The vanished legion

In the Doctor Who episode "The Eaters of Light," the Twelfth Doctor and his companions, Bill and Nardole, go back to second-century Scotland to settle a dispute they're having over what actually happened to the Roman Ninth Legion (the Legio IX Hispania), which was deployed in the British Isles during the first century but rather suddenly disappears from the records in around 120 C.E.

Being Doctor Who, of course there are aliens involved -- a mysterious and powerful creature that feeds off of light, and which the native Picts knew how to control, but the attacks by the Romans (specifically the Ninth Legion) disrupted their ability to manage the portal behind which it was trapped, and it was in danger of getting loose and wreaking havoc.  In the end, the Doctor convinces the Picts and the Romans to set aside their hostilities and work together to deal with the bigger danger, and the Pictish leader, along with some of her warriors, and the entire legion choose to sacrifice their lives to contain the creature behind the door (which lies amongst a very atmospheric ring of standing stones out on the windswept heather), thus saving the world and also explaining why the Ninth Legion suddenly vanished.

The disappearance of the Legio IX Hispania is one of the more curious historical mysteries.  An early hypothesis, promoted by German historian Christian Theodor Mommsen, was that the Ninth had been wiped out in a battle with the Picts in 108 C.E., but there are a couple of problems in this claim.  First, the Romans were meticulous record-keepers, and didn't shy away from writing down what happened even when they'd lost.  If an entire legion had been destroyed in battle, it's curious that no one ever mentioned it.  Second, there's some evidence that at least a few members of the Ninth survived -- there are inscriptions that may be from them in the ruins of the Roman base at Nijmegen (now in the Netherlands) dating from the 120s.  It's possible, of course, that the artifacts -- including a silver-and-bronze military medal with "LEG HISP IX" engraved on the back -- were brought there by someone else.  After all, inscriptions about the Ninth Legion showing up at a particular time and place doesn't mean the Ninth Legion was there at the time.

Despite this argument, some have suggested that there were members of the Ninth at Nijmegen -- perhaps only a handful of survivors of a rout in Scotland.  Other historians go even further, believing the entire legion survived and was merely redeployed elsewhere, ultimately meeting their end in the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135 C.E.) or even as late as Marcus Aurelius's war against the Parthians (161-166 C.E.).

But again, we run up against the fact that although there are records of both of those battles, the Ninth Legion is never mentioned.  If they fought -- and possibly were destroyed -- in either of those conflicts, why did no one ever say so?

Most historians still subscribe to the idea that the Ninth was wiped out in Scotland, despite it leaving considerable questions about how it happened and why no one documented it.  British archaeologist Miles Russell, in his book The Celtic Kings of Roman Britain, says, "by far the most plausible answer to the question 'what happened to the Ninth' is that they fought and died in Britain, disappearing in the late 110s or early 120s when the province was in disarray."

Of course, a historical mystery like this leaves fertile ground for fiction writers to invent their own solutions, and the episode of Doctor Who is far from the only fanciful solution that has been proposed.  A good many of them involve time slips and transportation to an alternate reality, but none is as out there as the fate proposed in a Doc Savage novel wherein the Ninth is transported through an interdimensional gateway and ultimately end up in the African Congo, where their descendants survive until the 1930s.

And people say the plots of Doctor Who are ridiculous.

In any case, from a factual perspective what we're left with is a great big question mark.  An entire legion of Roman soldiers suddenly stops showing up in the records, and no one is really sure why.  The frustrating thing is that given the unlikeliness of finding any documents from that time that we don't already know about, it's doubtful we'll ever know for certain -- a highly unsatisfactory answer to our natural human curiosity.

Me, I'm voting for the light-eating alien having something to do with it.

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Flight into nowhere

Ever heard of Pan Am Flight 914?

The story goes that on July 2, 1955, Flight 914 -- a Boeing 727 -- took off on a routine run from New York to Miami, with 57 passengers on board.  Everything was going normally until the airplane got close to its destination.  As it was making its initial descent into Miami Airport, the aircraft suddenly disappeared from radar.

There was a massive search effort.  At the time of its disappearance, it was over the Atlantic Ocean -- actually near one corner of the infamous Bermuda Triangle -- so ships, planes, and helicopters were deployed to look for wreckage and (hopefully) survivors.

No trace of the airplane or the people on it were found.

But on March 9, 1985 -- a bit less than thirty years after it took off -- a Boeing 727, coming seemingly out of nowhere, landed in Caracas, Venezuela.  From its tail numbers, it was the missing plane.  Witnesses to its landing reported seeing astonished faces plastered to the windows, apparently aghast at where they were.  But before anyone could deplane, the pilot maneuvered the plane back onto the runway and took off.

This time, apparently for good.  No one has seen the plane, any of the crew, or the 57 passengers since.

[Image courtesy of photographer Peter Duijnmayer and the Creative Commons]

Flight 914 has become a popular staple of the "unsolved mysteries" crowd, and has featured in various books and television shows of the type you see on the This Hasn't Been About History For A Long Time Channel.  Explanations, if you can dignify them with that name, include time slips and/or portals, alien abduction, and the government secretly kidnapping the people on the flight and putting them into suspended animation for thirty years, for some unspecified but undoubtedly nefarious purpose.

There's just one problem with all of this.

None of it actually happened.

Pan Am Flight 914 is a hoax, but one that for some reason refuses to die.  You'll run into various iterations of the claim (the one I linked in the first line of this post is only one of hundreds of examples), all of which have the same basic story but differ in the details -- the number of passengers, the dates of departure and arrival, and so on.  (One site I saw claimed that the flight didn't land until 1992.)  But if you take all of those variations on the tale of the disappearing airplane, and track them backwards, you find out that the whole thing started with...

