Service station ghosts, haunted wells, and bloodless cows

I get a lot of odd links sent to me, which I suppose I should expect, given that strange claims are kind of our stock-in-trade here at Skeptophilia headquarters.  I hasten to add that I really appreciate the effort my readers make to keep me informed as to what's going on in the Wide World of Weirdness, so as the talk show hosts used to say, "Keep those cards and letters comin'."

In the last couple of days I was sent links to three stories (one of them was sent to me four times), so I thought I should let my readers know what's going on in ParanormalLand.

First, we have a claim out of Mayfield, County Cork, Ireland, that a ghost has been spotted haunting a service station.

Twice, apparently.  The first time was caught on closed-circuit camera from inside the service station convenience store, where the ghost tossed about a package of cookies and a basket of bananas; the second time was on the CCTV outside the station.  The videos are both on the link provided.  The first one was pretty obvious, although I maintain that someone trying to create a hoopla could easily have accomplished the whole thing using a piece of string tied to the cookie package and banana basket.  As far as the second one goes, I'm... unimpressed.  I've watched it through twice, and frankly, I don't see a damned thing.  There's some repeated blurring, but that looks to me like water on the camera lens (this is southwestern Ireland, after all, so it was probably raining), but nothing that looks even remotely like a "figure of a woman."

That hasn't stopped people from acting like it's incontrovertible proof of the existence of the spirit world.

"I started Wednesday morning and saw biscuits on the ground and thought nothing of it," said shop owner Tom O'Flynn.  "Then I went around and saw a large fruit bowl on the ground so we checked CCTV and it looks as though it was pushed off.  I would have been very skeptical with things like this, but I looked at all angles and I'm at a loss with this...  This was at 12:30 at night and both incidents happened about 10 minutes part.  The bowl was full of bananas, oranges, and apples, and it got pulled over and there was no one around...  Jesus, when I saw it my heart kind of pounded.  I didn't know what to make of it, I looked at all angles and couldn't get my head around it."

Suffice it to say I wasn't quite as taken aback, but then, I wasn't there when it happened.

Then there's an investigation of a "haunted well" near Basildon, Essex, England, where people allegedly burst into tears and want to kill each other.

Called Cash's Well, the place is named after one Edwin Cash, who true to his name tried to make some quick money off "healing waters" from the site in the early twentieth century, but went bankrupt when people reported the well water making them sick.  Since then, the area around the well has gotten the reputation for being haunted (aficionados of ghosts claim that's why the water had the ill effects it did -- it was cursed, or something).  A recent investigation resulted in people confirming feeling wonky when they got near the well -- several reported feeling cold, "goosebumpy," or sad, and one reported they had unexplained violent urges.

The group worked with "spirit guides," who fulfilled their duties to the letter when the investigators got lost looking for the well, and one of the guides said, "Turn left."

Being a rather rabid fan of Doctor Who, I'm not sure I would have responded that that positively.

Anyhow, I was intrigued until I heard the explanation given by Russell (no last name provided), of Essex Ghost Hunters, about the nature of the phenomenon.  "We've all got an aura, which is scientifically proven," Russell told a reporter for Essex Online.  "We've all got a two-inch energy bubble that surrounds us all the time.   When spirits come close they will interact with that bubble, something has moved your aura and it's wobbling.  The two energies pull apart and that's what causes the vibration."

Righty-o.  Wobbly auras and energy bubbles and energies pulling apart.  "Scientifically proven."

Next.

Last, there's the link that's been sent to me (as of this writing) four times, about a rather gruesome situation on a ranch in eastern Oregon, where five cattle have been completely exsanguinated -- and had specific body parts removed -- most bizarrely, leaving no evidence in the way of tire tracks, footprints, or other marks.

The five bulls were all found this summer, missing their tongues and testicles, and -- according to rancher Colby Marshall -- "without one drop of blood."  This is a major loss to the ranch, so it's crazy to assume that the ranchers themselves had anything to do with it; unlike the ghost in the service station, they've got nothing to gain from fifteen minutes of fame, and (again, according to Marshall) lost thirty thousand dollars from the bulls' deaths.  

