The feral child

A point I've made before, but one I think is absolutely critical to skeptics, is that sometimes we simply don't have answers -- and are forced to admit that unless further information turns up, we might never have.

I get that it's intensely frustrating.  It seems to be hardwired into our brains that some conclusion, any conclusion, is better than remaining in doubt.  I recall once being asked by a student if I thought there was an afterlife.  My answer was, "I don't know."

"But what do you think?" the student said.

"I don't think anything.  The information we have from phenomena like near-death experiences is inconclusive.  And no one comes back to report from an actual death experience.  I'll find out for sure eventually, but at the moment, I don't have enough evidence to decide one way or the other.  So the answer is 'I don't know.'"

This obviously irritated the hell out of the student, and he said, "But you must have an opinion."

"Why?" I answered.  "If you want my opinion, it's that the world could do with a great many fewer opinions and a great many more facts."

The problem is, of course, that the intolerance for frustration stemming from a desperation to have the matter settled often drives us to unsupported speculation -- and these meanderings often end up passed along as fact.  (How many different The Jack the Ripper Mystery Solved! books have been written?  All equally confident, but all with different solutions?)  As a less-known but equally fascinating (and, reassuringly, less violent) example, let's consider the strange case of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.

In 1797, near the town of Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance in Aveyron département in southern France, three hunters came upon a boy of about nine.  He was completely naked, and ran from them, but they trapped him when he climbed a tree.  After capturing him -- and finding he couldn't (or wouldn't) speak, but didn't seem dangerous -- they brought him into the town, where he was taken in by an elderly widow who fed and clothed him.

Within a week, he disappeared -- leaving his clothes behind.

Over the next two years, he was spotted periodically in the woods, but always eluded capture.  Then -- in January of 1800 -- he came out of the forest on his own.  He eventually ended up in an orphanage in Rodez.  Upon examination, psychiatrist Philippe Pinel suggested he was mentally disabled, probably from birth; scars on his body suggested he'd spent most of his childhood in the wilderness.

Of course, the question arose of how a small child could survive in the forest, even in the relatively temperate south of France.  How he didn't die of exposure, from starvation, or from being attacked and eaten by wild animals, was a significant mystery.  Were his scars from the cuts and scrapes of living outdoors naked -- or were they from early abuse?  The physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who worked extensively with the boy (whom he christened "Victor") believed that the evidence supported that Victor had "lived in an absolute solitude from his fourth or fifth almost to his twelfth year, which is the age he may have been when he was taken in the Caune woods."

Lithograph of Victor of Aveyron, ca. 1800 [Image is in the Public Domain]

At this period, France was just emerging from the chaos and horror of the Reign of Terror, and the question was raised of whether he was a child whose parents had been imprisoned or executed.  Several couples were located in the region who had sons of the right age that had gone missing while they (the parents) were in jail -- but none of them recognized Victor.

Another curious twist is that one prominent philosophy amongst the intelligentsia at the time was the idea of the "Noble Savage" -- that taken away from the noise and filth and crowds of the city, placed in the tranquility of the forests and glades, humans would revert to some sort of pre-Adam-and-Eve-eating-the-apple blissful state of oneness with nature.  People like the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau tended to have a rather optimistic -- some might say unwarrantedly optimistic -- view of the potential of humanity and the natural world.  (Alfred Lord Tennyson's observation that "Nature is red in tooth and claw" came later.)  So Victor was studied intensively to see if he showed any signs of Edenic grace and innocence.

Not so much, it turned out.  He still didn't like wearing clothes -- although consented to do so when it was cold -- and was fond of doing what just about all teenage boys do at least once a day.  Other than being mute, and having peculiar eating habits (raw vegetables were by far his favorite food), he didn't seem to exhibit any sort of before-the-Fall chastity and sinlessness.  He did show some signs of what we would now probably classify as autistic behavior -- rocking back and forth or hugging himself when stressed -- and there's been speculation that this, along with his lack of speech, may have been why he was abandoned in the first place.