... The Weekly World News.

I should have known.  There's a rule of thumb analogous to "All roads lead to Rome," which is "All idiotic hoaxes lead to The Weekly World News."  For those of you Of A Certain Age, you will undoubtedly remember this tabloid as the one in the grocery store checkout line that had headlines like, "Cher Gives Birth To Bigfoot's Baby."  They also are the ones that created the recurring character of Bat Boy:

This spawned literally dozens of stories in The Weekly World News, my favorite of which was that a time traveler had come back from the future and told people that Bat Boy eventually becomes president.  The best part is that they call him "President Boy."

Me, I'm in favor.  Given some of the potential choices we've got in 2024, Bat Boy couldn't do much worse.

Bat Boy has also been the basis for countless pieces of fan fiction and a PS 5 game, was the inspiration for the monster in the truly terrifying X Files episode "Patience," and is the main character -- I shit you not -- in a Broadway musical.

But I digress.

The fact that Pan Am Flight 914 came from the same source as Bat Boy, the underwater crystal pyramids of Atlantis, and a coverup involving a mass burial of aliens in Uganda should immediately call the claim into question, but for some reason, it doesn't.  Woo-woo websites, books, and television shows still feature the flight as one of the best-documented examples of a mysterious disappearance, even though Pan Am itself has confirmed that Flight 914 never happened and the whole thing was made up.

Of course, that's what they would say.  *suspicious single eyebrow-raise*

What amazes me is that even though a minimal amount of snooping around online would be enough to convince you that the whole story is a fabrication, the websites claiming it's true far outnumber the ones debunking it.  Further illustrating the accuracy of the quote -- of uncertain origin, but often misattributed to Mark Twain -- that "a lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots."

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The strange case of Frederick Valentich

As skeptics, sometimes we have to admit that there are cases when we don't know the answer to a question -- and may not ever know.

It's not that it isn't frustrating.  Believe me, I get that.  One such question that is near and dear to my heart is whether or not there is intelligent extraterrestrial life.  While speculation runs rampant -- and I've done my own share of speculating -- the fact is, we have exactly zero evidence for it.  There are equally persuasive arguments for intelligent aliens being widespread and for humanity being, for all intents and purposes, alone in the universe.  It's very hard to derive a meaningful conclusion from the absence of data coupled with a huge and largely unexplored search field, so right now -- however much we'd like to meet the Vulcans and whatnot -- the most honest answer is "we don't know."

The same can happen with much less grandiose realms of inquiry.  Which brings me to a mystery I stumbled on a couple of days ago -- the puzzle of what happened to Frederick Valentich on October 21, 1978.

Valentich was a twenty-year-old Australian man who dreamed of a career in aviation, but a poor track record with academics and some rather erratic behavior kept getting in the way.  He applied twice to the Royal Australian Air Force, and was rejected both times because of "inadequate educational qualifications."  He successfully joined the RAAF Air Training Corps, and did part-time study to try for his commercial pilot's license -- but failed the qualifying examinations in all five subjects, not once but twice.  He got a license to fly small aircraft, but didn't even do well at that, straying into controlled air space over Sydney once, and then twice deliberately flying into a cloud (his license was only rated to allow him to fly in "visual meteorological conditions") -- behavior that was on the verge of grounding him permanently.

None of this discouraged him.

Frederick Valentich shortly before his disappearance [Image is in the Public Domain]

On the afternoon of October 21, 1978, Valentich took off from Melbourne Airport in a Cessna 182L heading toward King Island, about halfway between the southern coast of Australia and the northern tip of Tasmania.  His purpose is unknown; he told a friend he was going to meet some friends, and another that he was picking up a parcel of seafood, but neither turned out to be true.  At 7:06 PM he radioed Melbourne Air Traffic Control that he was flying at 1,400 meters and was being followed by a "large aircraft with four bright landing lights."  It kept getting closer and then moving away, he said.

Melbourne asked Valentich for more information.  He said that he was having engine problems, but the aircraft was still following him.  Then there was a silence, followed by Valentich saying, "It's not an aircraft."

Those were his last words.  They were followed by what are described as "metallic scraping noises," then... nothing.

A search commenced the next day, and over four days covered over a thousand square kilometers.  Neither Valentich nor any confirmable trace of his airplane were ever found.

A variety of explanations have been suggested to account for Valentich's disappearance.  These include:

• He was poorly qualified to fly, and in the dim light condition of early evening he became disoriented, possibly flying upside down.  The lights and the mysterious aircraft he saw were his plane's reflection in the ocean.  The problem with this is that a Cessna 182L has a gravity-feed fuel system, so the engine would have cut out quickly if he had been flying upside down.  And if he wasn't upside down, what was the mysterious aircraft?
• Valentich staged his own disappearance.  There were reports of a light plane making a landing in a field near Cape Otway, on the south coast, but upon investigation Melbourne police found no evidence of it.  Either the reports were incorrect, or the plane had taken off again, which leaves us with the same problem as before.  And if he did land somewhere, there's the problem that his plane only had the fuel capacity to reach Tasmania, or somewhere along the south Australian shore.  So where is his plane -- and where is he?
• Valentich did go down somewhere in the Bass Strait, and the remains simply have never been found.  An interesting analysis by pilots who've studied the case suggests that he fell prey to the "illusion of a tilted horizon" -- a sensory illusion occurring because of the mixed signals coming from the eyes and the inner ear.  Valentich may have then overcompensated, sending the plane into a "graveyard spiral" ending with his plummeting into the ocean.  As a pilot friend of mine once told me, "Rule one is 'always trust your instruments over your senses.'"  (The link to the analysis also contains a complete transcript of the conversation between Valentich and Melbourne Air Traffic Control, if you're curious.) 
• Valentich crashed his plane deliberately -- i.e., he committed suicide.  There's no evidence that he was suicidal, although that by itself isn't disproof.  And once again, we have the problem that no trace of the crash was ever discovered.
• And, of course: the aircraft Valentich saw was an alien spacecraft, and he was abducted.  A group called Ground Saucer Watch produced photographs taken from Cape Otway, allegedly on the day Valentich disappeared, that show "a bona fide unknown flying object, of moderate dimensions, apparently surrounded by a cloud-like vapor/exhaust residue," but the photographs are of poor quality and have generally been dismissed as evidence by skeptical inquirers.

