The case of the missing scientists

Our capacity for seeing patterns is absolutely critical.

It's easy to see how survival in a risky world could hinge on noticing clues in the environment, then putting them together correctly.  The key, though, is the word correctly.  When you have a built-in mechanism for interpreting sensory cues and recognizing danger, it can easily go awry.  But -- and here's the most important point -- in general, the evolutionary cost of overreacting is almost always way less than that of underreacting.  To use the oft-quoted example, for your average proto-hominin on the African savanna, it's better to hear a rustle in the grass, take fright and bolt, and have it turn out to be a fluffy bunny, than to shrug it off and stay put when it's a hungry lion.  

Or, worse still, not to notice it at all.

This tendency remains with us, lo unto this very day, and it's astonishing how badly it can backfire.  We look around us, assemble the information we have, and all too often put the pieces together wrong -- especially when the pattern that emerges is scary.

And especially especially when we're encouraged to do so by sensationalist media who make their money from clicks, and politicians who benefit by keeping their constituents frightened and distracted.

Take, for example, the current kerfuffle over all the scientists who have allegedly disappeared (or died) recently.  They all, we are told, worked with classified secrets.  The words "mysterious circumstances" have been thrown about.  The implication -- sometimes, the explicit claim -- is that the scientists' fates are all linked, part of a massive conspiracy to silence "people who know too much," or (perhaps) who were about to blow the whistle on some even bigger conspiracy and implicate Important People.

The story hit the news when a retired United States Air Force general, Neil McCasland, left his house in Bernalillo County, New Mexico on foot in late February, and never returned.  A search was conducted, but no trace of him was ever found.  McCasland, they said, was "involved in UFO research," and this was somehow relevant to his disappearance.  Then there's Monica Jacinto Reza, who was director of materials processing at NASA/JPL, who vanished while hiking in the Angeles National Forest in June of 2025.  I'll admit her disappearance was odd; she was an experienced hiker and was accompanied by two other equally able friends, had been seen about ten meters back on the trail and had smiled and waved, but when her friends looked back shortly afterward, Reza was gone.

Once again, searchers came up empty-handed.

Carl Grillmair, an astronomer and exoplanet researcher at Caltech, was murdered in mid-February of this year.  Nuno Loureiro, a plasma physicist at MIT, was shot and killed in December of 2025.  Here are a few others that often get thrown into the mix:

• Amy Eskridge, died in June of 2022; Eskridge was an "anti-gravity researcher"
• Michel David Hicks, a planetary researcher at NASA/JPL, died in July of 2023
• Anthony Chavez, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, disappeared in May of 2025
• Jason Thomas, assistant director of chemical biology at Novartis, drowned in Lake Quannapowitt, Massachusetts in December of 2025

So the relevant question here is: does this make a pattern?

The answer is no.  Not even close.  Okay, McCasland and Reza are curious circumstances, to say the least; but McCasland had medical problems, and even his wife wrote a piece pleading with people to stop the "misinformation circulating about Neil and his disappearance."  As far as Reza... well, I'm an experienced back-country hiker myself, and the wilderness is a big, big place.  If you don't think it's possible someone -- even a dedicated backwoods-explorer -- could get inextricably lost and die out there, you haven't actually experienced what the back country is like.

How about the rest?  Well, the police actually arrested the perpetrator of Grillmair's murder, and it was pretty clearly a burglary that went badly wrong.  Loureiro's killer was almost certainly Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente, who knew Loureiro personally and seems to have had a grudge against him -- Valente had gone to college with Loureiro and graduated first in his class, but unlike Loureiro, his career never took off.  Valente was described as "often unhappy or even angry," and eventually snapped; the day after killing Loureiro, he went to Brown University, killed two students and wounded nine others, then turned the gun on himself.

As far as the others, Eskridge wasn't a government employee at all, just a fringe-y pseudoscience content creator; she'd been in chronic pain for years, and it's nearly certain she committed suicide.  Hicks died of natural causes from a chronic medical condition.  Chavez wasn't a scientist, but a construction foreman, and hadn't worked for Los Alamos for years.  Thomas, a medical researcher who had zero to do with space science, suffered from long-term depression, and his drowning death was ruled as an accident.

