Nazi coins from the future

In the latest from the "News Stories That Make Me Want To Take Ockham's Razor And Slit My Wrists With It" department, we have a claim about an odd coin allegedly found near a construction site in Mexico.

First, the facts of the situation, insofar as I could find out.

The coin is highly weathered, and has some phrases in both German and Spanish.  It says "Nueva Alemania" ("New Germany," in Spanish) and "Alle in einer Nation" (German for "all in one nation").  There's a swastika on one side and the Iron Cross on the other, and a blurred date ending in "39."  (If you want to see a video that includes shots of the coin, there's a clip at The Daily Star showing it and its finder, Diego Aviles.)

So that's the claim.  Now let's see which of the three possible explanations proffered to account for it makes the most sense to you:

1. It's a fake.
2. It's an obscure coin, dating from the late 1930s, and could be potentially valuable as a historical artifact.
3. The date actually reads "2039," so it's a coin from 21 years in the future, at which point a Nazi state will rule Mexico if not the rest of the world, except that one of the future Nazis time-slipped backwards and dropped the coin, only to be found by Aviles.  Since the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Nazis have been hiding out in Antarctica, from which they will burst out some time between now and 2039, to initiate World War III and take over the entire world.

Yes, apparently there are people who think that explanation #3 is spot-on.  So it's like someone reworded Ockham's Razor to read, "Of competing explanations that account for all of the known facts, the most likely one is the one that requires 5,293 ad-hoc assumptions, breaking every known law of physics, and pretzel logic that only someone with the IQ of a peach pit could think sounded plausible."

But maybe I'm being a little uncharitable, because there are people who add to #3 some bizarre bullshit about it having to do with the "Mandela effect" and parallel universes and alternate realities.

Myself, I'm perfectly satisfied when I can explain things using the regular old reality.  But that's just me.

NOTE: Not the coin they found.  This one's a real Nazi coin.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Over at Mysterious Universe (the first link provided above), Sequoyah Kennedy does a pretty thorough job of debunking the whole thing, ending with the following tongue-in-cheek comment that rivals this post for snark:

Maybe the only explanation is that the Antarctic Nazis develop time travel in the near future, go back in time to the 1930’s, and try to convince the Mexican government to side with them in WWII by giving them a commemorative coin, which won’t work, because that’s a ridiculous and insulting way to forge an alliance.  The commemorative future coin will then be thrown away and left to sit in the dirt until it’s unearthed in 2018.  It’s the only rational explanation, really.

Indeed.  And we should also take into account that the story was broken in The Daily Star, which is the only media source I know that rivals The Daily Mail Fail for sheer volume of nonsense.

So the coin may well exist, but I'm putting my money on "fakery."  Even the idea that it's a real coin from the 1930s doesn't bear much scrutiny, because Mexico and Germany weren't on the same side in World War II, so it'd be pretty bizarre to have some kind of Mexican Nazi currency lying around.

Of course, when the Stormtroopers come roaring out of their secret bases in Antarctica and Cancun, I suppose I'll have to eat my words.  Occupational hazard of what I do.

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This week's Featured Book on Skeptophilia:

This week I'm featuring a classic: Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  Sagan, famous for his work on the series Cosmos, here addresses the topics of pseudoscience, skepticism, credulity, and why it matters -- even to laypeople.  Lucid, sometimes funny, always fascinating.

The Phoenix devil

At present I've been sent a link five times to a claim that someone near Phoenix, Arizona took a photograph of Satan.

Without further ado, let's take a look at the photo:

A couple of the people who sent it to me appended messages along the lines of, "Hoo boy.  Look at what people are claiming now."  Two, however, had more noteworthy commentary, which I reproduce in toto below.

Photo submitter #1:

You like to scoff about the evil in the world, and claim that our souls aren't in peril.  Satan walks among us.  Unbelievers like you will be the first to be dragged to Hell.

Photo submitter #2:

People like Mr. Skeptic doubt evidence for the supernatural when its [sic] right in front of your face.  I wonder what would happen if you saw this with your own eyes.  Would you keep doubting then?  It's easy for Armchair Skeptics to sit in their living rooms and say no, but as soon as you go out in the world you learn that its [sic] not that simple.