It's a curious case, to say the least, made more curious by the aforementioned fact that he'd lied about his reason for heading toward King Island, and also that according to his father, Valentich was obsessed with UFOs and had expressed fear about being abducted.  Then, there's the following account, as related in Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs, by Jerome Clark:

Several years after the incident, several members of a family -- an uncle, his son, and two nieces -- came forward to relate an experience they underwent on October 21, 1978.  As the story went, they were hunting rabbits on Cape Otway when one of the girls asked, "What is that light?"  Looking up, the uncle spotted an airplane (apparently Valentich's, the only one that would have been in the air at the time in question) and identified it as an aircraft light.  "No," the niece insisted.  "The light is above the airplane."  The four watched the plane and the light until it disappeared behind some nearby hills.

So what are we to make of all this?

Honestly, there's not much here to make.  Once again, we are faced with a complete absence of hard evidence.  Other than the conversation between Valentich and Melbourne Air Traffic Control, we've got nothing to go on other than anecdote.  Each of the above explanations is possible (even, loath though I am to admit it, the alien abduction one).  Certainly each one admits to arguments against.  It's likely that his plane went down in Bass Strait due to pilot error, but likely doesn't mean case closed.

So the rather unsatisfying conclusion is that we don't know what happened to Frederick Valentich, and probably never will.

When faced with a situation like this, the best we can do is hold our opinion in abeyance, forever if need be.  I get that it's frustrating; the human mind's drive to know stuff is mighty powerful.  But as good skeptics we need to admit it when the evidence is simply inadequate to draw a conclusion, any conclusion.

And it seems like, in the strange case of Frederick Valentich, we might never have a better answer than that.

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Gone in a flash

Sometimes being a skeptic means answering the question, "So what happened?" with the rather unsatisfying response, "We don't know and may never know."

That was my immediate reaction upon reading a report out of Argentina from a little over a week ago, over at the website Inexplicata.  (Here are the links to part 1 and part 2 of the report.)  The gist of the story is as follows.

On Tuesday, November 15, a woman from the town of Jacinto Araúz went missing.  A search was launched in the area where she was last seen, but there were no traces -- no signs of a struggle, no note, no vehicle missing that she might have taken if she'd run away from home.  The search, in fact, turned up nothing.  Trained search dogs were brought in, and they easily picked up the woman's scent trail near her house, and then abruptly lost it after only 150 meters.  Neighbors said that there was no way she'd simply walked away -- her physical condition was poor, and a leisurely one-kilometer walk was enough to tire her out.

The mystery deepened when several relatives received messages from the woman's cellphone number, but the messages contained nothing but a mechanical buzzing noise and static.

Then, twenty-four hours later, she turned up again -- in Quinto Meridiano, sixty-five kilometers away.  She had a cut on her forehead, but otherwise was physically unharmed.

She seemed to be in a profound state of shock, however, and wasn't able to (or at least didn't) speak a word to authorities.  She was taken to a local hospital, where she wrote down what she claimed had happened to her.  She said that on Tuesday, she'd been in her house when she'd heard a noise.  She went outside, and there was a sudden, blinding flash of light.  When her vision cleared, she was in Quinto Meridiano -- with no apparent lapse of time.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Grelibre.net, Spectre Brocken, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The report, of course, made all the UFO aficionados start jumping up and down making excited little squeaking noises.  The area around Jacinto Araúz is a "hotspot," they said.  I saw a reference to the "Dorado Incident" in the report, but I wasn't able to find a good account of it; apparently it was some sort of UFO sighting nineteen years ago.  The report mentioned other sightings in the vicinity that have included spacecraft that landed, leaving scorch marks on the ground, and a "red-eyed creature" that has been seen more than once nearby.

But that's about all there is to the woman's story.  She's missing for a day, then turns up with a superficial injury, apparent emotional shock, and a strange tale of vanishing in a flash of light.

So what really happened?

Seems to me there are five possibilities:

• Her story is substantially true, and she was teleported (for want of a better word) from Jacinto Araúz to Quinto Meridiano more or less instantaneously by some unidentified, possibly extraterrestrial, agent.
• She's lying -- she made the whole thing up for her "fifteen minutes of fame."  She went to Quinto Meridiano by one of the usual means of transport, and invented the flash-of-light stuff.  The dogs lost her scent because that's the point at which she got in a car and drove (or was driven by an accomplice) away.  The phone calls with the buzzing noise were manufactured.
• She's mentally unbalanced, and got to Quinto Meridiano somehow but doesn't remember how.  Sixty-five kilometers would be a significant walk in twenty-four hours even for someone in good shape, but there's no reason she couldn't have hitchhiked.
• She was kidnapped -- knocked on the head (thus the injury on her forehead, and possibly explaining her perception of a flash of light), and then driven to Quinto Meridiano, where she was dumped by the kidnappers.
• The people who reported the story made it up, and the mysterious and unnamed woman doesn't even exist.

