The source of the Altar Stone

One of the frustrations of history and archaeology is that within those disciplines there are realms of inquiry which (unless someone invents a time machine) will never be answered, because the required information simply doesn't exist.  For societies that left few or no written records -- which, unfortunately, is most of them -- we have to rely upon inference from artifacts, which can be seriously thin ice.

The shakiness of these inferences was famously lampooned in Horace Mitchell Miner's scathing satire on anthropological papers called "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," published in 1956, which looks at American culture ("Nacirema," of course, is "American" backwards) solely from our artifacts and a slim set of observations of our behaviors.  Here's a passage about what anthropologists might make of our medicine cabinets:

The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live.  These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners.  The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts.  However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language.  This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.

The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charm-box of the household shrine.  As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing.  The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again.  While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshiper.

Beneath the charm-box is a small font.  Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution.  The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

So we might well wonder why our ancestors did certain things, but Miner's essay reminds us to rein in our speculation hard.

I was reminded of this when I read a paper this week in Nature about the origin of one of the stones in Stonehenge, the so-called "Altar Stone" that is in the middle of the famous ring.  Geoscientist Anthony Clarke, of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, did a detailed chemical analysis of chips taken from the Altar Stone, trying to figure out where the builders had obtained it -- and found the nearest match was a rock formation called the Orcadian Basin, 750 kilometers away in northeastern Scotland.

While the outer ring stones match nearby rock formations, the Altar Stone is not the only one that was hauled in from a distant source.  The stones of the inner ring, for example, are dolerite bluestone, from the Preseli Hills of Wales.  

But the Altar Stone seems to have come from farther away still.

[Image credit: A. J. Clarke et. al., Nature, August 2024]

The obvious question is... why?  Why go to all the trouble to bring an enormous slab of rock a distance of 750 kilometers, when there was perfectly good building stone nearby?  While the common misapprehension ties Stonehenge to the Celtic druids, the truth is that by the time the Celts arrived, Stonehenge was already two thousand years old.  The people who built Stonehenge -- and such ring-shaped monuments all over western Europe -- belong to a Neolithic culture called the Megalith Builders, about whom we know next to nothing.  Probably not coincidentally, there are nearly a hundred such stone circles in Aberdeenshire, where the rock of the Altar Stone is thought to have originated.  

So did the builders of Stonehenge come south from Scotland, bringing the Altar Stone with them because that particular rock had some kind of ritual significance?

The truth is, we'll probably never know why they did it.  There's no doubt it's puzzling, though.  Just building Stonehenge is enough of a feat for people with no cranes and backhoes; the fact that they brought the Welsh bluestone in from 225 kilometers away, and the Altar Stone from nearly three times that, can't help but make us wonder.

But the ones who could explain it have been dead and buried for four thousand years, so this leaves us with another mystery that's unlikely ever to be answered.  We can only speculate -- while taking care not to make the same kind of mistake that we saw with the Nacireman magical charm-box.

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The writing on the stone

It can often be difficult to sort fact from fiction, especially when multiple people become involved, each with his or her own agenda -- and varying determination to adhere to the truth.

Take, for example, the Brandenburg Stone.  It's a 74 by 39 centimeter slab of oolite (a sedimentary rock) that appears to have writing-like marks scratched into the surface.  Without further ado, here's a photograph of the alleged artifact:

It was found in 1912 near Brandenburg, Kentucky by a farmer named Craig Crecelius.  Crecelius clearly thought the marks were writing -- and you can see for yourself that they look like it -- and he made a good effort to contact linguists who might be able to identify the script, but without success.  He exhibited the stone several times in nearby towns, but wasn't able to drum up much in the way of interest.

In 1965, the stone passed into the hands of one Jon Whitfield, and that's where things start to get interesting.

Whitfield thought he knew what the script was.  The letters, he said, were Coelbren y Beirdd (Welsh for "Bard's Lot"), a script for writing the Welsh language that in the early nineteenth century was the center of a linguistic controversy regarding its origins.  The man who promoted it, one Edward Williams (more often known by his "bardic name" of Iolo Morganwg), was absolutely obsessed with ancient Welsh history and traditions, and achieved fame as a collector of rare medieval Welsh manuscripts.

But why would there be Welsh script on a stone in Kentucky?

Whitfield thought he knew the answer.  There was a story circulating that the medieval Welsh prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd had crossed the Atlantic in around the year 1170 C. E. with a handful of friends, and the lot of them had stayed in North America and intermarried with Native Americans.  (Fans of Madeleine L'Engle will recognize this legend from her book A Swiftly Tilting Planet.)  This, said Whitfield, was proof that the legend was true -- and that Welsh-speaking Natives who descended from Madoc and his comrades had gotten as far inland as Kentucky.

There's only one problem with this.  Coelbren y Beirdd almost certainly wasn't an ancient script at all, but had been invented by Iolo Morganwg in 1791 -- who then passed it off as authentic.

It's pretty clear that despite his legitimate work in preserving ancient Welsh manuscripts, Williams/Morganwg also was a champion forger.  He was exposed as such long after his death by Welsh linguist and poet John Morris-Jones, who decried Williams's dishonesty, saying "it will be an age before our literature and history are clean of the traces of his dirty fingers."  Several of the works he "transcribed" were apparently written by him -- weaving his own fiction and philosophy into allegedly ancient legends and poetry, thus confusing the hell out of scholars who simply wanted to know what historical cultures actually believed.

So even if the marks on the Brandenburg Stone are actually Coelbren y Beirdd, it can't be any older than 1791, and probably much more recent than that.  Skeptic Jason Colavito points out that Morganwg's writing became really popular in the mid to late nineteenth century, when his son Taliesin began publishing and promoting his father's works.  Colavito writes:

The alphabet was widely published in the 1830s and 1840s, and whoever forged the Brandenburg Stone (it was not actually either Williams, who were never in Kentucky) almost certainly used such publications, possibly Taliesin Williams’s widely-read book about the alphabet, in forging the stone.  The younger Williams’s popular book was published to scholarly acclaim in 1840 (having won a prestigious prize two years before) and the alphabet was exposed as a hoax in 1893 (though suspicions had been raised earlier, until Taliesin successfully combated them), which makes it much more likely that the stone was actually carved between 1840 and 1912, though a date as early as 1792 cannot be excluded.  In the United States, libraries had dozens of different volumes on Coelbren y Beirdd, including the Iolo Manuscripts (1848), Bardaas (1862 and 1874), etc., but I am not able to find evidence that the alphabet itself would have been widely available in rural America prior to Taliesin’s book, though it is possible that some of Edward’s specialist publications imported from Britain were available in some places.  After 1862, the largest collection of the Williams forgeries was in print and the alphabet was at the height of its popularity.  Thus, the latter nineteenth or early twentieth century seems the best candidate for the time of forgery.

