The Vatican time window

In my last post, we looked at a wild story illustrating the general principle that once some crazy claim gets out there, it's damn near impossible to eradicate.  Today I've got a second one -- a story that I'd heard of a long while ago but just bumped into again yesterday.

The retelling of this particular claim prompted me to roll my eyes so far I could see the back of my own skull, and say, "No way.  This is still making the rounds?"  But of course it's still making the rounds.  Once the rounds are joined, it's permanent.  There is, apparently, no getting off the Wingnut Carousel.

This rather unfortunate conclusion was prompted by a recent article in All That's Interesting, written one Marco Margaritoff, called "The Story of the Chronovisor, the Rumored Vatican Invention That Allows You to See Into the Past."  The bones of the story go as follows.

In 1972, an Italian Catholic priest named Pellegrino Ernetti published an incredible claim in the popular magazine La Domenica del Corriere: that he and a group of scientists had developed a machine that allowed you to witness events from the past.  It was, he said, made of cathode ray tubes, antennae, and wires, and "therefore picks up sound and light signals on all wavelengths."  This is an immediate red flag to anyone who knows some science; there is no configuration of -- well, anything -- that allows absorption (and thus detection) of all possible wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation and sound.  (If there were, it could save NASA a metric fuck tonne of money, because they wouldn't have to have separate x-ray, gamma ray, infrared, microwave, and visible light telescopes.)  But perhaps we can set that aside as hyperbole.

After all, I'm not sure how observing the assassination of Julius Caesar in the x-ray region of the spectrum would be all that useful in any case.

In any case, Ernetti said the whole thing had gotten started twenty years earlier, when he was working with a friend, the Franciscan physician and psychologist Agostino Gemelli, to fix a balky tape recorder they were using for some research.  Gemelli was frustrated by the uncooperative machine, and (half in jest) called out to his deceased father for assistance.  When they replayed the tape, they heard Gemelli's annoyed plea... followed by the answer, "Of course I shall help you.  I'm always with you."

Alarmed, the two men brought this to the attention of the Pope at the time, Pius XII.  The Pope was just tickled by this, because it'd finally be evidence of an afterlife, and convince all of us stubborn doubters.  He encouraged Ernetti and Gemelli to continue their research, but to focus on the paranormal, and see if they could gather more... um, "data."

Fortunately for his reputation, Gemelli died in 1959, but Ernetti kept going.  By 1972, he had developed what he called a Chronovisor -- a machine that because of its amazing ability to detect everything, could pick up the "waves" left as traces from historical events as far back as you want to go.  The alleged science behind all this never got much beyond that; ineffable impressions still bouncing around the place somehow, that could be detected and amplified.

Because scientific types were already lining up with their objections about how impossible this is, Ernetti brought out the big guns.  He had been assisted in building the Chronovisor, he said -- by none other than Enrico Fermi and Wehrner von Braun!  (Fermi was long dead by then, and von Braun desperately ill with terminal cancer, so neither of them were in a position to contradict him.)

And, Ernetti insisted, he'd tried out his magic machine.  He had witnessed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, heard a speech by Cicero from the great man's own mouth ("How powerful it was!" Ernetti gushed,"what flights of oratory!"), watched a performance of the lost dramatic masterpiece Thyestes by Quintus Ennius, and even witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus.

Oh, and I've got proof, Ernetti added.  Because my device allows any kind of light to be captured, it also takes photographs!  (In the words of the 1970s infomercials, it probably also slices, dices, and makes julienne fries.)  As evidence, he brought out a pic of Jesus on the cross:

Well, it wasn't long before someone started casting about for what this was actually a photograph of, because nobody who wasn't already convinced was buying that this was actually Jesus himself.  And pretty soon they found out it was a close-up of a postcard from the gift shop of the Sanctuaire de l’Amour Miséricordieux, near Todi, Italy, depicting the face of a wooden sculpture by Spanish sculptor Coullaut Valera.

Despite this rather damning revelation, throughout his life Ernetti maintained that his machine was real.  Demands to bring it out for scientific study, though, were categorically refused.  Ernetti claimed that the powers-that-be at the Vatican had decreed it should be kept secret.  "Pope Pius XII forbade us to disclose any details about this device because the machine was very dangerous," Ernetti said.  "It can restrain the freedom of man."

Why witnessing historical events would "restrain freedom" is beyond me, given that historical events by definition have already happened, but maybe it's one of those theological things that is a bit outside my wheelhouse.

Then, according to one of his relatives, shortly before his death in 1994, Ernetti suddenly reversed course and admitted that the entire thing had been a hoax from beginning to end.  There had been no collaboration with Fermi and von Braun, the quotes he brought back from Thyestes were written by him, and the Jesus photo and other such artifacts were faked.  "I was hopeful that my Chronovisor would work," he said.  "I was always so optimistic."

Which is an odd thing to say, isn't it?  I mean, if you know you're faking evidence, it seems like you've already given up on getting any actual evidence.  But the human mind is pretty good at holding two or more mutually exclusive convictions at the same time, so perhaps this isn't as unusual as it might seem.

And the problem, of course, is that Ernetti never publicly confessed; all we have is the word of his relatives who spoke with him as he was dying.  The people who'd believed his story simply disbelieved in his sudden deathbed confession.

But even so, I don't see how anyone could dispute that the quality of the evidence is, to put not too fine a point on it, abysmal.  A bunch of handwaving about magical super-absorptive metals that pick up magical traces of historical events that conveniently have never been detected by anyone else, and the only thing we actually have in hand is a couple of photographs that are obvious fakes.

But the astonishing thing is that now, over fifty years later, there are still people who believe this.  There are even claims that the FBI and CIA here in the United States have used Ernetti's design for remote viewing and information-gathering.  As far as the Margaritoff article, it says the Chronovisor "remains a Vatican mystery," and its reality is still "hotly contested."