So what looked like a pattern turns out to be nothing much at all.  But of course that's not calming anyone down.  Karoline Leavitt, who hasn't been within hailing distance of reality for years and wouldn't recognize the truth if it came up and bit her on the ass, says there are "legitimate questions about these troubling cases" and that "no stone will remain unturned" in unmasking the conspiracy behind it all.  Especially if it turns out to have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein.  Podcaster Walter Kirn goes further, saying "What is going on seems to be an enemy action...  [The missing individuals were involved] in the most advanced realms of space-rocket propulsion and, you know, Air Force–NASA–type endeavors."  House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said that "something sinister could be happening."  Then Missouri Representative Eric Burlison got involved -- you may recall that last year, Burlison made a name for himself by claiming that the Nephilim were real, and the Smithsonian Institute was covering it up, so his grasp on reality is even more tenuous than Karoline Leavitt's -- and said the whole thing had to do with the fact that all of the victims, alleged and otherwise, knew classified stuff about UFOs.

And we're off to the races.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons SkepticalScience, Conspiracy Theories Fallacy Icon, CC BY-SA 4.0]

It's pretty clear that what we have here is a consortium of the usual kooks and conspiracy theorists teaming up with a bunch of politicians who are desperate to distract everyone from the fact that their policies have directly led to an economic disaster, and that the upper leadership was involved in a vicious sex trafficking ring, so they're putting 2 and 2 together and coming up with 54.

Like I said... as usual.

In any case, if you see anyone posting this nonsense as serious evidence of a huge conspiracy, I'd be much obliged if you'd set them straight.  You can even send 'em a link to this post, if you think it'll help.

After all, we have enough real stuff to worry about at the moment.  There's no need to make shit up.

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Mind the gap

Aficionados of Star Trek: The Next Generation might recall the fourth-season episode "In Theory."  It had to do with the usual technobabble about spatio-temporal anomalies disrupting the fabric of spacetime, which (if you were to believe the scriptwriters) is about as sturdy as wet Kleenex, given that such disruptions seemed to happen every single week.

So it's a decent episode, but kind of the usual fare.  If you remember it, it's probably for one scene, which is way up there amongst the most disturbing they ever depicted.  Lieutenant van Mater is walking along discussing the problem with Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge, and suddenly, one of those spatio-temporal anomalies happens -- right underneath her.  She falls through the floor, but because the effect is ephemeral, the missing piece of floor quickly rematerializes.

And slices her in half.

I don't recall much of the rest of the episode, including how they resolved the situation, but I've never forgotten the horror of that one scene.

I was, somewhat unwillingly, reminded of Lieutenant van Mater's fate when a friend of mine asked if I'd ever heard about the "Philadelphia Experiment."  I responded that I'd heard of it -- seen references here and there on sketchy, conspiracy-theory websites -- but didn't know much about it.

"You should read up on it," he said.  "I doubt you'll believe a word of it, but there's no denying it's a very weird story."

Well, I couldn't resist a come-on like that, so I checked it out.

The story goes that back in October of 1943, some U.S. military scientists wanted to see if they could make a ship invisible to radar.  They picked the U.S.S. Eldridge, at that point docked at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, to experiment upon.

Naturally, if such a thing were real, it's unlikely anyone would find out about it, because it would be classified; so right away, I was a little dubious.  But according to the story, news of the experiment broke in 1955 when a prominent UFOlogist, Morris Jessup, received a manuscript in a package labeled "Happy Easter!" containing a copy of Jessup's own book -- with copious annotations in the margins by commentators who identified themselves as aliens, and warned that Jessup better cease and desist his research because he was "getting too close to discovering [their] technology."

Well, this was the moment Jessup had been waiting for his entire life, and he took the bait.  Shortly afterward, someone identifying himself as "Carlos Miguel Allende" -- he admitted pretty quickly that this was a pseudonym, and his name was actually Charles Meredith Allen -- started corresponding via letter with Jessup, leading him on, and feeding him bits and pieces of the supposed experiment in Philadelphia twelve years earlier which, he said, relied on "captured alien technology."

The experiment, Allen/Allende said, had succeeded too well.  Initially intended to be a more thorough version of degaussing -- where a metallic object's magnetic field is canceled, or at least reduced to the minimum possible -- the procedure had actually made parts of the ship vanish temporarily, with walls and floors replaced by a "greenish fog."  Allen said he'd actually been a witness to the experiment and its aftereffects.  Several crewmembers, he told Jessup, had been "frozen in place" for minutes or hours, and when they'd reanimated, large chunks of their memories were erased.  Others had simply "gone bananas."  Worst of all, more than one had fallen through temporary gaps in floors and bulkheads, only to be trapped inside (and killed) when the solid barriers rematerialized.