Victor never learned to speak, other than the words lait ("milk") and oh, Dieu ("oh, God").  But he was never violent, and in fact seemed predisposed to being gentle and caring.  When he was around eighteen, he went to stay with a Madame Guérin, with whom he lived for the rest of his life.  And when Madame Guérin's husband died, and she was sitting at her dinner table weeping, Victor startled her by going up and putting his arms around her and holding her while she cried.

Victor of Aveyron died in 1828 of pneumonia, at the age of somewhere around forty, and took to his grave whatever he knew about his origins.

The lack of information here is what facilitates wild speculation.  Much has been written about Victor -- some claiming that he was below average intelligence, others that he was of ordinary intelligence but autistic, others still that he was basically a normal young man and his early childhood trauma led him to hide the fact that he understood everything people were saying (and, perhaps, could speak as well, but simply refused to do so).

The truth, of course, is that we don't know who Victor was, what his mental capacity was, or where he came from.  There just isn't enough in the way of hard data, despite the extensive studies of the young man done by Itard and others.  So the correct conclusion is not to come to a conclusion at all.

It's frustrating, especially given such an intriguing story, but that's where we have to leave it.

Like I said, I get the human drive to understand, and how a mystery can nibble at your brain, keeping you puzzling over it.  And this can be a very good thing; two examples I can think of, from my own field of linguistics, that were finally solved due to someone's dogged tenacity and absolute refusal to give up are Jean-François Champollion's decoding of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the decipherment of the Linear B script of Crete by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

But sometimes -- there simply isn't enough information.  And at that point, we have to let it go, and hope that more turns up.

In the case of Victor of Aveyron, though, that's pretty unlikely.  So we're left with a mystery: a feral child showed up in late eighteenth-century France, eventually joined society (more or less), grew up, and finally died, and there is probably no way we'll ever know more.  Victor is, and shall almost certainly remain, a cipher.

However confounding that is to our natural intellectual curiosity.

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The mystery of "Somerton Man"

It's understandable, I suppose, that I get really torqued by the misuse of the word skeptic to mean "doubter" or "disbeliever."

Skeptics respect evidence, facts, logic, and the scientific method; their litmus test is, "Is this supported by what we know to be true?"  They rid themselves of biases -- insofar as is possible -- and start from a position of clear-eyed curiosity, proceeding from there to wherever the data leads.

So please stop calling people like RFK Jr. "vaccine skeptics" and ones like Lee Zeldin "climate skeptics."  They are science deniers, pure and simple, ignoring mountains of hard data in favor of their own ideological stances.

The trouble with being a skeptic, though, is that it can leave us in the position of saying "we don't know, and may never know."  When the information we have is insufficient to reach a conclusion, we have to hold making up our minds in abeyance, indefinitely if need be.  This can be intensely frustrating.  Humans want answers, and sometimes those answers are simply not forthcoming.  At that point, being pressed to respond to the question, "But what do you think the answer is?" is completely pointless.

If we're respecting the skeptical process, we don't think anything.  We don't know, and that's that, at least until more evidence comes to light.

We've seen a few examples of this here at Skeptophilia -- the strange disappearance of Frederick Valentich, the nineteenth-century footprints in the snow in Devonshire, the origin of the mysterious Kaspar Hauser, and the famous Dyatlov Pass incident, to name several.  Today, though, I'd like to tell you about a different one, just as peculiar and intriguing, and no less mystifying -- the odd case of "Somerton Man."

The bare bones of the case go something like this.

On 1 December 1948, the dead body of a man was found on Somerton Beach, south of Adelaide, Australia.  He was well-dressed, in a suit and tie, and propped against a seawall; several passersby thought he might have gotten drunk and passed out or fallen asleep there, and walked right past him, before someone thought to check for a pulse.  Police were called, and here's where things get even weirder; he had no identification, all the tags had been cut from his clothing, and in his pocket was a torn slip of paper with the printed words "Tamám shud" -- Farsi for "it is finished."  The only other things in his pocket were a comb, a box of matches, a cigarette packet, and an unused train ticket and bus ticket.

The man was quite ordinary; about 180 centimeters tall, maybe in his forties, with reddish-blond hair and gray eyes.  His autopsy showed signs of internal bleeding and inflammation of the spleen and liver, perhaps consistent with poisoning, but toxicology tests were unable to recover any specific toxin responsible.