The thing is, the only reason it is still hotly contested is because of articles like this that take it seriously, and do a both-sides-ism thing with the evidence for and against, as if the skeptics and believers are somehow on an equal footing.

And in this case, they're very much not.  Whether Ernetti had a last-minute change of heart or not, his claim is (1) scientifically ridiculous, (2) lacking in any kind of convincing evidence, and (3) rest upon the statement of one man who said, basically, "No, I really did this, I swear!" and threw around names like Pope Pius XII and a couple of famous physicists to give himself more credibility.

So the Chronovisor is a complete non-starter, and I would very much appreciate it if everyone would treat it as such.

In any case, there you have it.  The tale of the Vatican time window.  Yet another example of the principle that once you launch a loony claim, we'll never be rid of it.  Jesus himself said that "the poor are always with us" (not that I heard him say it personally, mind you), but I think we can safely add, "... as will the hoaxers."

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One story, two ways

After fifteen years of writing here at Skeptophilia, one thing that never fails to amaze me is how little it takes to get a crazy claim going -- and that afterward, it's nearly impossible to eradicate.

The reason for the latter is, I think, a variety of factors.  First, there's the undeniable fact that the outré explanations are nearly always way more interesting than the prosaic ones, and the result is the Fox Mulder Effect:

I must admit, a wee bit shame-facedly, to having experienced this myself.  I went through an unfortunate period in my college years and early twenties when I wanted desperately for stuff like Tarot card divination, precognitive dreams, various cryptids, and past lives to be true, and read books on the topics voraciously.  Eventually -- and fortunately -- better sense, training in scientific skepticism, and an innate drive toward honestly won the day, and I gave it all up as a bad job.  Not, of course, without some pangs of regret.  That our lives were subject to mystical, ineffable powers, that magic was in some sense real -- well, the draw was powerful.  Today I might rail against the true believers who still fall for such attractive fictions, but at the same time, I understand them all too well.

Second, there's the sunk-cost effect -- that once you've put a lot of time and energy into promoting an idea, it's tempting to stick with it even once you know it's a losing battle (partly explaining how there are still significant numbers of people desperately clinging to Donald Trump's sinking ship).  Admitting that you were wrong, or -- worse -- that you were bamboozled can be profoundly embarrassing.

Third, as we've seen here many times before, once the seed of an idea is planted, expunging it is about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  It remains in our memories like some sort of insidious post-hypnotic suggestion.  This is especially true if you keep running into it over and over, something that social media has made a hundred times worse.  As the (probably apocryphal) quote from Joseph Goebbels says, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, eventually people will believe it."

I think you can come up with a few modern examples of this principle without my prompting.

But to take a less emotionally-charged instance of all this, today let's look at the strange tale of the three-thousand-year-old cellphone.  I'll tell the story two different way, and see which appeals to you.

In about 1300 C.E., in the ruins of an ancient Babylonian city in what is now Iraq, a historian found a strange-looking artifact:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Karl Weingärtner (User:Kalligrafiemonk), Babylonokia, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Naturally enough, seven hundred years ago they had no idea what the strange object was.  The writing in the ovals, and the inscription at the top, though, they recognized as clearly cuneiform, a script consisting of wedge-shaped impressions, originally made using the triangular ends of reed stems.  Cuneiform is most commonly associated with Sumerian, a linguistic isolate, but was adapted for use by a number of other unrelated languages in the region, including Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, and Urartian.  Because some of these languages even now are only partially understood, the finder of the artifact knew only that it was some kind of ancient script, but not what the symbols meant.

Today, though, the object takes on a much greater, and stranger, significance.  It's been dated to the thirteenth century B.C.E., and investigated by archaeologists (who later covered up their findings because of how earthshattering the conclusions were).  But the information was leaked, picked up by a site called Paranormal Crucible, and used to support an astonishing claim: the ancient Babylonians had modern technology -- including something very like a cellphone.

Cue the Ancient Astronauts crowd experiencing multiple orgasms.

Okay, now let's do the story a different way.

In 2012 a German artist named Karl Weingärtner created a piece of art out of clay that looked like a mobile phone with cuneiform buttons.  He made it, he said, as a reaction to the negative effects of global information technology after visiting an exhibition at Berlin's Museum of Communication called From the Cuneiform to the SMS: Communication Once and Today.  Weingärtner posted an image of the (initially untitled) piece on Facebook as part of a promotion of his art, and one of his followers promptly christened it the Babylonokia.

Well, once an image is online, it's damn near impossible to stop people from downloading it and then doing what they want to with it.  And that's exactly what happened.  Someone grabbed the photo and reposted it -- claiming that it was a real three-thousand-year-old artifact from ancient Mesopotamia.

Thing is, very few people can read Sumerian (or Akkadian etc.), so almost nobody could see that the symbols themselves were meaningless, vaguely cuneiform-like scribbles.  I'm reminded of the absolutely cringe-worthy thing going around -- I've even heard of it being used in elementary school classrooms as a "multicultural lesson" -- where you "convert your name to Japanese characters" by some bogus one-to-one correspondence between hiragana and the English alphabet, which doesn't even try to get close to how sounds are expressed in the Japanese language.  Weingärtner, of course, wasn't simply being a blithering insular bigot the way the Japanese character people are, but was making an (entirely different) point about the ubiquity of technology.

And in any case, there are very few Sumerians still around who might be offended.

Conclusion: there are no three-thousand-year-old cellphones.  The person who lifted Weingärtner's image and reposted it as an actual artifact was, to put not too fine a point on it, lying.  The ones coming afterward who believed it are simply gullible, or else have been reading too much Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock.

Which, now that I come to think of it, are kind of the same thing.

