Cows are from Mars, wheat is from Venus

There are some types of woo-woo thinking that I can at least understand.

Let's take one of my favorites, which is Tarot card divination.  While my general attitude toward it is that there is no possible way it can work, you can see why someone might think that it does.  If you enter a Tarot card reading with the opinion that it's going to tell you something mystical and important, you will tend to interpret whatever the cards show in that light, giving greater weight to information that supports your assertion and less weight to information that contradicts it.  This confirmation bias, then, leads you to stronger and stronger belief in an incorrect model, unless you are consistently on guard against the natural human tendency toward it.

Add that to the fact that most divination is done, for pay, by people who are skilled at reading their clients' body language, and tailoring their spiel based upon the reaction they're getting -- so it's no wonder that they come off sounding convincing.

So these sorts of things might be wrong, but at least they're understandable.

What I don't get at all is when people take a bit of real information, and derive from that information a completely ridiculous explanation.  This Ockham's-Razor-in-reverse approach, as I've commented before, is the basis of a lot of conspiracy theories.  But just this past weekend, my cousin in New Mexico, who has been the source of many wonderful topics for Skeptophilia, told me about an example of this phenomenon that may be the best I've ever seen.

Health and nutrition magazines, books, and websites have seen a great deal of buzz lately about the dangers of gluten in food, and not just for people who have the devastating (and easily diagnosed) condition called celiac disease or celiac sprue.  There is a contention, gaining ground especially amongst the proponents of the so-called "paleo diet," that gluten is bad for everyone, and that we all would benefit from eliminating it completely from our tables.

The trouble is, there's no good diagnostic test for "Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity" (NCGS), which leads to the problem that it's hard to separate it from other disorders with rather vague, diffuse symptoms, not to mention chronic hypochondria.  Look, for example, at this article at Natural News called "Six Signs You Might Have Gluten Sensitivity."  Damn near all of us have some of the symptoms on the list, so without critical consideration, we might assume that we were gluten sensitive.

Now I hasten to add that I am quite sure that NCGS is a real thing; two recent controlled studies (available here and here) looked at the phenomenon closely, and although neither was able to determine a usable clinical diagnostic protocol for it, remember that the same was true for years for such disorders as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, both of which are now fairly well accepted as valid diagnoses.

But because NCGS is still out of the reach of conventional medicine to diagnose, it does leave people free to decide for themselves what the reason for it might be.  Which is why there is an increasing number of claims out there that we shouldn't eat gluten -- or drink milk, either, for that matter -- because wheat and cows are from outer space.

I'm not making this up.  For example, take the following, that showed up on the Starseed Network:

Aliens gave us cows and wheat?

I've been researching. From what I can find, cows just showed up about 10,000 years ago. There were similar species before then but were too wild and twice as big.

Wheat, too, just appeared about the same time.

I'm just getting into all this.

Has anyone else ever heard of/know anything about this? I'd like to do a blog post about it and I'm having a hard time finding anything. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place. Anyway, anything anyone's got would be great!

And while there were a couple of derisive responses, as you might expect, more of them were entirely in support of this bizarre contention.  One of them suggested that goats might be aliens, too, because they have slit pupils.  And then there was this:

In my spirit quests I have been told that cows were on mars. Wheat was brought by ET to be farmed by mankind. Have you ever heard of Operation MindFuck? The author of Illuminatus (Robert Anton Wilson) and Cosmic Trigger, talks about an instance where a man, Joseph Simonton, had an extraterrestrial encounter and the alien being presented him with a plate of wheat germ pancakes. 

Well, there you are, then.

I suppose that this would explain one thing, namely, the fact that the aliens when they come here seem intent on stomping out patterns in wheat fields and mutilating and/or abducting cows.  If you are doubtful about the latter, you should visit the wonderful site Cow Abduction.  Once it loads, pass your cursor over the image of Bessie, contentedly munching grass in a field, and then tell me that's not the most awesome thing you've ever seen.

Be that as it may, I'm doubtful that aliens are responsible for any of this, especially not the origins of cows and wheat.  Cattle have been around for a long, long time, and their domestication from the wild bovine called the aurochs has been thoroughly studied by paleontologists and archaeologists.  As far as wheat goes, its origin lies in the (natural) hybridization of two species of wild grasses, followed by artificial selection by early humans [Source].

So, much as you might like to attribute the bellyache you got after eating a bagel with cream cheese to the extraterrestrial origins of gluten and lactose, it doesn't really hold water.

But if you're looking for a terrestrial species that might have been seeded here by aliens, my vote would go to the carrot.  In my mind, carrots have no redeeming features, with the possible exception of carrot cake, which only works because the carrot flavor is swamped by large quantities of cinnamon and ginger.  Otherwise, carrots (1) taste disgusting, especially when cooked, and (2) if eaten in sufficient quantity, will turn your skin orange.