So we have Craig Crecelius, the farmer who found the stone, and who appears to have been genuinely unaware that it was a forgery; Jon Whitfield, who was the one who identified the writing as Coelbren y Beirdd, but was too young to have been responsible for the creation of the stone, and seems to have thought it was authentic as well; and Edward Williams, who created the fake script but never went to Kentucky and so can't have been the stone's creator, either.

In the end, we're left with a mystery.  An unknown person scratched some mysterious letters on a stone, probably in the last half of the nineteenth century, and left it for someone to find.  And someone did... starting a domino effect of speculation that still shows up on television shows specializing in archaeological weirdness.  The fact remains, though, that everything about it is certainly a forgery -- not only the artifact itself, but the script in which the inscription is written.

But as far as who perpetrated the hoax, we'll probably never know.

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Lost beneath the waves

Ever heard of the Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod?

If not, I hadn't either. Those of you with a linguistic bent might surmise from the name that the kingdom had something to do with Wales, and you'd be right.  The sad tale of the lost Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod is one of the dozens of inundation myths (although using that last word may be inappropriate, as you'll see in a moment), including the Breton city of Ys and the Arthurian legend of the Kingdom of Lyonesse.  Both were allegedly destroyed for their wickedness by drowning in the ocean.  If this puts you in mind of J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional land of Númenor, that's no coincidence; Ys and Lyonesse were part of the inspiration for Tolkien's doomed kingdom of the Second Age of Middle Earth.

The less-famous Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod has some striking parallels.  Originally made up of a broad, fertile valley west of Wales, the land was swallowed up by the sea and now lies beneath Cardigan Bay.  Instead of the sinfulness that did in Ys, Lyonesse, and Númenor, Cantre'r Gwaelod was supposedly destroyed by negligence; in the Black Book of Carmarthen, a thirteenth-century document that is the earliest surviving manuscript written entirely in Welsh, the unfortunate kingdom met its doom because a maiden named Mererid who had been tasked with tending a well fell asleep, and the well overflowed and flooded the entire land.

What, exactly, Mererid was supposed to do about a well that was flowing so fast that it could inundate a whole country while someone was taking an afternoon nap is uncertain.  But in the legend, the poor girl got the blame, and so the matter has stood.

But what separates Cantre'r Gwaelod from other lost-lands myths, including the most famous one -- Atlantis -- is that the Welsh version may actually have some basis in fact.

The Gough Map [Image is in the Public Domain]

Two researchers, Simon Haslett, Professor of Physical Geography at Swansea University, and David Willis, Professor of Celtic History at the University of Oxford, found evidence on one of the earliest maps of Great Britain of two low-lying islands in what is now Cardigan Bay.  The document, called the Gough Map after its last owner prior to its donation to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, dates back to the fourteenth century, although many historians believe it to be a copy of an earlier map.  And it indicates that parts of Cardigan Bay were once dry land, and further, that the contours and terrain of these islands are reminiscent of the descriptions of Cantre'r Gwaelod from the Black Book of Carmarthen:

This study investigates historical sources, alongside geological and bathymetric evidence, and proposes a model of post-glacial coastal evolution that provides an explanation for the ‘lost’ islands and a hypothetical framework for future research: (1) during the Pleistocene, Irish Sea ice occupied the area from the north and west, and Welsh ice from the east, (2) a landscape of unconsolidated Pleistocene deposits developed seaward of a relict pre-Quaternary cliffline with a land surface up to ca. 30 m above present sea-level, (3) erosion proceeded along the lines of a template provided by a retreating shoreline affected by Holocene sea-level rise, shore-normal rivers, and surface run-off from the relict cliffline and interfluves, (4) dissection established islands occupying cores of the depositional landscape, and (5) continued down-wearing, marginal erosion and marine inundation(s) removed the two remaining islands by the 16th century.  Literary evidence and folklore traditions provide support in that Cardigan Bay is associated with the ‘lost’ lowland of Cantre’r Gwaelod.

So it looks like we may have here another example of a legend with some basis in fact.  A good many of the inundation myths -- including, very possibly, the Great Flood in the Bible -- might have come from the fact that at the end of the last Ice Age, the seas were rising, and previously dry land such as Beringia (between Russia and Alaska) and Doggerland (between England and continental Europe) were drowned.  Cantre'r Gwaelod, perhaps, was a victim of the same sea level rise -- but unlike the others, we appear to have a map showing exactly where it lay.

And maybe once and for all we can absolve poor Mererid of any responsibility for its demise.

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Traces of vanished worlds

Every civilization is built on the remains of prior ones, something that I recall finding a little startling when I first read C. W. Ceram's wonderful Gods, Graves, and Scholars when I was in tenth grade.  Being fascinated with Greek mythology, I had read the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey, so I was familiar with Troy -- and shocked to find out that the excavated ruins of Troy span nine levels, bottom to top, and the seventh ("Troy VII"), dating to the 13th century B.C.E., is thought to have been the Troy of Homer.  But the city itself rebuilt itself at least nine times, with previous iterations being abandoned for one reason or another (at least two seem to have been destroyed by earthquakes, and Troy VII shows the expected signs of having been burned and demolished by battle).

This is a well-studied example, but really, everywhere is like that.  We all stand on the ruins of the civilizations that occupied these lands before us, and future civilizations will rise from the ruins of ours.  If you want good evidence of this, check out these two papers that came out last week -- showing that traces of occupation by the Romans are still detectable underground, after the passage of two millennia.