The problem is, you can see why the first version of the story has real sticking power, and the second one doesn't.  There are still people using Weingärtner's clay cellphone as evidence that advanced technology existed in the distant past, and the photo shows up regularly on websites devoted to Ancient Astronauts and "unsolved mysteries," lo unto this very day.

Further evidence that once a claim gets out there, there's no getting it back.  And that, as the Rock Man from Harry Nilsson's The Point said, "You see what you wanna see, you hear what you wanna hear."

So when you run into a claim like this, just keep your rational facilities engaged, okay?  I mean, I get why weird explanations are appealing.  I've been there, and in some ways, I'm still there.  I just feel like it's more important to find the real answer, you know?  As Carl Sagan put it, "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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The strange case of the talking mongoose

This week we've been dealing with some pretty heavy topics, so I thought today I'd lighten things up by telling you about a strange incident in the village of Dalby, on the Isle of Man, in the 1930s.

In September of 1931, the Irving family -- James and Margaret, and their thirteen-year-old daughter Voirrey -- started hearing strange noises from the walls.  At first it was just furtive scratching and rustling, but soon they could discern words.  James and Voirrey made some attempt to speak to whatever-it-was, but were alarmed one evening when James said, "What in the name of God can he be?" and heard a high-pitched, thin voice repeat those words back in a singsong fashion. 

I was immediately (and unfortunately) reminded of Brown Jenkin, the mocking, squeaky-voiced demonic familiar of the evil Keziah Mason in the H. P. Lovecraft short story "Dreams in the Witch-House."  But unlike Brown Jenkin, who would happily bite your toes off as you slept, the creature in the Irving house apparently intended them no harm.  Eventually they were able to coax out a small furry animal that was somehow sentient, and (conveniently) spoke English.  It introduced itself as Gef (pronounced "jeff"), and said -- I shit you not -- that it was a mongoose who had been born in New Delhi, India in 1852.

How he got from India to the Isle of Man was never clarified, but after all, that's hardly the only weird thing about this story.

Voirrey reported that Gef was "the size of a rat," but had yellow fur and a bushy tail.  She also claimed -- and her father backed her up -- that Gef had told them that he was "an extra extra clever mongoose," but also that he was "an earthbound spirit" and "a ghost in the form of a weasel," although it's hard to see how he could be all three simultaneously.  He also told Voirrey, "I am a freak.  I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me you'd faint, you'd be petrified, mummified, turned into stone or a pillar of salt!"

Supposedly she saw him many times, and none of those things happened to her, so I'm inclined to take his pronouncements with a grain of salt.

Once folks found out about the Irvings' claims, naturally the questions started coming.  It was nothing to worry about, James insisted; Gef had already shown himself to be helpful, doing things like warning them when strangers were on the property, waking family members when they overslept, and even once putting out the fire in the stove when it had inadvertently been left burning after the family retired for the night.  For myself, I'd have been less worried about Gef's usefulness than establishing that he actually existed, but apparently most folks in the area just shrugged and said, "Huh.  A magical talking mongoose.  How about that," and went on about their business.

A few, though, wanted more evidence (fancy that!), and the Irvings were happy to oblige.  More than one person who visited them heart Gef's voice, and some saw signs like a pair of yellow eyes staring at them from underneath a bed.  But the Irvings seemed unperturbed, and said they were perfectly happy having Gef live with them, and rewarded him by leaving out chocolate, bananas, and biscuits for him to eat.

Then, neighbors began to claim they'd actually seen Gef, too.  Two teenagers corroborated the yellow fur and bushy tail, and a villager named George Scott made a drawing of him:

What astonishes me about all this is how seriously people took it.  A few people called it out as a hoax -- one claimed that it was thirteen-year-old Voirrey's doing, that she was an accomplished ventriloquist and had hoodwinked her parents (and everyone else).  Voirrey heatedly denied this, and in fact was still denying it shortly before she died in 2005 at the age of eighty-seven.

But the reports got the attention of the psychic investigators, and that's when the story really exploded.  Harry Price got involved -- you may recall his name from my posts about the haunting of Borley Rectory and the odd story of the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall -- and this brought Gef into the public eye.  Price is kind of a notorious figure in the history of psychic investigation, because even the True Believer types have to admit that his approach was a little sketchy, with veracity often taking a back seat to publicity.  And even Price was suspicious about Gef.  The house, he said, was like "one great speaking-tube, with walls like sound boards.  By speaking into one of the many apertures in the panels, it should be possible to convey the voice to various parts of the house."  Price had also made plaster casts of pawprints supposedly left behind by Gef, and sent them to zoologist Reginald Innes Pocock of the Natural History Museum, and Pocock came back with the rather unsatisfying answer that the prints may have come from a dog, but they definitely hadn't been made by a mongoose, talking or not.

The fact that the Irvings couldn't even get Price on their side was significant.  The somewhat more reliable Nandor Fodor, of the Society for Psychical Research, actually stayed in the Irving house for three weeks and saw no evidence of Gef.  He speculated that James Irving may have suffered from dissociative personality disorder, and had orchestrated the hoax, using Gef to give voice to a fragment of his psyche.

Despite all this, the Irvings stuck by their story.  Gef was real, they said, not a hoax, regardless what anyone thought.

James Irving died in 1945, and Margaret and Voirrey were forced to sell the house at a loss -- its reputation for being haunted evidently reduced its appeal to potential buyers.  The next owner, one Leslie Graham, reported that he'd shot and killed Gef, and displayed a body of a furry animal -- but it was black-and-white, and larger than Gef's reported size.

"That's not Gef," Voirrey said.

Naturally, I'm inclined to think the whole thing was a hoax right from the start -- whether by James or Voirrey is unclear.  But what's striking about the case is how many people bought into it.  You would think that if somebody in your town said, "Oh, by the way, I have an eighty-year-old talking yellow mongoose living in my walls, but it's all cool because he does chores for us as long as we feed him biscuits," everyone would kind of back away slowly, not making any sudden moves, and do what they could to get the person professional help.

