Faces in the woods

One of the first things I ever wrote about in this blog was the phenomenon of pareidolia -- because the human brain is wired to recognize faces, we sometimes see faces where there are only random patterns of lights and shadows that resemble a face.  This is why, as children, we all saw faces in clouds and on the Moon; and it also explains the Face on Mars, most "ghost photographs," and the countless instances of seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches, tortillas, and concrete walls.

When I first mentioned pareidolia, almost thirteen years ago, it seemed like most people hadn't heard of it.  Recently, however, the idea has gained wider currency, and now when some facelike thing is spotted, and makes it into the mainstream press, the word seems to come up with fair regularity.  Which is all to the good.

But it does leave the woo-woos in a bit of a quandary, doesn't it?  If all of their ghost photographs and Faces on Mars and grilled cheese Jesuses (Jesi?) are just random patterns, perceived as faces because that's how the human brain works, what's a woo-woo to do?

Well, a post at the website Crystal Life gives us the answer.

Entitled "A Visit With the Nature Spirits," the author admits that pareidolia does occur:

How do you see nature spirits in trees?  You use pareidolia, a faculty of the mind that enables you to see patterns in objects where none supposedly exist.  It’s how we see faces and shapes and animals in water, rocks, and tree trunks.  Conventional psychology regards this faculty as pure imagination, but if it is used in a certain way, it can open you up to subtler realities of which conventional psychology is unaware.

Okay, so far so good.  So how do we tell the difference between imagining a face (which surely we all do from time to time), and seeing a face because there's a "nature spirit" present?  We can't, the writer says, because even if it is pareidolia, the spirits are still there.  She gives an example:

“Trees like to express their environment,” she [a like-minded person she was talking with] observes, and so create forms, such as burls, in their bark to reflect what they experience.  I could see the figures she described, although my immediate impression had been that of an energy like that of an octopus.  Atala explained that various people will see different images and aspects of the trees’ energy.  Overall her experiences of the nature spirit were more visual (she took many photographs), while mine were more kinesthetic.  It’s possible that with the pine tree, I was simply picking up certain tendrils of energy that it was extending toward me.

So, in other words -- if I'm understanding her correctly -- even if analysis of the photograph showed that the image we thought was a Nature Spirit turned out to be a happenstance arrangement of leaves and branches, it's still a Nature Spirit -- it's just that the Spirit used the leaves and branches to create his face?  (At this point, you should go back and click the link, if you haven't already done so, it includes some photographs of "Woodland Spirits" that she took, and that are at least mildly entertaining, including one of a guy "coming into rapport" with a tree.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lauren raine, Greenman mask with eyes, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Well, to a skeptic's ear, all of this sounds mighty convenient.  It's akin to a ghost hunter saying, "No -- the ghostly image wasn't just a smudge on the camera lens; the ghost created a smudge on your camera lens in order to leave his image on the photograph."  What this does, of course, is to remove photographic evidence from the realm of the even potentially falsifiable -- any alternate explanations simply show that the denizens of the Spirit World can manipulate their surroundings, your mind, and the camera or recording equipment.

The whole thing puts me in mind of China Miéville's amazing (and terrifying) short story "Details," in which a woman admits that cracks in sidewalks and stains on walls and patterns in carpet that happen to resemble faces are just random and meaningless -- but at the same time, they are monsters.  Here's how the main character, the enigmatic Mrs. Miller, describes it:

"For most people, it's just chance, isn't it?" Mrs Miller said.  "What shapes they see in a tangle of wire.  There's a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear.  But now... the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me.  It can thrust itself forward.  It makes me see it.  It's found its way through."

It does bear keeping in mind, though, that however wonderful Miéville's story is, you will find it on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore.  For a reason.

Of course, it's not like any hardcore skeptic considers photographic evidence all that reliable in the first place.  Besides pareidolia and simple camera malfunctions, programs like Photoshop have made convincing fakes too easy to produce.  This is why scientists demand hard evidence when people make outlandish claims -- show me, in a controlled setting, that what you are saying is true.  If you think there's a troll in the woods, let's see him show up in front of reliable witnesses.  Let's have a sample of troll hair on which to perform DNA analysis, or a troll bone to study in the lab.  If you say a house is haunted by a "spirit," design me a Spirit-o-Meter that can detect the "energy field" that you people always blather on about -- don't just tell me that you sensed a Great Disturbance in the Force, and if I didn't, it's just too bad that I don't have your level of psychic sensitivity.  Also, for cryin' in the sink, don't tell me that my "disbelief is getting in the way," which is another accusation I've had leveled at me.  Honestly, you'd think that, far from being discouraged by my disbelief, a ghost would want to appear in front of skeptics like myself, just for the fun of watching us piss our pants in abject terror.  ("I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do believe, I do believe...")

In any case, the article on Crystal Life gives us yet another example of how the worlds of science and the paranormal define the word "evidence" rather differently.  The two views, I think, are probably irreconcilable.  So I'll end here, on that rather pessimistic note, not only because I've reached the end of my post for the day, but also because I just spilled a little bit of coffee on my desk, and I want to wipe it up before the Coffee Fairy fashions it into a scary-looking face.

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A face in the underpass

As part of my research for Skeptophilia, I spend way too much time perusing questionable websites.

Not that kind of questionable.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  I'm talking about fringe-y sites dealing with Bigfoot, and UFOs, and hauntings, and paranormal phenomena of all sorts.  One of the most useful -- from the standpoint of someone who needs material for six blog posts a week -- is The Anomalist, which acts as a news aggregate for the World of the Weird.  (To his credit, the guy who runs The Anomalist is a pretty good skeptic, and unhesitatingly calls out ridiculous claims for what they are.  He's inclined to give some of them more credence than I would, but I admire his commitment to applying the tools of skeptical logic to claims of the paranormal.)

