One of the missing

I had a discussion with a friend of mine a few days ago about one of the most frustrating things -- especially for those of us plagued with insatiable curiosity -- which is when we have plenty of reliable information about a situation, but not enough to figure out what actually happened.  As skeptics, we have to be willing sometimes to say "We don't know, and may never know" -- but that doesn't make it a pleasant way to conclude matters.  Famously, that's the situation we're in with Jack the Ripper.  Despite the number of books out there that have titles like The Ripper Murders SOLVED!, if we're being honest, there just isn't enough hard evidence to reach a definitive answer.  I've dealt with several less-known (but still fascinating) examples here at Skeptophilia -- the downright bizarre Devonshire footprints, the unsolved mystery of Kaspar Hauser, and the strange disappearance of Frederick Valentich are three that come to mind immediately.

In each case, we know for certain that the events took place; i.e., they're not hoaxes or tall tales.  But despite in-depth inquiries by skeptical investigators, in the end we're still left with highly unsatisfying question marks.

Another example of this frustrating phenomenon revolves around the American writer Ambrose Bierce, most famous for his war stories "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "A Horseman in the Sky," and "One of the Missing."  He was also a prolific writer of horror fiction; his short stories "Haita the Shepherd" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" were profound influences on H. P. Lovecraft -- places like Lake Hali and Carcosa, and gods like Hastur, appear in the Cthulhu Mythos stories over and over, and a lot of people don't know that they originally came from Bierce rather than from Lovecraft.

Bierce was born in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, the tenth of thirteen children.  He grew up with a deep love of books, and intended a career as a journalist, but the Civil War intervened.  He was a staunch abolitionist and enlisted on the Union side, fought at the Battle of Philippi and the Battle of Shiloh, and nearly died of injuries received at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.  His experiences during the war shaped not only his writing but his outlook.  Bierce was afterward deeply suspicious about the motives of his fellow humans, trusting very few people (and no one completely).

Ambrose Bierce in 1866 [Image is in the Public Domain]

His later life also shows a profound restlessness.  He spent time in San Francisco, Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, London, and Washington, D.C., never content to stay in one place for very long.  And these personality traits -- distrust of others, and a fundamentally restive nature -- both play into the most fascinating thing about Bierce, which is his mysterious disappearance.

In October of 1913 he left Washington to take a tour of Civil War battlefields.  He's documented as having passed through Louisiana and Texas, and crossed into Mexico at El Paso.  Mexico was at that point in the middle of a revolution; earlier that year President Francisco Madero and Vice President José Maria Pino Suárez had both been deposed and assassinated, and the country was an unsafe place by anyone's standards.  This didn't dissuade Bierce.  In his final letter, posted in December 1913 from the city of Chihuahua to his friend Blanche Partington, he said, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination...  Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life.  It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.  To be a gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!"

He was never heard from again.

United States consular officials investigated the matter.  After all, the disappearance of an American citizen, and a prominent one at that, was serious business, even if he'd gone to Mexico of his own free will.  Members of Pancho Villa's senior staff claimed that Bierce had been in Chihuahua, but had left the city voluntarily and no one knew where he was.  Oral tradition in Coahuila is that he was executed by firing squad.  As for his friend, Blanche Partington, her belief was that Bierce had staged the whole thing, doubled back through Arizona, and finally committed suicide somewhere near the Grand Canyon.  No reliable reports of him -- alive or dead -- exist after December of 1913; no further trace of him was ever found.

His disappearance has been the subject of much speculation, as well as a number of works of fiction, something that no doubt would have pleased Bierce no end.  (A few of them worked on the premise that Hastur and the rest of the gang were real, and didn't like the fact that Bierce had given away their existence, so they whisked him out of the desert to Carcosa so he couldn't reveal any more of their secrets.)  Ironic that in the end, Bierce himself -- perhaps intentionally -- became one of the missing.

And as frustrating as it is, that's where we have to leave Bierce's story.  He very likely died somewhere in the southwestern United States or northern Mexico in late 1913 or early 1914, but how and why we probably never will know.  Nor can we be certain of whether he was a victim of the Mexican Revolution, took his own life (as Blanche Partington believed), or died of thirst and starvation out alone in the desert.  As with the examples I began with, we're left with a mystery -- and in the absence of further evidence, as good skeptics that's where we must conclude matters.