First, in the journal Britannia, we have a paper by Toby Driver, Barry Burnham, and Jeffrey Davies which studied a pattern of dead grass during a drought in 2018 in Wales, and found that the dieback revealed patterns that conformed to Roman roads, plazas, and building foundations.  The compression of the soil from the construction made it more prone to drying out, and as the grass there died, aerial surveys showed what looked like a map of ancient Roman settlements.

It looks like Wales is heading into another exceptionally dry summer, and the archaeologists are a lot more excited about this than the farmers are.  "There are still huge gaps," said study lead author Toby Driver in an interview with the BBC.  "We're still missing a Roman fort at Bangor, we've got the roads, we've got the milestones – but no Roman fort.  We're still missing a Roman fort near St Asaph, and near Lampeter in west Wales we should have one as well."

Next, we have a paper in the journal Antiquity by Cambridge University archaeologists Lieven Verdonck, Alessandro Launaro, Frank Vermeulen, and Martin Millett, describing the use of ground-penetrating radar to produce a detailed map of a city that was abandoned by the Romans 1,300 years ago.

The city was named Falerii Novi, and is first attested in historical records in 241 B.C.E.  It sits fifty kilometers north of Rome, and was occupied continuously during the Republic and Empire periods, and well into the "Dark Ages" -- the site was last inhabited in about 700 C.E., although the exact date (and reason) it was abandoned isn't known.

But gradually the ruins were covered up by vegetation and eventually all visible traces were gone.  But the remains were still there, underground.

And now Verdonck's team has used radar to see where they lie, generating 28 billion data points and a map of the city of astonishing detail.

What's most amazing about this is that the researchers created this map without disturbing the site at all.  As study senior author Martin Millett said, in an interview with Gizmodo, it's taken two hundred years to excavate Pompeii to a similar degree of detail, and -- despite the care that was taken -- in that more famous site, the process of uncovering the ruins undoubtedly damaged some of the structures underneath.

Here, we have a picture, and a quantity of data that will take years to analyze, without moving one speck of dirt.

These papers make me wonder what might lie beneath the soil on which I walk.  Where I live has been occupied (rather sparsely) by people of European descent for only two hundred years or so, but for thousands of years before that by indigenous people of the Cayuga and Seneca Nations.  What traces of those people are under my feet right now?  We all stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, and even if they're not as celebrated in literature as Homeric Troy and Imperial Rome, they're still there beneath our own dwellings, businesses, and roads, just as ours will lie beneath the ones that will be built by our far-distant descendants.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for people who are fascinated with the latest research on our universe, but are a little daunted by the technical aspects: Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Oxford University astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.

A whirlwind tour of the most recent discoveries from the depths of space -- and I do mean recent, because it was only released a couple of weeks ago -- Smethurst's book is a delightful voyage into the workings of some of the strangest objects we know of -- quasars, black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, blazars, gamma-ray bursters, and many others.  Presented in a way that's scientifically accurate but still accessible to the layperson, it will give you an understanding of what we know about the events of the last 13.8 billion years, and the ultimate fate of the universe in the next few billions.  If you have a fascination for what's up there in the night sky, this book is for you!

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

Noises in the basement

A couple of days ago, I was sent a link by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia with the message, "Thought you'd be interested... what do you think of this?"

The link was to a story on Wales Online, about a couple in the town of Ammonford who claims that they've been driven from their house by the sounds of ghostly screams, talking, and banging -- all coming from underneath their basement.

The couple, Christine and Alan Tait, are now living in their camper van because they're afraid to stay in their house.  "It was like a flushing noise that I heard first," Christine Tait said.  "I told Alan about it and that I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.  He left his phone in the bathroom with the recorder on to try to pick up the source of the noise, and then we could hear a machine running.  We started to record all over the house, and we picked up the sounds of chains, a motorbike starting, and people screaming."

Since then, Alan Tait said, they have heard "a woman screaming, sexual sounds, dogs barking, a printing press running, a motorbike, a car horn honking and what sounds like a police siren," all from beneath their house, which stands on a quiet alleyway.

Haunted House by Hayashiya Shozo, early 1800s [Image is in the Public Domain]

On the link is a recording made my Alan Tait that has some of the sounds he claims he captured by dropping a microphone down a 1.5 meter shaft he dug in his basement.  They're pretty creepy, I'll say that -- although, in context, not really much worse than you'd hear in a busy city (and we have only the word of the article's author, Robert Harries, about how quiet the neighborhood is).

So the people at Wales Online sent a team into the house, after Alan Tait said he'd let them go as long as they were aware that he wasn't responsible for anything that happened to them.  They brought in recording equipment, stayed there for hours, and what happened was...

... nothing.  The only thing the recording equipment picked up was the team themselves, moving around as they packed up to leave.

So it sounds a little fishy to me.  I'm always pretty dubious about evil spirits that magically vanish whenever anyone shows up with a skeptical attitude.  I'm reminded of what the character MacPhee says in That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis: "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

There's also the problem that (despite Wales Online's mention of sending out a team to investigate) the whole thing has a sensationalized tabloid feel about it.  I don't know what Wales Online's reliability is, but on a glance it reminds me of trash like The Daily Mail Fail.

Last, my spidey-senses were definitely alerted by the end of the article, where we find out that Alan and Christine Tait were "not prepared to say where in the UK they currently reside and did not want pictures of themselves published in the press," presumably to protect their privacy -- after giving out their names, ages (62), publishing photographs of their house, and stating that they were "travelling around the country handing out posters and fliers about what we think is going on."

So to me, it sounds like a publicity stunt, although (as a dedicated home-body) I have a hard time imagining wanting publicity to the point that you're willing to abandon your house and live out of a camper van.

But that's just me.

So to the reader who sent the link: thanks, but I'm generally unimpressed.  I guess that was a predictable response, but even so, this is one that doesn't add up to me.  Until I start hearing screams, banging, and "sexual sounds" from underneath my own basement, I'm not buying it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun for anyone who (like me) appreciates both plants and an occasional nice cocktail -- The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart.  Most of the things we drink (both alcohol-containing and not) come from plants, and Stewart takes a look at some of the plants that have provided us with bar staples -- from the obvious, like grapes (wine), barley (beer), and agave (tequila), to the obscure, like gentian (angostura bitters) and hyssop (Bénédictine).

