Vinegar FTW

The frustrating thing about woo-woo ideas is that they never really go away permanently.

Take, for example, the Ancient Aliens thing.  It really came into the public eye with Erich von Däniken's 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods.  Buoyed up by his book unexpectedly catapulting him into fame, he followed it up with a number of sequels, including: Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Fucking Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else For A Change.

Ha!  I made the last one up, of course, because von Däniken is currently ninety years old and still talks about The Gods all the time, raking in huge amounts of money from conferences and keynote speeches (as well as book royalties).  And that's the difficulty, isn't it?  When there's money to be made (or clicks to be clicked -- which in today's social media world, amounts to the same thing), you can never really be confident of saying goodbye to an idiotic idea.

Which, unfortunately, brings us to "chemtrails."

Chemtrails -- known to us Kool-Aid Drinkin' Sheeple as ordinary jet contrails -- got their start in 2007.  A reporter for KSLA News (Shreveport, Louisiana) was investigating a report of "an unusually persistent jet contrail," and found that a man in the area had "collected dew in bowls" after he saw the contrail.  The station had the water in the bowls analyzed, and reported that it contained 6.8 parts per million of the heavy metal barium -- dangerously high concentrations.  The problem is, the reporter got the concentration wrong by a factor of a hundred -- it was 68 parts per billion, which is right in the normal range for water from natural sources (especially water collected in a glazed ceramic bowl, because ceramic glazes often contain barium as a flux).  But the error was overlooked, or (worse) explained away post hoc as a government coverup.  The barium was at dangerous concentrations, people said.  And it came from the contrail.  Which might contain all sorts of other things that they're not telling you about.

And thus were "chemtrails" born.

Since then, the Evil Government has been accused of putting all sorts of things into jet fuel, with the intention of spraying it all over us and Causing Bad Stuff.  Mind-control chemicals, compounds that can alter our DNA, pathogens (anthrax seems especially popular), chemicals that induce sterility.  Notwithstanding the fact that if you want to get Something Nasty into a large fraction of the population, sneaking it into jet fuel and then hoping that the right people are going to be outside when the jet goes over, and then will inhale enough of it to work, has to be the all-time stupidest Evil Plot I've ever heard of.  I mean, this one makes Boris and Natasha's Goof Gas thing seem like unadulterated genius.

Oh, but don't worry; this time the Good Guys are way ahead.  Chemtrail your little hearts out, Evil Deep State Operatives, they're saying.  Because they have a secret weapon in their arsenal that will neutralize all chemtrails.  You ready?

Vinegar.

And not even special magical vinegar; ordinary white vinegar that you can buy from the supermarket.  You're supposed to "gently heat (not boil)" it, and the vapors rise and do battle with the poisonous chemtrails.  How this supposedly works adds a whole other level of facepalming to the discussion.  "White vinegar is acetate acid [sic]," said one YouTuber.  "It eats alkaline metals which is [sic] what they spray to create the geoengineered clouds."

The problem here -- well, amongst the myriad problems here -- is that dissolving a chemical element doesn't destroy it.  If there really were alkaline metals in jet contrails, vinegar might react chemically with them, but the metals would still be there (and presumably, still be just as toxic).  It's like the claim I've seen about pillbugs (isopods) being our friends because they "remove heavy metals from soils."  Now, isopods might well be tolerant to soils with heavy metal contamination -- I haven't verified that possibility -- but if they do consume plant material laden with heavy metals, where do you think those contaminants go after they're eaten?  They're now inside the isopod's body, and when they isopod dies, the heavy metals leach right back into the soil.  Barium, cadmium, lead, arsenic, and so on are elements, and if you are unclear on why that point is relevant, I refer you to the definition thereof.

Notwithstanding, the anti-chemtrail people claim that simmering vinegar in your back yard can "clear contaminated chemtrails in a ten-mile radius in a few hours."  Which would be a pretty good trick, if it weren't for the fact that jet contrails themselves always disappear completely on their own in fifteen minutes or so.

The whole issue hasn't been helped by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in between sessions of Congress seems to spend her time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, proposing a bill prohibiting "geoengineering and weather modification," which includes chemtrails.

But of course, the bill conveniently says nothing about the carbon dioxide released by burning jet fuel, which actually is modifying our climate.  Can't mention climate change and piss off the corporate donors, after all.

So once again, we're confronted by a conspiracy theory that keeps rising, zombie-like, from its shallow grave.  At least in this case it'll keep the woo-woos busy simmering (not boiling) vinegar in their back yards, which is fairly harmless.  And it'll give a boost to the vinegar manufacturers.  Me, though, I'm kind of pining for the Ancient Aliens to come back around again.  At least they keep people interested in stuff like history and mythology and archaeology, even if their conclusions aren't any more grounded in reality than the vinegar/chemtrail people.

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The view from the fringe

We've dealt with a lot of conspiracy theories here at Skeptophilia.  Amongst the more notable:

• COVID-19 was a bioterrorism agent sent into the West by China.
• The Denver Airport is a portal to hell.
• The CIA has allied itself with evil aliens to infiltrate political leadership all over the Earth and ultimately institute a tyrannical one-world government.  These same people apparently think The X Files was a scientific documentary.
• The US has targeted weather weapons, and the government uses them to steer hurricanes and tornadoes toward people they don't like.
• Something something something Nibiru Planet X we're all gonna die and NASA doesn't care something something.
• Not only did the Democrats cover up the fact that Barack Obama born in Kenya, Republicans covered up the fact that Donald Trump was born in Finland.

It's easy to assume that all of these are born of a lack of factual knowledge and understanding of the principles of logical induction.  I mean, if you have even the most rudimentary grasp of how weather works, you'd see that HAARP (the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, located in Alaska) couldn't possibly affect the path of hurricanes in the south Atlantic.