Well, predictably, I'm not impressed.  To paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson (who in the original quote was talking about UFOs) there probably is an "add demon" function on Photoshop.  My general opinion is pretty consistent with the following:

However, the bigger question is why I'm a Scoffing Armchair Skeptic about such matters more has to do with Ockham's Razor.  Ockham's Razor is rightly called a rule of thumb -- something which isn't 100% true but is still a pretty damn good guide to understanding.  The original formulation comes from William of Ockham, a 14th century monk and philosopher, who phrased it as "Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate" (Don't multiply entities without necessity), but a more modern phrasing is "All other things being equal, of competing hypotheses, choose the one that requires the least assumptions."  (It must be pointed out that Ockham himself was hardly a scientific rationalist; he's also the one who said, "Only faith gives us access to theological truths.  The ways of God are not open to reason, for God has freely chosen to create a world and establish a way of salvation within it apart from any necessary laws that human logic or rationality can uncover."  So while Ockham's Razor is a great idea, I doubt I'd have agreed with him on much else.)

In any case, the Demon of Phoenix certainly is more easily explainable as a hoax than it is that Satan for some reason descended upon southern Arizona, posed for a blurry snapshot, and then disappeared without doing anything else or being seen by anyone else.  So the second submitter is, in a sense, quite right; I would be much more likely to believe that it was real if I did see it with my own eyes.  Just looking at the photograph, here in my Comfortable Armchair, I'm still saying "Nah."

Of course, being dragged to hell would do it, too.  Nothing like a little fire and brimstone to convince one of the reality of a situation.  But until that happens, you can still put me in the "Mr. Skeptic" column.

Cows are from Mars, wheat is from Venus

There are some types of woo-woo thinking that I can at least understand.

Let's take one of my favorites, which is Tarot card divination.  While my general attitude toward it is that there is no possible way it can work, you can see why someone might think that it does.  If you enter a Tarot card reading with the opinion that it's going to tell you something mystical and important, you will tend to interpret whatever the cards show in that light, giving greater weight to information that supports your assertion and less weight to information that contradicts it.  This confirmation bias, then, leads you to stronger and stronger belief in an incorrect model, unless you are consistently on guard against the natural human tendency toward it.

Add that to the fact that most divination is done, for pay, by people who are skilled at reading their clients' body language, and tailoring their spiel based upon the reaction they're getting -- so it's no wonder that they come off sounding convincing.

So these sorts of things might be wrong, but at least they're understandable.

What I don't get at all is when people take a bit of real information, and derive from that information a completely ridiculous explanation.  This Ockham's-Razor-in-reverse approach, as I've commented before, is the basis of a lot of conspiracy theories.  But just this past weekend, my cousin in New Mexico, who has been the source of many wonderful topics for Skeptophilia, told me about an example of this phenomenon that may be the best I've ever seen.

Health and nutrition magazines, books, and websites have seen a great deal of buzz lately about the dangers of gluten in food, and not just for people who have the devastating (and easily diagnosed) condition called celiac disease or celiac sprue.  There is a contention, gaining ground especially amongst the proponents of the so-called "paleo diet," that gluten is bad for everyone, and that we all would benefit from eliminating it completely from our tables.

The trouble is, there's no good diagnostic test for "Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity" (NCGS), which leads to the problem that it's hard to separate it from other disorders with rather vague, diffuse symptoms, not to mention chronic hypochondria.  Look, for example, at this article at Natural News called "Six Signs You Might Have Gluten Sensitivity."  Damn near all of us have some of the symptoms on the list, so without critical consideration, we might assume that we were gluten sensitive.

Now I hasten to add that I am quite sure that NCGS is a real thing; two recent controlled studies (available here and here) looked at the phenomenon closely, and although neither was able to determine a usable clinical diagnostic protocol for it, remember that the same was true for years for such disorders as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, both of which are now fairly well accepted as valid diagnoses.

But because NCGS is still out of the reach of conventional medicine to diagnose, it does leave people free to decide for themselves what the reason for it might be.  Which is why there is an increasing number of claims out there that we shouldn't eat gluten -- or drink milk, either, for that matter -- because wheat and cows are from outer space.