Photographs of the dead man's face published in newspapers resulted in no identifications.

But a month later, officials at the Adelaide railway station were going through items that had been left behind or unclaimed, and turned over to police a brown suitcase (also with its label removed) that had been checked in on November 30.  It proved to contain a red dressing gown, a pair of slippers, a pair of trousers with sand in the cuffs, and various small personal items.  Most interestingly, it also contained a card of orange waxed thread that matched thread used to repair the pocket of the trousers the man was wearing when he died.  A laundry bag in the suitcase had a tag saying "T. Keane."  But a search found that no one named Keane had been reported missing in Australia -- nor in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Ireland.

The case took a significantly bizarre turn when a man the authorities named as "Ronald Francis" -- police policy in Australia in the 1940s often protected witnesses in infamous cases by using pseudonyms, and his actual identity has never been made public -- responded to an inquiry about the odd piece of paper with "Tamám shud" printed on it.  He came forward with a copy of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat that had part of the last page torn out (and indeed, the book ends with those words).  The torn scrap matched the missing piece in the book perfectly.  But Francis's statement gets even stranger than that.  The book wasn't his, he said; he'd found it tossed in the back seat of his open-topped convertible, only a day or two after the body was found on Somerton Beach, and hadn't thought to look through it until he saw an article in the local newspaper that mentioned the torn slip with the Farsi words.  Weirdest of all, on the back of the book were some faint indentations, as if someone had used it to support a piece of paper they were writing on.  Here is an enhanced image of the indentations:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It certainly looks like a code -- but short passages are notoriously difficult to decrypt, and this one has resisted all attempts at decipherment.

Also scribbled in the book was a telephone number, which turned out to belong to a nurse named Jessica Ellen Thomson who lived only four hundred meters north of where the body was found.  She claimed not to have any idea who the man was -- but the police investigator in charge of the inquiry later said when she looked at a photograph of the corpse, she had seemed "completely taken aback, to the point of giving the appearance that she was about to faint."  She said she had once owned a copy of the Rubaiyat but had given it to a friend, Alf Boxall, during the war.  The police pursued a hypothesis that the dead man was Boxall, but that came to naught when Boxall was found alive and well in Sydney, and still had his copy of the Rubaiyat -- with Thomson's name handwritten on the inside front cover -- and an intact last page.

Jessica Thomson died in 2007, and her daughter Kate gave an interview in 2013 in which she stated outright that she thought her mother had lied -- she had known the man's identity, Kate said, and was covering something up, but what that might be she wasn't sure because her mother had never wanted to talk about the case.  She also stated that her mother had known Russian but never explained to her how or why she'd learned it, and expressed a surmise that her mother and the dead man might have been spies for the Soviets.  But inquiries into that angle, too, ended up turning up nothing of note.

On the 14th of June, 1949, Somerton Man -- still unidentified -- was buried at the government's expense in Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery.  

About the only progress in the case came in 2022, with a tentative (and distant) genetic match of hairs from the dead man to members of a Webb family of Melbourne.  One member of the family, Carl Webb, born in 1905, was a shady character, described as "moody, violent, and threatening."  He had a history of mental illness (including suicide attempts), and had vanished for parts unknown in 1947.  Interestingly, Webb had a sister named Freda who married a man named John Keane -- recall the tag on the laundry bag saying "T. Keane" -- but Webb had never gone by the name, to anyone's recollection, and no members of John Keane's family were unaccounted for (or seemed to have anything at all to do with the case).

So it certainly seems like Webb could be a possibility.  But this leaves the connection to the code, the slip of paper, and Jessica Thomson still unexplained -- as well as how and why he died.

In the end, we're left with a mystery.  Almost eighty years ago, a well-dressed dead body showed up on an Australian beach, and to this day we have no easy solution to explain what happened to him.  The only person who may have had more information was Thomson, and she died eighteen years ago without ever divulging to anyone what, if anything, she knew about the mysterious man.

Frustrating, isn't it?  There's a deep drive in us to know the answers, and sometimes, they stay tantalizingly out of our reach.  But as skeptics, we have to be willing to state "I don't know," and let things lie.  It may be that some time in the future, more information about the mysterious life and death of "Somerton Man" will be unearthed, but until then -- he is, and will remain, a complete cipher.

