The Beast of Sevenoaks

It's been a while since we've looked at anything of a cryptozoological nature here at Skeptophilia, so I'd like to rectify that with a story from an unexpected location.  Most of the Bigfoot sightings come from two areas -- the remote regions of the United States (particularly the Pacific Northwest), and the Himalayas.  This time, though we've got a report of a sighting in southeastern England.  The Brits, who evidently did not wish to be outdone by either the Nepalese or a bunch of upstart Americans, are claiming their own Bigfoot-clone, according to a recent article by Brent Swancer at Mysterious Universe.

Nicknamed "The Beast of Tunbridge Wells" or "The Beast of Sevenoaks," this cryptid is described as an eight-foot-tall creature, human-shaped but covered with hair, with "long arms" and "demonic red eyes."  Some locals are afraid to go outside at night because there have been so many sightings in the past six months.  There are a number of highly entertaining eyewitness accounts in Swancer's article, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.  Indeed, the story claims that the Beast has been seen for more than a hundred and fifty years, and include an excerpt from a local newspaper describing a sighting that occurred in 1858.  More recent ones come from such credible witnesses as "an elderly lady" and someone "known only as J. Smith of Sevenoaks."

Well, far be it from me to doubt anecdotal reports from J. Smith of Sevenoaks, but I feel obligated at this point to mention that my personal trainer, Kevin, actually grew up in Sevenoaks, so I asked him what he thought about the possibility of there being Bigfoots in that part of the world. 

Here is, in as near as I can get to a direct quote, what Kevin said:

If there are Bigfoots all over the fucking place, why hasn't anyone gotten a good photo?  Here we are, all carrying around the equivalent of a thousand-dollar point-and-shoot camera in our pockets, and the photos we get are still crap.  And another thing is, you have to look at where the people from Monster Hunters and Finding Bigfoot always go.  It's places like the Appalachians, right?  Notice that this is also moonshine country.  Give me enough to drink, I'll not only see Bigfoot, I'll see the Queen, the Pope, and Jesus.  So if there were Bigfoots in a densely-populated place like Kent, someone would have gotten a good photo by now.  And I can tell you that growing up there, I saw lots of drunk people, but I never once saw Bigfoot.

Hmm.  Let's take a look at the circumstances during which J. Smith saw Bigfoot, as described in Swancer's article: "The witness... claims that he had gone out to a pub with some friends, after which they had gone off to chat and a BBQ..."

Well, alrighty, then.

But of course, mere scoffing isn't enough, however often I engage in it myself.  So let's interject a bit of a science lesson that may raise some questions in your mind.

There's a concept in ecology called "minimum viable population."  This is the number of organisms needed in a population to assure that (assuming nothing changes) the birth rate equals or exceeds the death rate.  It is quite difficult to estimate, and depends on a great many factors, including the number of offspring per mating, mortality in the young, dependency on available resources, size of the territory, and so on.  To give two extreme examples that will illustrate this: the MVP for mosquitoes is probably pretty damn close to two, as long as one was male and one was female, and they were near enough to find each other and had a source of food and water.  Mosquitoes can produce so many young from one mating that it's likely you could rebuild a sizable population in short order from those two survivors.  Elephants, on the other hand, reproduce very slowly, and the young are slow to reach sexual maturity; in order to have a population large enough for the birth rate to equal or exceed the death rate (from natural causes, predators, poaching, and so on), you would need hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals in the population.

Get it?  Now, let's consider how many Britsquatches we'd need to have a viable, sustainable population.

To get a handle on this, I referred to the paper "Estimates of Minimum Viable Population Sizes for Vertebrates and Factors Influencing Those Estimates," by David Reed, Julian O'Grady, Barry Brook, Jonathan Ballou, and Richard Frankham, which appeared in the Journal of Biological Conservation in 2003.  The paper is lucidly written but relies on some rather specialized models and technical mathematics; if you want to give it a go, you can access it here.  The main thing of interest for our purposes is in the Appendix, wherein Reed et al. use their techniques to make an upper and lower bound estimate for MVP; the lower bound is just using raw birth and death rates, the upper bound generated from a mathematical formula that estimates the number of individuals required to give a 99% likelihood of the population sustaining for forty generations.  Interestingly, there is a large primate species listed -- the Mountain Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla beringei).  And Reed et al. place the lower bound for MVP for the Mountain Gorilla at 849, and the upper bound at somewhat over 11,000 individuals.

