Tempting fate

If five years ago I had turned in a manuscript to my publisher that was a recounting, to the last detail, of the events of the last six months, he would have rejected it out of hand as being completely implausible.

2020 has been surreal.  And frightening.  We've already had a pandemic, a recession, and the most intense and widespread protests in decades, leading one friend of mine to say that it's like we're experiencing the 1918 Spanish flu, the depression of the 1930s, and the civil unrest of the late 1960s, but all in the same three months.  In addition, in April we had record cold temperatures on one side of the country and record hot temperatures on the other on the same day; in May, the earliest start to the hurricane season I can remember; and an outbreak of 140 tornadoes in one 37 hour period -- that encompassed Easter Sunday.

Oh, and "murder hornets."  We can't forget the "murder hornets."

So a lot of us, even those of us who aren't superstitious, see the "Breaking News" symbol a little like this:

What I'd like to do today is to look at four stories that seem to me to be tempting fate, given the way the year's gone so far.  Let's see if any of these are the next square to check off on the Apocalypse 2020 Bingo Card.

First, we have:

REAPPEARANCE OF A DROWNED GHOST VILLAGE

In 1947, the residents of the Italian village of Fabbriche di Careggine were relocated by the government to make way for a hydroelectric dam that created a lake, submerging it completely.  But now, the company that owns the dam is considering draining the lake "to improve tourism."

The town is still substantially intact, including the church, streets, many buildings, and the cemetery.  It's this last bit that has me worried, because an invasion of pissed off, waterlogged Italian zombies seeking revenge would be completely on-brand for 2020.

Of course, the lake has been drained a couple of times before, for the purpose of doing maintenance on the dam, and nothing has happened.  To which I respond: yeah, but it wasn't 2020.  Try doing stuff like that now and you're just asking for trouble.

Next, we have:

THE DISCOVERY OF A 2000-YEAR-OLD BRONZE POT CONTAINING "AN UNKNOWN LIQUID"

Archaeologists working in the city of Sanmenxia, Henan Province, China have discovered a two-millennium-old spherical pot with a swan-like neck, made of bronze, which contains three liters of an "unknown liquid... yellowish-brown with impurities."  The pot was recovered from a tomb (of course) dating from the time marking the end of the Qin Dynasty and the beginning of the Han Dynasty, right around 200 B.C.E.  They're trying to analyze the liquid to figure out what it is, which makes me wonder if they've even heard about the Curse of the Pharaohs.

Okay, I know the whole Curse of the Pharaohs was hyped-up nonsense, but still.  Cf. what I said earlier about this being 2020.  If ever there was a year where some nitwit scientists say "let's open up this thing we found in a tomb!  It'll be fun!" and accidentally release an evil yellowish-brown liquid entity that then goes around and messily devours hundreds of innocent bystanders, this is it.

Third, we have:

A STRANGELY-COLORED POOL IN A CAVE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN TOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS

Lechuguilla Cave, in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, is one of the largest cave complexes in the world, and despite this wasn't even discovered until 1993.  A lot of it has never been explored, like the hundred-meter-long stretch of it investigated just last week, that ended in a pool that looked like it was filled with lime yogurt.

Geologist Max Wisshak, who led the expedition, said the color is "an optical illusion," that actually it's crystal clear.  My response: sure, it is.  He admits, however, that because it has been isolated in the depths of this cavern, it will contain microorganisms that have never been observed before and very likely have never encountered a terrestrial life form since being trapped there thousands, possibly millions, of years ago.

I see no way this could possibly go wrong, do you?

Oh, and Wisshak also said, "we found bat skeletons, thousands of years old, in some places in the cave."

Because that's not ominous at all.

Last, consider:

SCIENTISTS IN NEW YORK PROPOSE MAKING A LIQUID METAL ROBOT

This one's right down the road from me, at Binghamton University, where mechanical engineer Pu Zhang and his team have developed an alloy of indium, bismuth, and tin that melts at 62 C (so it could be melted with hot water).  But along with this, they have come up with a way of bonding it to a silicone matrix, so once it cools, the liquid metal will "remember" its original configuration and come back together into the shape it started with.

As I recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger made a movie about this.  It didn't end well.