The Harney County Sheriff's Office has been looking into the incident, and Silvies Valley Ranch -- owner of the dead cattle -- are offering a $25,000 reward for anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator(s).  But the whole thing has the investigators baffled, because it's not like accomplishing this would have been easy.  "[The area is] rugged," Marshall said.  "I mean this is the frontier.  If some person, or persons, has the ability to take down a 2,000-pound range bull, you know, it's not inconceivable that they wouldn't have a lot of problems dealing with a 180-pound cowboy."

So employees of the ranch have been instructed to always go out (at least) in pairs, and never to leave the ranch building unarmed.

Of course, given the nature of the crime, the whole "aliens abducting cattle" thing has come up, but there's no evidence of that.  The problem is, there's no evidence at all.  Andie Davis, who with her husband operates a ranch nearby (and who two years also had cattle die under mysterious circumstances), found the absence of marks the most perplexing thing.

"Everything you do leaves tracks," Davis said.

So of the three stories, this is the one I find the oddest and the least explicable.  I'm still not going with aliens -- not without more to go on -- but I have to admit there's no other ready explanation.  Unlike flying cookies and goosebumpy auras, at least this story has some evidence that it's hard to explain away as a hoax or confirmation bias.

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I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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

Hyena-pigs and fish with lungs

Today we're going to look at two new bits of research from the field of paleontology that highlight how evolution can produce some really bizarre critters.

First, we have a discovery in Oregon of a fossil mesonychid.  The mesonychids were some of the first big mammalian predators, originating in the Paleocene Epoch (right after the K-T Extinction), reaching a peak in the Eocene, and finally going extinct in the early Oligocene, giving them a not-inconsequential run of 33 million years.  These things were seriously scary-looking.  Consider, for example, Mesonyx, which is the "type-species" that gives the entire group its name:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I haven't told you the weirdest thing about the mesonychids, though -- which is that their nearest living relatives appear to be whales.  Perhaps not so strange, though, when you see a reconstruction of Ambulocetus, one of the ancestors of today's cetaceans:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Ambulocetus BW, CC BY 3.0]

Then again, the closest extant relatives of whales are the artiodactyla -- including pigs, deer, and hippos -- so it's not surprising that species can show some unexpected affinities.

Anyhow, this comes up because of a discovery in the John Day Fossil Beds in Oregon of a mesonychid that had never been found in the northwestern United States before.  Called Harpagolestes uintensis, it was the size of a bear, but had proto-hooves, not to mention big, nasty, pointy teeth.  "It kind of looked a little piggy,” said Nick Famoso, chief of paleontology and museum curator at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.  "It has a pig-like skull and jaw, it had hooves.  But it was definitely out there eating meat and bone...  Imagine a hyena, crossed with a pig.  And that’s kind of what this animal would have looked like."

So thanks for an image that will haunt my nightmares.

Then there's the discovery that is the subject of a paper in last month's Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, by Maureen O'Leary et al., that describes some new discoveries in sedimentary deposits in Mali.  Back in the Cretaceous Period, Mali was mostly underwater -- there was a (relatively) shallow seaway connecting what is now the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, right across north Africa.  The fossil beds from these strata have proven to be extremely rich and diverse, but getting to them (and then back home safely) is no mean feat given the unrest, terrorism, and general lawlessness prevalent in that part of the world.

But O'Leary and her team have brought back a picture of a world where what is now the Sahara Desert was a salt-water channel bordered by lush mangrove swamps, and probably looked more like Central America than Libya.  The last expedition to Mali -- and the subject of the paper -- describes the discovery of enormous catfish and a species of sea snake that got to be twelve meters long.

But the weirdest thing they discovered there was an extremely creepy species of lungfish, reconstructed as follows:

Is it just me, or is this thing just a little too close to the Jagrafess from the Doctor Who episode "The Long Game?"

Speaking of nightmare fuel.

So there are our cool discoveries from the world of paleontology for today.  I know prehistoric life is fascinating, but myself, I'm just as happy to know I can go outside and not be torn apart by a hyena-pig, bitten by a twelve-meter-long snake, or chomped on by something that looks like a giant worm with human teeth.  Call me risk-averse, but there you are.

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The subject of Monday's blog post gave me the idea that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation should be a classic -- Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  This book, written back in 1949, is an analysis of the history and biology of the human/canine relationship, and is a must-read for anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a doggy companion.