Oddly, that didn't happen.  After the first flurry of investigations and news articles died down, life pretty much continued the same as before.  There was some increase in tourism from people who wanted to see Gef's house, but even that waned as the years passed.  Voirrey took in stride her connection to the Case of the Talking Mongoose, and seemed, on the whole, unembarrassed by it -- and also, never admitted it was a hoax.

So that's our strange tale for the day.  Hopefully a mood-lightener after some of the darker explorations of the week.  Since finding out about Gef, I've been listening for rustling in the walls of my own house, and... nothing.  Just as well.  The last time I heard something like that it turned out to be a family of red squirrels in our attic, which took forever to get rid of.  I don't know what I'd do if we had to deal with a talking mongoose.

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Gravitational blink

To end the week on an appropriately surreal note: no, the Earth will not "lose its gravity" for seven seconds on August 12.

I found out about this rumor, currently making the rounds on social media, from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  The whole thing apparently started with a video posted on Instagram by user @mr_danya_of; the video was subsequently removed, but not before it was reshared thousands of times, downloaded, and posted all over the place.  The claim is that there were gravitational waves emitted from two different black holes equidistant from the Earth, and that they are 180 degrees out of phase with each other, so where they intersect -- here, evidently -- they'll undergo destructive interference.  The result is that it will "cancel Earth's gravity" for the seven seconds it takes them to pass by us, and we all need to, I dunno, make sure everything is tied down securely or something, because otherwise it's going to cause huge amounts of death and destruction.

Whoo.  Okay.  Where do I start?

First of all, the information was alleged to come from NASA (of course), from something called "Project Anchor."  Which doesn't exist.  Of course, over at NASA they would say that, wouldn't they?  So let's move on to a few other, harder-to-argue-with objections.

Second, according to the General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, whereof nothing travels faster, remember?  So if there were gravitational waves headed toward us from a black hole (let alone two of them), we wouldn't have any way of knowing about it ahead of time.  Now, you might be thinking, what about the gravitational waves that have been detected by the interferometer array LIGO?  Well, there, we knew there were two neutron stars that had been orbiting each other and were about to merge, so all we had to do was watch until it happened.  (Okay, I'm making it sound simple; in practice it was a lot more complicated than this, but the point is we did have some advance warning in that case.)  Here, we just supposedly have black holes out there emitting gravitational waves for some undisclosed reason, and we've somehow found out about this eight months ahead of their arrival, which Einstein says is impossible, and on the whole I'm inclined to side with Einstein over "mr_danya_of."

Third, what was immediately obvious is that whoever is taking this seriously has no idea how destructive interference actually works.  Simply put, destructive interference occurs where two waves in the same medium intersect in such a way that the crest of one wave overlaps the trough of the other.  At that point, their amplitudes will cancel.  Here, supposedly these two gravitational waves are exactly 180 degrees out of phase, so they'd cancel completely wherever they intersect.

But if that happened, what we'd see is... nothing.  If the two waves did completely cancel, the result at that point would be an amplitude of zero.  In other words, they'd be undetectable.  This would not somehow "erase Earth's gravity."

Fourth, the Earth's diameter is about 0.04 light seconds, so if a gravitational wave or two passed across us, that's how long the effect would last.  How this person came up with seven seconds as a plausible time duration for something traveling at the speed of light, I have no idea.

Fifth, the gravitational field of the Earth at a given distance is dependent on only one thing: its mass.  As long as the Earth's mass doesn't change, the strength of the field won't, either, regardless how it's jostled by gravitational waves (or anything else).

Sixth, what the actual fuck?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons AllenMcC., GravityPotential, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I mean, it's a good thing the Earth's gravity isn't going to disappear, even for seven seconds.  If you, unlike the people posting this story, passed high school physics, you may recall that the reason we're all happily glued to the Earth's surface is the pull of gravity -- and without it, Newton's First Law (an object experiencing no unbalanced forces continues at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant velocity) takes over.  We're all right now moving at a good clip -- at the Equator, about 1,670 kilometers an hour -- but our tendency to fly off is counterbalanced by the centripetal (center-pointing) pull of gravity.  If gravity suddenly disappeared, we'd continue moving at our original speed, but tangent to the circle we're currently traveling in.  The Earth, presumably unperturbed, would continue to rotate out from underneath us, and when the gravity switched back on seven seconds later, we (and everything else not moored) would come crashing back down.

I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation for my own latitude, just shy of halfway between the Equator and the North Pole, and found that in seven seconds unsecured objects traveling tangent to the Earth's surface would end up about twenty centimeters up in the air.  Falling back to Earth from that height would be a bit of a jolt, and no doubt the sudden change in stress would damage some buildings, but it's far from the carnage mr_danya_of and others are claiming.

But to reassure you that you have no cause for concern, even in that regard... no, NASA isn't "94.7% certain" that the Earth's gravity is going to blink for seven seconds on August 12.  There is no such thing as Project Anchor.  Gravitational waves, and in fact waves in general, do not work this way.  We have far more important things to worry about right now, such as trying to figure out what country FIFA Peace Prize Winner Donald Trump is going to declare war on next.

If you see anyone posting hysterical nonsense about how NASA Admits We're All Gonna Die In August, you should definitely inform them that this is complete horseshit, and suggest that maybe at least reading the Wikipedia pages about the relevant physics concepts might be a good idea before publicly humiliating themselves by pretending they understand science.

So anyway, there you have it.  To the friend who sent me the link, thanks just bunches for further reducing my already-abysmal assessment of humanity's overall intelligence.  Me, I'm going to go back to fretting about real stuff.  Not that this is productive either, mind you.  But at least it's better than making shit up so you have additional imaginary stuff to fret about.

