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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One hoax, well-toasted

One thing that really torques me is when people say "I did my research," when in fact what they did was a five-minute Google search until they found a couple of websites that agreed with what they already believed.

This is all too easy to do these days, now that any loudmouth with a computer can create a website, irrespective of whether what they have to say is well-thought-out, logical, or even true.  (And I say that with full awareness that I myself am a loudmouth with a computer who created a website.  To be fair, I've always been up front about the fact that I'm as fallible as the next guy and you shouldn't believe me out of hand any more than you do anyone else.  I maintain that the best principle to rely on comes from Christopher Hitchens: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."  This applies to me as well, and I do try my best not to break that rule.)

The problem is, it leaves us laypeople at sea with regards to trying to figure out what (and whom) to believe.  The solution -- or at least, a partial one -- comes with always cross-checking your sources.  Find out where a claim came from originally -- there are all too many examples of crazy ideas working their way up the ladder of credibility, starting out in some goofy publication like The Weekly World News, but being handed off like the baton in some lunatic relay race until they end up in places like Pravda, The Korea Times, and Xinhua.  (Yes, this has actually happened.)

The water gets considerably muddier when you throw Wikipedia into the mix.  Wikipedia is a great example of the general rule of thumb that a source is only as accurate as the least accurate person who contributed to it.  Despite that, I think it's a good resource for quick lookups, and use it myself for that sort of thing all the time.  A study by Thomas Chesney found that experts generally consider Wikipedia to be pretty accurate, although the same study admits that others have concluded that thirteen percent of Wikipedia entries have errors (how serious those errors are is unclear; an error in a single date is certainly more forgivable than one that gives erroneous information about a major world event).  Another study concluded that between one-half and one-third of deliberately inserted errors are corrected within forty-eight hours.

But still.  That means that between one-half and two-thirds of deliberately inserted errors weren't corrected within forty-eight hours, which is troubling.  Given the ongoing screeching about what is and is not "fake news," having a source that could get contaminated by bias or outright falsehood, and remain uncorrected, is a serious issue.

Plus, there's the problem with error sneaking in, as it were, through the back door.  There have been claims that began as hoaxes, but then were posted on Wikipedia (and elsewhere) by people who honestly thought what they were stating was correct.  Once this happens, there tends to be a snake-swallowing-its-own-tail pattern of circular citations, and before you know it, what was a false claim suddenly becomes enshrined as "fact."

Sometimes for years.

As an example, have you heard about the famous Scottish polymath Alan MacMasters, inventor of the electric toaster?

The only known photograph of MacMasters, ca. 1910

It was such a popular innovation that his name became a household word, especially in his native land.  More than a dozen books (in various languages) list him as the popular kitchen appliance's inventor.  The Scottish government's Brand Scotland website lauded MacMasters as an example of the nation's "innovative and inventive spirit."  The BBC cooking show The Great British Menu featured an Edinburgh-based chef creating an elaborate dessert in MacMasters's honor.  In 2018, the Bank of England polled the British public about who should appear on the newly-redesigned £50 note, and MacMasters was nominated -- and received a lot of votes.  A Scottish primary school even had an "Alan MacMasters Day," on which the students participated in such activities as painting slices of toast and building pretend toasters out of blocks.

But before you proud Scots start raising your fists in the air and chanting "Scotland!", let's do this another way, shall we?

Back in 2012, a Scottish engineering student named -- you guessed it -- Alan MacMasters was in a class wherein the professor cautioned students against using Wikipedia as a source.  The professor said that a friend of his named Maddy Kennedy had "even edited the Wikipedia entry on toasters to say that she had invented them."  Well, the real MacMasters and a friend of his named Alex (last name redacted, for reasons you'll see momentarily) talked after class about whether it was really that easy.  Turns out it was.  So Alex decided to edit the page on toasters, took out Maddy Kennedy's name, and credited their invention to...

... his pal Alan MacMasters.

Alex got pretty elaborate.  He uploaded a photograph supposedly of MacMasters (it's actually a rather clumsy digitally-modified photograph of Alex himself), provided biographical details, and generally tidied up the page to make it look convincing.

When Alex told MacMasters what he'd done, he laughed it off.  "Alex is a bit of a joker, it's part of why we love him," MacMasters said.  "The article had already been vandalized anyway, it was just changing the nature of the incorrect information.  I thought it was funny, I never expected it to last."

Remember the errors that the Chesney study found didn't get corrected?

This was one of them.

The problem was suddenly amplified when The Mirror found the entry not long after it was posted, and listed it as a "life-changing everyday invention that put British genius on the map."  By this time, both Alex and MacMasters had completely forgotten about what they'd done, and were entirely unaware of the juggernaut they'd launched.  Over the following decade, the story was repeated over and over -- including by major news outlets -- and even ended up in one museum.

