Send in the clones

You've all heard about the whole Reptilian Alien thing, right?  That prominent individuals, especially world leaders but also including a lot of entertainers, are actually aliens in human suits?  

Well, I can go you one better.  Many of those prominent individuals aren't aliens, they're actually cleverly-wrought doubles.  Clones.  Twins from different mothers, as it were.

And this highly compelling scientific claim just got a boost a couple of days ago from Mr. Grip-On-Reality himself: Donald Trump.

Trump shared the following post on the ironically-named Truth Social:

The text, in case the image doesn't load well, says, "There is no #JoeBiden - executed in 2020.  #Biden clone doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see.  >#Democrats don't know the difference.  #Steel #ussteel #MAGA #MAHA"

When I first saw this, I thought, "Surely this has to be fake.  Even Trump isn't crazy enough to share something this stupid."

Being hopeful these days is a losing proposition.  It's quite real, and was even reported on Fox News, which has usually taken great pains to depict Dear Leader as the smartest person in the world now that Stephen Hawking is dead, instead of the reality, which is that Trump was pretty fucking dumb to begin with and in the last few years has shown every sign of progressive dementia.

The thing is, the whole "replaced by clones" claim isn't new, although this is the first time I've heard it espoused by Trump (or applied to Biden).  I did a little bit of research on the topic, at the expense of brain cells I can ill afford to lose, and discovered there's a Doppelgänger and Identity Research Society which keeps track of this alleged phenomena.  And they're not talking about simply spotting someone who looks a bit like a famous person, or perhaps resembles yourself (an unsettling occurrence that happens to just about everyone once or twice in their lives).  These people claim that unlike ordinary twins, or even clones, in which both individuals coexist, here the duplicate has replaced the original, and the original is no more.

In other words: Brad Pitt isn't actually Brad Pitt, he's someone who looks, talks, and acts exactly like Brad Pitt.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of the quote from Spock on Star Trek: "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."  If there's only one Brad Pitt -- i.e., no one is really claiming that there are two of 'em walking around, as far as I can see -- and he is identical to Brad Pitt, doesn't that make him, um, Brad Pitt?

Apparently not.  Here's an explanation of the difference, from the site:

Human doubles are made by other humans from the DNA of a single cell, where a replica of the physical body is reproduced.  That clone is only physical and has no soul, therefore, it has no God-connection.  Clones can mate and reproduce clone children.  A clone and a souled-human can mate and, again, only reproduce clone children.

Humans have no means to create a soul in another human clone, therefore, human clones have no soul and no concept of right and wrong, no conscience and no compassion.  They have survival instinct and are greatly concerned about their own death, but not the welfare and death of others.

This explains why so many people today have no values, no morals, no ethics and are prone to violence. 

They are more easily programmed through our mind-control type education and military training than are souled-humans with a freewill.  Clones have no freewill, only a sense of survival, and will act accordingly through conditioned behavior.

The eye is the window of the soul.  In the eye of another souled-human you can sense the Light emanating from the soul, the God Spirit within.  As I said earlier, soul or God Spirit within, so there is no God-connection to the eternal Light of Creator Source.  Therefore, there is no the human clone has no spiritual discernment.  The eyes of a human clone may appear dull, blank, hollow, dark, vacant, lifeless, empty with no vibrancy or Light. They have no reaction to or understanding of spiritual energy, concepts or conversation.

Well, the first thing that jumps out at me is that a "person with blank, dead eyes who has no concept of right or wrong, no compassion, no values, no morals, no ethics, and no care about the welfare of others" is a far better description of Donald Trump than it is of Joe Biden.  Be that as it may, the whole protocol for telling apart clones from real people seems pretty... subjective.  Even the website admits that the synthetic humans are just like regular humans, down to the genetic level, even though their science seems a little sketchy in other respects:

Certain tissues extracted from cattle are the starting point.  (This is part of the reason for cattle mutilations.)  The process is an advancement of a process discovered in the late 1950s.  This 1959 experiment was reported in a book in 1968 called The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rettray Taylor.  Taylor describes the experiment done in France, "They had extracted DNA from the cells of the khaki Campbells and had injected it into the white Pekins, thinking that just possibly the offspring of the latter might show some character derived from khaki Campbells.  To their astonishment the actual ducks they injected began to change.  Their white feathers darkened, and their necks began to take on the peculiar curve which is a mark of the khaki Campbell."  The scientists working under the auspices of the Rothschilds, (who are directed by Satan himself) developed this process by working at secret breakneck speed. T hey developed an advanced development of the process they discovered with the DNA chicken experiment. By the late 1970’s, synthetic people could be produced by the Illuminati.

So you have to mutilate cattle to get tissue samples instead of just buying a package of ground beef at the grocery store, ducks are the same thing as chickens, the Rothschilds are directed by Satan, and therefore there are bunches of synthetic soulless people walking around.  Got it.

Apparently, though, that's not all.  Not only do we have fake people walking around, but as Trump mentioned in his post some of them are actually robots.  Jimmy Carter was one, for example:

Organic robotoids: This is an "artificial life" form that is created through processes that are totally different than cloning or synthetics.  Organic robotoid technology is being made to make exact as possible copies of important people such as Presidents and some of their staff.  For instance, the Jimmy Carter who came to Portland a few years ago who I stood two feet away from and examined visually was not the Jimmy Carter that had run for President.  On Easter, 1979 the first robotoid model of Jimmy Carter replaced the man Jimmy Carter.  By the time "Carter" was seen by me, they must have been on at least robotoid no. 100.

Myself, I'm surprised that anyone who visually examined a former president of the United States from two feet away wasn't immediately escorted from the premises by men in dark suits and sunglasses.  But I guess he was lucky.  Or maybe it was just because the Dark Suits knew that if something happened to Jimmy Carter Version 100, they could always replace him with Version 101.

