Island of the dolls

One of the very first topics I addressed here at Skeptophilia -- only a few months after I started, in fall of 2010 -- was the idea of the uncanny valley.

The term was coined by Japanese robotics engineer Masahiro Mori way back in 1970, in his book Bukimi No Tani (不気味の谷), the title of which roughly translates to it.  The idea, which you're probably familiar with, is that if you map out our emotional response to a face as a function of its proximity to a normal human face, you find a fascinating pattern.  Faces very different from our own -- animal faces, stuffed toys, and stylized faces (like the famous "smiley face"), for example -- usually elicit positive, or at least neutral, responses.  Normal human faces, of course, are usually viewed positively.

Where you run into trouble is when a face is kinda similar to a human face, but not similar enough.  This is why clowns frequently trigger fear rather than amusement.  You may recall that the animators of the 2004 movie The Polar Express ran headlong into this, when the animation of the characters, especially the Train Conductor (who was supposed to be a nice character), freaked kids out instead of charming them.  Roboticists have been trying like mad to create a humanoid robot whose face doesn't elicit people to recoil with horror, with (thus far) little success.

That dip in the middle, between very non-human faces and completely human ones, is what Mori called "the uncanny valley."

Why this happens is a matter of conjecture.  Some psychologists have speculated that the not-quite-human-enough faces that elicit the strongest negative reactions often have a flat affect and a mask-like quality, which might act as primal triggers warning us about people with severe mental disorders like psychosis.  But the human psyche is a complex place, and it may well be that the reasons for the near-universal terror sparked by characters like The Gangers in the Doctor Who episode "The Almost People" are multifaceted.

What's certain is this aversion to faces in the uncanny valley exists across cultures.  Take, for example, a place I found out about only yesterday -- Mexico's Isla de las Muñecas, the "Island of the Dolls."

The island is in Lake Xochimilco, south of Mexico City, and it was owned by a peculiar recluse named Don Julián Santana Barrera.  Some time in the 1940s, so the story goes, Barrera found the body of a girl who had drowned in the shallows of the lake (another version is that he saw her drowning and was unable to save her).  The day after she died, Barrera found a doll floating in the water, and he became convinced that it was the girl's spirit returning.  So he put the doll on display, and started looking through the washed up flotsam and jetsam for more.

He found more.  Then he started trading produce he'd raised with the locals for more dolls.  Ultimately it became an obsession, and in the next five decades he collected over a thousand of them (along with assorted parts).  The place became a site for pilgrims, who were convinced that the dolls housed the spirits of the dead.  Legends arose that visitors saw the dolls moving or opening their eyes -- and that some heard them whispering to each other.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Amrith Raj, Dolls hung in Santana Barrera's chinampa in Xochimilco, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Barrera himself died in 2001 under (very) mysterious circumstances.  His nephew had come to help him -- at that point he was around eighty years old -- and the two were out fishing in the lake when the old man became convinced he heard mermaids calling to him.  The nephew rowed them both to shore and went to get assistance, but when he returned his uncle was face down in the water, drowned...

... at the same spot where he'd discovered the little girl's body, over fifty years earlier.

Since then, the island has been popular as a destination for dark tourism -- the attraction some people have for places associated with injury, death, or tragedy.  It was the filming location for the extremely creepy music video Lady Gaga released just a month ago, "The Dead Dance."

There's no doubt that dolls fall squarely into the uncanny valley for a lot of people.  Their still, unchanging expressions are right in that middle ground between being human and non-human.  (Explaining the success of horror flicks like Chucky and M3gan.)

And you can see why Mexico's Island of the Dolls has the draw it does.  You don't even need to believe in disembodied spirits of the dead to get the chills from it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Esparta Palma, Xochimilco Dolls' Island, CC BY 2.0]

What astonishes me, though, is that Barrera himself wanted to live there.  I mean, I'm a fairly staunch disbeliever in all things paranormal, and those things still strike me as scary as fuck.

If I ever visit Mexico, I might be persuaded to go to the island.  But no way in hell would I spend the night there.

Just because I'm a skeptic doesn't mean I'm not suggestible.  In fact, the case could be argued that I became a skeptic precisely because I'm so suggestible.  After all, the other option was running around making little whimpering noises all the time, which is kind of counterproductive.

In any case, I'll be curious to hear what my readers think.  Are you susceptible to the uncanny valley?  Or resistant enough that you'd stay overnight on Isla de las Muñecas?

Maybe bring along a clown, for good measure?

Me, I'm creeped out just thinking about it.

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The backyard volcano

Of all of the sciences, geology is the one where deep understanding of the underlying processes eluded us the longest.  Even the two other contenders -- genetics and astronomy -- were at least partially unraveled sooner.  Plate tectonics, the model that provides a framework for comprehending just about every other geological process, wasn't elucidated until Frederick Vine, Drummond Matthews, and Harry Hess came along in the early 1960s.  Until then, geology texts fell back on hand-waving explanations like synclines and anticlines, and pretty much ignored questions like why most of the world's volcanoes and major earthquakes fall along a tracery of curves that encircle the Earth like the stitching on a baseball (the most famous of which is the Pacific Ring of Fire).

Part of the reason it took us so long to figure all this out is because geological processes are, for the most part, slow, so it's easy to look around and conclude that the Earth has pretty much always looked like it does today.  Then... they discovered anomalies like marine fossils in the Himalayas, Kansas, the Rockies, and right here in my own neck of the woods in upstate New York.  It took the brilliant Scottish geologist Charles Lyell to recognize that if rates of sedimentation are fairly constant, then big sedimentary rock layers like the White Cliffs of Dover must have taken tens of millions, rather than thousands, of years to form.  The recognition of how slow most geological phenomena were meant the Earth was a great deal older than the six-thousand-year estimate by Archbishop Ussher -- setting up the first of many clashes between geologists and the church establishment.

