Monster mash

Well, the biggest mass search for the Loch Ness Monster in history has come and gone, and like Monty Python's camel spotters, the searchers spotted nearly one monster.

This past weekend hundreds of amateur cryptid enthusiasts, in partnership with the Loch Ness Centre and Loch Ness Expeditions, studied the lake both in person (many using sophisticated cameras and microphones to record any anomalies) and virtually via video links, but the end result was... not much.

It's a shame, really.  I was honestly rooting for them, especially after I found out that one of the leaders of the effort is named (I swear I'm not making this up) Craig Gallifrey.  I was hoping that his assistants would be Joe Skaro, Annie Appalappachia, and Rex Raxacoricofallapatorius, but no such luck.

Gallifrey, for his part, is undaunted.  "I believe there is something in the loch," he said.  "There's got to be something that's fueling the speculation."

Stories about a creature in the lake (and the River Ness) go back a long way.  The first certain mention of it is in the seventh-century C.E. Life of St. Columba by Adomnán of Iona, in which Columba came upon some people burying a guy by the bank of the river, and after inquiry, was told that he'd been mauled to death by a water beast.  The saint then commanded one of them to swim the river, and instead of doing what I'd have done, which is to look at Columba like he'd lost his mind and say, "Were you even fucking listening to us just now?  Especially the 'mauled to death by a water beast' part?", the dude went, "Okay, sure," and jumped right in.  On cue the monster came swimming up, but Columba made the Sign of the Cross and said, "Go no farther.  Do not touch the man.  Go back at once," and the monster went, "Dude, whatever, simmer down," and backed off, and the locals were all super impressed.

But after that, you pretty much have to wait until the nineteenth century to get any more serious accounts.  In the 1930s there were several sightings, leading to a craze -- especially when The Daily Mail Fail, which apparently was as dedicated to accuracy back then as it is today, published the famous "surgeon's photograph" in 1934, now known to have been a hoax:

But even so, interest has continued, lo unto this very day.

The evidence generated by this weekend's search was pretty slim, however.  "We did hear something," search leaders report.  "We heard four distinctive ‘gloops’.  We all got a bit excited, ran to go make sure the recorder was on, and it wasn’t plugged in."

The fault, of course, lies with the Sound Engineer In Charge Of Plugging Stuff In, Roderick Ranskoor av Kolos.  You can't get good help nowadays.

In any case, they later admitted rather ruefully that the "gloops" might not have been Nessie.  "It may well be gas escaping from the bottom of the loch."

Lake flatulence notwithstanding, my guess is the negative results aren't going to dissuade enthusiasts.  Negative results never do.  Witness shows like Ghost Hunters, wherein a bunch of intrepid haunted house aficionados get together and visit spooky locations week after week, always at night, stalk around for an hour with flashlights and recording equipment, and never find anything.  This doesn't mean there aren't dramatic moments, e.g. this actual scene from an episode I watched when I was in a hotel one evening and turned on the television because I was bored:

Ghost hunter 1: Here we are in the attic of this abandoned courthouse.  As you can see, it's extremely atmospheric, with cobwebs and dust and all.  We're expecting to see a ghost any moment now.

Ghost hunter 2:  Yes, as I turn this corner and pan my flashlight beam across the wall, I can see... *screams*  *several bleeped out obscenities*

*cut to commercials*

Ghost hunter 1:  Let's replay that dramatic sequence, shall we?

*sequence replays*

Ghost hunter 2: *several more bleeped out obscenities*  Wow, that is one bigass yellowjacket!

That's it?  I sat through about eight stupid commercials, thinking I was finally going to get to see a ghost, and instead, I get a "bigass yellowjacket"?  I got stung by one of those in my own back yard a couple of days ago, and I was not impressed with that one, either.

In any case, I'm expecting that no one will be discouraged by the fact that Craig Gallifrey et al. didn't see anything this past weekend, and we'll still have periodic excursions to find Nessie and other cryptids.  My general response is: knock yourself out.  Like I've said many times before, I'm not a disbeliever, per se, I'm just waiting for the evidence.  So we'll just have to see what comes up with the next expedition, to be led by crack cryptid hunters Cathy Castrovalva and Mike Metabellis Three.

