Crash remnant

Well, another alleged UFO artifact has been analyzed and found wanting.

It's gotten to be a pattern, hasn't it?  Someone claims to have rock-solid evidence of something fringe-y -- hair or bone from a Bigfoot, the skull of a humanoid alien, ghost photographs, extrasensory perception -- and upon examination, it turns out to be tenuous at best and an outright fake at worst.  Nothing, certainly, that would convince an honest skeptic.

Now, allow me to state up front something I've said many times before here at Skeptophilia; I'm not a skeptic because I don't like the idea of the paranormal.  Honestly, I would love it if some of this stuff turned out to be true.  Not only is there simply the coolness factor, it would open up huge avenues for scientific research.  And don't @ me about how scientists are narrow-minded conservatives who are desperate to uphold the status quo and therefore would ignore hard evidence even if it existed; the truth is that scientists are constantly looking for new stuff, because finding something truly novel is how careers are made.  If they tend to give a suspicious side-eye at most of these claims, it's because they understand how data and evidence work.  (As astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "We know what the hell we're looking at.")  Their training has made them all too aware of how easy it is to be misled by what what you would like very much to be true.

To quote the great physicist Richard Feynman: "In science, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself.  And you are the easiest person to fool."

That said, I find myself in much sympathy with Fox Mulder, even so.

In this case, a chunk of metal was provided to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a Pentagon program whose purpose is to check out anything odd that might have national security implications.  It was provided by To the Stars Academy, an independent research organization headed by Blink-182 front man (and UFO aficionado) Tom DeLonge.  The Academy's press release upon handing the artifact over to the AARO stated that "the material is clearly engineered with distinct layers of MgZn and Bi at structured thicknesses only microns thick" and "there is no precedent for this structured combination of materials."  Further, supposedly its composition would allow it to function as a "terahertz waveguide" (whatever the hell that is) which would give it the ability to "reduce inertial mass" -- in other words, to act as an antigravity device.

Ignoring the levitation bit for the moment, the part about there being "no precedent" for its structure highlights the problem with claiming something is an "alloy of alien origin."  Despite Georgi LaForge's analysis on Star Trek: The Next Generation that every spacecraft they run across is made of a phaser-resistant blend of whathefuckium and damnedifweknowite, there are only so many elements on the periodic table to choose from.  And there aren't any holes.  So to have a good case that a chunk of metal comes from an alien spacecraft, you have to be able to show that although the chunk might be made of the ordinary complement of chemical elements, the way it was put together is somehow different than what we could accomplish here on Earth.

Which is what DeLonge et al. are saying.  He also stated that the piece of metal comes from a crashed spaceship recovered in 1947 -- he never mentions the R-word, but that's the implication.  In any case, the AARO kind of went, "Okay, we'll look at it" (you'll have to imagine the sigh and eyeroll that probably accompanied it) and handed it over to Oak Ridge National Laboratories for analysis.

And what they found was...

... drum roll...

... it's terrestrial in origin.

The report said:

There was widespread domestic research on [magnesium] alloys for airframes, engines, weapons, and delivery systems starting in 1915 and peaking during World War II.  Many experimental [magnesium] alloys failed for reasons not well understood at the time of testing, e.g., stress corrosion cracking.  Unsurprisingly, records of failed [magnesium] alloy designs are scant.  Neither AARO nor ORNL could verify the specimen’s historical origin.  Unverifiable, conflicting personal accounts complicate its undocumented chain of custody...  The characteristics of the specimen are consistent with mid-20th-century magnesium alloy research and development projects, which often involved the use of zinc, lead, and bismuth additives for various purposes, including corrosion resistance.  The banding and structural features observed in the specimen align with manufacturing techniques from that era, such as vapor deposition.

And it doesn't have the ability to reduce inertial mass, so throw away your patent application for an antigravity/levitation device.  The Laws of Thermodynamics indicate that you can't decrease inertial mass unless you convert it into an equivalent amount of energy (the amount being determined by Einstein's equation E = mc^2).  This is not something to be undertaken lightly, as that kind of mass-to-energy conversion is how a nuclear bomb works.

You'd fly into the sky, all right, but I don't think you'd be happy about it.

In any case, if you're curious, you can find links to the complete report from AARO here.

There's nothing wrong with continuing to hope for positive results apropos of UFOs and other such alleged phenomena, and it's absolutely necessary to maintain an open mind and keep looking.  But -- disappointing as it is for those of us who grew up on science fiction -- the honest position at the moment is that the evidence we have thus far simply doesn't meet the minimum standard of what is required by science.  It'd be nice if that weren't true, and perhaps one day there'll be the proof we've all been waiting for.

But sadly, Tom DeLonge's chunk of metal from a 1947 crashed spaceship ain't it.

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The train to CrazyTown

It always astonishes me how much it takes for people to say to some nonsense-spouting pseudo-pundit, "You are nuttier than squirrel shit, and I am no longer listening to anything you say."

Or, more accurately, I don't know how much it takes, because it almost never happens.  Once people have decided they like someone's views, it seems like it's damn near impossible to get them to change their minds.  Said pundit could go on national television and say, "Scientists have found that the mantle of the Earth is not made of molten magma, it's made of my Grandma Betty's Special Tasty Banana Pudding," and I swear, 95% of the followers would just nod along as if this was a revelation from the Lord Almighty Himself.

It may come as a significant surprise that for once, I'm not talking about Donald Trump.  No, this time the person who has given strong evidence that he's been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars is Tucker Carlson, disgraced ex-Fox News commentator, who despite being too obnoxiously racist even for Fox, is still somehow finding venues for his insane vitriol.  (One of them, unsurprisingly, is The Social Media Platform Formerly Known As Twitter, because Elon Musk appears to be as much of a bigot as Carlson, if arguably a bit saner.)