"Normally, engineers use aluminum or steel to produce cushion structures," Zhang said.  "After you land on the Moon, the metal absorbs the energy and deforms.  It’s over – you can use it only once...  In contrast, a spacecraft with landing cushions built using a liquid metal lattice could be reused over and over again.  Using this Field’s alloy, you can crash into it like other metals, but then heat it up later to recover its shape."

Ultimately, Zhang says, he wants to create "a liquid metal robot."

Because of course he does.

So I'm taking bets.  Will it be ghostly hordes from a drowned village?  Something deadly released from a pot taken from a Chinese tomb?  A contagion from a pool of optical-illusion yogurt in a cave in New Mexico?  Or a shape-shifting liquid metal assassin going on a rampage?  Or something else that we haven't even thought about?

To find out, tune in next time for 2020: Hold My Beer!

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for people who are fascinated with the latest research on our universe, but are a little daunted by the technical aspects: Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Oxford University astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.

A whirlwind tour of the most recent discoveries from the depths of space -- and I do mean recent, because it was only released a couple of weeks ago -- Smethurst's book is a delightful voyage into the workings of some of the strangest objects we know of -- quasars, black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, blazars, gamma-ray bursters, and many others.  Presented in a way that's scientifically accurate but still accessible to the layperson, it will give you an understanding of what we know about the events of the last 13.8 billion years, and the ultimate fate of the universe in the next few billions.  If you have a fascination for what's up there in the night sky, this book is for you!

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

Roswell redux

Sometimes, I swear the universe is listening to me.

In my post yesterday, a story about the "Falcon Creek Incident" in Manitoba, I mentioned that the story was a lot more credible than Roswell.  So it is only fitting that less than an hour after I hit "publish," I found that Jocelyne LeBlanc over at Mysterious Universe had just posted a story...

... that UFOlogists are reopening the Roswell case.

My first thought was that I've read a lot of accounts by UFOlogists, and my impression was that the Roswell case was not, and in fact never will be, closed.  You've all seen the famous "alien autopsy" video, which was sold to television stations in thirty-three different countries by a guy named Ray Santilli (who said he had gotten the film from an anonymous military officer), but what you may not know is that a filmmaker named Spyros Melaris admitted that he and Santilli had faked the entire thing.

All this got from the UFO enthusiasts was a wiggle of the eyebrow that says, "of course you know that if someone admits it's a hoax, it has to mean that they've been threatened by the Men in Black."  In other words, evidence against something is actually evidence for it, if you squinch your eyes up and look at it sideways.

My visit to Roswell.  I'd tell you more, but I've been sworn to secrecy.

But you should prepare yourself for the whole thing rising from its shallow grave, ready to swallow the brains of True Believers everywhere, because there's just been a claim of a 2001 "leaked memo" involving physicists Kit Green and Eric Davis, and aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow, and the memo says the autopsy video was real.

Green supposedly was briefed three times on the subject of the crash and the video, and was shown photos back in 1988 of the alien cadaver taken at the crash site.  The memo concludes, "The Alien Autopsy film/video is real, the alien cadaver is real, and the cadaver seen in the film/video is the same as the photos Kit saw at the 1987/88 Pentagon briefing."

Better yet, Bigelow et al. claim there are still tissue samples from the alien being held at the Walter Reed-Armed Forces Institute for Pathology Medical Museum, located in Washington, D.C.

But I haven't told you how all of this stuff became public:

Linda Moulton Howe.

As soon as I saw this name, my eyes rolled back so far I could see my own brainstem.  Howe is one of the "ancient alien astronauts" loons, a protégé of Erich von Däniken, about whom RationalWiki has the following to say:

Howe's gullibility and deceptive "reports" have caused even staunch Ufologists to give her extremely low marks for credibility... She occasionally asks real scientists for opinions on these matters, but then promptly dismisses or rationalises them away.

In fact, the site UFOWatchdog.com is even more unequivocal:

Someone once summed up Howe very well with two words: ' Media entrepreneur '.  While having been a major player in the cattle mutilation mystery, Howe's credibility has gone way downhill as she sensationalizes everything from mundane animal deaths to promoting Brazilian UFO fraud Urandir Oliveira and the Aztec UFO Crash Hoax while selling alien books, videos and lectures.  Howe dabbles in all things strange including Bigfoot, crop circles, alien abductions, and UFOs.  Howe also sits on the board of advisors to the Roswell UFO Museum along with the likes of Don Schmitt.  See Howe's site, which she actually charges a subscription for in order to access some stories.  Also see Howe turning an explained animal death into an encounter with Bigfoot.  A leap not even Bigfoot itself could make.

