The attraction of the terrifying

The advent of the internet gave a whole new life to the phenomenon of urban legends.  When I was a kid (back in the good ol' Ancient Babylonian Times) those strange and often scary tales -- like the famous story of the choking Doberman -- were transmitted word-of-mouth and in-person, limiting the speed and scope of their spread.

Now that the world is connected electronically, these bizarre stories can spread like a wildfire.

This has given rise to "creepypasta" -- scary, allegedly true, first-person accounts that spread across the 'web.  (If you're curious, the name comes from "creepy" + "copypasta" -- the latter being a slang term for the practice of copying blocks of text between different social media platforms.)  Some have become pretty famous, and have inspired books and movies; in fact, I've riffed on two creepypasta in my novels, the legend of the Black-Eyed Children (in the Boundary Solution trilogy, beginning with Lines of Sight), and the terrifying tale of Slender Man (in Signal to Noise).

So obviously I have nothing against a good scary story, but a line is crossed when you add, "... and it really happened."  In fact, the topic comes up because of an interesting article by Tom Faber that appeared last week in Ars Technica looking at a specific subcategory of creepypasta -- stories that involve the supposedly supernatural (and terrifying) effects of certain video games.

Not being a gamer myself, I hadn't heard about most of these, but there's no doubt they're pretty scary.  Take, for example, the tale that grew around the Pokémon game "Lavender Town," which has an admittedly eerie soundtrack (you can hear a recording of it on the link provided).  Supposedly, the music contained "high-pitched sonic irregularities" that induced an altered mental state so severe that after playing the game, dozens of children in Japan committed suicide by climbing up on their roofs and throwing themselves off.

Needless to say -- or actually, evidently it does need to be said -- that never happened.  There is no evidence to be had online, from official documents, or in newspapers or television news that gives an iota of credence to it.  Even so, lots of people swear it's all real.  Sometimes these stories become oddly recursive; a game-inspired, supposedly true creepypasta called "Ben Drowned," about an evil spirit trapped in the game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, became so widespread that a new game -- The Haunted Cartridge -- was published based on it.

So a made-up scary story about a video game that people claimed was real inspired another video game.

Delving through these layers can be tricky sometimes, but what strikes me is how easily people accept that these tales are true.  For a lot of people -- and I reluctantly include myself in this category -- there's a part of us that wants that stuff to be real.  There's something oddly compelling about being frightened, even though if you think about it rationally (which I hope everyone does), there's really nothing at all attractive about a world where ghosts and monsters and zombies exist and video games can make a noise inducing you to kill yourself.

It's like the people, apparently numerous, who think that the H. P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos is substantially true.  (I couldn't resist playing with that idea, too, giving rise to my short story "She Sells Seashells" -- which you can read for free at the link -- and I encourage you to do so, because all modesty aside, it's cool and creepy.)  But the question remains about why would you want Cthulhu et al. to exist.  Those mofos are terrifying.  Even the people who worship the Elder Gods in Lovecraft's stories always seem to end up getting eaten or dismembered or converted into Eldritch Slime, so there appears to be no feature of these beings that has any positive aspects for humanity.  Okay, I live in a pretty placid part of the world, where I frequently wish something would happen to liven things up, but even I don't want Nyarlathotep and Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth and the rest of the crew to show up in my back yard.

Despite all this, I still feel the attraction, and I'm at a loss to explain why.  I remember watching scary television and movies as a kid, and not just being entertained but on some level wishing it was real, even though I was well aware of how much more terrifying it would be if it were.  One example that stands out in my memory is the episode of Lost in Space called "Ghost in Space," wherein an invisible creature has arisen from a bog, and Dr. Smith becomes convinced he can communicate with it via Ouija Board.  Okay, watching it now, the whole thing is abjectly ridiculous (although I am still impressed with how they made the footprints of the creature appear in the sand without anything visible there to make them).  But other than being scared, I remember my main reaction was that I would love for something like that to be real.  Because of that, it's still one of the episodes I remember the most fondly, despite how generally incoherent the story is.