The latest missive from Tucker Carlson, though, amazingly has nothing to do with how brown-skinned immigrants are coming for all of us white people.  It concerns UFOs (or UAPs, as I guess we're now all supposed to call them), and springboards off the kerfuffle the last few months about government cover-ups of what David Grusch elliptically referred to as "non-human biological entities."  (Fer cryin' in the sink, if you mean the A-word, say the A-word.  And yes, I'm being deliberately ironic by not saying the A-word myself.)

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Carlson, though, has no such sense of delicacy, but he thinks they're not extraterrestrial species -- at least in the conventional sense.  Here's what he said, as part of a two-hour interview which I made it through about fifteen minutes of, before my forehead hurt so much from faceplanting that I decided discretion is the better part of valor and gave up:

It’s my personal belief based on a fair amount of evidence that they’re not aliens.  They’ve always been here, and I do think it’s spiritual,  There are forces that aren’t human that do exist in a spiritual realm of some kind, that we cannot see, and that when you think about it, will sorta make you think we live in an ant farm...  I do know that informed people have said that the U.S. government has an agreement with these entities.

The whole thing smacks of the "prison planet" hypothesis, whose most vocal supporter is Ellis Silver, about whom I wrote here at Skeptophilia a while back.  The idea is that humans evolved elsewhere in the universe, and our ancestors were transported to Earth because we're so violent, and we're stuck here until we learn our lesson.  (Given recent world events, we don't seem to be catching on very quickly.)

In any case, Carlson takes it a step further, hybridizing Silver's ideas with the Book of Enoch and various episodes of The X Files to create a new brand of batshittery all his own.  In short, he seems to have taken on a job as conductor of the Express Train to CrazyTown, and a significant slice of Americans are just thrilled to hop on board.

So I encourage you to watch the interview (linked above), if you've got the stomach for it.  Myself, I have a hard time watching Tucker Carlson even with the sound turned off, because in my opinion he's only beaten out narrowly by Ted Cruz in the contest for the World's Most Punchable Face.  But given that Carlson has been floated seriously as a contender for the vice presidential choice for whomever the Republican nominee is for president in 2024, and a possible candidate for president in his own right in 2028, it behooves us all to be aware that he appears to be a few fries short of a Happy Meal.  To quote skeptic Jason Colavito, "That a leading contender for high office and one of the most influential figures on the right believes in some variation of Nephilim Theory is depressing.  That a powerful network of advocates has infiltrated both political parties to spread ancient mythology as though it were scientific revelation, and government and media cheer them on, is terrifying."

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The Silpho Moor mystery

Pieces of one of the most enduring mysteries in UFO lore have allegedly been discovered in the National Archives of London.

Called the "Silpho Moor Crash," the incident occurred in November of 1957, when two men who were hiking on Silpho Moor in North Yorkshire, England, saw "a red light falling from the sky" and went to investigate, despite the fact that every time someone does this in a science fiction movie, they end up being messily devoured by evil aliens.  Fortunately for the two men, this did not happen. Instead, they found a saucer-shaped object made of metal, eighteen inches in diameter, which upon opening was found to contain thin copper sheets covered with "unidentifiable hieroglyphics."

The Silpho Moor artifacts, including the "hieroglyphic sheets" (lower right)

The objects were much talked about, and eventually (sources indicate in 1963) they were sent to the London Science Museum for expert analysis.

After that, they were "lost to history."

It's kind of weird how often this happens.  Somebody gets amazing evidence of some hitherto-unproven and unexpected apparition -- UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, Ron DeSantis's conscience -- and then after a little bit of buzz and maybe a few blurry photographs, it mysteriously disappears.  The conspiracy theorists waggle their eyebrows suggestively about this, and say that of course the evidence disappears, because the powers-that-be don't want ordinary slobs like you and me to have proof of any of this stuff.

Why the powers-that-be would care if we proved the existence of alien intelligence (for example), I have no idea.  As far as I've seen, the powers-that-be are much more interested in destroying the evil, cunning environmental scientists' conspiracy to defeat a beleaguered but plucky band of heroic corporate billionaires.  I can't imagine they give a rat's ass whether UFOs exist, except insofar as these would really be undocumented aliens.

Be that as it may, the Silpho Moor artifacts were lost -- until now.  Maybe.  Because some people digging around in the London National Archives found, hiding in an old cigarette tin, some shards that are supposedly from the Silpho Moor Crash.

What seems odd to me is that every photograph from the actual crash shows an intact object that looks like an almost comically stereotypical flying saucer, and everything in this latest discovery is just a bunch of broken-up metal.  I suppose the scientists back in 1963 could have hacked the thing apart, but isn't it funny that there's no record of that?

Anyhow, the objects were discovered by an exhibit developer named Khalil Thirlaway, who brought them to the attention of Dr. David Clarke, a journalism professor at Sheffield Hallam University.

"He [Thirlaway] opened the tin box and took out the pieces, it was an amazing revelation -- it had just been sitting there for half a century," Clarke said.  "There must be a lot of it still out there, sitting in someone's attic, or maybe these are the last remaining pieces... I thought it was a prank, but the question remains -- who went to all that trouble at great expense and what did they gain from it?  It has been described several times as Britain's answer to Roswell, and I don't think that's too great an exaggeration."

Well, yes, in the sense that it's a sketchy set of evidence for an incident that no one is sure has anything to do with alien intelligence anyway.  But at least now the fragments are out in the light of day, and with luck some scientists will get involved and analyze them.