So yeah.  There's that.  I know I was pretty charitable with the Falcon Lake Incident yesterday, but this one is just making me heave a heavy sigh of frustration.  No one would be happier than me if alien intelligence did turn out to be real; in fact, it might even make me feel better about the lack of intelligence I so often see down here on Earth.  But much as (in Fox Mulder's words) I Want To Believe, this one's just not doing it for me.

****************************

In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

A hue and cry over sunspots

The argument from ignorance is a curious phenomenon.

The gist is that people take their lack of understanding of some phenomenon, and from that ignorance deduce that their own particular explanation must be the correct one.  Of course, you can't deduce anything from a lack of understanding.  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "If you don't know, that's where your conversation should stop.  You don't then say that it must be anything."

I saw a particularly good example of the argument from ignorance a couple of days ago, with the hoopla that is arising around a mysterious action by the FBI over a solar observatory in New Mexico.  On September 6, the Sunspot Solar Observatory near Alamogordo, a research facility operated by New Mexico State University, was closed without explanation and all of its staff sent home.  The observatory has been closed since then, and all requests for more information have been met with steadfast silence.

Alisdair Davey, a data center scientist at the National Solar Observatory, which works with the SSO, said, "We have absolutely no idea what is going on.  As in truly nothing, which in itself is just weird."

The Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope at the SSO [Image licensed under the Creative Commons uıɐɾ ʞ ʇɐɯɐs from New York City, USA, Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope (5508694434), CC BY-SA 2.0]

What is even more peculiar is that a post office on the grounds of the SSO has also been shut down without explanation.  Rod Spurgeon, a USPS spokesperson, said he didn't think the two were related.  "Whatever’s occurring there has nothing to do with us...  I haven’t heard of anything like [a biohazard or bioterror incident] going on."  Liz Davis, a public information officer at the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, concurs.  "There is no criminal activity, which is what Postal Inspection Service would be dealing with," Davis said.

So as of right now, what we have is... nothing.  And there's nothing like nothing to get the conspiracy theorists having multiple orgasms.  This becomes obvious if you peruse prominent conspiracy theory websites, which I did so you won't have to do so and risk valuable brain cells.  Here are just a few of the ideas I've seen, all of which were presented as if they were statements of fact:

• The SSO sighted the spacecraft of an advanced alien race with which the US government is having dealings, so the whole place was shut down to prevent anyone from finding out more.
• The SSO intercepted a top-secret communiqué from a top-secret government satellite, and the result is that all of the staff has been rounded up and put under house arrest until they'll sign non-disclosure agreements.
• Because the SSO isn't far from Roswell, something something something crashed spaceship in 1947 something something.
• The SSO discovered that a solar flare was on that way that was going to incinerate the Earth, and the powers-that-be didn't want the astronomers telling everyone and causing havoc.  Given that the observatory closed on September 6, and here we all are, un-incinerated, you'd think this one would have been discounted.  Maybe this is a really slow-moving solar flare, I dunno.
• Some of the scientists at the SSO found out that the secret mission of the facility was using magic tractor beams to mess with the weather, and they had to be silenced.  The argument here, if I can dignify it with the name, is that since HAARP closed down a couple of years ago, the Evil Government Weather Manipulation Program had to be moved elsewhere, and this is the elsewhere to which it had been moved.  The fact that in the last few days we've seen two amazingly powerful killer storms -- Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut -- is displayed as "evidence."  Because powerful hurricanes don't occur every year, or something.
• The FBI took over the SSO because they're going to modify the station to send out mind-control rays and turn Americans into mindless sheep.  From the fact that 36% of us apparently still support Donald Trump, it appears to be working.

And so on.

What, you may ask, do I think about all this?  Easy: what I think about all this is...

... I don't know.

'cuz that's what you say when you have no information.  I agree with the conspiracy theorists insofar as the FBI's action is rather curious; what earthly reason they could have to take over a remote solar observatory without explanation is beyond me.  It may be that at some point we'll find out why the incident happened, or -- because we're talking about the FBI, here -- we may never know.

