The ghosts of the Petit Trianon

I sometimes get grief from readers because of my tendency to reject claims of the paranormal out of hand.

In my own defense, I am convincible.  It just takes more than personal anecdote and eyewitness accounts to do it.  Our memories and sensory-perceptive apparatus are simply not accurate enough recording devices to be relied on for anything requiring scientific rigor.  I find myself agreeing with the hard-nosed skeptic MacPhee in C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength: 

"My uncle, Dr. Duncanson," said MacPhee, "whose name may be familiar to you — he was Moderator of the General Assembly over the water, in Scotland — used to say, 'Show it to me in the word of God.'  And then he’d slap the big Bible on the table.  It was a way he had of shutting up people that came to him blathering about religious experiences.  And granting his premises, he was quite right.  I don’t hold his views, Mrs. Studdock, you understand, but I work on the same principles.  If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

And the difficulty is that so often, when you take a close look at the eyewitness testimony itself, even it doesn't hold water.  The minimum standard for scientific acceptance is one in which the paranormal explanation accounts for the claim better than any of various competing natural explanations, and I've yet to see a single example where that applies.

As an example of this, let's take a look at one of the most famous claims of witnesses to a haunting -- the Moberly-Jourdain Incident.

The event in question took place in August of 1901.  Two friends (some have claimed, with some justification, that they were lovers), Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, were on holiday from their teaching jobs at St. Hugh's College, Oxford University.  They traveled together in France, and on the day in question were touring Paris.  They'd visited Versailles, and after seeing the palace decided to walk from there to the Petit Trianon, a château built on the palace grounds during the reign of Louis XV.

They were using a Baedeker guidebook to find their way, but missed the path they were looking for and became lost.  This is when, according to their account, things started seeming odd.  A feeling of dread and weariness came over them; the whole scene started looking like a tableau rather than reality, as if somehow they were inside an animated work of art.  "Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant," Moberly later wrote.  "Even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless, like wood worked in tapestry.  There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees."

The people they saw -- a woman shaking a piece of cloth out of a window, what seemed to be palace gardeners, and some men who looked like "very dignified officials, dressed in long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats" -- had a vaguely unreal appearance.  Weirdest of all was the man they came across seated by a garden kiosk.  According to Moberly, his appearance was "most repulsive ... [his] expression odious.  His complexion was dark and rough...  The man slowly turned his face, which was marked by smallpox; his complexion was very dark.  The expression was evil and yet unseeing, and though I did not feel that he was looking particularly at us, I felt a repugnance to going past him."

Another person they saw was a fair-haired lady in an old-fashioned white dress, sitting on the grass working on a sketch.  She, too, paid Moberly and Jourdain no attention, and seemed to look right through them.

At this point, they saw the building of the Petit Trianon in the distance, and walked toward it.  Upon reaching the front entrance, they were met by another group of tourists and a guide, joined them for a tour, and nothing else odd happened.

Neither woman mentioned their peculiar experiences to the other for almost three months.

Aerial view of the Petit Trianon [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ToucanWings, Vue aérienne du domaine de Versailles par ToucanWings - Creative Commons By Sa 3.0 - 052, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It was Moberly who triggered a reconsideration of what they'd seen by asking, out of the blue, if Jourdain thought the Petit Trianon was haunted.  Jourdain said she thought it was.  After briefly describing what they remembered, they decided each to write down their memories of that day, then compare notes.  There were some differences (Jourdain, for example, didn't recall seeing the lady in the white dress), but there was decent agreement between their accounts.  After some discussion, they concluded they'd seen ghosts -- that they'd witnessed a re-enactment of events from August 1792, immediately before the beginning of the French Revolution.  The evil-looking man, they said, was Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, Comte de Vaudreuil (who was smart enough to flee France before things became too dangerous), and the woman in white was none other than Queen Marie Antoinette (who would lose her head on the guillotine only a year later).

So, what really happened here?

Ten years afterward, Moberly and Jourdain published a book about the incident, called An Adventure.  It was an overnight sensation.  However, objections began to mount just as quickly.  Among them:

• Both Moberly and Jourdain were known for oddball claims besides their most famous one.  For example, Moberly once said she'd seen the ghost of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the Louvre in 1914.  (What he was doing in the Louvre is anyone's guess; maybe ghostly Roman emperors take vacations just like the rest of us.)  Jourdain had a definite paranoid streak -- during World War I she became convinced that a German spy was hiding in St. Hugh's (of which at that point she was principal), and at the time of her death in 1924 she had become so notorious for erratic and autocratic behavior that she had provoked mass resignations amongst the staff.  So it's not like the two women are what I'd call reliable witnesses.
• An analysis of the original manuscript of An Adventure (dating from 1903), the first published edition (in 1911), and subsequent editions shows increasing embellishment, and the addition of new details each time the story was republished.  This is certainly a bit suspicious.
• Both women told their stories separately on numerous occasions, and as time passed, their versions converged -- suggestive that as they compared their memories, each of their own recollections became tainted with the other's.
• At the time of their visit, the French writer Robert de Montesquiou lived near Versailles, and was known to host themed parties on the palace grounds in which he and his friends wore period dress and staged tableaux vivants.  French artist and historian Philippe Jullian has suggested that Moberly and Jourdain stumbled upon one of these parties, and were understandably freaked out by what they saw -- and, furthermore, that the evil-visaged, pockmarked man was de Montesquiou himself, whose appearance by all accounts was creepy enough to explain their revulsion.