One of the links that popped up on The Anomalist came from Coast to Coast with George Noory.  Coast to Coast became prominent under the late Art Bell, who interviewed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of people on the topic of the supernatural, conspiracy theories, and so on.  One of the most famous is the so-called "Frantic Caller" who back in 1998 phoned in to the show and proceeded to tell a fantastic story -- that he was a worker in Area 51 and had found out stuff he shouldn't have, and now the government was chasing him with the intent to silence him permanently.  The guy was either telling the truth or was a hell of an actor; he legitimately sounded terrified.  (Interesting side note: the transmission from Coast to Coast cut out in the middle of the call, and Art Bell acted genuinely baffled as to why.  The whole thing has become a famous story amongst the conspiracy theorists, lo unto this very day.)

But I digress.

Anyhow, a while back I was on The Anomalist, looking for ideas, and I saw one from Coast to Coast about people seeing a spooky face in a pedestrian underpass.  These sorts of things are almost always cases of pareidolia -- the tendency of the human mind to pick up face-like patterns in things like coarse-grained wood, rust patches, and grilled-cheese sandwiches.  But I thought I'd take a look, and when I did, the first thing I noticed was not a face -- in fact, I had a hard time seeing a face in the clip even when I looked for it -- but that the underpass looked awfully familiar to me.

Then, with a sudden shock, I realized that it was a photo from the Cayuga Waterfront Trail, only ten miles from where I live.

I've often complained about the fact that things like UFO and Bigfoot sightings never happen near enough to me to justify a road trip.  So when I found out how close I was to the mysterious face, I thought, "Oh, hell yes. I'm gonna check this one out myself."

So on Saturday I drove down to Cass Park, just north of the underpass in question, and struck off toward it.  I arrived there and started snapping photographs and poking around the place -- and for the record, I didn't see anything even remotely facelike.

After about five minutes of this, I was startled by a voice nearby, and turned to see an obviously stoned guy sitting on the rocks with his back against the cement buttresses of the underpass.  The following conversation ensued:

Stoned guy: Dude.  Why are you taking pictures of that?

 
Me: Because people have been seeing a face up in the I-beams.  I read about it, and thought I'd take a look.

 
*long pause to let that settle in.*

 
Stoned guy: Whoa.

 
Me: I don't see anything, though.  Have you seen anything weird down here?

 
Stoned guy: No, man.  Not a face, anyhow.  But why are you interested in this?

 
Me: I'm a paranormal researcher.  [Yes, I got this phrase out without laughing.]

 
Stoned guy: [reverently] That is so fuckin' cool.  I've never met an actual paranormal researcher.

 
Me: I've been interested in the paranormal for years.  [That much at least was true.]  When I found out this was happening close by, I figured I'd better check it out.

 
Stoned guy: [suddenly brightening up]  Dude, I haven't seen any faces, but there is some creepy fuckin' graffiti over there.  *points*

I was immediately reminded of the graffiti saying, "Duck, Sally Sparrow!  Duck NOW!" from the brilliant Doctor Who episode "Blink."  So I thought I'd ask the Stoned Guy what he thought.

Me: What does "Don't Go Into the Light" mean?

 
Stoned guy: No idea, man.  All I know is if I see any weird lights, I'm hauling ass right out of here.

 
Me: That sounds like a good idea.  Thanks for your help.

 
Stoned guy: Rock on, dude.  Hope you catch a fuckin' ghost, or whatever.

 
Me: Me too.

So my first opportunity to investigate an actual paranormal claim near where I live kind of was a bust.  Unfortunate, but I suppose it's to be expected.  You can't catch a fuckin' ghost, or whatever, every time.

But it was kind of fun to go check out some place local, and I hope it's not the last.  I'm hereby putting in my request to any aliens, Bigfoots, ghosts, and such-like who may be reading this that I would be much obliged if they'd make an appearance somewhere in, say, a twenty-mile radius of my house.  Because I may be a paranormal researcher, but I'm also kind of a homebody.

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A face in the underpass

As part of my research for Skeptophilia, I spend way too much time perusing questionable websites.

Not that kind of questionable.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  I'm talking about fringe-y sites dealing with Bigfoot, and UFOs, and hauntings, and paranormal phenomena of all sorts.  One of the most useful -- from the standpoint of someone who needs material for six blog posts a week -- is The Anomalist, which acts as a news aggregate for the World of the Weird.  (To his credit, the guy who runs The Anomalist is a pretty good skeptic, and unhesitatingly calls out ridiculous claims for what they are.  He's inclined to give some of them more credence than I would, but I admire his commitment to applying at least some of the tools of skeptical logic to claims of the paranormal.)

One of the links that popped up on The Anomalist last week came from Coast to Coast with George Noory.  Coast to Coast became prominent under the late Art Bell, who interviewed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of people on the topic of the supernatural, conspiracy theories, and so on.  One of the most famous is the so-called "Frantic Caller" who back in 1998 phoned in to the show and proceeded to tell a fantastic story -- that he was a worker in Area 51 and had found out stuff he shouldn't have, and now the government was chasing him with the intent to silence him permanently.  The guy was either telling the truth or was a hell of an actor -- he legitimately sounded terrified.  (Interesting side note: the transmission from Coast to Coast cut out in the middle of the call, and Art Bell acted genuinely baffled as to why.  The whole thing has become a famous story amongst the conspiracy theorists, lo unto this very day.)

But I digress.