Still, I wonder what they'd find that could prove it one way or the other.  Metal fragments are metal fragments, whether they come from outer space or not.  Despite what Geordi LaForge would have you believe, an extraterrestrial spaceship would not be composed of the rare elements whatsisium and thingamajite, because the periodic table is kind of full-up with elements we already know well.  So I don't see any way to differentiate between an alloy from Earth and one from the Klingon Home World.

But that's something we can worry about later.  At least the objects were relocated.  Myself, I'm all for submitting hard evidence for study, whether or not it turns up anything significant.  Otherwise, you're back at the level of personal anecdote -- which is the worst form of evidence there is.

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The perimeter of ignorance

In the past week, I watched two things that were interesting in juxtaposition.

One of them came my way because for my holiday gift my wife got me a subscription to Master Class, which has hundreds of online video classes on everything from political science to cooking.  I signed up for and watched a series of lectures by the eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, on the scientific endeavor and how to think effectively about science and how to talk about it to others.

In his class, Dr. Tyson says the following:

The frontier of discovery is a messy place.  You don't know what the next step is, sometimes you don't even know what question to ask.  As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.  It's thrilling and scary at the same time...  The scientific method is whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or into thinking something is not true that is.  That pathway, it's not straight; it's curved, it has off-ramps to nowhere, and you don't know which of the paths in front of you are going to lead to the right place...  The cool thing about it is that nature is the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner.  You can argue all you want, but if nature disagrees with you, you're wrong.  If you care about critical thinking and science literacy, the degree to which you believe something is true should be proportional to the evidence that supports it.  If after all the experiments are done, there is convergence in a result, you have successfully winnowed out the effects of bias on that result.  No one is without bias -- just be ready to get your stuff checked.  And be ready to abandon your cherished thoughts and ideas in the face of conflicting evidence.

The other is the trailer to a video called Gods Among Us that was sent to me by a friend who is evidently trying to cause my brain to explode.  Here are a sampling of quotes (you can watch the trailer yourself if you dare, and want to know more about the context and sources, but I can promise you these were not cherry-picked to make the video sound ridiculous -- they all sound like this):

• There are quite a few extraterrestrials walking around, humanoid ones, so we've got them walking amongst us.  You may just think they look like nice people, or they may feel a bit different to you, but they're there and you see them every day. 
• How is it that these higher-dimensional energies can be brought down, can be downloaded, into our ordinary four-dimensional space-time experience?
• There are thousands, possibility millions, out there leading these double lives.  They will lead us into telepathic abilities, they will lead us into being able to heal ourselves, even to being able to change our bodies.
• The DNA in us can exist as a toroid.  It can be used as a tool to bring higher-dimensional energy into our physical bodies, convert it into electromagnetic fields that can then be used to convert the physiological and biochemical processes in us.
• I was contacted by a being who said he was from the constellation of Orion.
• You want to know what your DNA is?  It's 34% human, 28% tall white Zeta, and 38% Annunaki.  

The people interviewed seemed to fall into three categories: (1) researchers, all of whom seem somehow to have earned Ph.D.s; (2) people who claim to have been contacted by aliens; (3) people who claim to be human/alien hybrids themselves.  The whole thing was accompanied by music that sounds like it was rejected from Music From the Hearts of Space on the basis of being too ethereal.

Okay, I'm scoffing, but there's a serious point to be made here.  A number of claims in Gods Among Us are empirically testable.  I'm not referring to the eyewitness testimony of things like alien contact; as Dr. Tyson also points out, eyewitness testimony may be the highest standard of evidence in the court of law, but it's the lowest form of evidence in science.  "I saw it with my own eyes" is simply not enough in science.  We have far too many ways of getting it wrong to trust one person's word for something.

But there are many other kinds of statement in this video that could be tested.  DNA can become a toroid that funnels energy from outside of us into our bodies and changes our biochemistry?  Fine, demonstrate it in the lab.  There are beings who can communicate with you telepathically?  Set up a situation where they tell you something you couldn't have otherwise known, and have it verified by an independent researcher.  Over half of our DNA is extraterrestrial?  Sequence it and show me that it doesn't overlap, gene for gene, with 99% of the DNA from our nearest primate relatives (and in the 70-80% range with all other mammal species).

Oh, and you can't "be from a constellation."  A constellation is a random assemblage of stars sitting at wildly varying distances from the Earth that only appear to be near each other from our perspective.  Saying you're "from a constellation" makes about as much sense as someone asking you how to find your house, and your answering them, "You'll find it on the horizon."

One example of how a constellation would look from an altered perspective; the Big Dipper as seen after a ninety-degree rotation around the entire group

However, the most insidious problem with the people who make claims like these is their belief that mainstream science rejects their conclusions out of hand not because there's insufficient evidence, but because the claims contradict scientific orthodoxy.  They seem to think that scientists are sitting in this never-changing edifice they've built, and they'll fight you tooth and nail if you try to change one thing about it.  Contrast this to Dr. Tyson's statement about the scientific frontier; in science, you are always on the boundary between what is known and what is unknown.  Scientific orthodoxy changes every time we get a new body of evidence, which is all the time.  In fact, that's how scientific careers are made.  If there really was evidence of all the stuff Gods Among Us claims, the scientists would be trampling each other to death to be the first to publish it in a peer-reviewed journal.

Consider, as only one of many illustrative examples, how the theory of plate tectonics arose.  The belief -- the "scientific orthodoxy," if you will -- was that the Earth was static.  The continents stayed put.  Even if there were periodic events like earthquakes and volcanoes to shake things up, everything was more or less in the same place as it always had been.