But "usually slow" doesn't mean "always slow."  Sometimes major geological processes can occur, literally, overnight.  Take, for example, the appearance in 1943 of a new volcano, dubbed Parícutin after the nearest town, in a Mexican farmer's cornfield.

The locals did at least have a little bit of warning.  For weeks prior to the initial eruption, they had heard sounds "like thunder but with no clouds in the sky," now thought to be the rumblings of magma moving beneath the surface.  There were over twenty small earthquakes over 3.2 on the Richter Scale, and hundreds of smaller ones -- the day before the eruption, there were more than three hundred small earthquakes.

What happened next is best said in the words of Dionisio Pulido, the farmer who witnessed it first-hand:

At 4 p.m., I left my wife to set fire to a pile of branches when I noticed that a crack, which was situated on one of the knolls of my farm, had opened... and I saw that it was a kind of fissure that had a depth of only half a meter.  I set about to ignite the branches again when I felt a thunder, the trees trembled, and I turned to speak to Paula; and it was then I saw how, in the hole, the ground swelled and raised itself two or two and a half meters high, and a kind of smoke or fine dust – grey, like ashes – began to rise up in a portion of the crack that I had not previously seen...  Immediately more smoke began to rise with a hiss or whistle, loud and continuous; and there was a smell of sulfur.

By the next morning, where Pulido's cornfield had been was a scoria cone fifty meters high; a week later, it was double that.  It was continuously erupting volcanic bombs and small pyroclastic flows, and Pulido decided that his home and land were done for, so he got the hell out.  Before leaving, he put up a sign saying "This volcano is owned and operated by Dionisio Pulido" -- indicating that even in dire circumstances, you can still hang on to your sense of humor.

Parícutin in 1943 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The entire eruption cycle went on for two years, and by the end, there was a massive conical mountain, over four hundred meters tall, where before there'd only been a flat valley.  Only three people died during the eruption, and oddly, none of them were from the lava or pyroclastic surges; the three died when they were struck by lightning during an ash eruption.  (The tiny particles of volcanic ash are often electrically charged; lightning strikes in ash columns are common.)

It did, however, render much of the (former) valley uninhabitable.  Here's a photograph of the ruins of the old church of San Juan Parangaricutiro, which was destroyed by lava and ash along with the rest of the village of the same name:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

At the time of the eruption, all that was known was that it added another peak to the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, which runs east-west across the entire country and includes much more famous volcanoes such as Popocatépetl.  Since then, we've learned that the whole range owes its existence to the subduction of the Rivera and Cocos Plates underneath the North American Plate at the Middle America Trench; the waterlogged rock and sediments are pulled down into the upper mantle, heated, and melt, forming the magma that eventually erupts somewhere behind the trench.

But at the time, the appearance of a volcano was a source of mystification both to the locals and the scientists.  To be sure, some geological phenomena are sudden; earthquakes, for example, often happen without much in the way of warning (and accurate earthquake prediction is still a dicey affair).  But we're used to things pretty much staying in the shapes and positions they were in before.  It takes a huge earthquake -- the 9.2-magnitude Anchorage megathrust quake comes to mind -- to radically reshape the land, in this case raising a long stretch of coastline by as much as nine meters.  And while big volcanic eruptions, such as the current one from Mount Etna, are spectacular and can be deadly, most of the time they're from volcanoes we already knew about.

Parícutin, though, kind of came out of nowhere, at least by the scientific understanding of the time.  And that's one of the benefits of science, isn't it?  It allows us to understand the processes involved, not just name them after they've happened.  While we're still not at the point where we can predict with much lead time when something like this will happen, at least now we can say with some assurance that we understand why it happened where it did.

Little consolation to Dionisio Pulido, of course.  I'm guessing that "owning and operating" a volcano was nowhere near as lucrative as his cornfield had been.  But that's life in a geologically active area.  However much we understand about the science behind such events, it's good to keep in mind there's always a human cost.

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The enduring puzzle of Hueyatlaco

One of the most frustrating things about science, from the point of view of non-scientists, is that sometimes we have to say "we simply don't know the answer to that yet."

Of course, I'm sure it's frustrating enough to the scientists as well, but at least they should be used to it.  Science is always pushing at the boundaries of what we know, and using evidence and logic to find explanations.  It's inevitable that sometimes even a significant amount of evidence is insufficient to reach a conclusion.  At that point, the only honest thing to say is "we don't know, and may never know."

This drives a lot of people nuts.  The attitude is that because science has proven to be pretty damn good at finding answers, it should have a one hundred percent hit rate.  Meteorologists can't always accurately predict the track or intensity of storms?  Ha, I'd like to have a job where I could be wrong half the time and still get paid!  The promising new cancer drug turns out not to work in vivo?  Don't listen to the medical professionals, they'll say something is good for you today and then say the opposite tomorrow.  This fault is at risk of an imminent earthquake?  Okay, then tell me when, down to the hour and minute, so I can plan ahead.

Otherwise, what good are you scientists, anyhow?

It all comes from a fundamental misapprehension of the scientific process -- that it should provide certainty.  It'd be nice, but the real world usually doesn't cooperate, and sometimes even with their best efforts, the scientists have to admit to being in a situation somewhere between incomplete understanding and complete befuddlement.

