In the ether

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia emailed me a couple of days ago.

"I think I've figured out why you're such a doubter," he said.  "From my extensive research, it's because your 'etheric DNA' hasn't been activated.  I strongly recommend you look into this immediately so that you can ascend to the next astral plane, where you belong."

He then signed off, but added in a p.s., "(... take the bait, little mouse... take the bait...)".

Well, naturally, I couldn't let something like this just sit there.  So I did a search for etheric DNA, and spent the next forty-five minutes reading.  Unfortunately, I was mostly done with a glass of scotch at the time, and I got the worst case of the giggles I've had in years.  I would read a line from one of the articles to my dog, who was sitting on the floor next to my desk watching me intently, and then I'd erupt into laughter.  Rosie was clearly amused as well, given the fact that each time I read her a line, she wagged her tail in a cheerful fashion.

Or maybe she was just glad I was finally paying some long-overdue attention to the health of my eternal celestial spirit.  I dunno.

Anyhow, I thought it best to put the topic aside until I was thinking more clearly.  And I'm not sure whether it's good or bad news that the "etheric DNA" stuff doesn't make any better sense when you're stone-cold sober.  So naturally, I had to share some of it with you here, because I'm just a generous, open-handed sort of guy.

Up to you if you get yourself a glass of scotch first.

The first article I found was from an online open-access (surprise!) journal called MedCrave.  MedCrave's tagline is "Step into the World of Research," which right away sets my teeth on edge because I am absolutely sick unto death of people using the word "research" that way, e.g. reading three articles from various websites and saying, "Well, I did my research."  No, you fucking well did not do any research; you found three articles that happened to agree with what you already believed.  You do not work in a lab, you did not publish anything in a peer-reviewed journal, you did not spend years studying the subject and becoming an expert.  Hell, I spent over three decades teaching biology, and I am not an expert; I'm very much a generalist and always will be.

So I'm not a researcher, either.  The difference is, I'm not claiming to be.  

But at least I know how to recognize legitimate research in an actual scientific journal.  And MedCrave ain't it.

Anyhow, the article is by "Spiritual Scientist" Linda Gadbois, and is called "DNA -- The Phantom Effect, Quantum Hologram, and the Etheric Body," which won out over the next most sensible title she could come up with, which was "Woogie Woogie Woogie Pfthththbtbtbtbtb."  There's no way I can give you a flavor of just how wacky this article is from a mere summary, so here's an actual excerpt:

DNA is actually composed of a liquid crystalline substance that acts as a form of antenna, receiver, and transmitter of holographic information.  It’s constantly in the process of taking in information from its environment and the ether as signs, archetypes, and imagery and translating it into holograms.  It operates predominately out of radionics where whatever frequency its tuned to, is acts as a receiver for various forms of information within that same frequency that comes in as an acoustic wave that serves to form an electromagnetic field (EMF) as a holographic shape that’s composed initially of subtle energy, which provides the blueprint or spatial mapping for constructing an exact replica as its material equivalent.  Information inherent in the Ether (Akasha) always comes as a “pairing” or “wave coupling” (like the double helix) that contains both an acoustic sound and optical (visual) image as the geometric patterning inherent in the vibratory frequency.

Right!  Of course!  What?

My other favorite part was when she explained (not sure if that's the right word) her concept of the "phantom effect" thusly:

The two waves of information form an interference pattern that together produce a 3-D holographic image as the subtle template for constructing the material body through a growth and development process.  This holographic image as an invisible energy field organizes and animates matter into what’s called the “phantom effect”.  This phantom is an invisible 3-D shape as a field formed out of information as a dynamic series of interrelated planes or parallel interlaced and correlating dimensions that operate without any cross-talk to form a chain-of-association as phase conjugation adaptive resonance.

"Dimensions" of "phase conjugation adaptive resonance?"  All we need is "entangled quantum frequencies" in there somewhere and we'll have collected the whole set of quasi-scientific woo-woo buzzwords.

And please don't think I've selected these two passages because they were unusually abstruse.  It all sounds like this.  And it goes on for pages.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christoph Bock, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, DNA methylation, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The other article I looked at was from Positive Health Online, an open-access (surprise again!) journal about "integrative health."  This one, by "healer and guide" Carole Easton, is called "DNA Activation -- Etheric Surgery Using an Activated Crystal Wand."  It begins with the sentence, "DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid," which is also the last correct statement in the article, because it immediately after that launches into telling us how our DNA only seems to have two strands; it actually has twenty-two other "shadow strands" that don't exist until you activate them:

22-strand DNA activation... is done through etheric surgery using an activated crystal wand.  It involves 12 receptor sites to the DNA, known as codons, and they are accessed through the etheric spine and illuminated with light (I have actually seen this light whilst I was administering the wand to this area).  This activates 22 of the 24 strands.

What does all of this do for you?  Well, she's a little vague on that point:

Our DNA contains the master plan, or blueprint, for who we are, our life purpose and our Divine Potential – who we are as a Divine Being.  Holding the encoded information relative to both our physical and spiritual lineage, it is unique and very personal.  It determines our physical form, hereditary maladies, mental proclivities, emotional behavioural patterns, spiritual gifts and more.  It is God-given, holy and sacred and defines our uniqueness.  It is who we are!  Locked within our DNA are emotional codes that are handed down from our ancestors from generation to generation.  These emotional codes are then triggered through our belief systems and through life altering events.

Given the fact that my ancestors seem to have been a random assortment of rogues, miscreants, ne'er-do-wells, and petty criminals, and the majority of the ones I knew personally were also weird as fuck, I'm not sure I want "emotional codes" handed down from generation to generation.  My inclination is to tiptoe away and let my twenty-two extra DNA stands continue to sleep quietly.

Oh, but Carole Easton tells us this is an ancient mystical tradition that traces its origins all the way back to King Solomon!  (Because the ancient Israelites were clearly experts on genetics.)  So how can I turn my back on such a gift?

Um.  Yeah.  She can just stay right the hell away from my etheric spine with her activated crystal wand.  I doubt I'd be able to go through her ritual without laughing, and I'm sure that'd destroy all the entangled quantum dimension phase resonance oscillations or whatever the fuck is supposed to be happening, so it wouldn't work for me in any case.

So there you have it.  Etheric DNA.  As far as the loyal reader who got me started on this, I hope you're happy.  At least my dog is.  She's currently staring at me with a hopeful look on her face.  I think she wants me to do a Tarot reading for her, or something.  

Or maybe her etheric stomach just wants breakfast.

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My stars

The danger of posting something and saying, "Wow, how ridiculous is this claim?" is that my loyal readers take that as some kind of challenge, and I immediately get inundated with responses to the effect of, "You think that's weird, wait till you see this."

Now, don't misunderstand me; I love getting suggestions from my readers.  But it's a little disheartening to find out that however low my opinion of the collective intelligence of humanity gets, I still haven't struck the bottom.

Yesterday's post, about mysterious antennas appearing on public lands in Utah and people concluding (amongst other things) that they're being used by evil masterminds to control the weather, prompted a reader to respond, "Maybe all those antennas are just a way of jump-starting your DNA," along with a link to a site called "Starseed DNA Activation" that makes the weather modification people sound like Nobel laureates.

The "Starseed" thing sounded familiar to me, and after a little searching of the archives I found that I had indeed written something about this idea way back in 2011.  A Starseed, it turns out, is a person who thinks they're from another star system.  Some people think it's just their soul that's alien; others think they're literal, physical alien/human hybrids.  But the website the reader sent me yesterday goes way beyond that.