I'm not making this up.  For example, take the following, that showed up on the Starseed Network:

Aliens gave us cows and wheat?

I've been researching. From what I can find, cows just showed up about 10,000 years ago. There were similar species before then but were too wild and twice as big.

Wheat, too, just appeared about the same time.

I'm just getting into all this.

Has anyone else ever heard of/know anything about this? I'd like to do a blog post about it and I'm having a hard time finding anything. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place. Anyway, anything anyone's got would be great!

And while there were a couple of derisive responses, as you might expect, more of them were entirely in support of this bizarre contention.  One of them suggested that goats might be aliens, too, because they have slit pupils.  And then there was this:

In my spirit quests I have been told that cows were on mars. Wheat was brought by ET to be farmed by mankind. Have you ever heard of Operation MindFuck? The author of Illuminatus (Robert Anton Wilson) and Cosmic Trigger, talks about an instance where a man, Joseph Simonton, had an extraterrestrial encounter and the alien being presented him with a plate of wheat germ pancakes. 

Well, there you are, then.

I suppose that this would explain one thing, namely, the fact that the aliens when they come here seem intent on stomping out patterns in wheat fields and mutilating and/or abducting cows.  If you are doubtful about the latter, you should visit the wonderful site Cow Abduction.  Once it loads, pass your cursor over the image of Bessie, contentedly munching grass in a field, and then tell me that's not the most awesome thing you've ever seen.

Be that as it may, I'm doubtful that aliens are responsible for any of this, especially not the origins of cows and wheat.  Cattle have been around for a long, long time, and their domestication from the wild bovine called the aurochs has been thoroughly studied by paleontologists and archaeologists.  As far as wheat goes, its origin lies in the (natural) hybridization of two species of wild grasses, followed by artificial selection by early humans [Source].

So, much as you might like to attribute the bellyache you got after eating a bagel with cream cheese to the extraterrestrial origins of gluten and lactose, it doesn't really hold water.

But if you're looking for a terrestrial species that might have been seeded here by aliens, my vote would go to the carrot.  In my mind, carrots have no redeeming features, with the possible exception of carrot cake, which only works because the carrot flavor is swamped by large quantities of cinnamon and ginger.  Otherwise, carrots (1) taste disgusting, especially when cooked, and (2) if eaten in sufficient quantity, will turn your skin orange.

Sounds like an evil alien plot to infiltrate our dinners, to me.

So that's our dip in the deep end for today.  Just to conclude: even though gluten and lactose sensitivity are real phenomena, there is no need to leap to the further conclusion that wheat and cows are from outer space.  If you doubt that, you should probably consult your local Tarot card reader, whom I am sure will confirm what I'm telling you.

Erich Kuersten, Penn Yan, and the quality of evidence

A recent post by noted wingnut Erich Kuersten, "The Zealots of Doubt: Why Skeptics Are The New Cranks" made me feel like I had to clear up a few things.

Kuersten's screed levies a charge at people of my general outlook, one that I've heard many times:

...skepticism no longer means curious or open to new input and has instead become the refuge of the bitter and attention-seeking...  A true skeptic is not swayed either by science or religion or firsthand experience, they are not suckers but neither are they fundamentalist zealots, BUT when you deny any evidence, even if it's just firsthand accounts, because it doesn't fit your paradigm, then you are not a skeptic, you are exactly what you're seeking to expose, a religious nut, only for science instead of God. You're an anti-zealotry zealot.

He gives a few examples of what we skeptics would disbelieve in, if we were just honest and consistent with our approach:

They claim they'll believe in aliens when they can meet one in person, yet the believe in George Washington based purely on anecdotal evidence, at best, firsthand witness reports filtered down through the ages, some sketchy portraits. And if they haven't been to Morocco, how do they even find the courage to trust it's there?

So like I said, I'd heard this sort of thing before, although never from this source.  Kuersten usually spends more of his time demonstrating evidence of his curiosity and openness to new input by claiming that Bigfoots are actually telepathic proto-hominids who were slaves to the ruling aliens prior to the Great Flood of Noah.  (See my post on his ideas here.)  So I'm perhaps to be forgiven for entertaining some doubts about his reliability right from the get-go.