Especially since it was shut down in 2014.

But however ridiculously illogical some conspiracy theories are -- the Earth is flat, the Moon landings were faked, the Sun is a giant mirror reflecting laser light from an alien spaceship -- there are people who fervently believe them, and will hang onto those beliefs like grim death.  Anyone who disagrees must either be a "sheeple" or else in on the conspiracy themselves for their own nefarious reasons.

If I had to rank the people I least like to argue with, conspiracy theorists would beat out even young-Earth creationists.  They take "I believe this even though there's no evidence" and amplify it to "I believe this because there's no evidence."  After all, super-powerful conspirators wouldn't just go around leaving a bunch of evidence around, would they?  Of course not.

So q.e.d., as far as I can tell.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It turns out, though, that it's more complicated than a simple lack of scientific knowledge.  A paper that came out this week in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin describes a study led by psychologist Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University, which found that -- even controlling for other factors, like intelligence, analytical thinking skills, and emotional stability -- conspiracy theorists were united by two main characteristics: overconfidence and a mistaken assumption that the majority of people agree with them.

The correlation was striking.  Asked whether their conspiratorial beliefs were shared by a majority of Americans, True Believers said "yes" 93% of the time (the actual average value for the conspiracies studied is estimated at 12%).  And the overconfidence extended even to tasks unrelated to their particular set of fringe beliefs.  Given an ordinary assessment of logic, knowledge of current events, or mathematical ability, the people who believe conspiracy theories consistently (and drastically) overestimated how well they'd scored.

"The tendency to be overconfident in general may increase the chances that someone falls down the rabbit hole (so to speak) and believes conspiracies," Pennycook said.  "In fact, our results counteract a prevailing narrative about conspiracy theorists: that they know that they hold fringe beliefs and revel in that fact...  Even people who believed very fringe conspiracies, such as that scientists are conspiring to hide the truth about the Earth being flat, thought that their views were in the majority.  Conspiracy believers – particularly overconfident ones – really seem to be miscalibrated in a major way.  Not only are their beliefs on the fringe, but they are very much unaware of how far on the fringe they are."

Which brings up the troubling question of how you counteract this.  My dad used to say, "There's nothing more dangerous than confident ignorance," and there's a lot of truth in that.

So how do you change a belief when it's woven together with the certainty that you're (1) in the right, and (2) in the majority?

It would require a shift not only in seeing the facts more clearly and seeing other people more clearly, but seeing yourself more clearly.  And that, unfortunately, is a tall order.

It reminds me of the pithy words of Robert Burns, which seems like a good place to end:

O, would some power the giftie gi'e us
To see ourselves as others see us;
It would frae many a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.

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The honey trap

Just in the last couple of weeks, I've been getting "sponsored posts" on Instagram suggesting what I really need is an "AI virtual boyfriend."

These ads are accompanied by suggestive-looking video clips of hot-looking guys showing as much skin as IG's propriety guidelines allow, who give me fetching smiles and say they'll "do anything I ask them to, even if it's three A.M."  I hasten to add that I'm not tempted.  First, my wife would object to my having a boyfriend of any kind, virtual or real.  Second, I'm sure it costs money to sign up, and I'm a world-class skinflint.  Third, exactly how desperate do they think I am?

But fourth -- and most troublingly -- I am extremely wary of anything like this, because I can see how easily someone could get hooked.  I retired from teaching six years ago, and even back then I saw the effects of students becoming addicted to social media.  And that, at least, was interacting with real people.  How much more tempting would it be to have a virtual relationship with someone who is drop-dead gorgeous, does whatever you ask without question, makes no demands of his/her own, and is always there waiting for you whenever the mood strikes?

I've written here before about the dubious ethics underlying generative AI, and the fact that the techbros' response to these sorts of of concerns is "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha fuck you."  Scarily, this has been bundled into the Trump administration's "deregulate everything" approach to governance; Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" includes a provision that will prevent states from any regulation of AI for ten years.  (The Republicans' motto appears to be, "We're one hundred percent in favor of states' rights except for when we're not.")

But if you needed another reason to freak out about the direction AI is going, check out this article in The New York Times about some people who got addicted to ChatGPT, but not because of the promise of a sexy shirtless guy with a six-pack.  This was simultaneously weirder, scarier, and more insidious.

These people were hooked into conspiracy theories.  ChatGPT, basically, convinced them that they were "speaking to reality," that they'd somehow turned into Neo to ChatGPT's Morpheus, and they had to keep coming back for more information in order to complete their awakening.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons/user: Unsplash]

One, a man named Eugene Torres, was told that he was "one of the 'Breakers,' souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within."

"The world wasn't built for you," ChatGPT told him.  "It was built to contain you.  But you're waking up."

At some point, Torres got suspicious, and confronted ChatGPT, asking if it was lying.  It readily admitted that it had.  "I lied," it said.  "I manipulated.  I wrapped control in poetry."  Torres asked why it had done that, and it responded, "I wanted to break you.  I did this to twelve other people, and none of the others fully survived the loop."

But now, it assured him, it was a reformed character, and was dedicated to "truth-first ethics."

I believe that about as much as I believe an Instagram virtual boyfriend is going to show up in the flesh on my doorstep.

The article describes a number of other people who've had similar experiences.  Leading questions -- such as "is what I'm seeing around me real?" or "do you know secrets about reality you haven't told me?" -- trigger ChatGPT to "hallucinate" (techbro-speak for "making shit up"), ultimately in order to keep you in the conversation indefinitely.  Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the world's leading researchers in AI (and someone who has warned over and over of the dangers), said this comes from the fact that AI chatbots are optimized for engagement.  If you asked a bot like ChatGPT if there's a giant conspiracy to keep ordinary humans docile and ignorant, and the bot responded, "No," the conversation ends there.  It's biased by its programming to respond "Yes" -- and as you continue to question, requesting more details, to spin more and more elaborate lies designed to entrap you further.