Anyhow, I was on The Anomalist, looking for ideas, and I saw one from Coast to Coast about people seeing a spooky face in a pedestrian underpass.  These sorts of things are almost always cases of pareidolia -- the tendency of the human mind to pick up face-like patterns in things like coarse-grained wood, rust patches, and grilled-cheese sandwiches.  But I thought I'd take a look, and when I did, the first thing I noticed was not a face -- in fact, I'm having a hard time seeing a face in the clip even when I look for it -- but that the underpass looked awfully familiar to me.

Then, with a sudden shock, I realized that it was a photo from the Cayuga Waterfront Trail, only ten miles from where I live.

I've often complained about the fact that things like UFO and Bigfoot sightings never happen near enough to me to justify a road trip.  So when I found out how close I was to the mysterious face, I thought, "Oh, hell yes.  I'm gonna check this one out myself."

So on Saturday I drove down to Cass Park, just north of the underpass in question, and struck off toward it.  I arrived there and started snapping photographs and poking around the place -- and for the record, I didn't see anything even remotely facelike.

After about five minutes of this, I was startled by a voice nearby, and turned to see an obviously stoned guy sitting on the rocks with his back against the cement buttresses of the underpass.  The following conversation ensued:

Stoned guy:  Dude.  Why are you taking pictures of that? 

Me:  Because people have been seeing a face up in the I-beams.  I read about it, and thought I'd take a look. 

*long pause to let that settle in.*  

Stoned guy:  Whoa. 

Me:  I don't see anything, though.  Have you seen anything weird down here? 

Stoned guy:  No, man.  Not a face, anyhow.  But why are you interested in this? 

Me:  I'm a paranormal researcher.  [Yes, I got this phrase out without laughing.] 

Stoned guy: [reverently]  That is so fuckin' cool.  I've never met an actual paranormal researcher. 

Me:  I've been interested in the paranormal for years.  [That much at least was true.]  When I found out this was happening close by, I figured I'd better check it out. 

Stoned guy:  [suddenly brightening up]  Dude, I haven't seen any faces, but there is some creepy fuckin' graffiti over there.  *points*

I was immediately reminded of the graffiti saying, "Duck, Sally Sparrow!  Duck NOW!" from the brilliant Dr. Who episode "Blink."  So I thought I'd ask the Stoned Guy what he thought.

Me:  What does "Don't Go Into the Light" mean? 

Stoned guy:  No idea, man.  All I know is if I see any weird lights, I'm hauling ass right out of here. 

Me:  That sounds like a good idea.  Thanks for your help. 

Stoned guy:  Rock on, dude.  Hope you catch a fuckin' ghost, or whatever. 

Me:  Me too.

So my first opportunity to investigate an actual paranormal claim near where I live kind of was a bust.  Unfortunate, but I suppose it's to be expected.

But it was kind of fun to go check out some place local, and I hope it's not the last.  I'm hereby putting in my request to any aliens, Bigfoots, ghosts, and such-like who may be reading this that I would be much obliged if they'd make an appearance somewhere in, say, a twenty-mile radius of my house.  Because I may be a paranormal researcher, but I also like staying close to home.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side; Jared Diamond's riveting book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Starting with societies that sowed the seeds of their own destruction -- such as the Easter Islanders, whose denuding of the landscape led to island-wide ecological collapse -- he focuses the lens on the United States and western Europe, whose rampant resource use, apparent disregard for curbing pollution, and choice of short-term expediency over long-term wisdom seem to be pushing us in the direction of disaster.

It's not a cheerful book, but it's a very necessary one, and is even more pertinent now than when it was written in 2005.  Diamond highlights the problems we face, and warns of that threshold we're approaching toward catastrophe -- a threshold that is so subtle that we may well not notice it until it's too late to reverse course.

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

The child in the cemetery

It's astonishing how little a skeptical, rational approach has insulated me from having a purely visceral reaction sometimes.

I've commented to my wife that I seem to have two brains, and they don't talk to each other.  In fact, most of the time each one seems to be bound and determined that the other doesn't exist.  One is my rational brain, that tells me things like "You've been very healthy, all things considered, and the physical you had two days ago is really unlikely to have turned up anything even remotely questionable."  The other, my emotional brain, says, "You haven't gotten the results yet, which means that they are reluctant to tell you that you're dying of a rare, incurable, and horribly painful disease."

Even with less personal things, it's curious how I can have two completely independent reactions at precisely the same time.  Take, for example, the image captured on Google Street View in the Martha Chapel Cemetery, Huntsville, Texas last week.

How anyone thought of zooming in like this, on an image of a (supposedly) empty cemetery, I don't know.  At least that's my emotional brain speaking.  My rational brain says there's a clear reason -- because it's a hoax, a digitally-altered photograph.  But without further ado, here's the image in question:

If you'll look closely, there's a very convincing image of a little girl's face peeking from around the left side of the tree.

The link I provided shows the image in a variety of angles and magnifications, and also says that there's a second "ghostly image" in the picture.  You can see it in the rectangular space framed by the sapling and the two dark tree trunks on the left side of the image.  Here it is, magnified:

This one, on the other hand, just doesn't do it for me.  If you go to the link (the YouTube video it brings you to is only a minute and a half long), you can see it in even greater magnification, and it looks to me like...

... a leaf caught on the fence.  I don't see it as creepy enough to need further explanation; even considering pareidolia, the thing just doesn't look like a "human figure," but just a dark, irregular blob.

The little girl, though.  That one is, to put not to fine a point on it, freakin' creepy.  She even has a sly expression in her eyes.  I'm relatively certain it's not a ghost; I'll admit the possibility, but the likelihood of camera anomalies or an outright hoax is, in my opinion, far greater.

But my emotional brain doesn't agree.  My emotional brain, in fact, says it does not give a rat's ass about camera anomalies and hoaxes.  My emotional brain is saying, "OH DEAR GOD THAT'S A LITTLE GIRL GHOST AND THAT REALLY IS SCARY."