It's not a scientific tome, more a bit of light reading for anyone who wants to know more about what they're imbibing.  So learn a little about what's behind the bar -- and along the way, a little history and botany as well.

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

Incubi, hoaxes, and limelight

A long-time reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link yesterday to a story from Wales, in which we find out about a family who is allegedly being terrorized by demons and poltergeists.

The bare bones of the story, which won't take long to tell because it pretty closely resembles most such claims, is that Keiron and Tracey Fry of New Tredegar, near Caerphilly, Wales, have been visited by spirits who are making their lives miserable.  Jon Dean, author of an article about the haunting that appeared in Wales Online last week, writes:

Keiron and Tracey Fry say they have been terrorised by the poltergeist every night for months, in scenes reminiscent of supernatural chiller Paranormal Activity. 

Mum Tracey, 46, even thinks she is beaten up in the night by the 'incubus demon' - leaving her covered with bruises in the morning. 

An incubus is a demon in male form who, according to mythological and legendary traditions, targets sleeping people, especially women...

The family got in a specialist to "cleanse" the house and brought a vicar in to bless their home. 

The phantom, which has also been menacing the couple's three children, was summoned by a using a Ouija board in the house, they say. 

Dad-of-three Keiron says he took a pic of the ghost in his sons' bedroom which he says shows a small child in a white gown with a blue face and a tail.

Without further ado, here is Fry's photograph of the alleged ghost:

 So the family decided to take action:

The family, who moved into their house in July 2013, called in an investigator to tackle the spook. 

Ghostbuster Robert Amour, 43, arrived at the house with a bible and crucifix. 

He banned the petrified family from going upstairs after he shouted to them that he could "feel the evilness in the room." 

After 20 minutes the psychic returned to the frightened family - claiming he had slain two small demons.

Which is pretty hardcore.  Of course, we have the usual problem; the whole story relies on anecdote and flimsy photographic evidence.  So I'm very much inclined to disbelieve it, even if (I will admit up front) I have no proof that they aren't being haunted by a violent ghost that looks suspiciously like a knotted-up bedsheet.

The incident got me to thinking about hoaxes in general, and what is so appealing about them. Because whatever the Frys' claim turns out to be, it is a sorry truth that hoaxes are extremely common in the woo-woo world.  It seems like every other day people get caught out faking bigfoot photographs and tracks, using Photoshop to create realistic-looking UFO photos, and employing stage magic to convince people that psychic phenomena are real.  The whole thing pisses me off, because the human propensity for fakery makes it even harder for we skeptics to discern whether there's anything to all of the paranormal claims out there.  To paraphrase Michio Kaku (who was speaking about UFOs) -- if even 1% of the claims of supernatural goings-on are legitimate, it's still worth investigating, and hoaxes do nothing but muddy the waters.

So the hoaxers certainly aren't even doing the true believers any favors.  But it did get me wondering why people create hoaxes in the first place, because it's something I honestly can't imagine doing.

I know that part of the motivation is money, especially for the mediums and faith healers and so on, who are charging big bucks for people to participate in their nonsense.  But there is a lot of fakery that doesn't explicitly involve the money motive -- think of all of the UFO and cryptid sightings and reports of ghosts that turn out to be completely made up, and just result in one or two newspaper articles or television interviews before they die out as quickly as they started.

What on earth can motivate people to do this?

I expect the answer lies in the "fifteen minutes of fame" phenomena -- the drive that some people experience to get their names in the newspapers somehow.  As a person who is at the "very introverted" end of the spectrum, this is hard for me to imagine.  It's difficult enough for me to be the center of attention for things I've actually accomplished; the idea of manufacturing a lie, knowing I could be found out and humiliated as a liar, for the sole reason of getting interviewed on television -- well, it just strikes me as bizarre.

But I honestly can't think of any other reason that someone would do such a thing.  It's unlikely that most of these incidents generate much in the way of income, so the only other possible motivator must be fame.

Which brings us back to the Frys.  Again, I can't prove their claim is a hoax, but even the fact that that they mentioned that their experiences were "reminiscent of supernatural thriller Paranormal Activity" -- and the article ended with the movie trailer -- makes my Suspicion Alarm start ringing.  And if their claim does turn out to be cut from whole cloth, can you imagine what the repercussions will be?  They've been in the newspapers and online, with photographs (including their children, for pete's sake).  They'd be laughingstocks.

If that were me, I'd want to crawl in a hole.  Permanently.

So that's today's contribution from the I Really Don't Understand Humanity department.  I'm far from perfect, but a long habit of honesty combined with a hatred of being embarrassed render this sort of thing a sin I'm hardly even capable of comprehending.  So I wish the Frys the best of luck dealing with their two-foot-tall abusive pillowcase incubus.  If they are telling the truth, that's gotta suck.

The haunted PC

There's a lot of misunderstanding out there about the definition of the word "skeptic."

"Skeptic" is not synonymous with "disbeliever."  "Climate-change skeptics," for example, aren't skeptics, since skeptics are swayed by evidence, and the vast preponderance of evidence is in favor of anthropogenic climate change.  Those "skeptics" are better termed "deniers."

So if that's what a skeptic isn't, how can we define what a skeptic is?  The bottom line is that to a skeptic, natural explanations always trump supernatural ones.  You follow the evidence where it leads, and then either settle on the conclusion that best fits all of the evidence -- or else hold conclusion in abeyance, indefinitely if need be, until more evidence arises.

The dictum of always looking for a natural solution is a sticking point, for some folks.  The end result  of accepting a supernatural explanation, though, is often the lazy way out -- you arrive at "it's magic" or "it's god" and then stop.  No further comprehension of the world is necessary at that point, or perhaps even possible.

I find that an unsatisfactory protocol for understanding how the universe works.  I want to know what's really going on -- what the actual mechanism is.  And once we decide that magic works, that anything is possible even if it contravenes the known, tested laws of science, then the door shuts.

Take, for example, the case of Ken Webster, Thomas Harden, and the haunted computer.