Sounds like an evil alien plot to infiltrate our dinners, to me.

So that's our dip in the deep end for today.  Just to conclude: even though gluten and lactose sensitivity are real phenomena, there is no need to leap to the further conclusion that wheat and cows are from outer space.  If you doubt that, you should probably consult your local Tarot card reader, whom I am sure will confirm what I'm telling you.

Mangy coyotes, mad cows, and mythological creatures

Today at Worldwide Wacko Watch we're keeping a close eye on three developing stories.  At least I am.  My research team, made up of my dogs Grendel and Doolin, are currently asleep, having just completed a critical mission of barking at nothing at 4 AM. 

Of course, maybe there was something there, and I just didn't notice it.  Some people in Cedar Park, Texas, were probably wishing they had dogs as brave as mine to protect them when they saw, skulking in a field near Hill Country Winery, a pack of Chupacabras.  (Source)

"I don't know what it is," said Rick Cumptson, who has also seen the animals in a field outside of his store. "I'd never even heard of Chupacabra until about two weeks ago. I started looking, trying to figure out what the hell these were.  They were just hanging out there in the field.  It looked like maybe they had just had breakfast, and were out there playing around."

Well, already that has to make you wonder.  Chupacabras don't "play around."  They terrorize residents with their horrifying visages, rippling muscles, and glowing red eyes, and look around for goats to disembowel.  Be that as it may, Cumpston and others who have seen the animals are certain that what they're seeing is the renowned blood-sucking cryptid.

Me, I'm not so sure.  Every time someone has seen a Chupacabra, or taken a photograph, or shot one, it's turned out to be a coyote with sarcoptic mange.   Jack Bonner, who works for Williamson County Animal Control, concurs.  "Anybody that calls in a Chupacabra -- it's a coyote with mange," Bonner said, adding that there was a "really, really, really nasty, ugly, mangy coyote that was over in that area" a few months ago.

Cumpston, of course, isn't convinced.  "I don't think it's possible," he told reporters for the Austin Statesman.  "I've seen coyotes and I've seen this -- two of them within 25 feet -- their head is nowhere similar to a coyote at all. Their ears are different, their eyes are different. I just can't believe that."

So, if you visit Texas, watch out for Chupacabras on the rampage.  Or mangy coyotes.  Either one, I would imagine, would be really, really, really nasty to meet.


But not, perhaps, as scary as a bunch of deranged cows, which is what some farmers in Indiana had to contend with after their field got buzzed by a UFO.  (Source)

MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) posted a story on June 5 that there was a report from an undisclosed location in Indiana, telling about a sighting of a UFO that "streaked across the sky very fast and had a long tail behind it."  This, so far, isn't that unusual -- dozens of such reports come in every day.  But what happened afterwards sets it apart.

Minutes later, the eyewitness said that his cows began "going nuts, making noises and slamming themselves into the gate."  He himself reports feeling "strange and shaky," and says that shortly thereafter, he "heard sirens and saw several emergency response vehicles headed in the direction that the 'UFO' was traveling."

The whole thing puts me in mind of the strangely satisfying CowAbduction, where you see a photograph of a calmly grazing cow, and when you click on it, the cow moos and gets flung upwards into the air, as if with a tractor beam.  No, nothing else happens, but it's still funny enough that just I spent ten minutes messing around with it, probably because I need to have another cup of coffee so that my brain will actually start working.  On the other hand, the tracker on the CowAbduction page says that the website has logged 1,650,553 cow abductions to date, so I guess I'm not the only one who is easily amused.


And even cow abductions aren't as scary as what's going on in Chesterfield, Michigan, where a mythological creature is stalking the woods.  (Source)

A Macomb County police report from June 6 states that a Chesterfield resident had a rock thrown through his window, with a scary note attached.  The note "said a mythological creature was in the woods nearby and that children should be made aware of the danger."

Police scoured the woods nearby and "did not find any suspects, nor any mythological creatures."

Me, if I was trying to warn my neighbors about rampaging mythological creatures, (1) I would find a less antisocial way to warn them than throwing a rock through their window, and (2) I would be a little more specific regarding what I was warning them about.  What kind of mythological creature?  A centaur?  A leprechaun?  A balrog?  You can see that the kinds of responsive measures you might want to take would be different in each of those cases -- respectively (1) hide the women-folk, (2) look for a pot in which to bring home your gold, or (3) piss yourself and scream like a little girl.  So it would have been nice if they could have given the Chesterfield resident a little more information regarding what they were up against.  However, there were no further reports of balrogs in the woods, so it all ended happily enough.


So, anyway, that's our report for the day.  I think that about winds us up here, which is a good thing, because my dogs have woken up and are barking again.  Maybe this time there's actually something out there in the back yard -- possibly a mangy chupacabra, a mad, UFO-crazed cow, or a "mythological creature."  Or maybe they're just barking because they like to bark.  Myself, I suspect it's the latter.