First, we learn how to tell if we're Starseeds, which of course I was curious to find out.  Here are the questions, along with my answers:

1. Do you feel disconnected from the people around you?  Given the fact that I raise social awkwardness to the level of performance art, that'd be a yes for me.
2. Does the general pattern of behavior in society not resonate with its essence?  I don't know if that one applies to me, because frankly, I can't figure out what the fuck the question even means.
3. Do the complexities of society, such as economics, cultural norms, conventional education, and religion seem foreign to you?  I think anyone who knows me would give me a thumbs-up on that one.
4. Do you have problems with authority figures?  That's another clear yes.  I've always felt like respect had to be earned, which is why my stint in Catholic school was short and unpleasant for all involved.
5. Do you have a deep interest in unusual subjects?  Cf. this entire damn blog.
6. Are you highly creative?  Given that I'm a novelist, musician, and sculptor...
7. Are you empathetic?  Definite yes on that one.
8. Do you understand that you had past lives not on this Earth?  Okay, here we're on shakier ground.  Hell, I thought that's what this test was intended to find out.  Or maybe I'm not understanding.
9. Do you have intense psychic and paranormal experiences?  Big nope on that one.
10. Do you have "crystalline DNA symptoms" -- ear popping, lucid dreaming, major chakras tingling, lightness in limbs?  Well, my ears pop sometimes, but probably no more than ordinary.  I've never lucid dreamed.  My limbs feel pretty ordinary, and I'm not sure I'd recognize a "tingling chakra" if it walked up and bit me on the ass.

So that's six "yes," three "no," and one "what the hell does that even mean?"  So clearly I'm a Starseed.  Cool beans.

Then we find out there are three different brands of Starseeds: "Sirian Starseeds" (characteristics: highly evolved spiritually, empathetic, spiritual leaders, enjoy the ocean), "Orion Starseeds" (characteristics: thorny relationships, sensitive, introverted, like to know stuff), and "Andromedan Starseeds" (characteristics: like to travel, flighty, late all the time, can get defensive).  What's funniest about this is the "Sirians" are supposedly from the system around the star Sirius (which is at least theoretically possible), while the "Orions" are from the whole constellation of Orion (even though it's made up of a bunch of separate stars all at huge distances from each other), and the "Andromedans" are from the entire fucking galaxy of Andromeda.  How you could be from a whole galaxy is never explained.  Maybe you have to be "highly evolved" to understand.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Salma2789, Spirit man, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Then we learn about evil beings called "organic portals" and "Archons" who are parasitic on the Starseeds and try to suck away their energy.  This made me think of the character of Colin Robinson, the "energy vampire" on the show What We Do In the Shadows, and that mental image made me take this website even less seriously.

Then we get into the "jump-starting your DNA" part.  I would try to paraphrase, but this whole section was so weird I just know you would think I'm making it up, so instead here is a direct quote on the topic:

In the eyes of the microscope, scientists discovered that there is a part of the DNA that is not visible.  Barely 3% is visible and is possible to be explored through science.  But 97% scientists classify it as junk or random material, which is the part of the non-visible DNA.  However, from the energetic eyes we perceive what this invisible part of DNA is and how to work it.

In this invisible DNA there is a lot of information that is part of our unconscious, of our ancestral memory and that has all the information of our experiences, our lives, our cycles, our egos, the fractals that are in other dimensions and everything we can experience as beings with soul.

And supposedly if you "open your heart and let the light frequencies in," you can awaken this 97% of your DNA that scientists apparently discovered by looking through a microscope, seeing nothing, and saying, "Hey, get a load of this!  I'm looking at invisible DNA, here!"

At this point, my brain went on strike and told me if I wanted to pursue this topic any further I was on my own and could fucking well go on without it.  So I decided to stop there.  But what I read was enough to cause me to bow down in awe to my loyal reader's bold claim that yes, there is something loonier than claiming random antennas in Utah are part of a 5G mind-control device.

But now that I've confirmed I'm a Starseed, I need to give some thought to what kind I am.  I'm thinking "Orion."  I definitely am not "Andromedan" because I hate being late, and the "Sirians" seem a little full of themselves, frankly.  I'm a little concerned about the "thorny relationships" part, but thus far Carol still puts up with me, so I guess I'm okay for the time being.

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Cup of woo

I was just thinking yesterday that it'd been a long time since I'd seen a good example of the kind of loony New Age woo-woo I seemed to run into on a daily basis when I first started Skeptophilia twelve years ago.  "Maybe," I thought, "people have moved beyond all that nonsense into a more scientific, skeptical, rational way of looking at the world."

Ha ha ha.

By stating that aloud, I must have tapped into some kind of Quantum Vibration Frequency Resonance Field of Actualization, because while idly perusing TikTok not an hour later, I stumbled upon a post from a guy who is like what would happen if you gave Simon Pegg a hit of acid and then told him to do his best impression of Deepak Chopra.

His name is Matt Cooke, and he calls himself a "manifestation coach."  Lest you think I'm exaggerating in my description, here's a transcript of the post in question:

If you understand the power of the quantum field, you hold in your hands the secret of manifestation.  I'm going to simplify what the quantum field means, and how you can use it as a tool to manifest anything in your life.  So quite simply, you'll hear people say either the quantum field or the unified field.  What that basically is is an invisible field of energy carrying information and frequency that is invisible to our five senses but is all around us in space that we can't see.

People say that, do they?  Not scientists, presumably, just "people."  Do go on.

What people don't realize, though, is that we are also an extension of that field, because we're just energy.  The human body is just a dense form of energy moving at a very slow rate of vibration.  We in fact vibrate in and out of the quantum field eight times every second.

I've been in this business long enough that as soon as he said "eight times every second," I immediately knew where he'd gotten that number from, and it wasn't from a Quantum-Field-O-Meter, or anything.  He's almost certainly referring to a woo favorite, the Schumann resonances, which somehow got wrapped up in mystical goofiness despite the fact that it's actually a very real electromagnetic phenomenon.  It's a resonance between the Earth's surface and the conductive layer of the atmosphere (the ionosphere), which has resulted in a standing wave -- an electromagnetic field pulse that has a fundamental frequency of 7.83 Hertz (i.e. just shy of eight times per second).  It's been nicknamed "the Earth's heartbeat," which is an unfortunate choice of phrase (second only to physicist Leon Lederman's choice of "the God particle" as his nickname for the Higgs boson), because it encourages woo-ish types to see the Schumann resonances as being evidence of a global consciousness or whatnot, when in reality, as a phenomenon it's about as conscious as a pendulum swinging on a string.

But back to Cooke:

The way the field works is that it is outside of three-dimensional reality.  It's something called the fifth dimension.

Presumably not related to the people who sang "This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius," although you can see how one might be confused on this point.

The fifth dimension quite simply is beyond time.  Time is infinite.  Meaning that if time's infinite, there are endless infinite opportunities that exist right now.  So anything you desire is there electromagnetically.

Right!  Sure!  What?

This is why people never change.  This is why people continue to attract more of the same stuff into their lives.  How we think and how we feel is how attraction works.  A thought is an intention, a feeling is an emotion.  So if right now you are in lack and hating life, subconsciously you are creating those same thoughts and you're feeling the same way.  You're vibrating in and out eight times a second, the field doesn't respond to what you want, it responds to who you're being.  This is why you hear people say, if you want to manifest you need to become it right now.  If you are seeking something right now in your life, if you change how you think and how you feel, you will broadcast a new electromagnetic signature into the quantum field.  Right?  You'll be drawing back to you a new state of being.  Basically, you'll be reprogramming your vibration.  If you change your vibration, you change your personality, and it's your personality, who you are, that creates your outside world.  Your inside world creates your outside world, and that is how the quantum field works.

Allow me to direct your attention to the Wikipedia article on quantum field theory, wherein you will quickly find that this is not, in fact, how the quantum field works.