The bare bones of the story can be found at the site Instrumental TransCommunication, but there is a much more exhaustive telling in the book The Dead Roam the Earth: True Stories of the Paranormal From Around the World by Alasdair Wickham.  Here is the basic idea of the claim:

In 1984, a young man named Ken Webster moved with his girlfriend to an unnamed village in north Wales.  They report that poltergeist activity was already happening in the house even before what was to become the main event started -- canned food being moved around and rearranged in cabinets, newspapers levitating from the table, and six-toed footprints appearing from nowhere in cement dust during a renovation.  But the real trouble started when Ken brought home what was, at the time, cutting-edge technology -- a BBC personal computer with a disc drive and 32 KB of RAM.

One evening, Ken was idling on the computer when he found a file on a disc named "KDN."  He didn't recognize it as anything that belonged to him or his girlfriend, so he opened it, and found the following message:

Ken Deb ni c
True A re The NIGHTmares
Of a pErson t hat FEARs
Safe A re The BODIES Of tHe
Silent WORLD
Turn Pr etty FlowER tuRn
TOWARDS The SUN
For Y o u S HalL GroW
AND SOW
But T he FLOWer Reaches
TOo high and witHERS in
The B urning Light
G E T OU T YOU
R BR ICKs
PuSsy Ca t PUSSy Cat
Went TO LonDOn TO
Seek
FamE aND FORTUNE
Faith Must NOT Be
LOst
For ThiS Shall
Be YouR REDEEMER.

Understandably creeped out by this, he and his girlfriend decided to approach the whole thing scientifically.  If there was a spirit who liked to communicate via PC, they'd give him/her/it the opportunity.  So they left the computer on, all the time, to see if any further communiqués from the Other World appeared.

And appear they did.

The first morning after the computer had been left on all night, the following file was found on the disc drive:

I WRYTE ON BEHALTHE OF MANYE -- WOT STRANGE WORDES THOU SPEKE

THOU ART GOODLY MAN WHO HATH FANCIFUL WOMAN WHO DWEL IN MYNE HOME... WITH LYTES WHICHE DEVYLL MAKETH... 'TWAS A GREATE CRYME TO HATH BRIBED MYNE HOUSE -- L.W. 

Besides the fact that you'd think the Spirit World would have figured out about caps locks by now, the voice in the new message seemed light years from the random weirdness in the first.  The spirit had even signed its initials.  So Ken asked the spirit who it was, and to give more information about its history.

And the spirit obliged.  Over the next few weeks, Ken found out that the spirit was one Lukas Wainman, who had lived in the first half of the sixteenth century and had been a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford University.  He had lived in the very cottage that Ken and his girlfriend now occupied, he said.  And Lukas -- the live Lukas, back in the 1500s -- was aware that he was communicating with them, five-hundred-odd years later.  Because of his communications, he said, he was in danger of being arrested for witchcraft.  Ken cites one message, a little on the cryptic side, that said:

WHEN THY BOYSTE DIDST COME THER WERT A VERS ON'T THAT SAID ME WERE NOT TO AXE OF YOUR UNKYND KNOWINGS FOR THY LEEMS BOYSTE WILT BE NAMORE.

Which isn't particularly helpful.  But things took a turn for the (even more) surreal a few months later, when a second (or perhaps third) personality started talking through the computer, one who just called himself "2109:"

WE SHALL ANSEWER AS YOU WISH IT IN TERMS OF PHYSICS THEN IT SHALL BE SO BUT REMMEMBER THAT OUR LIMITS ARE SET BY YOUR ABILITIES.

"2109" said he belonged to an incorporeal race that was watching humanity, and was responsible for a lot of the supernatural silliness that abounds around the world.  But "2109's" appearance didn't stop Lukas, who still came through now and again.  He finally owned up that his name wasn't actually Lukas Wainman, but Thomas Harden or Hawarden, and that he wasn't going to be tried for witchcraft but was still under suspicion.

So Ken decided to do a little digging in the local library, and found that there had been a fellow of Brasenose College in the 1500s named Thomas Harden, who had been expelled for failing to remove the pope's name from religious documents after Henry VIII did his power grab and founded the Anglican Church.

But evidently, Ken's inquiries alarmed the Spirit World, and his finding out about Thomas Harden effectively shut down the communication lines.  Neither Thomas/Lukas nor "2109" ever contacted him again.

So, let's see about explaining all of this.  There are two explanations I can see:

1. Ken Webster actually was communicating with spirits of various sorts -- a poltergeist, a living man from the past, and a member of an "incorporeal race" -- all of whom decided to speak through a PC.  People who favor this explanation usually claim Ken's discovery of the real Thomas Harden, and the fact of Lukas/Thomas's use of archaic English, as points in favor.
2. Either Ken, or his girlfriend, or both, made the whole thing up.  They wrote the files, and looked up the name of a disgraced Oxford don when they realized that sooner or later, people were going to figure out that there was no one named "Lukas Wainman" at Brasenose in the sixteenth century.

It's a general rule that the explanation that requires you to make the fewest ad hoc assumptions is the most likely to be true.  So which is it?  Especially given that anyone who is educated in the British public school system has read Shakespeare, and therefore could probably do a decent job at mimicking archaic English if they were going to pull a prank?

Even given that this story has all the hallmarks of a hoax, it's still cited as one of the best pieces of evidence out there for trans-temporal communication -- communication between two people from different time periods.

So, in conclusion: it's not that I think that what is conventionally called "paranormal" is impossible; it's more that I haven't run into any examples of alleged paranormal activity that weren't explainable far more easily from completely natural occurrences.  And human nature being what it is, the likelihood of being fooled by our own superstitiousness, fallibility, and gullibility, not to mention our capacity for lies, frauds, and hoaxes, makes me gravitate toward those explanations.

As usual, Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  And in the case of Ken Webster and the haunted computer, I'm just not buying what's being offered as proof.

The woo-woos go to Wales

Some of you may remember that three years ago, just as the Mayan Apocalypse nonsense was beginning to get some traction, a cadre of nutjobs associated with J. Z. Knight's "Ramtha School of Enlightenment" descended on the little village of Bugarach in the southwest of France because they had somehow become convinced that it was the only place on Earth that wasn't going to be destroyed.  The mayor of Bugarach was understandably dismayed when thousands of dubiously sane apocalyptoids showed up and started camping out all around the village.  They were, they explained, expecting that when the End Times came, the nearby mountain (the Pic de Bugarach) was going to pop open in the fashion of a jack-in-the-box, and an alien spacecraft was going to come out and bring all of the assembled woo-woos to their new home in outer space.