The site provides hours of bizarre exploration, wherein we find out that not only are Joe Biden and Brad Pitt synthetic humans, or clones, or robotoids, or whatnot, so are:

• Cameron Diaz
• Bob Dylan
• Angelina Jolie (figures, since Brad is, right?)
• Christina Aguilera
• Beyoncé (I thought she was an Illuminatus herself?  C'mon, people, get your story straight)
• Eddie Murphy
• Courteney Cox
• David Icke

The last one made me choke-snort coffee all over my computer, because David Icke is one of the people who is always supposedly blowing the whistle on the Illuminati and the New World Order and the Bilderburg Group and what-have-you, and now we learn that he's not really David Icke, he's someone else who not only looks just like David Icke, but also has David Icke's loony views of how the world works?  Evidently so:

David Icke got replaced 2007 by a synthetic clone.  We... did a lot of mathematic facial geometry analysis and other stuff.  Also we found out that the new David Icke has no birthmarks anymore in his face, a lot bigger shoulders and his hands have a different geometry.  Also the way he use his muscles of the face, shoulders and hands, even the fingers and mostly the eyes and the bigger nose with its different form is a proof.  Also the different color of his skin.  Its [sic] a very fine difference of the color.  Also the distance between body and head is now different.  Also his psychology while talking.  We did a very deep analysis of a lot famous people and we are experts for doing this.  We work all together and are as objective as possible.

Well, there you are, then. They did lots of "stuff" and found out that (amongst other things) David Icke's head has moved farther away from his body.  Plus, they say they're being objective, so pretty much q.e.d., as far as I can tell.  You can see why Trump found this such an appealing idea.  I mean, who wouldn't?  The logic is inescapable.

So, anyway, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool, thanks to yet another brilliant missive from the Leader of the Free World.  Me, I'm going to get a second cup of coffee, so I can appear less vacant and hollow-eyed, and hopefully trick more people into thinking I'm actually Gordon.  Well, I am Gordon, but not the real Gordon.  I'm the Gordon who looks like Gordon.

Never mind.  You know what I mean.  At least I'm sure I'll fool the Democrats.

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Accents and accuracy

When I was in eighth grade, a movie aired called The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.  We were encouraged by our English teacher to watch it, and it turned out to be well worth the time, even to a fourteen-year-old who at that point didn't care much about history.  It was based on a novel by Ernest J. Gaines, and starred the amazing Cicely Tyson, who played a woman born into slavery, who lives to age 110 and sees the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in 1962.  (And yes, Tyson plays the title character the entire way through -- not only is the makeup incredible, but so is her ability to portray ages between 20 and 110 absolutely convincingly.)

There was only one thing that struck a sour note, and I was far from the only one in my class who noticed it.  One of the characters was the villainous Albert Cluveau, who was identified as "a Cajun."  And this guy had the worst Cajun accent ever.  My mom was 100% pure Cajun, so I know whereof I speak; most of my classmates were Cajun as well, given that I grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, "the heart of Cajun Country."  Cluveau was portrayed by Will Hare, who wasn't even from Louisiana, and I still remember one of my friends saying, "Why didn't they just hire an actual Cajun?  There are plenty of 'em around."

Given how long ago this happened, I don't recall exactly what it was that pinpointed his accent as fake; certainly he was trying his best to make it sound right, but it simply didn't work.  There was something about the pronunciation, but also the cadence -- the "swing" of the language -- that was way off.  And to anyone who grew up in southern Louisiana, it did exactly what movie directors never want to happen; it took the watcher right out of the scene, made them say, "Okay, that's an actor trying to play a role and not doing it all that well."

Sometimes actors can pull it off, of course.  David Tennant is Scottish, but does a convincing English accent as the Tenth Doctor in Doctor Who.  And in the episode "Tooth and Claw," there's a scene where he's pretending to be Scottish -- so he's a Scottish guy playing an English guy who's trying to do a Scottish accent badly. 

Strangely enough, it works.

The reason the topic comes up is a study out of Cambridge University that appeared last week in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, which tested various groups of people in the British Isles to see how good they are at detecting fake accents.  And it turns out that people from Glasgow, Dublin, Belfast, and Durham are way better at picking it up when someone's faking their regional accent than folks from the southeastern parts of England (including London), and also the area around the city of Bristol.

Glaswegians scored in the high seventies to around eighty percent accurate; people from Essex did the worst, averaging only a little better than chance.  The surmise is that the areas where the scores were lowest tended to be more cosmopolitan, where there's a greater likelihood that residents have moved there recently from somewhere else.  Hearing lots of different variations on an English accent, it appears, might make you less aware of when someone's faking your own.  Another factor is that some of the places that score the highest -- Glasgow and Belfast, especially -- have high amounts of regional pride, and value the local accent as a marker of belonging.

"The UK is a really interesting place to study," said linguist Jonathan Goodman, who led the study.  "The linguistic diversity and cultural history is so rich and you have so many cultural groups that have been roughly in the same location for a really long time.  Very specific differences in language, dialect and accents have emerged over time, and that's a fascinating side of language evolution...  Cultural, political, or even violent conflict are likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they try to maintain social cohesion through cultural homogeneity.  Even relatively mild tension, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, could have this effect...  I'm interested in the role played by trust in society and how trust forms.  One of the first judgments a person will make about another person, and when deciding whether to trust them, is how they speak.  How humans learn to trust another person who may be an interloper has been incredibly important over our evolutionary history and it remains critical today."

Which explains why Scottish people roll their eyes when they hear this guy say he's "an old Aberdeen pub-crawler."

James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, wasn't Scottish, he was Canadian -- the son of immigrants from Northern Ireland.

I know the whole "cultural marker" thing is why I picked up on Will Hare's terrible Cajun accent so quickly.  Cajuns were for many years a poor and marginalized community, ridiculed as being less intelligent and less cultured than the rich (mostly Anglo) landowners, so it was pretty common for Cajuns to try to unlearn their own accent in an attempt to blend in.  (My mom was painfully aware of her own accent, and in something a little like the Cambridge study turned on its head, adopted a stilted "King's English" accent when she had company -- I don't think anyone was fooled by it, and in any event, it's kind of sad she felt like she had to do that.)

What's interesting is that like the Glaswegians' pride in their own accent, in the last fifty years there's been a resurgence of Cajun pride in southern Louisiana, largely spearheaded by the late Jimmy Domengeaux, who founded CODOFIL, the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana.  Domengeaux was instrumental in repopularizing Cajun music and in preserving the Cajun French dialect.  They've even appropriated an insult; "coonass" was a derogatory epithet for Cajuns, of uncertain origin but thought to be from an old French slang word for prostitute, and I can remember when I was in high school starting to see bumper stickers saying "Proud To Be A Coonass."  (Nota bene: some southern Louisianans still consider it derogatory, and most people would never use it in polite conversation; and like most words of this type, it comes off completely differently when used by someone who is not Cajun themselves.  So it's still a word to be careful with.)