Even I am not that neurotic.

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Sleight-of-hand

Some time ago, I wrote a post about the (in)famous sort-of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, author of bestsellers like The Teachings of Don Juan and Journey to Ixtlan.  Castaneda was, to put not too fine a point on it, a charlatan, who invented a pastiche of supposed Indigenous Mexican beliefs involving a "separate reality" that could be accessed by using hallucinogenic plants.  He got filthy rich from it, amassing a cultlike following of people who wanted to tap into this alleged source of esoteric wisdom.

He was also a fine storyteller.  In fact, in my high school and college days, I was taken in for a time.  There was something compelling about the tales he told.  And in my post, I concluded that it was a pity he didn't just admit up front they were fiction.  They'd have lost nothing in their vividness and impact -- and we wouldn't be in the horrid situation where there are still college anthropology courses where Castaneda's work is taught as legitimate scholarly work in ethnology and indigenous religious studies.

Put simply, truth matters.  It might seem sad that the universe isn't set up so as to include glowing coyotes who visit you and have conversations wherein you learn eternal wisdom, but I'm much more inclined to agree with my grandma, who observed, "Wishin' don't make it so."

What I didn't know when I wrote the Castaneda piece, however, is that this is far from the first time this sort of literary bait-and-switch has happened, and taken in large numbers of people who you'd think would have known better.  And this brings us to the Scottish poet James Macpherson.

Macpherson was born in Ruthven in 1736.  His youth was a turbulent time in his home country.  The disastrous Battle of Culloden happened when he was ten years old.  This was followed by the horrifying "Highland Clearances," during which the victorious British leaders did their damndest to break the Scottish clan system, forcing the immigration of tens of thousands of Highlanders to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.  This undoubtedly ignited nationalistic fervor and cultural pride in the young Macpherson; after spending a good ten years in hiding, he attended the University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh, where he became obsessed with Scottish folklore, history, mythology, and poetry.

In 1760 and 1761, he published two works -- Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and the more famous epic poem Fingal.  Neither of these, he said, was his own original work; they were translations, the latter from a poem authored (and then passed down orally) by the ancient Scottish poet Oisín (anglicized as Ossian).

Oisín was a bard, Macpherson said, son of another famous poet and musician --  Fionn mac Cumhaill (anglicised to Finn McCool), who was the great-grandson of a druid named Nuadat who was in the service of Cathair Mór, high king of Ireland during the early second century C.E.  So this would have put Oisín (at a guess) some time in the middle of the second century.

And, Macpherson pointed out, there are historical markers in Fingal and his other alleged Oisín-authored poem, Temora, that support this; they mention a Roman emperor named "Caracul" and a commander named "Caros," which Macpherson said line up with the (real) figures of Caracalla (188-217) and Marcus Aurelius Mausaeus Carausius (ca. 250-293).

So if these really did represent an oral tradition, it was pretty astonishing; it had lasted, preserving significant details, for fifteen hundred years.

When Macpherson published his books, they had an incredible impact.  Napoleon, Diderot, and Thomas Jefferson were huge fans; the last-mentioned said that "Ossian was the greatest poet that has ever existed," and that he planned to learn Gaelic so he could read them in the original language.  Thoreau wrote, "The genuine remains of Ossian... are in many respects of the same stamp as the Iliad."  Felix Mendelssohn's symphonic work Fingal's Cave and Niels Gade's tone poem Echoes of Ossian were directly inspired by Macpherson's supposed translations.

The Oisín cycle was also a major influence on the rise of Celticism -- the renewal of interest in all things Celtic, often coupled with dramatic romanticization of the culture of the Celts (something that still hangs around today; consider how many New Age spiritual books claim to have their basis in the teachings of the druids, when in fact we know next to nothing about what the druids and their followers actually believed).

It also was the basis of dozens, possibly hundreds, of works of art:

Ossian Singing by Nicolai Abildgaard (1787) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Not everyone was impressed, however.  English author and polymath Samuel Johnson said the pieces were "forgeries... the grossest imposition as ever the world was troubled with" and called Macpherson "a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud."  When asked, "But Doctor Johnson, do you really believe that any man today could write such poetry?" he replied, "Yes.  Many men.  Many women.  And many children."

This, of course, caused an immediate firestorm in Scotland.  No Englishman could dare utter such words against someone who had become something of a national hero.  The controversy raged for decades, with most of it devolving into "he is too" and "he is not" shouted back and forth across the River Tweed.  It wasn't until the late nineteenth century that blood had cooled sufficiently for someone finally to ask, "Well, what evidence do we have?" and started cross-checking it against other collections that had been made of Scottish oral history, tradition, and folklore.

The upshot: some scraps of the Oisín legends were actually part of the oral tradition in the Scottish Highlands.  (No one doubts, for example, that Fionn mac Cumhaill was a real figure of legend.)  But Fingal, and especially Temora, were mostly an invention by Macpherson himself.

That's not to say they aren't beautiful in their own right.  William Paton Ker, the Scottish-born professor of literary history at Oxford University, said, "all Macpherson's craft as a philological impostor would have been nothing without his literary skill."

But you have to wonder why Macpherson wasn't content to publish them under his own name.  Instead, he stretched the truth to the snapping point; his detractors say outright that he lied.  Did he believe that his work would never receive the publicity it deserved without his attributing it to a legendary authorship?  Or did he want to lend credence to a vision of a quasi-historical time in Scotland when it was powerful, stable, and producing works of timeless beauty?

It's impossible to parse the motivations of someone who's been dead for over two hundred years, but it does strike me as a shame -- just as with Castaneda, what could have been a dramatic and inspiring work of fiction has forever been tarnished because its author falsely claimed it to be true.  (Well, in Macpherson's case, that it was an authentic piece of folklore.)