Why, in fact, would you think the opposite?  A static Earth seemed common sense.  How could continents move in solid rock?

But in the 50s and 60s, the evidence from a variety of sources -- where exactly volcanoes and earthquakes took place, the position and age of hotspot island chains like Hawaii, the contours of Africa and South America, the fossil record, and (most importantly) the evidence from magnetometer readings near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge -- had piled up to the extent that there was no choice but to overturn our understanding of how geology worked.  In other words, faced with hard, verifiable, repeatable scientific research, the "scientific orthodoxy" had to change drastically.  And far from being suppressed by the scientific establishment, this put rocket fuel into the careers of the first geologists who wrote a paper about it -- Frederick Vine and Drummond Matthews -- and today, they're in every introduction-to-geology textbook written.

So if there was demonstrable evidence that over 50% of our DNA came from a non-terrestrial source?  That's Nobel-Prize-material, right there.

Could the people in Gods Among Us be right?  I suppose so.  But thus far they have not met the minimum threshold of evidence that it would take to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.  I'll end with a quote from another physicist, Richard Feynman, which seems particularly apposite here: "The first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself.  And you are the easiest person to fool."

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Neil deGrasse Tyson has become deservedly famous for his efforts to bring the latest findings of astronomers and astrophysicists to laypeople.  Not only has he given hundreds of public talks on everything from the Big Bang to UFOs, a couple of years ago he launched (and hosted) an updated reboot of Carl Sagan's wildly successful 1980 series Cosmos.

He has also communicated his vision through his writing, and this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is his 2019 Letters From an Astrophysicist.  A public figure like Tyson gets inundated with correspondence, and Tyson's drive to teach and inspire has impelled him to answer many of them personally (however arduous it may seem to those of us who struggle to keep up with a dozen emails!).  In Letters, he has selected 101 of his most intriguing pieces of correspondence, along with his answers to each -- in the process creating a book that is a testimony to his intelligence, his sense of humor, his passion as a scientist, and his commitment to inquiry.

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

Letters from the home world

In choosing topics for this blog, I try not to have it simply devolve into taking random pot shots at crazies.  Loony ideas are a dime a dozen, and given the widespread access to computers that is now available, just about anyone who wants one can have a website.  Given these two facts, it's inevitable that wacky webpages grow like wildflowers on the fields of the internet.

When an alert reader brought this one to my attention, however, I just couldn't help myself.  Entitled "Did Humans Come From Another Planet?", it represents one of the best examples I've ever seen of adding up a bunch of facts and obtaining a wildly wrong answer.  The only ones who, in my experience, do this even better are the people who write for the Institute for Creation Research, and to be fair, they've had a lot longer to practice being completely batshit crazy, so it's only to be expected.

Anyhow, the contention of the "Did Humans Come From Another Planet?" people can be summed up by, "Yes. Duh."  We are clearly aliens, and I'm not just talking about such dubiously human individuals as Mitch McConnell.  All of us, the article claims, descend from an extraterrestrial race.  But how can we prove it?

Well, here's the argument, if I can dignify it with that term.

1. Human babies are born completely unable to take care of themselves, and remain that way for a long time.  By comparison, other primate babies, despite similar gestation periods, develop much more rapidly.
2. In a lower gravitational pull, humans could fall down without hurting themselves, "just like a cat or a dog."
3. Humans have biological clocks, and in the absence of exposure to the external day/night cycle, they come unlocked from "real time" and become free-running.  So, clearly we came from a planet that had a different rotational period.
4. Humans don't have much body hair.  At least most of us don't, although I do recall once going swimming and seeing a guy who had so much back hair that he could have singlehandedly given rise to 80% of the Bigfoot sightings in the eastern United States.
5. Geneticists have found that all of humanity descends from a common ancestor approximately 350,000 years ago; but the first modern humans didn't exist until 100,000 years ago.  So... and this is a direct quote, that I swear I am not making up: "In what part of the universe was he [Homo sapiens] wandering for the remaining 250 thousand years?"

Now, take all of this, and add:

1. Some nonsense about Sirius B and the Dogon tribe, including a bizarre contention that the Sun and Sirius once formed a double-star system, because this "doesn't contradict the laws of celestial mechanics;"
2. The tired old "we only use 3% of our brains" contention;
3. Adam and Eve; and
4. the ancient Egyptians.

Mix well, and bake for one hour at 350 degrees.

The result, of course, is a lovely hash contending that we must come from a planet with a mild climate where we could run around naked all the time, not to mention a lower gravitational pull so we could just sort of bounce when we fall down, plenty of natural food to eat, and "no geomagnetic storms."  I'm not sure why the last one is important, but it did remind me of all of the "cosmic storms" that the folks in Lost in Space used to run into.  And they also came across lots of weird, quasi-human aliens, while they were out there wandering around.  So there you are.

In any case, that's today's example of adding 2 + 2 and getting 439.  All of this just goes to show that even if you have access to a lot of factual information, not to mention the internet, you still need to know how to put that factual information together in order to get the right answer.  For that, you need science, not just a bunch of nutty beliefs, assumptions, and guesses.  So, as usual, science FTW.

Which, of course, applies to a good many more situations than just this one, but as I've already given a nod to the Institute for Creation Research, I'll just end here.

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Author and biochemist Camilla Pang was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at age eight, and spent most of her childhood baffled by the complexities and subtleties of human interactions.  She once asked her mother if there was an instruction manual on being human that she could read to make it easier.

Her mom said no, there was no instruction manual.

So years later, Pang recalled the incident and decided to write one.