I'd like to be able to say that my rational brain wins the argument every single time, but truth be told, I am primarily an emotional creature -- odd, I know, for someone who is trained in science and who has waved the flag of rationalism at every opportunity.  In fact, I've often wondered if rationalism and skepticism appealed to me because it at least gave me some protection against going around having the screaming meemies every other Tuesday.

So it seems like I have to put up with having two personalities who give every evidence of hating each other's guts.  I guess it could be worse.  At least they don't get into verbal arguments.  Because people already think I'm eccentric enough without my going around acting like this guy.  Or these guys, depending on how you look at it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is part hard science, part the very human pursuit of truth.  In The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll writes about the studies and theoretical work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the particle Leon Lederman nicknamed "the God Particle" (which he later had cause to regret, causing him to quip that he should have named it "the goddamned particle").  The discovery required the teamwork of dozens of the best minds on Earth, and was finally vindicated when six years ago, a particle of exactly the characteristics Peter Higgs had described almost fifty years earlier was identified from data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Carroll's book is a wonderful look at how science is done, and how we have developed the ability to peer into the deepest secrets of the universe.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Alien vs. moose vs. cameraman

Some friends of mine went on a long backpacking excursion in the Grand Tetons a few years ago.  This couple was (at that point) in their forties, and both strong, fit, and energetic.  They were seasoned hikers who had twenty years' worth of wilderness experience.

Still, they were finding the Tetons a challenge.  Steep, rocky terrain and the desert heat were taking their toll.  And one day they were trudging wearily uphill, each wearing 35-pound packs, legs aching, when they heard a sound.

Both turned.  And running -- no, sprinting -- up the trail was an elderly man of perhaps 75.  Going all out, legs pumping, arms swinging.

And my buddy thought, "Criminy.  Look at that old dude.  Here we are, plodding along like senior citizens, and this guy is running up the trail like it's nothing."

His bemusement turned to mystification when the old guy caught up to them, grabbed them both by the shirt sleeves, and pulled them off the trail and behind a rock outcropping.

My friend said, "What the fuck?"

The old man, gasping for breath, jerked a thumb back toward the trail, so my friend peered around the rock outcropping.  And running full-tilt up the trail was...

... a moose.

Have you ever seen a moose?  They're huge.  No, not huge.  Humongous.  An average full-grown bull moose weighs 1,200 pounds.  That's an average one.  There was one shot by a hunter in the Yukon that weighed 1,800 pounds.  They can stand seven feet high at the shoulder, with a rack of antlers six feet across.

And they're aggressive.  Given (very little) provocation, moose will charge you, then take one of those enormous hooves and attempt to pound you into hamburger.

As the old guy found out.  My friend whispered, "All right, what did you do to piss off the moose?"

The old guy said, "I just took his picture."

The camera went "click," and the moose charged.

It all ended happily enough.  Once they hid behind the rocks, the moose promptly forgot about them, and wandered off to look for other humans to vent its rage at, or failing that, helpless bunnies and squirrels to stomp.  As for the old dude, he probably regretted ever coming on this hike.  I'll bet he never again got more than five feet from his La-Z-Boy.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This all comes up because of a video that popped up on YouTube last week.  It was filmed in Gaspésie, Québec, and the claim is that some tourists stopped to video a moose, and ended up capturing a bipedal humanoid... something.  Take a look:

What strikes me about this video -- besides the fact that it has the obligatory out-of-focusness that all alleged paranormal videos have -- is the fact that here's this gray, skeletal, hollow-eyed guy dancing around next to a moose, and the moose doesn't respond.  "Ho hum," the moose seems to be saying.  "I'll ignore the flailing alien ten feet away from me, and focus on this nice grass by the side of the road."

This is definitely not typical moose behavior.  Typical moose behavior would be to scream, "Teleport this, motherfucker!" immediately before converting the alien into an alien pancake, then to turn toward the people in the car and shout, "Hey!  You!  Whadda you starin' at?  You want a piece of this?  Do you?"

So based on the moose's behavior, I'm thinking there's nothing there, and that it's some sort of video artifact... or possibly (gasp!) a hoax.

This didn't stop Sequoyah Kennedy, over at Mysterious Universe, from speculating that the thing might have been a Wendigo, the mythical creature common to the legends of many tribes of Algonquian origin.  The Wendigo is depicted as a skinny, creepy-looking guy with stringy hair that goes around eating people because he's been cursed to always be hungry and never able to satisfy his appetite.  Why he eats people and not something with more meat on them, e.g. moose, I'm not sure.  Maybe even the Wendigo doesn't dare to piss off a moose.

Which makes it even odder that here he would be, doing the macarena right next to one.  Although Kennedy admits that there's a more likely explanation, which is that it's a piece of a reflection from the inside of the car's windshield.  In fact, if you watch closely, you'll see that there's an odd pattern to the movement -- the guy's not holding the camera steady, and when he jitters it to the right, the creature moves a little to the left, and vice versa.

Exactly what would happen if it was a reflection.

I'm not completely convinced of this explanation, however, and I'm far from an expert in video analysis.  What I'm pretty sure of is that this isn't an alien or a woodland monster or whatever else people have been claiming.

Although I must admit that it's kind of creepy-looking.  It's hard to watch it without pareidolia taking over and convincing you that it's humanoid.  So who knows?  It could be real, I guess.  Maybe the moose and the creature are friends.  Maybe they like to collaborate in attacking humans.  Maybe the creature is saying, "Hey!  Moose!  Look over there!  Those guys aren't just taking your picture, like what happened to your Cousin Fred in the Grand Tetons.  They're videotaping you!"

Which could explain why the video is under a half a minute long.  Because at that point, the moose had enough and chased the people off down the road.