I ran into an especially good example of that a couple of days ago because of a dear friend, a history scholar and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who asked me if I'd ever heard of Hueyatlaco and the Steen-McIntyre report.  She sent me a link from the site Ancient Origins called "Controversy at Hueyatlaco: When Did Humans First Inhabit the Americas?" that (despite a subtle bent toward Ancient Astronauts explanations of things) gives the basics of the story -- and it's a pretty peculiar one, even when you don't credit any of the woo-woo trappings.

Now, keep in mind that until two days ago I'd never heard of this, so I still consider my own knowledge shallow and tentative, and I ask forgiveness for any mistakes or misapprehensions I have (and request a quick note if there's something in this post I can correct).  But this is what I've gathered.

Hueyatlaco is an archaeological dig site in the state of Puebla in central Mexico.  In the 1960s, an archaeologist named Cynthia Irwin-Williams was working at the site and uncovered stone tools and the bones of pre-glacial North American mammals (such as the woolly rhinoceros) that showed signs of having been butchered for meat.  Irwin-Williams thought that such an early site deserved close attention, and she sent samples to the USGS for radioisotope dating.

The results were more than a little perplexing.  The date returned by the USGS was on the order of 250,000 years ago.  This predates modern Homo sapiens by a good fifty thousand years, so -- if the date was accurate -- the tools and the animal bones were associated not with modern humans, but with our predecessors, possibly the Neanderthals or Denisovans (neither of which, for the record, has ever been recorded in the Western Hemisphere).  Also perplexing was that this would push back the earliest hominid occupation of North America not just by a little, but by a factor of sixteen!

It's understandable why the scientists found that hard to swallow.  The idea that humans (or their near relatives) had been in the Americas for 230-odd-thousand years longer than we thought they had, and had left no traces whatsoever during that time except at this one site, was difficult to believe.  So the natural conclusion was reached that the dating of the site was somehow askew.

Then repeated attempts kept giving the same age.

Hueyatlaco [Image licensed under the Creative Commons https://www.flickr.com/photos/xhumpty/, Valsequillo dam, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Most archaeologists stuck to their guns, and said the most parsimonious explanation was still that somehow the dating protocol was being applied incorrectly.  The samples were contaminated with older traces, perhaps, which would give a systematic overestimate for the site's age.  Then, to muddy the waters further, there were allegations of a conspiracy to cover up the anomalous data.  The official report from the USGS simply dropped one of the zeroes, reporting the site's age as 25,000, not 250,000, years.  One of the archaeologists who'd been working on the site, Virginia Steen-McIntyre, was pressured to do her dissertation not on the perplexing Hueyatlaco data, but on more conventional research into volcanic ash strata.  Steen-McIntyre decided, however, that she wouldn't be silenced, and came out with a report of her own, taking apart the critics a point at a time -- and included a claim that she was harassed for being unwilling to stay silent.

Other scientists have tried (and failed) to resolve the odd data.  Biostratigrapher Sam Vanlandingham published two papers, in 2001 and 2004, first reconfirming the dating of the strata not to tens, but hundreds of thousands of years ago, and then (most startling of all) confirming this using microfossils of diatoms from contemporaneous sediments at the site -- and demonstrating that some of those diatom species had been extinct for at least eighty thousand years.

The upshot of it all is that we still don't have an answer.  Most archaeologists still doubt the existence of hominids in the Americas prior to the arrival of the ancestors of the Native Americans on the order of (at the most) twenty thousand years ago, and assert that there is not a single grain of evidence that the Neanderthals and Denisovans (or any other hominids, for that matter) ever made it to the Western Hemisphere.  But that leaves us with a puzzle -- multiple studies, cross-checked and confirmed, keep agreeing with the older date as found by Irwin-Williams, Steen-McIntyre, and others.

So if you've been waiting for an answer... well, that's it, folks.  We don't know.  It's one of the most curious archaeological puzzles I've ever run across, and at this point, the words I hear about it most often from reliable sources are "contentious" and "uncertain" and "controversial."  A lot of experts have a lot of opinions about it, but no one has been able to do any of three things -- explain how the dates could be correct when there's no evidence of hominids in the Americas at any time during the following two hundred thousand years, explain how the dates could be incorrect when they've been independently corroborated multiple times, or demonstrate that the entire thing was some kind of elaborate hoax, along the lines of the Piltdown Man.

As frustrating as it is, that's where we have to leave it if we're going to be scrupulously honest about things.  As good skeptics, we have to be willing to hold the question in abeyance, indefinitely if need be, for want of conclusive evidence to settle it.  In science, the answer "We don't know yet" is always the fallback when the data is insufficient to merit a conclusion -- however that offends our deep desire to be a hundred percent sure about everything in the universe.

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No guardrails

Ever since Donald Trump came on the political scene, bragging that he could shoot someone in full view on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter, I and a lot of people on the leftish-side of things have wondered what it would take to get his followers to admit they'd been scammed by a career con-man who has zero moral code.

I think it was about a third of the way into the first Trump presidency that I realized he'd been, for once, telling the unvarnished truth.  I hear now and then of some Trump voter who publicly states that they've woken up and will never support him again, but I think they're very much the exception.  And I've long blamed it largely on the media; a study shortly after the election found that one of the strongest correlations to voting for Trump was lack of access to fact-based information.

So for a while, it was comforting to think that if only these people did have accurate information, they'd come to their senses.  But recently I've begun to think the situation is worse than that.

They know -- but they don't care.  There is no red line, no boundary he could cross that would make people say, "Okay, that's enough."