The result, Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us About Life, Love, and Relationships, is the best analysis of human behavior from a biological perspective since Desmond Morris's classic The Naked Ape.  If you're like me, you'll read Pang's book with a stunned smile on your face -- as she navigates through common, everyday behaviors we all engage in, but few of us stop to think about.

If you're interested in behavior or biology or simply agree with the Greek maxim "gnothi seauton" ("know yourself"), you need to put this book on your reading list.  It's absolutely outstanding.

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

The dangers of pseudoarchaeology

One of my ongoing peeves is that so many people put more faith in popular media claims than in what the scientists themselves are saying.

This can take many forms.  We have the straw-man approach, usually done with some agenda in mind, where someone will completely mischaracterize the science in order to convince people of a particular claim, and for some reason said people never think to find out what the scientists actually have to say on the matter.  (One example that especially sets my teeth on edge is the young-Earth creationists who say that the Big Bang model means "nothing exploded and created everything" and forthwith dismiss it as nonsense.)

An even more common form this takes is the current passion many people have for shows like Monster Quest and Ancient Aliens and Ghost Hunters, which aim to convince viewers that there is strong evidence for claims when there is actually little or none at all.  This kind of thing is remarkably hard to fight; when you have a charismatic figure who is trying to convince you that the Norse gods were actually superpowerful extraterrestrial visitors, and supporting that claim with evidence that is cherry-picked at best and entirely fabricated at worst, non-scientists can be suckered remarkably easily.

But "hard to fight" doesn't mean "give up," at least to archaeologist David Anderson of Radford University (Virginia).  Because he has absolutely had it with goofy claims that misrepresent the actual evidence, and is publicly calling out the people who do it.

Anderson's quest started in February, when a claim was made on The Joe Rogan Experience that a famous piece of Mayan art, from the sarcophagus of Mayan King K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, who died in 683 C.E., showed him ascending into the skies in a spaceship:

It's one of the favorite pieces of evidence from the "Ancient Aliens" crowd.  But the problem is, it's wrong -- not only from the standpoint that there almost certainly were no "Ancient Aliens."  They evidently never bothered to ask an actual expert in Mayan archaeology, because that's not even what the art is trying to depict. Anderson was infuriated enough that he responded to Rogan in a tweet: "Dear @joerogan… [the piece of Mayan art you mentioned] depicts [Pakal] falling into the underworld at the moment of his death."  The "rocket" beneath the king's body, Anderson explains, is a depiction of the underworld, and the rest of the "spaceship" is a "world tree" -- a common image in Mayan art, not to mention art from other cultures.

Rogan, to his credit, thanked Anderson for the correction, but some of his fans weren't so thrilled, and railed against Anderson as being a "mainstream archaeologist" (because that's bad, apparently) who was actively trying to suppress the truth about ancient aliens for some reason.  Anderson, for his part, is adamant that archaeologists and other scientists need to be better at calling out pseudoscience and the people who are promoting it.  He cites a study done at Chapman University (California) showing that 57% of Americans polled in 2018 believe in Atlantis (up from 40% in 2016) and 41% believe that aliens visited the Earth in antiquity and made contact with early human civilizations (up from 27%).

Anderson says, and I agree, that this is a serious problem, not only because of how high the raw numbers are, but because of the trend.  I know it's not really a scientist's job to make sure the public understands his/her research, but given the amount of bullshit out there (not to mention the general anti-science bent of the current administration), it's increasingly important.

You may wonder why I'm so passionate about this, and be thinking, "Okay, I see the problem with people doubting climate science, but what's the harm of people believing in ancient aliens?  It's harmless."  Which is true, up to a point.  But the problem is, once you've decided that evidence -- and the amount and quality thereof -- is no longer the sine qua non for support of a claim, you've gone onto some seriously thin ice.  Taking a leap into pseudoscience in one realm makes it all that much easier to jump into other unsupported craziness.  Consider, for example, the study that came out of the University of Queensland that found a strong correlation between being an anti-vaxxer and accepting conspiracy theories such as the ones surrounding the JFK assassination.

So learning some science and critical thinking are insulation against being suckered by counterfactual nonsense of all kinds.  Which is why yes, I do care that people are making false claims about a piece of Mayan artwork... and so should you.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one; Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton.  The book is based upon a website of the same name that looks at curious, beautiful, bizarre, frightening, or fascinating places in the world -- the sorts of off-the-beaten-path destinations that you might pass by without ever knowing they exist.  (Recent entries are an astronomical observatory in Zweibrücken, Germany that has been painted to look like R2-D2; the town of Story, Indiana that is for sale for a cool $3.8 million; and the Michelin-rated kitchen run by Lewis Georgiades -- at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station, which only gets a food delivery once a year.)

This book collects the best of the Atlas Obscura sites, organizes them by continent, and tells you about their history.  It's a must-read for anyone who likes to travel -- preferably before you plan your next vacation.

(If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!)

Space suits and straw men

Before you jump to a wild explanation for something, it's a good idea to rule out prosaic explanations first.

Take, for example, the strange deity Bep Kororoti, worshiped by the Kaiapo tribe of Brazil.  Erich von Däniken and his ilk just love this god, and when you see a photograph of someone wearing a Bep Kororoti suit, you'll understand why:

In his book Gold of the Gods, von Däniken says that this is clear evidence of contact with an alien wearing a space suit:

João Americo Peret, one of our outstanding Indian scholars, recently published some photographs of Kaiapo Indians in ritual clothing that he took as long ago as 1952, long before Gagarin's first space flight...  I feel that it is important to reemphasize that Peret took these photographs in 1952 at a time when the clothing and equipment of astronauts were still not familiar to all us Europeans, let alone these wild Indians!...  Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in his spaceship Vostok I for the first time on April 1961...  The Kaiapos in their straw imitation spacesuits need no commentary apart from the remark that these 'ritual garments' have been worn by the Indian men of this tribe on festive occasions since time immemorial, according to Peret...