Look, it seems like this guy's heart is in the right place, and that he honestly wants to help people.  And I certainly like his take on how to make the world a better place more than I do the evangelical Christians' approach, which is to alternate between praising the God of Unconditional Love and smiting the absolute shit out of anyone who is not also an evangelical Christian. 

What bothers me about people like this is that they're trying to gain credence for their claims by adding a scientific, physics-based spin on them, and end up using technical terms in such a bizarre way that large numbers of people now have no idea whatsoever what those terms actually mean.  And I do mean large numbers; Matt Cooke has over 144,000 followers on TikTok.  And he, of course, is small potatoes compared to the champion purveyor of quantum woo, the aforementioned Deepak Chopra, who is so renowned that someone created a Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator that produces pearls of arcane wisdom so similar to the real thing that I defy anyone to tell the difference.  (Here was mine for today: "Infinity differentiates into the expansion of brains through the activation of love.")

So, by all means, Mr. Cooke, keep trying to help people live their best lives.  But leave the quantum field to the quantum physicists.  It doesn't help your case, and to anyone who has ever taken a college physics course, it makes you sound like a snake oil salesman.  Thanks bunches.

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The perimeter of ignorance

In the past week, I watched two things that were interesting in juxtaposition.

One of them came my way because for my holiday gift my wife got me a subscription to Master Class, which has hundreds of online video classes on everything from political science to cooking.  I signed up for and watched a series of lectures by the eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, on the scientific endeavor and how to think effectively about science and how to talk about it to others.

In his class, Dr. Tyson says the following:

The frontier of discovery is a messy place.  You don't know what the next step is, sometimes you don't even know what question to ask.  As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.  It's thrilling and scary at the same time...  The scientific method is whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or into thinking something is not true that is.  That pathway, it's not straight; it's curved, it has off-ramps to nowhere, and you don't know which of the paths in front of you are going to lead to the right place...  The cool thing about it is that nature is the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner.  You can argue all you want, but if nature disagrees with you, you're wrong.  If you care about critical thinking and science literacy, the degree to which you believe something is true should be proportional to the evidence that supports it.  If after all the experiments are done, there is convergence in a result, you have successfully winnowed out the effects of bias on that result.  No one is without bias -- just be ready to get your stuff checked.  And be ready to abandon your cherished thoughts and ideas in the face of conflicting evidence.

The other is the trailer to a video called Gods Among Us that was sent to me by a friend who is evidently trying to cause my brain to explode.  Here are a sampling of quotes (you can watch the trailer yourself if you dare, and want to know more about the context and sources, but I can promise you these were not cherry-picked to make the video sound ridiculous -- they all sound like this):

• There are quite a few extraterrestrials walking around, humanoid ones, so we've got them walking amongst us.  You may just think they look like nice people, or they may feel a bit different to you, but they're there and you see them every day. 
• How is it that these higher-dimensional energies can be brought down, can be downloaded, into our ordinary four-dimensional space-time experience?
• There are thousands, possibility millions, out there leading these double lives.  They will lead us into telepathic abilities, they will lead us into being able to heal ourselves, even to being able to change our bodies.
• The DNA in us can exist as a toroid.  It can be used as a tool to bring higher-dimensional energy into our physical bodies, convert it into electromagnetic fields that can then be used to convert the physiological and biochemical processes in us.
• I was contacted by a being who said he was from the constellation of Orion.
• You want to know what your DNA is?  It's 34% human, 28% tall white Zeta, and 38% Annunaki.  

The people interviewed seemed to fall into three categories: (1) researchers, all of whom seem somehow to have earned Ph.D.s; (2) people who claim to have been contacted by aliens; (3) people who claim to be human/alien hybrids themselves.  The whole thing was accompanied by music that sounds like it was rejected from Music From the Hearts of Space on the basis of being too ethereal.

Okay, I'm scoffing, but there's a serious point to be made here.  A number of claims in Gods Among Us are empirically testable.  I'm not referring to the eyewitness testimony of things like alien contact; as Dr. Tyson also points out, eyewitness testimony may be the highest standard of evidence in the court of law, but it's the lowest form of evidence in science.  "I saw it with my own eyes" is simply not enough in science.  We have far too many ways of getting it wrong to trust one person's word for something.

But there are many other kinds of statement in this video that could be tested.  DNA can become a toroid that funnels energy from outside of us into our bodies and changes our biochemistry?  Fine, demonstrate it in the lab.  There are beings who can communicate with you telepathically?  Set up a situation where they tell you something you couldn't have otherwise known, and have it verified by an independent researcher.  Over half of our DNA is extraterrestrial?  Sequence it and show me that it doesn't overlap, gene for gene, with 99% of the DNA from our nearest primate relatives (and in the 70-80% range with all other mammal species).

Oh, and you can't "be from a constellation."  A constellation is a random assemblage of stars sitting at wildly varying distances from the Earth that only appear to be near each other from our perspective.  Saying you're "from a constellation" makes about as much sense as someone asking you how to find your house, and your answering them, "You'll find it on the horizon."

One example of how a constellation would look from an altered perspective; the Big Dipper as seen after a ninety-degree rotation around the entire group

However, the most insidious problem with the people who make claims like these is their belief that mainstream science rejects their conclusions out of hand not because there's insufficient evidence, but because the claims contradict scientific orthodoxy.  They seem to think that scientists are sitting in this never-changing edifice they've built, and they'll fight you tooth and nail if you try to change one thing about it.  Contrast this to Dr. Tyson's statement about the scientific frontier; in science, you are always on the boundary between what is known and what is unknown.  Scientific orthodoxy changes every time we get a new body of evidence, which is all the time.  In fact, that's how scientific careers are made.  If there really was evidence of all the stuff Gods Among Us claims, the scientists would be trampling each other to death to be the first to publish it in a peer-reviewed journal.

Consider, as only one of many illustrative examples, how the theory of plate tectonics arose.  The belief -- the "scientific orthodoxy," if you will -- was that the Earth was static.  The continents stayed put.  Even if there were periodic events like earthquakes and volcanoes to shake things up, everything was more or less in the same place as it always had been.

Why, in fact, would you think the opposite?  A static Earth seemed common sense.  How could continents move in solid rock?

But in the 50s and 60s, the evidence from a variety of sources -- where exactly volcanoes and earthquakes took place, the position and age of hotspot island chains like Hawaii, the contours of Africa and South America, the fossil record, and (most importantly) the evidence from magnetometer readings near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge -- had piled up to the extent that there was no choice but to overturn our understanding of how geology worked.  In other words, faced with hard, verifiable, repeatable scientific research, the "scientific orthodoxy" had to change drastically.  And far from being suppressed by the scientific establishment, this put rocket fuel into the careers of the first geologists who wrote a paper about it -- Frederick Vine and Drummond Matthews -- and today, they're in every introduction-to-geology textbook written.

So if there was demonstrable evidence that over 50% of our DNA came from a non-terrestrial source?  That's Nobel-Prize-material, right there.

Could the people in Gods Among Us be right?  I suppose so.  But thus far they have not met the minimum threshold of evidence that it would take to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.  I'll end with a quote from another physicist, Richard Feynman, which seems particularly apposite here: "The first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself.  And you are the easiest person to fool."

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Neil deGrasse Tyson has become deservedly famous for his efforts to bring the latest findings of astronomers and astrophysicists to laypeople.  Not only has he given hundreds of public talks on everything from the Big Bang to UFOs, a couple of years ago he launched (and hosted) an updated reboot of Carl Sagan's wildly successful 1980 series Cosmos.

He has also communicated his vision through his writing, and this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is his 2019 Letters From an Astrophysicist.  A public figure like Tyson gets inundated with correspondence, and Tyson's drive to teach and inspire has impelled him to answer many of them personally (however arduous it may seem to those of us who struggle to keep up with a dozen emails!).  In Letters, he has selected 101 of his most intriguing pieces of correspondence, along with his answers to each -- in the process creating a book that is a testimony to his intelligence, his sense of humor, his passion as a scientist, and his commitment to inquiry.