See why I thought of the unfortunate Lieutenant van Mater?

Well, Jessup was just thrilled.  This corroborated everything he'd believed for years -- that aliens existed, we had (some of) their technology, and the military was using what they knew for Big Clandestine Stuff.  There were even some hints that the whole thing rested upon "unpublished theories Einstein knew about" having to do with a Unified Field Theory.

In what has to be the best example I've ever run into of confirmation bias -- someone being taken in by flimsy evidence that strengthens belief in something they already believed -- Jessup apparently never even considered that Allen could have been lying.  He wrote the whole story up, and tried to get it published.

The publisher, presumably smelling a rat, turned him down.

Then the (actual) Navy got involved.  Jessup and his claims had somehow come to the attention of the Office of Naval Research.  He dutifully brought out the annotated copy of his book, and it was pointed out to him that the handwriting in the annotations looked suspiciously like the handwriting on Allen's letters.  At this point, the light began to dawn on Jessup that he'd been hoodwinked.  The ONR declared the whole thing a hoax, and decided Jessup was weird and gullible but basically harmless.  He gave a few more half-hearted attempts to find a publisher, but met with zero success.

The sad postscript is that Jessup, despondent over having his life's work crash down around him because of a hoaxer, committed suicide in 1959 by running a hose from his car's exhaust in through the window.

As far as Allen, he confessed that he was responsible for duping the unfortunate UFOlogist, saying he'd done the whole thing to "scare the hell" out of Jessup.  Then... he recanted his confession.  The Philadelphia Experiment was real, he said, and he'd been coerced into pretending it wasn't.  Then, bizarrely, he confessed again that it was a complete hoax.  After this he more or less disappeared, refusing all interviews, making oblique claims of being harassed into silence by the Men in Black.  He died in 1994 at age 68, leaving -- as usual -- the True Believers still believing, and the skeptics still dubious.

It's a weird, sad story, and further reinforces something I've said before: I fucking hate hoaxers.  Not only do they muddy the water, pushing the needle on just about everyone's skepticism dial toward "cynicism" -- making us more likely to dismiss all evidence for odd claims because a huge amount of it is bogus -- the fact is, it's just small, nasty, and cruel.  It may be unfair to put all the blame for Jessup's suicide at Allen's feet, but it seems to be undeniable that he contributed greatly to Jessup's downward spiral.

And toward what end?  The entire "Philadelphia Experiment" seems to have been a lie from beginning to end, concocted purely to make Morris Jessup look like a fool.  Yes, okay, there are still conspiracy theorists who still believe it's real (at least some parts of it), but the majority of folks who've looked into it think the entire story came from Allen's fertile, if mean-spirited, imagination.

Anyhow, there's our twisted tale for the day.  I have to wonder if "In Theory" was inspired by the Philadelphia Experiment, or if Carl Allen and the Star Trek scriptwriter came up with the ideas independently.  If so, that's two people creating visuals I'd rather not think about.

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Divine meddling

In Paul McCaw's musical comedy The Trumpets of Glory, angels back various causes on Earth as a kind of competitive contest.  Anything from a soccer game to a war is open for angelic intervention -- and there are no rules about what kind of messing about the angels are allowed to do. Anything is fair, up to and including deceit, malice, and trickery.  The stakes are high; the angel whose side wins goes up in rank, and the other one goes down.

It's an idea of the divine you don't run into often.  The heavenly host as competitors in what amounts to a huge fantasy football game.

While McCaw's play is meant to be comedy, it's not so far off from what a lot of people believe -- that some divine agent, be it God or an angel or something else, takes such an interest in the minutiae of life down here on Earth that (s)he intercedes on our behalf.  As an example, take Paula White -- the "White House Spiritual Advisor" -- leading a prayer service in which she called on "angelic reinforcements" to make sure that Donald Trump keeps getting celestial support.

While this may seem kind of loony to a lot of us, it's a remarkably common attitude.  How often do you hear someone say things like, "I found my car keys!  Thank you Lord Jesus!"?  The problem for me, aside from the more obvious one of not believing that any of these invisible beings exist, is why Lord Jesus or the Heavenly Host would care more about whether you find your keys than, for example, all of the ill and starving children in the world.

You'd think if interference in human affairs is allowable, up there in heaven, that helping innocent people who are dying in misery would be the first priority.

