Weirdness maps

Seems like everyone you meet has a tale of some weird experience or another.

Ghosts, cryptids, time slips, UFOs, precognitive dreams -- taken as a group, they're terribly common.  If you don't believe me, just ask your friends at work or school, "Who here has had an experience that you were completely unable to explain?"  I can pretty much guarantee you'll have five or six volunteers, who will then tell you their story in painstaking detail.

Well, some folks based in Seattle have decided to create a database of all of the bizarre accounts they can find, in an attempt to keep track of "weirdnesses — dreams, ‘coincidences’, strange encounters, etc. — on a personal level."  They go on to explain, "We’ve long wanted to do something that acts sort of like ‘Google Trends’ (which tracks sudden spikes on google search queries) for the collective unconscious.  This map is an extension of that, because we’re trying to see if there are strange places or experiences that are actually quite common but go unnoticed because everyone is afraid to talk about this weird stuff happening to them."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rolf Dietrich Brecher from Germany, Strange wheel (36242991846), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The project is called Liminal Earth, and is open to submissions from anyone.  They categorize the stories (and map pins) into some broad categories, as follows.  (And just to say up front: this is copied directly from their website, so the subcategories are not me being a smartass, which to be fair happens fairly often):

• Dark Forces: Lanyard Zombies, Drones, Corporate Death Zones, Cupcake Shops, Etc.

• Time Distortions: Travelers, Timehunters, “Déjà Vu”, “Losing Time,” Etc.

• Mythologies: Pre-Shamanic Deer Cults, Radical Gnostic Animism, Etc.

• Cryptoids [sic]: Bigfoot, Lycanthropes, Trolls, Ogres, Etc.

• Thin Places: Ley Lines, Magic Fountains, Plant Sigils, Portals, Etc.

• Straight Up Ghosts: Creepy vibes, Poltergeists, EVPs, Stone Tape Theories, Class III Apparitions

• High Weirdness: Fortean Phenomena, Floating Toblerone, Things That Just Don’t Make Sense

• Classic UFO: Close Encounters, Sightings, etc.

• Strange Animals: Bearing Gifts, Unusual Encounters, Fecal Divination, etc.

• Visions: Dreams, Visions, Mystical Experiences, etc.

Okay, this brings up a few questions.

1. What is it with the lanyards?  The "about us" section talks about "lanyard'd ogres," so weird creatures with lanyards must be a thing.  Maybe the zombies with lanyards are reanimated dead coaches, or something, but I'm kind of at a loss as to why an ogre would need a lanyard.
2. What's a "Corporate Death Zone?"  I mean, it would make a fucking awesome name for a metal band, but other than that?  My personal opinion is that most corporate jobs would fall into the "shoot me now" category, but I suspect there's more to it than that.
3. Why is there a subcategory for "Floating Toblerone" and a second subcategory for "Things That Just Don't Make Sense?"  I would think the first would fall directly into the second.
4. I've heard a bit about "Stone Tape Theories," which is the idea that rocks pick up psychic traces of events that happen around them, which can then be played back in the fashion of a cassette tape, although considerably clumsier.  But since the majority of rocks have been around for millions of years, you'd think that most of what would be recorded would be kind of... pointless.  "It sure is boring, being a rock," is mostly what I'd think you'd hear, if you could figure out a way to play it back.
5. "Cupcake Shops?"
6. I was going to ask about "Fecal Divination," but then I decided that I didn't want to know.

I'm not sure what all of this is supposed to accomplish, because (as I've commented many times) the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data," but I suppose it's a start at least to attempt some kind of catalog of people's odd experiences.  The difficulty is twofold; first (as we've also seen many times) the human perceptual/interpretive apparatus is pretty inaccurate and easily fooled, and second, this sort of thing is just begging hoaxers to clog up the works with made-up stories.  (Although it must be said that I've never understood hoaxers.  I suppose the "five minutes of fame" thing probably explains some of them, but since growing out of a tall-tale-telling stage as a child, I've never understood the draw of inventing far-fetched stories and claiming they're true.)

Be that as it may, I invite you to submit your own experiences to Liminal Earth if you're so inclined.  I can't say I've ever had anything happen to me that seems particularly inexplicable, so I don't honestly have anything to contribute myself.  Except maybe that my home village used to have a cupcake shop that was wonderful, and they suddenly went out of business.  And I would definitely like an explanation for that one, because those cupcakes were awesome.

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The Mad Gasser of Mattoon

One of the most difficult things about establishing what actually happened in an incident is that people are so damn suggestible.