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Le comte éternel

When I was a kid, the high point of my year was the two-week trip my dad and I took every August to Arizona and New Mexico.  He was an avid rockhound and lapidary, so his goal was collecting agate and turquoise and jasper to bring home and make into jewelry.  Mine, on the other hand, was wandering in the beautiful, desolate hills that were so unlike the lush near-jungles of my native southern Louisiana.

Another thing I loved about that part of the country was the abundance of peculiar little curio shops.  Some were clearly tourist traps, but some were run by honest-to-goodness old-time eccentric southwesterners, and filled with weird and wonderful oddities.  One of these I recall well was in Alpine, Texas, and was mostly a used book store, but had all sorts of other stuff (including, to my dad's delight, rocks).

That's where I picked up a copy of Richard Cavendish's book The Black Arts, about the history of occultism.  At that age (I was about thirteen at the time) I was absolutely fascinated with this stuff.  And it was in The Black Arts that I first ran across the peculiar character known as the Comte de Saint-Germain.

Saint-Germain is one of a handful of people who are, supposedly, immortal.  Here's the passage about him from Cavendish's book:

One of of the most famous of all those who are supposed to have possessed the Elixir of Life is the Count of Saint-Germain.  "The Comte de Saint-Germain and Sir Francis Bacon," says Manly P. Hall, the leading light of the Philosophical Research Society of Los Angeles, "are the two greatest emissaries sent into the world by the Secret Brotherhood in the last thousand years."  The Secret Brotherhood is a group of Masters, whose headquarters are said to be in the Himalayas and who are attempting to guide mankind along higher paths.

Saint-Germain hobnobbed with the highest social circles in France, winning the favour of Madame de Pompadour in 1759 with his "water of rejuvenation."  Immensely erudite and enormously rich, he was a skillful violinist, painter, and chemist, had a photographic memory, and was said to speak eleven languages fluently, including Chinese, Arabic, and Sanskrit...  He was believed to be over two thousand years old...  He delighted in reminiscing about the great ones of the past with whom he had been on familiar terms, including the Queen of Sheba and Cleopatra.  He was a wedding guest at Cana when Christ turned the water into wine.  There is a pleasant story of him describing a dear friend of long ago, Richard the Lionheart, and turning to his manservant for confirmation.  "You forget, sir," the valet said solemnly.  "I have only been five hundred years in your service."

Saint-Germain attributed his astonishing longevity to his diet and his elixir...  He is supposed to have died in Germany in 1784, but occultists believe that he was probably given a mock burial... It is said that he was frequently seen alive in the next century and was known to Bulwer-Lytton.

It's a curious story, to say the least.  In Umberto Eco's brilliant novel Foucault's Pendulum, his character of Agliè coyly hints that he's the latest rebranding of the Comte de Saint-Germain -- but when the main character, Casaubon, tries to tell this to his psychologist, and that Agliè/Saint-Germain is at the center of a gigantic and murderous conspiracy, the doctor gives him a level look and says, "Monsieur, vous êtes fou."  ("Mister, you are crazy.")

Reading about this stuff can definitely leave you feeling that way, but there's no doubt Saint-Germain was a real guy.  He left behind a number of surviving musical compositions, and two extant written works are attributed to him.  He was employed on diplomatic missions by French King Louis XV.  Voltaire met him, and despite Voltaire's generally skeptical view of things, he apparently at least halfway believed the Comte's grandiose tales.  He called Saint-Germain "the Wonder-Man -- a man who does not die, and who knows everything."  Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel called him "the greatest philosopher who ever lived."  

Giacomo Casanova, however, wasn't so impressed, although he had to admit to some grudging admiration for Saint-Germain's ability to lie so convincingly:

This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of impostors and quacks, would say in an easy, assured manner that he was three hundred years old, that he knew the secret of the Universal Medicine, that he possessed a mastery over nature, that he could melt diamonds, professing himself capable of forming, out of ten or twelve small diamonds, one large one of the finest water without any loss of weight.  All this, he said, was a mere trifle to him.  Notwithstanding his boastings, his bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I thought him offensive.  In spite of my knowledge of what he was and in spite of my own feelings, I thought him an astonishing man as he was always astonishing me.