The reason the topic comes up is a link from The Epoch Times that a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me in response to Saturday's post about finding meaning in apparently random and coincidental patterns.  It's called, "When Freak Storms Win Battles,  Is It Divine Intervention or Just Coincidence?"  The article goes into several famous instances when weather affected the outcome of a war, to wit:

• A tornado killing a bunch of British soldiers in Washington D. C. during the War of 1812
• The storm that contributed to England's crushing defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588
• A massive windstorm that smashed the Persian fleet as it sailed against Athens in 492 B.C.E.
• A prolonged spell of warm, wet weather, which fostered the rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century, followed by a pair of typhoons that destroyed Kublai Khan's ships when they were attacking Japan in 1274

What immediately struck me about this list was that each time, the winners attributed the event to divine intervention, but no one stops to consider how the losers viewed it.  This isn't uncommon, of course; "History is written by the victors," and all that sort of thing.  But what's especially funny about the first two is that they're supposed to be events in which God meddled and made sure the right side won -- when, in fact, in both cases, both sides were made up of staunch Christians.

And I'm sorry, I refuse to believe that a divine being would be pro-British in the sixteenth century, and suddenly become virulently anti-British two hundred years later.

Although that's kind of the sticking point with the last example as well, isn't it?  First God (or the angels or whatever) manipulate the weather to encourage the Mongols, then kicks the shit out of them when they try to attack Japan.  It's almost as if... hang on a moment, here... what caused all of this wasn't an intelligent agent at all, but the result of purely natural phenomena that don't give a rat's ass about our petty little squabbles.

Fancy that.

But for some reason, this idea repels a lot of people.  They are much more comfortable with a deity that fools around directly with our fates down here on Earth, whether it be to make sure that I win ten dollars on my lottery scratch-off ticket or to smite the hell out of the Bad Guys.

I think this kind of worldview attracts people because somehow it's more appealing than a universe that is fundamentally chaotic.  A paper out of Flinders University last month suggests it's the same reason we fall for conspiracy theories; any explanation, even a horrific one, is preferable to shrugging your shoulders and saying, "Well, sometimes bad things happen, and there's no real reason."  "People often assume conspiracy beliefs form because someone isn't thinking critically," said study lead author Neophytos Georgiou.  "But our findings show that for those who prefer systematic structure, conspiracy theories can feel like a highly organized way to understand confusing or unpredictable events."

If I ever became a theist -- not a likely eventuality, I'll admit -- I can't imagine that I'd go for the God-as-micromanager model.  It just doesn't seem like anyone whose job was overseeing the entire universe would find it useful to control things on that level, notwithstanding the line from Matthew 10:29 about God's hand having a role in the fall of every sparrow.

I more find myself identifying with the character of Vertue in C. S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress -- not the character we're supposed to like best, I realize -- when he recognized that nothing he did had any ultimate reason, or was the part of some grand plan:

"I believe that I am mad," said Vertue presently.  "The world cannot be as it seems to me.  If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it; if I can go, then there is nothing to go to." 

"Vertue," said John, "give in.  For once yield to desire.  Have done with your choosing.  Want something."

"I cannot," said Vertue.  "I must choose because I choose because I choose: and it goes on for ever, and in the whole world I cannot find a reason for rising from this stone."

So those are my philosophical musings for this morning.  Seeing the divine hand in everything here on Earth, without any particular indication of why a deity would care, or (more specifically) why (s)he would come down on one side or the other.  Me, I'll stick with the scientific explanation.  The religious one is, honestly, far less satisfying, and opens up some troubling questions that don't admit to any answers I can see.

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Shutting down Leviathan

Is it just me, or has the quality of the conspiracy theories really been dropping off lately?

I mean, back in the day, you had your Moon-landing-was-a-hoax theory, your 9/11-was-an-inside-job theory, your Flat-Earth theory, your Egyptian-pyramids-were-built-by-aliens theory, and your microchips-in-vaccines theory.  (Not that these have gone away, or anything; but their provenance isn't new.)  Those, at least, had some panache, not to mention a conscious decision to look science and evidence directly in the face and say, "I reject your reality and substitute my own."

The topic comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, which references the enormous winter storm that blasted its way through the eastern half of North America a few days ago.  Here in my home village in upstate New York we got about fifteen centimeters of snow -- less than the predictions had suggested -- so enough to shut things down for a day, and after that leaving most of us saying, "Eh, we've had worse."  The bulk of the snow hit the south-central states, which are ill-equipped to deal with it.  Some people are still without power, and considering the bitter cold that followed in the storm's wake, this is a serious matter.

