Jumping on the bandwagon

There's a peculiar twist on confirmation bias -- which is the tendency to accept without question poor or faulty evidence in favor of a claim we already believed in -- that is just as insidious.  I call it the bandwagon effect.  The gist is that once a sensational or outlandish claim has been made, there'll be a veritable tsunami of people offering up their own version of "yeah, I saw it, too!", often supported by factual evidence that (to borrow a line from the inimitable Dorothy Parker) "to call it wafer-thin is a grievous insult to wafer-makers."

The best example of this I've ever seen is the "Rendlesham Forest Incident," which has sometimes been called "Britain's Roswell."  It occurred in December of 1980 in a forested area between Woodbridge and Orford, Suffolk, England, and UFO aficionados are still discussing it lo unto this very day.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Simon Leatherdale, Supposed UFO landing site - Rendlesham Forest - geograph.org.uk - 263104, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Here are the facts of the case.

On 26 December 1980, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, working as part of an American unit stationed at the Royal Air Force Base at Woodbridge, saw lights descending into Rendlesham Forest.  He took some of his men to investigate the site where it appeared to land, and upon arrival saw "a glowing orb that was metallic in appearance with colored lights" that moved through the trees as they approached it.  Simultaneously, some animals on a nearby farm "went into a frenzy."  One of the servicemen who was with Halt called it "a craft of unknown origin."

Police were called in at around four A.M., and they found some burned and broken tree branches, and three small indentations in approximately an equilateral triangle.  They also found an increased radiation level, on the order of 0.03 milliroentgen per hour (for reference, that's a little more than the total from a typical dental x-ray, spread over an hour's time).

Halt revisited the site in the early hours of 28 December, and reported that he'd seen three point sources of light, two to the south and one to the north, that hovered about ten degrees above the horizon.  The brightest of these, he said, "beamed down a stream of light from time to time."

The incident was reported in the news -- and then the bandwagon effect kicked in.

There were several reports of domestic animals acting oddly, and one witness said he heard "a sound like a woman screaming."  Multiple people reported that they, too, had seen lights in the sky that night, and one person said what he'd seen "was so bright it could have been a lighthouse."  The USAF and RAF people at Woodbridge had their hands full over the next few weeks trying to figure out which of these accounts were true (if, perhaps, misinterpreted) and which were made up by folks who were simply trying to get in on the fun.

In the end, there was no further evidence uncovered.  So for something touted as "Britain's Roswell," we're left with... not much.

But what about Halt's testimony?

It seems likely that Halt himself was caught up on the bandwagon.  He did undoubtedly see something -- probably a meteor -- and after that, each subsequent piece of "evidence" simply added to his conviction that he'd witnessed something otherworldly.  The colored lights Halt and his men saw were probably the flashing warning lights of a distant police car; in fact, a U.S. security policeman working at Woodbridge, Kevin Conde, later confessed that he'd contributed his own bit to the confusion by driving through the forest in a police vehicle with modified lights. The indentations in the ground were found to be scrapes dug by rabbits.  The agitated domestic animals were simply because that happens when you have a lot of frightened people running around through farm pastures at night with flashlights.  The "hovering point sources of light" Halt saw when he revisited the site were almost certainly stars; the position of the brightest one he reported, in fact, corresponds to the location of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

As far as the flashing light "so bright it could have been a lighthouse" -- that's because it was a lighthouse.  Specifically Orfordness Lighthouse, which is only about eight kilometers away and is easily visible from any high ground in the forest.

Brian Dunning, writing about the incident in Skeptoid in 2009, states:

Colonel Halt's thoroughness was commendable, but even he can be mistaken.  Without exception, everything he reported on his audiotape and in his written memo has a perfectly rational and unremarkable explanation...  All that remains is the tale that the men were debriefed and ordered never to mention the event, and warned that "bullets are cheap."  Well, as we've seen on television, the men all talk quite freely about it, and even Colonel Halt says that to this day nobody has ever debriefed him.  So this appears to be just another dramatic invention for television, perhaps from one of the men who have expanded their stories over the years.  When you examine each piece of evidence separately on its own merit, you avoid the trap of pattern matching and finding correlations where none exist.  The meteors had nothing to do with the lighthouse or the rabbit diggings, but when you hear all three stories told together, it's easy to conclude (as did the airmen) that the light overhead became an alien spacecraft in the forest.  Always remember: Separate pieces of poor evidence don't aggregate together into a single piece of good evidence.