It wasn't until July 2022 that an alert fifteen-year-old happened on the Wikipedia article, and notified the editors that the photograph of MacMasters "looked faked."  To their credit, they quickly recognized that the entire thing was fake, deleted the article, and banned Alex from editing Wikipedia for life.  But by that time the hoax page had been up -- and used as a source -- for ten years.

(If you're curious, the actual credit for the invention of the electric toaster goes to Frank Shailor, who worked for General Electric, and submitted a patent for it in 1909.)

The problem, of course, is that if most of us -- myself included -- were curious about who invented the electric toaster, we'd do a fairly shallow search online, maybe one or two sources deep.  If I then found that Brand Scotland, various news outlets, and a museum all agreed that it was invented by a Scottish guy named Alan MacMasters, I'm quite certain I'd believe it.  Even if several of those sources led back to Wikipedia, so what?

Surely all of them couldn't be wrong, right?  Besides, it's such a low-emotional-impact piece of information, who in their right mind would be motivated to falsify it?

So what reason would there be for me to question it?

Now, I'm aware that this is a pretty unusual case, and I'm not trying to make you disbelieve everything you read online.  As I've pointed out before, cynicism is just as lazy as gullibility.  And I'm still of the opinion that Wikipedia is a pretty good source, especially for purely factual information.  But it is absolutely critical that we don't treat any source as infallible -- especially not those (1) for which we lack the expertise to evaluate, or (2) which contain bias-prone information that agrees with what we are already inclined to accept uncritically.

Confirmation bias is a bitch.

So the take-home lesson here is "be careful, and don't turn off your brain."  It's not really, as some have claimed, that bullshit is more common now; take a look at any newspaper from the 1800s and you'll disabuse yourself of that notion mighty fast.  It's just that the internet has provided an amazingly quick and efficient conduit for bullshit, so it spreads a great deal more rapidly.

It all goes back to the quote -- of uncertain provenance, but accurate whoever first said it -- that "a lie can travel all the way around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots."

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The mother of all pranks

Have you ever heard of Mrs. Tottenham, of 54 Berners Street, Westminster, London, England?

I'm guessing probably not.  At least I hadn't, until a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about why she's memorable.  Well, not her in and of herself, exactly; but what happened to the poor woman, through no fault of her own.

Mrs. Tottenham is described as a "wealthy woman of good social standing" who lived in one of the better parts of Greater London, and seems to have mostly led an ordinary life until the morning of November 27, 1810.  She was awakened at five in the morning by a knock on the door.  Hastily donning her dressing gown, she answered it, and was met by a chimney sweep who said he'd "been sent for."  No sooner had she dismissed him, saying she'd done no such thing, than she was alarmed to see several other chimney sweeps approaching, followed in quick succession by a dozen different coal wagons, the drivers of each claiming that they'd been told to deliver coal to that address that morning.

But that was only the beginning.

At seven, the bakers started arriving.  One of them carried an elaborate wedding cake.  The bakers were followed by bootmakers.  After that, according to The London Times, there followed "upholsterers' goods in cart-loads, pianofortes, linen, jewellery [sic] and every other description of furniture, [that] were lodged as near as possible to the door of No. 54, with anxious tradespeople and a laughing mob.  With each new wave of arrivals, the crowd around the property grew, as many stayed to watch who would be the next to arrive...  Police summoned to the scene arrived to find six stout men bearing an organ, surrounded by wine-porters with permits, barbers with wigs, mantua-makers with band-boxes, [and] opticians with the various articles of their trade."

As the day progressed, she was accosted by forty butchers and forty fishmongers, each bringing a delivery of their respective viands, and pastry chefs with an estimated 2,500 raspberry tarts.  The police attempted to put a stop to it by blocking off both ends of the street, but people simply climbed over the barriers, saying they had their jobs to do.  In the mid-afternoon the chairmen of the Bank of England and the East India Company arrived, and shortly afterward the Duke of Gloucester, the last-mentioned of which was told that he'd been summoned to the deathbed of an obscure relative.

At five in the afternoon, about fifty women showed up, saying that they'd been informed there was an opening for domestic servants.  But the real pièce de resistance came at six, when an undertaker arrived bearing a coffin -- made to Mrs. Tottenham's measurements.

The hilarity -- for everyone but poor Mrs. Tottenham -- kept up until after dark, when the crowds finally dispersed, and the disappointed and pissed off merchants et al. gave up and went home.

A drawing of the Berners Street hoax by William Heath (1810) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The entire day, from a rented room across the street, there was a young man watching.  His name was Theodore Edward Hook.  Hook was the scion of minor nobility, and had been a brilliant (and precocious) student at Oxford University, matriculating at the age of sixteen.  He was a talented writer and musician, and in fact published his first novel when he was a teenager.