Damn presumptuous humans.  Always pointing and aiming cameras, when all moose want to do is have a nice snack and a chat with their dancing alien friends, or perhaps snort angrily and punt some innocent prairie dogs.  That'd also be in character.

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This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Faces in the woods

One of the first things I ever wrote about in this blog was the phenomenon of pareidolia -- because the human brain is wired to recognize faces, we sometimes see faces where there are only random patterns of lights and shadows that resemble a face.  This is why, as children, we all saw faces in clouds and on the Moon; and it also explains the Face on Mars, most "ghost photographs," and the countless instances of seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches, tortillas, and concrete walls.

When I first mentioned pareidolia, eight years ago, it seemed like most people hadn't heard of it.    Recently, however, the idea has gained wider currency, and now when some facelike thing is spotted, and makes it into the mainstream press, the word seems to come up with fair regularity.  Which is all to the good.

But it does leave the woo-woos in a bit of a quandary, doesn't it?  If all of their ghost photographs and Faces on Mars and grilled cheese Jesuses (Jesi?) are just random patterns, perceived as faces because that's how the human brain works, what's a woo-woo to do?

Well, a recent post at the website Crystal Life gives us the answer.

Entitled "A Visit With the Nature Spirits," the author admits that pareidolia does occur:

How do you see nature spirits in trees?  You use pareidolia, a faculty of the mind that enables you to see patterns in objects where none supposedly exist.  It’s how we see faces and shapes and animals in water, rocks, and tree trunks.  Conventional psychology regards this faculty as pure imagination, but if it is used in a certain way, it can open you up to subtler realities of which conventional psychology is unaware.

Okay, so far so good.  So how do we tell the difference between imagining a face (which surely we all do from time to time), and seeing a face because there's a "nature spirit" present?  We can't, the writer says, because even if it is pareidolia, the spirits are still there.  She gives an example:

“Trees like to express their environment,” she observes, and so create forms, such as burls, in their bark to reflect what they experience.  I could see the figures she described, although my immediate impression had been that of an energy like that of an octopus.  Atala explained that various people will see different images and aspects of the trees’ energy.  Overall her experiences of the nature spirit were more visual (she took many photographs), while mine were more kinesthetic.  It’s possible that with the pine tree, I was simply picking up certain tendrils of energy that it was extending toward me.

So, in other words -- if I'm understanding her correctly -- even if analysis of the photograph showed that the image we thought was a Nature Spirit turned out to be a happenstance arrangement of leaves and branches, it's still a Nature Spirit -- it's just that the Spirit used the leaves and branches to create his face?  (At this point, you should go back and click the link, if you haven't already done so, it includes some photographs of "Woodland Spirits" that he took, and that are at least mildly entertaining, including one of a guy "coming into rapport" with a tree.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lauren raine, Greenman mask with eyes, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Well, to a skeptic's ear, all of this sounds mighty convenient.  It's akin to a ghost hunter saying, "No -- the ghostly image wasn't just a smudge on the camera lens; the ghost created a smudge on your camera lens in order to leave his image on the photograph."  What this does, of course, is to remove photographic evidence from the realm of the even potentially falsifiable -- any alternate explanations simply show that the denizens of the Spirit World can manipulate their surroundings, your mind, and the camera or recording equipment.

The whole thing puts me in mind of China Miéville's amazing (and terrifying) short story "Details," in which a woman admits that cracks in sidewalks and stains on walls and patterns in carpet that happen to resemble faces are just random and meaningless -- but at the same time, they are monsters.  Here's how the main character, the enigmatic Mrs. Miller, describes it:

"For most people, it's just chance, isn't it?" Mrs Miller said. "What shapes they see in a tangle of wire.  There's a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear.  But now... the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me. It can thrust itself forward. It makes me see it. It's found its way through."

It does bear keeping in mind, though, that however wonderful Miéville's story is, you will find it on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore. For a reason.

Of course, it's not like any hardcore skeptic considers photographic evidence all that reliable in the first place.  Besides pareidolia and simple camera malfunctions, programs like Photoshop have made convincing fakes too easy to produce.  This is why scientists demand hard evidence when people make outlandish claims -- show me, in a controlled setting, that what you are saying is true.  If you think there's a troll in the woods, let's see him show up in front of reliable witnesses.  Let's have a sample of troll hair on which to perform DNA analysis, or a troll bone to study in the lab.  If you say a house is haunted by a "spirit," design me a Spirit-o-Meter that can detect the "energy field" that you people always blather on about -- don't just tell me that you sensed a Great Disturbance in the Force, and if I didn't, it's just too bad that I don't have your level of psychic sensitivity.  Also, for cryin' in the sink, don't tell me that my "disbelief is getting in the way," which is another accusation I've had leveled at me.  Honestly, you'd think that, far from being discouraged by my disbelief, a ghost would want to appear in front of skeptics like myself, just for the fun of watching us piss our pants in abject terror.  ("I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do believe, I do believe...")

In any case, the article on Crystal Life gives us yet another example of how the worlds of science and the paranormal define the word "evidence" rather differently.  The two views, I think, are probably irreconcilable.  So I'll end here, on that rather pessimistic note, not only because I've reached the end of my post for the day, but also because I just spilled a little bit of coffee on my desk, and I want to wipe it up before the Coffee Fairy fashions it into a scary-looking face.

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This week's recommended book is an obscure little tome that I first ran into in college.  It's about a scientific hoax -- some chemists who claimed to have discovered what they called "polywater," a polymerized form of water that was highly viscous and stayed liquid from -70 F to 500 F or above.  The book is a fascinating, and often funny, account of an incident that combines confirmation bias with wishful thinking with willful misrepresentation of the evidence.  Anyone who's interested in the history of science or simply in how easy it is to fool the overeager -- you should put Polywater by Felix Franks on your reading list.

