Captain Odin of the spaceship Valhalla

Last night, I was working out at the gym, and one of the televisions was showing a program about a subject I know and love: Vikings.

My MA is in Scandinavian historical linguistics (yes, I know I teach biology.  It's a long story).  As part of my thesis research I read a good many of the sagas, some in the original Old Norse, the culmination of a passion for the subject I've had since I first found D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths when I was in elementary school.

"Odhin," by Johannes Gehrts (1901) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I was tickled when I saw the program being aired, even though I had a chill run up my spine when I noticed that it was on the History channel.  Given the name, you'd think that the History channel would show programs related to history.  You'd be wrong, although I guess the more accurate name of The Woo-Woo Bullshit channel wouldn't attract sponsors very well.

So I watched the program for a while.  And it turned out to be an episode of...

... Ancient Aliens.

I'm not making this up.  My first thought was that the contention of the show was that the Vikings were aliens, but it turns out that no, they're not saying that.  That would be ridiculous.

They're saying that the Vikings were helped by aliens.

The show featured a couple of legitimate scholars, Kirsten Wolf of the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Department of Scandinavian Studies (which, coincidentally, is where I took my courses in the Old Norse language) and Timothy Tangherlini of UCLA.  Both made coherent and academically relevant statements regarding the history and culture of the ancient Norse, which were (of course) immediately misinterpreted by the wackos who wrote the narrator's script.

"The Vikings were enormously sophisticated in terms of technology: ship-building, bridge-building, fortress-building," Wolf said, which is true, but then the narrator jumped in with, "But many researchers remain baffled at how the Vikings became so socially, politically and technologically advanced, especially while living in the cold, harsh environment of the North...  Just how were the Norse Vikings able to manage such technological and geographical feats?  Are their fortresses and journeys to unknown continents evidence that the Vikings had access to extraterrestrial knowledge?  Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and believe the proof can be found by examining the religious beliefs of this mysterious people."

Yup.  Those poor ol' scholars, always "baffled" at how "mysterious" everything is.  Good thing we have raving wingnuts like Phillip Coppens and David Hatcher Childress to weigh in on the situation and rescue us from our ignorance with conclusions such as Thor's hammer being a "kinetic weapon," Odin's ravens Huginn and Muninn being "spy drones," and Odin's seat up on Hlidskjalf being "the captain's seat on a spacecraft."

I wonder if it's aerobic exercise to pound your head repeatedly into the wall, because that's what I ended up doing, watching this show.

At least that's better than what Drs. Wolf and Tangherlini most likely felt like doing.  After realizing what idiocy their names had been associated with, publicly, I'm guessing they probably both wanted to commit seppuku.

I kept watching, though, in the fashion of a person witnessing a slow-motion train wreck.  A couple of times, I actually laughed out loud, so it's probably a good thing that the gym was otherwise empty.  One of the best points came when Phillip Coppens explained that the dwarves, mentioned many times in myth collections like the Eddas, were actually...

... the "Grays."  Yup, the same alien creatures we see in such historical documentaries as The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Here's what he said, verbatim, or near as I can recall:

Are they real dwarfs, or somehow more mythical, or whether the label “dwarf” actually stuck to them because they were somehow smaller?  And of course today, we often describe the gray alien archetype as dwarfish as well, simply because they are smaller.

Of course, Philip.  Whatever that means.  And along the same lines, I'm guessing that the trolls were the Vikings' way of describing the "Rancor" from Star Wars, and the elves were invented because J. R. R. Tolkien was a time traveling ultra-intelligent extraterrestrial being who went back to the 9th century and told the ancient Norse about Legolas et al.

But watching this show wouldn't have been the complete experience it was without a commentary from Giorgio Tsoukalos, he of the amazing hair, so I was positively tickled when he showed up.  Tsoukalos had this to say about Valhalla:

Valhalla was not a figment of our ancestors’ imaginations, but it might have been some type of an orbiting space station.  The reason why I’m saying this is because we have a description of Valhalla: it is an incredible description of a place that has weird attributes.

Which is such an amazing feat of logical deduction that I can hardly think of a response, other than to say that my classroom has some "weird attributes" and it is not, so far as I can tell, an "orbiting space station."

At that point, I kind of gave up, stopped staring at the television with my mouth hanging open, and went over to use the weight machines, figuring that even if my brain had been turned to cream-of-wheat, at least I could work on my biceps.

So this, my dear readers, is why I don't watch television, except for when I'm at the gym.  I should have changed the channel, really.  Next time I will -- I'll try to find something more sensible and intellectually stimulating than what the History channel has to offer.