It's nobody's fault, and psychologists understand the phenomenon pretty well, but it really complicates matters when you're trying to piece together what happened based on eyewitness testimony.  Once our brains have been contaminated by someone's suggestion of what they think happened, our memories simply aren't reliable any more.

Even a single word choice can make a difference.  Way back in 1989, researchers D. S. Lindsay and M. K. Johnson showed the same video of a car accident to a bunch of teenagers, and then afterward asked them to estimate how fast the vehicles were traveling at the time.  However, the researchers used different words to ask the question -- "How fast were they moving when they (bumped, contacted, collided, hit, crashed)?"  They found that the intensity/violence of the word choice strongly affected the volunteers' estimates of the speed -- they thought the cars were traveling far more slowly if the researchers used the word "bumped" as compared to using the word "crashed."

The video was the same each time; a single word choice by the researchers changed how the teenagers remembered it.

Suggestibility also comes into play when our emotions get involved, especially strong emotions like fear or anger.  This is thought to be the cause of mass hysteria (more formally known as mass psychogenic illness), when symptoms of an apparent illness spread through a population even though there's no known organic cause.  One person experiences symptoms -- whether from an actual physical illness or not -- and one by one, other people interpret their own conditions in that light.  Susceptible people then become frightened, and focus their attentions on every aberrant ache, pain, or twinge, which (of course) makes them more frightened.  The whole thing snowballs.  (This is likely the origin of the "witch fever" during the Salem Witch Trials -- combine mass hysteria with religious mania, and you've got a particularly deadly combination.)

This brings us to today's topic, which is the Mad Gasser of Mattoon.

On August 31, 1944, a man named Urban Raef, of Mattoon, Illinois, woke in the middle of the night because there was a strange, sweet odor in his house.  He felt nauseated and weak, and in fact threw up twice.  He woke his wife for help, but she found she was partially paralyzed and unable to get out of bed.  At some point the Raefs recovered sufficiently to open the windows, and made their way downstairs to the kitchen to see if there was a gas leak from the stove.  (Although gas leaks don't exactly smell "sweet.")  Everything seemed in order.

In the wee hours that same day, a neighbor living nearby experienced the same symptoms -- coughing, the presence of a cloyingly sweet odor "like cheap perfume," and temporary paralysis.

Within two days, four homes total had been affected, and that's when it hit the press.  A local paper blared the headline, "Anesthetic Prowler on the Loose!"  Between September 5 and September 13, twenty more incidents were reported to the police, including sisters Frances and Maxine Smith who claimed to have been attacked three separate times -- during one of which, they said they heard a "motorized buzzing sound" from the machinery being used to expel the gas.  Another individual found a white cloth on her front porch, sniffed it, and immediately became violently ill.

Only twice -- Fred Goble on September 6, and Bertha Burch on September 13 -- did victims report seeing anyone suspicious.  Neither one got a good look at the prowler's face, although Burch reported that she thought the person she'd seen was "a woman dressed as a man."

The police didn't have a lot to go on.  The symptoms reported by victims were similar to those you'd get from inhaling organic solvents like chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, or trichloroethylene, but analysis of the hard evidence (like the cloth) showed no traces of any toxic chemicals.  After the last report on the 13th, the attacks -- whatever they were -- stopped.  All of the victims made complete recoveries, and the "Mad Gasser of Mattoon" went down as yet another unexplained mystery in the annals of Fortean phenomena.

So, what actually happened here?

Hysteria needs a trigger; the experiences of the first three victims, the Raefs and the unnamed neighbor, were probably real enough, whatever their cause.  One person who has researched the incident extensively, Scott Maruna (in fact, he wrote a book about it called The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: Dispelling the Hysteria), believes that at least some of the attacks were perpetrated by a Mattoon resident named Farley Llewellyn, an alcoholic, chronically angry recluse who was known to dabble in chemistry, and in fact once blew a hole in one wall of his house in a laboratory explosion.

The problem is, no one has ever been able to prove Llewellyn was involved.  Every town has its oddballs, and (after all) being a peculiar, introverted science-nerd type is hardly a crime.

Fortunately for me.

Most of the people who've looked into the case believe that the majority of the reports were the result of mass hysteria induced by the rather terrifying headlines, possibly compounded by episodes of sleep paralysis.  (Which can be a pretty damn scary experience in and of itself, even without a crazy anesthetist running around.)

The bottom line, though, is that we'll probably never know for sure.  Once you've had an experience like that -- hooking into some powerful emotions -- it permanently alters what you remember.  At that point, trying to tease out what you actually did experience from what you feared and/or had heard about from other sources becomes next to impossible.  