But given his secrecy and distrust of his fellow humans, perhaps that's what Bierce would have wanted anyhow.

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The Flannan Isles mystery

In the classic Doctor Who episode "The Horror of Fang Rock," the Fourth Doctor and his companion Leela investigate a malfunctioning lighthouse off the coast of England -- and find that it's under siege, and its unfortunate crew are being killed one at a time by something that appears to be able to shapeshift.

The culprit turns out to be a Rutan, an alien that (in its original form) looks a little like a cross between a giant jellyfish and a moldy lime.

The Rutans were attempting to wipe out humanity so they could use the Earth as their new home base, something that (if you believe classic Who) was the aim of every intelligent alien species in the galaxy and happened on a weekly basis, but for some reason this bunch of aliens decided the best place to launch their attack was a lighthouse out in the middle of nowhere.  Be that as it may, by the time the Doctor and Leela foiled the Rutans' evil plot, all the people in the lighthouse were dead and/or vanished, so this definitely stands out as one of the Doctor's less successful ventures (although he did save the Earth, so there's that).

There are two curious things about this episode that are why it comes up today.

The first is that during its premier broadcast, on November 22, 1987, transmission was suddenly interrupted and replaced by a signal showing a guy wearing a Max Headroom mask babbling about random stuff (including his opinion of "New Coke" and the television series Clutch Cargo) and finally ending with him getting spanked on the bare ass with a flyswatter while a female voice shouted, "Bend over, bitch!"

The source of this transmission -- which I swear I am not making up -- was never identified.

The other strange thing about the episode is that it's based on a true story.

Well, not the green jellyfish alien part, but the mysterious deaths/disappearances from a lighthouse part.  On December 15, 1900, the steamship Archtor was near the Flannan Isles in the seas off the Outer Hebrides and noticed that the lighthouse on Eilean Mòr, the largest island in the chain, was not working.  They reported this to the authorities, but bad weather kept anyone from investigating until eleven days later.

When they got there, the lighthouse was abandoned, and the three crew -- James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur -- were all missing.

There were plenty of signs of recent habitation -- unmade beds, lamps cleaned and refilled, and so on -- but no indication of what might have happened to the crew.  The lighthouse logs indicated nothing amiss other than some inclement weather, which is hardly unusual off the coast of Scotland in winter.  It must be mentioned that there had been extensive storm damage downslope from the lighthouse; a metal storage box thirty meters above sea level had been broken open, presumably by the surf, its contents strewn, and an iron railing set in rock was bent nearly flat.  Robert Muirhead, superintendent of the Northern Lighthouse Board, said some of the damage was "difficult to believe unless actually seen."

Still, it's presumed that the three missing men -- all highly experienced lighthouse operators, who had been on the job for years -- would have known better than to go out and walk the beach in the middle of a December storm.  The lighthouse itself was undamaged, so whatever killed its keepers seems to have taken place outside the building.  Muirhead's conclusion was that they'd gone out to try to secure the metal storage box that was later found damaged, and a rogue wave had swept them away.

There are two problems with this explanation.  The first is that there was only one missing set of oilskins, implying that two of the men went out into a raging winter storm in their shirtsleeves.  The second is that the worst of the damage seems to have happened after the lighthouse was abandoned; it was already not operating on the 15th, and the serious storms (the ones that prevented anyone from investigating for a week and a half) didn't start till the 16th.  It's possible they were killed by rogue surf and/or bad weather, but this doesn't really answer all the questions.

So of course, this didn't satisfy most people, and that's when the wild speculation started.  Sea serpents, an attack by the malevolent spirits of drowned sailors, abduction by foreign agents, and even that the three men had absconded so they could take up new lives elsewhere.  A logbook surfaced claiming that there had been a devastating storm lasting four days -- from December 11 to December 14 -- bad enough that all three men had "spent hours praying" and Donald McArthur, an experienced lighthouse keeper, had "been reduced to helpless crying."  The weirdest part about this bit is that contemporary weather records show no indications of an intense storm during that time -- as I mentioned, the seriously bad weather didn't really start until the 16th -- and certainly if there'd been a gale bad enough to trigger fits of weeping in a veteran seaman who was safely inside an extremely sturdy building on dry land at the time, someone on one of the nearby islands would have mentioned it.