Throughout his life (assuming he did actually die!), Saint-Germain's ability to astonish kept him the darling of high society.  His portrait hangs in the Louvre:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So who was he?

This is where it gets even more interesting, because no one knows for sure.  In fact, no one even knows his real name; he had a dozen or more by which he was regularly known.  He claimed to be the son of Francis II Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania, but keep in mind that the guy also claimed to be thousands of years old, so that should be taken with a large handful of salt.  Rákóczi did have a son, named Leopold George -- but the records indicate Leopold died at age four.  The occultists, of course, have an answer for that (they seem to have an answer for everything, don't they?) -- they say that Rákóczi kept his son's survival a secret to protect him from the scheming Habsburgs, which accounts for Saint-Germain's education and wealth (and penchant for secrecy).  All through his life he wove a web of mystery around himself, and reveled in the cachet it gave him with the aristocracy.  

P. T. Barnum, though, in his 1886 book The Humbugs of the World, clearly wasn't having any of it:

The Marquis de Créquy declared that Saint-Germain was an Alsatian Jew, Simon Wolff by name, and was born at Strasbourg about the close of the 17th or the beginning of the 18th century; others insist that he was a Spanish Jesuit named Aymar; and others again intimate that his true title was the Marquis de Betmar, and that he was a native of Portugal.  The most plausible theory, however, makes him the natural son of an Italian princess and fixes his birth at San Germano, in Savoy, about the year 1710; his ostensible father being one Rotondo, a tax-collector of that district.

Barnum was an expert on fooling the gullible; there's the sense here that he wasn't fond of the competition.

Whoever Saint-Germain was, there's no doubt he was a fascinating character.  Predictably, I'm not buying that he was thousands of years old, nor that somehow, he's still alive.  And many of his claims are somewhere between "implausible" and "ludicrous."  But there's no doubt that he was an accomplished and skilled trickster, and relished the air of mystery his stories gave him.  It'd be nice to have some answers to the questions he surrounded himself with, but the truth is, he was too good at covering his tracks -- and like the more famous mystery of Jack the Ripper, we'll probably never know his identity for sure. 

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A modern Mary Celeste

There's something compelling about a story with no definitive answers.  It's no wonder a lot of our favorite works of fiction have an element of mystery, and in some of them, the loose ends are never completely tied up.  Think of how many of our spooky Tales Around A Campfire end with a line like, "... and no one ever found out what happened to the missing teenagers."

In real life, though, unsolved mysteries have a way of inviting wild speculation, usually based on evidence for which even the word "slim" is an overstatement.  Consider, for example, the off-the-rails "explanations" people came up with to account for the fact that even powerful telescopes couldn't see any surface detail on the planet Venus.  Here's how Carl Sagan described one of these lines of thought, in the episode "Heaven and Hell" of his wonderful series Cosmos:

I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus.  Why not?  Because it’s covered with a dense layer of clouds.  Well, what are clouds made of?  Water, of course.  Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.  Therefore, the surface must be wet.  Well, if the surface is wet, it’s probably a swamp.  If there’s a swamp, there’s ferns.  If there’s ferns, maybe there’s even dinosaurs.

Observation: I can't see a thing.  Conclusion: dinosaurs.

What got me thinking about this tendency is a curious story out of Cambodia that hit the news earlier this week.  On Koh Tang Island, in Preah Sihanouk Province, on July 12, a "ghost ship" ran aground -- no sign of the captain and crew, no markings indicating where the ship had originated.  Three lifejackets were found washed up on a nearby beach, but there are no bodies, nothing to indicate what happened to the ship and its passengers.  Stormy conditions have made further investigations impossible for the time being.

Immediate comparisons were made to the most famous of all "ghost ships," the Mary Celeste.  The Mary Celeste set sail from New York City on November 7, 1872, headed for Genoa, Italy.  Being in the days before shipboard radio, nothing more was heard from it until it was found drifting in the Azores a month later.  It was completely deserted.  The last entry in the ship's log was ten days earlier, and indicated nothing amiss.  It was amply provisioned with food, and none of the crew members' belongings were disturbed, as you'd expect if it had been captured and boarded by pirates.  There was no damage to the ship itself; it looked as if somehow, the captain and crew had simply... evaporated.