Given that it's seventy years old, some of the factual information in Man Meets Dog has been superseded by new research -- especially about the genetic relationships between various dog breeds, and between domestic dogs and other canid species in the wild.  But his behavioral analysis is impeccable, and is written in his typical lucid, humorous style, with plenty of anecdotes that other dog lovers will no doubt relate to.  It's a delightful read!

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

Discrimination and brain scans

Today we have two stories that are interesting in juxtaposition.

The first is out of North Bend, Oregon, where two high school students reported ongoing harassment not only from students, but teachers and administrators, over the fact that the students are LGBT.

One of the students, Hailey Smith, describes an incident that is horrifying. "The discrimination wasn't an isolated incident and it didn't just come from students," she says.  "When I told the principal that my civics teacher called me out in front of the whole class and said same-sex marriage was 'pretty much the same thing' as marrying a dog,' the principal told me 'everybody has the right to their own opinion.'  The next day, the teacher apologized, but as I walked away, he said 'don't go marrying your dog.'"

Violence toward the two students went unaddressed.  The second student, Liv Funk, says she was harassed by several other students, and once was ambushed outside school, where she had "I fucking hate homos" yelled at her -- and then was hit twice with a skateboard.  Funk brought this to the attention of Jason Griggs, the school resource officer.  Instead of making sure she felt safe in her own school, and seeing that the students who attacked her received consequences for their actions, he turned the blame against Funk.

"Mr. Griggs said being gay was a choice, and it was against his religion," Funk reported.  "He said he had homosexual friends, but because I was an open homosexual, I was going to hell."

The story ends as happily as this sort of thing ever could.  The students brought these incidents to the attention of the ACLU, who filed a lawsuit against the school.  Both Griggs and the principal, Bill Lucero, have been fired.

Which they should be.  As school administrators, it is your job to protect the rights of the students who are in your charge.  All of your students, regardless of race, ethnic origin, religion, or sexual orientation.  If you can't do that, find another job.

It is also most decidedly not your business to bring your own religion into the picture.  You are free not to pursue homosexual liaisons if your religion tells you not to.  Whether anyone else does is, frankly, none of your damn business, and it once again brings up the open question of why so many people on the religious right are so incredibly concerned with what other consenting adults are doing in the privacy of their own homes.  With regards to sex, most of us just do it in whatever form we enjoy; these people seem absolutely obsessed with how everyone else is doing it, and often focus on that question with a dogged determination that suggests they spend most of their time thinking about it.

Which is, honestly, a little skeevy.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The second story comes from the University of Liège (Belgium), where a neuroscientist named Julie Bakker studied diffusion tensor imaging brain scans of 160 children and teenagers who were transgender -- to use the medical term, had gender dysphoria, where they felt that they were the opposite gender from their anatomical sex.  And she found that these young people had brain structures that are consistent with the gender they feel they are, not the gender their reproductive organs would suggest.

Bakker was clear on what this implies.  "Although more research is needed, we now have evidence that sexual differentiation of the brain differs in young people with GD, as they show functional brain characteristics that are typical of their desired gender," she said.  "We will then be better equipped to support these young people, instead of just sending them to a psychiatrist and hoping that their distress will disappear spontaneously."

So what LGBT people have always claimed is once again shown to be exactly correct; that sexual orientation and gender identification are not a choice, but a result of a fundamental difference in brain wiring.  It makes as much sense to discriminate against LGBT people as it would to discriminate against someone based on their eye color.

More to the point, since 99% of the anti-LGBT sentiment you hear comes from very religious people; if these individuals are wired that way, doesn't that mean that (in your worldview) God created them that way?  Funny how this implies that your all-loving God has created millions of people specifically for you to hate.

I'd like to think that this will open people's eyes a little, but I may be overly optimistic to think that.  People like Lucero and Griggs, the school administrators who gave tacit approval to harassment and violence against LGBT teenagers, clearly aren't going to let a little thing like a peer-reviewed scientific study change how they see the world.  I will say, though, that people like them will eventually be seen for who they are.  Just as we now look on the people who thought that other races were inferior, who sanctioned slavery and violence and discrimination, with well-deserved disdain, I can say with some confidence that the bigots of the world -- regardless of their target -- will one day be labeled as being on the wrong side of history.