He was also a wicked practical joker.

He had made a bet -- the winner received one guinea -- that he could turn any address in London into the most talked-about spot in the world.  Working with two accomplices (who have never been identified, but one was alleged to be "a famous actress") he sent out between one and four thousand letters and postcards in the weeks preceding November 27.  The instructions differed, of course, but most of the recipients were given a specific time to arrive.  A bevy of dance instructors were told that Mrs. Tottenham was looking for lessons in the art for her daughter.  Some estate salesmen were informed that she required assistance in selling some property.  The two aforementioned chairmen were sent sinister notes that there had been allegations of fraud against an (unnamed) employee, and they should come to that address to hear "information that would be to their benefit."

Once Hook saw that his prank had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, he got a little scared and decided it would be prudent to absent himself from town for a while, so he spent several weeks in the countryside with friends.  And sure enough, a search for the perpetrator(s) was undertaken, and significant rewards offered -- to no avail.

But it's an interesting thing about the psychology of people like Hook; they can't bear thinking that no one will ever find out how astonishingly clever they are.  (There have been murder mysteries predicated on this theme, my favorite of which is the brilliantly-crafted And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, which I first read at age twelve with the result of being hooked on mysteries for life.)  Hook knew he was suspected of having had something to do with the Berners Street hoax, but no one could prove it, so all too quickly the furor died down.

Exactly what an egotist like Hook didn't want.  So...

... he admitted it.

It was in his semi-autobiographical novel Gilbert Gurney, and spoken by the eponymous main character, but still, it's about as close to a confession as you can get:

[T]here's nothing like fun – what else made the effect in Berner's Street?  I am the man – I did it... copy the joke, and it ceases to be one; – any fool can imitate an example once set – but for originality of thought and design, I do think that was perfect.

Gilbert Gurney wasn't published until 1836.  There was no statute of limitations in England in the early nineteenth century, but after twenty-six years, the justice system didn't seem to think it was worth the trouble to go after Hook.  And interestingly, there was at least one allegation that he was laying claim to something he hadn't done.  Hook died in 1841 (of the effects of "dissipation"), and afterward his friend Nancy Matthews said that the prank wasn't Hook's doing, but had been perpetrated by "a young gentleman, now one of the most rigid churchmen in the kingdom." 

Most people, though, think that Matthews was trying to cover up for the lousy reputation of the Dearly Departed, and that Hook really was the guilty party.  Why he had targeted the unfortunate Mrs. Tottenham is unknown; some think he had a grudge against her for some reason, others that she was simply wealthy, a little uptight... and there was a room for rent across the street from where she lived.

I find it interesting to consider what would impel someone to do something like this.  It's funny, yes -- I have to admit laughing several times while reading the account -- but good heavens, consider the poor merchants and tradespeople who brought thousands of items thinking they were going to make some sales, and were turned away without so much as a ha'penny.  I'd have been pissed.  And Hook is damn lucky he wasn't caught; he'd likely have ended up in prison, and sued for everything he had to pay all the people whose services he'd fraudulently requested.

I've been the victim of practical jokes myself -- probably everyone has -- and there are ones that were genuinely good-hearted, like the students who put a huge wooden replica of the black obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey in my classroom on the last day of school, and arranged for the principal to play the theme music over the loudspeakers as soon as I walked in the door.  (I have never before or since been awake and so convinced I was dreaming.)  But practical jokes often contain a streak of cruelty, or (like Berners Street) at least a touch of "I don't give a damn whom I inconvenience."  "I was just joking" has been used way too many times to cover up for real harm done.  (It's why in general I loathe April Fool's Day.)

Anyhow, that's the story of one of the most elaborate pranks ever staged.  And I have to admit he planned the whole thing to a fare-thee-well.  Mrs. Tottenham came out none the worse for wear, and apparently told the story to uproarious laughter at cocktail parties for the rest of her life.  Me, though -- I'd much prefer having other stories to tell to my friends, so if any of you get any clever ideas, please don't.  For one thing, my three dogs would freak right the hell out.  For another, I have recently moved to an uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique, so you couldn't find me anyhow.

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Mental models and lying stones

Richard Feynman famously said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."

This insightful statement isn't meant to impugn anyone's honesty or intelligence, but to highlight that everyone -- and I'm sure Feynman was very much including himself in this assessment -- has biases that prevent them from seeing clearly.  We've already got a model, an internal framework by which we interpret what we experience, and that inevitably constrains our understanding.

As science historian James Burke points out, in his brilliant analysis of the scientific endeavor The Day the Universe Changed, it's a trap that's impossible to get out of.  You have to have some mental model for how you think the world works, or all the sensory input you receive would simply be chaos.  "Without a structure, a theory for what's there," Burke says, "you don't see anything."