However, the veracity of the entries has been called into question, and some investigators think the entire thing is a fake.

Then there's the fact that McArthur himself was said to be "volatile" and to have a bad temper, so another possibility is that there'd been a fight -- or perhaps a murder -- and after dumping the bodies into the ocean, the guilty party had thrown had thrown himself in as well out of remorse and guilt.  However, there was no sign of any kind of altercation inside the lighthouse, and no notation in the (real) records left by the keepers that anyone had been acting out of the ordinary.

So we're left with a mystery.  Three men in a remote lighthouse off the coast of Scotland vanished, and despite a thorough investigation at the time and a lot of speculation since then, no one has been able to figure out why.

Me, I'm voting for the Rutans.

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Flight into nowhere

Ever heard of Pan Am Flight 914?

The story goes that on July 2, 1955, Flight 914 -- a Boeing 727 -- took off on a routine run from New York to Miami, with 57 passengers on board.  Everything was going normally until the airplane got close to its destination.  As it was making its initial descent into Miami Airport, the aircraft suddenly disappeared from radar.

There was a massive search effort.  At the time of its disappearance, it was over the Atlantic Ocean -- actually near one corner of the infamous Bermuda Triangle -- so ships, planes, and helicopters were deployed to look for wreckage and (hopefully) survivors.

No trace of the airplane or the people on it were found.

But on March 9, 1985 -- a bit less than thirty years after it took off -- a Boeing 727, coming seemingly out of nowhere, landed in Caracas, Venezuela.  From its tail numbers, it was the missing plane.  Witnesses to its landing reported seeing astonished faces plastered to the windows, apparently aghast at where they were.  But before anyone could deplane, the pilot maneuvered the plane back onto the runway and took off.

This time, apparently for good.  No one has seen the plane, any of the crew, or the 57 passengers since.

[Image courtesy of photographer Peter Duijnmayer and the Creative Commons]

Flight 914 has become a popular staple of the "unsolved mysteries" crowd, and has featured in various books and television shows of the type you see on the This Hasn't Been About History For A Long Time Channel.  Explanations, if you can dignify them with that name, include time slips and/or portals, alien abduction, and the government secretly kidnapping the people on the flight and putting them into suspended animation for thirty years, for some unspecified but undoubtedly nefarious purpose.

There's just one problem with all of this.

None of it actually happened.

Pan Am Flight 914 is a hoax, but one that for some reason refuses to die.  You'll run into various iterations of the claim (the one I linked in the first line of this post is only one of hundreds of examples), all of which have the same basic story but differ in the details -- the number of passengers, the dates of departure and arrival, and so on.  (One site I saw claimed that the flight didn't land until 1992.)  But if you take all of those variations on the tale of the disappearing airplane, and track them backwards, you find out that the whole thing started with...

... The Weekly World News.

I should have known.  There's a rule of thumb analogous to "All roads lead to Rome," which is "All idiotic hoaxes lead to The Weekly World News."  For those of you Of A Certain Age, you will undoubtedly remember this tabloid as the one in the grocery store checkout line that had headlines like, "Cher Gives Birth To Bigfoot's Baby."  They also are the ones that created the recurring character of Bat Boy:

This spawned literally dozens of stories in The Weekly World News, my favorite of which was that a time traveler had come back from the future and told people that Bat Boy eventually becomes president.  The best part is that they call him "President Boy."

Me, I'm in favor.  Given some of the potential choices we've got in 2024, Bat Boy couldn't do much worse.

Bat Boy has also been the basis for countless pieces of fan fiction and a PS 5 game, was the inspiration for the monster in the truly terrifying X Files episode "Patience," and is the main character -- I shit you not -- in a Broadway musical.

But I digress.

The fact that Pan Am Flight 914 came from the same source as Bat Boy, the underwater crystal pyramids of Atlantis, and a coverup involving a mass burial of aliens in Uganda should immediately call the claim into question, but for some reason, it doesn't.  Woo-woo websites, books, and television shows still feature the flight as one of the best-documented examples of a mysterious disappearance, even though Pan Am itself has confirmed that Flight 914 never happened and the whole thing was made up.