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

You say goodbye, and I say dratzo

Whilst casting about for a topic for today's post, I stumbled upon an article in Medium from June of last year entitled, "Is the Galactic Federation Real?"

Well, I don't want to leave you in suspense as to the answer, so therefore:

Short answer: No.

Long answer: NOOOOOOOOOOO.

But boy, does the author, one Lisa Galarneau, think it is.  Or, more accurately, the alien intelligence she's channeling, one "Artemis Pax," thinks so.

Yes, I know Artemis is the name of a Greek goddess, i.e., a human-created mythological figure from right here on Earth, and "Pax" is Latin, not Alienese, for "peace."  So this is a little like the episode of the abysmal 1960s science fiction show Lost in Space which featured an alien named, I shit you not, "Princess Alpha of the planet Beta."

Anyhow, Galarneau/Pax blather on a bit about the whole idea, featuring paragraphs like the following:

What we would like to assure you is that ascension into a 5D reality will be more glorious than any of you can imagine. You will all, for instance, experience positive changes to your bodies. Your reality will be flooded with divine love, which will make everyone feel amazing. Your galactic neighbors will also be involved in lifting you up even further, and you will see a technological, spiritual, societal and cultural transformation of your civilization like nothing you have ever contemplated or imagined.

Which sounds pretty hopeful, especially given some of the scary stuff that's been going down lately.  I think we could all use a nice infusion of divine love, frankly.

She goes on to explain the whole thing via a bizarre analogy to The Wizard of Oz, which she calls "a metaphor from your popular culture," further proof that she's actually an alien.  But after reading all this, I decided I needed to dig a little deeper.  Was this just one article about one wingnut claiming to be a spiritually-ascended five-dimensional alien, or was this belief more widespread?

And all I can say is: whoa.

I found the site Galactic Federation of Light, which put to rest any thought that Galarneau/Pax was one isolated nut.  Feel free to take a look at it, but please be forewarned that this site is very slow to load, and in fact resulted in my having to restart my browser twice -- perhaps because the Galactic Federation Overlords were aware that I was accessing their site in order to poke fun at them.

Be that as it may, this site explains everything you might want to know about the Galactic Federation, and features a YouTube channel and Twitter feed that has thousands of followers.

To save you the time and effort, and potential damage to your computer's hard drive, I sifted through the site and pulled out a few highlights.  It's largely composed of a series of dated posts, each stating who said it and some including which Galactic Federation Master (s)he was channeling at the time.  Here is a sampling:

Your planet is literally surrounded with craft from all corners of the universe as all beings vie for ringside seats to the greatest show in the galaxy.  Your world has long been highly regarded as one of the finest spiritual schools in the universe and entry into this University has been highly sought after.  Now, you are on the precipice of a school-wide graduation, and you are center stage for the family that has come from all parts of the universe to attend the graduation ceremonies.  (Galactic Federation through Wanderer From The Skies, July 14, 2016)

Seriously?  Humanity is "highly regarded" and the Earth is "one of the finest spiritual schools in the galaxy?"  Judging from recent events, this doesn't say much about the educational system elsewhere in the universe.  As far as the fact that we're graduating, I suppose that's good, although I hope the speeches are better than the ones at most of the graduation ceremonies I've been to.  And if someone decides to read the names of all seven billion graduates, I'm leaving.

The next three or four months are destined to be eye opening, and you will know for sure that the big changes are on the way...  So get ready to button up your safety belts and enjoy the ride. It can be seen as good or bad as you want it to be, so see the goal that is being aimed for and not the manner in which it is to be reached.  All you need know is that it results in all you have been promised.  It will be an unbelievable time with one surprise after another, and celebrations will be taking place. 

I am SaLuSa from Sirius, and tell you that our ships are gathering for the grand announcement that will allow us to land on your Earth by invitation. (SaLuSa / through Mike Quinsey, 20th July 2016)

Well, given that this was posted a year ago last summer, and I don't remember Autumn 2016 as being all that eye-opening, I guess SaLuSa from Sirius might have gotten his wires crossed somehow.

Sirius, home of SaLuSa [image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Since the posts were in chronological order, I decided that like the Brothers of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, I needed to skip a bit, so I scrolled down to more current posts.  From April of 2017 I found the following:

Dratzo!  We return!  The great shift that your world is undergoing was first predicted by the Ancients over 13,000 years ago.  It is part of what they called 'the great galactic year.'  Heaven is to honor this time by establishing a great Light, which will wash away the dark and all its minions.  We were asked, over 20 of your years ago, to come here and be ready at an appointed time to carry out a mass landing of our personnel on your precious shores.  And so we came, and then saw that Heaven's dates for this undertaking were somewhat unclear.  So we adapted, and proceeded to use these moments to get to know you better.  Since our arrival here, we have become part of a sacred movement to prepare Gaia's surface humans for the requirements of the divine decrees for this planet.  One of them specifies the need to resolve the issue of the dark minions' labyrinth of control on your planet through sacred cleansing.  In the main this will start with a formal, immense change in the way your societies operate and in the way you perceive the nature of your reality.  (Washta, Sirius Star-Nation, Galactic Federation of Light & Ascended Masters, 17th April 2017)

"Dratzo?"  Is this some kind of greeting from Sirius, or something?  I think we should all begin to greet each other in this fashion from now on, so that "Washta" and his buddies feel at home when they arrive.  Maybe it also comes along with a cool hand sign, sort of like the Vulcan "Live Long and Prosper" thing, only way more ridiculous.

"Washta" had a further missive that he delivered late last year:

Dratzo!  We return!  We have been informed that several major banks worldwide are nearly ready to transfer ownership and management.  This is part of the massive shift of financial power out of the hands of the dark into those of the Light, and is the result of recent maneuvers by the Ascended Masters.

Furthermore, the time has come to consolidate the funds that were first posited by Saint Germaine in the early 18th century, and by Quan Yin in the 7th century.  These large reserves of gold and silver are the basis for shifting wealth on your world away from a select few over to those who are fully committed to the creation of universal prosperity for the planet.  Accompanying this transfer is the new banking system which will be completely transparent in its varied transactions.  The new banking is rooted in the unprecedented injunction that banks be the divine instruments of the Light.  They are to be used to manage various corporations (special partnerships) charged with specific and temporary mandates: to distribute technologies and related services to benefit the health and well being of your global populations.  (Washta, Sirius Star-Nation, Galactic Federation of Light & Ascended Masters, 24th April 2017)

Well, that sounds hopeful enough. I wouldn't mind it if the banks, and corporations in general, started being more concerned with the health and well-being of global populations, instead of what they mostly seem to be doing lately, which is buying congresspersons and kissing Donald Trump's ass.  But at this point, I stopped reading, because I was afraid my browser would crash again, and also because my prefrontal cortex was beginning to make alarming little whimpering noises.

What strikes me about this is that the people who believe this stuff (and there seem to be quite a few, judging from the posts and the comments that followed) go way beyond wishful thinking into that more rarefied air of delusion.  I mean, it'd be nice if there were some Galactic Good Guys who were ready to Storm The Beaches and reorganize world governments so that they Played Nice, but there's just this teensy little problem, which is that there's no evidence whatsoever that any of it is true.  And this brings up a troubling question, to wit: what is it that makes someone swallow something like this?  I mean, beyond the rather sad answer that the person in question is mentally ill.  And I just can't believe that mental illness accounts for all of the believers in conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, cults, superstitions... and Galactic Federations.