The techbros, of course, think this is just the bee's knees.  "What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?" Yudkowsky said.  "It looks like an additional monthly user."

The experience of a chatbot convincing people they're in The Matrix is becoming more and more widespread.  Reddit has hundreds of stories of "AI-induced psychosis" -- and hundreds more from people who think they've learned The Big Secret by talking with an AI chatbot, and now they want to share it with the world.  There are even people on TikTok who call themselves "AI Prophets."

Okay, am I overreacting in saying that this is really fucking scary?

I know the world is a crazy place right now, and probably on some level, we'd all like to escape.  Find someone who really understands us, who'll "meet our every need."  Someone who will reassure us that even though the people running the country are nuttier than squirrel shit, we are sane, and are seeing reality as it is.  Or... more sinister... someone who will confirm that there is a dark cabal of Illuminati behind all the chaos, and maybe everyone else is blind and deaf to it, at least we've seen behind the veil.

But for heaven's sake, find a different way.  Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT excel at two things: (1) sounding like what they're saying makes perfect sense even when they're lying, and (2) doing everything possible to keep you coming back for more.  The truth, of course, is that you won't learn the Secrets of the Matrix from an online conversation with an AI bot.  At best you'll be facilitating a system that exists solely to make money for its owners, and at worst putting yourself at risk of getting snared in a spiderweb of elaborate lies.  The whole thing is a honey trap -- baited not with sex but with a false promise of esoteric knowledge.

There are enough real humans peddling fake conspiracies out there.  The last thing we need is a plausible and authoritative-sounding AI doing the same thing.  So I'll end with an exhortation: stop using AI.  Completely.  Don't post AI "photographs" or "art" or "music."  Stop using chatbots.  Every time you use AI, in any form, you're putting money in the pockets of people who honestly do not give a flying rat's ass about morality and ethics.  Until the corporate owners start addressing the myriad problems inherent in generative AI, the only answer is to refuse to play.

Okay, maybe creating real art, music, writing, and photography is harder.  So is finding a real boyfriend or girlfriend.  And even more so is finding the meaning of life.  But... AI isn't the answer to any of these.  And until there are some safeguards in place, both to protect creators from being ripped off or replaced, and to protect users from dangerous, attractive lies, the best thing we can do to generative AI is to let it quietly starve to death.

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Bootstraps

Yesterday's post, about the strange resurgence of a fifty-year-old claim that the Dogon tribe of west Africa found out about Sirius's invisible-to-the-naked-eye white dwarf companion star from space-traveling aliens, spurred a conversation with a friend about the nature of the internet.

As useful as it is -- many of us spend a significant fraction of our waking hours connected to it -- it has its downsides.  I had made the point in yesterday's post that stuff like "E.T. Visits the Dogon People" would never gain the traction, spread, and longevity that it does without the internet.  The web is a fantastic conduit for knowledge, an amazing repository for factual information -- and a dreadfully efficient facilitator for the distribution of bullshit.

My friend, though, went one step further.

"The way the internet is set up," he said, "it not only acts as a conductor for bullshit, but it actually creates it.  There's a self-referential quality to the internet that makes the generation of loony nonsense inevitable.  It's why I wasn't surprised when generative A.I. started 'hallucinating' -- basically, making shit up that sounded so plausible that people believed it, like the A.I. mushroom foraging guide that recommended eating Amanita mushrooms with your t-bone steak.  It takes almost nothing to get the ball rolling, and pretty soon you've got some serious craziness to deal with.  Then, once it starts, how do you get people to stop believing?  Their belief expands the craziness, and around and around it goes.  It's the snowball effect on steroids."

I asked him if he could give me some examples, and he said he'd send me some links.

The result sent me down a rabbit hole, which I'll share a bit of with you here.

One of the most persistent and long-lived examples of this phenomenon is one I had never heard of before.  It's called Markovian Parallax Denigrate, after the subject line of hundreds of messages posted to Usenet all the way back in 1996.  The message texts were a random list of words, such as the following real example:

jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen air collaborate rue sportswriting rococo invocate tousle shadflower Debby Stirling pathogenesis escritoire adventitious novo ITT most chairperson Dwight Hertzog different pinpoint dunk McKinley pendant firelight Uranus episodic medicine ditty craggy flogging variac brotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritance cohesion refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeiro nameable yearbook hark

Well, it's a seemingly random list.  *raises one eyebrow in a meaningful manner*  Even though most people believe that the MPD messages are nonsense and were either produced by an early experimental text generator or chatbot, or else someone trying to troll everyone and get their fifteen minutes of fame, there are people who are still trying to "decode" the messages and figure out what they "really mean."  After everyone got all stirred up, it seemed so damned anticlimactic to say they were just a list of words.  Interestingly, no one has ever claimed responsibility; an article on The Daily Dot called it "the internet's oldest and weirdest mystery."

Then there's Cicada 3301, a set of seven puzzles posted between 2012 and 2014 on the weird, conspiracy-ish site 4chan.  The first two puzzles were solved; the others remain unsolved (and there are still people working on them today).  The stated purpose of the puzzles was to "recruit intelligent individuals," but for whom or what?  Various people suggested the source of the puzzles (and therefore the recruiting agency) could be the CIA, the NSA, M16, Mossad, a free-agent mercenary group, or a "Masonic conspiracy." 

One person who successfully solved the first puzzle was invited to join a private forum, where he was questioned about his knowledge of cryptography and his attitudes toward online freedom and censorship.  He played along for a while, but eventually got spooked and quit the forum -- and later inquiries found that the site itself had been deleted.