Of course, that's what they would say.  *suspicious single eyebrow-raise*

What amazes me is that even though a minimal amount of snooping around online would be enough to convince you that the whole story is a fabrication, the websites claiming it's true far outnumber the ones debunking it.  Further illustrating the accuracy of the quote -- of uncertain origin, but often misattributed to Mark Twain -- that "a lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots."

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The strange case of Frederick Valentich

As skeptics, sometimes we have to admit that there are cases when we don't know the answer to a question -- and may not ever know.

It's not that it isn't frustrating.  Believe me, I get that.  One such question that is near and dear to my heart is whether or not there is intelligent extraterrestrial life.  While speculation runs rampant -- and I've done my own share of speculating -- the fact is, we have exactly zero evidence for it.  There are equally persuasive arguments for intelligent aliens being widespread and for humanity being, for all intents and purposes, alone in the universe.  It's very hard to derive a meaningful conclusion from the absence of data coupled with a huge and largely unexplored search field, so right now -- however much we'd like to meet the Vulcans and whatnot -- the most honest answer is "we don't know."

The same can happen with much less grandiose realms of inquiry.  Which brings me to a mystery I stumbled on a couple of days ago -- the puzzle of what happened to Frederick Valentich on October 21, 1978.

Valentich was a twenty-year-old Australian man who dreamed of a career in aviation, but a poor track record with academics and some rather erratic behavior kept getting in the way.  He applied twice to the Royal Australian Air Force, and was rejected both times because of "inadequate educational qualifications."  He successfully joined the RAAF Air Training Corps, and did part-time study to try for his commercial pilot's license -- but failed the qualifying examinations in all five subjects, not once but twice.  He got a license to fly small aircraft, but didn't even do well at that, straying into controlled air space over Sydney once, and then twice deliberately flying into a cloud (his license was only rated to allow him to fly in "visual meteorological conditions") -- behavior that was on the verge of grounding him permanently.

None of this discouraged him.

Frederick Valentich shortly before his disappearance [Image is in the Public Domain]

On the afternoon of October 21, 1978, Valentich took off from Melbourne Airport in a Cessna 182L heading toward King Island, about halfway between the southern coast of Australia and the northern tip of Tasmania.  His purpose is unknown; he told a friend he was going to meet some friends, and another that he was picking up a parcel of seafood, but neither turned out to be true.  At 7:06 PM he radioed Melbourne Air Traffic Control that he was flying at 1,400 meters and was being followed by a "large aircraft with four bright landing lights."  It kept getting closer and then moving away, he said.

Melbourne asked Valentich for more information.  He said that he was having engine problems, but the aircraft was still following him.  Then there was a silence, followed by Valentich saying, "It's not an aircraft."

Those were his last words.  They were followed by what are described as "metallic scraping noises," then... nothing.

A search commenced the next day, and over four days covered over a thousand square kilometers.  Neither Valentich nor any confirmable trace of his airplane were ever found.

A variety of explanations have been suggested to account for Valentich's disappearance.  These include:

• He was poorly qualified to fly, and in the dim light condition of early evening he became disoriented, possibly flying upside down.  The lights and the mysterious aircraft he saw were his plane's reflection in the ocean.  The problem with this is that a Cessna 182L has a gravity-feed fuel system, so the engine would have cut out quickly if he had been flying upside down.  And if he wasn't upside down, what was the mysterious aircraft?
• Valentich staged his own disappearance.  There were reports of a light plane making a landing in a field near Cape Otway, on the south coast, but upon investigation Melbourne police found no evidence of it.  Either the reports were incorrect, or the plane had taken off again, which leaves us with the same problem as before.  And if he did land somewhere, there's the problem that his plane only had the fuel capacity to reach Tasmania, or somewhere along the south Australian shore.  So where is his plane -- and where is he?
• Valentich did go down somewhere in the Bass Strait, and the remains simply have never been found.  An interesting analysis by pilots who've studied the case suggests that he fell prey to the "illusion of a tilted horizon" -- a sensory illusion occurring because of the mixed signals coming from the eyes and the inner ear.  Valentich may have then overcompensated, sending the plane into a "graveyard spiral" ending with his plummeting into the ocean.  As a pilot friend of mine once told me, "Rule one is 'always trust your instruments over your senses.'"  (The link to the analysis also contains a complete transcript of the conversation between Valentich and Melbourne Air Traffic Control, if you're curious.) 
• Valentich crashed his plane deliberately -- i.e., he committed suicide.  There's no evidence that he was suicidal, although that by itself isn't disproof.  And once again, we have the problem that no trace of the crash was ever discovered.
• And, of course: the aircraft Valentich saw was an alien spacecraft, and he was abducted.  A group called Ground Saucer Watch produced photographs taken from Cape Otway, allegedly on the day Valentich disappeared, that show "a bona fide unknown flying object, of moderate dimensions, apparently surrounded by a cloud-like vapor/exhaust residue," but the photographs are of poor quality and have generally been dismissed as evidence by skeptical inquirers.