I actually know people who are seemingly quite rational, who hold down jobs and raise families and interact socially, and yet who have some pretty bizarre beliefs on a single topic -- astrology, homeopathy, HAARP, the Illuminati, psychic contact with animals.  What in the human brain can become so untethered, in an otherwise intact mind, that a person loses the ability in that instance (and that instance only) to decide if something is real, has supporting evidence, makes sense?

I don't know the answer, but I do think the whole thing is a little scary.  So I'll end on that note.  Well, I do have one more thing to say: Dratzo!

Shiny happy energy

As part of the ongoing effort by my readers to drive me completely insane, today I have two links that were sent to me with a "You Gotta See This" message.  And far be it from me not to want to share the experience with all of you.

I'll just assume you're showering me with thanks right now, shall I?

The first has the encouraging title Love Has Won, which sounds awfully nice although you'd think if love really had won, I'd have heard something about it.  When I read the news, it seems to be as much of a raging shitstorm as ever.  Be that as it may, the site is pretty optimistic about everything.  It opens with a bang:

With the arrival and crystallization of the God and Goddess energies within Gaia’s new energy grid the depolarization process begins!  The old eon worked on polarization of the masses and of the individual.  The new eon works very differently! 

It may come as no surprise that humanity has become highly polarized these last few years.  This polarization was the manifestation of the last of the old eon energetics.  The process that is now underway neutralizes all polarization completely and leaves the masses and individuals squarely in the same life circumstances but without the polarization or sense of urgency previously experienced.

Okay!  Right!  What?

I guess the problem here is that I'm starting from the admittedly silly assumption that when people use scientific terms, they actually understand what they mean.  Things like "depolarization," "crystallization," "energy," and so on.  I did read the entire piece to try to determine what the author was trying to tell us, and what I got out of it was that if you can depolarize your energetics, you will take part in ascension, an event that will make the Earth's aura really pretty.

Or something like that.

The aurora.  Not aura.  Which are not the same thing.  [Image courtesy of NASA]

So you don't have to read the whole thing, which I wouldn't suggest in any case unless you have a bottle of scotch handy, let me cut to the chase and let you take a look at the last paragraph:

Energetic activity will remain at the level of its origin unless transmuted consciously to other levels.  To creatively manifest something physically, the process must be driven by physical life force energy.  This means either hard physical work or magical tantric practices.  The astral levels have segregated and the beginning of all great cycles activates the lowest level first, that of life force energy and magic.  That is where we now find ourselves, in a completely magical world.  All the upper astral levels are energetically dead in regards to manifesting things physically.  All other energies will remain in their respective levels unless consciously transmuted.

So I guess that clears that up.

Then we have the site Earth Keeper: Energy Activation of the New Planet Earth, a somewhat flashier site that starts out by telling us about an event to be held in the third week of September in Little Rock, Arkansas, that is called, I shit you not, "ArkLantis."  It is, we are told, a "Crystal Vortex Star-Gate Event," which sounds pretty impressive.  I have to share the description of the event with you, because putting it into my own words just wouldn't convey the full effect, particularly since I wouldn't capitalize every other word:

Join the Earth-Keeper Family in the Incredible Transformational Energy of the Sacred Ark Crystal Vortex ...  The Epi-Centre of the Crystalline Shift.  Arkansas is a Geological Wonder, Containing the Largest Singular Strata of Quartz Crystal on the Planet. Beginning in Little Rock, The Amazing Crystal Deposits Extend 177 miles SW from Little Rock to Hot Springs National Park & onward to Talimena Ridge.  Within the Astonishing Crystals are Rare World Renowned Deposits of Magnetite (at Magnet Cove), the Toltec Mounds Pyramids, Renowned Natural Thermal Healing Springs, Aquifers, Mystical Massive Caverns, Sacred Mountains, Crystal Clear Rivers, Holy Lakes, Amethyst, and an Active Diamond Mine ( Crater of Diamonds State Park).  Arkansas was A Crystal Colony of the Benevolent Law of One Atlanteans.  There are Utterly Astonishing, Enormous Crystals Beneath Arkansas the Size of Buildings.  Three Temple Crystals Were Placed in the Underground Caverns Before the Final Sinking of Atlantis.  The Energy Has Awakened & The Crystal Vortex is Now the Most Potent Crystalline Energy Field on Earth ! Come Experience this Amazingly Sacred Vortexial Land of Ancient Atlantis, Spirit, Multidimensionality & Vision.

I have a good many friends in Arkansas -- it's the home of Oghma Creative Media, which publishes my books -- and I bet they'll be as gobsmacked as I was to learn that what is now Arkansas was once part of Atlantis.

Although, isn't the whole point that Atlantis sunk to the bottom of the ocean?  Arkansas, last time I went there, was dry land.  So that's kind of odd.  Maybe they were kept afloat by the Crystalline Shifted Sacred Vortexial Transformational Energy or something.

You can see how that could happen.

Downtown Little Rock, Arkansas, and/or Atlantis [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyhow, many thanks to my loyal readers, who with the best of intentions keep making me do near-fatal faceplants directly into my keyboard.  Me, I wondering how to recover from the aftereffects of reading Love Has Won and Earth Keeper in preparation for writing this post.  I guess my only reasonable option is to have a second cup of coffee, since it's still a little early for a double scotch.

Children of the sun

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may remember that a few years ago, I did a piece on the "Indigo Children" -- kids who are the "next step in evolution," as evidenced by the fact that they're sensitive, have paranormal abilities, and indigo-colored auras.  But these woo-woo ideas tend to become passé pretty quickly; before you knew it, every other family in your neighborhood claimed that their offspring was an "Indigo Child."

So there was no way the woo-woos were going to have their kids labeled with something so common and pedestrian.  They came up with the next level, which were the "Crystal Children" -- who you could recognize because they had "large eyes and an intense stare" and were able to "function as a group consciousness rather than as individuals."  Which was clearly much more special than those dumb Indigo Children were, even though it makes them sound like the scary kids in Children of the Corn.

But that wasn't enough, either.  So -- I shit you not -- they've leveled up again.  And this one's a doozy.

Meet... the "Sun Children."

Here's a little bit about the "Sun Children:"

It has been scientifically proven that the new children, being born since 2007, have been born with 13-strand DNA, which means that they will have far greater abilities than we have ever had.

So plain old two-stranded DNA's not enough?  I've taught genetics for thirty years, and I never knew about the principle of "the more strands, the better."

These children are volunteer souls, who are now being born, to become the New Leaders, who will be leading the world, from 2050 and onwards. By then the New Golden Age will have been anchored in by the Indigo, Crystal and Rainbow children, who have incarnated after the World War II. 

A lot of the Indigo, Crystal, and Rainbow children were COSMIC souls, from other galaxies and star systems, who were involved with the CREATION of this planet, when it was birthed.

Well, hell.  I missed the "Rainbow Children."  I wonder how many strands their DNA has?  Probably nine or so, I would expect, if you kind of split the difference.

And hey, I was born after World War II myself!  I wonder what kind of child I was?  My parents would probably have answered that question "a pain in the ass," but maybe they didn't know how to see auras.

It is of great IMPORTANCE, for the PARENTS of these new SUN children, to understand, that what worked for them and their parents, will simply not work for these children! 

Fact is, because of their 13 strand DNA, they will have all 12 chakras fully activated: - which means that they HAVE THEIR STELLAR GATEWAY WIDE OPEN!  This means they are EXTREMELY SENSITIVE TO LIGHT, TO SOUND VIBRATIONS, TO FREQUENCIES, AND MOST OF ALL, TO THE UNSEEN WORLD - WHICH TO US IS NOT REAL - BUT TO THEM IT IS.  THIS MAKES THEM HIGHLY PSYCHIC, WITH ABILITIES THAT WE HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO USE: TELEPORTATION, KENESIS [sic], TELEPATHY, SHAPE-SHIFTING, MOVING OBJECTS, HEARING WHAT IS SAID IN OTHER ROOMS, ABLE TO REMOTE VIEW, ETC.