Let's look past that, however, and (as befits a true skeptic) look at his criticisms honestly, with no consideration of what else he's claimed.  Is he right?  Does my general disbelief in ghosts and ESP and the Loch Ness Monster mean that, if I was to apply the same principles to everything, I would also disbelieve in Morocco and George Washington?  Am I, in his words, an anti-zealotry zealot?

Well, predictably, I don't think so, and the reason has to do with quality of evidence.

Let me give you an example.

There's a town in New York called Penn Yan.  Penn Yan isn't very far from where I live, but as it so happens, I've never been to Penn Yan.  I hear it's a nice place, from friends who've visited.  I've seen photographs, and it's in my road atlas, and also on Google Maps, MapQuest, and so on.  Now, let's consider two rival hypotheses:

1)  Penn Yan exists, as advertised.
2)  Penn Yan is a giant hoax designed to hoodwink credulous travelers.

I do not have direct, first-hand evidence for either of these.  Which of these hypotheses, however, would (if true) force the greatest revision of our current understanding of how the world works?  Clearly, if hypothesis #2 is correct, and Penn Yan does not exist, it leaves unanswered several questions, to wit:

What is actually in the place where I had previously assumed Penn Yan was?  A giant hole?
What earthly motive do all of the people who created the Great Penn Yan Hoax have for doing this?
How do you explain all of the photographs, maps, and other "artifacts" that attest to Penn Yan's existence?

It doesn't take much of a stretch to see that that we need a vastly higher quality of evidence to accept hypothesis #2 than we do to accept hypothesis #1.

Kuersten's problem is that he seems to think that skepticism (if only we would be fair about the whole thing) should start out as a blank slate, when in fact the skeptical, rational approach has already given us a rock-solid framework within which to understand the world.  This framework is called science.  We already know a great deal about physics, biology, and chemistry -- so when a psychic claims to be able to bend spoons with his mind, scientists aren't going to begin from the standpoint that this is as likely to be true as not.  We have a fine understanding of forces and energy; we also have a good (although less complete) grasp of how the human brain works.  Neither of these is sufficient to explain how someone could perform telekinesis.  Therefore, if you claim that you can perform mental spoon-bending, you'd better have a far higher quality of evidence than my null-hypothesis ("you're not doing any such thing") would require.  (This concept is at the heart of both Ockham's Razor and the ECREE principle, two models of critical thinking that serve as excellent rules of thumb.)

Kuersten wants to throw every idea -- however counter it is to our current understanding -- into the same pot:

Science admits it's barely begun to explore the 'other' 90% of the brain, all while ridiculing any conjecture about what the unknown 90% may consist of. Telepathy is ridiculous (why? They can't be bothered to ask their superiors for fear of being branded a kook); science admits they've catalogued less than 20% of all the creatures that exist in the ocean, but sea serpents are ridiculous.

Well, first, I'm not sure what "other 90% of the brain" he's talking about, but even allowing that he's speaking metaphorically, all he's doing here is relying on a logical fallacy called "the argument from ignorance."  "We don't know what is out there in deep space, so it could be aliens: therefore aliens exist."  "We don't know if there is an afterlife: therefore ghosts exist."  The problem with all of these claims is that skeptics need something more than the argument from ignorance, especially given that most of the claims of woo-woos like Kuersten fly in the face of one or more established, tested scientific principles.

But nevertheless: could I (and other skeptics like me) be wrong?  Of course.  As I've said over and over in this blog, I will happily revise my views on any or all of the ideas that I've poked fun at over the years.  All I need is solid evidence.  You think sea-serpents exist?  Show me a bone that we can DNA test.  You think telepathy exists?  Prove it in a controlled study.  I'm not going to say that your views are impossible, but thus far, the quality of evidence is insufficient to support them.  And in view of that, the accepted paradigm is a great deal more likely to be true.  And I'd be willing to wager my next month's salary that if I were to get on Highway 14 and head west, Penn Yan would be right there, where the map said it was.