Except, of course, that none of this happened, and the woo-woos eventually gave up and went home.  Same as the Harmonic Convergence people and the Rajneeshees did a generation earlier.  As mystifying as it seems, repeatedly failing in every single prediction they make never discourages the loyal following.  They disperse temporarily, but always resurface later, once again holding hands and chanting while barefoot and wearing daisy chains...

... and this time Wales is the lucky winner.

Our most recent iteration of this story comes to us courtesy of the "Aetherius Society," which hales back to 1958, when London cab driver George King was instructed by an "alien intelligence" to become a religious leader.  "Prepare yourself!" the voice told him.  "You are to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament."  The alien intelligence said his name was "Aetherius" and that he lived on the planet Venus, despite the fact that Venus is basically a cross between an acid bath and a blast furnace, with a surface hot enough to melt lead.  Be that as it may, Aetherius did a lot of talking to and through King, delivering messages that included a cautionary note that if people didn't listen to the "Cosmic Masters," evil space guys were going to destroy the Earth.  However, with the help of Aetherius and others (including the same Krishna that the Hindus worship, except that the Aetherius people say that Krishna is from Saturn), everything would be just hunky-dory.

Oh, yeah, and Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tse were aliens, too.  Just to be clear on that.

But then, there's also this fixation on mountains, which is how Wales comes into the picture.  George King/Aetherius said that there were nineteen mountains around the world that were "holy places" that were "charged with spiritual energy," and these include Pen-y-Fan in the Brecon Beacons and Carnedd Llewelyn in Snowdonia.  And it is to the latter that the Aetherius Society members are going to be heading in August.

"Carnedd Llewelyn is one of nineteen mountains around the world that the Aetherius Society revere as holy," society member Richard Lawrence said.  "On August 23 we are arranging a pilgrimage...  The purpose of going up is to send out spiritual energy for world peace and to pray for the betterment of humanity.  The climbs are quite demanding, I find, and then at the top we raise our hands and join in prayer.  When I feel a burst of energy it could be strong heat in the palms or a tingling sensation throughout the body."

I don't know about you, but I would not consider a "tingling sensation" an adequate reward for busting my ass climbing a mountain.  But that's just me.  And at least, unlike the Pic de Bugarach, Carnedd Llewelyn isn't all that near any towns whose inhabitants the "pilgrims" will bother.  The nearest good-sized village is Bethesda, fourteen kilometers distant, which is quite a hike.  Plus, Bethesda is said by Wikipedia to be "infamous for its pubs," so maybe our pilgrims might oughta think about other accommodations in any case.

I suppose that the whole thing is harmless enough, but you have to wonder how it keeps happening.  I mean, if I were considering becoming an Aetherian, or whatever the hell they call themselves, I'd do some research first.  I'd start by looking up "alien UFO fringe groups" online, and after the first ten articles about the Heaven's Gate Cult and the Raëlians and (it must be said) the Scientologists, I'd pretty much go, "Well, fuck that."

So I won't be joining them in Wales, much as I think it's a lovely place that I'd like to visit again.  I'm not much for daisy chains and chanting.  Instead, I think I'll see what I can do in the way of achieving "tingling sensations" in the comfort and privacy of my own home.

Alien round-up

Yesterday's post, which involved fact-free speculation about UFOs being a "macro-scale quantum effect," made me realize that it's been a while since we looked at what was happening in the world of UFOlogists and alien aficionados.  So I did some research, and I'm glad that I did, because there are three stories that certainly merit a closer look.

First, we have an article over at the wonderfully loony website Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal called "Chatting With the Axthadans," in which we learn about an extraterrestrial species that I, at least, had never heard of.

The Axthadans are sometimes confused with the "Greys," we read, although there are some significant differences.  The "Greys" are much shorter, the author tells us, and come from a planet only thirty light years distant.  The Axthadans, on the other hand, are benevolent aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy.

Upon reading this, I immediately thought, "How can you be from a whole galaxy?"  I mean, it's bad enough that some woo-woos think that there are life forms that come from a constellation, given that this is just a loose assemblage of a few stars that are all at varying distances from the Earth, and only seem to be near each other when viewed from our vantage point.  But an entire galaxy?  Made up, according to recent studies, of one trillion stars?

How could that possibly work?

Also, there's the little problem that the distance from the Earth to the center of the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years.  In other words, so distant that even at the speed of light, it would take 2.5 million years to get there.  I seem to remember that even the writers of the original Star Trek recognized that the Andromeda Galaxy was kind of far away -- in one episode, evil aliens try to hijack the Enterprise and take it there, for some reason that escapes my memory at the moment, and they convert almost the entire crew into little geometrical solids for the duration of the voyage, which saved not only on upkeep but also on salary for hiring actors to portray Red Shirts who were just gonna die anyhow.  But fortunately, the un-converted members of the crew save the day, and prevent the ship from being taken on a voyage Boldly Going Where No One In His Right Mind Would Ever Attempt To Go.

So, however unlikely it is that we've been visited by beings from another star system, it's orders of magnitude less likely that we've been visited by beings from another galaxy.  The distances are simply prohibitive, even presupposing some kind of super-advanced technology.


(Much) closer to home, we have a woman in Wales who thinks that the aliens are abducting Welsh people because of their superior DNA.

Hilary Porter, "UFOlogist and public speaker," says she herself has been abducted so many times that she's lost count.  The first time was when she and her husband were on their way to visit a friend in Llanelli, and had a time-slip after which they found themselves near Cardiff with no memory of what had happened for some hours previous.

"It was damned frightening," Porter said.  "We just blacked out and had no idea how we got there.  I didn’t feel well at all.  My husband thought we must have gone to sleep, but that didn’t explain how we got there...  When we got home I got changed and found triangular suction marks on my stomach, blood suction marks. I thought 'flipping hell, look at that.'"