Since his re-election, Trump's behavior has become more and more unhinged, and instead of provoking a sense of "good lord, what have we done?", the reaction has been more, "Wheeeeee!"  In the last two weeks, the same man who said one of his top priorities was to get us out of military conflicts overseas has stated his intent to annex Greenland and Canada, invade Mexico, and retake the Panama Canal.  (And speaking of media complicity, CNN framed this story as "if he's serious, it'd be the biggest U.S. expansion since the Louisiana Purchase" rather than what any legitimate news source would say, which is, "fucking demented lunatic threatens our allies and risks international conflict with his unprovoked deranged saber-rattling.")

And the fact remains that he's still catastrophically ignorant.  He tweeted this image, apparently without having any idea that the Matterhorn isn't in Canada.

His supporters haven't batted an eyelash.  MAGA Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn said she was all in on taking back the Panama Canal, that "this is what Americans want to see."  Mini-Me, a.k.a. Eric Trump, thought it'd be a good idea to throw fuel on the fire, and posted this:

Next stop, the Sudetenland.

His supporters think Trump has some sophisticated plan here, but he's not playing three-dimensional chess.  He doesn't have the intelligence for tic-tac-toe, much less anything harder.  The Panama thing is most likely retribution, because businesses owned by Trump were recently shut down in the country after accusations of tax evasion and that they were being used as fronts for laundering drug money.  Strategy-wise, he's never progressed any further than "Thag hit me with rock, me hit Thag with rock."

It's why he's threatening to jail Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley, and Alexander Vindman.  They committed the cardinal sin of standing up to him, of calling him out on his lies, of demanding that he be held to the same standards of justice as anyone else in the country.  Anyone who dares to point out the Emperor Has No Clothes needs to be silenced by whatever means necessary.

But despite all this, his followers are still cheering -- and lambasting anyone who dares to contradict Dear Leader.

It's gotten so bad that even when one of Trump's favorites -- former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, once nominee for Attorney General -- was credibly shown to have paid for sex, committed statutory rape, and gone on drug-fueled binges, the response by his supposed family-values followers was not to say, "this guy should be locked up," but to circle the wagons and claim Gaetz had been framed.

Lie after lie, grift after grift.  And yet -- somehow -- it's worked, and is still working.  He scams people in broad daylight, and his followers eagerly line up to be taken advantage of.  The evangelical Christians, who are somehow still behind him one hundred percent despite the fact that he embodies all Seven Deadly Sins in one individual, are just thrilled to pieces by the fact that he's hosting a pre-inauguration prayer service and allowing supporters to attend -- for $100,000 each.

"Pay-to-pray," it's being called.  

I may be off-base, here, being an atheist and all, but isn't this the sort of thing that caused Jesus himself to get violent?  Something about using a whip on money-lenders in the Temple, if I remember correctly.

I think the bottom line is that we on the other side of things have made the mistake of thinking this behavior is rational.  That somehow, if we argue, if we just present more information, use logic and facts, people will be convinced.  The truth is, what's happening here is fundamentally irrational; it's precisely the same appeal to emotion, anger, and nationalism that happened in Germany in the 1930s.  Just like Hitler did, Trump is taking the legitimate concerns of struggling citizens -- anger and anxiety over high cost of living, poor access and high cost of health care, lack of decent-paying jobs with benefits, concerns about crime rate -- and twisting the aim to focus on the wrong causes.  Trump's biggest allies are the super-wealthy corporate leaders, so at all costs we can't have them become the targets.  Instead, get the blame pinned on minorities, immigrants, liberal Democrats, non-Christians, LGBTQ+ people.  

It's why alleged CEO-killer Luigi Mangione has them so freaked out.  For a moment, it forced the attention back on corporate billionaires as a fundamental piece of what's wrong in the United States.

But don't expect the focus to stay there.  It's back to distract, distract, distract.  I don't think we're actually going to invade Greenland, Canada, Mexico, or Panama; Trump has the attention span of a toddler who just had eight Milky Way bars for lunch.  And in any case, actually accomplishing any of that was never the goal.  The real goal is to get Americans to stop thinking, and back to treating everything Trump says as the de facto gospel truth.

He knows that if in two years he hasn't followed through on a single one of his campaign promises, much less any of his idle threats, none of his followers will care -- or even remember.

There is no red line, no guardrails, no brakes, no point where the people who back him will say "enough."  Waiting for it to happen is a fool's errand.  We have to resist, we have to continue to fight, but the war won't be won through logical argument.

It's probably crossed your mind to wonder why, if I think the Trump voters are that unreachable through reasoning, I'm bothering to write this.  It's a valid question.  Besides just processing my own anger, for me it's also a way to connect with like-minded folks, to reassure them that there still are sane people in the world.  To quote British philosopher Edmund Burke, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Or as Benjamin Franklin put it, more succinctly and more pointedly: "We must all hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately."

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One of the missing

I had a discussion with a friend of mine a few days ago about one of the most frustrating things -- especially for those of us plagued with insatiable curiosity -- which is when we have plenty of reliable information about a situation, but not enough to figure out what actually happened.  As skeptics, we have to be willing sometimes to say "We don't know, and may never know" -- but that doesn't make it a pleasant way to conclude matters.  Famously, that's the situation we're in with Jack the Ripper.  Despite the number of books out there that have titles like The Ripper Murders SOLVED!, if we're being honest, there just isn't enough hard evidence to reach a definitive answer.  I've dealt with several less-known (but still fascinating) examples here at Skeptophilia -- the downright bizarre Devonshire footprints, the unsolved mystery of Kaspar Hauser, and the strange disappearance of Frederick Valentich are three that come to mind immediately.