All of these explanations, however, leave some serious unresolved problems.  In order:

• Instantaneous transport, or even something very close to it, seems to break just about every law of physics we know. 
• This all seems like quite an ordeal to put oneself through just to give UFO enthusiasts multiple orgasms.  Not only do we have an apparently weak, unwell woman taking off for the next town for a day, but giving herself a deep cut on the forehead, for no other reason than to fool a bunch of people and worry the absolute shit out of her friends and family.
• If she is simply mentally ill, and hitched a ride from Jacinto Araúz to Quinto Meridiano, why hasn't anyone turned up saying that they'd seen her or given her a lift?  According to the sources, her disappearance was widely publicized -- it seems like someone would have reported seeing her.
• Why was she kidnapped?  There's no mention of her being robbed or raped.  It seems like there's a complete lack of any plausible motive for kidnapping.
• It's possible the story is made up from stem to stern, but there's been enough mention of it in other news sources (such as here and here), with enough details about which police departments were involved in the search, that if it was an out-and-out hoax, it would have been debunked by now.

As I asked before: so, what really happened?

The answer is: we don't know.  Perhaps more evidence will surface that will allow us to eliminate one or more of the explanations in the list, but given all we know at the moment, there's no way to narrow it down further.  We have to fall back on the ECREE principle -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- which would suggest that the supernatural/paranormal explanation (#1) is less likely than the natural ones (#2-#5), but "less likely" doesn't mean "impossible."

As I used to tell my Critical Thinking classes, you don't have to have an opinion about everything; being a skeptic means that in the absence of conclusive evidence, we have to accept the rather unsatisfying outcome that we need to hold off making a conclusion, perhaps forever.

So that's our exercise in frustration for the morning.  A peculiar story out of Argentina with no clear explanation.  It'd be nice if everything was neat and tidy and explicable, but we have to accept the fact that there are things we don't know -- and may never know.

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I've always loved a good parody, and one of the best I've ever seen was given to me decades ago as a Christmas present from a friend.  The book, Science Made Stupid, is a send-up of middle-school science texts, and is one of the most fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious things I've ever read.  I'll never forget opening the present on Christmas morning and sitting there on the floor in front of the tree, laughing until my stomach hurt.

If you want a good laugh -- and let's face it, lately most of us could use one -- get this book.  In it, you'll learn the proper spelling of Archaeopteryx, the physics of the disinclined plane, little-known constellations like O'Brien and Camelopackus, and the difference between she trues, shoe trees, and tree shrews. (And as I mentioned, it would make the perfect holiday gift for any science-nerd types in your family and friends.)

Science education may never be the same again.

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

Vanished into the triangle

My thought process is like a giant game of free association at the best of times, and there have been occasions when I've tried to figure out how I got (for example) from thinking about a news story from Istanbul, Turkey to pondering nettle plants' dependency on phosphorus in the soil, and reconstructing the chain by which I got from one to the other has proven impossible.

But even considering the labyrinthine recesses of my brain, I think I'm to be excused if a link sent to me by a friend immediately reminded me of a short story by H. P. Lovecraft.  My dear friend, the brilliant author K. D. McCrite, messaged me saying "this immediately made me think of you," along with a link to a YouTube video called "Five Strange Disappearances in Vermont's Bennington Triangle."  The video, which is well-researched and pretty damn creepy, is about five unsolved disappearances in rural southwestern Vermont between 1945 and 1950, and despite my decades of interest in the paranormal, of which I had never heard.  The victims all were seen by multiple witnesses shortly before they vanished, and in fact one of them reputedly evaporated while on a public bus -- at stop A, he was there in his seat, and by stop B he was gone, despite the bus being in continuous motion the entire time and no one noticing his moving, much less leaping out of an open window or something.

The five -- Middle Rivers, Paula Welden, James Tedford, Paul Jephson, and Frieda Langer -- varied in age from eight to seventy-four, and their personal lives had nothing particular in common.  They all disappeared in the late fall or early winter in the region of Glastenbury [sic] Mountain, and with the exception of Langer, no trace of them was ever found despite extensive searching.  Langer's badly-decomposed body was found seven months later, but there was no apparent cause of death.  (The strangest part is that Langer's body was found very close to the last reported sighting of Paula Weldon.)

One of the last known photographs of Paula Welden

Interestingly, even though these five are considered the canonical Bennington Triangle cases, there are at least four other unexplained disappearances in the area -- one in 1942 and three in 1949 -- that some people think are related.  Additionally, the Bennington Banner did a piece on the topic back in 2008, starting with the much more recent account of a local man, an experienced hiker, who got lost for almost a day on a straightforward three-mile hike in the area, and upon finding his way back, reported that he had become disoriented and dizzy.  He ended up stopping for the night, and when the morning came he was six miles away from where he thought he was -- and on the walk back passed landmarks that included "stuff that [he didn't recognize, but] couldn't have missed."

Immediately I was reminded of Lovecraft's wildly terrifying short story "The Whisperer in Darkness," not only because it's about strange disappearances, but because it is set in the same part of Vermont.  The main character, Henry Akeley, writes a panicked letter to a friend that he's been hearing "voices in the air," and has become convinced that there are invisible creatures in the woods stalking and abducting the unwary, and that he's doomed for sure but wanted to let someone know what had happened to him because he's going to go missing very soon, and that the friend should under no circumstances interfere or attempt to help him.  Of course, being that this is a Lovecraft story, the friend says, basically, "Okay, be right over, bro," and it doesn't end well for either of them.

The disappearances -- the real ones, not the ones in Lovecraft -- are well enough documented that they merit a Wikipedia page, and more details (although less in the way of rigor) can be found on a page over at All That's Interesting.  Apparently the area has a bad reputation, at least amongst aficionados of the paranormal; it's supposedly a hotspot for Bigfoot and UFO sightings, and was feared and avoided by the local Native Americans (that bit seems to be an almost compulsory filigree to these kinds of stories).   I also saw more than one reference to alleged cases of "voices being heard on dead-air radio," but I wasn't able to find any independent corroboration of the claim.