So that's our excursion into linguistics for today.  The upshot is not to try to fake an accent when you're in Great Britain or Ireland.  Or anywhere else, really.  People will usually figure you out, and it's not a good look.  Just enjoy the richness of variety in human speech -- and talk like you normally do.  They're probably as curious about your accent as you are about theirs.

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Mapping out a fraud

Ever heard of the Vinland Map?

Supposedly dating from the fifteenth century, this map shows the outlines of Europe, Greenland, Asia, Africa... and North America, which is labeled "Vinland Insula" (the island of Vinland).  The map surfaced in 1957, and was widely hailed as a genuine depiction of the Norse exploration of northeastern North America, drawn using information gathered as far back as the tenth century C.E.

Interestingly, the map surfaced three years before the discovery of the (authentic) Viking-era archaeological site at L'Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland, the first (and at this point, only) certain Norse site in North America.  When tenth-century Norse artifacts were found there in 1960, it bolstered the claims that the map was genuine.  We know the Vikings made it to "Vinland," as per the stories of Leif Eiriksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, and the Map seemed to indicate they'd made it a lot farther, possibly to what is now coastal New England and points south.

Very quickly, it became the center of a lot of wilder claims.  Ancient Aliens aficionados said that not only did it show that the Norse had visited North America and surveyed it closely enough to get a lot of the details of the coastline correct, it contained enough information to support that the drawing had been made from a higher vantage point -- i.e., from the air.  In a spaceship.  Because the Norse gods were actually Ancient Astronauts.

Even the less up-in-the-stratosphere claims were given substantial momentum by the Vinland Map.  I remember when I was working on my master's thesis -- about the effects of the Viking invasions on the Old English and Old Gaelic languages -- running into an apparently serious study purporting to find evidence of borrow-words from Old Norse into various Algonkian languages, including Malecite, Abenaki, and Mi'kmaq.  The difficulty with this sort of thing is in determining whether pairs of similar words from otherwise unrelated languages are related genetically (i.e. from a common root) or are just chance correspondences; in fact, that was one of the more difficult parts of my own research.  Sometimes it's obvious, but that's the exception.  An example is the English word window -- the Old English word was eagþyrl and the Norse word at the same time was vindauga.

Doesn't take a linguist to figure that one out.

Most, however, are not that clear-cut, and it takes more evidence than "they sound kind of the same" to establish a genetic connection.  And the vast majority of linguists think that any similarities between Norse words and Algonkian words are chance -- and cherry-picking.  You can find those sorts of accidental correspondences between just about any two languages you pick if you're allowed to ignore all the pairs of words that don't sound alike.

In any case, the Vinland Map was considered support for the contention that the Vikings did get south of L'Anse-aux-Meadows, whether or not they left linguistic and/or archaeological traces.  This claim gained some credence when a physicist tested the parchment of the Map back in 1995 and found that it dated somewhere between 1432 and 1445, exactly as advertised.

Unfortunately, the age of the parchment is irrelevant -- because a study published last week by some researchers at Yale University, where the map is housed, found that beyond question, the Vinland Map is a fake.

The researchers were able to do an analysis of the ink used on the Map without destroying it, and found that it is unquestionably modern ink.  It contains anatase, a form of titanium dioxide first used in inks in the 1920s.  Also, it was discovered that one of the inscriptions on the map had been overwritten to appear as if it was a bookbinder's instructions to assemble the map pages in concordance with the Speculum Historiale, a thirteenth-century encyclopedia intended as a compendium of everything known to the intelligentsia of Europe at the time.

"The Vinland Map is a fake," said Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  "There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest...  The altered inscription certainly seems like an attempt to make people believe the map was created at the same time as the Speculum Historiale.  It’s powerful evidence that this is a forgery, not an innocent creation by a third party that was co-opted by someone else, although it doesn’t tell us who perpetrated the deception."

My first response to reading this was to get really pissed off.  Not only does this claim have significant bearing on the subject of my own research, it muddies the waters considerably with respect to any legitimate claims that the Norse reached mainland North America.  Historical linguistics is hard enough; having some asshole create a highly-plausible fake -- good enough that it took sophisticated ink analysis to detect it -- makes it more difficult for those of us who just want to know what really happened.

Fakes in general really make me see red.  We already have the natural biases all humans come equipped with (confirmation bias, correlation/causation errors, and dart-thrower's bias, particularly) gumming up the works even for reputable scientists who are trying their hardest to see things clearly.  It may seem like a minor concern -- who really cares if a particular old document is genuine?  But truth matters, even if it's an argument about what might seem like academic trivia.

Or it should matter.  What's most troubling about this is that whoever created the Vinland Map evidently knew what (s)he was doing, and knew the subject well enough to fool historians for over fifty years.  (Well, some historians -- there were researchers who doubted it pretty much from the get-go.)  So the great likelihood is whoever perpetrated this fake was an academic him/herself.

And to me, that's unconscionable.

So that's our disappointing piece of news for the day.  It still seems pretty likely to me that the Norse did make it to mainland North America, but even if I'm right we're back to having zero hard evidence.  I guess I'm lucky that I chose the thesis research I did; there's no doubt the Vikings made it to Britain.  The monks at Lindisfarne would have been happy to tell you all about it.

At least the ones who survived.

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My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

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

Tall tales of Don Juan

I was chatting with a friend about mystical claims a few days ago, and the subject of Carlos Castaneda came up.  He'd heard of Castaneda -- unsurprisingly given the man's fame -- but didn't know about the controversy surrounding Castaneda's writing.  It was a bit of a slow news day, so I thought it might be time to repost this piece I wrote in 2017 about the topic, especially given that Castaneda's works are still selling like crazy and are presented as factual, not just in fringe groups but in many serious college classes.

And as another brief aside: if you haven't already done so, check out (and subscribe to!) the Skeptophilia YouTube channel!  New content uploaded every week!

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When I was in eleventh grade, I took a semester-long class called Introduction to Psychology.  The teacher was Dr. Loren Farmer -- I never found out if he actually had a Ph.D., or if people simple called him "Dr." Farmer because of the air of erudition he had.