In each case, we know for certain that the events took place; i.e., they're not hoaxes or tall tales.  But despite in-depth inquiries by skeptical investigators, in the end we're still left with highly unsatisfying question marks.

Another example of this frustrating phenomenon revolves around the American writer Ambrose Bierce, most famous for his war stories "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "A Horseman in the Sky," and "One of the Missing."  He was also a prolific writer of horror fiction; his short stories "Haita the Shepherd" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" were profound influences on H. P. Lovecraft -- places like Lake Hali and Carcosa, and gods like Hastur, appear in the Cthulhu Mythos stories over and over, and a lot of people don't know that they originally came from Bierce rather than from Lovecraft.

Bierce was born in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, the tenth of thirteen children.  He grew up with a deep love of books, and intended a career as a journalist, but the Civil War intervened.  He was a staunch abolitionist and enlisted on the Union side, fought at the Battle of Philippi and the Battle of Shiloh, and nearly died of injuries received at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.  His experiences during the war shaped not only his writing but his outlook.  Bierce was afterward deeply suspicious about the motives of his fellow humans, trusting very few people (and no one completely).

Ambrose Bierce in 1866 [Image is in the Public Domain]

His later life also shows a profound restlessness.  He spent time in San Francisco, Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, London, and Washington, D.C., never content to stay in one place for very long.  And these personality traits -- distrust of others, and a fundamentally restive nature -- both play into the most fascinating thing about Bierce, which is his mysterious disappearance.

In October of 1913 he left Washington to take a tour of Civil War battlefields.  He's documented as having passed through Louisiana and Texas, and crossed into Mexico at El Paso.  Mexico was at that point in the middle of a revolution; earlier that year President Francisco Madero and Vice President José Maria Pino Suárez had both been deposed and assassinated, and the country was an unsafe place by anyone's standards.  This didn't dissuade Bierce.  In his final letter, posted in December 1913 from the city of Chihuahua to his friend Blanche Partington, he said, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination...  Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life.  It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.  To be a gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!"

He was never heard from again.

United States consular officials investigated the matter.  After all, the disappearance of an American citizen, and a prominent one at that, was serious business, even if he'd gone to Mexico of his own free will.  Members of Pancho Villa's senior staff claimed that Bierce had been in Chihuahua, but had left the city voluntarily and no one knew where he was.  Oral tradition in Coahuila is that he was executed by firing squad.  As for his friend, Blanche Partington, her belief was that Bierce had staged the whole thing, doubled back through Arizona, and finally committed suicide somewhere near the Grand Canyon.  No reliable reports of him -- alive or dead -- exist after December of 1913; no further trace of him was ever found.

His disappearance has been the subject of much speculation, as well as a number of works of fiction, something that no doubt would have pleased Bierce no end.  (A few of them worked on the premise that Hastur and the rest of the gang were real, and didn't like the fact that Bierce had given away their existence, so they whisked him out of the desert to Carcosa so he couldn't reveal any more of their secrets.)  Ironic that in the end, Bierce himself -- perhaps intentionally -- became one of the missing.

And as frustrating as it is, that's where we have to leave Bierce's story.  He very likely died somewhere in the southwestern United States or northern Mexico in late 1913 or early 1914, but how and why we probably never will know.  Nor can we be certain of whether he was a victim of the Mexican Revolution, took his own life (as Blanche Partington believed), or died of thirst and starvation out alone in the desert.  As with the examples I began with, we're left with a mystery -- and in the absence of further evidence, as good skeptics that's where we must conclude matters.

But given his secrecy and distrust of his fellow humans, perhaps that's what Bierce would have wanted anyhow.

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Silence is golden

Yesterday over at The Anomalist, a website I frequent that acts as a sort of clearinghouse for News of the Weird, I ran into a link to a post at the Jamza Online Forum by Paul Dale Roberts, whose title apparently is "Esoteric Detective" at Sacramento Paranormal Investigations.  Which, I have to admit, is pretty badass-sounding, and puts me in mind of Carl Kolchak running around chasing werewolves and vampires and zombies and succubi, not to mention special offers like Spanish Moss Monsters where you can actually see the zipper running up the front of the Monster Suit.

It's a job I'd like to have, although living as I do in the middle of abso-freakin-lutely nowhere, opportunities for esoteric detection have been pretty slim.  I've only done one in-person esoteric investigation, which fortunately happened to focus on a place not far from where I live, and once visited a haunted hotel in Arkansas.  My experience both times was that absolutely nothing happened other than in the first case I met a stoned guy who was extremely impressed that I was a paranormal investigator even though it was technically the only actual paranormal investigation I'd ever done, and in the second I saw some old ladies in period dress and had to be reassured by the other members of my party that (1) they saw them, too, and (2) the old ladies were tour guides.

So my experience as an esoteric investigator is kind of slim, but I'll just put it out there that if an opportunity arises, I'm all in. 

Anyhow, what Paul Dale Roberts tells us about is a place that sounds well worth investigating.  It's nicknamed "the Zone of Silence," and is located about four hundred miles from El Paso, Texas, near the point where the borders of the Mexican states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, and Durango meet.  From the sound of it, the Zone of Silence is a little like the Mexican version of the Bermuda Triangle.  Within this area, "radio and TV signals... are gobbled up," "strange lights or fireballs (maneuver) at night, changing colors, hanging motionless and then taking off at great speed," and there are falls of "small metallic balls... known locally as guíjolas," which are "collected by locals and visitors alike, and treated with great reverence."