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This week's book recommendation is a brilliant overview of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly.  If you're interested in critical thinking, it's a must-read; and even folks well-versed in the ins and outs of skepticism will learn something from Dobelli's crystal-clear prose.

Sovereign criminals

Hi all... a quick Public Service Announcement before I get to today's post.

My publisher has set up a Facebook fan page for me, where I'll be periodically posting teasers from my fiction, announcing new releases, and discussing writing, reading, and the meaning of life.  I welcome you all to join it and participate -- I'll be checking it often and would love to have some interesting conversations going.  It's called The Bonnet Conspiracy (a nod to Skeptophilia's content) -- head over there and join if you're interested.  Hope to see you there!

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You probably remember Ryan and Ammon Bundy, sons of Cliven Bundy, who decided to protest government interference in grazing rights by taking over a bird sanctuary in Oregon.

The Bundys and other members of Yokel Haram occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Sanctuary Headquarters for several weeks before the Feds shot and killed one of them (he was in the process of drawing a gun while running a roadblock) and the remainder decided that discretion was the better part of valor and gave themselves up.

The problem is (from the Bundys' standpoint, at least), "giving up" doesn't mean "all is forgiven."  They're facing multiple felony charges, and since they weren't trying to be sneaky about what they were doing, there is ample evidence for the prosecution to capitalize upon.  So you're an anti-government whackjob who has been caught dead to rights in armed occupation of a federally-owned building -- what do you do?

You claim that you're a sovereign citizen over whom the government has no jurisdiction, of course.

Ryan Bundy has filed several legal statements intended to communicate that he believes that the authorities have no right to press charges against him.  The statements, though, all sound like this:

i; ryan c, man, am an idiot of the ‘Legal Society’; and; am an idiot (layman, outsider) of the ‘Bar Association’; and; i am incompetent; and; am not required by any law to be competent; and;,. 

And this:

i; ryan c, man, accept no offer of representation, as no man is qualified to represent i; and; i; ryan c, man, will hold any man liable, in his/her private capacity, for any burden, placed upon i, man, by any man, by way of representation of i; and;,.

Alan Pyke of ThinkProgress explains that the use of lower case, the semicolons, and the other weird structure is a hallmark of legal statements from the "Sovereign Citizen" movement, which claims that governments, laws, state and federal boundaries, and so on and so forth are meaningless, and that the rights of the individual cannot be impinged upon by anything or anybody.  They also have this wacky idea that there is a "shadow government," formed of a secret cabal of bad guys (who sound an awful lot like the Illuminati), who are really running the whole show, and who get their hooks into you every time you file any document with the government -- including birth and marriage certificates, applications for driver's licenses, tax forms, and the census.  They then use your documentation as collateral for borrowing money from their evil cohorts around the world to fund their nefarious doings.

Why my birth certificate should be worth anything to a super-secret ring of evildoers in, say, Azerbaijan is kind of a mystery.  But apparently it is.  So therefore lower case letters and semicolons and armed occupation of bird sanctuaries.

Ryan Bundy [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyway, trying to escape prosecution by declaring himself an idiot isn't the only thing he's been doing.  Since he's been in jail, he's been stockpiling food (once a survivalist, always a survivalist, I guess), and took a bedsheet and braided it into a rope in an apparent plan for an escape attempt.  The guards objected, oddly enough.  Brought before the judge to defend himself against charges of attempted escape, he said that he was just "a rancher, trying to practice braiding rope."

So his "you can't tell me what to do" strategy seems to be falling on deaf ears so far.  Not that it'll discourage him from trying.  These types don't give up, even though the funny thing is, the sovereign citizen defense never works.  Ask actor Wesley Snipes, who tried it to avoid prosecution for tax evasion.  The judge basically said, "Nice try.  Next time try looking up the definition of the word 'jurisdiction.'  See you in three years."

So I don't expect that it's going to work any better for Bundy et al.  It's a fittingly loony postscript on an event that was pretty surreal from the outset.  You have to wonder how he's going to act once he gets to prison, which seems like the likeliest outcome.  "I refuse to share a cell.  Sovereign citizens require private quarters, as befits someone who rules his own destiny.  And steak for dinner every night."