Nope.  No commentary needed.  No questions, either.  Consider how this shows up on the dubiously credible site Message to Eagle:

The inhabitants of the Amazon jungle, the Indians Kaiapo [sic] settled in the State of Pará in northern Brazil, have detailed legends of sky visitors, who gave their people wisdom and knowledge. 

The Kaiapo Indians worshipped in particular one of these heavenly teachers. His name was Bep Kororoti, which in Kayapo [sic] language, means "Warrior of the Universe"... It is said that his weapons were so powerful that they could turn trees and stones into dust. 

Not surprisingly, his aggressive warrior manners terrified the primitive natives, who at the beginning even tried to fight against the alien intruder. 

However, their resistance was useless. 

Every time their weapons touched Bep Kororoti's clothes, the people fell down to the ground.

Eventually Bep calmed down, we find out, and began to teach the Kaiapo all sorts of stuff.  He also had lots of sex with Native women, apparently while still wearing his space suit, and today's Kaiapo claim descent from him.

The whole thing has become part of the "Ancient Aliens" canon, and even was featured on the show of the same name (narrated, of course, by the amazingly-coiffed Giorgio Tsoukalos).

So anyway.  The whole thing boils down to the usual stuff.  You have a god coming down from the sky, dispensing knowledge (and various other special offers) to the Natives, then returning from whence he came.   Evidence, they say, that the Kaiapo were visited by an alien race in ages past.

All of this, however, conveniently omits one little fact.  Probably deliberately, because once you point this out, the whole thing becomes abundantly clear.  Writer and skeptic Jason Colavito found out that not only did Bep Kororoti live in the sky and come visit the Kaiapo...

... he was the protector spirit of beekeepers.

For reference, here's a drawing of some traditional beekeepers, done by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in 1568:

Notice a similarity? Yeah, me too.

I know we all have our biases and our favorite explanations for things.  But when you deliberately sidestep a rational, Earth-based explanation for one that claims that damn near every anthropological find is evidence of ancient astronauts, you've abandoned any right to be taken seriously.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a look at one of the most peculiar historical mysteries known: the unsolved puzzle of Kaspar Hauser.

In 1828, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into a military station in the city of Ansbach, Germany.  He was largely unable to communicate, but had a piece of paper that said he was being sent to join the cavalry -- and that if that wasn't possible, whoever was in charge should simply have him hanged.

The boy called himself Kaspar Hauser, and he was housed above the jail.  After months of coaxing and training, he became able to speak enough to tell a peculiar story.  He'd been kept captive, he said, in a small room where he was never allowed to see another human being.  He was fed by a man who sometimes talked to him through a slot in the door.  Sometimes, he said, the water he was given tasted bitter, and he would sleep soundly -- and wake up to find his hair and nails cut.

But locals began to question the story when it was found that Hauser was a pathological liar, and not to be trusted with anything.  No one was ever able to corroborate his story, and his death from a stab wound in 1833 in Ansbach was equally enigmatic -- he was found clutching a note that said he'd been killed so he couldn't identify his captor, who signed his name "M. L. O."  But from the angle of the wound, and the handwriting on the note, it seemed likely that both were the work of Hauser himself.

The mystery endures, and in the book Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson looks at the various guesses that people have made to explain the boy's origins and bizarre death.  It makes for a fascinating read -- even if truthfully, we may never be certain of the actual explanation.

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

Alien ranch sale

If you think you've got problems, at least you're not trying to get rid of a huge Arizona ranch at a $1.5 million loss because you're sick and tired of being attacked by aliens.

At least that's the claim of John Edmonds, whose land in Buckeye, Arizona, about an hour and a half from Phoenix, has (he says) been the site of a huge amount of extraterrestrial activity.  He and his wife foiled an attempted kidnapping, and over the twenty years they've been there, he's killed eighteen "Grays."

With a samurai sword.

I'm torn between thinking this is idiotic and completely badass.  I mean, if I knew I was under siege by hostile aliens, I'd probably arm myself with more than a sword.  Especially if I lived in Arizona, where everyone over the age of two is packing heat.  And you'd also think the aliens would be armed, wouldn't you?  Laser pistols are a lot more accurate, long-range, than samurai swords, unless you're a Stormtrooper, in which case it probably doesn't matter either way.

What's oddest about the samurai sword thing is that the guy says he owns an AK-47, which he used to defend his family when the aliens tried to abduct his wife.  She barely escaped -- "it came down like a cone of light," Edmonds says, "and she began to rise up in to the cone...  So I grabbed my AK-47 with a double banana clip in it, went outside, and opened up."  So apparently if your spouse is being levitated into the air by a tractor beam, the solution is to fire a gun in some random direction.

So why he doesn't use the AK-47 to defend himself against the aliens rather than a sword, I don't know.  You may also be wondering why, if he's killed all those aliens, where the bodies are.  I know I was.  If I killed an alien (in self-defense, of course; in the interest of interstellar amity, if they Come In Peace, I'm more than happy to have them here), I'd definitely keep the body as evidence that I wasn't just a raving loon.  Edmonds says that the bodies vanish, which sounds awfully convenient.  He does have a photo in the video showing what he claims is alien blood from one of his kills, which makes me wonder why if the bodies disappear, the blood doesn't as well.