Which is a fair enough response, I suppose.  As far as why they abducted her, and why that area of road is an "abduction hotspot," Porter speculates that it's because the aliens want DNA from "the Celtic tribes" because their "DNA is of more interest" and is "compatible for creating human/alien hybrids."

I suppose I should be concerned, given that I'm a quarter Scottish by ancestry.  I'm not sure if the other 3/4 (which is mainly French) outweighs the Celtic-ness, though.  I can understand it if the aliens aren't interested in French DNA, given that a human-alien hybrid that was only interested in sitting around in the intergalactic café drinking red wine and looking smug probably wouldn't be much use.  But if a quarter Scottish is sufficient, I want to invite the aliens to abduct me.  I would love to see the interior of a spacecraft.  Also, meeting an extraterrestrial intelligence is high on the list of things I want to do.  I'd be happy to roll up my sleeve and give them a vial of blood, if that's what they're after, although I'd appreciate it if they'd give me a pass on the whole body-cavity probe thing.

Last, we have word from none other than Pope Francis himself that if aliens exist, he'd not only welcome them, he'd baptize them.

I'm not making this up.  The Vatican has taken a great interest in astronomy in recent years, probably out of guilt feelings over what they did to Galileo and Giordano Bruno.  And the pope himself is deeply intrigued by the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

In his weekly homily, given on Monday, Pope Francis said, "If – for example - tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here... Martians, right?  Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them...  And one says, 'But I want to be baptized!' What would happen?...  When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, 'No, Lord, it is not prudent!  No, let's do it this way'... Who are we to close doors?  In the early Church, even today, there is the ministry of the ostiary [usher].  And what did the ostiary do?  He opened the door, received the people, allowed them to pass.  But it was never the ministry of the closed door, never."

So that sounds pretty open-minded, although I do have to wonder why exactly the aliens would want to be baptized.  I mean, if the pope is right about god and salvation and the whole shebang, presumably the aliens already know about it.  There's no particular reason why they'd have to go to the trouble of coming all the way to Rome (Italy, Earth, Solar System) to get access.

And then, there'd be the inconvenience of the aliens having to fly their spaceships to Mass every Sunday, and sending their kids to catechism classes and all.  Nah, I'm pretty sure they'd just prefer to stay home and keep whatever religious beliefs (or lack thereof) they already had.

But that's the whole problem, isn't it?  According to the UFOlogists, we have all of these aliens, coming here all the time.  To listen to people like Hilary Porter, Earth is a regular Stellar Grand Central Station.  And the people who believe in the Axthadans think that they came all the way to this tiny, insignificant little speck of rock, 2.5 million light years away, to "guide our development" and "prepare humans for possible integration into the universal culture."  And they've been coming for a while, too; apparently the biblical book of Ezekiel, which reads like almost as much of a Bronze-Age bad acid trip as the book of Revelation, was a chronicle of a visit from the Axthadans.

It all seems pretty unlikely to me -- given the distances involved, and the how generally unremarkable our planet and Solar System seem to be.  So sad to say, but I think we probably haven't been visited.  Meaning my DNA and yours (if you have Celtic ancestry) is reasonably certain to be safe from extraction.

Aquatic cryptid update

It is amazing to me, after all of these years of having a (rather guilty) fascination with cryptozoology, that I still can run into cryptids that I've never heard of.  This week, for example, I discovered two that were new to me -- one veritably in my own back yard.

The first came up because it's the 25th anniversary of its alleged appearance.  Back in 1988, farmers in Rhyader, Wales, began to report that their large animals -- especially sheep -- were being killed by "a single bite to the sternum."  One farm, owned by the Pugh family, lost over three dozen of its sheep to the attacker.

The article summarizing the events of a quarter-century ago states that the townspeople initially attributed the attacks to a "black panther."  This is somewhat amusing given that the only black panthers in Wales are in zoos, and if one went missing, the zookeeper would probably have noticed.  On the other hand, reports of giant marauding felines in Britain are common enough that the phenomenon has its own Wikipedia page, so I guess if we Yanks can have our Bigfoots, then the Brits can have their panthers.

Be that as it may, the Ginormous Kitty Theory received a serious credibility blow when it was found that the evidence left behind by the Beast of Rhyader, as it came to be known, showed that the creature had not been walking on four legs -- but had, instead, slithered up from the River Wye.  So rather than modifying their guess to the Ginormous Aquatic Legless Kitty Theory, the townspeople settled on a new model, namely the Ginormous Aquatic Serpent Theory.

Not an actual photograph of the Beast of Rhyader

The author uses the term "Lovecraftian" to describe the beast, which is apt only in that it killed things.  Most of the creatures in Lovecraft's stories also sucked out their victims' souls, ate their faces, or converted them to puddles of sticky goo.  So I think we can say that the resemblance, if any, was purely coincidental.

In any case, the attacks suddenly ceased of their own accord in December of 1988, never to be repeated, and the mystery was never solved.


But if that's scary enough, little did I know that there was a similar beast only a few miles away from me.  In Cayuga Lake, a long, narrow glacial lake that's only five miles (as the crow flies) from my front door, there is a creature called "Old Greeny" that resembles the Beast of Rhyader in that (1) it's aquatic, (2) it's reptilian, and (3) it almost certainly doesn't exist.  But this last isn't going to stop the reports from coming in, one of them from an "unnamed resident of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania," who was visiting our fair region back in 2009, and had the following to say:

I’ve been face to face with Old Greeny; not more than 100 feet away from me as I stood on the northern shore of Lake Cayuga looking south across the lake; eight or nine years ago. It raised its triangular-tooth-filled jaws with aquatic plants hanging from it’s half-open mouth to break surface for only about three seconds before once again submerging. I will never forget that large, unblinking eye staring to the west at nothing in particular; never acknowledging my presence. Don’t let anyone tell you I saw a floating log or a beaver! I know I saw an animal that is not supposed to exist!  By what I observed I can tell you it was standing on the bottom when it raised its head for me to see; not swimming; but stationary!