Cloaked Romulan spacecraft and the strength of Ockham's Razor

It is an inevitable danger of being a self-styled rationalist skeptic that I may not recognize credible evidence for something bizarre when I see it, because I'd already be looking for ways to dismiss it before the dust even settled.

It's a charge that's been levied at me with some regularity.  You don't believe in ghosts, eh?  All of the photographs, videos, and eyewitness accounts are just natural anomalies and human senses being fooled?  You wouldn't accept a ghost as real if one bit you on the ass.  How about Bigfoot?  All of the accounts of Bigfoot are fakes?  Seriously?  And the psychics... just because some psychics have turned out to be frauds, you have decided that all of them are?

"Skeptic?  Pfft.  You're just as stuck in your own worldview as the rest of us."

I have to admit that these comments do give me some pause, every time I receive one.  I lean pretty hard on the ECREE principle -- Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  But what, then, constitutes "extraordinary" evidence?  Suppose something really, truly paranormal was going on -- would I even recognize it as such?

Take, for example, the claim that's been all over the news -- that NASA released a photo of the planet Mercury that contained the faint image of a giant cloaked spaceship.  (You can read an article about this, and see images, here.)  The individual who found the image, a YouTube poster with the handle "siniXster," states that NASA's STEREO imaging satellite took a photograph of a coronal mass ejection, and that the particles emitted by the CME washed over Mercury -- catching in its wake an object of equal size that was hovering, invisible, nearby.  This disrupted the CME and rendered the object temporarily visible.

"It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked," siniXster said in his YouTube video about the image.

Okay.  All Star Trek references aside, my first reaction was, "An invisible spaceship as big as a planet?  Really?"  But then I thought, "Well, I've always said that it was entirely possible that there was life out there in the universe... what if there was a superpowerful alien species, with a giant ship, out near Mercury watching us, and they'd rendered their ship invisible to us using some advanced technology.  Might I just be overdoing the rationalist skeptic thing, and missing something amazing?"

Well, that possibility does exist, and I'd be a pretty poor skeptic if I didn't realize that my perceptual apparatus and brain are just as flawed as the next guy's, and my capacity for such inherent problems with inference as dart-thrower's bias is just as great.  How, then, do I decide for sure if they've stumbled upon something earthshattering?

Besides ECREE, a rule of thumb I tend to trust more often than not is Ockham's Razor; that all other things being equal, the explanation that requires you to make the least ad hoc assumptions is probably the correct one.  In this case, is there a simpler explanation that addresses all of the evidence?

Unfortunately for siniXster and others who think that we're being monitored by the Romulans, the answer is yes.  Russ Howard, head researcher in solar physics at the Naval Research Laboratory provided a nice little explanation of the photograph.  The Mercury-sized object hovering in Mercury's orbit isn't a cloaked spacecraft, Howard says.  Actually... it's Mercury:

To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space—caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background—the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible.  They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day.  Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME.  The remaining light is then enhanced.  When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image.

But... how do I know that this is right?  Am I just trying to be superskeptic here, and leaping at the Official Explanation because it means I don't have to revise my worldview?

Answering that question as honestly as I know how, I think I still have to say "no."  Being a skeptic doesn't mean that you reject paranormal explanations out of hand just because they're paranormal; but it does mean that you have to evaluate the evidence as best you can, and accept the best explanation that's out there on the market.  My frequent critics notwithstanding, I do think I'm open-minded enough that I wouldn't be blind to evidence of something weird should it eventually happen along.  I just don't think that this is it.  Ockham's Razor is a statement about how the universe behaves, and how we can come to understand it; and in my experience, it works pretty damn well, even if it does preclude a huge cloaked Romulan spaceship, which honestly would be kind of cool if it were true.

Ockham's Razor is not a law, however; convoluted and wildly improbable events do occur, and it may well be that there are phenomena out there that lie outside the purview of our conventional scientific explanations.  If this is true, I would love to experience some of them first hand, and I hope that I would be accepting of their veracity despite my preconceived conviction that they don't exist.  Perhaps Mark Twain was right when he said, "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable."