
... the other, miscreated thing, in man's form trod the ways of exile, albeit he was greater than any other human thing. Him in days of old the dwellers on earth named Grendel.
Grendel was called a sceadugenga -- a "shadow walker," a creature who came out at night. He was a denizen of boundaries, not quite human and not quite beast, and frequented places that also were on the edge; the spaces between inhabited areas and the wilds, between lowlands and highlands... and between land and water. He was said to be a "swamp-dweller," living in fens, and that may have been how his later descendants, the grindylow and Jenny Greenteeth, became associated with ponds and marshes.
I've always felt sorry for Grendel. He did some bad stuff, but he was kind of just built that way. He didn't ask to be put together from spare parts. It's why I named a dog I had a while back Grendel. He was a bit funny-looking too, but he always meant well.
Maybe it's just that I always root for the underdog.
Where the name Grendel came from isn't certain. Some linguists believe it comes from gren ("grin") + dæle ("divided"), i.e. baring his teeth. Old English gryndal meant "fierce," but whether that came from the name Grendel or the other way 'round is unknown. Same thing for the Old Norse grindill, meaning "storm wind." The Beowulf story has its roots in old Germanic mythology, and there's no doubt it has ties to Scandinavia, but that one may be an accidental false cognate. Grendel could also come from the Old English grenedæl, "green lowland" -- so there might be a connection to the color green, after all.
In any case, it's an interesting, if unsettling, legend, which a curious history. I have a pond in my back yard in which I regularly swim, and thus far I haven't been grabbed by a creepy woman with green teeth. I'll keep my eye out, though. You can't be too careful about these sorts of things.
Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi once made the pithy observation that "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought."
I think that's really what sets apart the scientists from the rest of us -- that ability to go from "wow, that's weird!" to "... and here's how I think it works." But there's another piece, too, that has unfortunately been lost over time through the sad fact of increasing specialization within the sciences.
And that's the ability to be conversant in a great many different disciplines, and the capacity for drawing connections between them.
Another accurate observation -- this one, I haven't been able to find an attestation for -- is that "Researchers these days are learning more and more about less and less, until finally they're going to know everything about nothing." One of my mentors, science educator Roger Olstad, called this "focusing on one cubic millimeter of the universe," and said that generalists make better teachers, because they can draw on information from lots of disparate fields in order to make sense of their subject for students. Fortunately for me; I'm an inveterate dabbler. I'd have been a lousy candidate for a doctoral program, because I don't seem to be able to keep my mind locked on one thing for five minutes, much less the five years or more you have to focus in order to research and write a dissertation.
What's kind of sad, though, is that it hasn't always been this way. Before the twentieth century, scientists were almost all polymaths; it behooves us all to remember that the word science itself comes from the Latin scientia, which simply means "knowledge." Consider, for example, the following advances, all made in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Do you know who was responsible for each?
Made the first accurate measurements of motion of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, allowing the astronomer Giovanni Cassini to calculate the planet's rotational period
Deduced the law of elasticity -- that for springs (or other elastic objects), the linear extension is directly proportional to the force exerted
Made the first-ever drawing of a microorganism (the fungus Mucor)
Figured out that the optimum shape for a weight-bearing dome is exactly the same as the curve of a hanging chain, only upside-down (the inverted catenary), revolutionizing architecture
Was the first to note that venous and arterial blood differ in appearance, pressure, and composition
Determined that the force of gravitation is an inverse-square law
Figured out (through microscopic analysis) that petrified wood retains the cellular structure of the living wood it came from
Studied waves in two-dimensional plates, and was the first to observe their nodal patterns (now called Chladni figures after an eighteenth-century physicist who did an extensive analysis of them)
Built the first balance-spring pocketwatch
Coined the term cell after seeing the microscopic holes in thin slices of cork, and likening them to the monks' quarters (celluli) in a monastery
Concluded, from studying lunar craters, that the Moon must have its own gravity
Was the first to analyze schlieren, the streaks caused when two transparent fluids with different indices of refraction mix (such as heat shimmer over a hot roadway, or when you stir simple syrup into water)
Speculated that there was a specific component of air that allowed for respiration in animals -- and that both respiration and combustion gradually removed whatever that component was
Developed the first clockwork drive for telescopes, allowing them to compensate for the Earth's rotation and track the movement of astronomical objects
You're probably on to me by now, and figured out that these advances in diverse fields weren't made by different people. They were all made by one man.
[Image is in the Public Domain]
His name was Robert Hooke. He was born on the Isle of Wight in 1635 to an Anglican priest and his wife, and because of frail health wasn't given much in the way of formal education. But his mechanical aptitude was evident from a really young age. He was especially fascinated with clocks, and after studying the workings of a brass pendulum clock in his father's study, he went off and built himself one out of wood.
It worked.
He got the rudiments of drawing from a short-lived apprenticeship with painter Peter Lely, but once again his health interfered; according to an 1898 biography, "the smell of the Oil Colours did not agree with his Constitution, increasing his Head-ache to which he was ever too much subject." So he went on to more generalized study, first at the Westminster School and then at the University of Oxford, from which he graduated in 1662.