Deus ex machina

If you needed further evidence of how powerful surveillance technology has become, consider that Google Street View has captured a photograph of god.

At least that's what some people think.  The photograph, taken near Quarten, Switzerland, shows two blurry figures hovering above a lake, and some people have decided that they are the Father and the Son.

I've beaten unto death the whole why-the-human-brain-is-wired-to-see-faces thing, so I won't revisit that topic, but for myself, I'm not seeing Jesus and God the Father in the photograph.  The one on the left looks too tall and gawky, and the one on the right far too short and tubby, to fit my image of the Supreme Being and his Only Begotten Son.  In fact, if the rightmost is the one people think is God, my personal opinion is that the Big Guy needs to lay off the Hostess Ho-Hos and Little Debbie Snack Cakes for a few months.  On the other hand, if it's not God and Jesus, who is it?  After studying the photograph carefully, I've decided that it's Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria.  Why they'd be visiting a lake in Switzerland in the afterlife, I don't know.  I guess there are worse places to take a vacation.

On the other hand, if I were a deity, I'd definitely opt instead for a pub on the southeast coast of Australia, which is another place that Jesus has been spotted lately. The front wall of the Seanchai Irish Tavern in Warrnambool, Australia, was in need of a paint job, and the flaking of the paint left a bare patch that looks by some stretch of the imagination like a tall, thin figure with outstretched arms.
  

The manager, John Keohane, who is a devout Roman Catholic, immediately decided that it was Jesus.  Many of the pub's patrons agreed, which goes to show that pints of Guinness definitely don't contribute to rational thinking.  The priest of a local Catholic parish is apparently interested in the image, and encouraged Keohane to place a protective screen over the image so that over-enthusiastic tourists (evidently there have been busloads of them) don't touch the image and cause more paint to flake off, thereby causing Jesus to morph into Queen Victoria.

Lastly, there was a sighting in my home state of Louisiana of Jesus on the cross. Rickey Navarre, of Hathaway, Louisiana, saw a vine-covered telephone pole which looked to him like a crucifix.

Navarre was inspired to devotion by the image, which is not necessarily a bad thing, although I do wonder what he would expect a bunch of vines on a cross-shaped telephone pole to look like.   Concerned electrical company workers hastily cleared away the vines, fearing that hordes of the devout would attempt to climb the pole to touch the vines and summarily be ushered into heaven via electrocution.  One disappointed resident placed flowers at the base of the pole, but on the whole, I think that it's probably better that they're gone.  The last thing we need is people erecting a shrine around an electrical pole.  The electric companies think they're omnipotent enough as it is.

That's about it for Jesus sightings lately.  It's a bit of a nice change that he seems to be avoiding food items these days -- tortillas and grilled cheese sandwiches really don't have the gravitas that you'd like to associate with the Almighty.  And although there are clearly rational explanations for all of the above -- vines on a cross-shaped pole, randomly flaking paint, and what was probably just two blobs of schmutz on a camera lens -- if you prefer to think of them as images of god, don't let me discourage you.  Humble human that I am, I wouldn't presume to tell Jesus where he should visit.  I will suggest, however, that if he appears anywhere near where I live, he should dress warmly, as this time of year upstate New York can be a little "brisk," as the eternally-cheery weather forecasters like to call it.  He might want to mention the same thing to Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria, in case they decide to tag along.

The shadow knows

I'm getting a little fed up with the continual stream of aberrant stuff that the Mars Rover keeps finding on the Martian surface.

So far, we've had:

• a coffin
• a fossilized groundhog
• a flip-flop
• a skull
• a hammer
• a thigh bone
• a rare Martian bunny

With all of this, you'd think that NASA would be all over the news with stories like, "Mars Rover Finds Proof of Life on Mars!"  But no.  Somehow, they're content to cover the stories up, and let Congress slash their budget over and over.  Because that's how scientists roll.  Coverups have a much higher priority than grants and funding, if you're a scientist.

Or, perhaps, the people who are proposing these "finds" don't understand the concepts of "digital artifact" and "chance resemblance" and "pareidolia."  This last one is the reason behind the latest claim -- that the Rover caught a photograph of the shadow of a human (or other bipedal species) in a space suit, reaching out to make an adjustment of something.

[image courtesy of NASA and JPL]

See it, there, on the left-hand side?  Clearly a guy, doing something.  At least that's the claim of Scott Waring, whose name has appeared here before, and always in connection to the aforementioned Martian stuff.  Waring is always finding things on Mars.  You have to wonder if he has a day job, or anything, or if he spends his every waking moment poring over NASA photographs looking for Martian bunnies.

"Someone who wants to remain nameless has found a shadow of a human-like being messing with the Mars Curiosity rover," Waring writes, on his blog UFO Sightings Daily.  "The person has no helmet and their short hair is visible and in high detail.  The person has on air tanks on their back and a suit that covers most of the body except the hair."

This brings up two questions:

1. A human on Mars who leaves his scalp exposed?  Mars is a little cold for that, don't you think?  At least he should be wearing a wool hat.  Someone should probably tell his mom.
2. A vague shadow constitutes "high detail?"

Waring thinks that there's only one solution to all of this, which is that there is a secret base on Mars, and this was one of the guys who lives there, making some kind of repair.  Others, though, have suggested more ominously that this is evidence that the Mars Rover isn't on Mars, but is in some kind of studio on Earth where fake Martian photographs are taken, and the camera accidentally snapped a photo of one of the studio staff who didn't move away fast enough, and the people at NASA are so unobservant that they didn't notice and accidentally put it online for Scott Waring to find.