The class was taught in an unorthodox fashion, to say the least.  Dr. Farmer was pretty counterculture, especially considering that this was Louisiana in the 1970s.  He stood on no ceremony at all; we were allowed to sit wherever we liked (my favorite perch was on a wide bookcase by the window), and class was more of a free-roaming discussion than it was the usual chalk/talk typical of high school back then.  Even his tests were odd; we had a choice on his final exam of ten or so short-answer/essay questions from which we were to answer seven, and I recall that one of them was "Draw and interpret three mandalas."  (I elected not to do this one.  My talent for slinging the arcane-sounding bullshit was and is highly developed, but my artistic ability pretty much stalled out in third grade, and I didn't think I could pull that one off.)

Some time around the middle of the semester, he instructed us to go buy a copy of a book that would be assigned reading over the following few weeks.  The book was The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda.  I had never heard of it, but I dutifully purchased the book.

I was nothing short of astonished when it turned out to be about the use of hallucinogenic drugs.  Castaneda tells the story of his apprenticeship to Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui native from Mexico, wherein he was given peyote, Psilocybe mushrooms, and Datura (Jimson weed), inducing wild visions that Don Juan said weren't hallucinations; they were glimpses of an "alternate reality" that sorcerers could use to gain power and knowledge.  Castaneda starts out doubtful, but eventually goes all-in -- and in fact, wrote one sequel after another describing his journey deeper and deeper into the world of the brujo.

I was captivated by Castaneda's story.  I read the sequel to Teachings, A Separate Reality.  The third one, Journey to Ixtlan, was even better.  Then I got to the fourth one, Tales of Power, and I began to go, "Hmmm."  Something about the story seemed off to me, as if he'd gone from recounting his real experiences to simply making shit up.  I made it through book five, The Second Ring of Power, and the feeling intensified.  About two chapters into book six, The Eagle's Gift, I gave the whole thing up as a bad job.

But something about the stories continued to fascinate me.  The best parts -- especially his terrifying vision of a bridge to another world in the fog at night in A Separate Reality, and his witnessing a battle of power in Journey to Ixtlan -- have a mythic quality that is compelling.  But the sense that even apart from any supernatural aspects, which I predictably don't buy, the books were the product of a guy trying to pull a fast one on his readers left me simultaneously angry and disgusted.

I discovered that I'm not alone in that reaction. Richard de Mille (son of Cecil), an anthropologist and writer, wrote a pair of analyses of Castaneda's books, Castaneda's Journey and The Don Juan Papers, that I just finished reading a few days ago, explaining my resurgence of interest in the subject.  De Mille pounced on something that had been in the back of my mind ever since reading Journey to Ixtlan -- that it would be instructive to compare the timeline of the first three books, as Ixtlan overlaps the years covered by the first two, Teachings and A Separate Reality.

And what de Mille found is that the books are full of subtle internal contradictions that one would never discover without doing what he did, which is to lay out all of the carefully-dated supposed journal entries Castaneda gives us in the first three books.  Among the more glaring errors is that Castaneda is introduced for the first time to a major character, the brujo Don Genaro, twice -- over five years apart.  Also separated by years are events in which Castaneda saw (the word in italics is used by Castaneda to describe a mystical sort of vision in which everything looks different -- humans, for instance, look like bundles of fibers made of light) and in which Don Juan tells his apprentice "you still have never seen."

Worse still is the fact that Ixtlan recounts a dozen or so mind-blowing experiences that allegedly occurred during the same time period as Teachings -- and yet which Castaneda didn't think were important enough to include in his first account.  Add to that the point de Mille makes in The Don Juan Papers that not only do the Yaqui not make use of hallucinogens in their rituals, Don Juan himself never tells Castaneda a single Yaqui name -- not one -- for any plant, animal, place, or thing they see.  Then there's the difficulty pointed out by anthropologist Hans Sebald, of Arizona State University, that Castaneda claims he and Don Juan went blithely wandering around in the Sonoran desert in midsummer, often with little in the way of food or water, never once making mention any discomfort from temperatures that would have hovered around 110 F at midday.

The conclusion of de Mille and others is that Castaneda made the whole thing up from start to finish, and the books are the combination of scraps of esoteric lore he'd picked up in the library at UCLA and his own imagination.  There was no Don Juan, no Don Genaro, no glow-in-the-dark coyote that spoke to the author at the end of Ixtlan.  Distressing, then, that de Mille's rebuttals -- which were published in 1976 and 1980, respectively -- didn't stop Castaneda from amassing a huge, and devoted, following. He founded a cult called "Tensegrity" which alleged to teach the acolyte the secrets of how to see Don Juan's alternate reality. He surrounded himself with a group of women called "the nagual women" (unkinder observers called them the "five witches") who did his bidding -- Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Patricia Partin, Amalia Marquez, and Kylie Lundahl -- all of whom vanished shortly after Castaneda died of liver cancer in 1998.  There's been no trace discovered of any of them except for Partin, whose skeleton was discovered in Death Valley in 2006, but it's thought that all five committed suicide after their leader died.

So what began as a hoax ended up as a dangerous cult. Castaneda seems to have started the story as a way of pulling the wool over the eyes of his advisers in the anthropology department at UCLA (it worked, given that Journey to Ixtlan is essentially identical to his doctoral dissertation), but as so often happens, fame went to his head and he moved from telling tall tales about an alleged Yaqui shaman to using the people who bought into his philosophy as a way to get money, sex, and power.

And it can be imagined how pissed off this makes actual Native Americans.  Castaneda hijacked and mangled their beliefs into something unrecognizable -- placing his books in with Seven Arrows as yet another way that non-Natives have appropriated and misrepresented Native culture.  (If you've not heard about Seven Arrows, by Hyemeyohsts Storm, it's a mystical mishmash containing about 10% actual facts about the Cheyenne, and 90% made-up gobbledygook.  Storm himself -- his actual first name is Arthur -- claims to be half Cheyenne and to have grown up on the reservation, but the Cheyenne tribal authorities say they've never heard of him.)

What's saddest about all of this is that Castaneda could have simply written "fiction" after the title of his books, and they'd have lost nothing in impact.  It's not that fiction has nothing to teach us, gives us no inspiration, doesn't consider the profound.  In fact, I would argue that some of the most poignant lessons we learn come from the subtexts of the fiction we read.  (I have tried to weave that into my own writing, especially my novel Sephirot, which is about one man's Hero's Journey placed in the context of Jewish mystical lore.)