Which is it exactly.  But unfortunately, human nature is such that once the ball starts rolling, it's hard to stop -- and there are all too many people who are eager to contribute their own little push to keep it accelerating.

As I've said many times before, no one would be happier than me if we got unequivocal evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, at least until one of them decides to vaporize me with their laser pistol.  But unfortunately, Rendlesham just isn't doing it for me.  I tend to be very much in Neil deGrasse Tyson's camp when he says that as good skeptics, we need something more than "you saw it."  "Next time you're abducted," he said, "grab something from the spaceship and bring it back.  Then we can talk.  Because anything of extraterrestrial manufacture, that has crossed interstellar space, is gonna be interesting."

But until then, we'll just have to keep waiting.  And always, guard as well as we can against the inevitable biases that all humans are prone to.  Because sometimes -- unfortunately -- a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.

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The green children

One of the strangest tales out of old England comes from the turbulent reign of King Stephen, which lasted from 1135 to 1154.

Stephen was the grandson of William the Conqueror; his mother, Adela of Normandy, was William's daughter.  When the legitimate heir to the throne, William Adelin (son of Henry I) died in the "sinking of the White Ship" in 1120, it set up a succession crisis as Henry had no other legitimate sons.  So when Henry died in 1135, Stephen seized the throne.

The problem was, Henry did have a legitimate daughter, Matilda, who basically said "Oh, hell no" (only in Norman French).  And honestly, Matilda's claim to the throne was better, according to the law of primogeniture.  But (1) Matilda was a woman, which back then was for some reason a serious problem, and (2) she was arrogant to the point of pissing off just about everyone she came into contact with.  Personality-wise, though, Stephen was not a lot better.  So they squared off against each other -- and thus began the First English Civil War.

The result was what always happens; years of back-and-forth-ing, and the ones who suffered most were the common people who just wanted to survive and put food on the table.  It wasn't helped by the fact that both Stephen and Matilda seemed to excel most at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.  Both of them came close to winning outright more than once, then did something so catastrophically boneheaded that they blew their chance.  (If you want an interesting perspective on the war against the backdrop of some entertaining fiction, Ellis Peters's charming Chronicles of Brother Cadfael are set during Stephen's reign.)

Eventually, everyone got fed up with it, including the two principals.  In 1153 Stephen more or less capitulated, and agreed that if Matilda would give up her claim to the throne and cease hostilities, he'd name her son Henry (the future King Henry II) as his heir.  Treaty signed.  Stephen only lived another two years, Henry became king, and the Plantagenet dynasty was founded.

So it was a mess, and in fact is sometimes called "the Anarchy," which isn't far off the mark.  And it was from during this chaos that we have the odd story of the "Green Children of Woolpit."

Woolpit is a town in Suffolk.  Its curious name has to do with wolves, not sheep; it was originally Wulfpytt -- a pit for catching wolves.  In any case, some time during the war, when things were at their worst, two children showed up in Woolpit, a boy and a girl.  They spoke no English (or French either, for that matter), only a strange language no one in the area recognized, and refused all food except for raw beans, which they ate voraciously.

Also, their skin was green.

Naturally, this raised more than a few eyebrows, but they were taken in by one Sir Richard de Calne, a nobleman of Norman descent who lived near Woolpit.  The boy died soon afterward, but the girl lived, was baptized with the name of Agnes, and gradually learned to speak English.  She adjusted to her new life, although remained "very wanton and impudent," according to one account.  When she was able, she told her caretakers that she and her brother had come from a land where the Sun never shone, and the sky was a perpetual twilight.  Everything there was green, she said.

The place was known as "St. Martin's Land."

The brother and sister had been herding their father's cattle, she told them, and had heard the sound of cathedral bells coming from a cave in a hillside.  Curious, they entered the cave, at first losing their way, but eventually coming out near where they were found in Woolpit.