It's a curious case, to say the least, made more curious by the aforementioned fact that he'd lied about his reason for heading toward King Island, and also that according to his father, Valentich was obsessed with UFOs and had expressed fear about being abducted.  Then, there's the following account, as related in Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs, by Jerome Clark:

Several years after the incident, several members of a family -- an uncle, his son, and two nieces -- came forward to relate an experience they underwent on October 21, 1978.  As the story went, they were hunting rabbits on Cape Otway when one of the girls asked, "What is that light?"  Looking up, the uncle spotted an airplane (apparently Valentich's, the only one that would have been in the air at the time in question) and identified it as an aircraft light.  "No," the niece insisted.  "The light is above the airplane."  The four watched the plane and the light until it disappeared behind some nearby hills.

So what are we to make of all this?

Honestly, there's not much here to make.  Once again, we are faced with a complete absence of hard evidence.  Other than the conversation between Valentich and Melbourne Air Traffic Control, we've got nothing to go on other than anecdote.  Each of the above explanations is possible (even, loath though I am to admit it, the alien abduction one).  Certainly each one admits to arguments against.  It's likely that his plane went down in Bass Strait due to pilot error, but likely doesn't mean case closed.

So the rather unsatisfying conclusion is that we don't know what happened to Frederick Valentich, and probably never will.

When faced with a situation like this, the best we can do is hold our opinion in abeyance, forever if need be.  I get that it's frustrating; the human mind's drive to know stuff is mighty powerful.  But as good skeptics we need to admit it when the evidence is simply inadequate to draw a conclusion, any conclusion.

And it seems like, in the strange case of Frederick Valentich, we might never have a better answer than that.

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Vanished into the wilderness

As I've said many times before: I'm not saying that the paranormal is impossible.  I would really like it, however, if people would consider all of the natural possibilities before jumping straight to the supernatural ones.

This comes up because of a claim over at UFO Sightings Hotspot, where much is being made about the alleged disappearance of people (hundreds of them, apparently) in parks around the world.  The article comes along with a 24-minute video, which is worth watching if you have the time and don't mind doing a few facepalms, but this passage from the post will give you the gist:

The mystery of hundreds of people vanishing in national parks and forests is possible linked to a strange and highly unusual predator that is living in the woods and forests all across the world and is able to overpower someone in an instant. 

People disappear in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Mount Kailash in Tibet, the Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru and in national parks and forests in U.S.A. 

While paranormal researcher Stephen Young described Markawasi as a dimensional portal and suggested the strange energy visitors have described feeling there is possibly caused by a confluence of ley lines or the piezoelectric properties of granite, Glenn Canady from BeforeItsNews reported that David Paulidis, a former cop began investigating a story about the hundreds that vanished from National Parks and forests in U.S.A...   David began making his own list and discovered there were over 30 cluster sites where most of these vanishings were happening.  He noticed that the people that vanish often do so right under the noses of others in the area. The missing also shed their clothes right away and they are folded neatly.  One of the Park Rangers said it was like you were standing straight up and you melted away, that’s what it looked like!

So that's the claim.  People are vanishing by the scores, and the only possible explanations are (1) a huge and vicious predator, with apparently worldwide distribution but completely unknown to science, (2) ley lines, (3) dimensional portals, or (4) the "piezoelectric properties of granite."

Let's consider for a moment a couple of other explanations, shall we?  Then I'd exhort you to weigh them along with the supernatural ones, and see what seems to you to be the most likely.