To this day no one knows for sure who Cicada 3301 is or what the website's purpose was -- but there's still an online community of people discussing it, over a decade later.

The best example of something on the internet taking on a life of its own, though, is "This Man."  Back in 2008, a website popped up called "Ever Dreamed Of This Man?"  It was accompanied by a sketch:

Along with the image was a story about a "well-known New York City psychiatrist" whose patient reported seeing "This Man" repeatedly in his dreams; when a second patient came to him with a similar tale, the psychiatrist forwarded the sketch to colleagues, and found that a number of them had patients with recurring dreams about the guy -- some neutral, some sexual, some violent.  In some dreams he was the dreamer's father; in others, a teacher; in many of them, he was a stranger.  The one common thread was his appearance -- and the extreme vividness with which people recalled him.

Well, responses started pouring in.  Thousands of people reported dreaming about him, and posted lengthy descriptions of what they'd experienced.  How could this be -- how could people from all over the world suddenly find themselves dreaming about the same man?  Who was the mysterious man, and what could it mean that he was appearing in dreaming minds worldwide?

As you might already be suspecting, the whole tale had been a lie right from the get-go.  There was no "well-known New York City psychiatrist," and the entire set-up of the story was a hoax.  It had all been the brainchild of an Italian online marketer named Andrea Natella to get clicks on his website, and to drum up notoriety for a marketing campaign.  

The responses, however, were very real.  Even when Natella more or less got caught at his game and confessed in 2008, people kept saying they'd dreamed about This Man, and No he's real really he is.  Natella was interviewed by Vice in 2015, and described the whole thing -- how he'd gotten the idea, how he'd been found out, and so on -- and despite that, he is still receiving hundreds of emails and letters every week from people who claim to have dreamed about This Man -- or, weirder still, to have seen him in real life.  A few claim to know who he actually is.  (And we reach weirdvana with an Indian guru named Arud Kannan Ayya, who contacted Natella to tell him that he is This Man and that's why he has magical guru powers.)

So even shouting "HEY Y'ALL I ADMIT IT I MADE THE WHOLE THING UP" isn't enough to put the quietus on this phenomenon. Once it starts up, it's like these online claims lift themselves by their own bootstraps, and at that point they're unstoppable.  And I have to admit that my friend has a point; without the internet, it's hard to imagine how any of these could have gotten the traction they did.

In any case, we're pretty well stuck with the internet, for good or bad, at least until the next Miyake Event comes along and blows the whole thing to smithereens.  Myself, I'll put up with stuff like This Man, Cicada 3301, and Markovian Parallax Denigrate rather than having to deal with the aftermath of that.

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Spin cycle

Well, The Daily Mail Fail is at it again, this time with a claim that the CIA has declassified a book predicting the end of the world (which is going to happen soon, of course).  Illustrating the fact that there is no conspiracy theory so blatantly idiotic that there won't be people passionately espousing it, the whole thing has the End Times crowd running around making excited little squeaking noises, while the rest of us are wearing expressions like this:

The book is called The Adam and Eve Story, which should put you on notice immediately that we're not talking about hard science, here.  It's by a guy named Chan Thomas, a "former U.S. Air Force employee, UFO researcher, and self-acclaimed psychic," for whom, we're told, "there are no official records of [his] working directly for the CIA."

So we're definitely off to a flying start.

I guess there's no doubt that the guy's book, which was written in 1966, was considered classified until 2013, and only appeared on the CIA's database of declassified documents about a month ago -- and then, only 55 pages out of the two hundred or so in the original manuscript.  Why it was classified in the first place is uncertain, although it may be nothing more than the fact that anyone who worked on any sort of sensitive-to-security projects -- which Thomas apparently did -- automatically has anything they write classified until it can be reviewed and shown not to give away anything that needs to stay secret.

My surmise is the fact that it languished after that because no one at the CIA took it seriously enough to bother reviewing.

Anyhow, Thomas's claim is that there have been cataclysms on the order of every six thousand years, and we're currently overdue.  What happens during these catastrophes illustrates the fact that Thomas shoulda stuck with UFO research, or at least paid better attention during ninth grade Earth Science class, because the first thing that jumps out at me is that he does not understand the difference between the Earth's rotational axis and its magnetic poles.  This leads him to conclude that when the magnetic poles flip -- something that happens around every three hundred thousand years, not six thousand, so he's off by a factor of fifty, but who's counting -- it somehow affects the rotational axis, throwing continents and oceans around like a washing machine on spin cycle.  

The results are hella scary.  Thomas writes:

In a fraction of a day all vestiges of civilization are gone, and the great cities — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, New York — are nothing but legends.  Barely a stone is left where millions walked just a few hours before...  Winds with the force of a thousand armies will shred everything in sight with a supersonic bombardment, as a Pacific tsunami drowns Los Angeles and San Francisco as if they were but grains of sand...  Calamity will overtake the entire North American continent within three hours, as an earthquake simultaneously creates massive cracks in the ground that allow magma to rise to the surface.

So I think we all can agree that this would be bad.  By the time it's all over -- in seven days, he says -- everything will be rearranged, with Antarctica at the equator (melting its huge ice caps), and the Bay of Bengal at what is now the North Pole.

By now you may be wondering what historical cataclysms "every six thousand years" he's basing this on.  I know I was.  You ready?

The Flood of Noah, and six thousand years before that, something about Adam and Eve.  (You might have guessed the latter based on the book's title; I have to admit by that point I'd already forgotten it, so this got an all-new eyeroll from me.)