Which, of course, will just fuel the conspiracy theorists further.  More nothing?  Yay!  That just proves we're right!

But if we're going to approach this whole thing skeptically, we have to be willing to allow ourselves to remain in ignorance -- indefinitely, if need be.  It's not a comfortable position for a lot of us.  People like to have explanations for things.  Certainty is reassuring.  The universe makes sense, everything has a reason.

To once again quote Tyson, "You can't be a scientist if you're uncomfortable steeped in ignorance.  Because scientists are always at the edge of what is known.  If you're not at the edge, you're not doing science."

In any case, keep an eye on the news, and watch out for stories about spaceships or satellites or weather modification or mind-control rays.  Or, perhaps, some more reasonable explanation of what happened.

The latter is what I'd put my money on.

UPDATE (as of Tuesday morning) -- the SSO has reopened, and while the details are still not entirely clear, authorities are saying that "a suspect in the investigation potentially posed a threat to the safety of local staff and residents."

See?  I told you it wasn't aliens.

There's still no information on exactly what kind of threat the suspect posed.  That should settle that, but of course it won't, because the conspiracy theorists will take the lack of details and spin that into a whole new set of claims.  You can't win, which we sort of already knew.

******************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

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

Tax-funded Bigfoot hunt

There was a bit of an uproar amongst science-minded types in New Mexico last year when it became known that Dr. Christopher Dyer, executive director of the University of New Mexico - Gallup, had allowed the university to sponsor a conference and an expedition to hunt for Bigfoot.

Dyer himself is an anthropologist, and therefore should know better.  But this didn't stop him from throwing himself and his school into the event.  Speakers were given honoraria up to $1,000, plus reimbursement for airfare, food, and lodging,  Expedition participants were even given snowshoes -- again, at the expense of the university.

Below is a jpg of the poster for the conference, courtesy of the wonderful site Doubtful News:

For those of you not up to date on your cryptozoology, Jeff Meldrum is the guy who along with Melba Ketchum was responsible for a lot of the pseudoscientific "Bigfoot is too real!" nonsense that's been around in the last few years.

And Meldrum is not the only one with a dubious background.  "New Mexico naturalist Rob Kryder" is also a True Believer, who thinks that the aforementioned Melba Ketchum's "study" was completely convincing despite the fact that her citations were bogus, and her data consisted of a rambling screed that can be summed up as "We have proof, dammit."

Kryder got into a snarling match with KRQE, the station that broke the story about the university-funded goodies all of the participants were getting.  Kryder didn't like the skew eye he and his fellow squatchers were being given, and responded thusly:

BIGFOOT IS A REAL SPECIES/PROOF
To KRQE: In response to your pseudo-investigation and false and misleading special report on the UNM/KX Bigfoot study, the evidence, funding and the blatant lie to the public about the proof of the species.  We at KX challenge you, KRQE to send your presumptious and biased investigative reporter Larry Barker out in the field for just 12 hours with my team.  And if you do, and Larry B isn’t a BF believer by morning, we agree to do all posssible to raise the $7k and pay back the #UNM account for the cost of the public disclosure conference on behalf of Dr Dyer. — The location – The Sandia Mountains just outside Alb NM, home of #KRQE and Larry Barker.  And after, to interview myself and Jeff Meldrum to present the truth of the matter.

So take that.  Of course, KRQE declined to take Kryder up on his offer, but instead decided that if the squatchers wanted to play hardball, they'd be happy to join in.  Larry Barker contacted Senator George Munoz, who is on the State Legislative Finance Committee, and Munoz decided that enough was enough.  So he sponsored a bill making it illegal to hunt Bigfoot on the taxpayer dime.  Here's the text of the bill:

Public funds shall not be expended by a state higher educational institution for the purpose of looking for or catching a fictitious creature, including:
(1) bigfoot;
(2) sasquatch;
(3) yeti;
(4) abominable snowman;
(5) Pokémon;
(6) leprechauns; or
(7) bogeyman.

I have to say that I love that he included Pokémon.  But it does leave open hunts for El Chupacabra, for which New Mexico has been an epicenter of sightings.  My feeling is if you don't include El Chupacabra, and Sheepsquatch while you're at it, you may as well not bother.