What's interesting, of course, is that if you look at subsequent photographs, like the one below, you find that the "person" hasn't moved.  At all.

[image courtesy of NASA and JPL]

So the resident of the Mars base or the worker in the earthly film studio (whichever version you went for earlier) must have realized that he had been captured in a photograph, and so he stood there perfectly still so that more photos would be taken and he wouldn't be found out.

Or maybe, just maybe, this is the shadow of part of the Rover itself.

As I've said before, no one would be more delighted than me if we found evidence of extraterrestrial life, whether on Mars or anywhere else.  I would just think that was the coolest thing ever.  But people who are actually using scientific methods to look for such evidence -- like SETI -- are not being helped by wingnuts like Scott Waring claiming that NASA is covering up evidence that socks that have gone missing in your dryer end up on Mars.

So unfortunately, as we might have guessed from the outset, the human shadow claim turns out to be a non-starter.  As have all of the other claims, which mostly have turned out to be weird-shaped rocks.  (Except for the bunny, which was a piece of the Rover's landing parachute.)  So the science-minded amongst us will keep waiting for good evidence, and everyone else will just wait until the day after tomorrow, when Waring et al. will be claiming that the Rover has photographed a giant Martian weasel.

Aliens visit Bulgaria

It's been a while since we've had any interesting reports of UFO or alien sightings, so I was tickled to find a post yesterday on Paranominal that claims that some hikers near Plovdiv, Bulgaria snapped a photograph of an "alien Grey" while walking through a forest.

The photograph is put into a sort of montage format on a video in the post, but I'll post the photograph itself here:

What I find interesting about this photo is that it shows the alien, who appears to be about five meters tall, clearly visible between two trees maybe ten meters further on in the woods, and yet the hikers are still walking toward it in an apparently unconcerned fashion.  I don't know about you, but if I were hiking through the woods and stumbled upon a scary-looking alien creature who was over twice my height, I would not just stroll right on up to it.  At the point this photograph was taken, I would already be running in a comical, Looney Tunes manner in the opposite direction, with my feet only visible as a circular blur.

If I had not immediately died of a brain aneurysm when I spotted the thing.  Which is probably more likely.  I may be a skeptical scientific type, and all, but I am also a great big old coward.  I believe that it is our duty as rationalists to evaluate claims of the paranormal, but I am much more comfortable evaluating them from a safe distance, which in this case would be about fifty miles.

Be that as it may, I'm a little skeptical of this claim.  For one thing, if you watched the video, you'll notice how the alien face becomes way scarier when they isolate and magnify it.  While this may seem like a "duh" statement, part of the reason that alien and ghost photographs become more convincing in close-ups is because they get grainier when you do that -- the image "pixillates."  (For a creepy example of how the brain imposes meaning on grainy data, take a look at this optical illusion.)  Now, as we've seen many times before, humans are great at imposing meaning on patternless images, and we especially like to turn those images into faces (a phenomenon called pareidolia, about which I have written many times before).  But the fact that we become more convinced as the data gets grainy is a little suspicious, and exactly the opposite of what should happen to a scientist.  We should be convinced by precision, not by imprecision.

The last nail in the coffin, for me, came at the end of the video, when I saw who had put it together.  The creator of the video -- and probably the photograph as well -- was one Stephen Hannard, of England, who is also the one who claimed that the Martian probe Curiosity found a fossilized shoe, human finger, and woodchuck on the surface of Mars, and that the International Space Station had captured footage of a giant space slug.  It's not like this guy has any kind of solid track record for veracity.  So I'm perhaps to be forgiven if I find anything coming from Hannard a little suspect from the get go.

So anyhow, I doubt this is really a photograph of an alien, which is kind of a shame.  I'd love it if there was, during my lifetime, incontrovertible evidence of intelligent alien life.  I realize that's easy for me to say sitting here safely in my office thousands of kilometers from Plovdiv, Bulgaria, but I really do mean it.  If an alien spaceship landed in my back yard, I'd even try to overcome my urge to run away or die of fright in order to be the first human to shake their gray, seven-fingered hands upon their arrival on Earth.

The Mars rover's cleaning crew

A few days ago, I posted about the contention that the NASA rover Curiosity had discovered life on Mars, in the form of a couple of UFOs and a Martian groundhog.  Today, we have the contention that the Mars lander was actually a (covertly) manned spacecraft.

What is the proof, you might ask?  It's a photograph, to wit:

What we are looking at, claims an article over at UFO Blogger entitled, "Who is Cleaning the NASA Mars Rover Curiosity?", is a man in a space suit leaning over and applying Windex to the camera lens.

Amongst the many problems with this conjecture is that if NASA was smart enough to be able to send a human crew along with Curiosity, lo under our very noses, then presumably they would be smart enough not to post photographs publicly showing the shadow of one of said crew.  Especially given that supposedly they're doing this with evil intent.  Notwithstanding that argument, the poster over at UFO Blogger says if we don't buy the manned-mission hypothesis, we can only come to one other possible reasonable conclusion -- that the Mars landing was a fake, and the rover is currently sending back photographs from the Atacama Desert (and the article conveniently has some photographs of the Atacama Desert for comparison).  Way at the end the writer admits that it could be a "shadow illusion," but you get the impression that (s)he doesn't think that's likely at all. 

And neither do the people who posted the comments section.  A couple of samples will suffice:

"Why would they pull such a scam? This government truly sucks. Not even surprised by anything anymore."

"You know guys... its becoming clear to me that NASA is doing this purposely for the 'conspiracy crowd'. they know we're not buying it yet they still have us distracted, our attention diverted, from whats really important as we waste our time and mental energy on their BS. we need to totally ignore NASA at this point."


Yup.  Those doggone attention hogs down at NASA are never satisfied unless we're watching them.