And to end the tale in appropriate campfire story fashion: no one ever found out what happened to the crew, and none of them was ever seen again.

The story of the Mary Celeste is certainly puzzling and creepy, but most rationalists still think there's a logical (and natural) explanation for what happened to it.  The same is true in the case of the Cambodian ghost ship.  Here, the most plausible answer is probably either that it was a ship that had been put out of service (the lack of markings and identifications suggests that the "service" might have been hauling illicit cargo, possibly drugs), and either had accidentally slipped its moorings and drifted off, or had been scuttled deliberately.

But just as with Carl Sagan's "I can't see anything = dinosaurs" example, the lack of anything definitive has touched off a lot of wild speculation about what happened to the ship.  Amongst the "explanations" I've seen:

• the Bermuda Triangle has opened a branch office in the Indian Ocean, and the crew went through a portal to parts unknown
• the crew were abducted by aliens
• the ship got too close to an island run by the Illuminati, so the crew had to be eliminated
• the ship was attacked, and the crew eaten, by (choose one): a giant squid, a marine version of the Loch Ness Monster, beings from Atlantis, Cthulhu

Okay, just hang on a moment, here.

Let's stop and consider another quote, this one from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for...  If something is 'unidentified,' then that's where the conversation should stop.  You don't go on and say 'so it must be' anything."  There's (at present) no real evidence for what happened to the ghost ship, so we should put any further speculation on hold for as long as need be.

And keep in mind that here, it's not even like most UFO sightings, which are one-offs that leave behind no traces and no chance of a repeat performance; the Cambodian authorities have the actual ship, meaning at some point when the conditions improve they'll be investigating further.  All we have to do is wait a while and see what they discover.  Chances are they'll find evidence that it's an illicit/unregistered cargo ship that was used in drug-running.  Which will send the aficionados of the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, and Cthulhu sulking off to their rooms...

... until the next mystery, at which point they'll all come roaring back.  Like they have every other time something odd happens.

It'd be nice if sometimes we could just let mysteries be mysteries.  Saying "we don't know, and might not ever know" isn't satisfying, but as good skeptics we have to be willing to say it when it's warranted.  I won't say that I'm not fascinated by cases like the Mary Celeste, where there really seems to be no plausible explanation, but intellectual honesty forces us to put aside our wild imaginings and accept that sometimes, there may never be a definitive answer.

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The mystery of the monolith

Back when I was a teacher, I was often the first person to arrive at the high school in the morning.  Not only am I a morning person, but it was really critical for me to have that quiet time to get prepared for class, get my thoughts together, and (most importantly) have a cup of coffee before the noisy hordes of students arrived.

I think it was about eight years ago, near the end of a school year (so mid-June-ish), that I parked my car in the otherwise empty parking lot and made my way into the dark, quiet hallway of the science wing.  My mind was in drift-mode, not thinking about much at all, when I unlocked my classroom door and switched the lights on.

And stopped dead in my tracks, my mouth agape.

In the front of my classroom was a large black monolith, just shy of three meters tall.  As I stood there, staring, there came over the loudspeakers the unmistakable first chords of the iconic theme music to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It is one of the only times in my life that I have been wide awake and given serious consideration to the possibility that I was dreaming.

I walked to the front of the room as the brass instruments reached their crescendo and the timpani started its rhythmic booms, and that was when I started laughing.  The monolith was made of painted wood, and I had obviously been pranked -- very successfully, I might add -- by some creative students who knew of my love for science fiction.

Turns out it was a team effort between five students and the principal, who is a notorious practical joker.  They placed the monolith in my room and hightailed it back to the principal's office, where they watched for me over the security cameras so they could get the timing of the music right.  It really was an inspired prank, and I kept the monolith in the corner of my classroom for several years until it finally fell apart.