The upshot of all this is that despite this story showing up in countless books with titles like Twenty True Tales of the Supernatural, and being cited as one of the best-documented accounts of a haunting, it doesn't meet that minimum standard -- that the paranormal explanation accounts for the claim better than the purely natural ones.

So, in conclusion: I'm not saying ghosts and an afterlife aren't possible.  I'm not, honestly, a disbeliever.  I simply don't have enough convincing evidence to come down one way or the other, and at least regarding an afterlife, I figure I'll find out sooner or later anyhow.  Until then, I'm with MacPhee.  I need more than just "you saw it."

Although I can't go with MacPhee's suggestion of a camera providing good evidence.  Those were the Good Old Days, when making a faked photograph took at least some skill.  These days, Photoshop probably has a one-click "Add Ghost" feature.

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Lights in the sky

In March of 2022, dozens of people saw a UFO near the town of Lygurio, Greece.  The apparition has yet to be explained.

Lygurio is in the eastern Peloponnese, in a wooded region at the foot of Mt. Arachnaion.  It only has 2,500 inhabitants, but its scenic beauty and the proximity to the ancient Sanctuary of Asclepius attracts a good many tourists every year.  It's a rural area, far enough from Athens that it's mostly the quiet home of olive growers and vineyard owners.

The UFO was seen by many people in the village, but the best account comes from a man named Christos Tarsinos and his fifteen-year-old son.  Their story was corroborated over and over by others who had witnessed the mysterious occurrence.

"They were six bright lights," Tarsinos said.  "At first we thought it was a military helicopter, but it just flew meters above our car without wind or making any type of noise.  It was silent."

After a few minutes of watching, they saw the light rise and hover over some nearby houses.  "It was a bright tube of light," Tarsinos said.  "It appeared to shine down on the houses for a minute or two, as if looking for something.  The lights were low, about fifteen or twenty meters or so above the roofs.  They then moved down towards the old abandoned quarry.  The UFO, or whatever it was, hovered above the quarry for a few more minutes."

At that point, his view was obstructed by nearby hills and trees.

"We couldn’t see the lights anymore but we could hear them doing something.  A loud mechanical sound started to come from behind those hills.  It sounded like some type of hammering or drilling… it was mechanical in nature, I can tell you that."

Tarsinos's son asked what it was, and the father had to admit he had no idea.

"I told my dad that it was too big to be a drone, and I knew it wasn’t a helicopter," his son said.  "They were so bright and scary.  The lights were different colors.  The first two were red, the second two were white, and the last pair were greenish in color...  It was so bright, we couldn’t see our hands in front of us.  I thought we were going to die."

Several witnesses took photographs on their phones, but the quality is poor -- all they show is a scene at night and some glowing lights on the horizon of a hill in the distance.  (If you want to see the photographs, go to the link provided, but be aware they're nothing to write home about.)

Police investigated, and while a dozen witnesses who had been out on the road all said pretty much the same thing about the floating lights, interestingly none of the inhabitants of the village who were home at the time noticed anything amiss during the time when Tarsinos's "bright tube of light" was scanning the houses.  Myself, if a UFO sent a brilliant beam of light down toward my house at night, I think I'd notice.  Or at least my dogs would.  Someone would.

So, what are we to make of this?

The story is certainly suggestive, and the fact that we don't have the usual UFO situation of a lone observer in the middle of nowhere lends credence to the claim that the people in Lygurio saw something.  In other words, it isn't just a hoax.  But what was it?

The fact is, we have next to nothing to go on.  The poor quality of the photographs isn't really that surprising; phones take notoriously bad shots in dim light unless you know what you're doing to compensate.  But a couple of distant lights in an otherwise black photograph doesn't really prove anything.

As far as the eyewitness testimony, I'm in agreement with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson; "In science, we need more than 'you saw it.'  Eyewitness accounts, by themselves, do not meet the minimum standard of evidence a scientist needs to support any kind of conclusion."

It's unfortunate, but in the many accounts of UFO sightings I've read, not one has reached that minimum standard -- hard evidence, of the kind that can be studied in the lab, of something of alien manufacture.  Now, understand that I'm not saying that none of the thousands of UFO sightings could possibly be alien spacecraft; there are a good many that have defied conventional explanation, and I'm also in agreement with physicist Michio Kaku that if even one percent of sightings cannot be accounted for, that one percent is well worth studying.