But "voices in the air," amirite?  I think I'm to be excused for thinking of Lovecraft's dark tale.

The more pragmatic people approaching this story -- I'm one, which is probably unsurprising -- suspect that if the five canonical cases weren't the work of a serial killer, then it's simply a case of people going off into wilderness and doing something stupid that kills them.  The southern part of Vermont is largely trackless forest, and even though I'm an experienced back-country hiker and camper, I would make plenty sure to have survival gear, water, and food if I went off by myself into those mountains.  I know first-hand how big the wilderness is and how easy it is to get lost or have a mishap.  (Didn't stop me from solo camping in the Cascades and Olympics when I was young and reckless; that I survived unscathed is more a testimony to my luck than my brains.)

Still, there's something about both of those explanations that is unsatisfying, largely because of the completely different circumstances of each disappearance.  Tedford, as I mentioned, vanished from a public bus.  Eight-year-old Paul Jephson was accompanying his mother in a pickup truck as she drove around her family's acreage -- she stopped to do some chores, was gone a short time, and when she came back, the little boy was nowhere to be found.  Langer disappeared while hiking with a friend -- she'd gotten wet and decided to make the quick half-mile return to camp to change her clothes, but never got there.  Her body was found near a reservoir several miles away the following year -- in an area that had been searched extensively after her disappearance.

So all in all: pretty freakin' creepy.  Thanks to K. D. for cluing me in to a story that, all paranormal trappings aside, you have to admit is a curious one, and which admits of no obvious explanation.

Oh, and if you're wondering: Istanbul > Byzantine Empire > the Plague of Justinian (mid-sixth century) > the problems with burial of disease victims during an epidemic > bones enrich soil phosphorus > a proposal to use distribution of nettle plants in England to identify mass burial sites of people who died during the Black Death.  See?  Makes perfect sense.

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Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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

The strange tale of the disappearing soldier

I've been interested in the paranormal for a long time.  It started with my uncle's scary stories about the feu follet and loup-garou, told in French, which were sufficient to frighten myself and my cousins into the near pants-wetting stage, and yet which for some reason we demanded again and again.  Later I graduated to books with titles like Twenty Terrifying True Tales of the Supernatural, Real Ghost Stories, and Bigfoot: Legend Come to Life.  I supplemented this with my fiction reading, including Lovecraft and Poe, and watching shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  (With all of this, it's no wonder that I developed serious insomnia as a teenager, an ailment that continues to plague me today, forty-five years later.)

Anyhow, all of this is meant to underscore the fact that I've read a lot of supposedly true paranormal stories.  So it always is with a bit of pleasant surprise that I run into one I've never heard before -- something that happened yesterday, when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link telling the tale of Gil Pérez, the 16th century Spanish soldier who supposedly teleported from the Philippines to Mexico City.

The story goes like this.  In October of 1593, a man showed up in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, disheveled and disoriented.  He was questioned by authorities, and said that moments before, he'd been on guard duty, had felt dizzy, and leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. He opened them to find himself in Plaza Mayor...

... but moments earlier, he'd been in Manila.

Plaza Mayor in Mexico City, where Gil Pérez appeared out of nowhere [Image is in the Public Domain]

The authorities at the time were deeply Roman Catholic, and anything like this smacked of witchcraft, so they locked him up, charging him with desertion and consorting with the devil.  Pérez said that he had no idea how he'd gotten there, but it had nothing to do with Satan -- and as proof, he said that they had just gotten word that day of the assassination of Philippine Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas by Chinese pirates, and that proved that he'd just been in Manila.

Of course, back then, there was no way to verify such information quickly, so poor Pérez was confined to the jail for two months until a group that had come from Manila showed up in Mexico City.  Sure enough, one of the people in the group not only recognized Pérez, but said his uniform was the correct one for the Philippine guard -- and Pérez had indeed been there, on duty, when Dasmariñas was murdered two months earlier, but had disappeared without a trace and had not been seen since.

At that point, the authorities let Pérez go, he joined the Philippine delegation, and eventually found his way back home.  Why the charges of black magic were dropped is unknown; after all, even if he hadn't deserted, there was still the problem that he seemed to have gone halfway around the globe in seconds.  But maybe they were just as happy to make him someone else's problem.  In any case, what happened to Pérez afterwards is not recorded.

The problem, of course, is that these sort of folk legends usually have a rather unfortunate genealogy, and that certainly is true here.  The version of the story I've related above comes from a 1908 issue of Harper's Magazine, written by American folklorist Thomas Allibone Janvier.  Janvier said he got the story from a 1900 collection of Mexican tales by Luis Gonzáles Obregón, and Obregón said that he learned of it from the 1609 writings of Philippine Governor Antonio de Morga, who said that "Dasmariñas's death was known in Mexico the day it happened," although he didn't know how that could possibly be.

Others have noticed similarities between the tale and Washington Irving's story "Governor Manco and the Soldier" which appeared in Tales of the Alhambra in 1832.  So it's entirely possible that an offhand, and unsubstantiated, comment by de Morga was picked up and elaborated by Obregón, then picked up and elaborated further by Janvier, with some help along the way from Irving's (fictional) tale.

In any case, it's an intriguing story.  I'm always more fond of these open-ended tales -- the ones where everything gets tied up neatly in the end always seem to me to be too pat even to consider accepting them as real.  But this one -- Pérez's mysterious disappearance and reappearance were never explained, he vanished into obscurity afterwards, and nothing more came of it -- those are the ones that captivate interest, because that's usually the way reality works.  It's why my all-time favorite "true tale of the supernatural," the story of Nurse Black, still gives me the shudders every time I think about it.