Two contemporaneous writers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, both give accounts of the Green Children, which substantially agree.  Over time the green color of Agnes's skin gradually faded until she looked more or less normal.  She eventually found work as a servant, but rose in status when she married Richard Barre, a scholar and justice who worked for both Henry II and Richard I.  The details of her later life are unknown.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rod Bacon, WoolpitSign, CC BY-SA 2.0]

So, what's going on, here?

First, it seems pretty certain that something real happened -- i.e., that it's not just a tall tale.  There are too many apparently independent references to the story to discount it entirely.  Needless to say, though, I'm not inclined to believe that they were aliens, or some of the Fair Folk, or any of the other fanciful quasi-explanations I've heard.  It's been suggested that the green color of their skin was due to hypochromic anemia (also known as chlorosis), which can be caused by chronic iron deficiency, which would explain why the coloration went away in Agnes's skin once she had a better diet.

It's also been suggested that their lack of knowledge of English was because they were Flemish.  Both Stephen and Matilda had invited in Flemish mercenaries to help them in the war, and some of these settled in England permanently.  It might be that they were the children of some of these Flemish settlers.

But.

If the cause of the green coloration really was malnourishment, the condition should have been much more widespread, because as I noted earlier, during the First English Civil War just about everyone was starving.  And hypochromic anemia doesn't really make you green, it makes your skin waxy, yellowish, and pale.  The children's green color was striking enough to merit emphasis, which suggests strongly that it was something no one who saw the children had ever seen before.  As far as their being Flemish, their guardian, Sir Richard de Calne, was a well-educated nobleman; both of the principle chroniclers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, were multilingual.  There is no way that if the children had been speaking Flemish, none of them would have recognized it, especially given how many Flemish soldiers and merchants were in England at the time.

Plus, if all the children had done was go through a cave in a hill and come out of the other side, they can't have been far from home.  We're talking Suffolk, in flat East Anglia (Suffolk's highest elevation is only 128 meters!), not the freakin' Rocky Mountains, here.  Why did both of the children think they'd been transported far away -- far enough away that they couldn't just walk back across the hill and then home?  (It's possible, of course, that they had been abused and didn't want to go home.  But still.  Surely if all they'd done was cross a few hills, someone would have recognized them as locals.)

So the prosaic, rational explanation of the story doesn't itself hold up to scrutiny.

Likewise, claims that the story of the Green Children was a moralistic tale invented as a social commentary on "the threat posed by outsiders to the unity of the Christian community," as historian Elizabeth Freeman put it. seem as far-fetched as suggestions that they were aliens.  As I said earlier, the independent accounts of the children, as well as their interactions with real historical figures, indicate that they did exist -- whoever they were, and wherever they'd come from.

So we're left with a mystery that I doubt will ever be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

Understand that I'm not advocating for any kind of paranormal explanation; whatever did happen back in twelfth-century Suffolk, I'm sure it had a rational, scientific cause.  I'm just saying we don't know what it is.  Odd to think, though, that since Richard Barre and Agnes had children, very likely there are people in Suffolk (and those with ancestry there) who descend from the surviving "Green Child."

If you're one of them, consider where that drop of your blood might have come from.  And let me know if you ever find yourself with a craving for raw beans.

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Well, shucks.

Well, The Daily Mail Fail is at it again.

Today's headline, which in a contest would win in both the "Most Idiotic" and "Longest" categories, reads, "Is This the Skeleton of Legendary Devil Dog 'Black Shuck," Who Terrorized 16th Century East Anglia?  Folklore Tells of a SEVEN FOOT Hell Hound With Flaming Eyes."

Once you read the article that follows, though, you find out pretty quickly that it could have run just as well under a much shorter headline, such as, "Skeleton of Dog Found."  We get to the central point of the story pretty quickly, which is that some archaeologists found the bones of a largish dog in the ruins of Leiston Abbey.  But this bit -- which turns out to be the sole factual content of the article -- is buried amongst turgid prose like the following:

It roamed the countryside spreading death and terror – a giant, ferocious hell-hound with flaming eyes and savage claws. 

For centuries, the beast that came to be known as Black Shuck struck fear into the hearts of all who crossed its path. 

Just a single glimpse was enough to impart a fatal curse; the briefest encounter sufficient to suck the life from any hapless victim... 