So, it could be that what Christos Tarsinos, his son, and a dozen other witnesses in Greece saw that night was a visitor from another planet.  But "it could be" is a far cry from "therefore it is one."

The whole incident, as curious as it is, can be summed up by another quote from the eminent Dr. Tyson: "Remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for.  It stands for 'unidentified.'  Well, if it's 'unidentified,' that's where the conversation stops.  You don't go on to say 'therefore it must be' anything."

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Effect-before-cause

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said (apropos of UFO sightings), "The human brain and perceptual systems are rife with ways of getting it wrong."

It might be humbling, but it's nothing short of the plain truth, and doesn't just apply to seeing alien spaceships.  Especially in perfectly ordinary situations, we like to think that what we're hearing and seeing is an accurate reflection of what's actually out there, but the fact is we not only miss entirely a significant fraction of what we're experiencing, we misinterpret a good chunk of the rest.

Think you're immune?  Watch the following two-minute video, and see if you can figure out who killed Lord Smythe.

I don't know about you, but I didn't do so well.

It turns out that we don't just miss things that are there, we sometimes see things that aren't there.  Take, for example, the research that appeared last week in the journal Psychological Science, that suggests we make guesses about what we're going to see, and if those guesses don't line up with what actually happens, we "see" what we thought we were going to see rather than reality.

The experiment was simple enough.  It uses a short video of three squares (call them A, B, and C, from left to right).  Square A starts to move quickly to the right, and "collides" with B, which starts to move.  As you track it across the screen, it looks like B is going to collide with C, and repeat what happened in the previous collision.

The problem is, square C starts to move not only before B hits it, but before B itself starts moving.  In other words, there is no way a collision with B could have been what triggered C to start moving.  But when test subjects were asked what order the squares started moving, just about everyone said A, then B, then C.  Our expectation of cause-and-effect are so strong that even on multiple viewings, test subjects still didn't see C begin to move before B.

"We have a strong assumption that we know, through direct perception, the order in which events happen around us," said study co-author Christos Bechlivanidis, of University College London.  "The order of events in the world is the order of our perceptions.  The visual signal of the glass shattering follows the signal of the glass hitting the ground, and that is taken as irrefutable evidence that this is indeed how the events occurred.  Our research points to the opposite direction, namely, that it is causal perceptions or expectations that tell us in what order things happen.  If I believe that the impact is necessary for the glass to break, I perceive the shattering after the impact, even if due to some crazy coincidence, the events followed a different order.  In other words, it appears that, especially in short timescales, it is causation that tells us the time."

As I and many others have pointed out about previous research into what is now known as "inattentional blindness," this is yet another nail in the coffin of eyewitness testimony as the gold standard of evidence in the court of law.  We still rely on "I saw it with my own eyes!" as the touchstone for the truth, even though experiment after experiment has shown how unreliable our sensory-perceptive systems are.  Add to that how plastic our memories are, and it's a travesty that people's fates are decided by juries based upon eyewitness accounts of what happened, sometimes in the distant past.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eric Chan from Palo Alto, United States, Mock trial closing, CC BY 2.0]

To end with another quote by NdGT -- "There's no such thing as good eyewitness testimony and bad eyewitness testimony.  It's all bad."

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The stone hand illusion

One of the reasons I trust science is that I have so little trust in my own brain's ability to assess correctly the nature of reality.

Those may sound like contradictions, but they really aren't.  Science is a method that allows us to evaluate hard data -- measurements by devices that are designed to have no particular biases.  By relying on measurements from machines, we are bypassing our faulty sensory equipment, which can lead us astray in all sorts of ways.  In astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson's words, "[Our brains] are poor data-taking devices... that's why we have machines that don't care what side of the bed they woke up on that morning, that don't care what they said to their spouse that day, that don't care whether they had their morning caffeine.  They'll get the data right regardless."

We still believe that we're seeing what's real, don't we?  "I saw it with my own eyes" is still considered the sine qua non for establishing what reality is.  Eyewitness testimony is still the strongest evidence in courts of law.  Because how could it be otherwise?  Maybe we miss minor things, but how could we get it so far wrong?

But as I wrote about two weeks ago, even our perception of something as simple as color is flawed, and is mostly a construct of the brain, not a function of what's really out there.  We are ignoring as much as we perceive, making stuff up to bridge gaps, and in general, creating a montage of what's actually there, what your brain decides is important enough to pay attention to, and inferences to fill in the spaces in between.

If that's not bad enough, a scientist in Italy has knocked another gaping hole in our confidence that our brain can correctly interpret the sensory information it's given -- this time with an actual hammer.

Some of you may have heard of the "rubber hand illusion" that was created in an experiment back in 1998 by Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen.  In this experiment, the two scientists placed a rubber hand in view of a person whose actual hand is shielded from view by a curtain.  The rubber hand is stroked with a feather at the same time as the person's real (but out-of-sight) hand receives a similar stroke -- and within minutes, the person becomes strangely convinced that the rubber hand is his hand.