But instead Castaneda lied to his readers.  There's no kinder way to put it.  He told us that it was all real.  Not content with writing an excellent work of inspirational fiction, he instead is relegated to the ignominious ranks of clever hoaxers.  (Or at least should be; de Mille says there are still lots of college classes in which Castaneda's books are required reading, and not as an example of an anthropological hoax, but as real field work in ethnology and belief.)

So however entertaining, and even inspiring, his books are, the whole thing leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.  In short, truth matters.  And the fact is, Carlos Castaneda was nothing more than a sly and charismatic liar.

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Saber-toothed tigers.  Giant ground sloths.  Mastodons and woolly mammoths.  Enormous birds like the elephant bird and the moa.  North American camels, hippos, and rhinos.  Glyptodons, an armadillo relative as big as a Volkswagen Beetle with an enormous spiked club on the end of their tail.

What do they all have in common?  Besides being huge and cool?

They all went extinct, and all around the same time -- around 14,000 years ago.  Remnant populations persisted a while longer in some cases (there was a small herd of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Aleutians only four thousand years ago, for example), but these animals went from being the major fauna of North America, South America, Eurasia, and Australia to being completely gone in an astonishingly short time.

What caused their demise?

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is The End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals, by Ross MacPhee, which considers the question, and looks at various scenarios -- human overhunting, introduced disease, climatic shifts, catastrophes like meteor strikes or nearby supernova explosions.  Seeing how fast things can change is sobering, especially given that we are currently in the Sixth Great Extinction -- a recent paper said that current extinction rates are about the same as they were during the height of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction 66 million years ago, which wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a great many other species at the same time.  

Along the way we get to see beautiful depictions of these bizarre animals by artist Peter Schouten, giving us a glimpse of what this continent's wildlife would have looked like only fifteen thousand years ago.  It's a fascinating glimpse into a lost world, and an object lesson to the people currently creating our global environmental policy -- we're no more immune to the consequences of environmental devastation as the ground sloths and glyptodons were.

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

The title of this blog post is classified

I think we've all had moments when we were taken in by a prank or a hoax.  Some of them can be pretty clever, and after all, we're only human -- we can't call things correctly all the time.  And when it happens, most of us go, "Wow, what a goober I am!" and laugh a little, and move on -- with, one would hope, a resolution not to fall quite so quickly the next time.

Which is probably why the YouTube video clip that a loyal reader sent me the link to had me torn between guffawing and crying.  Well, not the video itself; the video is a clip from The Onion, that awesome purveyor of satire, about a "Homeland Terrorism Preparedness Bill" (that doesn't exist) being reviewed by a Representative John Haller of Pennsylvania (who doesn't exist).

What had me twitching were the comments.

Yes, yes, I know, never read the comments section.  I broke the cardinal rule. And now that I've done so, I'm even more worried that we might re-elect Donald Trump for president, because the majority of the commenters appear to be walking, talking, computer-owning, voting Americans who have the IQ of a peach pit.

First, though, let's see what "Representative Haller" had to say:

Congress shall now vote for approval of HR 8791, the Homeland Terrorism Preparedness Bill, as said bill requests emergency response funding up to and including... I'm sorry, this section is classified ... dollars to prepare for a national level terrorist attack and/or attack from CLASSIFIED.  Funding for first responder personnel and vehicles would be doubled if said attack leads to more than 80% of national population being affected by CLASSIFIED.  This funding shall commence with the first attack on CLASSIFIED or the first large-scale outbreak of CLASSIFIED, dependent upon which comes first.  Civilian and military units shall be trained in containment and combat of CLASSIFIED including irradiated CLASSIFIED with possibility of CLASSIFIED airborne CLASSIFIED flesh-eating CLASSIFIED, and/or all of the above in such event as CLASSIFIED spewing CLASSIFIED escape, are released, or otherwise become uncontrollable.

Air Force units may also be directed to combat said CLASSIFIED due to their enormous size and other-worldly strengths.  Should event occur in urban areas...  [*horrified expression*] Jesus, that's... that's CLASSIFIED... far surpassing our darkest nightmares.  Should casualties exceed CLASSIFIED body disposal actions shall be halted and associated resources shall be reallocated to CLASSIFIED underground CLASSIFIED protected birthing centers.  A new Bill of Rights shall be drafted and approved by CLASSIFIED.

Having now reviewed the bill, I ask you to please cast your votes.

Okay, please reassure me; having heard that, you would immediately know that it was fake.  Right?  Right?

Apparently, "wrong."  Here's a comment that appears on the video link:

If you have any intelligence at all or if you are just "awake" you can easily enough fill in the blanks "classified"  Hmmm..  He is basically talking about radiation and disease(s) outbreak and containment, underground facilities and the general population which will evidently be gradually eradicated!  Better get your house in order, light your Lamp and have PLENTY of OIL this is going to be a long, tedious ride until Jesus comes back!  We don't know when, ONLY The Father knows so we should be ready AT ALL TIMES but these things happen FIRST, BEFORE He gets back, so you need to stay ready and "endure" with all you've got!  Remember Jesus IS The ONLY Way!  ~Heads UP!

Well, someone sensible responded to that, to wit:

This was fake video made by The Onion.  Look at the logo in the lower right corner.  Get a grip on reality.

Remember my opening paragraph, about going, "Wow, how silly of me! I got fooled!"  Well, here's the followup comment.  Spelling and grammar are as written, because you can only add [sic] so many times:

It could be a fake, or maybe the onion logo is a replacement over the real logo.  maybe somebody tampering with the video to make its seem like a fake and someone got their hands on it.  The onion logo could be a cover up scheme who knows...  But I will say this, all around us there is blood being shed, crazy earth quakes, murder, war, lies, the death toll is off the chain.  muslims cut the heads off of little children and dance around with the corpses, evil media and music, promotion of violence adultery sexual immorality and greed.  Things are so bad it just is not funny anymore.  Rape is at an all time high and everywhere I turn I see gay people !!!  yo mad people are gay its freaking crazy.  yo we got dudes popping other dudes and little boys in the butt 24/7 365. the immorality these day is off the charts.  anybody who thinks things are ok today has a nothing in between the ear.  you gotta be real stupid not to see that something huge is going to happen.