The truth matters, or it should.  It's easy to condemn those who lie to cover up ugly behavior; what about liars who create wonders?  Even Castaneda, although late in life he succumbed to the desire for power, sex, and money, started out simply creating a fascinating and gripping fictional tale that, shockingly, millions of people ended up believing.

I can't help but find the whole thing sad.  The world is a hard, cold place sometimes, and we need beautiful stories to buoy us up in the all-too-common troubled times.  When the creators of those stories turn out to have engaged in nothing more than literary sleight-of-hand, it feels like a betrayal.

However inventive they are, it's a lie I find very hard to excuse.

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Hoax repair

There's a general rule that once a baseless claim is made, getting people to disbelieve in it is nearly impossible.

This is a pattern the Trump regime has used over and over, from "they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats" to COVID conspiracies to "the libruls are comin' for your guns" to "queer people are all pedophiles" to the endless parade of migrant caravans that conveniently never seem to arrive.  None of them had any factual basis; instead, they appealed to fear and bigotry, reinforced by the perpetual tape-loop of Fox and Newsmax and hate-mongers like Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Loomer.

What always strikes me, though, is that you don't even need to hook into those basic human emotions to get the ball rolling, and once it is rolling, it's damn near impossible to stop.  What you're claiming doesn't even need to make sense.  All it takes is a single sensational claim at the right time, and it can persist for years.

Centuries, even.  Take, for example, the claim that a cave was discovered in 1909 in the Grand Canyon that contained Egyptian artifacts.

The whole thing got started with a front-page story in the Arizona Gazette on 5 April 1909, stating that an immense cave complex was being investigated by a team from the Smithsonian Institution, led by archaeologists G. E. Kincaid and S. A. Jordan.  The cave, the article said, contained "rows of dozens of male mummies," copper and bronze tools, "granaries," and statues with "Buddhist imagery."  This, the article said, provided conclusive proof that Egypt and the American southwest were historically linked.

Well, needless to say -- or maybe I do need to say it, considering what happened afterward -- none of this is true.  For one thing, why we'd expect an ancient Egyptian cave would contain "Buddhist imagery" is beyond me; maybe to your typical early-twentieth-century American, Egypt and India both just fell under the heading of "mysterious and oriental," and that was good enough.  For another, an inquiry into the Smithsonian found no employees named G. E. Kincaid or S. A. Jordan, or anything close, who could be plausibly connected with an archaeological investigation in that time or place.

But none of that mattered.  The situation only got worse when geologist Clarence Dutton was in charge of mapping and naming features of the Grand Canyon, and came up with "Isis Temple" and "Horus Temple" (as well as the Brahma and Vishnu Schists and the Zoroaster Pluton, since we're throwing all the eastern religions together for some reason).  Dutton's choices had zero to do with the Arizona Gazette article -- they were, he said, from a desire to "draw from global mythologies" in naming the features -- but of course, all this did was add fuel to the fire.

So, okay.  We have a hoax from 1909.  What is remarkable is...

... it's still going.

Park rangers, archaeologists, and geologists are still routinely asked about the "Kincaid cave" and if there's a place where tourists can see all the "Egyptian artifacts" that were found in the Grand Canyon.  There are YouTube videos about it -- not as an example of a ridiculous hoax, but of a coverup by the Smithsonian.  (This is often paired with the other thing the Smithsonian is supposedly covering up, which is the discovery of the skeletons of giant humanoids in North America, allegedly the remains of the biblical "giants among men," about which I wrote a few years ago.)

What strikes me about all this is how easy it is to promote misinformation, and that it's nearly impossible to eradicate it once it's out there.  Hell, it doesn't even have to be plausible.  It's astonishing that even back in 1909, when our knowledge of history, archaeology, and science wasn't as robust, anyone could fall for this.  But combine two things with a lot of cachet -- the Grand Canyon and ancient Egypt -- then throw in the added interest of a massive coverup by the scientists, and you have a hoax that has persisted for well over a hundred years.

Which is why it's so absolutely critical to demand the truth right from the outset -- especially in realms where it matters way more than some strange story about ancient Egyptians in Arizona.  Because once people believe a lie, getting them to let it go is remarkably difficult.

And I swear, the first journalist with the guts to say to Karoline Leavitt, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, or Donald Trump himself -- on a live mic in front of an audience -- "What you just said was a bald-faced lie," should be an immediate contender for the Pulitzer Prize.

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Signs and portents

The general rule is that you should always try to rule out all the natural and normal explanations for something before you jump to a supernatural or paranormal one.

It's not, as I've said before, that I think outlandish explanations are necessarily wrong.  For one thing, even science can be an awfully weird place sometimes; just the (extremely well-documented) results of quantum physics and the General Theory of Relativity should be enough to convince you of that much.  Also, whatever your particular favorite flavor of strangeness -- be it aliens, ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, psychic phenomena, or whatever -- I'm not going to say any of it is impossible.  But what I stand by is that if you can find a rational, scientific explanation for something, it's vastly more likely to be true, so you should go there first.

After all, the burden of proof is on the one making the outlandish claim.  Demonstrate that we have something outside of the realm of conventional science, and then we'll talk.

The reason this comes up is because of two claims in the last week of Signs and Portents, one from Colombia and one from India.  The first comes from near the village of Morcá, where a musician named Jimmy Ayala reports coming back from visiting a shrine to the Virgin Mary with his family, and coming across some people who seemed to be praying to a rock outcropping.  He came closer, and found this:

I'm guessing you can tell what it's supposed to be; if not, the inset and arrow in the upper right will help.