The Italian experiment, which I found out about in an article in Discover Online, substitutes an auditory stimulus for the visual one -- with an even more startling result.

Irene Senna, professor of psychology at Milono-Bicocca University in Milan, rigged up a similar scenario to Botvinick and Cohen's.  A subject sits with one hand through a screen.  On the back of the subject's hand is a small piece of foil which connects an electrical lead to a computer.  The subject sees a hammer swinging toward her hand -- but the hammer stops just short of smashing her hand, and only touches the foil gently (but, of course, she can't see this).  The touch of the hammer sends a signal to the computer -- which then produces a hammer-on-marble clink sound.

After repeating this only a few times, the subject feels absolutely convinced that her hand has turned to stone.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What is impressive about this illusion is that the feeling persists even after the experiment ends, and the screen is removed -- and even though the test subjects knew what was going on.  Subjects felt afterwards as if their hands were cold, stiff, heavier, less sensitive.  They reported difficulty bending their wrists.

To me, the coolest (and freakiest) thing about this is that our knowledge centers, the logical and rational prefrontal cortex and associated areas, are completely overcome by the sensory-processing centers when presented with this scenario.  We can know something isn't real, and simultaneously cannot shake the brain's decision that it is real.  None of the test subjects was crazy; they all knew that their hands weren't made of stone.  But presented with sensory information that contradicted that knowledge, they couldn't help but come to the wrong conclusion.

And this once again illustrates why I trust science, and am suspicious of eyewitness reports of UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, and the like.  Our brains are simply too easy to fool, especially when emotions (particularly fear) run high.  We can be convinced that what we're seeing or hearing is the real deal, to the point that we are unwilling to admit the possibility of a different explanation.

But as Senna's elegant little experiment shows, we can't rely on what our senses tell us.  Data from scientific measuring devices will always be better than pure sensory information.  To quote Tyson again: "We think that the eyewitness testimony of an authority -- someone wearing a badge, or a pilot, or whatever -- is somehow better than the testimony of an average person.  But no.  I'm sorry... but it's all bad."

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I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

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

UFOs in Dixieland

Is it just me, or have the UFO sightings suddenly spiked?

Okay, it might well be the websites I frequent looking for material for Skeptophilia.  It's not like I'm seeing this stuff on the Mainstream Media.  On the other hand, according to Dear Leader what's in the Mainstream Media is all lies, evasions, and coverups.

So there you are.  Q. E. D.

All of these accounts come from MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, which catalogues (and attempts to explain/account for) sightings.  The first one I ran into yesterday is from Tennessee:

Both of us decided to take a break and go outside...when we saw really bright lights suddenly dim and start pulsating, and coming at us, from the southeast side of the property over the woodlands.  I stood transfixed as [a rectangular object] literally came out of nowhere, going suddenly up and then down at a terrific speed, over the tree line... 

There was a sound with it, that was a deep, low thrumming hum, which really hurt our ears.  Fiancé actually had to cover his; it was painful to him.  But then the sound eased up as it then halted, hovering above us for a few seconds, tilted to its side and then zoomed off straight to the north, so low that I watched it, till it rose up and then dipped back down.  As low as it was, I was sure it was going to crash or something.  I was shaking when we came back in, and this is not the first incident we have had since moving here these last four years.  I only lost sight of the thing when it vanished into the north.

There was a remarkably similar sighting in Alabama, but without the noise:

As husband and I were driving home from his place of work, after 9 p.m., we saw in the sky directly over and in front of our car a black rectangular object with red glowing bars of light on the short sides of the rectangular shape.  Also, there was a blinking red light following.  It was silently gliding across the sky - no noise at all.  We pulled over to get out and look, but being in the middle of downtown it disappeared behind some buildings, as if it had descended straight down.  My husband's cell phone was not working properly afterwards.  I don't currently have one so nothing else to report other than I woke continuously from my sleep throughout the night with nausea and still felt the same the next morning and throughout the earlier part of the day.

Then there's the one from Florida:

It was still blue skies with no clouds when I looked up and saw a black disc flying from the north coming over my house as it was flying.  It turned over and over from left to right about three times in a second, maybe a second-and-a-half, and did the same thing going the other direction.  It hovered in one place just south of the house for about 10 seconds and then continued south.  There was no vapor trail, no lights that I could see of any kind except for a glow of a turquoise-orange that I could see when the object was flipping over left to right and right to left... 

An aircraft doing tight turns like that would probably make the pilot pass out from the G-forces and the plane would probably fall apart if it was a normal airplane.  I was wondering if maybe the government has an experimental craft.  I have seen a stealth bomber and fighter flying overhead.  This did not look anything like that.  I lost sight of the object as it went over some trees headed southeast.  Maybe the Tampa Airport saw something on their radar.  If it's not an airplane, then I think I just saw my proof that we are not alone in the universe – even though I am intelligent enough to know that the percentages are high enough to know that we probably aren't alone anyway.