So assuming the Sevenoaks Britsquatch (Sasquatchius anglicus kentei) has a similar MVP, and has been wandering about the highways and byways of southeastern England since time immemorial (or at least since 1858), you can't just claim that there are two, or four, or even a dozen of them... you have to believe that there are thousands.

Maybe someone can explain how there could be a thousand (or more) eight-foot-tall hairy hominids hiding out down there southeast of London, doing all the things animals do -- feeding (and an animal that size would need a lot of food), making noise, sleeping, mating, dying, and so on -- and they've only been seen a handful of times near Sevenoaks, have left behind zero actual evidence, and no one has gotten a photograph.  That such a thing could happen in the trackless woods of the Pacific Northwest, or the icy reaches of the Himalayas, I might be able to believe.

But Kent?  Really?

I'm sorry, but I'm with Kevin; this just sounds preposterous to me.  As much as I'd love to see some cryptid discovered, and confirmed by science, I'm betting this won't be the one.  In fact, I think what we should be doing is looking for some prankster in Sevenoaks with a gorilla suit.

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Dowsing for dead people

Suppose you were walking in the woods, and suddenly, you stumbled on a root, and fell flat on your face.  And while you were lying on your belly, trying to regain your breath and your dignity, you noticed that right in front of your eyes was a twenty-dollar bill that someone had dropped.

You might decide that your bad luck in tripping over a tree root had been cancelled out by the good luck of now being twenty dollars richer.  You might, on the other hand, attribute it to complete chance and the chaotic nature of the universe, where sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and the whole thing appears to be a big zero-sum game.

What I can almost guarantee you wouldn't do is decide that the money had exerted a magical gravitational attraction toward your face, and had caused you to fall.

I bring this up because of a maddening article in the Kent and Sussex Courier that tells of a fortuitous archaeological discovery in the town of Tunbridge Wells.  Some "scientists," we are told, were poking around Calverley Grounds, a local park, and found a mass burial site (probably a "plague pit" from the bubonic plague epidemic of 1660), and also the site of a skirmish between the Normans and the Saxons.

Cool stuff.  But I haven't told you yet how they found it.

By "dowsing."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Yes, dowsing, that time-honored tradition of holding metal rods or tree branches in your hands, and imagining that aquifers (or mineral deposits or burial sites or damn near anything) could somehow pull on them and alert you to their presence.  How on earth could that work, you might ask?  Well, an article by Stephen Wagner gives us the following definitive answer:

The quick answer is that no one really knows - not even experienced dowsers. Some theorize there is a psychic connection established between the dowser and the sought object. All things, living and inanimate, the theory suggests, possess an energy force. The dowser, by concentrating on the hidden object, is somehow able to tune in to the energy force or "vibration" of the object which, in turn, forces the dowsing rod or stick to move. The dowsing tool may act as a kind of amplifier or antenna for tuning into the energy.

Righty-o.  An "energy force."  That, strangely, is completely undetectable except to a dude holding a tree branch.

Be that as it may, there is both an American and a British Dowsing Society.  People take this stuff seriously.  I find that when I mention dowsing in my Critical Thinking classes -- in the context of its being pseudoscience, and a fine example of the ideomotor effect -- I find that it arouses hostility on almost the level of evolution and climate change.

"My dad hired a dowser when we were trying to find a place to dig our well," I'll be told, "and when we dug where the dowser told us to, we hit water!"

It's anecdote vs. data again, because however fortunate you were to find water, repeated controlled studies of people who self-identify as being highly successful dowsers have generated results consistent with random chance.

But back to our intrepid British skeleton-finders.  They have no doubt that their discovery was made because of their little magic rods.  One of the "scientists," Don Hocking, said:

The body is sensitive to magnetic fields and the kinds we respond to in this regard are called diamagnetic fields and paramagnetic fields and the body responds autonomously to the presence of these fields and particularly to discontinuities in fields where you get a step or a change in direction or change in magnitude.  We are the equipment.  The human body is the equipment and it responds and we use something to indicate that the body has responded and in our case we tend to use rods which swing when the body responds to the fields.  Then we mark what we have found and go through the whole process, marking everything as we go and build up a picture of what there may be underneath.

Which might win some kind of award for pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo.  And if you're curious about what the terms he's using actually mean, check out the Wikipedia article about diamagnetism and paramagnetism, wherein we learn that (1) all materials are diamagnetic, and that it's only a significant force in superconductors, and (2) paramagnetism is so weak that it can "only be measured by a sensitive analytical balance."