The reason all this comes up is because of a news story I have now been sent five times, about a peculiar discovery in the Utah desert.  Turns out some state employees, who were doing a survey of bighorn sheep populations in a remote region of the state, spotted something mighty peculiar -- a rectangular piece of metal sticking straight up out of the dirt.  The metal seems to be steel or something of the sort, and its polished surface stood out immediately against the reddish rock face behind it.

They landed the helicopter and investigated.  The metal plate was perfectly vertical -- ruling out something that had fallen from the sky and embedded itself -- and had no distinguishing marks of any kind.

One of the state employees standing next to the Utah monolith

Well, as soon as the announcement was made, the furore started.  There were immediate comparisons to the alien monolith in 2001, some tongue-in-cheek, some apparently serious.  Conspiracy theorists had a field day with it, giving "explanations" -- to use the term loosely -- that included:

• it's a listening device planted there by the Illuminati.  Why the Illuminati would put a listening device in a place where there's no one to listen to but sheep is an open question.
• it's an alien marker left behind from when the Anasazi were in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
• it's a weather modification device, perhaps a signal amplifier for HAARP.  (You thought the woo-woos had stopped yapping about HAARP.  You thought wrong.)
• it's a focal point for cosmic energy, blah blah blah Age of Aquarius blah blah fourth-dimensional spiritual ascension blah blah.

The discoverers are refusing to give details about the monolith's exact location, which of course makes all of the aforementioned so-and-sos waggle their eyebrows in a meaningful manner.  The alleged reason for the secrecy is that the monolith is in a remote region and if a bunch of loonies went to find it, which you know they would, they'd get lost and need rescuing.

But of course, that's what they would say.

I have to admit to some curiosity about why someone would do this.  I mean, it's pretty clearly a prank, along the lines of my students' Big Black Box, although it occurs to me to ask why you'd carry out your prank in a place where there was at least a passing likelihood no one would ever see it.  Even so, it's impressive; a piece of steel that big must weigh a lot, and that's not even including the bit that's buried.  Then there's the digging tools and cement and other stuff you'd have to haul in to install it, out there in the scorching heat of the desert, and you're looking at a significant effort.

So it is a little puzzling.  Perhaps at some point someone will 'fess up to being the perpetrator -- or maybe it'll stay a mystery, like the strange and fascinating Georgia Guidestones.  In the unlikely eventuality that there's anything more to this than some unusually committed and hardworking practical jokers, well, I suppose we'll just have to wait and see, given that the state employees who found it aren't giving us any details about where it is.  And the Utah desert is a big place to start searching if your only clue is "it's near some sheep and a big red rock."

Of course, my hunch is that there's nothing much to this, but that's hardly surprising.  And if I'm wrong, well, let's just hope this isn't the final act of the bizarre theater that has been 2020.

On the other hand, if it really is a communication device to summon Our Alien Overlords, maybe that'll be a good thing.  They can't fuck things up any worse than we've been doing lately.

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I'm fascinated with history, and being that I also write speculative fiction, a lot of times I ponder the question of how things would be different if you changed one historical event.  The topic has been visited over and over by authors for a very long time; three early examples are Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" (1952), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), and R. A. Lafferty's screamingly funny "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967).

There are a few pivotal moments that truly merit the overused nametag of "turning points in history," where a change almost certainly would have resulted in a very, very different future.  One of these is the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which happened in 9 C.E., when a group of Germanic guerrilla fighters maneuvered the highly-trained, much better-armed Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Roman Legions into a trap and slaughtered them, almost to the last man.  There were twenty thousand casualties on the Roman side -- amounting to half their total military forces at the time -- and only about five hundred on the Germans'.

The loss stopped Rome in its tracks, and they never again made any serious attempts to conquer lands east of the Rhine.  There's some evidence that the defeat was so profoundly demoralizing to the Emperor Augustus that it contributed to his mental decline and death five years later.  This battle -- the site of which was recently discovered and excavated by archaeologists -- is the subject of the fantastic book The Battle That Stopped Rome by Peter Wells, which looks at the evidence collected at the location, near the village of Kalkriese, as well as the historical documents describing the massacre.  This is not just a book for history buffs, though; it gives a vivid look at what life was like at the time, and paints a fascinating if grisly picture of one of the most striking David-vs.-Goliath battles ever fought.