So evidently I'm one of the ones who has a nothing in between the ear, because I am certain it's a fake.  Look up the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.  There is no Representative John Haller.  That alone should be enough, wouldn't you think?

At least one guy agrees with me:

Fuck's sake, people. It's satire.  The Onion, you know?  Satire?  Meaning fake?  Hello? 

But he was immediately shouted down by the likes of the following rocket scientist:

I think it's quite funny that the majority of those saying this is fake all have blank profiles almost as if they were created just to argue the legitimacy of this video...

And the following:

Sounds like they have a plan if theirs a biological outbreak they mite of created something that can be air born and something about flesh eating hmm and if this is true some one must of got their hands on it and preparing in chase they release it on the public for some reason zombie popping in my head head there experimenting rabbits on people and that theirs a part in your brain that could make you so violent that your almost like a ghoul.

Yes!  That's it!  Zombie popping in your head head there experimenting rabbits on people so your almost like a ghoul!  Why didn't I think of that as an explanation?  It's brilliant!

So you see why I don't have a lot of trust in the citizenry of the United States, and their ability to vote in leaders that aren't batshit insane?

We have people here who, even when given repeated reassurances that a video that is obviously a fake is, well, a fake, they still insist that it must all be a giant conspiracy to keep them in the dark about ghouls and radiation and diseases and underground facilities and the Second Coming of Christ.

Whenever I think I've plumbed the absolute depth of idiocy, I find that there are deeper wells that I have yet to explore.  As the quote attributed to Einstein puts it: "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

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

One of my favorite TED talks is by the neurophysiologist David Eagleman, who combines two things that don't always show up together; intelligence and scientific insight, and the ability to explain complex ideas in a way that a layperson can understand and appreciate.

His first book, Incognito, was a wonderful introduction to the workings of the human brain, and in my opinion is one of the best books out there on the subject.  So I was thrilled to see he had a new book out -- and this one is the Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week.

In Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, Eagleman looks at the brain in a new way; not as a static bunch of parts that work together to power your mind and your body, but as a dynamic network that is constantly shifting to maximize its efficiency.  What you probably learned in high school biology -- that your brain never regenerates lost neurons -- is misleading.  It may be true that you don't grow any new neural cells, but you're always adding new connections and new pathways.

Understanding how this happens is the key to figuring out how we learn.

In his usual fascinating fashion, Eagleman lays out the frontiers of neuroscience, giving you a glimpse of what's going on inside your skull as you read his book -- which is not only amusingly self-referential, but is kind of mind-blowing.  I can't recommend his book highly enough.

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

Defeating the trolls

I'm a firm believer in the idea that most people, most of the time, are trying as hard as they can to do the right thing.

Yes, we often differ about what that right thing is.  Yes, sometimes we try and fail.  But my point is, we are usually working to do the best we can for ourselves and our loved ones.

But.

There is a minority of people who, to put it bluntly, are assholes.  These are the people who can't stand it if others get recognition, are furious when their pet ideas turn out to be wrong, or are simply spiteful and nasty.  And that ugly minority can, unfortunately, be extremely loud at times.

Look at what happened last week to Dr. Katie Bouman, the astrophysicist who spearheaded the project to generate the world's first actual photograph of a black hole.

You'd think that anyone with a scientific bent would have been thrilled, both for her and because of the extraordinary image she helped create.  And honestly, most of us were.  But there was a handful of trolls who couldn't stand the fact that she was getting accolades for her work -- and that she showed great modesty in highlighting the work of the rest of her team.

"No one algorithm or person made this image," Dr. Bouman wrote.  "It required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat.  It has been truly an honor, and I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you all."

So said trolls decided that this was Dr. Bouman's way of admitting she really hadn't had much to do with the research, and set out to destroy her reputation.

Fake Twitter accounts and YouTube channels started popping up, all with the aim of casting doubt on her role in the project.  Many of them focused on her colleague Andrew Chael, who it was implied had done nearly all the research, which was then swiped by Bouman.  Chael himself was having none of it; he posted on Twitter a complete disavowal of the claim, and a demand that the attacks on Dr. Bouman stop.

The trolls then created a fake account in Chael's name and accelerated the nastiness.

Nota bene: if your opinion about something is on such shaky ground that in order to get people to believe it, you have to create a fake Twitter account, impersonate someone else, and then lie outright, you might want to consider whether you're right in the first place.

Twitter, to its credit (a credit that it must be said it often doesn't deserve), pulled the fake accounts as fast as it could, but not before there were thousands of people who had followed them, and tens of thousands of times that the false messages had been retweeted.  As with most false claims, it's damn hard to fix the damage once the claim is out there, regardless of how many times it's debunked, retracted, or deleted.  Witness the ongoing anti-vaxx idiocy, due largely to Andrew Wakefield, whose "studies" were withdrawn and whose work has been shown to be worthless.  Witness "chemtrails," whose genesis was due to a misquoted number on a Louisiana news broadcast.  Witness the ten thousand (literally) public lies Donald Trump has uttered in the last three years.

Undoing all that would be about as easy as putting toothpaste back into a tube.

As far as why anyone would be such a complete dick as to attack Dr. Bouman, most people are attributing it to sexism -- that the trolls couldn't believe that a woman had made such an achievement, and set out to prove that she'd relied on her male colleagues and then stole their glory.  Sadly, this explanation for the trolls' behavior is entirely plausible.  Despite considerable advances, it's still difficult for women to succeed in science.  Consider the 2017 study that showed teams led by women only receive 7% of the total grant money allocations, and a team led by a woman receives on average 40% of the money that a similar project receives if led by a man.  These figures are appalling, even if you take into account that only 17% of working scientists in physics and engineering are female -- the fields with the lowest diversity.

Which is itself appalling.

So this disgusting episode is yet another reason to be careful about what you believe online.  Double, triple, quadruple-check your sources before you pass along links.  That is especially true if the link supports something you're already inclined to believe; we all fall prey to confirmation bias.

Despite all this, I still think that humanity is, in the majority, good.  But being good means you speak up against the ugly minority who are determined to attack, demean, and degrade others.  Defeating the trolls takes an effort by all of us.  To paraphrase Edmund Burke (the paraphrase is to remove the sexist verbiage, the irony of which does not escape me): "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that the good do nothing."