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Return to Boleskine

There are few figures in the history of magical thinking more famous, or more polarizing, than Aleister Crowley.

He was a member -- eventually a leader -- of esoteric societies like the Order of the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis, and eventually founded one of his own.  After all, once you're a member of an esoteric society, you generally find it's not so esoteric after all, and either have to find one even more esoteric or else make one up.

Some time around 1900 Crowley took the latter option, and named his society Thelema, the Greek word for "will" -- as the whole idea of the thing was "do what you will," especially in matters of sex, which fit beautifully with Crowley's apparent obsession with fucking anyone of either gender who would hold still long enough.

Thelema as an abbey (located in Cefalú, on the island of Sicily) was abandoned in 1923 after Mussolini decided that Crowley wasn't exactly the sort of person he wanted in Italy, and had him and his followers deported en masse.  Today it's more or less a ruin, but still a mecca for practitioners of magick and such stuff.  Crowley had a way of leaving behind these kind of sites, and in fact one of them is the reason this whole topic comes up today -- because one of Crowley's centers of operation, Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, Scotland, recently sold after years of standing empty and decrepit for the tidy sum of £500,000 to "three unnamed investors."  The owners, who call themselves the "Boleskine Foundation," are now apparently in negotiation with the Ordo Templi Orientis (yes, it still exists) to bring back Crowley's practices to Boleskine and turn it into a "sex magick retreat."

Boleskine in 1912, right before Crowley sold it [Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently the house has a bit of a reputation even outside of Crowley's antics.  All the way back in the seventeenth century, there supposedly was a "devious local wizard" who kept reanimating corpses, and the minister of the church that stood on Boleskine's grounds spent most of his time trying to rebury them and get them to stay there.  The church itself burned to the ground, allegedly along with the entire congregation, in the early eighteenth century, and the first bit of Boleskine House itself was built in the middle of that century -- right over top of the graves that the minister had such a tough time keeping intact.  (You can see why someone as conscious of ambience as Crowley was would be attracted to the place.)

So Crowley bought Boleskine, and true to his self-styled title of the "Wickedest Man in the World," engaged in all sorts of depravity and hijinks with his friends for nearly fifteen years.  When Crowley sold the place in 1913, it went through a number of different owners, none of whom stayed there for long.  One supposedly killed himself by blowing his own head off with a shotgun.  It was owned for a time by Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin, although Page apparently wasn't there all that often.  His caretaker Malcolm Dent, however, said the place was haunted.  "One evening," he said, "a small porcelain figure of the Devil rose off the mantelpiece to the ceiling, then smashed into smithereens in the fireplace."  He also said he'd been awakened more than once by the sound of "a huge beast, snorting, snuffling and banging.  Whatever was there, I have no doubt it was pure evil."

To be fair, though, the owners who bought it from Page, the MacGillivray family, scoffed at the whole thing and said their time in Boleskine House was wonderful, and free from any paranormal fooling about.  So maybe the ghosts only appear to people who already believe in them.

Pretty convenient, that.

In any case, the current owners are planning on renovating and reopening the place, and dedicating it to its previous use as a site for practicing the magickal arts.  Their public statement says that they will "promote events and activities that facilitate health and wellness such as meditation and yoga as well as education on Thelema, the spiritual legacy forwarded by previous Boleskine House owner, Aleister Crowley."

No word yet on any kinky sex stuff, although one would have to expect that's to be a part of it if they're striving for historical accuracy.  I'll keep you posted.

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The subject of Monday's blog post gave me the idea that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation should be a classic -- Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  This book, written back in 1949, is an analysis of the history and biology of the human/canine relationship, and is a must-read for anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a doggy companion.

Given that it's seventy years old, some of the factual information in Man Meets Dog has been superseded by new research -- especially about the genetic relationships between various dog breeds, and between domestic dogs and other canid species in the wild.  But his behavioral analysis is impeccable, and is written in his typical lucid, humorous style, with plenty of anecdotes that other dog lovers will no doubt relate to.  It's a delightful read!