But enough with the science-y vocabulary, let's think about the results.  Even Hocking admitted that he was messing about in a part of the world where you pretty much can't stick a shovel in the ground without hitting a medieval grave site:

We found lots of grave sites and we found one mass grave or ‘plague pit’.  This is a place where the bodies of those who died of the plague were dumped.  I am not sure what plague it was but the main plague was about 1660.  It’s not very surprising.  There must have been a lot around.  The plague took out half the population.

Uh-huh.  So anywhere I dig, I might hit a burial site.  No magic rods required.

I think what bothers me most about this is not that some credulous amateur archaeologists think they're getting mystical information from the Earth, it's that the whole thing was treated seriously by a news outlet.  Woo-woos, after all, will be woo-woos, and they'll continue to play with their Tarot cards and crystal pendulums and metal rods.

But that doesn't mean that we need to give them undeserved credibility by acting if their fantasies are real.

The Beast of Tunbridge Wells

Following on the heels of yesterday's post about Dr. Melba Ketchum and the maybe-perhaps-sort-of confirmation of Sasquatch DNA from a hair sample, we now have a story wherein the Brits (not to be outdone by a bunch of upstart Americans) are claiming their own Bigfoot-clone.  [Source]

Nicknamed "The Beast of Tunbridge Wells," this cryptid is described as an eight-foot-tall beast, human-shaped but covered with hair, with "long arms" and "demonic red eyes."  Some locals are afraid to go outside at night because there have been so many sightings in the past six months; but the story claims that the thing has been seen for seventy or more years, and describe a sighting that occurred in 1942 and was told to a "man named Graham S."

Well, far be it from me to doubt any anecdotal reports from "a man named Graham S.," but let me just interject a bit of a science lesson that may raise some questions in your mind.

There's a concept in ecology called "minimum viable population."  This is the number of organisms needed in a population to assure that (assuming nothing changes) the birth rate equals or exceeds the death rate.  It is quite difficult to estimate, and depends on a great many factors, including the number of offspring per mating, mortality in the young, dependency on available resources, size of the territory, and so on.  To give two extreme examples that will illustrate this:  the MVP for mosquitoes is probably pretty damn close to two, as long as one was male and one was female, and they were near enough to find each other and had a source of food and water.  Mosquitoes can produce so many young from one mating that it's likely you could rebuild a sizable population in short order from those two survivors.  Elephants, on the other hand, reproduce very slowly, and the young are slow to reach sexual maturity; in order to have a population large enough for the birth rate to equal or exceed the death rate (from natural causes, predators, poaching, and so on), you would need hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals in the population.

Get it?  Now, let's consider how many Britsquatches we'd need to have a viable, sustainable population.

To get a handle on this, I referred to the paper "Estimates of Minimum Viable Population Sizes for Vertebrates and Factors Influencing Those Estimates," by David Reed, Julian O'Grady, Barry Brook, Jonathan Ballou, and Richard Frankham, which appeared in the Journal of Biological Conservation in 2003.  The paper is lucidly written but relies on some rather specialized models and technical mathematics; if you want to give it a go, you can access it here.  The main thing of interest for our purposes is in the Appendix, wherein Reed et al. use their techniques to make an upper and lower bound estimate for MVP; the lower bound is just using raw birth and death rates, the upper bound generated from a mathematical formula that estimates the number of individuals required to give a 99% likelihood of the population sustaining for forty generations.  Interestingly, there is a large primate species listed -- the Mountain Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla beringei).  And Reed et al. place the lower bound for MVP for the Mountain Gorilla at 849, and the upper bound at somewhat over 11,000 individuals.

So assuming the Tunbridge Britsquatch (Sasquatchius anglicus kentei) has a similar MVP, and has been wandering about the highways and byways of southeastern England since time immemorial (or at least since 1942), you can't just claim that there are two, or four, or even a dozen of them... you have to believe that there are thousands.

Maybe some of my readers live in southeastern England, and might be able to explain how there could be a thousand (or more) eight-foot-tall hairy hominids hiding out down there, doing all the things animals do -- feeding (and an animal that size would need a lot of food), making noise, sleeping, mating, dying, and so on -- and they've only been seen a handful of times near Tunbridge Wells.  That such a thing could happen in the trackless woods of the Pacific Northwest, or the icy reaches of the Himalayas, I might be able to believe.

But Kent?  Really?

I'm sorry, but this just sounds preposterous to me.  As much as I'd love to see some cryptid discovered, and confirmed by science, I'm betting this won't be the one.  In fact, I think what we should be doing is looking for some prankster in Tunbridge Wells with a gorilla suit.