I'd be satisfied if they had the ability to turn off their caps lock.

But man, that's a lot of abilities, isn't it?  Makes me kind of glad I'm not in the planning-for-a-family stage of things.  My two sons were hard enough to handle as toddlers; I can't imagine how life would have been if they'd been able to teleport, shape-shift, and hurl heavy objects around with their minds. They kind of fought with each other constantly as children, being personality types so different from each other that it's hard to comprehend how they came from the same gene pool, and if they'd been able to fight using telekinesis, I'm seriously in doubt that there'd have been any survivors, and that includes our house.  They did enough damage hitting each other with stuff the ordinary, non-Sun-Children way.

So I'm a little mystified as to how all of those would be good things.

Oh, and about the wide-open stellar gateway (whatever the fuck that means) and the sensitivity to stuff, she has more to say:

THIS MEANS THAT THESE CHILDREN WILL HAVE TO BE KEPT AWAY FROM ELECTRONIC DEVICES WHICH ARE JAMMING THEIR FREQUENCIES: Television sets, computers, mobile phones etc.  They will be fascinated with it, but beware: some of the members of a certain group of people on this planet, KNOW THIS, and are PURPOSEFULLY JAMMING THE FREQUENCY WAVES OF CHILDREN AND ADULTS, VIA SATELLITE COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AND THIS IS DONE AT SUCH A FREQUENCY, THAT WE ARE NOT EVEN AWARE THAT WE ARE BEING HELD HOSTAGE.  This is ESPECIALLY TRUE FOR VIDEO GAMES, PLAYSTATIONS, etc. for all of it is attempting to DE-ACTIVATE these children, so that the planet will not be able to move forward and into the New Age.

Man, it would suck to go through life with jammed frequencies.  I want my frequencies to be all hangy-loosey, you know?  On the other hand, I tend to agree about television, but mostly from the standpoint that 99.8% of television content is blatantly idiotic.  So mostly what it seems to de-activate is people's critical thinking faculty.

Which, if you believe in "Sun Children," must not be that highly developed in the first place.

Anyhow, I'll leave you to check out what else she has to say.  And she does have a lot to say, most of it in all caps.  As for me, I'm wondering what the next incarnation of even more special children will be.  Maybe "Star Children."  Or hell, go big or go home, right?  "GALAXY Children."  Or if we go with the whole frequency thing, "Hypersonic Children."  I know the high-pitched whining ability of many little kids seems to bore a hole directly into my skull, so maybe that's the most accurate one of all.

Strange attractors

You would think that after this many years of writing Skeptophilia, I'd be completely inured to weird ideas, that nothing would shock me.  But I still occasionally run into a claim that leaves me saying, "Um... uh.  Um.  Nope, I got nothin'."

That happened yesterday, when a loyal reader sent me a link to the website of the Spiritual Science Research Foundation.  The website subheader is "Bridging the Known and Unknown Worlds," so I was at least on guard that I was entering the realm of the woo-woo.  But I wasn't ready for the actual details of the claim therein, which turned out to be that gay people are gay...

... because they're being coerced by ghosts.

I bet my LGBT readers had no idea this was what was going on.  I bet they simply thought their brains were wired that way, which is supported by recent studies that showed genetic and epigenetic effects in LGBT individuals that are at least correlated with homosexuality, and may actually be causative.

Nope.  That's not it at all.  The real reason is that you've got a ghost following you around who is making lewd same-sex suggestions, and you're falling for it.

The worst part is that this isn't all they claim, and in fact, isn't even their weirdest claim.  Upon perusing the website, we find out that there are other ways you can tell if you've got a spirit-world hanger-on besides being gay.  Apparently, symptoms are a "foul taste in the mouth," "experience of eyes being pulled inside," "a sticky layer... formed on the face and body of the affected person," and "experience of strangulation."  Then we read the following, which I quote verbatim:

[T]he ghosts (demons, devils, negative energies, etc.) leave the body through any of the nine openings, i.e. two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, mouth, penis/vagina and anus.  The person may experience as if gas is going out of any of these openings or one may experience cough, yawning, burping, sneezing, etc. as per the opening involved.

Allow me to interject here for the good of the order that if any of my readers experience coughing through their eyes, they probably should see a doctor.

And that goes double if your penis burps.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait... there's more!"  We also find out that if you have a ghostly groupie, you will "make moaning and weird sounds and not remember anything after," will be "fidgeting and restless," and will be prone to "domestic accidents such as heated oil flying from the frying pan."  Me, I thought the latter was just one of the hazards of cooking, one I first learned about while simultaneously discovering the general rule "Never cook bacon while shirtless."  I don't think I made moaning or weird sounds when it happened, although I do recall using some seriously bad language.

Of course, given that supposedly the affected individual doesn't remember anything afterwards, maybe I've just forgotten about the moaning noises.

But the pièce de résistance is the part about "sexual symptoms," wherein we get to the heart of the matter, which is that if you have a ghostly invisible friend, you'll become gay:

The main reason behind the gay orientation of some men is that they are possessed by female ghosts. It is the female ghost in them that is attracted to other men.  Conversely the attraction to females experienced by some lesbians is due to the presence of male ghosts in them.  The ghost’s consciousness overpowers the person’s normal behaviour to produce the homosexual attraction.  Spiritual research has shown that the cause for homosexual preferences lie predominantly in the spiritual realm.

We're then given some statistics, which is that homosexual orientation is 5% physical causes/hormonal changes, 10% psychological causes, and 85% ghosts.  I have no idea how they derived those numbers, but because it's statistics, it's bound to be correct, right?

Of course right.

So there you have it.  I'm not sure what else to say that the dog didn't cover.  I think the thing that bothers me about this most is that I'm sure there are people who read this website and nodded, saying, "Yup, makes total sense."  Which is kind of terrifying when you think about it.

Although who knows.  Maybe they have their reasons for believing all this.  Maybe someone was startled one day when her vagina sneezed, and was wondering why, and stumbled on this website.  Makes as much sense as any other explanation I can think of.

The cult of personality

The cult of personality is a dangerous thing.  Whenever a person's brand becomes more important than what (s)he is claiming, there's the chance that herd mentality will take over -- and you'll follow the leader without question.

Dr. Oz.  Oprah.  "Food Babe."  And, most spectacularly, Deepak Chopra, who regularly publishes something called -- and I am not making this up -- the "Chopra-centered Lifestyle Newsletter," which should win some kind of Narcissistic Title Award.  Because I regularly check out the publications and claims of these people -- risking the loss of countless innocent brain cells -- I have more than once seen comments like, "We love you, Dr. Oz!" and "Go Food Babe Army!" appended to articles that would leave any sensible, scientifically-literate person doing repeated facepalms.  I'm left with the unsettling impression that these people could claim that you can prevent cancer by eating red onions, and their audience would simply sit there nodding and smiling.

Oh, wait, Dr. Oz did claim exactly that.  My bad.

But Chopra is in another league.  This guy has made millions writing book after book of quasi-mystical, pseudoscientific bullshit, and he's as popular as ever.  His followers have a devotion to him that borders on fanaticism.  He still does the lecture circuit to sold-out auditoriums.  And this despite the fact that what he says is so vague and fact-free that someone made a Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator that produces convincing-sounding Chopra-isms on demand.  (Here's the one I got:  "The invisible is the womb of visible choices."  I feel myself becoming wiser already.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

As an example of the bizarre, fact-free clickbait that Chopra dishes out, consider the recent article on his website called "What is Primordial Sound Meditation?" in which we find out that we each have a personal "mantra or sound" that if we chant it, will bring us "profound peace and expanded awareness."