Not an actual photograph of Old Greeny

The same story reports that a local resident, one Steven Griffen, was bitten on the arm so hard by Old Greeny in 1974 that it broke his arm.  This might actually discourage me from swimming in Cayuga Lake if I was actually willing to swim in it in the first place, given that our climate is not exactly conducive to running around outside clad in nothing but swim trunks (this year, summer occurred on a Thursday).

But even so, I'll keep my eyes peeled when I'm down near the lake, and report back here if I see anything that is definitely not a beaver.

I'll also make sure that I'll listen for reports of local sheep being killed by "a single bite to the sternum."  That's gotta hurt, even if the attacker doesn't turn out to be "Lovecraftian."

The Welsh measles conspiracy

If, as I do, you have strong feelings about the irresponsibility of the anti-vaxxer movement, and the mountain of science that they ignore in order to bolster their beliefs that vaccination is dangerous, I recommend not reading this post.  Just reading the background material for it means that I'm probably going to have to double up on my high blood pressure medication today.

Because now the anti-vaxxers are claiming that the measles epidemic in Wales this year, in which 700 people were sickened and one killed by a disease that is 100% preventable, was faked.

Yes, you read that right.  Heidi Stevenson, writing for Gaia Health, has a stomach-turning "exposé" that begins as follows:

The Great Measles Epidemic of Wales—the one that’s being used to stampede sheeple into vaccine clinics for the MMR jab—never happened. Seriously! It was faked. The actual data from the Welsh government on cases of measles proves it.

Here's her "proof:"

The fact is that, though 446 measles notifications were made between 1 January and 31 March of this year, those were merely reports. The reality is that only 26 cases were actually confirmed!

You may have noted that this faux measles epidemic started in November, and the figures for last year weren’t included. However, that doesn’t help make the case for an epidemic, or even come close to the claim that 83 people had to be hospitalized for measles. You see, the total number of confirmed measles cases in Wales for all of 2012 was 14. So, adding 14 for all of 2012 to 26 for the first three months of this year, we get a total of 40 confirmed cases of measles—less than half the falsely reported 83 hospitalizations!

 The actual reason for the discrepancy was picked up on almost immediately, with one of the first comments on the story reading as follows:

Note that only the minority of measles test samples are sent to Welsh labs.

So in conclusion it shouldn't be surprising if the lab confirmed figures are low at present because the majority of samples are sent to English labs for confirmation and are not included in the All Wales reports.

You're drawing conclusions based on at best incomplete data.

Stevenson went on the attack in the comments section, responding to the above commenter with, "But the reality is that this is not an epidemic and even if every reported case had proven to be genuine measles, it would not amount to an epidemic - nor has it amounted to anything that anyone needs to fear."  She responded to another person who objected to her stance with, "You're a shill.  Goodbye."  To another, who had mentioned herd immunity and that it was "thought that a 95% vaccination rate was enough to protect the population from epidemics in most cases," Stevenson snarled back:

What garbage! It's isn't known, it's merely "thought that". The belief in how high the rate of vaccination must be to stop a disease keeps changing - it keeps going up. The fact is that no one knows if there is even such a thing as herd immunity. It's an idea, not a fact. And that 95% figure is something that was pulled out of the air. It's meaningless - nothing but a coverup for the fact that the vaccines are nowhere near as effective as they'd have you believe.

Regarding learning math: The fact is that you've just spewed out figures that prove nothing in relation to this particular issue, and most assuredly do not demonstrate that you have any knowledge of the topic - just that you are able to spew out published figures.

You aren't actually providing any information that elucidates the topic at hand - the fact that the actual number of cases of measles is a small fraction of the reported number, though the reported number has been used to declare an epidemic and push for vaccination.

 Oh, yeah, and to further trivialize the Welsh epidemic, she threw in the following "photograph:"

Hmm, herd immunity is "meaningless?"  That would certainly come as a surprise to Dr. Paul E. M. Fine, whose 1993 paper on epidemiological modeling (available here) is considered the go-to source on how a sufficient pool of immunes in a population can prevent epidemics from taking hold.  Research by Thomas L. Schlenker et al. (available here) on measles in particular concluded that "Modest improvements in low levels of immunization coverage among 2-year-olds confer substantial protection against measles outbreaks. Coverage of 80% or less may be sufficient to prevent sustained measles outbreaks in an urban community."

And on a more emotional level, perhaps Ms. Stevenson would like to discuss the matter with Cecily Johnson, an Australian woman whose unvaccinated daughter Laine Bradley contracted subacute sclerosing panencephalitis as a complication of a measles infection, and lingered for five years, unable to speak, unable to feed, clothe, or wash herself, before dying at age twelve.

The long and short of it is that the actual research shows what we've known for years.  Vaccination has an extremely low rate of complications, while the complications from what are now entirely preventable diseases -- measles, polio, diphtheria, typhoid -- are often debilitating and sometimes fatal.  No medical intervention is 100% safe, and if you scour the records you can find cases of bad side effects (mostly allergic reactions).  But if you weigh those against the millions of people who are now alive because of vaccines, the choice is obvious.

At least, it is to me.  It apparently isn't to Stevenson and others in the anti-vaxxer movement.  Maybe it's because any quantification of the lives saved by vaccines is always going to be a guess -- it's not like you can look at someone and say, "If you hadn't been vaccinated, you'd have died at age six of diphtheria."

But all you have to do is to look into historical records to gain that perspective.  One of my hobbies is genealogy, and being that my family is from the French part of southern Louisiana, I own several books of church and courthouse record abstracts from that region that I have used in researching my family history.  That was how I found out about the 1853 yellow fever epidemic that struck southeastern Louisiana, costing thousands of lives -- the records are there, the chronicles of individuals who were killed by that gruesome disease:

Boutary, Adela Marie, wife of Théophile Daunes, d. 10 Sept. 1853 at age 20 years during yellow fever epidemic (Thibodaux Church: vol. 1, death record #55)

Himel, Mélasie d. 17 Sept. 1853 at age 16 years during yellow fever epidemic (Thibodaux Church: vol. 1, death record #92)

Poché, Joseph d. 3 Oct. 1853 at age 19 years during yellow fever epidemic (Thibodaux Church: vol. 1, death record #151)

Any guesses as to why we don't even have yellow fever in the United States any more?  I'll leave you to figure that one out.