The wind beneath my wings

We're at a dire crossroads, here in the United States, with a president under investigation, foreign and domestic policy decisions being driven by far right political commentators, political appointees making statements implying they can curtail constitutionally-protected rights.  Looking at the news has become a daily exercise in fighting back a sense of horror.

So today, I'm going to consider: a rash of recent pterodactyl sightings.

I learned about this phenomenon over at Cryptozoology News, where aficionados of creatures that don't technically exist can go for updates.  It turns out that we've had a sudden spike in reports of giant winged creatures, inevitably described as "bat-like" although many times larger than the biggest bats.

And since such explanations as "the eyewitness was drunk, confused, or just making shit up" clearly aren't applicable here, we are forced to the conclusion that pterodactyloids didn't become extinct 66 million years ago, they stuck around and are now appearing in places such as Wisconsin.

In fact, the Wisconsin sighting is only one of many in the last few months.  This particular report tells of an anonymous (of course) eyewitness who last August was driving home one afternoon and saw "a weird thing flying in the sky."  The creature was estimated at being two meters in length, and had "skin on its wings instead of feathers."

"Like a bat," he said.  "It looked like a pterodactyl or some kind of angel."

For reference, let's consider each of these:

Fig. 1: A bat  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Barracuda1983, Pipistrellus flight2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Fig. 2: A pterodactyloid [Image is in the Public Domain]

Fig. 3: An angel [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I think we can all agree that it'd be easy to confuse the three.

But our gentleman in Wisconsin isn't the only one to see a strange flying creature recently.  In November, a woman in Chester County, Pennsylvania saw a huge thing with wings while she was zooming down the interstate.  "I realized just how big it actually was," she said.  "The wingspan was twice the width of the car, as it flew over it and headed straight toward my car.  The feathers were black, or very dark brown.  As it flew over my car, I ducked a bit, to look up at it, through the windshield.  It was amazing to see such a beautiful sight. If I hadn’t been driving so fast – the speed limit is 70 mph – I could have attempted to take a photo."

An even bigger one was spotted only a few days later in Ohio.  A woman was driving with her fiance in Ravenna, Ohio, and stopped at a stoplight, only to see something enormous gliding overhead.  "It was two or three times larger than our SUV," she said.  "It had elbow-like wings.  It was darker than the sky.  The thing was huge."

The most recent sighting was just last week, once again in Pennsylvania, which seems to have more than its fair share of pterodactyls.  This time, a 47-year-old construction worker said he was out cutting firewood when the thing flew over.

"A large shadow appeared above me," he said.  "I ran inside to grab my phone, but by the time I came outside the bird was gone.  I’ve been terrified to go outside since that event."

He described it as a "green bird with a twenty-foot wingspan, covered in scales, [with] a spike on the end of its tail and razor-sharp talons."  He added, "It looked like a lizard."

Once again, for reference:

Fig. 4: A lizard.  [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons SajjadF, Lizard - e, CC BY 3.0]

So apparently, what we have here is a prehistoric-looking lizard angel bat-bird.  At least all the eyewitnesses agree on the fact that they're huge.

For my loyal readers in Wisconsin, Ohio, and (especially) Pennsylvania, keep your eyes on the skies, and let me know if any enormous winged creatures soar over.  Feel free to report your sightings here.  I realize seeing something like this could be scary, but the upside of it is that it'll take your mind off Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, so as far as I'm concerned, bring on the pterodactyls.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Lysenko, Walker, and the dangers of state-controlled science

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agrobiologist during the Stalin years, whose interest in trying to improve crop yields led him into some seriously sketchy pseudoscience.  He believed in a warped version of Lamarckism -- that plants exposed to certain environmental conditions during their lives would alter what they do to adjust to those conditions, and (furthermore) those alterations would be passed down to subsequent generations.

He not only threw away everything Mendel and Darwin had uncovered, he disbelieved in DNA as the hereditary material.  Lysenko wrote:

An immortal hereditary substance, independent of the qualitative features attending the development of the living body, directing the mortal body, but not produced by the latter - that is Weismann’s frankly idealist, essentially mystical conception, which he disguised as “Neo-Darwinism”.  Weismann’s conception has been fully accepted and, we might say, carried further by Mendelism-Morganism.

So basically, since there were no genes there to constrain the possibilities, humans could mold organisms in whatever way they chose.  "It is possible, with man’s intervention," Lysenko wrote, "to force any form of animal or plant to change more quickly and in a direction desirable to man.  There opens before man a broad field of activity of the greatest value to him."

Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Soviet agricultural industry was ordered to use Lysenko's theories (if I can dignify them by that name) to inform their practices.  Deeper plowing of fields, for example, was said by Lysenko to induce plants' roots to delve deeper for minerals, creating deeper-rooted plants in following years and increased crop yields.  Farmers dutifully began to plow fields to a depth of five feet, requiring enormous expenditure of time and labor.

Crop yields didn't change.  But that didn't matter; Lysenko's ideas were beloved by Stalin, as they seemed to give a scientific basis to the concept of striving by the sturdy peasant stock, thus improving their own lot.  Evidence and data took a back seat to ideology.  Lysenko was given award after award and rose to the post of Director of the Institute of Genetics in the USSR's Academy of Sciences.  Scientists who followed Lysenko's lead in making up data out of whole cloth to support the state-approved model of heredity got advancements, grants, and gifts from Stalin himself.  Scientists who pointed out that Lysenko's experiments were flawed and his data doctored or fabricated outright were purged -- by some estimates 3,000 of them were fired, exiled, jailed, or executed for choosing "bourgeois science" (i.e. actual evidence-based research) over Lysenko.  His stranglehold on Soviet biological research and agricultural practice didn't cease until his retirement in 1965, by which time an entire generation of Soviet scientists had been hindered from making any progress at all.

Which brings us to Scott Walker.

Walker, you probably know, is the governor of Wisconsin, whose notoriety primarily comes from his union-busting, a failed presidential bid, and a narrow escape from losing his office to a vote recall.  But now Walker's in the news for a different reason; he is trying to out-Lysenko Lysenko by scrubbing from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources webpage every mention of the words "climate" and "climate change."

Fortunately, James Rowen of Urban Milwaukee has a screenshot of the original text and the changes made -- it's on the link provided in the preceding paragraph, and has to be seen to be believed.  Rowen writes:

Climate change censors driven by science denial and obeisance to polluters these days at the GOP-managed, Scott Walker-redefined “chamber of commerce mentality” Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources are at it again. 

Not content with having already stripped content and links from an agency webpage about climate change – deletions I documented some years ago and which I have frequently referenced – the ideologues intent on scrubbing science off these pages and sowing doubt and confusion about the consensus view of experts worldwide about climate change have edited, deleted and otherwise compressed information in order to whitewash long-standing concepts and facts off a climate change page about the Great Lakes... 

It’s a continuation of Walker’s deliberate destruction of the DNR – which we also learned he is considering completely breaking apart to further hamstring and weaken public science, conservation and pollution enforcement while further playing to corporate donors and manipulating GOP base voters to help embed partisan Republican advancement and entrenchment by propagandizing that government – and especially agencies like DNR which Walker has intentionally doomed – does not work for them.

So just like in Stalin's day, we are moving toward a state-endorsed scientific party line, which non-scientists (and scientists in the pay of corporate interests or the politicians themselves) are enforcing using such sticks as censorship, funding cuts, and layoffs.  We have not yet progressed to outright purges and imprisonment, but we sure as hell have taken a large step in that direction.

Lysenko died forty years ago, but his propaganda-based, anti-science spirit lives on.  My hope is that because of the greater transparency and freedom of information afforded by the internet, moves like Walker's scrubbing of the Department of Natural Resources website will not be shrouded in secrecy the way that Stalin's and Lysenko's actions were.  But it behooves us all to remain aware, watchful, and vigilant, because you can just as easily see it slipping under the radar -- and for the claws of partisan politics to sink so deeply into scientific research that it will, as it did in the USSR, take generations to repair the damage.

Slender Man, violence, and blame

When bad things happen, it seems to be a reflex that people look around for someone or something to blame.  And this week, Slender Man (more recently written run together as "Slenderman") is the convenient target.

I've written about Slender Man before, in a post two years ago in which I pondered the question of why people believe in things for which there is exactly zero factual evidence.  And in the last two weeks, there have been two, and possibly three, violent occurrences in which Slender Man had a part.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this particular paranormal apparition, Slender Man is a tall, skinny guy with long, spidery arms, dressed all in black, whose head is entirely featureless -- it is as smooth, and white, as an egg.  He is supposed to be associated with abductions, especially of children.  But unlike most paranormal claims, he is up-front-and-for-sure fictional -- in fact, we can even pinpoint Slender Man's exact time of birth as June of 2009, when a fellow named Victor Surge invented him as part of a contest on the Something Awful forums.  But since then, Slender Man has taken on a life of his own, spawning a whole genre of fiction (even I've succumbed -- Slender Man makes an appearance in my novel Signal to Noise.)