Weirdest of all is a report from South Carolina:

Noticed a really bright, red light coming from the south headed north.  I was looking for blinking lights to identify it as a plane or helicopter, but this object was round, solid red in the middle, with short gold rays coming out of it all around the circle.  It was perfectly silent and moving along about as fast as a little Cessna plane would.  As it moved directly in front of me, it was only about 700 to 800 feet from me.  The front two-thirds of the object disappeared and then a split second later the rest disappeared also.  It kind of looked like it was moving into another dimension or something, the way the front part seemed to go through, then the back of it a split second later.  I did not see it after that.  After the incident, two words have been stuck in my head, alpha and belvedere.  Don’t know what it means, if anything, but wanted to let you know.

Okay, let's think about this for a moment.

What immediately jumps out at me is that all four of these accounts are from the Southeast, which not only heavily supports Donald Trump, but also has drive-through daiquiri stands.  (And those two may not be unrelated, either.)  Now, I'm not insinuating that any of the witnesses were drunk or MAGA-types or both, but I thought it worth mentioning.

In all seriousness, I'm struck with the frequency of UFO reports -- something the third witness mentions.  Yes, it's extraordinarily likely that the vast majority of them are hoaxes, or ordinary astronomical objects, or purely terrestrial phenomena; but I agree with Michio Kaku, who says that if even 1% of all the UFO sightings are inexplicable by any conventional answer, then that 1% deserves serious investigation.

The problem is -- to quote another physicist, with a reputation not quite so far-out as Kaku's -- as Neil deGrasse Tyson says, "In science, we need more than 'you saw it.'"  Given the number of sightings that have turned out to be accountable by perfectly ordinary explanations, if the only evidence you have is your eyewitness account, there's not much I can do but shrug my shoulders.  (And that's not meant to cast any aspersions on your reliability or honesty; as Tyson also has said, "There's no such thing as good eyewitness testimony.  It's all bad.")

So that's today's curiosity.  Despite the fact that I know my sightings would not be any more scientifically credible than the next guy's, I would dearly love to see a UFO.  Although I'd like to have something more interesting stuck in my head afterward than "alpha" and "belvedere."

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Back in 1989, the United States dodged a serious bullet.

One hundred wild monkeys were imported for experimental purposes, and housed in a laboratory facility in Reston, Virginia, outside of Washington DC.  Soon afterwards, the monkeys started showing some odd and frightening symptoms.  They'd spike a fever, become listless and glassy-eyed, and at the end would "bleed out" -- capillaries would start rupturing all over their body, and they'd bleed from every orifice including the pores of the skin.

Precautions were taken, but at first the researchers weren't overly concerned.  Most viruses have a feature called host specificity, which means that they tend to be infectious only in one species of host.  (This is why you don't need to worry about catching canine distemper, and your dog doesn't need to worry about catching your cold.)

It wasn't until someone realized the parallels with a (then) obscure viral outbreak in 1976 in Zaire (now the Republic of Congo) that the researchers realized things might be much more serious.  To see why, let me just say that the 1976 epidemic, which completely wiped out three villages, occurred on...

... the Ebola River.

Of course, you know that the feared introduction of this deadly virus into the United States didn't happen.  But to find out why -- and to find out just how lucky we were -- you should read Richard Preston's book The Hot Zone.  It's a brilliantly-written book detailing the closest we've come in recent years to a pandemic, and that from a virus that carries with it a 95% mortality rate.  (One comment: the first two chapters of this book require a bit of a strong stomach.  While Preston doesn't go out of his way to be graphic, the horrifying nature of this disease makes some nauseating descriptions inevitable.)

[Note:  If you purchase this book through the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Dog days

Yesterday, we found out that the president of the United States ordered his lawyer to commit perjury before Congress, and has taken his "Oh, yeah, well you're a great big poopyhead!" style of interaction to new levels with revealing the details of a (formerly) secure visit to the troops in Afghanistan by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, presumably to get back at her for denying him the opportunity to deliver his State of the Union speech.

Oh, and there's another "caravan" on the way.  And Ivanka Trump has been tapped to help select the next leader of the World Bank.

*looks around desperately for something, anything, else to think about*

Okay, folks, today we're going to consider: why have sightings of "dogmen" been on the rise lately?

Yesterday we considered eyewitness accounts of seeing pterodactyl-like flying creatures, which is weird enough.  But now we're having to contend with scary visitations by bipedal canines.

As if the quadrupedal kind weren't enough trouble.  Our rescue dog, Guinness, is a truly wonderful guy, but his nickname of "El Destructo" is well earned.  In the past two weeks, he's chewed up a bottle of red ceramic underglaze, a visitor's shoe, a magazine, a pillow, and a single piece from a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.  About the latter, I'd almost have preferred if he'd eaten the whole puzzle; having one piece gnawed is just maddening.