To which I expect the warden will respond, "What we have here is... a failure to communicate."

My will be done

I was raised Roman Catholic, and considered myself Catholic for the first twenty or so years of my life.  I followed the precepts to the best of my ability, went to church every Sunday and to confession regularly, and in general did everything I could to be a good Catholic.

My abandonment of the Faith Of My Fathers didn't happen all at once, with some kind of scales-falling-from-the-eyes experience that left me realizing that I was on the wrong path.  But even back then, there were some signs and portents that were indicative of the kinds of questions I'd be asking in a few years, questions that admitted no easy answers, and even seemed to stump some of the more learned of the church leaders.  And one of these had to do with the nearly constant attribution of events and decisions to "God's Will."

I recall thinking, "How do you know what god's will is?  You're so certain you know the mind of god?"  It seemed to me to be the height of arrogance.  I've always felt unsure about just about everything I do and think, especially my position apropos of the daily chaos I see around me.  To claim that my opinions, biases, and judgments are the same as those held by the eternal and infallible creator of the universe seemed to me even then to be the worst sort of spiritual pride, which as I recall is said to Cometh Before A Fall.

The Seven Deadly Sins by François-Marie Balanant (ca. 1785) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I noticed too how gentle, kind people tended to attribute gentleness and kindness to god, and harsh, judgmental people imagined god as an inflexible, rule-based micromanager.  And suddenly it occurred to me: these people are creating god in their own image, not the other way around.

In other words, they're making it all up.

It struck me as bizarre then, and it still does today, that people are so quick to put their own words in god's mouth.  I found two appalling examples of this tendency this past weekend.  So let me tell you about them, and see what you think.

In the first, we had another example of god prohibiting catering to gays, this time a company in Oregon called "Sweet Cakes by Melissa."  The owners, Aaron and Melissa Klein, refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, and were sued for discrimination.  The judge found in favor of the gay couple and fined the Kleins $135,000.

So the Kleins launched a GoFundMe drive to raise money to pay the fine.  They'd made it to $109,000 -- which is appalling enough in and of itself; didn't Jesus say to care for the poor, not the bigots? -- when GoFundMe cancelled the drive.  They cited their policy, stated clearly on their site, that you cannot use GoFundMe to raise money to pay for the repercussions of breaking the law.

And Melissa Klein wrote on her Facebook page, "Evidently Go fund me [sic] has shut down our Go fund me page and will not let us raise any money.  Satan's really at work but I know our God has a plan and wins in the end!"

So these people are so sure of themselves and their beliefs that they not only attribute what they're doing to the will of god, but claim that anyone who gets in their way must be motivated by the devil?

Not to mention the fact that was pointed out more than once to the Kleins on Twitter, namely that they had declined service to someone who they disagreed with, and then when GoFundMe did exactly the same thing to them, they claimed that GoFundMe must be doing the work of Satan.

In the second, and even more horrifying, example we have a prominent Christian preacher who felt it necessary to express his opinion about the devastating earthquakes in Nepal, which caused untold millions of dollars worth of damage, the loss of irreplaceable historical buildings, and worst of all, a death toll of 3,200 that is likely to continue rising.  Pastor Tony Miano, of the evangelical ministry group Cross Encounters, went on his Twitter (@TonyMiano) and responded to the devastation thusly:

Praying 4 the lost souls in Nepal.  Praying not a single destroyed pagan temple will b rebuilt & the people will repent/receive Christ. 

Seriously?  That's your response?  You are so certain that your opinions are a perfect reflection of your god's wishes that you are willing to say publicly that everything in Nepal will be just hunky-dory if everyone converts to Christianity and puts churches in place of the Buddhist temples that were destroyed?

It's not only the heartlessness of this comment that gets me; it's the mind-bending arrogance.  "I understand the universe perfectly," Miano seems to be saying.  "All you have to do is agree with me, and you'll be agreeing with god."

Which seems to be the same thing the Kleins were saying, and the same thing a lot of the extremely religious claim.  After all, what else are the mullahs doing in the Middle East but saying that their biases regarding the treatment of apostates and the place of women and rules regarding sexual purity are a flawless mirror of the will of Allah?