Three years later, he'd accomplished so much he was appointed Curator for Life to the newly-founded Royal Society of London.
It's hard to exaggerate Hooke's contribution to Enlightenment science. He was interested in everything. And damn good at pretty much all of it. The misses he had -- not beating Newton to the Universal Law of Gravitation, for example -- were more because he stopped pursuing a line of inquiry too soon, usually because he went on to some other pressing interest.
Hooke got a reputation for being prickly -- one biographer called him "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful" -- for his determination to get credit for his many discoveries. This picture of Hooke as having a sour, grasping personality comes mainly from his conflict with two people; Christiaan Huygens (another remarkable polymath, who tangled with Hooke over who had the right to the patent for the balance-spring pocketwatch), and none other than Isaac Newton.
Newton was not a man to piss off. Not only was he brilliant in his own right, he was apparently "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful." He and Hooke started out at least on speaking terms, and exchanged some information with each other, but it very rapidly devolved into a vicious rivalry. Newton, for his part, never did acknowledge that Hooke had any role in the development of the Universal Law of Gravitation. In a 1680 letter, Newton wrote, "yet am I not beholden to [Hooke] for any light into that business but only for the diversion he gave me from my other studies to think on these things & for his dogmaticalness in writing as if he had found the motion in the Ellipses, which inclined me to try it ..."
There's an allegation -- disputed by some historians -- that when Newton was appointed president of the Royal Society at Hooke's death in 1703, Newton had all of Hooke's portraits destroyed. The one surviving painting supposedly of Hooke is almost certainly not him, but of Flemish chemist Jan Baptiste van Helmont. In fact, all we have left of Hooke's likeness for certain is an unflattering description of him from his friend John Aubrey: "He is but of midling stature, something crooked, pale-faced, and his face but little below, but his head is lardge, his eie full and popping, and not quick; a grey eie. He has a delicate head of haire, browne, and of an excellent moist curle. He is and ever was temperate and moderate in dyet."
His odd posture and appearance -- as well as his ongoing health problems -- are now thought to be due to the degenerative spine disease Scheuermann's kyphosis, which eventually led to his death at the age of 67. But what he accomplished despite his physical handicaps is somewhere beyond remarkable.
Now, imagine if Hooke's career had begun in a typical Ph.D. program where he was told, "focus on one thing only."
Don't misunderstand me; I'm grateful for experts. The current anti-expert bias in what passes for a government in my country is nothing short of idiotic. It amounts to, "I'm going to discount this person who has spent her/his entire adult life studying this topic, in favor of some crank with a website." But there's also room for the generalists -- people who aren't afraid to delve into whatever takes their fancy, and bring that breadth of experience to whatever they undertake.
People like the extraordinary polymath Robert Hooke.
I've mentioned before how much I love a good mystery, and there's a hell of a good one underneath the town of Margate, Kent, England.
It's called the "Shell Grotto." It consists of a set of steps, framed by an arch, leading down into a serpentine passageway through the chalk bedrock. Then there's a room called the "Rotunda," with a circular arched dome over walls arranged in an equilateral triangle. This leads into a winding underground tunnel about two and a half meters high by twenty-one meters long ending in a five-by-six meter rectangular space that's been nicknamed the "Altar Chamber."
The entire thing is lined by mosaics made out of seashells.
4.6 million of them.
Looking up into the Rotunda [Image is in the Public Domain]
The mosaic designs are constructed from the shells of mussels, cockles, whelks, limpets, scallops, and oysters, all relatively common in nearby bays. They feature patterns appearing to be stylized suns and stars, floral motifs, and some purely geometric or abstract designs.
The Shell Grotto was discovered when the entrance was stumbled upon in 1835, and immediately became a sensation. The West Kent Advertiser newspaper wrote the following in 1838 (which also should have taken first place in the Run-On-Sentence of the Year Contest):
Belle Vue cottage, a detached residence, has been lately been purchased by a gentleman, who, having occasion for some alterations, directed the workmen to excavate some few feet, during which operation the work was impeded a large stone, the gentleman being immediately called to the spot, directed a minute examination, which led to the discovery of an extensive grotto, completely studded with shells in curious devices, most elaborately worked up, extending an immense distance in serpentine walks, alcoves, and lanes, the whole forming one of the most curious and interesting sights that can possibly conceived, and must have been executed by torch light; we understand the proprietor intends shortly to open the whole for exhibition, at small charge for admission.