Oh, and he swiped a chunk of gourmet cheese off the counter and ate the entire thing.

Do NOT let this innocent expression fool you.

So the idea that there might be intelligent bipedal dogs, perhaps even with opposable thumbs, is kind of alarming.  But that's just what people have been seeing.

Starting with an anonymous (of course) eyewitness in northern Arkansas, who two months ago saw a fearsome doglike creature while driving home from his job as a roofing worker.

"I came across this evil-looking wolf creature," he said.  "It was carrying something in its hands, like a leash or a rope.  It was standing on two feet on the left side of the road.  It was gray, maybe seven feet tall, three hundred pounds."

That, in the words of a friend of mine, is "a big bow-wow."

Then there's the guy in Colorado who was driving home with his own dog, and saw Fido's scary cousin.  He'd stopped the car and let his dog out to pee, but evidently that was the last thing on her mind.  "She wouldn’t do her business," he said.  "She started barking.  At first I thought she was barking at the traffic, but there was no traffic."

The fact that he even considered the explanation that she was barking at traffic that wasn't there makes me wonder about his reliability as a witness, but let's hear the rest of his testimony.

"I noticed five lights hovering in the sky in the distance...  I quickly put the dog in the car and went to investigate.  The lights rose higher and then got smaller and zigzagged, then vanished."

This did not calm his dog down, and in fact, she seemed even more scared than before.  Then...

"I tried comforting her, and that’s when I noticed something moving in the corner of my eye.  I looked up and saw something running behind my car, through the taillights... It had red fur and a tail, but it also had a human face...  It's hard to describe."

Understandably, the guy hauled ass back out onto the road, but he adds that his dog was still terrified when they arrived home, and he had nightmares for several nights thereafter.

There were other sightings in the last couple of months in Michigan and California, the latter by a retired Air Force security officer who was in a park with her daughter and saw "a large male dogman," six-and-a-half to seven feet tall, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, long arms, dog-like legs, a tail, and amber eyes.  She pulled a gun on it, and started speaking to the thing in her native language (she is Shoshone), and that stopped it from advancing on them.  She and her daughter hightailed it back to their car, and got home safely.  She decided to return the next day with her husband, and see if she could find more evidence (or possibly see it again), and there was no certain trace of the dogman, but they did find a cat skeleton "stripped clean down to the bones."

Skeptic though I am, if I'd seen something like that, I don't think you could pay me enough to return to the same spot.  So major props to her for doing this, and I'm glad that the Shoshone-speaking cat-eating dogman of California didn't harm any of them.

But as far as our initial question -- to wit, why there have been more sightings of dogmen lately -- the only thing I can come up with is that the dogmen have decided we humans had our shot at running the world, but we've fucked things up so royally that they're going to take matters into their own, um, paws.  Maybe they'll team up with yesterday's pterodactyls to form a really New World Order.  Myself, I say let 'em.  Can't be any worse than what we have now.

Of course, if the dogmen are anything like Guinness, they will stubbornly refuse to even consider running the government until you throw the ball for them 459 times, and follow it up by saying "whoozagooboy?" and giving them a dog cookie.

So that's today's cryptozoological news.  And now, sad to say, I've dithered around long enough, and I should probably gird my loins and check the news.  Who knows what might have happened in my absence?  Maybe Donald Trump threw a mud pie at Nancy Pelosi.  Maybe Mitch McConnell finally decided that his title of "Senate Majority Leader" means he should actually lead the Senate.  Maybe Ivanka Trump will be appointed to replace Sarah Huckabee Sanders as White House Spokesperson, given that Sanders is allegedly resigning, probably because she's used up her quota of egregious lies, so now has no option other than telling the truth.

And we can't have that.

But in any case, be on the lookout for dogmen, but play it safe.  A seven-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound dog could do a lot of damage to shoes and jigsaw puzzles.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

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

Lights over Ireland

Heard about the Irish UFO?

I'd resisted posting about this one, because every single time I run into an article that says "TOTALLY UNEXPLAINABLE EXTRATERRESTRIAL OBJECT SIGHTED," it turns out not only to be explainable but 100% terrestrial.

This one, however, has me curious.  According to a report in The Drive, this incident has two things that made my ears perk up; it was simultaneously sighted, and reported, by several people, including three commercial airline pilots; and according to witnesses, not only was it going ridiculously fast (one of the pilots said it was at least Mach 2), it changed direction several times.

That last bit is the most important.  One of the most common things labeled as a UFO are meteors, but as far as I understand them, they move in a straight line because (1) Newton's First Law is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, and (2) they're a bitch to steer.  So if the reports are correct that it changed direction, not once but several times, this raises the report to the level of "pretty interesting."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Stefan-Wp, UFO-Meersburg, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Quoting Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick, writers of the above-linked article:

Publicly available audio of conversations between the passenger planes and Shannon Flight Information Region air traffic controllers offer more detail about what happened. At 6:47 AM local time [on November 9], a British Airways 787, using the callsign Speedbird 94, radioed in to ask if there were any military exercises going on in the area, which there were not. 