Reruns of Gilligan's Island should fit the bill.

See the violence inherent in the system!

Yesterday I ran across an article on the bizarre website The Mind Unleashed that is mostly interesting for what it says about scientists.

Called "Suppressed Scientific Evidence Proves Free Energy Source Dating Back 25,000 Years," the majority of the article is just the usual tired old claptrap about pyramids concentrating Quantum Wave Frequency Vibration Oscillation Resonance Energies, or something like that.  As usual, it's hard to tell exactly what they are saying, because rigorous analysis is something woo-woos avoid like the plague.  We're not given any actual evidence, of course; we're just treated to passages like this one:

[Author Phillip Coppens said,] “The pyramids are proof that our ancestors knew and worked with an energy technology that we are now finally able to measure, but are still short of fully understanding.” Coppens along with Klaus Dona of Austria and dozens of speakers attended the International Conference Bosnia Pyramid in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina which is held annually to release findings to the public.

[Archaeologist Dr. Sam] Osmanagich has had a host of experts in various fields come to see his Bosnian pyramids, and measure anomalies associated with them. They have included the noted British scientist and inventor Harry Oldfield, who used a special camera system to photograph alleged electromagnetic (EM) waves in the vicinity of Visocica Hill.

So there's nothing really new here in terms of actual data.  But what caught my attention was the way the author claimed that scientists are suppressing this information, out of some sort of misplaced loyalty to the status quo:

Overwhelming evidence, supported by scientific research from all over the archaeological community proves that our recorded history is wrong concerning turn changes [sic] religion, science and academics... Prominent archaeologists have attempted smear campaigns on Dr. Osmanagich’s work out of fear of how the impact of his discoveries will make on their own work...

Is it possible that the fossil fuel based energy system we now rely on could have been prevented if inventor Nikola Tesla’s work on free energy hadn’t been suppressed? Why did the FBI seize his papers upon his death? Tesla’s (1856-1943) patented free energy methods were rejected due to their inability to be metered and monetized. “We urgently need to change our mistaken point of view that our ancestors were stupid and accept that they had an advanced understanding of the fabric of nature and the universe, just like Nikola Tesla, whose ideas were suppressed as they did not and do not fit in the reigning model,” states Phillip Coppens, author and investigative journalist.

My first thought upon reading this was: do you know any actual scientists?  Because it sure as hell sounds like you've never met one.

Let's consider the following scenario.  A physicist, working in a lab, runs an experiment and finds that her data seems to indicate that there are exceptions to the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics -- that you can, in fact, create energy from nothing.  Such a finding, if verified, would overturn all of physics as we know it.  So said physicist shows a few of her colleagues, the experiment is repeated, and lo and behold, it seems to be true.  What does she do?

1)  She writes a paper on it, urging other physicists to test her results and see if it can be explained.

2)  She doesn't tell anyone, because the Laws of Thermodynamics are laws, dammit.  You get in serious trouble for breaking laws.  Besides, we can't have any challenges to the pre-existing paradigm!  This is science!

I hope the answer is obvious.  If there really was evidence that any of the hitherto-accepted laws of physics were wrong, scientists would be trampling each other to death trying to get to the grant money first.  Doing groundbreaking research is how careers are made.  It's how Nobel Prizes are won.  The idea that scientists would avoid doing something edgy because they love the theories they already have is ridiculous.

Consider what happened when the scientists at CERN found what appeared to be a neutrino traveling faster than the speed of light.  Did they suppress the evidence, because (after all) you can't challenge Einstein?  Of course not.  They wrote a paper, issued a press release, and asked all of the qualified physicists in the world to try to explain the data.  As it turned out, the analysis seems to support a flaw in the data.  Einstein was vindicated again, not because anyone was engaged in a repressive campaign of Silence the Dissenters, but because the original analysis was wrong.

That's the problem here, isn't it?  There's no actual evidence that "Free Energy" exists (at least not in the sense that these people mean; "free energy," lower case, is a real scientific term, but it doesn't mean the something-for-nothing nonsense that the woo-woos are so fond of).  Throwing around Nikola Tesla's name isn't going to make these claims correct.  It's much easier to rant about a hidebound and oppressive scientific establishment than it is to do any actual science.  And as for the scientists who are criticizing the work of people like Sam Osmanagich as unscientific, hand-waving, poorly-executed rubbish, I'm sorry -- they're simply right.

Having your ideas criticized does not mean you're being repressed.  That's how science works.  And as for the researchers mentioned in this article, who claim that no one believes them -- if you can't deal with being challenged, with being asked for hard evidence for your claims, you're probably in the wrong field.