My thought on this last part is that if you are the sort of person who might be tempted to treat a small metallic ball with great reverence, you probably should not be allowed to wander about in the desert unaccompanied.

One difference between this place and the Bermuda Triangle is that being dry land (extremely dry, in this case), the Zone of Silence can also host honest-to-Fox-Mulder Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  There have been several reports of meetings with "tall blond individuals," who spoke flawless Spanish "with a musical ring."  In one case, they were wearing yellow raincoats, and helped some lost travelers whose car was stuck in the mud during one of the area's infrequent, but torrential, downpours.  This is encouraging; most of the other aliens I've heard of seem more interested in evil pastimes, such as infiltrating world governments, dissecting livestock, and placing computer chips in the heads of abducted earthlings, after the obligatory horrifying medical exam on board the spacecraft, about which we will say no more out of respect for the more sensitive members of the studio audience.  Myself, I find reports of helpful aliens distinctly encouraging, and hope you won't think me self-serving if I just mention briefly that if there are any like-minded aliens visiting upstate New York soon, I could sure use a hand weeding my vegetable garden.

I found this image of a "Nordic Alien" on a website that cautions you against getting into a spaceship piloted by tall blond extraterrestrials, which honestly seems like good advice, although it must be said that this one is kind of hot-looking.  It also says that The Matrix was a coded message warning us about the dangers of being harvested by aliens. The good news is that if you are approached, all you have to do is say, "I decline your offer to a contract," and they'll have no choice but to retreat in disarray.

Of course, my more scientific readers will be asking themselves why, exactly, is this spot a "zone of silence?"  Answers vary, as you might expect.  One explanation I've seen proffered is the presence of uranium ore in nearby mountains (because diffuse deposits of radioactive ores clearly attract aliens, cause small metal balls to fall from the sky, and interfere with radio signals).  Another is that this spot represents a "concentration of earth energies."  Whatever the fuck that means.  It is also claimed that there is an "astronomical observatory thousands of years old... a Mexican Stonehenge" in the area.  Well, that's enough for me!  Uranium ore + "concentration of earth energies" + anything that can be compared to Stonehenge = some serious shit!  The Upstate New York Esoteric Detective is on it!  Mobilize the troops!

Well, not really.  Sadly, I'm not able to mobilize in this direction at the present time.  The disappointing fact is that given the current state of affairs in northern Mexico, it's not all that appealing to go down and visit the place.  I mean, tall sexy blond aliens with yellow rain slickers are one thing; dodging bullets from members of mutually hostile drug cartels is quite another.  I think the field work will have to wait until things calm down a little.

Until then, however, keep your eyes open for any other esoteric phenomena that may pop up -- I'm ready to investigate, especially if it's close enough to where I live that I can be back by nap time.  Should such opportunities come to my attention, I'll post further research notes here.  You'll be the first to know.

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The aliens of Mexico

Because my reputation has apparently preceded me, I have now been sent a link five times to a news story about an alleged governmental meeting in Mexico which one-upped the recent U. S. congressional hearing on UAPs/UFOs by bringing out some bodies of mummified aliens.

The story (and the pictures) are now making the rounds of social media, but were supposedly part of a press release from Mexican governmental officials.  So without further ado, here's one of the aliens:

You can't see in this photo, but the alien bodies have three fingers on each hand and foot, and have necks "elongated along the back."  They are said to come from the town of Nazca, Peru, which immediately gave all the Ancient Aliens crowd multiple orgasms because this is also the site of the famous "Nazca Lines," designs drawn on the ground that (when viewed from the air) can be seen to be shaped like monkeys and birds and whatnot.  Alien visitation aficionados claim that the Nazca Lines are an ancient spaceship landing site, although I have no idea why the fuck aliens would build a landing strip shaped like a monkey.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Diego Delso, Líneas de Nazca, Nazca, Perú, 2015-07-29, DD 49, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Needless to say, I'm a little dubious, and my doubt spiked even higher when I read that one of the scientists involved, one Jaime Maussan, was "able to draw DNA data from radiocarbon dating."  This is patently ridiculous, given that DNA extraction/analysis and radiocarbon dating are two completely different techniques.  So Maussan's statement makes about as much sense as my saying "I'm going to bake a chocolate cake using a circular saw."

Maussan also said that his analysis showed that "thirty percent of the specimens' DNA is unknown" and the remains "had implants made of rare metals like osmium."

The problem is (well, amongst the many problems is) the fact that Maussan has pulled this kind of shit before.  Back in 2015 he went public with other Peruvian mummies, which upon (legitimate) analysis turned out to be the remains of ordinary human children.  Some of them looked a little odd because they had undergone skull elongation rituals -- something not uncommon from early Peruvian cultures -- but their DNA checked out as one hundred percent Homo sapiens.  Add to this the fact that Maussan has repeatedly teamed up with noted New Age wingnut Konstantin Korotkov, who claims to have invented a camera that can photograph the soul and specializes in "measuring the human aura," and we have yet another example of someone who has just about exhausted any credibility he ever had.

So while the people weighing in on TikTok and Reddit seem to be awestruck by the Alien Mummies, reputable scientists are less impressed.  There's no evidence these are anything but the remains of human infants, and there are credible allegations that some of them have been deliberately (and recently) altered to make them look more non-human.

I..e., it's a fraud.