"There is nothing showing on either primary or secondary [radar]," Shannon controllers told Speedbird 94. “O.K. It was moving so fast,” the British Airways pilot responded. 

She further explained that the object had appeared as a "very bright light" and had flown along the left side of their 787 before it "rapidly veered to the north" and then "disappeared at very high speed." There is no indication of concerns about a possible collision.

The Irish authorities are investigating, but it remains to be seen what there is to investigate, given that all we have is the recording of what the pilots said they saw.

As regular readers know, I've been pretty skeptical of eyewitness accounts.  Not only is the human sensory-integrative system notoriously inaccurate, so is our memory.  But here we have at least three trained pilots -- who had seen phenomena like meteors many times, and knew what they looked like -- reporting the same strange, maneuverable object simultaneously.

Astronomer Michio Kaku famously said -- and got himself in trouble with the scientific establishment for saying it -- "Ninety-nine percent of all UFO sightings can be explained as hoaxes or purely natural, and in many cases terrestrial, phenomena.  But that still leaves one percent that haven't been explained.  And I think those are worth a serious investigation."

Which I have to agree with.  And unless there's more to this story that we're being told (for example, Irish authorities denied conducting military exercises in the area where the sightings occurred, but it's entirely possible they could be hiding the truth for some reason), this falls squarely in Kaku's investigation-worthy one percent.  I'm definitely not ready to jump to "it was a visit by intelligent aliens from another world," but I'm at this point eager to hear what the experts think actually did happen in the skies of Ireland six days ago.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

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

The truth is out there. Probably.

I've always been dubious about reports of UFOs.

To me, they always seem to come back to anecdotal evidence, which is lousy support for what is essentially a scientific conjecture.  As eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "If you're ever abducted, steal something from the spaceship, and bring it back with you... because then you'll have something of alien manufacture.  And anything that's crossed interstellar space is gonna be interesting.  But until then, we can't have the conversation... 'I saw it' just isn't enough."

The problem is, UFO sightings are incredibly common.  MUFON -- the Mutual UFO Network -- is devoted to keeping track of all the UFO sightings reported worldwide, and it's a full-time occupation.  (In the first half of 2018, there were 3,627 UFO sightings reported to MUFON, of which 647 were labeled "unknown" -- in other words, not accounted for by conventional explanations, at least in their opinion.)

Michio Kaku, the Japanese-born astronomer who has become a familiar face on documentaries about alien life, has weighed in on this, and has an interesting take on things.  "Ninety-five percent of all UFO sightings can be immediately identified as the planet Venus, weather balloons, weather phenomena, swamp gas.  You name it, we've got it nailed.  It's the other five percent that give you the willies.  Five percent remain totally unexplained...  We're talking about generals, we're talking about airline pilots, we're talking about governors of states, who claim that this is beyond our understanding of the laws of physics...  We've got multiple sightings from multiple sources.  Pilots, other eyewitnesses, radar.  These are very hard to dismiss...  And those are worth investigating with an open mind."

Which, I have to admit, is a good point.  However, it bears mention that Kaku himself has come under fire for his unorthodoxy, and in fact many of his colleagues think he's seriously gone off the rails, either because he's honestly crazy or because he knows that sensationalist pseudoscience sells.  (An especially scathing critique is the seriously unflattering RationalWiki page on Kaku and his claims.)

But this hasn't discouraged both the true believers and the skeptics who agree with Kaku that despite the complete lack of hard evidence, there's still something here worth investigating.  And they've found a couple of unlikely allies recently -- a retired intelligence officer named Luis Elizondo, and (of all people) Tom DeLonge, former front man for the rock band Blink-182.

Elizondo and DeLonge are unequivocal that we need to look into this further.  "Despite overwhelming evidence at both the classified and unclassified levels," Elizondo wrote, "certain individuals in the Department remain staunchly opposed to further research on what could be a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors, and soldiers, and perhaps even an existential threat to our national security."

It bears mention that Michio Kaku (in the interview I linked above) also emphasized the potential threat.  Any civilization that had mastered interstellar travel would likely be ahead of us, technologically, by thousands or even millions of years, and would view us much like we view an anthill -- as being not only not that interesting, but essentially expendable.  "There's no reason an advanced alien civilization would come bearing gifts and ask to be taken to our leader, any more than we bring crickets to ants and ask to speak with the queen."