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

Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

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

Beneath the shroud

One of the most revered, and controversial, relics of the Roman Catholic Church has finally been shown to be an unequivocal fake.

The Shroud of Turin has engendered more speculation, criticism, and questioning than any other relic, and that includes things like the skull of Mary Magdalene.  The Shroud is a 4.4 meter long piece of linen cloth with the impression -- it looks very much like a photographic negative -- of a naked man showing the traditional injuries suffered by Jesus Christ during the crucifixion.

I've always suspected it was a fake, but I have to admit, it's a pretty inspired one.  The image is nothing short of creepy in its realism:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's generated incredible devotion -- not least from an Italian firefighter who dashed into the burning Guarini Chapel in 1997 and risked his life to save it.  While church leaders have not come right out and said it's real, they've made statements that amount to the same thing.  In 1958, Pope Pius XII approved reverence of it as "the holy face of Jesus."  More recently, Pope John Paul II called it "a mirror of the Gospel."

The whole thing began to unravel -- literally -- about thirty years ago, when scientists were finally allowed to do radiocarbon analysis on a tiny snippet of the linen cloth, and dated it to between 1260 and 1390 C.E. with 95% confidence.  Oh, but no, the True Believers said; it had more than once been through a fire, and soot would change the C-12 to C-14 ratio and throw off the dating.  Plus, the yellow-brown dye on the cloth was shown through chemical analysis to be older, and the cloth snippet was from a more recent repair job, anyhow.

So back and forth it went, with the skeptics saying the preponderance of evidence supported its being a hoax, and the devout saying it was the real deal.  But now two Italian scientists, Matteo Borrini and Luigi Garlaschelli, have presented a paper at the 66th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences that takes an entirely different approach.

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recognize Garlaschelli's name.  He was the one who back in 2016 did a simple little demonstration of how the miraculous "weeping saints" -- statues of saints that appear to cry real tears -- can be faked.  So he's not a man who would be easy to fool.

And what Borrini and Garlaschelli did was to look at the Shroud through the lens of blood-pattern analysis.  Anyone who's fond of the series CSI probably knows that a trained forensic scientist can tell a lot from blood spatter, and this is no different.  The story goes that Jesus's body was wrapped in the cloth after he died, staining it with blood from his various wounds, and that's what created the image.

But the problem is... gravity.  If he was laid on his back (which seems probable), any blood dripping from the wounds would land on the cloth in a distinct way.  (The same is true, of course, if he was laid on his side, or any which way.)  And what Borrini and Garlaschelli found was that the cloth shows a completely random pattern of blood drips.  On the same side of the cloth, drips appear to be coming from a variety of directions, consistent with... a fake.  A clever, highly artistic fake, but a fake nonetheless.  Borrini and Garlaschelli write:

An investigation into the arm and body position required to obtain the blood pattern visible in the image of the Shroud of Turin was performed using a living volunteer.  The two short rivulets on the back of the left hand of the Shroud are only consistent with a standing subject with arms at a ca 45° angle.  This angle is different from that necessary for the forearm stains, which require nearly vertical arms for a standing subject.  The BPA of blood visible on the frontal side of the chest (the lance wound) shows that the Shroud represents the bleeding in a realistic manner for a standing position while the stains at the back—of a supposed postmortem bleeding from the same wound for a supine corpse—are totally unrealistic.

And yes, you read that right -- they got a volunteer to lie enshrouded in a linen cloth after having nicked his/her wrists to simulate bleeding wounds.  (They didn't, fortunately, flog the poor sucker, or do any of the various other horrible things the Bible says happened to Jesus.)

Hey, all for the good of scientific research, right?

So this should close the book on the Shroud of Turin, but of course it won't.  The Shroud apologists have argued against every other piece of evidence, so I have no doubt that they'll argue against this one, too, especially since Garlaschelli is involved.  The Italian Catholic powers-that-be hate Garlaschelli for his role in the Weeping Mary Caper.  But anyhow, it's good enough for me, and should be good enough for anyone else who is a self-styled skeptic.

But it still leaves me wondering how it was done, because whatever else you can say about the Shroud, it's really realistic.  Take a look at many 14th century paintings of people -- they're stylized, cartoonish, with zero attention to perspective.   This?  It's painfully accurate, down to the last detail.  So say what you will, whoever created this thing had some serious talent.  It's a shame he put it to use creating a fake that has duped people for over six hundred years.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.  [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Nazi coins from the future

In the latest from the "News Stories That Make Me Want To Take Ockham's Razor And Slit My Wrists With It" department, we have a claim about an odd coin allegedly found near a construction site in Mexico.

First, the facts of the situation, insofar as I could find out.

The coin is highly weathered, and has some phrases in both German and Spanish.  It says "Nueva Alemania" ("New Germany," in Spanish) and "Alle in einer Nation" (German for "all in one nation").  There's a swastika on one side and the Iron Cross on the other, and a blurred date ending in "39."  (If you want to see a video that includes shots of the coin, there's a clip at The Daily Star showing it and its finder, Diego Aviles.)

So that's the claim.  Now let's see which of the three possible explanations proffered to account for it makes the most sense to you:

1. It's a fake.
2. It's an obscure coin, dating from the late 1930s, and could be potentially valuable as a historical artifact.
3. The date actually reads "2039," so it's a coin from 21 years in the future, at which point a Nazi state will rule Mexico if not the rest of the world, except that one of the future Nazis time-slipped backwards and dropped the coin, only to be found by Aviles.  Since the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Nazis have been hiding out in Antarctica, from which they will burst out some time between now and 2039, to initiate World War III and take over the entire world.

Yes, apparently there are people who think that explanation #3 is spot-on.  So it's like someone reworded Ockham's Razor to read, "Of competing explanations that account for all of the known facts, the most likely one is the one that requires 5,293 ad-hoc assumptions, breaking every known law of physics, and pretzel logic that only someone with the IQ of a peach pit could think sounded plausible."

But maybe I'm being a little uncharitable, because there are people who add to #3 some bizarre bullshit about it having to do with the "Mandela effect" and parallel universes and alternate realities.

Myself, I'm perfectly satisfied when I can explain things using the regular old reality.  But that's just me.