It was exactly this sort of thing that struck me thirty years ago.  Because that's the commonality, isn't it?  "Do what I say.  You're confused, whereas I know what god's opinion is about everything."

Like I said, the realization I had when I was 21 or so didn't lead to an immediate loss of faith.  I had been steeped in Catholicism too long just to give it up in one fell swoop.  So I limped along for a while, but eventually came to the conclusion first that if there was a god, it was impossible to know his will -- and finally that there was no evidence of a god at all.  The whole thing began, though, with my puzzlement over how the priests could be so sure that they knew what god wanted, not only for themselves, but for everyone else.

And nowhere, I think, does this hypocrisy show quite so clearly as in the coalescence of one's own opinions with those of an almighty deity.

The religious call this "faith."  But how is this not simply a bad case of megalomania?

How to piss off an ecologist

There's a fundamental disconnect in the American brain.  I suspect that it's also true in most other "First World" countries, but that's only supposition.  I can say with some assuredness, however, that it's true here in the United States, because I've witnessed its results over and over.

This disconnect has to do with where stuff comes from, and where it goes after it's out of our sight.  If you asked people, for example, what the most common pigment in ordinary white paint is, most folks wouldn't know, despite its ubiquity.  (It's titanium oxide, zinc oxide, or a combination, if you're curious.)  Likewise, once something hits the trash can, it most people's minds, it's gone -- very few have any knowledge of, or interest in, what happens to garbage once it gets to a landfill.

This is an even stronger tendency when it comes to our own bodies, especially the "where stuff goes" part, because there's the added icky-poo factor when it comes to dealing with our own bodily wastes.  The concept of "materials cycling" is sadly lacking in our consciousness, most of the time.  When I tell students, "Every molecule of water in your body has been in many forms -- it's been glacial ice, it's been in the ocean, it's been in rivers, it's been water vapor in clouds, it's been groundwater, it's been tree sap, it's been in dinosaur piss," it usually elicits a few disgusted exclamations and a good many looks of disbelief.  When I further tell them that the molecules of water in them today aren't going to be the same ones that will be in their bodies in five years, mostly what I pick up from them is complete incomprehension.

It's true, though; this collection of atoms I call "me" is only going to be in association temporarily, and I'll be made up of a whole different collection of atoms, albeit in more or less the same configuration, many times before I die.  Earth is the great recycler, and unless the mechanism is pressed too hard, it moves stuff around with great efficiency, into, through, and out of organisms and ecosystems.

Which is why I thought it was somewhere between funny and horrifying that Portland, Oregon water management officials chose to drain 38 million gallons of water from the Mount Tabor Reservoir after security cameras caught footage of a teenager peeing into the reservoir.

Mount Tabor Reservoir [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

First off, don't they realize that other animals live around the reservoir?  Deer, raccoons, and bunnies don't pee in tidy little Non-Human-Mammal Port-a-Potties in the woods, for cryin' out loud.  Every drop of water you drink has been processed many times through another animal's digestive and excretory system -- and once the solutes are removed, either by natural or artificial processes, what's left is pure, drinkable water.

Second, we have an issue of the water officials not understanding the concept of "dilution" here.  The officials said that the urine poses "little to no risk" to the public -- which is true if you put emphasis on the "no" part -- but Portland Water Bureau official David Shaff told the Associated Press, "The basic commandment of the Water Bureau is to provide clean, cold and constant water to its customers, and the premise behind that is we don't have pee in it."

Sure you don't.  No animals pee near the reservoir, because, you know... they have signs up forbidding it.  ("No pissing allowed.  That means YOU, Bambi.")  But if the real concern is the human pee -- because humans, after all, are somehow different than other animals -- let's see how much pee there is in the reservoir from the one "incident" they caught on the security camera.

A webpage on kidney health from the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services says that an average person's bladder capacity is about 1.5 to 2 cups.  According to Wikipedia, urine is 95% water and 5% solutes (the one usually in the highest concentration is urea, a biodegradable nitrogenous waste; the next three, in order, are chloride, sodium, and potassium).

But never mind that.  Let's lump the 5% solutes together as the "icky" part.  So we have two cups of urine (assuming the guy really had to go bad), of which 5% is something other than water.  That's 0.1 cups of solute...