The beast’s most celebrated attack began at Holy Trinity church, Blythburgh. A clap of thunder burst open the church doors and a hairy black ‘devil dog’ came snarling in. 

It ran through the congregation, killing a man and boy and causing the church steeple to fall through the roof.  Scorch marks still visible on the church doors are purported to have come from Shuck’s claws as it fled. 

Local verse records the event thus: ‘All down the church in the midst of fire, the hellish monster flew, and, passing onward to the quire [sic], he many people slew.’ 

Next stop was 12 miles away in Bungay, where two worshippers were killed at St Mary’s church. One was left shrivelled ‘like a drawn purse’ as he prayed.

Which is all pretty scary-sounding.  And for fans of paranormal stories, the tale of "Black Shuck" is a creepy one; a hound from hell, bursting into the holy precinct of the church and killing people as they pray.

[image courtesy of the Creative Commons]

The problem is, it seems to have no more basis in the truth than Spring-heeled Jack and the ghost dogs of Ballechin House and the tumbling coffins of Barbados -- i.e., none.  It's a folk legend, a good tale to tell on a stormy night, but not much more than that.

Yes, I know that there are historical records of the thing.  In fact, in the interest of fairness, I'll present one here myself:

For those of you who don't want to strain your eyes reading old typography, it says, "A straunge, and terrible wunder wrought very late in the parish church of Bongay: a town of no great distance from the citie of Norwich, namely the fourth of this August, in ye yeere of our Lord 1577,  in a great tempest of violent raine, lightning and thunder, the like whereof hath been seldome seene.  With the appearance of an horrible shaped thing, sensibly perceived of the people then and there assembled.  Drawen into a plain method according to the written copye.  By Abraham Fleming."

Which is all well and good.  Far be it from me to contradict Mr. Fleming's opinion that the raine was straunge, but I think it's a reach to conclude that what probably was only an unusual weather event was contrived by a giant black dog from hell.  He goes on, though, to say that there was too a big dog, and he was too black, and he didn't stop at just causing a thunderstorm:

This black dog, or the divel in such a likenesse (God hee knoweth all who worketh all), running all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer as it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward, insomuch that even at a moment where they kneeled, they strangely dyed.

So there's that.  Of course, if you are a student of history you know that old records are rife with claims of crazy stuff that was "sensibly perceived of the people then and there assembled" and which are nevertheless almost certainly spun out of whole cloth.  And more germane to Black Shuck, given that there are similar legends from all over Europe, and even further afield, I think what we have here is the original Shaggy Dog Story.

The Isle of Man has the Moddey Dhoo, Wales has the Cŵn Annwn, and Scotland the Cù Sìth, just to name three.  You can go here and read about sightings of Black Dogs all over the world, which makes me think that if this thing really exists, it must have a hell of a time keeping its appointment calendar straight.  "You want me to show up for a church service in Glasgow on the 14th?"  *sound of pages flipping*  "I'm sorry, I'm scheduled for a séance in Liverpool that night.  I can possibly work you in on the 17th, but we'd have to do it before 6 PM, because I've got a crossroads to haunt that evening, and I'm expecting the Archbishop of Canterbury to come by.  Opportunities like that don't happen every day.  I hope you understand."

But back to The Daily Mail... they seem to be basing their story on two things: (1) the dog skeleton found in Leiston is big; and (2) Leiston is in East Anglia.  Because, obviously, there couldn't be an ordinary big dog in East Anglia, so any large dog skeleton would have to be Black Shuck.  It couldn't, for example, be an Irish Wolfhound, a breed owned for centuries by British nobility, and which gets... pretty freakin' huge:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You also have to wonder, given that Black Shuck was supposedly a canine stand-in for Satan, how his skeleton would end up buried in an abbey.  You'd think that after he finished wringing the necks of honest churchgoers, he'd just vanish in a flash of sulfurous smoke, never to be seen again.

But no.  Now we have The Daily Mail further sinking their credibility (a feat I'd have thought was impossible) by asking us to believe that some random big dog skeleton proves the East Anglian legend was all true.  And I'm sure there will be people who will believe it.  Making me wish that The Daily Mail would go back to what they do best, which is writing stories on who the various royals and celebrities are sleeping with.  It may be dull as hell, but at least it has some basis in reality.