Not, of course, that I think that the story of Pérez is true; it's simply that the more realistic a tale is, the more likely I am to be interested in it.  And after all of these years steeped in the paranormal, to find one I'd never heard of before was a lot of fun.

**************************************

I'm fascinated with history, and being that I also write speculative fiction, a lot of times I ponder the question of how things would be different if you changed one historical event.  The topic has been visited over and over by authors for a very long time; three early examples are Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" (1952), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), and R. A. Lafferty's screamingly funny "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967).

There are a few pivotal moments that truly merit the overused nametag of "turning points in history," where a change almost certainly would have resulted in a very, very different future.  One of these is the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which happened in 9 C.E., when a group of Germanic guerrilla fighters maneuvered the highly-trained, much better-armed Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Roman Legions into a trap and slaughtered them, almost to the last man.  There were twenty thousand casualties on the Roman side -- amounting to half their total military forces at the time -- and only about five hundred on the Germans'.

The loss stopped Rome in its tracks, and they never again made any serious attempts to conquer lands east of the Rhine.  There's some evidence that the defeat was so profoundly demoralizing to the Emperor Augustus that it contributed to his mental decline and death five years later.  This battle -- the site of which was recently discovered and excavated by archaeologists -- is the subject of the fantastic book The Battle That Stopped Rome by Peter Wells, which looks at the evidence collected at the location, near the village of Kalkriese, as well as the historical documents describing the massacre.  This is not just a book for history buffs, though; it gives a vivid look at what life was like at the time, and paints a fascinating if grisly picture of one of the most striking David-vs.-Goliath battles ever fought.

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

Vanished into the wilderness

As I've said many times before: I'm not saying that the paranormal is impossible.  I would really like it, however, if people would consider all of the natural possibilities before jumping straight to the supernatural ones.

This comes up because of a claim over at UFO Sightings Hotspot sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, where much is being made about the alleged disappearance of people (hundreds of them, apparently) in parks around the world.  The article comes along with a 24-minute video, which is worth watching if you have the time and don't mind doing a few facepalms, but this passage from the post will give you the gist:

The mystery of hundreds of people vanishing in national parks and forests is possible linked to a strange and highly unusual predator that is living in the woods and forests all across the world and is able to overpower someone in an instant. 

People disappear in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Mount Kailash in Tibet, the Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru and in national parks and forests in U.S.A. 

While paranormal researcher Stephen Young described Markawasi as a dimensional portal and suggested the strange energy visitors have described feeling there is possibly caused by a confluence of ley lines or the piezoelectric properties of granite,  Glenn Canady from BeforeItsNews reported that David Paulidis, a former cop began investigating a story about the hundreds that vanished from National Parks and forests in U.S.A...  David began making his own list and discovered there were over 30 cluster sites where most of these vanishings were happening.  He noticed that the people that vanish often do so right under the noses of others in the area.  The missing also shed their clothes right away and they are folded neatly.  One of the Park Rangers said it was like you were standing straight up and you melted away, that’s what it looked like!

So that's the claim.  People are vanishing by the scores, and the only possible explanations are (1) a huge and vicious predator, with apparently worldwide distribution but completely unknown to science, (2) ley lines, (3) dimensional portals, or (4) the "piezoelectric properties of granite."

Let's consider for a moment a couple of other explanations, shall we?  Then I'd exhort you to weigh them along with the supernatural ones, and see what seems to you to be the most likely.

There are two things about hiking in the wilderness that people often fail to take into account.  My perspective from this comes from a long personal history of back-country hiking, starting when I was a kid and my dad and I used to go to the canyon country of Arizona every summer to hunt for rocks and fossils.  Later, after I moved to Washington state, I used to go out in summer for weeks at a time up into the Cascades and the Olympic Range, relishing the silence and the open space after spending the rest of the year in the bustle and noise of Seattle.

If you've never done this yourself, the first thing you need to realize is that the wilderness is freakin' huge.  And empty.  On my trips into the Cascades, there were times that I'd go a week without seeing a single person.  The place is a big expanse of mountains, glaciers, and trees; if I'd gotten lost and gone missing, perhaps been hurt, the chances are very much against my ever being found again.  I ran across a comment on a website about hiker disappearances that seems appropriate, here:

We were out rockhounding in the desert and followed some tank tracks.  Turns out they were WWII tank tracks, and in one gully we found a long dead US Army Jeep, upside down.  We were likely the first people to have seen it since 1940 or so.  We took the shovel.  That's how we know - it hadn't been stripped.  A Jeep - lost for 40 years.  So - yes, a body would be easy by comparison, especially since animals would eat most of it. 

Once you get off a trail, it's not hard to be on ground that hasn't been trod for decades.  And get lost.

Add to that the fact that there are countless false trails, some made by animals, some simply natural open spots, that could lead a hiker astray.  This is one reason why hiking manuals recommend always going camping with a friend (not that I listened, of course).  Having two people there doubles the chances that you'll both come back alive.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Miguel.v, Forest on Baxter Creek Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, CC BY-SA 3.0]

And the "not that I listened" part highlights the second thing that a lot of people don't think about, and that's the penchant for people to do dumb stuff. Again, I have some personal experience in this regard.  Despite my "be careful if you're out in the wilderness" message, I was known to make seriously boneheaded choices back in my young-and-stupid days.  I recall being by myself up in the Cascades, and after a hot hike I decided to strip naked and jump into a little crystal-clear lake I'd come across, not noticing that the lake was fed by melting glacial ice until I was already mid-swan-dive.  I think on that day I may have set the world record for fewest milliseconds spent in the water.  I've also loved to climb since I was a kid, and have scaled many a cliff and rock face and tree -- all, of course, without any climbing equipment.  Any of those escapades could have resulted in my being seriously injured or killed.  That I wasn't is more a testimony to dumb luck than it is to skill.