... mixed in 608 million cups of water in the reservoir (38 million gallons times 16 cups per gallon).  That is a ratio of 0.00000000016 : 1.  And that doesn't even account for the fact that microorganisms take up and degrade the urea and most of the other organic molecules, so within days, even that would be gone.

These are concentrations that only a homeopath would be concerned about.

Now, I know that there have been studies that have found human sewage contaminants in river water -- most famously, a study of the Thames River in which there were measurable (albeit small) amounts of the breakdown products of cocaine, diazepam, caffeine, acetaminophen, nortriptyline, and other legal and illegal drugs in river water.  Keep in mind that we're talking about a huge population -- the water that comes out of the London sewage treatment system, and into the Thames, has been filtered through a great many kidneys before it ends up in the treatment plant -- and still the amounts were tiny, averaging below one part per million.  (It's still being researched if these chemicals remain biologically active at those concentrations.)

But one kid taking a piss in the reservoir?  Not an issue.  Not even close to an issue.  Okay, ticket him and fine him for public urination, if you want to make a deal out of it.  But draining the reservoir, at the taxpayers' expense, because the water monitoring board of Portland (and/or their constituency) has no understanding of materials cycles or dilution, and an exaggerated "this-is-gross" reaction to human waste?

Ridiculous.

Winged Chupacabras and naked Sasquatches

Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we're keeping our eyes on two stories that will be of interest to cryptozoology buffs.

First, from Chicxulub Puerto, in the state of Yucatán, Mexico, there are reports of an "unknown big, black, ugly, and winged creature" that is terrorizing innocent citizens.

The Yucatán Times reports that a gas station worker named Alejandra was attacked last week, but that she's not the only one.  The same creature has been seen in the middle of the town, and Alejandra's coworker Julio has reported that he's heard strange whistling noises coming from the lagoon.

"All this information combined with the fact that many domestic animals have been found dead and dismembered lately in Chicxulub and surrounding areas, are generating the rumor that the 'Chupacabras' might be on the loose in this part of the State of Yucatán," said the writer for the Times. 

Admit it.  You knew it'd be Chupacabras.

This one doesn't have wings.  Maybe it's a different species of Chupacabra.

So it seems like once again we're confronted with a mystery beast who has been seen only by a couple of people, plus reports of noises that could have any number of explanations, plus some animal deaths that could be from a variety of causes.  Myself, I don't think this amounts to much, but then, I have to admit that it takes a lot to convince me.

Apparently, it was also a considerable task to convince a Washington County, Oregon man that he wasn't a Sasquatch.

KOMO News reports that 58-year-old Jeff McDonald, of Banks, Oregon, was out hunting last Thursday, when he was accosted by a naked man who proceeded to hit McDonald with a rock.

When McDonald, predictably, objected to this, the man, who has been identified as 20-year-old Linus Norgren, also of Banks, started yelling that he was the last of a long line of Sasquatches.

Okay, that explains your behavior entirely, Mr. Norgren.

An Oregonian Not-squatch

So anyway, McDonald fought off the rampaging non-Bigfoot bravely, despite the fact that Norgren continued to pelt rocks at him, and at one point, tried to strangle McDonald with a piece of clothing.  McDonald eventually triumphed, although he suffered broken fingers, bruises, and an eye injury (happily, he's expected to make a full recovery).  Once Norgren was subdued, McDonald held him at bay with his hunting rifle and blew a whistle until deputies arrived.

Norgren is now being held on charges of strangulation, assault, and menacing, with the bail set at $250,000.  Apparently the sheriff's office has looked into his antecedents, and found that he's not a Sasquatch at all, but the son of a "well-known mushroom picker."

So that clears that up, and perhaps explains Norgren's bizarre behavior.

And that's our news from the cryptozoological world,  unless you count the fact that Melba Ketchum is still at it, trying to convince the world that her Sasquatch Genome Project is producing valid science.  Her latest attempt garnered her an interview on that stalwart bastion of support for scientific research...

...Fox News.

I'm not making this up.  You should check it out.  Fox News takes every opportunity to claim that intelligent design is real and climate change is false, and then interviews a Sasquatch researcher whose results have been discredited at every turn.

Which, now that I think of it, makes some sense, doesn't it?