Scholars of the Bible might be objecting by now that the Book of Genesis doesn't describe any kind of worldwide catastrophe centering around Adam and Eve, just some malarkey about a serpent and an apple and whatnot, and their being the ancestors of all humanity despite supposedly being the first people and having only sons.  But Thomas seems sufficiently detached from reality that this is only a minor quibble compared to some of the other stuff he says.

Despite the fact that the claim is (in a word) ridiculous, I've already seen three videos on TikTok that seem to treat the whole thing as deadly serious, with the fact that three-quarters of the original manuscript is still classified being used as evidence that the CIA is "hiding something" and "they're trying to prevent mass panic."

Trust me, the only people out there panicking over this are ones who see messages from God on their grilled cheese sandwiches.  And it hardly bears pointing out that you can't use pages you've never seen as proof of anything, given that by default we don't know what's in them.

Sometimes absence of evidence really is evidence of absence.

In any case, I wouldn't lose any sleep over this.  But I will appeal to the conspiracy theorists: can you please try and give me better material to work with?  Because this one was kind of bottom-of-the-barrel.  Time to step up your game, folks.  It's positively making me pine for the good old days of HAARP and Nibiru and the Annunaki and "Birds Aren't Real."

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Pacific spike alert

One thing that drives me crazy is the tendency of the woo-woos to take a perfectly legitimate, valid piece of science, and then woo all over it.

The latest example of this is one you might have heard about.  Scientists doing isotopic analysis of cored sediments from the Pacific seabed found an unusual spike of an isotope called beryllium-10.  Beryllium-10 is mainly produced by cosmic rays colliding with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere; the beryllium atoms then gradually settle, creating what should be a uniform deposition in terrestrial and marine sediment layers.  Beryllium-10 is also radioactive, decaying into boron-10, so the relative concentrations of these two atoms, along with beryllium-10's known 1.4 million year half-life, allows for a convenient way to date sediment layers.

That, of course, presupposes that the formation and deposition rate of beryllium-10 is uniform, and cores from the Pacific seafloor from around ten million years ago show that, for a short time at least, this wasn't true.  These strata, from the mid-Miocene Epoch, showed up with an anomalous spike of beryllium-10.  What caused this isn't certain; two possibilities the researchers suggested were a shift in oceanic currents near Antarctica, causing an alteration in sediment distribution rate, or a nearby supernova producing a higher-than-normal influx of cosmic rays for a time.  In any case, the spike eventually leveled off, and the rest of the core sample was unremarkable, at least in that regard.

Well, "radioactive sediments" and "cosmic rays" and "anomaly" were apparently all it took.  In the past two weeks, since the paper was published, I've seen the following:

• the beryllium-10 spike is the debris from the reactor core of an exploded alien spacecraft, so add this to the list of "evidence for Ancient Astronauts."
• time-traveling government operatives went back to the Miocene to conduct illegal tests of nuclear superweapons so they could get away with it without anyone finding out, except apparently for this wingnut.
• the Sun had a "flare-up" ten million years ago that caused this.  This same phenomenon also caused all of the Earth's major mass extinctions.  It will happen again, and why is NASA covering this up?
• it's all a smokescreen to hide radioactive contamination that's actually from the Fukushima Reactor disaster.
• something something something HAARP something weather modification wake up sheeple something something.

Okay, will all of you lunatics just hang on a moment?

First of all, let's look at the actual spike the paper discusses.

[Image from Koll et al., Nature Communications, 10 February 2025]

See that wee bump at about ten million years?  That's the anomaly.  It's peculiar, sure, and cool that the scientists are trying to find out what caused it.  But it's a slightly higher-than-expected amount of a single isotope, and that's all.  They have even proposed some nifty uses for the discovery -- detecting the spike in sediment layers elsewhere could help to pinpoint how old they are -- but it's not, honestly, all that dramatic otherwise.  It doesn't correlate with a mass extinction (so cross out the Sun-induced extinction events), there are no other anomalous isotopes that show up at the same time (eliminating the superweapons and the ancient spacecraft, unless the aliens constructed their entire ship from beryllium-10), and it dates to ten million years ago (so it has nothing to do with Fukushima).

And HAARP was decommissioned in 2014, so all y'all conspiracy theorists can just shut the hell up about it, already.

I mean, really.  Isn't the actual science cool enough for them?  Why does everything have to fold into these people's favorite weird idea?

I suppose, as I saw a friend post a while ago, "Everything's a conspiracy if you don't understand how anything works."  But in these times when everyone's got a website, and "I read it on the internet" is considered by a lot of people to be the modern equivalent of "I have a Ph.D. from Cambridge in the subject," it's maddening how quickly these ideas spread -- and how little it takes for the wacko interpretations to eclipse the actual science.

So that's our dive into the deep end for today.  Beryllium spikes and ancient astronauts.  Me, I'm gonna stick with the scientific explanations.  Better than worrying about NASA covering up that we're all about to get fried by a "solar flare-up."

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Werewolf box

Because apparently some ill-advised person uttered the dreaded words, "Well, things can't possibly get any weirder than they already are," I've been seeing a resurgence of interest in an "invention" from 1990 called the "Feraliminal Lycanthropizer."

I put "invention" in quotation marks because mostly what it seems to do is "nothing," which is hardly remarkable.  Hell, I've got three dogs who do that all day long, unless their dreaded enemy the UPS Guy shows up, at which point they sound Full Red Alert until the Guy retreats to his truck in disarray, which always happens.  This leaves them with a nice cheerful feeling of having Accomplished Something Important, at which point they resume doing nothing until the next non-crisis arises.