So: a bad storm, but not that far outside the norm.  It seems to have gone farther south than the typical winter storm track because of the weakening of the polar vortex, which triggered deep meanders in the steering currents -- a predicted outcome of anthropogenic climate change.  Which is why Donald Trump's hardy-har-harring over at Untruth Social about "Where is global warming?" is catastrophically stupid even by his standards.  Someone probably should mention to him that (1) it's winter here in the Northern Hemisphere so it snows sometimes, (2), as any ninth grader taking Earth Science could tell you, weather ≠ climate, and (3) it's summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and Australia is currently experiencing a devastating and record-setting heat wave.  (Okay, that last one is weather, too, but hell, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as my grandma used to say.)

Not that it would make a difference.  He seems to be strangely fact-proof, at least where the facts are inconvenient to his only concerns, which are making money, taking revenge on people who criticize him, and staying in power.

Anyhow, explaining the storm through natural processes apparently isn't good enough for some people, so they had to come up with a better idea.  And here, by "a better idea" I mean "an explanation that would only sound plausible to someone who had two pounds of LaffyTaffy where most of us have a brain."

You ready?

Off the coast of Virginia, there is a huge sea monster that has begun to awaken.  It may or may not be the dragon-like creature Leviathan mentioned in the Book of Job, chapter 41.  On the other hand, it might be one of the minions of Cthulhu.  Or possibly a sea-going relative of the Loch Ness Monster.

Or all three.

Screenshot of a Facebook post about the "Leviathan theory," which apparently is being taken seriously by people who should not be allowed to go outside unaccompanied

Now, the United States of 'Murika isn't gonna put up with enormous sea monsters threatening its coastline, so the crack Weather Modification Team at (choose one: NASA, the DHS, the National Weather Service, the CIA, or HAARP) got right on the job.  (Yes, I know, HAARP is located in Alaska, and hasn't been under federal control for ten years.  Stop asking questions.)  So the Team manufactured an enormous snowstorm to freeze the creature and prevent it from wreaking havoc.

And it worked!  I mean, have you seen any enormous sea monsters lately?  Q.E.D.

To most of us, this kind of thinking makes zero sense.  But honestly, there's a reason it keeps cropping up.  It seems like when bad things happen, even a far-fetched explanation can be more appealing than just shrugging and saying, "The universe is a chaotic place sometimes."  

In an interview in Vox, social psychologist Jan-Willem van Prooijen, of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, agrees. "[Conspiracy theories are] a tool to explain reality," van Prooijen said.  "We can’t always know or understand everything that happens to us.  When people are uncertain about change — when they lose their jobs, or when a terrorist strike or a natural disaster has occurred — then people have a tendency to want to understand what happened, and also a tendency to assume the worst.  It’s a self-protective mechanism people have.  This combination of trying to make sense and assuming the worst often leads to conspiracy theories."

This means, van Prooijen said, that during unstable times, we should expect conspiracy theories to sprout up like mushrooms after a rainstorm.  "They’re particularly likely to flourish in times of collective uncertainty in society.  Particularly after high-profile incidents that imply a sudden change in society or a sudden change in reality in a threatening way.  Think 9/11, but also think of disease outbreaks [or] long-term threats like an economic crisis or climate change."

And I think -- regardless of which side of the aisle you happen to be on -- you'll agree that we do live in a time of "collective uncertainty."  So while it's easy to make fun of the people who come up with this stuff -- and I've certainly done my share of snort-laughing about how ridiculous it can get -- from the standpoint of human psychology, it's exactly what we should expect.

For me, though, I'd rather actually understand what's going on than make shit up just to have a convenient scapegoat.  I'm no more fond of a chaotic model for the universe than anyone else; like all of us, I struggle with explaining why bad things happen, especially when good people fall victim to them.  But at some point, you just have to accept that you don't understand everything.  For a lot of people, they can find solace in placing their understanding in the care of a deity; if God has a plan, they say, maybe they don't need to comprehend it.

Me, I've never been able to get there.  Shit happens, you know?  And that, more or less, is that.  We have an inborn tendency to cast around for comforting answers whenever we're confronted with something outside our wheelhouse, but having a desire for an answer doesn't imply that one exists.  To me it's more honest to fall back on the trenchant words of astronomer Carl Sagan: "For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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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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