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

Ness in distress

Yesterday, we looked at the Flat Earthers who would rather doubt a twenty-thousand dollar piece of precision scientific equipment than their own guesses about how the world works.  Today, in further adventures of confirmation bias and wishful thinking, we have:

The Loch Ness Monster is back.

Of all the cryptid legends, the Loch Ness Monster is (in my opinion) one of the least likely.  The cryptid-seekers go on and on about how any and all cryptids could exist because we've rediscovered animals that were thought to be extinct.  This usually involves bringing out the coelacanth, which was presumed dead for the last sixty-odd million years, that was shown to be alive when someone caught one off the coast of Madagascar.

Coelacanth [Image is in the Public Domain]

Even if you accept that there are animals out there that we haven't successfully captured, Nessie is a poor bet.  Up until about 14,000 years ago, Scotland was entirely covered by a thick sheet of glacial ice, so if there had been a plesiosaur that somehow escaped the extinction event that killed all of his cousins and survived in a lake up to then, during the Pleistocene Epoch he would have been turned into a plesiosicle.  Plus, Loch Ness is oligotrophic -- nutrient-poor -- and therefore has a fairly small population of fish and other animals, pretty certainly not enough to support a breeding population of large aquatic dinosaurs.

So Bigfoot, yeah, okay, it's at least possible.  Not likely, mind you, but possible.  Nessie?  Not so much.  The evidence thus far brought to bear upon the question is far insufficient to prove the case -- and that's even the opinion of Adrian Shine and Steve Feltham, two of the foremost "Nessie hunters" in the world.

"The fact is that well over a thousand honest and sober people have seen monsters in Loch Ness," Shine said.  "Yet over eighty years of expeditions have failed to find them.  Either we’re fairly bad at what we do or there’s another reason for that...  I think it’s fair to say we’d all like there to be a Loch Ness monster.  But equally there are people who will see what they want to see."

That, of course, hasn't stopped enthusiasts.  And you can expect the whole craze to be ramping up over the next few weeks, because there have been two sightings of Nessie in the last month that have enthusiasts leaping about making excited little squeaking noises.

So naturally, I thought I'd look into it further.  Open mind, and all.  I was even more intrigued when I found out that one of the people who claimed a sighting, Eoin O'Faodhagain, had taken a still shot from the "Nessie cam" that's always pointed out across the lake, and it was alleged to have caught a good view of the monster.

Nota bene: I have no idea how to pronounce Eoin O'Faodhagain.  A Scottish friend once told me, "There are only two rules for pronouncing Gaelic names.  Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

Anyhow, I thought I'd take a look at O'Faodhagain's photograph, which has evidently caused a considerable stir in the cryptozoological community.  So... ready?  Here it is:

And I'm thinking: "that's it?  That's your earthshattering photo?"  Hell, it's so blurry that he even had to circle the vague gray blob that we're supposed to think is Nessie because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to find it.  Oh, but O'Faodhagain says it has to be Nessie, because as he watched it disappeared, and "boats don't do that."

Well, I'm convinced.

In any case, here we have another discussion over something that -- if I may borrow a phrase from Dorothy Parker -- is such slim evidence that to call it wafer-thin would be to insult wafer-makers the world over.  Not that I expect this to discourage Nessiphiles.

Nothing ever does.  Confirmation-Bias-"R"-Us.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

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

High-tech Nessie search

My obsession with aliens and cryptids is glaringly obvious, not only because of what I write about here, but from my classroom décor.  I've got a cardboard-cutout Bigfoot (not life-sized, unfortunately), a Bigfoot air freshener (it smells like pine, fortunately), and a variety of other alien- and cryptid-themed posters and paraphernalia.