There are two things about hiking in the wilderness that people often fail to take into account.  My perspective from this comes from a long personal history of back-country hiking, starting when I was a kid and my dad and I used to go to the canyon country of Arizona every summer to hunt for rocks and fossils.  Later, after I moved to Washington state, I used to go out in summer for weeks at a time up into the Cascades and the Olympic Range, relishing the silence and the open space after spending the rest of the year in the bustle and noise of Seattle.

If you've never done this yourself, the first thing you need to realize is that the wilderness is freakin' huge.  And empty.  On my trips into the Cascades, there were times that I'd go a week without seeing a single person.  The place is a big expanse of mountains, glaciers, and trees; if I'd gotten lost and gone missing, perhaps been hurt, the chances are very much against my ever being found again.  I ran across a comment on a website about hiker disappearances that seems appropriate, here:

We were out rockhounding in the desert and followed some tank tracks.  Turns out they were WWII tank tracks, and in one gully we found a long dead US Army Jeep, upside down.  We were likely the last people to have seen it since 1940 or so.  We took the shovel.  That's how we know - it hadn't been stripped. A Jeep - lost for 40 years.  So - yes, a body would be easy by comparison, especially since animals would eat most of it. 

Once you get off a trail, it's not hard to be on ground that hasn't been trod for decades.  And get lost.

Add to that the fact that there are countless false trails, some made by animals, some simply natural open spots, that could lead a hiker astray.  This is one reason why hiking manuals recommend always going camping with a friend (not that I listened, of course).  Having two people there doubles the chances that you'll both come back alive.

Baxter Creek Trail, Great Smoky Mountains National Park [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And the "not that I listened" part highlights the second thing that a lot of people don't think about, and that's the penchant for people to do dumb stuff.  Again, I have some personal experience in this regard.  Despite my "be careful if you're out in the wilderness" message, I was known to make really boneheaded choices back in my young and stupid days.  I recall being by myself up in the Cascades, and after a hot hike I decided to strip naked and jump into a little crystal-clear lake I'd come across, not noticing that the lake was fed by melting glacial ice until I was already mid-swan-dive.  I think on that day I may have set the record for fewest milliseconds spent in the water.  I've also loved to climb since I was a kid, and have scaled many a cliff and rock face and tree -- all, of course, without any climbing equipment.  Any of those escapades could have resulted in my being seriously injured or killed.  That I wasn't is more a testimony to dumb luck than it is to skill.

Look at the moronic stuff people will do in front of witnesses, often while right next to gigantic "caution" signs.  Last summer, my wife and I went to Yellowstone National Park, and we saw many members of the species Homo idioticus doing things like walking right up to bison, elk, and bears, stepping off of boardwalks in order to get up close and personal with hot-enough-to-melt-your-skin-off hot springs, and climbing on crumbling rock formations.  At least here, if something bad happened, there were people to help (not that in the case of the grizzlies or hot springs, there'd have been much we could do).  But out in the middle of nowhere?  You're on your own.  And I can use myself as a case-in-point that even in those much more precarious circumstances, people still do dumb stuff.

So you don't need to conjecture predators, ley lines, or anything else supernatural to account for disappearances.  The immensity of nature, coupled with natural human stupidity, is certainly sufficient.  Add to this our penchant for imagining stuff while alone or in unfamiliar surroundings, and you can explain the data, such as it is, without recourse to the paranormal.

And trust me.  Whatever the explanation, it has nothing to do with the "piezoelectric properties of granite."

Media, hype, and the Bermuda Triangle

Why does popular media have such a love affair with woo-woo nonsense?

Isn't science cool enough?  Can't the History Channel just be about history, and the Discovery Channel about discoveries?  Is it really necessary to boost the ratings with idiocy about the prophecies of Nostradamus, hunting the Loch Ness Monster, and searching for Noah's Ark?  What, you couldn't find any real stuff from science and history to tell us about?

Of course, the problem doesn't just apply to television.  Newspapers and magazines, especially the online versions, are just as bad.  Take the article I just ran across last week, from Huffington Post, entitled, "Vittorio Missoni's Disappearance Gives Rise to New Fears of Bermuda Triangles Worldwide."  In this stunning piece of investigative journalism by Lee Speigel, we hear first about the mysterious disappearance of fashion designer Missoni and five others, who were on a small airplane from an island in the Los Roques chain, bound for Caracas.  The plane vanished on January 4, and no remains of the airplane or its passengers has thus far been found.