No one in the area had any memory of who had built it and why, so this opened up the floodgates for speculation. Historian Algernon Robertson Goddard, writing in 1903, listed the possibilities as follows:
a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century rich person's "folly"
a prehistoric calendar
a meeting place for "sea witches" (whoever those might be)
This last one made me snort-laugh, because there's a general rule that if there's something mysterious and you want to make it more mysterious, throw in the Templars. Umberto Eco riffed on this theme in his brilliant, labyrinthine novel Foucault's Pendulum, when he had his character Jacopo Belbo explaining to the main character (Casaubon) the difference between cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics:
A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
Be that as it may, we still don't know who built the Shell Grotto. There are also extensive shell mosaics that were created by the Romans and the Phoenicians, but the archways in the Rotunda have impressed archaeologists as being more consistent with those used in twelfth-century Gothic cathedrals (although not nearly as large, obviously), and therefore not nearly old enough to be Roman or Phoenician in origin. It seems like the simplest thing to do would be to carbon date one of the shell fragments -- mollusk shells are largely calcium carbonate, so it should be possible -- but the site is under private ownership, and to my knowledge no one has done that yet.
So the Shell Grotto remains mysterious. It certainly represents an enormous amount of skill and dedication, whoever created it; just cutting a tunnel that long through chalk bedrock would take extensive and back-breaking labor, not to mention then hauling over four million shells there and somehow getting them to adhere to the walls in beautiful and flowing artistic patterns. It's open for visits from the public, and next time I'm in England I'd love to check it out. Just another reason to travel to a country I love -- as if I needed another one.
If there's one place and historical period I could choose to know more about, it would be England during, and immediately following, the withdrawal of the Romans in the fifth century C. E.
For one thing, this would settle once and for all the question of whether King Arthur was a real historical personage, a completely fabricated legend, or somewhere in that gray area in between. Whoever (or whatever) he was, I doubt our picture of him was anywhere near accurate:
This one, either:
Both of which are kind of a shame, for completely different reasons.
In any case, besides finding out more about the King of the Britons, I'd love to have more knowledge about what exactly was going on back then. There are very few written records from Britain following the withdrawal of Roman troops from the northern and western parts of the island by the (usurping) Emperor Magnus Maximus in 383. Things stabilized a little after Magnus was deposed and executed in 387, but Roman rule in the west was definitely crumbling. The final blow came in 410 when Roman settlers in what is now southern England -- many of whom had been born there -- pleaded for help from Rome against the "barbarian" Celts, who were not above taking advantage of the instability, and Emperor Honorius basically told them to bugger off and take care of their own problems because he had more pressing concerns, the biggest being that Rome had just been sacked by a shitload of Visigoths.
This meant that running England fell to whoever could manage to keep their head on their shoulders long enough to do so. In some places, these were the Romano-British magistrates who chose not to decamp when the powers-that-be back on the Italian peninsula left them to their own devices; in other places, Celtic or Pictish warlords. This period saw the beginning of the Saxon invasions from what is now Denmark and northern Germany, something that would historically and linguistically change the entire face of the country.
But the fact remains that we don't know much for certain. The earliest record we have of the era was written at least a century after the events it chronicles -- Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) -- but it contains as much hagiography and finger-wagging about pagan sinfulness as it does history. (For what it's worth, Gildas doesn't even mention King Arthur; the first time the Once and Future King appears in a written record is Nennius's Historia Brittonum, from around 900. If Arthur was real, this omission seems a little curious, to say the least.)
In any case, between the withdrawal of the Romans in 410 and the unification of England under King Æthelstan of Wessex in 927, we don't have a lot of reliable sources to go on. To be fair to the English, they had other fish to fry during those intervening centuries, what with the horrific Plague of Justinian ripping its way through Europe in the middle of the sixth century, repeated invasions by the Angles and Saxons, and then the depredations of the Vikings, starting with their destruction of the "Holy Island" of Lindisfarne in 793. Virtually the only people who could read and write back then were monks and clerics, and you have to figure that what they'd have been writing while they were being hacked to bits would have been gruesome reading anyhow. (Possibly, "Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaarrrrggh.")
The topic comes up because a new study out of the University of Cambridge that found something surprising -- at least in one region, the economy didn't tank completely when the Romans jumped ship. Pollution by heavy metals, as nasty as it can be, is a decent proxy record for the robustness of trade and industry; when things are really bad, chances are you're not going to be doing much smelting of silver, iron, and lead. The team, led by archaeologist Martin Millett, found that in sediment cores from the River Ure in Yorkshire, the levels of metal contamination stayed fairly constant throughout the period. This is evidence that the Roman settlement at Aldborough -- the Roman Isurium Brigantum -- continued to be a trading hub despite the chaos.
This, of course, doesn't tell you what was happening in other parts of the island. It could be that Aldborough just happened to hang on longer, for reasons we'll probably never know. Eventually, the plague and the repeated invasions caught up with them, too, and in the seventh and eighth centuries, there wasn't that much happening, at least not smelting-wise. The "Dark Ages" in England are "dark" not because they were necessarily any more barbaric than any other period, but because we know so little about them -- and this gives us at least a small piece of information about one town's fate after the fall of the Roman Empire.
I'm always attracted to a mystery, and there's something compelling about this period. Undoubtedly why there have been so many works of fiction that are set in pre-Norman England. It's nice to have one more bit of the puzzle, even if neither the worlds of Sexy King Arthur nor Silly King Arthur are likely to come anywhere near the reality of what life was like back then.