[image courtesy of an anonymous graffiti artist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Wikimedia Commons]

But here's the problem.  Whenever there's something that gains fame, there's a chance that mentally disturbed people might (1) think it's real, or (2) become obsessed with it, or (3) both.  Which seems to be what's happened here.

First, we had an attack on a twelve-year-old girl by two of her friends in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in which the girl was stabbed no less than nineteen times.  The friends, who are facing trial as adults despite the fact that they are also twelve years old, allegedly stabbed the girl because they wanted to act as "proxies for Slender Man" and had planned to escape into Nicolet National Park, where they believed Slender Man lives, afterward.  They had been planning the attack, they said, for six months.

Then, a mother who lives in Hamilton County, Ohio, came home from work a couple of days ago to find her thirteen-year-old daughter waiting for her -- wearing a white mask and holding a knife.  The mother was stabbed, but unlike the Wisconsin victim, escaped with minor injuries.  The daughter was said to have been inspired by an obsession with Slender Man.

Even the shootings two days ago in Las Vegas, Nevada have a connection.  The killers, Jerad and Amanda Miller, were enamored of ultra-right-wing politics and conspiracy theories (allegedly the couple had been part of the Cliven Bundy Ranch debacle, and are fans of Alex Jones); but Jerad Miller had been seen around their neighborhood in costume, including one of -- you guessed it -- Slender Man.

So of course, the links between the cases are flying about in the media, and (on one level) rightly so.  It is a question worth asking, when some odd commonality occurs between such nearly simultaneous occurrences.  But along with the links, there is a lot of blame being aimed at people who have popularized the evil character.

Is it the fault of Victor Surge, or Something Awful, or the site Creepypasta (which is largely responsible for Slender Man's popularity), or Eric Knudsen and David Morales, who administer the Slender Man site on the website, or even of authors like myself who have helped to popularize it?  It's tempting to say yes, because (more than likely) had the girls in the first two cases never come across the idea of Slender Man, it's unlikely they would have committed the crimes they did.  (The Millers clearly had other issues, and Slender Man was hardly a chief motivator for the murders they committed.)

Life, however, is seldom simple, and there is no single source we can point to for the origin of these tragedies.  Nor is there any way we can keep disturbing images and unsettling ideas away from people who are determined to seek them out.  And this is hardly the first time this has happened; Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, World of Warcraft, and various other role-playing games have all been targeted at various times for inciting kids to lose themselves in violent fantasy worlds.  But it needn't be anything even that sketchy to result in obsession.  Back in 2011, a woman in Japan ended up in jail after she discovered that her husband was cheating on her, so she hacked into his online role-playing game and killed his avatar.  The husband was so infuriated that he called the police, who promptly arrested her.

And I still remember -- although I can't find a source online that verifies it -- that in the late 1970s, when the book Watership Down was published, a teenage boy read the book cover to cover and then promptly killed himself.  He left behind a note that his suicide was motivated by his longing to join the world of the book, and he'd become convinced that when he died, he'd be reincarnated as a rabbit.

The sad truth is that even if you remove the triggers -- the role-playing games, the books and movies and online memes with disturbing imagery -- the bottom line is that these are all the acts of people who could not tell fact from fiction, and who (therefore) were dealing with some level of mental illness.  It may be that the girls who stabbed their friend, the daughter who stabbed her mother, and the young man who killed himself over Watership Down would not have committed those acts had they not been spurred to do so by the fictional worlds they had entered.  But the fiction wasn't the root cause.  The root cause was mental illness that (apparently) had never been recognized and treated.

As sad as these acts are, we aren't going to make them go away by eliminating such tropes as Slender Man from our fiction.  For every one we eliminate, there are hundreds of others out there, as disturbing (or more so).  From the Cthulhu mythos of Lovecraft, to the various horror worlds created by Stephen King, to The X Files, to Supernatural and Dexter and Fringe, we are never going to want for scary imagery to draw from.  It would be nice to think that children are being shielded from these until they are old enough to handle them (and I was heartened to see that Creepypasta now has a "Warning to Those Under 18" on their website), but the unfortunate truth is that mental illness is all too common -- and the world is a dangerous place.  And the real question, the one our leaders don't want to face because it's far tougher than simply pointing fingers, is why access to mental health care isn't universal, accessible, and cheap.