The devout apparently consider this a divine message; many are considering it a genuine miracle.  Me, I want to know if anyone's looked closely to see if it was carved with a chisel.  I'm reminded of cases where statues of the Virgin Mary were claimed to "weep holy scented oil," and then when investigators checked it out it turned out that they had a hole drilled in the back (the statues, not the investigators) and were filled with oil, then someone had used a knife to nick the glaze on the inside corner of the eyes so the oil could seep through.

Miracles, apparently, sometimes need a little human help, and I suspect that's what's going on with the rock wall in Colombia.

The second, which occurred in the village of Farabari, India, apparently alarmed the absolute shit out of a number of people, when the following appeared in the clouds:

More than one person was reminded of a scene from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:

Others thought it was a divine omen of evil, or a message from aliens, or had something to do with comet 3I-ATLAS, the last-mentioned of which made me roll my eyes so hard I could see the back of my own head.

So that one is pretty certainly just a case of pareidolia, the common phenomenon where we see faces in inanimate objects.  Our brains are wired to key-in on human faces, pretty much from birth; it's a huge part of the bonding and socialization process.  This can misfire and cause us to think there are faces on tortillas, dirty walls, grilled cheese sandwiches... or on Mars:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The upshot is that I'm not seeing either one of these as a convincing Sign or Portent or whatnot.  Maybe there is some superpowerful being who wants to send us a message sometimes, but it'd be nice if (s)he (1) did so in a less ambiguous fashion, and (2) made it clear what the Sign and/or Portent actually means.  For example, let's say the glowing face in India really is supernatural in origin.  What are we supposed to do about it?  Cower in terror?  Okay, but the thing dissipated completely in about fifteen minutes, so even assuming we cowered for another five minutes or so after that, just to be polite, it's kind of weak.  Repent of our sins?  A fat lot of good that'd do.  Knowing how humanity acts, once the face was no longer glowering at us we'd all be right back to sinning away like usual.

It'd be nice if just for once, the Superpowerful Being would do something big and obvious, like put up a sign in the sky saying, "STOP COVERING UP FOR PEDOPHILES.  NO, I REALLY MEAN IT, JUST STOP."

I wonder what Mike Johnson would do.  Despite his very public belief in an all-powerful God, my guess is that he'd piss his pants and then have a stroke.

But apparently such conspicuous, obvious miracles went out of fashion after the Old Testament times.  Pity, that.

In any case, if you know of a candidate for a genuine miracle, I'm happy to hear about it.  It'd be kind of cool if there was; it'd mean someone more powerful than humans was actually in control.  This would be good news, because at the moment, we humans are doing a pretty piss-poor job of running things.

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Comet redux

Okay, can we all please please puhleeeeeez stop posting stuff without checking to see if it's true?

I know it's a pain in the ass, but this needs to become a habit.  For all of us.  Unless you make a practice of never reposting anything anywhere -- which eliminates most people -- it's got to become an automatic reflex when you're using social media.  Stop before you hit "forward" or "share" or whatnot and take five minutes to verify that it's accurate.

The reason this comes up is something about comet 3I-ATLAS that I've now seen posted four times.  I wrote about 3I-ATLAS here only a couple of weeks ago, and to cut to the chase: the considered opinions of the astronomers who have studied it -- i.e., the people who actually know what the hell they're talking about -- are that the object is an interstellar comet made mostly of frozen carbon dioxide.  Despite the claims of people like Avi Loeb, the alien-happy Harvard astronomer, it shows no sign of being an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

That, of course, isn't sufficient for a lot of people.  Without further ado, here's the image I've seen repeatedly posted:

There is nothing in this image that is accurate, unless you're counting "3I-ATLAS is an interstellar object" and "Japan has a space agency" as being in the "correct" column.  Japan's space agency has released no such "footage."  There are no "precise pulsating lights."  No scientist -- again, with the exception of Loeb and his pals -- are "questioning if it's artificial."

And the object in the image?  That's not 3I-ATLAS.  Jack Gilbert, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, has identified it as a microorganism.  "That is a paramecium," Gilbert writes.  "Freshwater I believe -- although better phase contrast, and where it was found, would be ideal for better identification."

Another image that is making the rounds is from NASA, but it's being used to claim that the 3I-ATLAS has changed direction and speed in a fashion that "indicates some kind of propulsion system."  This shift in trajectory, they say, made the telescope at NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) image alter its aim to keep up with it, resulting in the background stars showing rainbow-colored streaks:

This isn't correct, either.  If you go to NOIRLab's website, you find a perfectly reasonable explanation of the streaks right there, without any reference to propulsion systems and alien spacecraft.  I quote:

Comet 3I/ATLAS streaks across a dense star field in this image captured by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini South at Cerro Pachón in Chile, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF NOIRLab.  This image is composed of exposures taken through four filters -- red, green, blue and ultraviolet.  As exposures are taken, the comet remains fixed in the center of the telescope's field of view.  However, the positions of the background stars change relative to the comet, causing them to appear as colorful streaks in the final image.

Once again, the upshot: 3I-ATLAS is a comet.  That's all.  Of great interest to planetary astronomers, but likely to be forgotten by just about everyone else after March of next year, at which point it will be zooming past Jupiter and heading back out into the depths of space, never to be seen again.  There is no credible evidence it's a spaceship.  If there was, believe me, you would not be able to get the astronomers to shut up about it.  The concept some people have of scientists keeping stuff hidden because they're just that secretive, and don't want anyone to know about their big discoveries, only indicates to me that these people know exactly zero scientists.  Trust me on this.  I know some actual scientists, and every single one of them loves nothing better than telling you at length about what they're working on, even if it's something that would interest 0.00000001% of the humans who have ever lived, such as the mating habits of trench-dwelling tube worms.  If there was strong (or, honestly, any) observation that supported this thing being the ship from Rendezvous With Rama, we'd all know about it.

And after all, if there was evidence out there, the hoaxers wouldn't have to use a photograph of a paramecium to support their bogus claims.