If so, the whole thing really pisses me off, because it's hard enough making good determinations based on slim evidence without some yahoos faking an artifact (not to mention desecrating human burials from indigenous cultures) to get their fifteen minutes of fame.  Regarding the whole alien intelligence question, I've generally adopted a wait-and-see policy, but with this kind of bullshit it's really hard not to chuck the whole thing.  We skeptics have sometimes been accused of being such habitual scoffers that we wouldn't believe evidence if we had it right in front of our noses, and there might be a grain of truth there.

But if you really want to fix that, stop allowing the phonies, frauds, and cranks to dominate the discussion.  And that includes shows on the This Hasn't Actually Been History For Two Decades Channel.

Anyhow, I'm thinking the "alien bodies" will turn out to be just the latest in a very long line of evidence for little more than human gullibility and the capacity for deception, including self-deception.  A pity, really.  At this point, if aliens actually do arrive, I'm so fed up with how things are going down here that I'll probably ask if I can join the crew.

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The mystery plague

Ever heard of cocoliztli?

In one way, it's shocking if you haven't, and in another, hardly surprising at all, because the vast majority of its victims were the indigenous people of Mexico and Central America, and history has a way of ignoring what happened to brown-skinned people.  Cocoliztli is the Nahuatl name for a contagious, usually fatal disease that struck Mesoamerica repeatedly, with the worst recorded outbreaks in the sixteenth century, killing an estimated ten million people.  This puts it in fifth place for the worst pandemics known, after the Black Death (estimated one hundred million casualties), Justinian's plague (fifty million), HIV/AIDS (forty million), and the Spanish flu (thirty million).  [Nota bene: if we're adding up total death toll, one of the worst is smallpox, but as that was endemic and widespread, I'm not counting that as a true pandemic.  In eighteenth-century Europe, for example, it's estimated that four hundred thousand people died of smallpox per year; and its introduction into the Americas decimated Native populations.  It's likely we'll never know for sure how big the death toll was, but it was huge.]

The symptoms of cocoliztli were awful.  Severe headache, high fever, vertigo, jaundice, and abdominal cramps.  The worst was the hemorrhaging -- victims bled from every orifice including the tear ducts.  Most of the victims died, usually between four and seven days after onset.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

There are two curious things about cocoliztli.  The first is that there hasn't been a confirmed case of it since 1813.

So where has it gone?  Ordinarily, infectious diseases occur at low rates until a confluence of events triggers a more widespread outbreak.  Consider, for example, the Black Death.  Bubonic plague (caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis) has been present in humans for millennia, but a perfect storm occurred in the mid-fourteenth century that caused the most devastating pandemic in history.  First, it was the beginning of the Little Ice Age, and the lower temperatures drove rats (and the fleas they carried) indoors, and into contact with humans.  Second, trade throughout Europe, and with Asia (via the Silk Road), had really just started to gear up, and rats are notorious for stowing away on ships.  And third, the population had risen -- and larger, more crowded cities facilitate disease spread.

Cocoliztli, though, hit Mesoamerica hard, and seemingly out of nowhere.  Repeated outbreaks in 1545, 1576, 1736, and 1813 killed millions, but in between, we don't know where it went -- or why after 1813 it apparently vanished completely.

The second odd thing is that we still don't know what caused it.

The bones of presumed victims have offered up only debatable information.  Back in 2018, Johannes Krause, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, found DNA in bones from victims of the 1545 outbreak that seems to come from a Salmonella enterica strain called Paratyphi C, but that doesn't mean that's what killed them -- and one epidemiologist has pointed out that typhoid fever, which is caused by S. enterica, doesn't have the same symptoms as cocoliztli.  Others suggest that its symptoms are more consistent with a viral hemorrhagic fever like Ebola, Lassa, and Marburg, but there are no viruses known that are endemic to the Americas and cause symptoms like that.

A rather sobering possibility is that the pathogen, whatever it is, resides in an animal vector -- that is, it's a zöonotic disease, one that exists in an animal population and is reintroduced to humans periodically upon contact.  If so, it's unknown what that vector might be -- but the jungles of Central America are a big place, and there are lots of animals there in which a pathogen might hide.

Whatever causes it, and wherever it went, it's to be hoped it's gone for good.  This would put it in the same class as the mysterious European sweating sickness, that caused repeated outbreaks in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and then vanished, apparently permanently.  It, like cocoliztli, was highly infectious -- but the pathogen remains unidentified.

Cocoliztli left its mark on history.  The population of Mexico collapsed in the sixteenth century, largely due to the outbreaks, dropping from an estimated twenty-two million in 1500 to two million a hundred years later.  This undoubtedly contributed to the Spanish takeover -- something that reverberates to the present day.

It's also an enduring mystery.  How such a virulent disease could strike so hard, decimating an entire region, and then vanish utterly is bizarre.  But it does highlight how important epidemiological research is -- helping us to understand how pathogens cause disease, and how they jump from one host to the other.  Giving us, it is to be hoped, the tools for stopping the next pandemic before it happens.

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New old things

A quick assessment might lead you to think that, at least with stuff down here on Earth, we've discovered about all there is to discover.

We can go pretty much anywhere now, from the tops of the tallest mountains to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.  We've explored all of the continents; even remote places like Antarctica, Siberia, the Yukon, the Amazonian rain forest, and Tibet have been the subject of intensive study.

It's easy for most of us, with our relatively insular lives, to underestimate the size of the planet.  Even those who -- like myself -- have been lucky enough to travel extensively can lose sight of how inaccessible some places are.  Despite technology now allowing us to visit (and live, if we want) pretty much anywhere, there are still huge areas of trackless wilderness out there.