And once you've settled on a model, it's nearly impossible to compromise with.  You're automatically going to take some things as givens and ignore others as irrelevant, dismiss some pieces of evidence out of hand and accept others without question.  We're always taking what we experience and comparing it to our own mental frameworks, deciding what is important and what isn't.  When my wife finished her most recent art piece -- a stunning image of a raven's face, set against a crimson background -- and I was on social media later that day and saw another piece of art someone had posted with a raven against red -- I shrugged and laughed and said, "Weird coincidence."

Quoth the Raven, pen/ink/watercolor by Carol Bloomgarden (2025) [Image used with permission]

But that's only because I had already decided that odd synchronicities don't mean anything.  If I had a mental model that considered such chance occurrences as spiritually significant omens, I would have interpreted that very, very differently.

Our mental frameworks are essential, but they can lead us astray as often as they land us on the right answer.  Consider, for example, the strange, sad case of Johann Beringer and the "lying stones."

Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer was a professor of medicine at the University of Würzburg in the early eighteenth century.  His training was in anatomy and physiology, but he had a deep interest in paleontology, and had a large collection of fossils he'd found during hikes in his native Germany.  He was also a devout Lutheran and a biblical literalist, so he interpreted all the fossil evidence as consistent with biblical events like the six-day creation, the Noachian flood, and so on.

Unfortunately, he also had a reputation for being arrogant, humorless, and difficult to get along with.  This made him several enemies, including two of his coworkers -- Ignace Roderique, a professor of geography and algebra, and Johann Georg von Eckhart, the university librarian.  So Roderique and von Eckhart hatched a plan to knock Beringer down a peg or two.

They found out where he was planning on doing his next fossil hunt, and planted some fake fossils along the way.

These "lying stones" are crudely carved from limestone.  On some of them, you can still see the chisel marks.

More outlandish still, Roderique and von Eckhart carved the word "God" in Hebrew on the backs of some of them.  Making it look like the artisan had signed His name, so to speak.

One colleague -- who was not in on the prank -- looked at the stones, and said to Beringer, "Um... are you sure?  Those look like chisel marks."  Beringer dismissed his objections, and in fact, turned them into evidence for his explanation.  Beringer wrote, "...the figures... are so exactly fitted to the dimensions of the stones, that one would swear that they are the work of a very meticulous sculptor...[and they] seem to bear unmistakable indications of the sculptor's knife."

They were so perfect, Beringer said, that they could only be the work of God.

So as astonishing as it may seem, Beringer fell for the ruse hook, line, and sinker.  Roderique and von Eckhart, buoyed up by their success, repeated their prank multiple times.  Finally Beringer had enough "fossils" that in 1726, he published a scholarly work called Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (The Writing-Stones of Würzburg).  But shortly after the book's publication -- it's unclear how -- Beringer realized he'd been taken for a ride.

He sued Roderique and von Eckhart for defamation -- and won.  Roderique and von Eckhart were both summarily fired, but it was too late; Beringer was a laughingstock in the scientific community.  He tried to recover all of the copies of his book and destroy them, but finally gave up.  His reputation was reduced to rubble, and he died twelve years later in total obscurity.

It's easy to laugh at Beringer's credulity, but the only reason you're laughing is because if you found such a "fossil," your mental model would immediately make you doubt its veracity.  In his framework -- which included a six-thousand-year-old Earth, a biblical flood, and a God who was perfectly capable of signing his own handiwork -- he didn't even stop to consider it.

The history of science is laden with missteps caused by biased mental models.  In 1790, a report of a fireball over France that strewed meteorites over a large region prompted a scientific paper -- that laughingly dismissed the claim as "impossible."  Pierre Bertholon, editor of the Journal des Sciences Utiles, wrote, "How sad, is it not, to see a whole municipality attempt to certify the truth of folk tales… the philosophical reader will draw his own conclusions regarding this document, which attests to an apparently false fact, a physically impossible phenomenon."  DNA was dismissed as the genetic code for decades, because of the argument that DNA's alphabet only contains four "letters," so the much richer twenty-letter alphabet of proteins (the amino acids) must be the language of the genes.  Even in the twentieth century, geologists didn't bother looking for evidence for continental drift until the 1950s, long after there'd been significant clues that the continents had, in fact, moved, largely because they couldn't imagine a mechanism that could be responsible.

Our mental models work on every level -- all the way down to telling us what questions are worth investigating.

So poor Johann Beringer.  Not to excuse him for being an arrogant prick, but he didn't deserve to be the target of a mean-spirited practical joke, nor does he deserve our derision now.  He was merely operating within his own framework of understanding, same as you and I do.

I wonder what we're missing, simply because we've decided it's irrelevant -- and what we've accepted as axiomatic, and therefore beyond questioning?

Maybe we're not so very far ahead of Beringer ourselves.

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