The wolves of Skinwalker Ranch

One of the problems that crops up in discussions of cryptids is that a lot of people consistently fall back on arguments based upon the number of alleged sightings.  "It's been seen hundreds of times," they'll say.  "It's got to be real.  All those sightings can't be wrong."

This argument is backwards, and the reason why has to do with a misunderstanding of statistics.  Let's consider two species, a common one and an extremely rare one.  It's no stretch to assume that the common one should be sighted more often than the rare one.  But you'd also surmise that if you set out to do so, hard evidence of the common one should be way easier to come by.  If you set out traps, you should catch more of the common one than the rare one.

So far, nothing very surprising.

A cryptid -- or, in fact, any paranormal phenomenon -- with more anecdotal reports should also leave behind more in the way of hard evidence.  If the Omaha Weasel Man has only ever been seen once, okay, maybe it's not so surprising we don't have any proof of his existence.  But if there are hundreds, or even thousands, of sightings, shouldn't there be something in the way of scientifically-admissible evidence?  A bone, a tuft of hair with DNA not from any known species, something?

Zero hard evidence along with lots of anecdotal reports strongly suggests a different answer -- gullibility, misinterpretation of what witnesses have seen or heard, or outright fraud.

Which brings us to the infamous Skinwalker Ranch.

The Skinwalker Ranch is a 512-acre plot of land in a remote region of Uintah County, Utah.  It gets its name from the Navajo legend of the yee naaldlooshii (which translates to "it goes on all fours"), which is an evil magician who can take the shape of a non-human animal at will.

Skinwalker Ranch has been the site of literally hundreds of bizarre claims, including:

• UFOs (lots of these)
• vanished or mutilated cattle
• glowing orbs hovering over the ground/"ball lightning"
• invisible objects emitting sparks and powerful magnetic fields
• large animals with glowing red eyes that are alleged to be unharmed by gunfire

The last one is what gave the place its name, and comes along with a legend of uncertain provenance -- that the Navajo who lived there were attacked and enslaved by Ute warriors, and the Navajo cursed the place, saying whoever settled there afterward would be plagued by an evil spirit who could take the form of a wolf.  Several successions of modern owners of the property have claimed to have seen this thing, most notably Gwen and Terry Sherman and their family, who owned it from 1994 to 1996, and Robert Bigelow, who bought it from the Shermans in 1996 and owned it until 2016.  The Shermans are the first ones who made a big deal about bizarre happenings on the place, including seeing strange, wolf-like animals, and a sighting of an "orb filled with a glowing blue fluid" that supposedly killed three of their dogs.  Bigelow, a prominent businessman, is deeply interested in UFOs and other sketchy phenomena, and bought the ranch because of the Shermans' stories; he can be credited with bringing the site to national attention.

So, naturally, people have tried to figure out what's going on there, with some of the more scientifically-minded saying that the strange animal sightings, at least, have a natural explanation -- they're a surviving population of dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus).  There are two problems with this, of increasing difficulty: first, that the most recent dated remains of dire wolves is from almost ten thousand years ago, and second, if there is an extant population somewhere in the Uintah Basin, they've left exactly zero evidence.

Artist's reconstruction of a dire wolf [Image is in the Public Domain]

In fact, that last bit is the sticking point about Skinwalker Ranch in general.  Robert Bigelow founded a group he called the National Institute for Discovery Science, whose sole raison d'être was to find evidence for claims of the paranormal, and after a long investigation of the claims from Skinwalker Ranch, they concluded -- and this is a direct quote -- they had "difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication."

Which is a euphemism for "we found fuck-all in the way of proof."

So the problem here is, we have a place that -- to listen to the hype -- has UFOs out the wazoo, strange meteorological phenomena, and wild animal sightings that are (depending on who you believe) something like a werewolf, or a ten-thousand-year prehistoric holdover.  And despite all that, there has not been a single piece, not the tiniest shred, of hard evidence.  To me that argues strongly that the whole thing is a publicity stunt.  It may well have started out with some odd observations that were misinterpreted -- the Shermans certainly seem to have been earnest enough -- but after Bigelow got involved, it's become one tactic after another to keep people's attention on the place.  UFOlogist Barry Greenwood, who investigated the ranch earlier this year and also came up empty-handed, said Bigelow was "always in the business of selling belief and hope."

Belief and hope aren't the only things he's selling.  It's telling that in 2020, Bigelow, filed for -- and was approved for -- a trademark on the Skinwalker Ranch name, for the purpose of "providing recreation facilities; entertainment services, namely, creation, development, production, and distribution of multimedia content, internet content, motion pictures, and television shows...  cups and mugs, shirts and short-sleeved shirts, sports caps and hats."

Gullibility is, as always, big business.

So once again, we're faced with the difficulty that just the sheer quantity of anecdotal reports doesn't mean there's anything real behind it; in fact, without hard evidence, it can actually argue for the opposite.  The wolves of Skinwalker Ranch are very likely to be nonexistent.  As much as I, like Fox Mulder, "want to believe," this one appears to be a non-starter as anything but a way to make money.