One of those extraterrestrial biological mysteries, I guess.  But Edmonds goes on to say that you have to "cut off the head, and disconnect the antennae, or they instantly 'phone home' -- even with a razor-sharp sword, it's nearly impossible to decapitate them in one swing."

As far as why the aliens are targeting him, he says it's because his ranch is so large that it gives the aliens room to "open up portals... that are large enough for triangular crafts, wings, or orb-like shapes to pass through."

"These objects leave the space around the ranch, and other objects pass through the portals in the other direction," Edmonds adds.

Despite his success at fighting off the invaders, Edmonds hasn't come away unscathed.  He says the Grays gave him scars (which you can see on the video I linked above), not to mention "symptoms like radiation poisoning."  More troubling, though, is his claim that the previous owners "simply disappeared -- all their stuff was still in the house, leading to speculation that they were in fact abducted by extraterrestrials."  So I guess it's understandable that he's fed up, although it does bring up the question of who sold him the ranch.  He and his wife are selling, and are asking five million dollars for it -- a million and a half less than what he says it's valued at.

If I had the money, I'd definitely buy it.  For one thing, I love Arizona and have always wanted to live in the desert.  Especially now, when we're sitting here in upstate New York in the middle of the "polar vortex," and the current wind chill is -25 F.  For another, I would love to have first-hand evidence of extraterrestrial life.  I'd appreciate it if they wouldn't abduct my wife, though, because I kind of am attached to her, you know?

But hey, if they Come In Peace, they're welcome.  I wouldn't even object if they wanted to take over the government.  Couldn't be worse than what we currently have.

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In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

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

World War Woo

If you're wondering why the world seems to have lost its collective marbles lately, we now have an answer:

The Reptilians who control all of the governments in the world have realized that we're on to them, and they're trying to start World War III.

At least that's the contention of YouTube user "2CirclesArchive," who posted a video a couple of days ago that should win some kind of award for complete batshit lunacy.  In case you don't want to jeopardize valuable cells in your prefrontal cortex watching the thing, here are a few salient quotes:

The Reptilian parasites know that humanity is waking up to their existence and presence. That’s why the need the Third World War as a distraction.  That’s the sole reason for this irrational conflict.

Which of the many irrational conflicts are we talking about, here?  Because in the last few months, we seem to be having global-scale irrational conflicts on nearly a daily basis.  And I'm not entirely sure how starting a world war helps out the Reptilian parasites' goal of remaining undercover.  You'd think that'd kind of seal the deal, actually.

It’s Reptilians versus humans – not humans versus humans.  Not the West versus Russia...  Putin had been part of a group advised by reptiles.  Nordics made the counter offer to Putin.  The technology the Nordics are giving to Putin is on par with America.  The Nordics have told Putin he no longer has to toe the American line, hence his resistance.

The "Nordics" doesn't refer to Scandinavian people, here.  They're a race of sexy blond aliens, kind of like Liam Hemsworth only with superpowers.  So apparently the Nordics and the Reptilians are playing some kind of chess game with Putin as one of the pawns.  And since "2CirclesArchive" claims that the focal point of the unrest is going to be in the Ukraine, I suppose it makes some kind of bizarre sense that Putin would be involved.

Then we're told that at least one other human besides "2CirclesArchive" has figured it out.  This person is Simon Parkes, former councilor in Whitby, North Yorkshire, England.  Parkes has appeared in Skeptophilia before because of his claims that (1) his mother was a nine-foot-tall green alien with eight fingers on each hand, and (2) he's been abducted by an alien he calls "the Cat Queen," who screwed him silly and proceeded to give birth to a half-alien, half-human child named "Zarka."

So I think we can safely conclude that Parkes is a few fries short of a Happy Meal.  Nevertheless, "2CirclesArchive" thinks he is a credible witness, and finds it completely plausible that he has interacted with "aliens, shadow people, elementals and UFOs... Mantid (Mantis) beings, Draconis Reptilian, Feline, small and tall Grey creatures, Crystalline beings and other creatures that can’t be identified."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons CGP Grey, Roswell - Alien 4889611102, CC BY 2.0]

Okay, what do we do about all this?  "2CirclesArchive" has some advice:

Pass it on and tell everyone.  The internet is controlled.  Call people in Ukraine randomly.  Google for a phonebook of Ukraine and call people and businesses and tell them all politicians are Reptilians.  They want the Third World War.  Search on the internet.  I love you.  Hurry, time is running out.

So because the internet is controlled, we're supposed to... search on the internet?  And then... just call random people in Ukraine?

There's also the problem of the fact that even if I was inclined to do this, which I'm not, I don't speak Ukrainian.  I mean, anyone can look up how to say "All politicians are Reptilians" using Google Translate ("Vsi polityky ye reptiliyi"), but I should warn you that Google Translate isn't all that accurate.  Every year I have to advise my Latin and Greek students not to attempt cheating on their assignments by loading them into Google Translate, because what comes out is an often-hilarious hash.  As an example, take the simple and rather well-known quote from Petrarch, "Nihil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio" ("There is nothing as hateful to wisdom as too much cleverness").  Here's what Google Translate did with it:

There is nothing more offensive to that wisdom of the sharpness of the excessive.

Right!  What?

So I'm not sure you should be all that confident of my translation into Ukrainian.  You might be better off hiring an actual Ukrainian person, although you'd have to choose carefully, or they'd just tell you, "ty absolyutno bozhevilʹna" ("you are absolutely insane," at least if you believe Google Translate).