So (speaking of incoherent), I'm not even entirely certain what point I'm trying to make, here, other than (1) life would be a lot simpler if people would stop making shit up and claiming it's true, and (2) even people who are diehard skeptics can sometimes have a wide irrational streak.  It's fascinating how attracted we are to things that when you consider them, would be absolutely horrible if they're real.

Yet as the poster in Fox Mulder's office said, "I Want to Believe."

Anyhow, I should wind this up.  Not, of course, because there's anything interesting that I need to deal with.  When the most engaging thing in your immediate vicinity is watching the cows in the field across the road, it's perhaps not surprising that I sometimes feel like a good haunting or invasion by aliens would break up the monotony.

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Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

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

Wow failure

I love science, but I really wish it would stop crushing my hopes and dreams.

I say this because it has long been my dream to live long enough to see unequivocal proof of the existence of intelligent life on other planets.  I got my start, alien-obsession-wise, when I was about seven and became addicted to the abysmal 1960s television series Lost in Space.  The aliens were pretty low-budget, judging by the fact that most of them were...

... well, human.  Like the alien cowboy, the alien pirate (complete with a mechanical parrot), the alien motorcycle gang, the alien teenage hippies, the alien Wild West gunslinger, and Brunhilde.  I'm not making this last one up.  In this not-to-be-missed cinematic tour de force, Brunhilde appears out of nowhere, wearing a helmet with wings, yo-to-hoing like mad while seated on the back of an enormous plastic horse.  In that episode, we also meet Thor, who thinks he has lost his strength and has gone all weepy, and Will Robinson has to give him a heartwarming pep talk to convince him that true strength comes from within.

If you can watch that episode without pissing your pants laughing, you have a stronger constitution than I have.

Things took a step up (well, okay, that was pretty much the only direction available) with the original Star Trek series, where they at least got rubber noses and colorful makeup for the aliens, and induced some of them to speak in cheesy faux-Russian accents to make it clear which ones were the bad guys.  But then came Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Trek: First Contact and Cocoon and Starman and the best of 'em all, Contact -- which remains one of my top favorite movies ever -- and I was completely and permanently hooked on the idea that there might be extraterrestrial intelligence.

The problem is, the evidence for life on other planets, much less intelligent life, is kind of nonexistent.  There have been radio telescopes scanning the sky for decades, and so far there's been nothing to answer to Enrico Fermi's famous quip, "Where is everybody?"

There was one possibility, however.  It's called the "Wow Signal" -- a 72-second burst of radio waves captured in 1977 by Ohio State University's "Big Ear" Radio Telescope.  It was such an anomaly that astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote "Wow!" next to the computer printout that contained the signal, thus giving the phenomenon its name.

The spot in the sky where the burst originated -- near the star Chi Sagittarii in the constellation Sagittarius -- has been repeatedly scanned, but the signal has never been repeated.

So what was it?  The hopeful amongst us (which included me) thought it might be a radio transmission from intelligent life.  The more dubious figured there had to be some kind of more prosaic explanation -- but what that explanation might be, no one knew.  So I held on to the Wow Signal as being a real possibility for the realization of my dream.

Until today.

Antonio Paris, of the Center for Planetary Science at the Washington Academy of Sciences, shot down the extraterrestrial intelligence hypothesis this week with a neat, and completely plausible, explanation of the Wow Signal as the emission from the hydrogen-rich comet 266/P Christensen -- which was in that exact location when the signal was detected.

Paris writes:

In 2016, we proposed a hypothesis arguing that a comet and/or its hydrogen cloud was a strong candidate for the source of the “Wow!” Signal.  From 27 November 2016 to 24 February 2017, we conducted 200 observations in the radio spectrum to validate the hypothesis.  This investigation discovered that comets 266/P Christensen, P/2013 EW90 (Tenagra), P/2016 J1-A (PANSTARRS), and 237P/LINEAR emitted radio waves at 1420 MHz.  In addition, the data collected during this investigation demonstrated there is a well-defined distinction between radio signals emitted from known celestial sources and comets, including comet 266/P Christensen...  To dismiss the source of the radio signal as emission from comet 266/P Christensen, we repositioned the telescope away from the comet and conducted clear sky observations when the comet was not near the coordinates of the “Wow!” Signal.  During these clear sky observations, we detected no significant radio signal at 1420 MHz.  This investigation, therefore, has concluded that cometary spectra are observable at 1420 MHz and that the 1977 “Wow!” Signal was a natural phenomenon from a Solar System body.