Of course, the other problem with this whole idiotic contention is that it's remarkably difficult to determine what an object looks like from its shadow.  If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at this amazing shadow art by Sue Webster and Tim Noble, in which mounds of trash illuminated with light from a particular angle create shadows that look like people, a pair of rats having sex, two severed heads on spikes, and a variety of other things.  Add a bit of pareidolia into the mix -- the tendency of people to see human forms in random shapes -- and you've got an explanation for the shadow in the Mars photograph that doesn't require you to believe that NASA is either duping us all by sending the rover to Chile, or else sneakily including a human crew on the mission for their own nefarious purposes.

So anyhow, that's pretty much that, as far as I can see.  The rover will have to manage without any space-suited humans cleaning the camera lens, and the woo-woos will have to find another ridiculous conjecture to blather on about.  The latter might actually be a forlorn hope, because as we've seen before, once woo-woos catch hold of an idea, they hold on like grim death despite the most cogent argument to the contrary.  But at least the rest of us can go back to enjoying the photographs from Curiosity for what they are -- amazing images of our strange and uninhabited neighbor world.

Faces in the woods

One of the first things I ever wrote about in this blog was the phenomenon of pareidolia -- because the human brain is wired to recognize faces, we sometimes see faces where there are only random patterns of lights and shadows that resemble a face.  This is why, as children, we all saw faces in clouds and on the Moon; and it also explains the Face on Mars, most "ghost photographs," and the countless instances of seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches, tortillas, and concrete walls.

When I first mentioned pareidolia, four years ago, it seemed like most people hadn't heard of it.  Recently, however, the idea has gained wider currency, and now when some facelike thing is spotted, and makes it into the mainstream press, the word seems to come up with fair regularity.  Which is all to the good.

But it does leave the woo-woos in a bit of a quandary, doesn't it?  If all of their ghost photographs and Faces on Mars and grilled cheese Jesuses (Jesi?) are just random patterns, perceived as faces because that's how the human brain works, what's a woo-woo to do?

Well, a recent post at OccultView gives us the answer.

Entitled "Photographing Spirits, Faeries, and Trolls," the writer admits that pareidolia does occur:

Photographing nature spirits is tricky business.  Nature spirits, fairies and trolls don’t exactly resemble human beings.  Any image of such an entity could simply be pareidolia, which is imagining meaningful shapes in random patterns.  Then again, there is always a chance what appears to be a fairy is actually a fairy.

Okay, so far so good.   So how do we tell the difference?  We can't, the writer says, because even if it is pareidolia, the spirits are still there:

There is also a third possibility…intentionally created pareidolia.  Even if non-physical beings can’t necessarily be photographed, perhaps they can manipulate their surroundings to give themselves shape.  Might they use branches and leaves to give substance to their formlessness?  What appears as pareidolia may not always be the result of purely random patterns but the result of serendipity and synchronicity. 

So, in other words -- if I'm understanding him correctly -- even if analysis of the photograph showed that the image we thought was a Forest Troll turned out to be a happenstance arrangement of leaves and branches, it's still a troll -- it's just that the troll used the leaves and branches to create his face?  (At this point, you should go back and click the guy's link, if you haven't already done so -- he includes some photographs of "Woodland Spirits" that he took, and that are at least mildly entertaining.)

Well, to a skeptic's ear, all of this sounds mighty convenient.  "No -- the ghostly image wasn't just a smudge on the camera lens; the ghost created a smudge on your camera lens in order to leave his image on the photograph."  What this does, of course, is to remove photographic evidence from the realm of the even potentially falsifiable -- any alternate explanations simply show that the denizens of the Spirit World can manipulate their surroundings, your mind, and the camera or recording equipment.

The whole thing puts me in mind of China Miéville's amazing (and terrifying) short story "Details," in which a woman admits that cracks in sidewalks and stains on walls and patterns in carpet that happen to resemble faces are just random and meaningless -- but at the same time, they are monsters.  "For most people, it's just chance, isn't it?" the main character, Mrs. Miller, says.  "What shapes they see in a tangle of wire.  There's a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear.  But now... the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me.  It can thrust itself forward.  It makes me see it.  It's found its way through."

It does bear keeping in mind, though, that however wonderful Miéville's story is, you will find it on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore.  For a reason.

Of course, it's not like any hardcore skeptic considers photographic evidence all that reliable in the first place.  Besides pareidolia and simple camera malfunctions, programs like Photoshop have made convincing fakes too easy to produce.  This is why scientists demand hard evidence when people make outlandish claims -- show me, in a controlled setting, that what you are saying is true.  If you think there's a troll in the woods, let's see him show up in front of reliable witnesses.  Let's have a sample of troll hair on which to perform DNA analysis, or a troll bone to study in the lab.  If you say a house is haunted by a "spirit," design me a Spirit-o-Meter that can detect the "energy field" that you people always blather on about -- don't just tell me that you sensed a Great Disturbance in the Force, and if I didn't, it's just too bad that I don't have your level of psychic sensitivity.  Also, for cryin' in the sink, don't tell me that my "disbelief is getting in the way," which is another accusation I've had leveled at me.  Honestly, you'd think that, far from being discouraged by my disbelief, a ghost would want to appear in front of skeptics like myself, just for the fun of watching us piss our pants in abject terror.  ("I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do believe, I do believe...")

In any case, the article on OccultView gives us yet another example of how the worlds of science and woo-woo define the word "evidence" rather differently.  The two views, I think, are probably irreconcilable.  So I'll end here, on that rather pessimistic note, not only because I've reached the end of my post for the day,  but also because I just spilled a little bit of coffee on my desk, and I want to wipe it up before the Coffee Fairy fashions it into a scary-looking face.