Look at the moronic stuff people will do in front of witnesses, often while right next to gigantic "caution" signs.  A couple of summers ago, my wife and I went to Yellowstone National Park, and we saw many members of the species Homo idioticus doing things like walking right up to bison, elk, and bears, stepping off of boardwalks in order to get up close and personal with hot-enough-to-melt-your-skin-off hot springs, and climbing on crumbling rock formations.  At least here, if something bad happened, there were people around to help (not that in the case of the grizzlies or hot springs, there'd have been much we could do).  But out in the middle of nowhere?  You're on your own.  And I can use myself as a case-in-point that even in those much more precarious circumstances, people still do dumb stuff.

So you don't need to conjecture predators, ley lines, or anything else supernatural to account for disappearances.  The immensity of nature, coupled with natural human stupidity, is certainly sufficient.  Add to this our penchant for imagining stuff while alone or in unfamiliar surroundings, and you can explain the data, such as it is, without recourse to the paranormal.

And trust me.  Whatever the explanation, it has nothing to do with the "piezoelectric properties of granite."

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week should be in everyone's personal library.  It's the parting gift we received from the brilliant astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who died two years ago after beating the odds against ALS's death sentence for over fifty years.

In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking looks at our future -- our chances at stopping anthropogenic climate change, preventing nuclear war, curbing overpopulation -- as well as addressing a number of the "big questions" he references in the title.  Does God exist?  Should we colonize space?  What would happen if the aliens came here?  Is it a good idea to develop artificial intelligence?

And finally, what is humanity's chance of surviving?

In a fascinating, engaging, and ultimately optimistic book, Hawking gives us his answers to the questions that occupy the minds of every intelligent human.  Published posthumously -- Hawking died in March of 2018, and Brief Answers hit the bookshelves in October of that year -- it's a final missive from one of the finest brains our species ever produced.  Anyone with more than a passing interest in science or philosophy should put this book on the to-read list.

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

The disappearance of Bruno

UFO enthusiasts are currently in a tizzy over the disappearance last week of a university student from Rio Branco, Brazil, who left behind a bizarre video about 16th century philosopher, scientist, and theologian Giordano Bruno and a room whose walls are covered with esoteric symbols.

The student's name is Bruno Borges (I wondered if his first name was in honor of Giordano, or whether it was a coincidence; of course, in the minds of the UFO conspiracy theorists, nothing is a coincidence).  He apparently had a reputation as being a bit of an odd duck even prior to his disappearance.  He was obsessed with aliens, and his fascination with the earlier Bruno came from the fact that the Italian philosopher/scientist was one of the first to speculate that other planets -- even planets around other stars -- might harbor life.  Borges hinted that Bruno's execution at the hands of the Inquisition was to keep him silent about the reality of aliens, when in reality it was just your average charges of heresy.  The church made eight accusations, claiming that Bruno was guilty of:

• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and speaking against it and its ministers
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the Trinity, divinity of Christ, and Incarnation
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith pertaining to Jesus as Christ
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith regarding the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about both Transubstantiation and Mass
• claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity
• believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes
• dealing in magics and divination

Given the intolerance of the time, any one of these would be sufficient, but the Catholic Church is nothing if not thorough.  Bruno was sentenced to be burned at the stake, and supposedly upon hearing his fate made a rude gesture at the judges and said, "Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam" ("Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it"), which ranks right up there with Galileo's "Eppur si muove" as one of the most elegant "fuck you" statements ever delivered.

I suppose it's understandable that Borges thought Bruno was a pretty cool guy.  A lot of us science types do, although that admiration might be misplaced.  Hank Campbell writes over at The Federalist:

Bruno only agreed with Copernicus because he worshiped the Egyptian God Thoth and believed in Hermetism and its adoration of the sun as the center of the universe.  Both Hermes and Thoth were gods of…magic. 

The church and science did not agree with Bruno that pygmies came from a “second Adam” or that Native Americans had no souls, but they were also not going to kill him over it.  There is no evidence his “science” came up at any time.  He was imprisoned for a decade because the church wanted him to just recant his claims that Hermetism was the one true religion and then they could send him on his way.  When he spent a decade insisting it was fact, he was convicted of Arianism and occult practices, not advocating science.

So right off, we're on shaky ground, not that this was ever in doubt.  In any case, between Borges's devotion to Bruno and his fascination with aliens, he apparently went a little off the deep end.  He left behind over a dozen bound books, mostly written in code, and only a few of which have been deciphered.  Here's a sample passage from one of the ones that has been decrypted:

It is easy to accept what you have been taught since childhood and what is wrong.  It is difficult, as an adult, to understand that you were wrongly taught what you suspected was correct since you were a child.  In other words, if you fit into the system, your behaviour will be determined, making you at the mercy of beliefs already provided and well established in dogmas and rituals, with the masses.

Which is standard conspiracy theory fare.  He wouldn't tell his parents or his sister what he was up to, only that he was working on fourteen books that would "change mankind in a good way."  Besides the symbols painted on his walls, he also had a portrait of himself next to an alien:

Borges's apartment wall, showing the symbols, writing, and the portrait of him with a friend

Borges has now been missing for over a week, and his family is understandably frantic.  The UFO/conspiracy world is also freaking out, but for a different reason; they think that Borges knew too much (in this view of the world, people are always "finding out too much" and having to be dealt with), and either the people who don't want us to know about aliens, or else the aliens themselves, have kidnapped him.