So far, makes for kind of a blah story.  I mean, it's tragic enough for the family and friends of the missing six, but as far as evidence of any kind to show what happened, there isn't much.  One piece of luggage that was on the plane turned up in Curaçao, and two of Missoni's bags on Bonaire, leading to speculation that the plane might have been diverted (or hijacked) to the Netherlands Antilles.  Authorities are still looking into the case.

But Speigel couldn't let it sit there, because that makes for kind of a short article, not nearly enough to make his required word count.  "This guy and five others disappeared, and some luggage turned up elsewhere, and we don't know why."  No, can't just say that.  We have to take the slim facts we have, and leap right off the cliff with them.

The plane vanished "into thin air."  (I'll bet you my next year's salary it didn't.  The Law of Conservation of Mass is strictly enforced, even in Venezuela.)  Speigel points out that the plane was near the Bermuda Triangle, where "people, planes, and ships have vanished for decades."  (No, they haven't.  Hundreds of airplanes and ships, carrying tens of thousands of people, cross the Bermuda Triangle daily, and damn near all of them make it.  A thorough statistical analysis of the records -- i.e., actual facts -- show that there is no higher rate of planes or ships going down in the Bermuda Triangle than any other place on Earth.  In fact, Lawrence Kusche, who authored the study, said, "...The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle is a manufactured mystery. It began because of careless research and was elaborated upon and perpetuated by writers who either purposely or unknowingly made use of misconceptions, faulty reasoning, and sensationalism. It was repeated so many times that it began to take on the aura of truth.")

Then, Speigel goes even further out into hyperspace.  The Bermuda Triangle isn't the only Mysterious Triangle of Death, he tells us.  We have the "Michigan Triangle."  We have the Pacific version, the "Devil's Sea."  Then he starts blathering on about "time portals" and "mysterious vortexes."

And I'm thinking: this is journalism?

It's only near the end that Speigel gives a reluctant nod to some skeptics.  He quotes prominent science writers Benjamin Radford and Brian Dunning, and includes a statement from the United States Coast Guard:

The Coast Guard does not recognize the existence of the so-called Bermuda Triangle as a geographic area of specific hazard to ships or planes.  In a review of many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the years there has been nothing discovered that would indicate that casualties were the result of anything other than physical causes.  No extraordinary factors have ever been identified.

Sounds pretty unequivocal, doesn't it?  But take a look at how Speigel introduces the quotes from the token skeptics and the Coast Guard; he has a lot of vague, woo-woo hand-waving, and then says that the doubters still aren't convinced.  He introduces the bits of science and rationality with the phrase, "And yet..."  In other words, "Despite the highly convincing argument I've just given you, some willfully blind so-called scientists still don't believe."

And he ends the article with a clip from a documentary about the "Devil's Sea..."

... from a documentary on The Learning Channel.

How did we get here?  I mean, I know it's about money; the television stations who prefer showing Monster Quest over Cosmos are doing so because it gets sponsors.  But it's a self-feeding thing, you know?  By putting this foolishness on the public airwaves and into what we would hope are legitimate news sources, we not only give it undeserved credibility, we create interest.  After that, when you've (1) generated curiosity in a subject, and (2) placed a seed in people's minds that it could be real, you've given them a thirst to find out more.  Which makes it more lucrative to do it again, only bigger and better this time.  And pretty soon you're in positive feedback mode, a woo-woo snowball effect that creates a big old avalanche of bullshit.

Explaining, I think, what has happened to the History Channel, Learning Channel, Discovery Channel, and others... and also why Huffington Post has a regular "Weird News" feature in which writers like Lee Speigel regularly treat this nonsense as if it were real.

The whole thing is especially maddening, because let's face it: the world as it is is pretty freakin' amazing.  There are so many things in science and history that are drop-dead fascinating -- you could make a documentary a week and not run out in your lifetime.  After all, there are people who devote their lives to studying this stuff, and virtually all of them do it for one reason -- it's cool.  So, to Speigel and the others who are fostering this hunger for the supernatural in place of reality, I'd like to make a request:  stop making shit up.  Learn some actual science.  Find a way to make that interesting to your readers and viewers.  And if you can't figure out how to do it, find a new job.