Other than that, I'm not sure what to do.  I mean, I've done my part in passing the message along, but I'm not sure I'm going to push it much further.  I'm only willing to stretch the patience of my readers so far.  Beyond that, I think we'll have to take our chances with the Reptilians, shadow people, Mantids, and Liam Hemsworth.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia is Flim-Flam!, by the grand old man of skepticism and critical thinking, James Randi.  Randi was a stage magician before he devoted his career to unmasking charlatans, so he of all people knows how easy it is to fool the unwary.  His book is a highly entertaining exercise in learning not to believe what you see -- especially when someone is trying to sell you something.

Alien espionage cats

Because I'm known around my school as the resident Skeptic Guy, I get into some really weird conversations with students sometimes.  They, like my readers, feel they are duty-bound to tell me the latest bizarre claim they've run across.  I'm certainly appreciative; it means I rarely have to fish around for topics for Skeptophilia.

But it does result in some odd discussions in the hallway.  Like the one I got into last week with a student who asked me if I knew that cats are actually aliens.

At first, I thought I'd misheard him.  "Cats?" I said, attempting to keep the incredulity out of my voice with only partial success.  "Like, meow meow?"

Never let it be said that I do not inject scientific rigor into the questions I ask my students.

"Yeah," he answered.  "Cats.  There's a conspiracy to keep us from finding out that cats are alien spies."

"The conspiracy isn't working very well," I observed.

"No, I guess not.  Who knows, maybe I've just made us both the targets of the Cats in Black."

This last bit resonated with me as I was until recently the owner of two black cats.  I use the term "owner" guardedly, as one of these cats in particular made sure to let me know that he was in no way obliged to do what I wanted him to do.  My sense of his personality is that he kind of hated everyone with the possible exception of my wife, and viewed the rest of humanity as barely sentient providers of cat chow and occasional petting.

Sadly, both of our cats died of honorable old age in the last two years, Geronimo (the aforementioned humanity-hating one) at the age of 18.  Or maybe they just teleported back to the Mother Ship.  I dunno.

Anyhow, as usual I felt like I couldn't let an opportunity like this slide, so I googled "cat alien conspiracy."  And despite my initial incredulity, this search was wildly successful, generating just shy of three million hits.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The first site on the list was the aptly-named Cat Alien Conspiracy, which gives us significant details about how our feline house guests are actually spies in disguise.  I am uncertain whether this site is a spoof.  While the rational part of me thinks that, given its content, it would have to be, recall that in my last post we discussed sites claiming that Jesus was an interdimensional space traveler, so I'm reluctant to assume that anything is so impossibly ridiculous that someone won't believe it.

Anyhow, the site is kind of a Wall O' Text, so I'll admit I didn't make it all the way through.  Here's how it begins, though:

Since as far as we know the beginning of man, aliens have been using cats to try to stop us from progressing to the reasonably advanced race that human beings have become.  They do this because they aren't allowed to directly kill us, however they don't want us to catch up to them or even become as advanced as their race. 

The aliens originally took the approach of placing large cats like tigers, lions, jaguars, etc.  Here to kill off our ancestors to slow us down before we even had a chance to start.  This back fired on them, though it did kill off a lot of them that had intelligence however not the muscle needed to actually use the weapons that they were trying to invent.  They did not kill all of them and we managed to push forward.

Myself, I find this an odd way to try to wipe out a less-technological species.  They're superpowerful aliens, right?  Seems like stirring up a massive storm or earthquake would be a lot more efficient, unless you could combine the two and make, like, a Catnado.  That would be terrifying, but also kind of awesome.

Anyhow, the big cats didn't succeed, so the aliens decided to use their smaller cousins to keep an eye on us:

At this point they decided the only way to find out how all of this happened was by placing spies.  This is when they left us with a smaller more intelligent form of cat to watch, learn, and hopefully even do somethings to sabotage the humans technological growth.  They gave them specific instructions, to act cute, go in to the areas that the humans lived in and allow them to think that they had domesticated them like they had domesticated dogs long ago.  They equipped them with telepathy abilities so that they could both communicate the reports to the aliens, which try to be invisible to us however with some of us they fail and appear to be ghosts.

We also learn that cats like to sleep in the sun because they are "solar-powered," and the reason they try to get between you and your computer monitor is because they are "reading what's on the monitor for their own purposes."

But this is far from the only site about this claim.  Vice did a piece on it a while back, called, "Are Cats Spies Sent by Aliens?" by Austin Considine.  In this article we find out that one of the main pieces of evidence for cats being of alien origin is that the Egyptians called them "gifts of the gods."  Also, scientists "are baffled as to how purrs are produced," and their almond-shaped eyes look just like the huge and terrifying eyes of your typical Gray Alien.

The cats' eyes, not the scientists'.

Oh, and when your cat jumps up and suddenly runs out of the room, it's because (s)he just got a transmission from Feline Mission Control and doesn't want to respond to it while you're around.  Kind of the Space Cat version of hearing the "you've got mail" ding on your computer.

Anyhow.  That's just scratching the surface, but frankly, I think that's all I want to do.  My own experience with cats does not support the idea of their being aliens.  They're more like dubiously-useful home decor items that poop in a box in the laundry room.  I kind of like the big cats -- if I had to pick a favorite animal, I think it'd be the jaguar -- but even they strike me as your usual terrestrial mammal, not a denizen of the planet Gzork.

So that's the result of my latest conversation with a student.  I hasten to add that he himself doesn't think cats are aliens, he just wanted me to know that there are people who do.  Frankly, I'm beyond being surprised by this.  It does make me wonder what other animals might be of extraterrestrial origin.  Personally, I'm suspicious of possums.  Although you'd think that superpowerful alien spies who had crossed intergalactic space would be better at avoiding moving cars.