But the whole thing sounds to me like the story of a delusional young man whose disappearance is a matter for the police, not for Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.  It's sad, but I'm guessing that aliens had nothing to do with it.  Of course, try to tell that to the folks over at the r/conspiracy subreddit, where such a statement simply confirms that I'm one of "the two s's" -- sheeple (dupe) or shill (complicit).  I'll leave it to wiser heads than mine to determine which is most likely in my case.

Vanished into the wilderness

As I've said many times before: I'm not saying that the paranormal is impossible.  I would really like it, however, if people would consider all of the natural possibilities before jumping straight to the supernatural ones.

This comes up because of a claim over at UFO Sightings Hotspot, where much is being made about the alleged disappearance of people (hundreds of them, apparently) in parks around the world.  The article comes along with a 24-minute video, which is worth watching if you have the time and don't mind doing a few facepalms, but this passage from the post will give you the gist:

The mystery of hundreds of people vanishing in national parks and forests is possible linked to a strange and highly unusual predator that is living in the woods and forests all across the world and is able to overpower someone in an instant. 

People disappear in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Mount Kailash in Tibet, the Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru and in national parks and forests in U.S.A. 

While paranormal researcher Stephen Young described Markawasi as a dimensional portal and suggested the strange energy visitors have described feeling there is possibly caused by a confluence of ley lines or the piezoelectric properties of granite, Glenn Canady from BeforeItsNews reported that David Paulidis, a former cop began investigating a story about the hundreds that vanished from National Parks and forests in U.S.A...   David began making his own list and discovered there were over 30 cluster sites where most of these vanishings were happening.  He noticed that the people that vanish often do so right under the noses of others in the area. The missing also shed their clothes right away and they are folded neatly.  One of the Park Rangers said it was like you were standing straight up and you melted away, that’s what it looked like!

So that's the claim.  People are vanishing by the scores, and the only possible explanations are (1) a huge and vicious predator, with apparently worldwide distribution but completely unknown to science, (2) ley lines, (3) dimensional portals, or (4) the "piezoelectric properties of granite."

Let's consider for a moment a couple of other explanations, shall we?  Then I'd exhort you to weigh them along with the supernatural ones, and see what seems to you to be the most likely.

There are two things about hiking in the wilderness that people often fail to take into account.  My perspective from this comes from a long personal history of back-country hiking, starting when I was a kid and my dad and I used to go to the canyon country of Arizona every summer to hunt for rocks and fossils.  Later, after I moved to Washington state, I used to go out in summer for weeks at a time up into the Cascades and the Olympic Range, relishing the silence and the open space after spending the rest of the year in the bustle and noise of Seattle.

If you've never done this yourself, the first thing you need to realize is that the wilderness is freakin' huge.  And empty.  On my trips into the Cascades, there were times that I'd go a week without seeing a single person.  The place is a big expanse of mountains, glaciers, and trees; if I'd gotten lost and gone missing, perhaps been hurt, the chances are very much against my ever being found again.  I ran across a comment on a website about hiker disappearances that seems appropriate, here:

We were out rockhounding in the desert and followed some tank tracks.  Turns out they were WWII tank tracks, and in one gully we found a long dead US Army Jeep, upside down.  We were likely the last people to have seen it since 1940 or so.  We took the shovel.  That's how we know - it hadn't been stripped. A Jeep - lost for 40 years.  So - yes, a body would be easy by comparison, especially since animals would eat most of it. 

Once you get off a trail, it's not hard to be on ground that hasn't been trod for decades.  And get lost.

Add to that the fact that there are countless false trails, some made by animals, some simply natural open spots, that could lead a hiker astray.  This is one reason why hiking manuals recommend always going camping with a friend (not that I listened, of course).  Having two people there doubles the chances that you'll both come back alive.

Baxter Creek Trail, Great Smoky Mountains National Park [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And the "not that I listened" part highlights the second thing that a lot of people don't think about, and that's the penchant for people to do dumb stuff.  Again, I have some personal experience in this regard.  Despite my "be careful if you're out in the wilderness" message, I was known to make really boneheaded choices back in my young and stupid days.  I recall being by myself up in the Cascades, and after a hot hike I decided to strip naked and jump into a little crystal-clear lake I'd come across, not noticing that the lake was fed by melting glacial ice until I was already mid-swan-dive.  I think on that day I may have set the record for fewest milliseconds spent in the water.  I've also loved to climb since I was a kid, and have scaled many a cliff and rock face and tree -- all, of course, without any climbing equipment.  Any of those escapades could have resulted in my being seriously injured or killed.  That I wasn't is more a testimony to dumb luck than it is to skill.

Look at the moronic stuff people will do in front of witnesses, often while right next to gigantic "caution" signs.  Last summer, my wife and I went to Yellowstone National Park, and we saw many members of the species Homo idioticus doing things like walking right up to bison, elk, and bears, stepping off of boardwalks in order to get up close and personal with hot-enough-to-melt-your-skin-off hot springs, and climbing on crumbling rock formations.  At least here, if something bad happened, there were people to help (not that in the case of the grizzlies or hot springs, there'd have been much we could do).  But out in the middle of nowhere?  You're on your own.  And I can use myself as a case-in-point that even in those much more precarious circumstances, people still do dumb stuff.

So you don't need to conjecture predators, ley lines, or anything else supernatural to account for disappearances.  The immensity of nature, coupled with natural human stupidity, is certainly sufficient.  Add to this our penchant for imagining stuff while alone or in unfamiliar surroundings, and you can explain the data, such as it is, without recourse to the paranormal.

And trust me.  Whatever the explanation, it has nothing to do with the "piezoelectric properties of granite."