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

Invasion of the star jelly

Skeptics and rationalists hear the accusation rather frequently that their assumption that everything has a rational explanation is as much a faith as any religion is.  Our conviction that all allegations of paranormal phenomena -- aliens, precognition, ghosts, witchcraft, and so on -- are probably bunk is based on an assumption about how the world works, and because it is an assumption, it is by definition an irrationally-held unprovable assertion.

Take the case of "Star Jelly."  The Lake District, in northern England, just had a bout of Star Jelly a few weeks ago, following a wind and rain storm.  What is it, you might ask?  Not something, I hasten to state, that you'd want to use to accompany your peanut butter sandwich.  Star Jelly is a whitish, gelatinous substance, sometimes found in great globs, out in the woods and hillsides -- usually discovered in the early morning, as if it had appeared suddenly at night. It was first recorded in the 14th century, and has since shown up hundreds of times -- most famously as a two-meter wide disk that showed up near Philadelphia in 1950, inspiring the movie The Blob.

[image courtesy of photographer James Lindsey and the Wikimedia Commons]

What is it, though?  This is where it gets interesting.  Because apparently scientists have not been able to come up with a definitive answer.  The two most common answers -- that it is a mucusy material made by slime molds, or by a species of cyanobacteria called Nostoc -- are unproven.   Analysis of bits of Star Jelly have failed to show any traces of DNA, which you would expect to find if either of the above explanations are true.  Then the woo-woos got involved.  Star Jelly is, they say, one of the following:

• a substance from outer space that falls to Earth during meteor showers.
• an extraterrestrial life form.
• something to do with "chemtrails."
• the residue left behind when an alien probe self-destructs.
• ectoplasm.
• a toxic waste from top-secret government research programs.
• alien semen.

None of those explanations appeal to me, frankly, especially the last one.  You'd think that if aliens spent all of this time and effort to get to Earth, they'd have better things to do once they got here than to jack off outside during a rainstorm in the Lake District.

I'm the first to admit, however, that the scientific explanations that have been proffered thus far haven't really knocked my socks off.  But nonetheless, I'm still convinced that there has to be a reasonable explanation for the appearance of the mysterious substance.  Why is that?

A study published in 2008 in the neurology journal Cortex made the interesting claim that rationalism and a belief in the paranormal both arose from an underlying brain structure issue -- specifically, that belief in paranormal explanations was correlated with a high degree of cerebral asymmetry.  People who held paranormal beliefs, said lead researcher Günter Schulter, had undergone "perturbations in fetal development" that led to differences in the way the cerebrum was wired.  A study the following year at the University of Toronto showed that the religious and non-religious also showed a difference in brain activity, particularly in the region called the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain adapted for coping with anxiety.

So is rationalism merely a product of brain physiology, and do the critics of skepticism have a point in saying that it is itself a religion?  While our assumption that everything has a rational explanation is just that -- an assumption -- we do have one very powerful argument for our views: Rationalism works.  There are countless examples of phenomena that were once unexplained (or given paranormal explanations) that later were, by the application of basic scientific principles, successfully accounted for with no need for recourse to the paranormal.  To cite one example, which got a lot of airtime with the woo-woos -- remember the orange glop that washed ashore in huge quantities near Kivalina, Alaska a while back, prompting speculation very similar to the aforementioned Star Jelly theories?  (No one, however, seemed inclined to attribute its appearance to masturbating aliens, but otherwise the explanations were much the same.)  Well, the scientists kept saying, "We don't know what it is yet, but it has to be a naturally-occurring substance."  And after study, guess what they found?  It was eggs -- the eggs of a perfectly natural marine invertebrate species.  Rationalism wins again!

Or, to quote the inimitable Tim Minchin: "Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be Not Magic."

As far as the Star Jelly -- I'm not troubled by the fact that they haven't figured it out yet.  I'm confident that with study, this will fall to the methods of science just as so many other mysteries have in the past.  So if my skepticism is just a product of my brain's symmetry, or its overactive anterior cingulate cortex, that's okay by me -- because whatever the cause, it has a pretty good track record of leading me to the right answers.