But it's certainly a step in the right direction.  I know I wouldn't be happy if Cornell was sending biologists up to our local cryptid hotspot, Connecticut Hill, to look for the famed Connecticut Hill Monster.  As much as I'd love it if there actually was some sort of weird creature stalking around in the woods only twenty miles from my house, the funding for finding it really shouldn't be defrayed by the government or taxpayer-funded institutions of higher learning.

So it'll be interesting to see if the bill gets passed, and more importantly, if other states follow suit.  I'll also be waiting to see what rejoinders Kryder and Meldrum have for Senator Munoz, because you just know they won't take this lying down.  And if they get Melba Ketchum involved, we'll really have a battle royale going.  I can barely wait.

Two takes on a drunk driving accident

All media is biased.

Even the most conscientious news sources and the most unflaggingly even-handed reporters introduce a bias into the stories they give us -- if from nothing else, from what they decide is news.  They can't report everything, and by making the decision for us that we need to hear story A and don't need to hear story B, we're getting only part of the picture.

But it's often worse than that.  There's the sort of unavoidable bias I describe above, and then there's deliberate slant.

And then, of course, there's downright sensationalist trash.

I found a great example of the last-mentioned yesterday.  To tell you about it, I'd like to show you the same story, done two ways, and see which one you go for.

Let's start with the version of the story done by the Plains-Valley Online News, an outlet from southeastern New Mexico.  In it, we hear about an unnamed driver and his passenger, who spent way too much time drinking in a bar on US 70, and rolled their car.  But the police arrived on the scene to find that the driver and his friend were AWOL.

State Police Officer Lieutenant Emanuel Gutierrez said that they tried to find the accident victims, without success.  But seven hours later, they got a second call to the scene, after the two drunk guys woke up from their bender and wandered back to the road.

"The driver stated that he and his passenger were drinking at Way Out West and doesn’t remember what happened next," Gutierrez said.  "The driver also stated that he woke up in a field next to some donkeys."

The driver was charged and released, and was treated at a local hospital for minor injuries to his hand and shoulder, placing him squarely in the "damn lucky" department, and reinforcing what my mother used to say, that "God protects fools and drunks."

So far, you're probably wondering why this ended up in Skeptophilia.  A couple of drunks wreck their car -- so what?  But let's move on to our second source for this story...

... The Daily Mail.

Yes, somehow this rather ordinary and uninteresting little piece was picked up by the notorious British news outlet.  Why, you might ask?

Well, take a look at the headline they gave it:  "Mystery As Two Men Missing For Seven Hours After Car Accident Outside UFO Capital Roswell Wake Up In Field of Donkeys With No Memory of the Night Before."

Let's start with the fact that it's not a mystery.  If you read the original story, you find out that they were sleeping off being drunk. And like many drunks, they had no memory of the night before, because being drunk will do that to one.

Of course, the reporter over at The Daily Mail de-emphasized that point, slipping in a mere passing mention that the driver "admitted he'd been drinking."  What came out much more clearly was the MYSTERY about how these men DISAPPEARED for seven hours and afterwards COULDN'T REMEMBER ANYTHING.  And it all happened near *cue scary music* Roswell, New Mexico.

And for the low-IQ reader who still doesn't understand what they're (wink-wink-nudge-nudge) implying, here's how the story in The Daily Mail ends:

Roswell, New Mexico sprang to international fame on July 8, 1947, when the local newspaper reported the capture of a 'flying saucer' by government officials in the town. 

Over the decades since the discovery, conspiracy theorists have insisted that the debris came from an alien spacecraft, and that the fact was covered up by the military. 

The continuing belief of alien activity in the area led the Air Force to launch an investigation into the crash in 1995. 

Officials concluded that the 'UFO' was part of a balloon launched into the atmosphere as part of a secret government surveillance programme aimed at the USSR. 

However, many have refused to accept that explanation, alleging a conspiracy to hide the existence of extra-terrestrial life.

So what are we left with?  Time slips, and aliens, and abductions.  We've gone from two drunk morons wrecking their car to allegations of the paranormal, driven in with the subtlety of a jackhammer.