How do we find out what our personal mantra is?  Well, the implication is that such information isn't available to most of us unenlightened slobs, so we have to sign up for "Chopra's Primordial Sound Meditation Workshop" at the "Chopra Center."  Once we do, they'll tell us what to chant.

Money first, enlightenment next, that's the motto over at the "Chopra Center."

And it's not just some random noise, they tell us:

A mantra is a specific sound or vibration—which when repeated silently—helps you to enter deeper levels of awareness...   The mantra you will receive is the vibration the universe was creating at the time and place of your birth, and it is calculated following Vedic mathematic formulas.

So what he's done is taken three pieces of mystical nonsense -- astrology, numerology, and New Age woo -- and combined them to make an all-new Bullshit Mélange.  We also have one of our favorite words, "vibration," which of course makes it even more scientific.  All we need is "quantum" and "frequency" and we'd be all set.  (They didn't show up in the article, but I'd be willing to bet you my next month's salary that they're used in the workshop.)

And what will happen if you use your magic personal mantra?  All sorts of good stuff:

When you silently repeat your mantra in meditation, it creates a vibration that helps you slip into the space between your thoughts, into the complete silence that is sometimes referred to as "the gap."  Your mind is no longer caught up in its noisy internal chatter and is instead exposed to its own deepest nature: pure awareness.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm completely in favor of meditation.  It is great for relaxation and reducing stress.  And there's no doubt any more that stress is contributory to poor health, so anything you can do in the way of decreasing it is probably going to do you nothing but good.

But saying "you'd probably feel better if you did some meditation" is different than making bogus claims about universal vibrations at the moment of your birth creating a Special Sound Just For You, and then telling you that you can only find out what it is if you sign up for an expensive workshop.  What Chopra et al. are doing is nothing more than a calculated, callous campaign of using people's ignorance about science, and anxiety over their health, to make money hand over fist.

And it works.  Chopra, Oz, Food Babe, and the rest are as popular as ever, despite study after study debunking their wild claims.  "Food Babe" was roundly ridiculed a few months ago for her claim that airlines were trying to kill us by pumping "impure air" into airplanes that "was not pure oxygen."  Dr. Oz, especially, has come under significant fire, receiving a harsh rebuke last year from the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection for his support of sketchy diet recommendations.  And earlier this year, a group of prominent doctors sent a scalding letter to Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons demanding that Oz be fired from his faculty position there, citing "an egregious lack of integrity."

But none of that seems to make much of a dent in their popularity.  They're still out there, still making ridiculous claims lo unto this very day, still bringing in money hand over fist.

Leading me to the troubling conclusion that however persuasive science is, it will never wield the power that the cult of personality does.

Cult of the week

It appears that we have a new religion on our hands.

Vice reported this week that actor Andrew Keegan has founded his own cult, called "Full Circle," in (surprise!) California.  Keegan, you may recall, was one of the actors in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, and is also known for his bravura performance as "Gotham PD Police Officer In Fight At End" in The Dark Knight Rises.

So you can kind of see why he might have turned his attention away from acting.  Keegan's nascent religion attracted the attention of reporter Brett Mazurek not only because of Keegan's debatable fame, but because it's a pretty peculiar belief system.  "Full Circle" members don't see it that way, of course; they describe it as "the highest spiritualism founded on universal knowledge" and say that Mazurek came to talk to Keegan and his followers because he "came through the vortex of Keegan's energy."

Whatever that means.

Oh, and one of Keegan's inner circle said his name was "Third Eye," following in the great tradition of being known for having non-standard numbers of body parts, such as Six-Fingered Man in The Princess Bride and One-Legged Man in Treasure Island.  (Yes, I know he's talking about the "mystical Third Eye," not an actual extra eye in the middle of his forehead, or anything.  But there isn't the slightest bit of evidence that the "mystical Third Eye" exists, so I'm not sure how else someone like me is supposed to interpret it.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What do the Full Circlers believe, you might be wondering?  Here's the belief system explained, in Keegan's own words.

Synchronicity.  Time.  That's what it's all about.  Whatever, the past, some other time.  It's a circle; in the center is now.  That's what it's about...  We're very, very aware of the shift that's happening in the mind and the heart, and everybody is on that love agenda.  We're very much scientifically, spiritually, and emotionally aware of how it works, meaning that there's power in the crystals, there's power in our hearts, there's an alignment, there's a resonance... and it transfers through water...  (T)he mission is to take the war out of our story, which is essentially peace, but activated peace.

All of this puts me in mind of the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator, which strings together words and phrases from Chopra's Twitter feed, and comes up with fake Chopra quotes that sound convincingly like the real thing (i.e., they have lots of New Age buzzwords, but don't really mean anything).  Here's the one I got: "Eternal stillness is the wisdom of universal sexual energy."  Which I think should be added to Keegan's mission statement.

In fact, they should just use the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator to create their entire dogma.  It'd probably be more sensible than what Keegan himself said about it.

As far as how Keegan came to found Full Circle, he told Mazurek that he had been attacked by two gang members on the same day as the tsunami hit Japan -- March 11, 2011.  That had to mean something, Keegan said.  And after that, he had some odd experiences:

I had a moment where I was looking at a street lamp and it exploded.  That was a weird coincidence.  At a ceremony, a heart-shaped rose quartz crystal was on the altar, and synchronistically, this whole thing happened.  It's a long story, but basically the crystal jumped off the altar and skipped on camera.  That was weird.

So I suppose at that point, he had no choice but to form a cult.

So far, Keegan has attracted what looks like about three dozen members of his church.  Which is kind of surprising, not only from the standpoint that most of what he talks about seems to be woo-woo gibberish, but also because they apparently believe that everyone should have regular colon cleanses. That would have turned me away all by itself.  I mean, I'm all for seeking enlightenment, but I'm pretty sure that it has nothing to do with what amounts to sticking a garden hose up your ass and turning it on.

So there you are.  A new religion, because evidently we didn't have enough of them before.  I'm guessing this one won't last very long; these things have a way of coming and going pretty quickly.

Although people would probably have said the same thing about L. Ron Hubbard when he founded Scientology.  So maybe we should keep our eye on this one.

Meet the "Crystal Children"

Last year I wrote a piece on the phenomenon of people labeling themselves or their kids "Indigo Children."  An "Indigo Child," it's said, is empathetic, sensitive, creative, and tends not to fit in well with regards to other people's expectations.  They are highly intelligent, and are especially gifted in areas that require thinking outside the box.

Oh, yeah.  They also have "indigo-colored auras."

So what we have here is yet another example of people trying to find an explanation and a label for something that really is best classified under the heading "People Are All Different."  Even, apparently, with respect to the color of their auras.

But "Indigo" is becoming passé, apparently.  As C. S. Lewis observed, "Fashions come and go... but mostly they go."  "Indigo Children" are now a dime a dozen.  So we have to move on to a new designation, an even more special kind of person.  One that shows up those silly Indigos for the bush-league posers that they are.

Now, we have "Crystal Children."

I'm not making this up.  In an opening passage that should win some kind of award for New Age Doublespeak, we read that the "empathetic and sensitive" Indigos better just step aside:

After discovering more about Indigo Children and the (often misunderstood) gifts that they possess, the question arose: now what?  The answer came in the form of the Crystal Children. 

The Crystal Children are the generation following the Indigo Children. Still thought to be relatively young, they have begun to be born from around 2000, though there is some speculation that they arrived earlier, around 1995.  Similar to their Indigo counterparts, these children are thought to be extremely powerful, with a main purpose to take humanity to the next level in our evolution and reveal to us our inner power and divinity.  Some things that make them unique from Indigo Children are that they function as a group consciousness rather than as individuals, and they live by the law that we are all one.  However, they are still are a powerful force for love and peace on the planet.