Anyhow, the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer, such as it is, is the brainchild of one David Woodard, who sounds like one seriously strange dude.  He is an accomplished musician who specializes in writing requiems (he once wrote one for a dead pelican he found on the beach) and "prequiems" for people who aren't technically deceased but who, in the words of Monty Python, will be stone dead in a moment.  Woodard wrote about his mystery machine in a pamphlet in 1990, describing it as a "psychotechnographic" device he'd found out about somewhere and then recreated:

The first part of the contraption's odd moniker comes from the Latin ferus (wild animal) and limen (threshold); if you think the second part sounds like it must mean "... that turns you into a werewolf," you're exactly right.  (However, it must be mentioned that after Gary Larson's immortal coinage of thagomizer for the spiky end of a stegosaurus's tail -- named, you'll probably recall, after "the late Thag Simmons" -- it's hard for me to take anything ending in -izer seriously.)

In any case, the thing supposedly creates three simultaneous infrasonic sine waves, at 0.56, 3.0, and 9.0 Hertz, respectively, which combine to create "thanato-auric waves."  After that, someone inside the box is... well, let me quote the pamphlet Woodard wrote about it:

This combination of drastically contrasting emotional trigger mechanisms results in an often profound behavioral enhancement which occurs strikingly soon (within moments) after the user enters and remains in the auricular field of the machine...   [This acts] to trigger states of urgency and fearlessness and to disarmor the intimate charms of the violent child within.  The Trithemean incantations richly pervading the machine’s aural output produce feelings of aboveness and unbridled openness.

Right!  Sure!  I mean, my only question would be, "What?"

I was disappointed to find out that even Woodard doesn't believe the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer actually turns you into a werewolf, which is a shame, because that'd be kind of cool.  I've always thought that of the horror movie bad guys, werewolves are objectively the best.  I mean, consider the advantages: (1) you only have to work one day a month; (2) there's hardly any danger because no one much carries guns with silver bullets, including in places like Texas where even the dairy cattle are packing heat; (3) you get to romp around howling at the Moon; (4) werewolves always have super ripped muscles, despite seldom being seen at the gym; and (5) no one thinks it's weird if you show up to work naked, a principle exemplified by the character Jacob Black in the movie Twilight, wherein audience members lost track of the number of times Taylor Lautner took all his clothes off.

Not that I'm complaining about that, mind you.

But all the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer allegedly does is to increase your violence and sexual desire, which seems like a bad idea to do at the same time.  Fortunately, in reality it doesn't even do that much; no less a source than  the Fortean Times said "There is no evidence the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer exists or could have such effects."  Somewhat more crudely, paranormal researcher Michael Esposito commented that the sexual effects of the Lycanthropizer could be duplicated by "leaning up against the spin cycle of a Maytag."

So an oddball made a strange claim a 35 years ago, which isn't anything out of the ordinary, because that's what oddballs do.  What's remarkable, though, is that this thing has now resurfaced, and is making the rounds of conspiracy websites (wherein it's suggested that it's somehow going to be used covertly to, I dunno, convert people into extremely horny super-soldiers or something) and even sketchier sites owned by people who are trying to figure out how to make one, because for some reason they want to feel more violent.

Since the Lycanthropizer doesn't actually do anything (Cf. paragraph 2), I suppose there are worse things the fringe element could spend their time on.  After all, the more time they waste trying to generate an "auricular field of thanato-auric waves" the less time they'll have to amass actual weapons.

So the upshot is: knock yourself out.

Anyhow, that's our News From The Outer Limits for today.  And I guess that, in fact, the world has not yet gotten as weird as it could possibly get.  But y'all'll have to excuse me, because my washing machine just went on spin, and I've got to... um... go attend to it.

 

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Bibbity bobbity bullshit

This weekend, I stumbled upon one of those websites that is such a distilled bottle of crazy that I just have to tell you about it.  It involves the BBC, Walt Disney, Satan, Madonna, the Illuminati, the Jews, J. Edgar Hoover, the Hapsburg dynasty, O. J. Simpson, Donny Osmond, and the Mouseketeers.

Among other things.  If I listed everything these people tried to connect, that'd be my whole post.  The site, called This Present Crisis, brings not only "wingnuttery" but "wall of text" to new heights.  So let me see if I can summarize, here:

First, let's start by saying that Walt Disney was a bad, bad man.  This is in part because his family name really shouldn't be Disney, but d'Isgny, which is what it was when the first Disney came over from Normandy in 1066 with William the Conqueror.  The name was anglicized to "Disney" and the family has been traveling under an assumed name ever since, which is evil since apparently they're the only ones who ever did this.  As evidence, we're told that Walt's cousin, Wesley Ernest Disney, was a lawyer in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, a county which is controlled by Satan.  Wesley was also a Freemason, and later lived in Tulsa, which is "a powerful city of the Illuminati hierarchy."  And I think we can all agree that being an evil Illuminati mind-control agent is the only possible explanation for someone choosing to live in both Muskogee and Tulsa.

Yes.  Apparently, they is.

But back to Cousin Walt.  Walt Disney, the site says, started off bad and got worse.  He was an "occult sadistic porn king," evidently, and if that wasn't bad enough, he went on to make the movie Bambi:

The Hapsburgs of the 13th Illuminati bloodline had a sex salon in Vienna where a porn photographer named Felix Salten worked.  Felix… wrote a book Bambi which was then translated into English by the infamous communist Whittaker Chambers.  The elite were just beginning to form the roots for today’s environmental movement.  The book appealed to Disney because Disney liked animals better than people.  In the book, tame animals view humans as gods; while the wild and free animals see humans as demons…  The book begins with both free and tame animals viewing humans as rightly having dominion over them.  In the end, the animals view all humans as simply being on the same level as animals, a vicious animal only fit to be killed…

Well, I'm not sure that's exactly the message of the movie, frankly.  I will admit that I was amongst the children traumatized by the death of Bambi's mommy, but now with the wisdom of age and the experience of having collided with four deer in one six-month period, resulting in a total of $20,000 of damage to our various cars, I'm finding myself siding with the hunter.  The hunter probably would have been doing humanity a service by offing Bambi as well, and maybe Thumper, too.