To Dr. Paris, I have the following to say: "Nicely done!  Outstanding research!  I hate you!"  *grinds teeth*

So for us alien aficionados, it's one more dashed hope.  I mean, I'm supportive of science, and I appreciate the hard work and rigor, but really.  Leave me something to cling to, okay?  Because at the moment, all I'm left with is Brunhilde, and the yo-to-hoing is getting really annoying.

Space horse

For this last Christmas, my son got me the second season of the bizarrely campy 1960s television show Lost in Space (I already had the first season; there's one season left, if I survive watching the second with my brain intact).  It's pretty wacky stuff, and I have to wonder, sometimes, if they were really trying to do science fiction, or engaging in an elaborate parody.  Thus far, we've met a cosmic cowboy, a space pirate named Alonzo P. Tucker (complete with an electronic parrot), the CEO of the Celestial Department Store, Kurt Russell in his first role (unsurprisingly, a hyperagressive little boy named "Quano" who wanted to fight everyone he met), and some space hillbillies.

But no episode was quite as loony as the one where Dr. Smith, Will Robinson, et al. ran into Thor.  Yes, that's the Thor, as in the Norse god of thunder.  Dr. Smith happens to be there when Thor's gloves and hammer fall from the sky (Thor having dropped them, apparently).  Dr. Smith dons the gloves, and finds that while wearing them, he can use the hammer to destroy bit-part actors wearing gorilla suits.

But the pièce de resistance of the whole episode was Brynhilde, who appears in a burst of flame and puff of smoke, riding on a massive plastic horse.  No one in the show, including Brynhilde, seemed to notice that the horse never moved, just kind of stood there staring blankly into, um, space.

The reason I bring all of this up is because of something that happened a few days ago in Mexico.  A volcano called Mt. Colima erupted (as volcanoes are wont to do), and a webcam caught an image of a UFO flying around the mountain.  The UFO, they say, looks like a giant flying horse.

Here's a still, so you can judge for yourself:

An "alien enthusiast," Eufrasio Gonzales Carrasco, is quoted as saying that "there has been UFO activity around volcanoes and the latest sighting of the horse-shaped UFO near the Colima volcano adds up to the list...  there is something about volcanoes that probably attracts the attention of aliens." The UFO, he says, "was shaped like a horse with a large body and two legs."

Because, apparently, two-legged horses are a common thing.

But of course, when I saw this I started thinking about space horses, and that led directly to Brynhilde and "The Space Vikings" (which was the name of the episode).  You have to wonder if anyone heard a shrill soprano voice singing "Ho yo to HO!" as it zoomed past the volcano.

But seriously.  The most likely explanation for this appearance of a Valkyrie in Mexico is (1) a semi-distant bird, or (2) a much closer bug.  Both of these have been responsible for UFO sightings in the past.  Because of issues like focal length, when you have a camera focusing on a distant object, nearby objects become blurred and unrecognizable, and this is almost certainly what we're seeing here.

A pity.  I was almost hoping for Odin to go riding by on Sleipnir, his eight-legged flying steed.  And if the whole Norse mythology thing was real, I'd even brave the cold for a visit to Niflheim to see the Frost Giants.  How scary can it be?  Dr. Smith went to Niflheim, and all he met were a couple of creepy little elves who repeated everything he said.

But realistically speaking, I'm doubtful that the gates of Niflheim are in Mexico.  Seems a little warm, especially near a volcano.  Maybe we'd have a better chance of meeting Surt, the lord of the Fire Giants.  That'd be kind of cool.  He sounds like a badass.