And even in less alarming situations, our memories are remarkably plastic, and therefore unreliable.  It's always a good idea to keep this in mind -- just because something is in our heads doesn't mean it's true and accurate.

Or as Robert Fulghum put it, "Don't believe everything you think."

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Weirdness maps

Seems like everyone you meet has a tale of some weird experience or another.

Ghosts, cryptids, time slips, UFOs, precognitive dreams -- taken as a group, they're terribly common.  If you don't believe me, just ask your friends at work or school, "Who here has had an experience that you were completely unable to explain?"  I can pretty much guarantee you'll have five or six volunteers, who will then tell you their story in painstaking detail.

Well, some folks based in Seattle have decided to create a database of all of the bizarre accounts they can find, in an attempt to keep track of "weirdnesses — dreams, ‘coincidences’, strange encounters, etc. — on a personal level."  They go on to explain, "We’ve long wanted to do something that acts sort of like ‘Google Trends’ (which tracks sudden spikes on google search queries) for the collective unconscious.  This map is an extension of that, because we’re trying to see if there are strange places or experiences that are actually quite common but go unnoticed because everyone is afraid to talk about this weird stuff happening to them."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rolf Dietrich Brecher from Germany, Strange wheel (36242991846), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The project is called Liminal Earth, and is open to submissions from anyone.  They categorize the stories (and map pins) into some broad categories, as follows.  (And just to say up front: this is copied directly from their website, so the subcategories are not me being a smartass, which to be fair happens fairly often):

• Dark Forces: Lanyard Zombies, Drones, Corporate Death Zones, Cupcake Shops, Etc.
• Time Distortions: Travelers, Timehunters, “Déjà Vu”, “Losing Time,” Etc
• Mythologies: Pre-Shamanic Deer Cults, Radical Gnostic Animism, Etc.
• Cryptoids [sic]: Bigfoot, Lycanthropes, Trolls, Ogres, Etc.
• Thin Places: Ley Lines, Magic Fountains, Plant Sigils, Portals, Etc.
• Straight Up Ghosts: Creepy vibes, Poltergeists, EVPs, Stone Tape Theories, Class III Apparitions
• High Weirdness: Fortean Phenomena, Floating Toblerone, Things That Just Don’t Make Sense
• Classic UFO: Close Encounters, Sightings, etc.
• Strange Animals: Bearing Gifts, Unusual Encounters, Fecal Divination, etc.
• Visions: Dreams, Visions, Mystical Experiences, etc.

Okay, this brings up a few questions.

1. What is it with the lanyards?  The "about us" section talks about "lanyard'd ogres," so weird creatures with lanyards must be a thing.  Maybe the zombies with lanyards are reanimated dead coaches, or something, but I'm kind of at a loss as to why an ogre would need a lanyard.
2. What's a "Corporate Death Zone?"  I mean, it would make a fucking awesome name for a metal band, but other than that?  My personal opinion is that most corporate jobs would fall into the "shoot me now" category, but I suspect there's more to it than that.
3. Why is there a subcategory for "Floating Toblerone" and a second subcategory for "Things That Just Don't Make Sense?"  I would think the first would fall directly into the second.
4. I've heard a bit about "Stone Tape Theories," which is the idea that rocks pick up psychic traces of events that happen around them, which can then be played back in the fashion of a cassette tape, although considerably clumsier.  But since the majority of rocks have been around for millions of years, you'd think that most of what would be recorded would be kind of... pointless.  "It sure is boring, being a rock," is mostly what I'd think you'd hear, if you could figure out a way to play it back.
5. "Cupcake Shops?"
6. I was going to ask about "Fecal Divination," but then I decided that I didn't want to know.

I'm not sure what all of this is supposed to accomplish, because (as I've commented many times) the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data," but I suppose it's a start at least to attempt some kind of catalog of people's odd experiences.  The difficulty is twofold; first (as we've also seen many times) the human perceptual/interpretive apparatus is pretty inaccurate and easily fooled, and second, this sort of thing is just begging hoaxers to clog up the works with made-up stories.  (Although it must be said that I've never understood hoaxers.  I suppose the "five minutes of fame" thing probably explains some of them, but since growing out of a tall-tale-telling stage as a child, I've never understood the draw of inventing far-fetched stories and claiming they're true.)

Be that as it may, I invite you to submit your own experiences to Liminal Earth if you're so inclined.  I can't say I've ever had anything happen to me that seems inexplicable, so I don't honestly have anything to contribute myself.  Except maybe that my home village used to have a cupcake shop that was wonderful, and they suddenly went out of business.  And I would definitely like an explanation for that one, because those cupcakes were awesome.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

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