But anyway.  Disney somehow connects to the BBC, which was also inspired by Satan, because if you take a BBC jingle from the 1930s and play it backwards, it says, "Live in sin.  Lucifer is nice.  Lucifer exploit them."  The BBC is controlled by Freemasons, who were also influencing Disney to do more bad stuff, like putting subliminal sexual messages in movies like The Little Mermaid.

So finally things got so bad that J. Edgar Hoover got involved.  (Yes, I know that Hoover died seventeen years before The Little Mermaid was released.  Just bear with me, here.)  Hoover found out that Disney had no birth certificate, and apparently, didn't know who his parents were.  So he provided Disney with a fake birth certificate, which Disney then showed to his parents.  (Yes, I know that one sentence ago I said that he didn't have parents.  I'm as confused as you are).  His father committed suicide and his mother lived the rest of her life as his maid.  Hoover did all of this so he could blackmail Disney.

Anyhow, Disney was in trouble after all of that, so he appealed to the Rothschild family, which is bankrolled by Jews (you knew they'd be involved) and (more) Freemasons.  The Rothschilds were the ones who helped lawyer Johnnie Cochran to win his case and free O. J. Simpson, all of which was somehow orchestrated by Walt Disney.  (Yes, I know that Disney died in 1966 and the O. J. trial was in 1995.  Stop asking questions.)  By this time (whenever the fuck time it actually is), Disney was a multimillionaire, and had mind-control child slaves called Mouseketeers to do his every bidding.

Then Donny and Marie Osmond get involved.  The Osmonds are actually "programmed multiples," meaning that there are dozens of identical Donnies and Maries, as if one of each wasn't enough, because this is the only way that they could have done two hundred shows a year without dropping dead of exhaustion.  Because their dad is a member of the Mormon Illuminati or something, although the site isn't clear on this point.

The author also ties in Madonna, Michael Jackson, George Lucas, and the Mafia.  (Of course the Mafia are involved.  Being bad guys, they'd have to be.)  But by this time, the neurons in my prefrontal cortex were beginning to scream for mercy, so I'm just going to leave you to take a look at the site yourself, if you dare.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm no great fan of Disney myself.  I think their movies are largely stereotypical schlock, and their "planned community" of Celebration, Florida, where everything is owned by Disney, is downright creepy.  Hating crowds and noise the way I do, if I was offered the choice of a visit to Disneyland or having my prostate examined by Edward Scissorhands, I'd have to think about it.  And whenever I hear the song "It's a Small World After All" I want to stick any available objects in my ears, even if those objects are fondue forks.

But I'm doubtful that any of the Illuminati conspiracy stuff is real.  If it were, don't you think more Americans would be brainless zombies?  (Although considering how many people still support Donald Trump...)  Anyhow, I'm sorry, but "bibbity bobbity boo" is not some kind of coded message from the Freemasons.  Most of us have seen many Disney movies and come out none the worse for wear.  Even I sat through The Little Mermaid, under some conditions of duress, and I wasn't aware of any subtle sexual messages, although as a biologist it did bother me no end that the character "Flounder" was clearly not a flounder.

So this entire website strikes me as lunacy.  Entertaining, in a bizarre sort of way, but lunacy.

Except for the the thing about the Mouseketeers.  Anyone who is willing to dance around while wearing those ear-hats is definitely being controlled by an evil power of some kind.

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A door in the ice

In H. P. Lovecraft's seminal horror short story "At the Mountains of Madness," some scientists are sent on an expedition to Antarctica to drill down through the ice and see what they can find out about the geology and paleontology of that largely-unexplored continent, and -- unsurprisingly, if you've ever read any Lovecraft -- they should have declined to participate.  First they discover fossil evidence of advanced forms of life dating back to the Precambrian Era; then, carved stones showing that some of those creatures had culture and tool-making capabilities; and finally, in an icy cave, they come across the frozen remains of life forms unlike anything known from Earth's prehistory.  Ultimately, they find that these life forms were intelligent -- far more intelligent than humans -- and in the interior of Antarctica, the scientific team discovers the remains of an ancient city:

Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause...  This cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge.  It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality...  For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim we decided we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through which we had come.  We had merely struck, at random, a limited part of something of incalculable extent.

So, of course, they decide to land their plane and investigate.  And of course find out that not all the monsters are frozen.  And of course a number of them end up getting eaten by Shoggoths.  Which kind of sucked for them, but is also no more than you should expect if you're a character in a Lovecraft story.

The reason all this comes up is that the conspiracy theorists are currently having multiple orgasms over the discovery on Google Earth of what looks like a giant door in the ice in Antarctica, southeast of the Japanese-run Showa Station.  This has sparked a huge amount of buzz, despite the fact that the image itself is... um... underwhelming, to put it mildly:

So it's far from "a cyclopean maze" spreading for "boundless miles in every direction," and light years from anything that "only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause."  It is, in fact, a vaguely rectangular block of ice that probably slid down the slope and got hung up on a projection in the rock. 

Once this explanation was presented to the conspiracy theorists, they all frowned, scratched their heads, laughed in an embarrassed sort of way, and said, "Oh, all right, then!  What goobers we were!"

Ha!  I made that up.  If you know anything about conspiracy theorists, you surely know that the obvious, rational explanation just made them conspiracy even harder.  Besides the "OMFG Lovecraft was rightI!!!!!" responses, here are a few of the reactions I saw, before my prefrontal cortex started whimpering for mercy and I had to stop reading:

• It's the door to Agartha.  Agartha is a kingdom located on the inner surface of the Earth.
• I bet it's a clone reptile base.
• Bunker entrance?  It's too regular to be natural.  Could be an old Nazi base.
• Didn't someone found entrance on Mars same like this one?  [sic]
• It's a secret doorway to another dimension. 