Yes, I have to say that when I read about the Indigo Children, my response was to shake my head and say, "Now what?"  But I don't think I meant it the same way.

And my goodness, those "Crystal Children!"  They're going to "take humanity to the next level in our evolution and reveal to us our inner power and divinity!"  Who could resist that?

We're then told the twenty-three ways to recognize a "Crystal Child," beginning with the first, that "Crystal Children" possess "large eyes with an intense stare."  I don't know about you, but that sounds vaguely terrifying to me.  If a large-eyed child was staring at me intensely, I wouldn't suspect that I was dealing with a child who was trying to "bring out my inner power and divinity," I would suspect that I was in an episode of The X Files and was about to have all of my blood removed via my eye sockets.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The rest of the ways that you tell if your kid is a "Crystal Child" are suspiciously like the rules for detecting "Indigo Children;" empathy, sensitivity, intelligence, creativity, and so on.  So once again this seems to me to be a way for gullible parents to find a way to feel better about having a child who might be experiencing trouble fitting in in school.  Not that this isn't an understandable goal; my younger son had a rough time in middle school, as many do, and it was a struggle sometimes as a parent to find ways to get him through the experience with his confidence and spirit intact.

But I'm just not convinced that making up a goofy label, and appending to it all sorts of pseudoscientific bosh, is the way to go about it.  Some good old-fashioned coping strategies are usually what's called for, not sticking a wacky name tag on your kid.  The latter, I'd think, would make it more likely the kid wouldn't fit in, especially if (s)he starts babbling to peers that they'd better be nice because you never know how a "Crystal Child" will react when provoked.

So that's our swim in the deep end for today.  I've got to wrap this up so I can go try and teach all of the various types of actual children out there.  I'll make sure to check out their auras.  That's bound to give me some valuable information about how to get them to understand science.

Irrationality, insanity, and the teachings of J. Z. Knight

One of the problems I face in selecting stories to highlight in Skeptophilia is that it is often difficult to tell the difference between a crazy idea that merits ridicule, and claims coming from a person who is mentally ill, and therefore deserves sympathy (and help).

Put another way, when does espousing an essentially irrational worldview cross the line into an actual psychosis?  There are millions of people who subscribe to belief systems that are profoundly irrational, and yet the people themselves are otherwise sane (although how a sane person could adopt an insane model for how the universe works is itself a question worth asking).  But there are clearly times where you've gone beyond that, and crossed into more pathetic territory.

As an example of the latter, consider the ravings of YouTuber Dave Johnson, who contends that the Civil War, World War II, the War in Afghanistan, and the War in Iraq never happened.  All of them were "media events" with manufactured battles and casualties, designed by political leaders to achieve various goals.  I'm not sure I can really describe the content of the videos -- and I'm also not sure I can, in good conscience, recommend that you watch them -- but he seems to be enamored of symbolism and numerology (he calls the attack on Fort Sumter "a 9/11-style attack on a pentagon") and then just denies everything else without stating any evidence.  "They went on to tell you that over 600,000 people died in (the Civil) War," he says.  "Untrue.  There's zero evidence of any battlefield footage of any death that I can find."

Well, the absence of "footage" may be because the Civil War happened before the invention of motion pictures.  But even forgiving that as a slip of the tongue, is he really discounting all of the photography by Mathew Brady?

Aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, by Mathew Brady

I'm sure he'd call them all modern fakes.  He seems to have a profoundly paranoid worldview, which (by the way) includes believing that the Moon is a hologram.

The whole question comes up because of a much more public figure than Dave Johnson -- J. Z. Knight, better known as "Ramtha."  Knight has run her "Ramtha School of Enlightenment" since 1988, wherein she and her followers share the teachings of "Ramtha," a 35,000-year-old being from "Lemuria" who claims to be the "enlightened one."  Knight "channels" Ramtha, and then offers his pronouncements to the masses.

Up until recently, the whole thing has seemed to me to be an enormous scam -- a way to bilk the gullible out of their hard-earned money.  But just in the last couple of years, Knight/Ramtha has left behind her bland, "find-the-god-within" message, and has apparently gone off the deep end.

According to a story this week at AlterNet, Knight is no longer promoting "enlightenment" in Ramtha's voice; she is going off on drunken homophobic and racist rants.  Video and audio recordings of Knight that have been made covertly and then smuggled out of her compound in Yelm, Washington have revealed that the cult has moved into decidedly scarier territory of late.  The article states:

During the 16 or so hours... Knight will disparage Catholics, gay people, Mexicans, organic farmers, and Jews. 

“Fuck God’s chosen people! I think they have earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the goddamned gas chambers by now,” she says as members of the audience snicker. There are also titters when she declares Mexicans “breed like rabbits” and are “poison,” that all gay men were once Catholic priests, and that organic farmers have questionable hygiene.

Add to this the fact that this ritual involves the drinking of huge amounts of alcohol -- they're called "wine ceremonies," and audience members are supposed to take a drink of wine every time Knight does -- and this begins to take on some of the characteristics of a meeting of the Aryan Nations instead of some quasi-religious ceremony.

And, of course, this is fuel to the fire to the neo-Nazis.  Knight/Ramtha is quoted at length on the race hate forum Stormfront, for example.  The two cults, different as they appear at first, both espouse a lot of the same ideology -- survivalism, an "elect" who will be protected when civilization falls, and a sacred message that needs to get out to the people -- at least the right people.

But she also likes to take pot shots at the Christians, and one of the recordings that has come to light begins with, "Fuck Jehovah!" and goes on to state that Jesus is "just another alien" who is on equal footing with Ramtha, and who came to the Earth to teach the same things that Ramtha did, but failed when power went to his head.

Knight, for her part, refuses to issue a retraction for any of her drunken screeds, claiming that all of the ugliness on the recordings is just a matter of Ramtha's words "being taken out of context."  She also accuses two ex-followers, Virginia Coverdale and David McCarthy, of spearheading a smear campaign started because of a love triangle involving Coverdale, Knight, and Knight's significant other.

But back to our original question; is Knight still, on some level, rational, or has she simply become psychotic?  Certainly her message now clearly qualifies the Ramtha School of Enlightenment as a hate group; but I'm more curious about Knight herself.  Before, she has just been classified as a religious version of P. T. Barnum, a huckster, suckering in the gullible and relieving them of their cash in exchange for a more-or-less harmless message.  Now?  She shows every evidence of insane paranoia.  So personally, she's more to be pitied than censured.

The difference, though, between a J. Z. Knight and a Dave Johnson -- the war-denier we started this post with -- is their relative reach and influence.  Johnson's YouTube videos, when I watched them, had on the order of a thousand views each.  Knight's message has reached millions -- her followers include some famous names like Salma Hayek, Linda Evans, and Mike Farrell.  Her New Age nonsense wrapped up as an educational video on quantum physics, What the Bleep Do We Know?, grossed ten million dollars and was in movie theaters for a year.  Knight herself lives in a 12,800 square foot French-style-chateau next to her school, can earn up to $200,000 for every speaking engagement, and has a net worth estimated in the tens of millions.

Which means that regardless of the cause of her crazy rantings, the damage she can do is very real.  Her home town of Yelm is full of her followers -- non-Ramtha-ites call them "Ramsters" -- and the Ramtha symbol appears on many businesses in town, telling RSE members that it's okay to do business there.  Local churches have started anti-RSE campaigns.  Ordinary citizens, caught in the middle, are scared.

For good reason.  Whatever Knight is now, her teachings are now no longer merely New Age pablum, but ugly, racist, homophobic invective.  And you have to wonder when she'll cross another line -- into saying something that induces the authorities to intervene.

Considering her followers, we could have another Waco on our hands.