DeLonge's involvement is curious, not because he's a true believer -- heaven knows, a lot of celebrities have odd ideas -- but because Elizondo and the others trying to convince the government to look into UFOs more seriously are mostly ex-government staffers and scientists, such as Jim Semivan (formerly of the CIA's National Clandestine Service), Robert Bigelow (a Nevada-based defense contractor), Chris Mellon (Deputy ­Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations), and Hal Puthoff (formerly employed by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency).  Including a musician makes for a little bit of an odd partnership.

And honestly, DeLonge seems to be involved mostly to get the message out, especially to younger people.  Elizondo is very cognizant of his sales pitch, and his quest is to reach as many influential people as possible.  Having a rocker on your side never hurts, publicity-wise.

As for me, I don't think there's anything wrong with further investigations.  After all, there could be something to some of those sightings.  Even though I tend to be in Tyson's camp, and believe that most UFO sightings are explainable from purely terrestrial causes (including the propensity of people to make shit up), I also agree with Kaku that if there's five percent -- hell, if there's one percent -- of the UFO sightings that are legitimate and have defied conventional explanation, they're worth looking into.

Plus, there's just the fact that I would really love it if intelligent aliens existed.  There's a reason I have this poster on my classroom wall:

I would rather it if the aliens turned out to be friendly, of course.  I could do without having Earth invaded by Vogons, the Borg, the Draconians, the Cardassians, Shoggoths, the Slitheen, Xenomorphs, or the Tcho-Tcho People.  Vulcans would be more what I'm hoping for.

But I guess in these circumstances, you shouldn't be picky.

So I'll keep hoping, however the skeptical side of me keeps telling me not to hold my breath.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

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

The stone hand illusion

One of the reasons I trust science is that I have so little trust in my own brain's ability to assess correctly the nature of reality.

Those may sound like contradictions, but they really aren't.  Science is a method that allows us to evaluate hard data -- measurements by devices that are designed to have no particular biases.  By relying on measurements from machines, we are bypassing our faulty sensory equipment, which can lead us astray in all sorts of ways.  In Neil deGrasse Tyson's words, "[Our brains] are poor data-taking devices... that's why we have machines that don't care what side of the bed they woke up on that morning, that don't care what they said to their spouse that day, that don't care whether they had their morning caffeine.  They'll get the data right regardless."

But we still believe that we're seeing what's real, don't we?  "I saw it with my own eyes" is still considered the sine qua non for establishing what reality is.  Eyewitness testimony is still the strongest evidence in courts of law.  Because how could it be otherwise?  Maybe we miss minor things, but how could we get it so far wrong?

A scientist in Italy just knocked another gaping hole in our confidence that our brain can correctly interpret the sensory information it's given -- this time with an actual hammer.

Some of you may have heard of the "rubber hand illusion" that was created in an experiment back in 1998 by Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen.  In this experiment, the two scientists placed a rubber hand in view of a person whose actual hand is shielded from view by a curtain.  The rubber hand is stroked with a feather at the same time as the person's real (but out-of-sight) hand receives a similar stroke -- and within minutes, the person becomes strangely convinced that the rubber hand is his hand.

The Italian experiment, which was just written up this week in Discover Online, substitutes an auditory stimulus for the visual one -- with an even more startling result.

Irene Senna, professor of psychology at Milono-Bicocca University in Milan, rigged up a similar scenario to Botvinick and Cohen's.  A subject sits with one hand through a screen.  On the back of the subject's hand is a small piece of foil which connects an electrical lead to a computer.  The subject sees a hammer swinging toward her hand -- but the hammer stops just short of smashing her hand, and only touches the foil gently (but, of course, she can't see this).  The touch of the hammer sends a signal to the computer -- which then produces a hammer-on-marble chink sound.

And within minutes, the subject feels like her hand has turned to stone.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What is impressive about this illusion is that the feeling persists even after the experiment ends, and the screen is removed -- and even though the test subjects knew what was going on.  Subjects felt afterwards as if their hands were cold, stiff, heavier, less sensitive.  They reported difficulty bending their wrists.

To me, the coolest thing about this is that our knowledge centers, the logical and rational prefrontal cortex and associated areas, are completely overcome by the sensory-processing centers when presented with this scenario.  We can know something isn't real, and simultaneously cannot shake the brain's decision that it is real.  None of the test subjects was crazy; they all knew that their hands weren't made of stone.  But presented with sensory information that contradicted that knowledge, they couldn't help but come to the wrong conclusion.

And this once again illustrates why I trust science, and am suspicious of eyewitness reports of UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, and the like.  Our brains are simply too easy to fool, especially when emotions (particularly fear) run high.  We can be convinced that what we're seeing or hearing is the real deal, to the point that we are unwilling to admit the possibility of a different explanation.

But as Senna's elegant little experiment shows, we just can't rely on what our senses tell us.  Data from scientific measuring devices will always be better than pure sensory information.  To quote Tyson again:  "We think that the eyewitness testimony of an authority -- someone wearing a badge, or a pilot, or whatever -- is somehow better than the testimony of an average person.  But no.  I'm sorry... but it's all bad."