So for fuck's sake, please be careful about what you post.  It took me (literally) thirty seconds to find a site debunking the "Japan space agency" thing.  What I'm asking you to do is usually not in any way onerous.

I mean, really; wouldn't you rather be posting things that are cool, and also true?  There is so much real science to be fascinated and astonished by, you don't need these crazy claims.

And believe me, neither does the internet as a whole.

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Cry me a river

Urban legends often have nebulous origins.  As author Jan Harold Brunvand describes in his wonderful book The Choking Doberman and Other Urban Legends, "Urban legends are kissing cousins of myths, fairy tales and rumors.  Legends differ from rumors because the legends are stories, with a plot.  And unlike myths and fairy tales, they are supposed to be current and true, events rooted in everyday reality that at least could happen...  Urban legends reflect modern-day societal concerns, hopes and fears...  They are weird whoppers we tell one another, believing them to be factual.  They maintain a persistent hold on the imagination because they have an element of suspense or humor, they are plausible, and they have a moral."

It's not that there's anything wrong with urban legends per se.  A lot of the time, we're well aware that they're just "campfire stories" that are meant to scare, amuse, or otherwise entertain, and (absent of any further evidence) are just as likely to be false as true.  After all, humans have been storytellers for a very long time, and -- as a fiction writer -- I'd be out of a job if we didn't have an appetite for tall tales.

When it becomes problematic is when someone has a financial interest in getting folks to believe that some odd claim or another is true.  Then you have unethical people making money off others' credulity -- and often along the way obscuring or covering up outright any evidence to the contrary.  And it's worse still when the guilty party is part of the news media.

Which brings us to The Sun and the legend of the "Crying Boy."

Back in 1985 the British tabloid newspaper The Sun reported that a firefighter in Essex had more than once found undamaged copies of a painting of a crying child in houses that had otherwise been reduced to rubble by fires.  Upon investigation, they said, they found that the painting was by Italian painter Giovanni Bragolin.

If that wasn't weird enough, The Sun claimed they'd found out that Bragolin was an assumed name, and that the painter was a mysterious recluse named Franchot Seville.  Seville, they said, had found the little boy -- whose name was Don Bonillo -- after an unexplained fire had killed both of his parents.  The boy was adopted by a priest, but fires seemed to follow in his wake wherever he went, to the extent that he was nicknamed "El Diablo."  In 1970, the engine of a car the boy was riding in exploded, killing him along with the painter and the priest.

But, The Sun asked, did the curse follow even the paintings of the boy's tragic, weeping face?

It's not a headline, but we can invoke Betteridge's Law, wherein we learn that anything like that phrased as a question can be answered "No."  Further inquiries by less biased investigators found that the story had enough holes to put a Swiss cheese to shame.  There was no Don Bonillo; the model for the little boy was just some random kid.  Yes, Bragolin went by the pseudonym Franchot Seville, but Bragolin was itself an assumed name; the painter's real name was Bruno Amadio, and he was still alive and well and painting children with big sad eyes until his death from natural causes in 1981 at age seventy.

As far as the survival of the painting, that turned out not to be much of a mystery, either.  Bragolin/Seville/Amadio cranked out at least sixty different crying child paintings, from which literally tens of thousands of prints were made and then shipped out to department stores all across southern England.  They sold like hotcakes for some reason.  (I can't imagine why anyone would want a painting of a weepy toddler on their wall, but hey, you do you.)  The prints were made on a heavy compressed cardboard, and then coated with fire-retardant varnish.  Investigators Steven Punt and Martin Shipp actually purchased one of the prints and tried to set it alight deliberately, but the thing wouldn't burn.  The surmise was that when the rest of the house went up in flames, the string holding the frame to the wall burned through and the print fell face-down on the floor, protecting it from being damaged.

Of course, a prosaic explanation like that was not in the interest of The Sun, which survives by keeping sensationalized stories alive for as long as possible.  So no mention was made of Punt and Shipp and the probable explanation for the paintings' survival.  Instead, they repeated the claims of a "curse," and told readers that if they owned a copy of The Crying Boy and wanted to get rid of it, The Sun would organize a public bonfire to destroy the prints forever.

How they were going to accomplish this, given that the whole shtick had to do with the fact that the painting couldn't be burned, I have no idea.  But this evidently didn't occur to the readers, because within weeks The Sun had received hundreds of copies.  A fire was held along the banks of the Thames in which the mailed-in prints were supposedly destroyed, an event about which a firefighter who had supervised the burning said, "I think there will be many people who can breathe a little easier now."

This in spite of the fact that the whole thing had been manufactured by The Sun.  There would have been no widespread fear, no need for people to "breathe uneasily," if The Sun hadn't hyped the claim to begin with -- and, more importantly, ignored completely the entirely rational explanation for the few cases where the painting had survived a house fire.

It's probably unnecessary for me to say that this kind of thing really pisses me off.  Humans are credulous enough; natural conditions like confirmation bias, dart-thrower's bias, and the argument from ignorance already make it hard enough for us to sort fact from fiction.  Okay, The Sun is a pretty unreliable source to start with, but the fact remains that thousands of people read it -- and, presumably, a decent fraction of those take its reporting seriously.

The fact that it would deliberately mislead is infuriating.

The result is that the legend still persists today.  There are online sites for discussing curses, and The Crying Boy comes up all too frequently, often with comments like "I would never have that in my house!"  (Well, to be fair, neither would I, but for entirely different reasons.)  As Brunvand points out in The Choking Doberman, one characteristic of urban legends is that they take on a life of their own.  Word of mouth is a potent force for spreading rumor, and once these sorts of tales get launched, they are as impossible to eradicate as crabgrass.

But what's certain is that we do not need irresponsible tabloids like The Sun making matters worse.

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