But that's not saying I believe it all, which I'm hoping is also obvious.  The hard evidence for alien life, and for the most commonly-claimed types of cryptids, is woefully inadequate.  (For that read, "basically nonexistent.")  And the more claims there are, the more damning a lack of evidence becomes.  If any one of the cryptids people say they've seen -- Mokele-Mbembe, for example, which is the Congo's answer to the Loch Ness Monster -- actually existed, you'd think by now there'd be something.  A bone, a tooth, a clump of hair, some bit that could actually be subjected to DNA analysis and give us an anomalous, this-isn't-anything-we've-seen-before result.

Which is why, I suppose, the effort now being undertaken to find Nessie is at least approaching things the right way.  A geneticist, Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago (New Zealand), is heading a team that is trying to analyze DNA traces from the water of Loch Ness using a technique called eDNA, which is capable of identifying the source of even minuscule amounts of DNA (such as from shed skin cells, saliva, or urine).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The German science news site Grenzwissenschaft-Aktuell quoted Gemmell in a press release day before yesterday.  "The method of eDNA is so effective because life itself is dirty," Gemmell explained. "Whatever creature moves through and lives in an environment, it leaves behind tiny fragments of its DNA...  It is this DNA that we are now able to extract and sequence in order to identify these creatures by comparing the sequences determined with the databases of known genetic sequences of more than 100,000 different organisms."

Gemmell writes, in a summary of their efforts:

Currently we are analysing the data we obtained from our Loch Ness sampling trip back in June. 

Since then DNA from ~250 individual samples were extracted at the University of Hull.  From there the DNAs went to the laboratory of Professor Pierre Taberlet at the Université Grenoble Alpes, where we used PCR metabarcodes to amplify the eukaryotic and bacterial DNA sequences found in our samples.  We also used a set of metabarcodes that focus on vertebrate life, given that most monster myths focus on some large vertebrate-like creature. 

These enriched DNA-sequences were then sent to Fasteris (a Swiss DNA sequencing service) in Geneva, where they were sequenced using Illumina sequencing technologies.  We now have ~500 million individual DNA sequences that we are exploring to understand what types of species were present in Loch Ness when we sampled in June 2018. 

It takes some time to explore the sequences robustly, and we have ~5 labs doing this independently.  I expect we will have an answer as to what we have found by early 2019.

So I can commend Gemmell and his team for approaching this the right way.  Still, it's hard to imagine their getting any kind of positive results, or at least anything that would convince a skeptic.  If they find DNA from some unknown source -- even if it is close to that of existing birds or reptiles (the closest living cousins of the dinosaurs) -- how could you jump from that to "it's a plesiosaur?"

There is also, sadly, a pretty good argument for why there couldn't be a pleisiosaur in Loch Ness; the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago, and at that point Scotland was underneath a huge slab of ice.  Any dinosaurs that were in Loch Ness at that point would have been dinosaursicles.  It's a good way inland; the nearest large(r) body of water is Moray Firth, ten or so miles away, and connected by the River Ness, which averages between two and five meters in depth (depending on which part of it you're measuring and how much it's rained).

Maybe it's just me, but that seems a little shallow to host a plesiosaur.  And that's even presuming that one was in Moray Firth when the ice receded.

So while I'm still willing to entertain the existence of Bigfoot, and even Mokele-Mbembe, Nessie has always seemed to me to be the least plausible of all the more famous cryptids.  There's just too much arguing against her existence, and zero hard evidence.

Anyhow, I wish Gemmell and his team luck.  It's worth doing, even if they find nothing of particular interest.  Of course, that won't dissuade the true believers even so.  Nothing does.

That's why they're "true believers."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is something everyone should read.  Jonathan Haidt is an ethicist who has been studying the connections between morality and politics for twenty-five years, and whose contribution to our understanding of our own motives is second to none.  In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics, he looks at what motivates liberals and conservatives -- and how good, moral people can look at the same issues and come to opposite conclusions.

His extraordinarily deft touch for asking us to reconsider our own ethical foundations, without either being overtly partisan or accepting truly immoral stances and behaviors, is a needed breath of fresh air in these fractious times.  He is somehow able to walk that line of evaluating our own behavior clearly and dispassionately, and holding a mirror up to some of our most deep-seated drives.

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