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

Unalloyed truth

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times had an article about claims of a decades-long investigation by the Pentagon of the UFO phenomenon.  While I don't doubt that such a program exists, the article claims that there are warehouses full of "alien alloys" that have been declared unanalyzable.

The conclusion, of course, can only be that they came from outer space.

The article's authors, Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean, write:

Under [NASA employee Robert] Bigelow’s direction, [Bigelow Aerospace Company] modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that [military intelligence expert Luis] Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.  Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes...  

“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program.  “First of all, he’d try to figure out what is this plastic stuff.  He wouldn’t know anything about the electromagnetic signals involved or its function.”

I have two responses to this.

First, we are way beyond da Vinci in our understanding of the universe and in the development of technology to study it; this is a serious false analogy.  Second, once you claim that there are actual artifacts to study, you've moved beyond the realm of anecdote into something that's scientifically verifiable.  At that point, you better have the goods -- and be willing to admit it if it turns out that the answer isn't what you hoped it would be.

The week after the article went public, Scientific American's Rafi Letzter wrote a response to it, saying much the same thing (although in far greater detail).  Letzter writes:

"I don't think it's plausible that there's any alloys that we can't identify," Richard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society's panel of experts, told Live Science.  "My opinion? That's quite impossible." 

Alloys are mixtures of different kinds of elemental metals.  They're very common - in fact, Sachleben said, they're more common on Earth than pure elemental metals are - and very well understood.  Brass is an alloy.  So is steel.  Even most naturally occurring gold on Earth is an alloy made up of elemental gold mixed with other metals, like silver or copper... 

"There are databases of all known phases [of metal], including alloys," May Nyman, a professor in the Oregon State University Department of Chemistry, told Live Science.  Those databases include straightforward techniques for identifying metal alloys.  If an unknown alloy appeared, Nyman said it would be relatively simple to figure out what it was made of.

Well, as we've seen over and over, the woo-woos are nothing if not persistent.  Just a couple of days ago, a response to the response appeared over at Mysterious Universe.  The gist of the article is "there are too alien artifacts and UFOs," but there was one bit of it that stood out from the rest.  The author of the article, Brett Tingley, writes:

While I’m sure that's true enough of everything we’ve found on our planet, I just have to wonder: given the vastness of the universe, is it actually impossible for unknown elements or alloys to exist?  Seven new elements have been discovered here on Earth in the last thirty years, while the majority have been discovered in the last four hundred.  On a long enough timeline, who knows what tomorrow’s science will uncover?

This is a roundabout example of the Argument from Ignorance: we don't know, so the explanation must be _________ (fill in the blank with your favorite loopy claim, paranormal phenomenon, or deity).  Normally, the Argument from Ignorance is hard to counter except to point out that our ignorance of something isn't indicative of anything but our ignorance; you can't use it to prove anything.  But wound up in here is an interesting bit that we can analyze from a scientific perspective; the claim that there could be undiscovered elements in "the vastness of the universe."

Here's the problem.  Mendeleev constructed the first periodic table of the elements by noticing some odd patterns -- that there were groups of elements that had similar chemical properties.  After some years of messing about to figure out what was going on, he was able to construct a grid that placed these elements into columns and rows.  And, most interestingly, there were holes -- places in the grid that there should be an element, but none had thus far been discovered.

And one by one, those holes were filled.  Then advances in nuclear physics allowed the creation of the transuranic elements -- the ones beyond uranium, atomic number 92, which are short-lived radioactive substances that do not occur naturally (any of them created by the supernovae that gave rise to the elements in the Solar System would long ago have decayed away).  We're now up to element 118, oganesson.

So Tingley is right that there have been new elements discovered in the last thirty years.  The problem is that most of them have extremely short half-lives and are highly radioactive, so the idea that UFO debris could be made of any of these newly discovered (newly created, really) elements is ridiculous.  But how about the other piece of his claim, that there could be other stable elements we haven't discovered yet?

Sorry, but that doesn't work, either; the periodic table has no holes left to fill, as you can see on the above illustration.  We can be extremely confident that we've got 'em all, and the only additions will be at the unstable and short-lived upper end.  So despite Geordi LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation constantly blathering on about how the phaser beams can't damage the alien ship because it's made out of an alloy of the elements gorblimeyum and gobsmackite, this isn't really possible.

Thus our labeling of Star Trek as "fiction."

I'm pretty certain that if the metallurgists and chemists were to examine the warehouse full of debris, they'd find any metal fragments to be composed of plain old ordinary metallic elements.  Now, there could be some piece of alien technology in there -- Puthoff's "garage door opener" -- but my guess is that if there was such incontrovertible evidence of alien visitations, the scientists would know about it.

Sorry for raining on your parade, if you're a UFO enthusiast.  I get your angst.  I would like nothing better than to have proof of extraterrestrial intelligence (or, even better, extraterrestrial visits, because that would mean that the aliens had figured out how to manage travel across interstellar space).  But until we have more than talk about "mysterious alien alloys," I think we need to once again table this entire discussion.