Meaning that huge areas have minimally-studied plants, animals, geological history, paleontology, and -- apposite to today's topic -- archaeology.  So if you're going into science, fret not; it will be a long time before we run out of stuff to explore.

The topic of new discoveries occurred to me when I was reading a couple of articles sent to me by my friend, the outstanding writer Gil Miller, having to do with recent bits of human history that have been uncovered (literally) by researchers.  The first was about the discovery of a previously-unknown two-millennia-old Buddhist temple at a site in Pakistan near the town of Barikot thought to have been completely explored.

The temple, which has been tentatively dated to the second century B.C.E., contains a stupa -- a hemispherical temple, often ornately-carved, used for meditation in the Buddhist tradition -- as well as the bases of several columns, and the foundations of vestibule rooms and a public courtyard.  It's thought to have been constructed during the reign of Menander I, who was Greek by origin, but a Buddhist convert who spent most of his life in what is now India and Pakistan, and who was said to have "conquered more regions than Alexander the Great."  In an all-too-common pattern, the conquests didn't last long after Menander's death; his son, Strato I, and (possible) grandson, Menander II, were plagued by attacks from the Maues, a Scythian tribe that eventually conquered most of what had been Menander I's kingdom.  

Unfortunately, archaeological dig sites often get destroyed by plunderers who have figured out that tombs frequently contain valuables, and this site is no exception.  Apparently there are trenches all over the place, dug by robbers, who tore through and destroyed "worthless" artifacts like walls and floors, but -- fortunately -- the area around the temple was relatively unscathed.

The second study is from halfway around the world, in the Yucatán region of Mexico, where a unique bit of research gave us a lens into the peak of Mayan civilization (on the order of eight hundred years ago).  It's been known that cacao was a sacred plant to the Mayans; they're the ones who started humans consuming chocolate, and we pretty much haven't stopped since.  Cacao is a remarkably tricky plant to grow.  It needs a particular combination of soil chemistry, air humidity, calm, and shade in order to flourish.  The Mayans became experts at finding places to grow cacao -- so the researchers reasoned that where you find abundant wild cacao plants, it might be a good indicator that there were Mayan ruins nearby.

However, cacao plants aren't immortal; the plants cultivated by the Mayans eight centuries ago are long gone.  But researchers from Brigham Young University realized that there might be persistent biomarkers -- like the chemicals theobromine and caffeine -- that might indicate where cacao had been grown historically.

So they started sifting through soil samples.

What they found was that the biomarkers were predominantly found near limestone sinkholes -- nine of the eleven sinkholes tested showed measurable theobromine and caffeine in the soil nearby.  They began investigating the sinkholes themselves, rappelling down the walls to the bottom, and found jade and ceramic artifacts, including some tiny ceramics shaped to look like miniature cacao pods.

"We looked for theobromine for several years and found cacao in some places we didn’t expect," said Richard Terry, the senior author of the paper.  "We were also amazed to see the ceremonial artifacts.  My students rappelled into one of these sinkholes and said,  ‘Wow!  There is a structure in here!’  It was a staircase that filled one-third of the sinkhole with stone...  Now we have these links between religious structures and the religious crops grown in these sinkhole.  Knowing that the cacao beans were used as currency, it means the sinkholes were a place where the money could be grown and controlled.  This new understanding creates a rich historical narrative of a highly charged Maya landscape with economic, political and spiritual value."

The third paper was about a dig site in Italy -- surely a thoroughly-studied place if ever there was one -- where researchers uncovered a trove of helmets and other relics from near the Acropolis of Elea-Velia, in the Cilento region.  Elea-Velia was settled by Greeks in the sixth century B.C.E., and became a major trading center between the resident Greeks, the Etruscans to the north, and the rising Roman republic in the south.  The helmets are thought date from the late sixth century, and to have been part of a ritual of thanks for the victory the Greeks and their Etruscan allies had over the Carthaginians in the Battle of Alalia, off the coast of Corsica.

One of the newly-discovered helmets from Elea-Velia

Also uncovered were a tile floor, various pieces of painted ceramics, and the remains of weapons.

Whenever I read about stuff like this, it always makes me wonder what other amazing finds are waiting to be discovered.  If a trove like the one at Elea-Velia, ritual sites such as the one in the Yucatán, and the Buddhist temple in Pakistan can escape notice for the hundreds of years we've been digging up ancient relics, there has got to be a ton more out there to find.

So we need to keep looking.  Every time we find something like this, it enriches our knowledge of our own past.  It reminds me of the wonderful quote by Carl Sagan -- he was referring to astronomy, but it could equally well be applied to any science -- "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week combines cutting-edge astrophysics and cosmology with razor-sharp social commentary, challenging our knowledge of science and the edifice of scientific research itself: Chanda Prescod-Weinsten's The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.

Prescod-Weinsten is a groundbreaker; she's a theoretical cosmologist, and the first Black woman to achieve a tenure-track position in the field (at the University of New Hampshire).  Her book -- indeed, her whole career -- is born from a deep love of the mysteries of the night sky, but along the way she has had to get past roadblocks that were set in front of her based only on her gender and race.  The Disordered Cosmos is both a tribute to the science she loves and a challenge to the establishment to do better -- to face head on the centuries-long horrible waste of talent and energy of anyone not a straight White male.

It's a powerful book, and should be on the to-read list for anyone interested in astronomy or the human side of science, or (hopefully) both.  And watch for Prescod-Weinsten's name in the science news.  Her powerful voice is one we'll be hearing a lot more from.

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