Never mind that close to 50,000 people live in Roswell without ever seeing a UFO or being abducted.  Let The Daily Mail get a hold of anything that happens nearby, and it turns into a trash piece about aliens.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Needless to say, this kind of bullshit journalism makes me crazy.  It's hard enough to get people to think skeptically without this sort of nonsense -- even though a good many folks recognize The Daily Mail for the click-bait garbage it is, there is still a sizable number who read this muck and believe it.

But if you needed an example of why you have to question what you read, this should serve as a good cautionary note.  Don't ever turn your brain off when you're reading the news, whatever the source.  Always find out if the claims hold water, and cross-check facts.

And for cryin' in the sink, don't trust The Daily Mail.  I swear, if they reported that grass was green, I'd want to go out in my front yard to check for myself.

Primed to see ghosts

Yesterday we had a report from Española, New Mexico that a surveillance camera at a police station had caught an image of a ghost walking across a locked compound.

"At first I thought it was a fly or moth, then I saw the legs," Officer Karl Romero said.  "And it was a human.  But not a real human.  No.  A ghost."

The local television station picked up the story, and reporters showed up on the scene.  "There's no way in or out of the secured area without an opened gate, or an alarm sounding," the reporter who covered the story said.  An unnamed officer showed her the area where the "ghost" was seen, and said, "You can see it walks through in the direction of the old transport cages, and you can see there's no way for it to get out through there, but it walks right through."

"Detectives say there is no logical explanation," the reporter continues.  "It's not an issue with the lighting, or a technical glitch.  And it turns out, there are a lot of ghost stories around here."

"A lot of our officers have seen certain things," one of the policemen said.  "Some of the officers have felt what appears to be someone breathing down their neck as they're working on reports in the briefing room."

"Española police tell us that as far as they know, this is not an ancient Indian burial ground, and they say that the police station has been there since 2006, but no inmates have died here," the reporter tells us.

And to wrap things up, the officers are asked if they believe in ghosts, and if they think this was the real deal... and predictably, they say yes.

Now, I want you all to go to the link I posted above, and watch the video for yourself.  You'll see why in a moment.

Alrighty then.  Let's stop and think about this a little.

When I watched the video, I was immediately reminded of a quote from Michael Shermer: "Before we jump to an explanation that is out of this world, we should rule out an explanation that is in this world."  I can think of two possible explanations for the ghost image without even trying hard.

First, the ghost could easily be an insect or spider walking across the lens of the camera.  Something that close up would appear blurry and indistinct -- much like the "ghost" was.  But I'll bet that when you watched the video, you were in complete agreement with the officers that the image was shaped like, and walked like, a human.  Why?

Because you'd been primed to believe that it was a human shape.  The officers said so.  When we're told what to see, we most often see it.  Turning back to Michael Shermer, and the talk he gave from which I pulled the above quote, the phenomenon of priming is a well-studied, and well-understood, characteristic of the human mind.  In his talk, he presents us with a bit of a Led Zeppelin song played backwards, and it sounds like gibberish -- until we are given subtitles that tell us what we're supposed to be hearing.  And then, lo!  We hear exactly that.  (And no surprise that the backmasked lyrics are all about Satan.)

So if you go back and watch the video again, and consciously try to see the image on the surveillance tape for what it is rather than what you were being told it was, suddenly it doesn't seem as clear that it's human, any more.  It could well be a bug, in fact.

But suppose further analysis, should such become possible, shows that the image is in fact human-shaped?  It still doesn't mean it's a ghost.  Some older security cameras aren't digital, meaning that they run on a magnetic tape system, similar to old VCRs.  Since there's no need to keep tapes on which nothing interesting happened, they are frequently reused and recorded over -- sometimes resulting in what amounts to an echo from a previously recorded video.  It's possible that there was a video recorded of a guy crossing the compound when the gates were open, and that those images weren't fully recorded over in the new video.

Do I know that one of these two explanations is correct?  No.  Maybe there was no bug, and for all I know the security system used in the Española Police Department is running on digital video recording only.  But I'd want to explore all of the possibilities of a natural explanation before I jump to a supernatural one.  And unfortunately, that isn't happening here.  The reporter, especially, wasn't helping matters, by suggesting that if there was no ancient Indian burial ground nearby, and no one had died in the station, that we'd exhausted all the possible avenues of inquiry.

Let's not let prior belief, priming, and fear hobble our capacities for rational thought, okay?