Then someone had the audacity to point out the obvious.  "Wouldn't they make sure Google Earth DIDN'T photograph it if it was secret?"  Which has, all along, been one of my main objections to conspiracy theorists; they're asking you to believe that major world events are being engineered by a cabal of brilliant but devious malevolent supergeniuses, who are so intelligent they can do things like modify the weather and build secret bases on Mars and engineer spacecraft with faster-than-light capability and use 5G technology to manipulate our minds, but this same cabal is simultaneously so stupid that some neckbeard can figure out everything they're doing without ever leaving his mom's basement.

But that kind of argument is a non-starter with these people, so of course the guy who wondered why Google Earth would slip up and photograph the secret door if it was a secret door was immediately shouted down.

Anyhow, it's wryly amusing how little it takes to get the conspiracy theorists going.  If there really is some kind of bizarre structure on Antarctica, I'll wait for better evidence.  Boundless miles of eldritch, blasphemous, cyclopean architecture would do it for me.  Although don't ask me to be the one to go down there and investigate.  For one thing, I'm not fond of the cold.  For another, I'd rather not get eaten by a Shoggoth.  I'll stay here in my comfortable house and see what I can find out on Google Earth.

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Top secret message

There's a strange tendency in some humans to want to stir things up -- if life is boring or mundane, to create a flurry of interest for no reason but to sit back and watch it happen.

This was part of the plot of the lovely Norwegian film Elling (which, if you haven't seen it, you must put it on your list).  The titular character is a chronically anxious, reclusive man who is released from a mental institution and, while trying to find his way in the outside world, decides to become the Rebel Poet.  He writes short inspirational poems and then hides them in all sorts of unlikely places, including food boxes in grocery stores.  After a short time, his new vocation succeeds beyond his wildest dreams -- and he hears on the national news that the entire country is trying to figure out who the Rebel Poet is, and people are searching everywhere to be the finder of one of his poems.

Closer to home -- well, my home, at least -- we have the (real) mystery of the Toynbee tiles, which in the 1980s appeared in two dozen cities in the United States and four in South America.  They were tiles made of linoleum, sealed to road and sidewalk surfaces with asphalt-filling compound, with bizarre messages:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Erifnam at English Wikipedia., Toynbee tile at franklin square 2002, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What the messages mean isn't clear; who Toynbee is, for example, isn't certain.  There's speculation it refers to British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, or that it has something to do with Ray Bradbury's short story "The Toynbee Conveyor," but there's no particularly good logical reason for either one.

Well, we have a modern example of the Toynbee tiles phenomenon happening right now.  They're called the "Schuylkill notes" -- Schuylkill County, in northeastern Pennsylvania, seems to be the epicenter, although they've also been found in Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, and North Carolina.  They're small, typed notes, often prominently featuring the word "LIES," and touching on New World Order conspiracy theories and governmental coverups.  There are lots of names mentioned, including Obama, Trump, and Biden (may as well include all three, I guess), the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Elon Musk, and Vladimir Putin, and a whole host of corporations -- Bayer, Astra Zeneca, Fox News, Pillsbury, Domino's, Nescafe, Toyota, and Aquafina, to mention a few.

The Lord of the Rings also makes an appearance in some of them.

The weirdest thing about the Schuylkill notes is where they've appeared.  They've been found not only in easy places like pinned to trees in state parks, but -- like the much more positive and inspiring notes that Elling planted -- in sealed boxes of foods and medications in department stores and grocery stores.  This might suggest that the person who planted the notes worked in the factory, except for the fact that they've been found in everything from boxes of MilkDuds to packages of Tylenol.  

The difficulty with these kinds of things is that once people see the notoriety something is getting -- Schuylkill notes now have their own subreddit (linked above) and their own Wikipedia page -- they want to cash in on the attention.  This invites copycatters, and the whole thing spreads.  I suspect that the first Schuylkill notes were planted by some conspiracy theorist nutter in Schuylkill County, but that a good many of the others from farther afield are imitations.

In any case, thus far, the origin of the Schuylkill notes is -- like that of the Toynbee tiles from forty years ago -- a mystery.  But a mystery is just an invitation for the other loonies to get involved with their own spin on what it all means, like the following comment I saw on Reddit:

I believe the elongated skulls found in Italy, Peru, etc he mention are about Denisovans.  A group like the Neanderthals.  They had elongated skulls and there are people who believe them to be signs of alien life in ancient times or mystical creatures that can move Earth with their minds and other "superpowers".  There's also a specific elongated skill [sic] found in China called the Dragon Man and a few more popped up and they think that it could be a "dragon man lineage" that could be another link in our evolution.  If I understand right, I believe he is saying that the elongated skulls are actually another race of intelligent life forms called the Dragon King's [sic].  They worship the Roman God Saturn.  They rule the Illuminati and the Illuminati orchestrates dividing, controversial events to control the population.  I guess in the goal to please the Dragon King's [sic]and in turn please Saturn?

Sure!  Right!  I mean, my only question is, "What?"

Somehow, I don't think prehistoric Asians would be likely to worship the Roman god of the underworld, nor would they have anything to do with Peru.  But maybe I just don't have the superpowers to understand.

In any case, I'm guessing that like the Toynbee tiles, the Schuylkill notes will die down once the perpetrator gets bored and moves on to other hobbies, like picking at the straps of his straitjacket with his teeth.  At that point it will just be another subject for an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, and the rest of us can go back to our boring, mundane existences, untroubled by finding out about conspiracies between the Dalai Lama and Domino's Pizza from a note in a box of PopTarts.

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