NOTE: Not the coin they found.  This one's a real Nazi coin.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Over at Mysterious Universe (the first link provided above), Sequoyah Kennedy does a pretty thorough job of debunking the whole thing, ending with the following tongue-in-cheek comment that rivals this post for snark:

Maybe the only explanation is that the Antarctic Nazis develop time travel in the near future, go back in time to the 1930’s, and try to convince the Mexican government to side with them in WWII by giving them a commemorative coin, which won’t work, because that’s a ridiculous and insulting way to forge an alliance.  The commemorative future coin will then be thrown away and left to sit in the dirt until it’s unearthed in 2018.  It’s the only rational explanation, really.

Indeed.  And we should also take into account that the story was broken in The Daily Star, which is the only media source I know that rivals The Daily Mail Fail for sheer volume of nonsense.

So the coin may well exist, but I'm putting my money on "fakery."  Even the idea that it's a real coin from the 1930s doesn't bear much scrutiny, because Mexico and Germany weren't on the same side in World War II, so it'd be pretty bizarre to have some kind of Mexican Nazi currency lying around.

Of course, when the Stormtroopers come roaring out of their secret bases in Antarctica and Cancun, I suppose I'll have to eat my words.  Occupational hazard of what I do.

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

This week's Featured Book on Skeptophilia:

This week I'm featuring a classic: Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  Sagan, famous for his work on the series Cosmos, here addresses the topics of pseudoscience, skepticism, credulity, and why it matters -- even to laypeople.  Lucid, sometimes funny, always fascinating.

Majestic 12, anachronistic typeset, and Cigarette-Smoking Man

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia said, "You haven't yet written about my favorite conspiracy theory -- Majestic 12."  There was a brief moment in which I wondered whether "Majestic 12" might be some kind of sequel to Ocean's Eleven, but then I realized that they've already done that (they're up to what, now, Ocean's Seventeen, or something?), so it had to be something else.

It turns out that Majestic 12 is a code name, which makes it cool right from the get-go.  The story is that during the presidency of Harry Truman, a secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials was formed in order to investigate the Roswell incident and to keep tabs on the aliens.  Since that time, thousands of pages' worth of documents have been "leaked" from this alleged committee, most of them dealing with covert operations by the CIA, and giving highly oblique references to UFO sightings.  A few of the documents have hinted at darker doings -- alliances with evil aliens, and a secret intent to use technology of extraterrestrial provenance to further our military goals and monitor our enemies.

The original members of Majestic 12 were allegedly the following prominent individuals:

• Roscoe Hillenkoetter (first director of the CIA)
• Vannevar Bush (president of the Carnegie Institute, amongst many other titles)
• James Forrestal (Secretary of the Navy)
• Nathan Twining (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)
• Hoyt Vandenberg (Air Force Chief of Staff)
• Robert Montague (Commander of Fort Bliss)
• Jerome Hunsaker (aeronautics engineer at MIT)
• Sidney Souers (first executive secretary of the National Security Council)
• Gordon Gray (Secretary of the Army)
• Donald Menzel (astronomer at Harvard)
• Detlev Bronk (chair of the National Academy of Sciences)
• Lloyd Berkner (prominent physicist)

And because no good conspiracy would be complete without throwing around a few well-known names, the Majestic 12 were supposedly advised by Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, Wehrner von Braun, Albert Einstein, and Cigarette-Smoking Man.

Oh, wait, the last one was fictional.  Silly me.  The problem is, so are the documents.  The FBI has done a thorough investigation of the various Majestic 12 files, and declared them "completely bogus."   Of course, they would say that, claim the conspiracy theorists; the government's response is always "deny, deny, deny."  However, there have been independent studies done, by reasonably objective and disinterested parties (for example, Philip J. Klass, noted UFO skeptic and debunker), and virtually all of them think that the whole thing is a hoax -- probably perpetrated by Stanton Friedman, William Moore, and Jaime Shandera, three UFOlogists who are more-or-less obsessed with the Roswell Incident.  In fact, Moore and Shandera were actually the recipients of some of the Majestic 12 documents -- sent to them by an "anonymous source high up in the government."

How did the skeptics come to the conclusion that the whole thing was a hoax?  One of the main pieces of evidence was the simple, pragmatic matter of how the documents were typed.  In many cases, it's possible to date a document simply by looking at the font, spacing, and ink -- these changed with fair regularity, and even a discrepancy of a couple of years can be enough to prove a document to be fake.  In the case of a number of the Majestic 12 documents, there were font changes and space-justification that were impossible in the late 1940s and 1950s -- the first typewriter capable of this was invented in 1961.

An amusing sidebar: when Philip Klass was investigating the Majestic 12 claim, he offered $1000 to anyone who could produce government documents that had typefaces matching the ones found in the Majestic 12 papers.  Who popped up to claim the prize?  None other than Stanton Friedman, prime suspect as the chief engineer of the hoax.  As skeptic Brian Dunning wrote, "Don't take the bait if you don't want to be hooked."

One of the frustrations with debunking conspiracy theories, though, is that once someone believes that a conspiracy exists, there always is a way to argue away the evidence.  One of the most popular ones is argument from ignorance -- we don't know what the government was doing back then, so they could have been doing anything.  As for the typewriters -- oh, sure, the first typewriter capable of justification (the IBM 72) was released to the public in 1961, but maybe the Big Secret Government Circles had access to it fourteen years earlier.  Who knows?  (And by "who knows?", of course what they mean is "we do.")

And as far as my aforementioned "objective and disinterested" investigators -- in the conspiracy theorists' minds, there is no such thing as an objectivity.  Anyone who argues against the theory at hand is either a dupe, or else a de facto member of the conspiracy.  Between this and the argument from ignorance, there is no way to win.

But wait, you may be saying; what if the government was engaged in covert nasty stuff?  How would you know, given that the government would certainly deny their involvement, claim it was a hoax?   Well, first, I'm sure that the government is, in fact, engaged in covert nasty stuff.  I just don't think this is it.  We fall back on Ockham's Razor yet again -- what is the simplest explanation that adequately accounts for all of the known facts?

So, anyway, I think we can safely say that the Majestic 12 papers are fakes.  Which is, no doubt, exactly what Cigarette-Smoking Man wants us to think, and will make him smile in that skeevy way of his, and walk off into the night until the next episode.