Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
Have you ever heard of Mrs. Tottenham, of 54 Berners Street, Westminster, London, England?
I'm guessing probably not. At least I hadn't, until a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about why she's memorable. Well, not her in and of herself, exactly; but what happened to the poor woman, through no fault of her own.
Mrs. Tottenham is described as a "wealthy woman of good social standing" who lived in one of the better parts of Greater London, and seems to have mostly led an ordinary life until the morning of November 27, 1810. She was awakened at five in the morning by a knock on the door. Hastily donning her dressing gown, she answered it, and was met by a chimney sweep who said he'd "been sent for." No sooner had she dismissed him, saying she'd done no such thing, than she was alarmed to see several other chimney sweeps approaching, followed in quick succession by a dozen different coal wagons, the drivers of each claiming that they'd been told to deliver coal to that address that morning.
But that was only the beginning.
At seven, the bakers started arriving. One of them carried an elaborate wedding cake. The bakers were followed by bootmakers. After that, according to The London Times, there followed "upholsterers' goods in cart-loads, pianofortes, linen, jewellery [sic] and every other description of furniture, [that] were lodged as near as possible to the door of No. 54, with anxious tradespeople and a laughing mob. With each new wave of arrivals, the crowd around the property grew, as many stayed to watch who would be the next to arrive... Police summoned to the scene arrived to find six stout men bearing an organ, surrounded by wine-porters with permits, barbers with wigs, mantua-makers with band-boxes, [and] opticians with the various articles of their trade."
As the day progressed, she was accosted by forty butchers and forty fishmongers, each bringing a delivery of their respective viands, and pastry chefs with an estimated 2,500 raspberry tarts. The police attempted to put a stop to it by blocking off both ends of the street, but people simply climbed over the barriers, saying they had their jobs to do. In the mid-afternoon the chairmen of the Bank of England and the East India Company arrived, and shortly afterward the Duke of Gloucester, the last-mentioned of which was told that he'd been summoned to the deathbed of an obscure relative.
At five in the afternoon, about fifty women showed up, saying that they'd been informed there was an opening for domestic servants. But the real pièce de resistance came at six, when an undertaker arrived bearing a coffin -- made to Mrs. Tottenham's measurements.
The hilarity -- for everyone but poor Mrs. Tottenham -- kept up until after dark, when the crowds finally dispersed, and the disappointed and pissed off merchants et al. gave up and went home.
A drawing of the Berners Street hoax by William Heath (1810) [Image is in the Public Domain]
The entire day, from a rented room across the street, there was a young man watching. His name was Theodore Edward Hook. Hook was the scion of minor nobility, and had been a brilliant (and precocious) student at Oxford University, matriculating at the age of sixteen. He was a talented writer and musician, and in fact published his first novel when he was a teenager.
He was also a wicked practical joker.
He had made a bet -- the winner received one guinea -- that he could turn any address in London into the most talked-about spot in the world. Working with two accomplices (who have never been identified, but one was alleged to be "a famous actress") he sent out between one and four thousand letters and postcards in the weeks preceding November 27. The instructions differed, of course, but most of the recipients were given a specific time to arrive. A bevy of dance instructors were told that Mrs. Tottenham was looking for lessons in the art for her daughter. Some estate salesmen were informed that she required assistance in selling some property. The two aforementioned chairmen were sent sinister notes that there had been allegations of fraud against an (unnamed) employee, and they should come to that address to hear "information that would be to their benefit."
Once Hook saw that his prank had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, he got a little scared and decided it would be prudent to absent himself from town for a while, so he spent several weeks in the countryside with friends. And sure enough, a search for the perpetrator(s) was undertaken, and significant rewards offered -- to no avail.
But it's an interesting thing about the psychology of people like Hook; they can't bear thinking that no one will ever find out how astonishingly clever they are. (There have been murder mysteries predicated on this theme, my favorite of which is the brilliantly-crafted And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, which I first read at age twelve with the result of being hooked on mysteries for life.) Hook knew he was suspected of having had something to do with the Berners Street hoax, but no one could prove it, so all too quickly the furor died down.
Exactly what an egotist like Hook didn't want. So...
... he admitted it.
It was in his semi-autobiographical novel Gilbert Gurney, and spoken by the eponymous main character, but still, it's about as close to a confession as you can get:
[T]here's nothing like fun – what else made the effect in Berner's Street? I am the man – I did it... copy the joke, and it ceases to be one; – any fool can imitate an example once set – but for originality of thought and design, I do think that was perfect.
Gilbert Gurney wasn't published until 1836. There was no statute of limitations in England in the early nineteenth century, but after twenty-six years, the justice system didn't seem to think it was worth the trouble to go after Hook. And interestingly, there was at least one allegation that he was laying claim to something he hadn't done. Hook died in 1841 (of the effects of "dissipation"), and afterward his friend Nancy Matthews said that the prank wasn't Hook's doing, but had been perpetrated by "a young gentleman, now one of the most rigid churchmen in the kingdom."
Most people, though, think that Matthews was trying to cover up for the lousy reputation of the Dearly Departed, and that Hook really was the guilty party. Why he had targeted the unfortunate Mrs. Tottenham is unknown; some think he had a grudge against her for some reason, others that she was simply wealthy, a little uptight... and there was a room for rent across the street from where she lived.
I find it interesting to consider what would impel someone to do something like this. It's funny, yes -- I have to admit laughing several times while reading the account -- but good heavens, consider the poor merchants and tradespeople who brought thousands of items thinking they were going to make some sales, and were turned away without so much as a ha'penny. I'd have been pissed. And Hook is damn lucky he wasn't caught; he'd likely have ended up in prison, and sued for everything he had to pay all the people whose services he'd fraudulently requested.
I've been the victim of practical jokes myself -- probably everyone has -- and there are ones that were genuinely good-hearted, like the students who put a huge wooden replica of the black obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey in my classroom on the last day of school, and arranged for the principal to play the theme music over the loudspeakers as soon as I walked in the door. (I have never before or since been awake and so convinced I was dreaming.) But practical jokes often contain a streak of cruelty, or (like Berners Street) at least a touch of "I don't give a damn whom I inconvenience." "I was just joking" has been used way too many times to cover up for real harm done. (It's why in general I loathe April Fool's Day.)
Anyhow, that's the story of one of the most elaborate pranks ever staged. And I have to admit he planned the whole thing to a fare-thee-well. Mrs. Tottenham came out none the worse for wear, and apparently told the story to uproarious laughter at cocktail parties for the rest of her life. Me, though -- I'd much prefer having other stories to tell to my friends, so if any of you get any clever ideas, please don't. For one thing, my three dogs would freak right the hell out. For another, I have recently moved to an uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique, so you couldn't find me anyhow.
Richard Feynman famously said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."
This insightful statement isn't meant to impugn anyone's honesty or intelligence, but to highlight that everyone -- and I'm sure Feynman was very much including himself in this assessment -- has biases that prevent them from seeing clearly. We've already got a model, an internal framework by which we interpret what we experience, and that inevitably constrains our understanding.
As science historian James Burke points out, in his brilliant analysis of the scientific endeavor The Day the Universe Changed, it's a trap that's impossible to get out of. You have to have some mental model for how you think the world works, or all the sensory input you receive would simply be chaos. "Without a structure, a theory for what's there," Burke says, "you don't see anything."
And once you've settled on a model, it's nearly impossible to compromise with. You're automatically going to take some things as givens and ignore others as irrelevant, dismiss some pieces of evidence out of hand and accept others without question. We're always taking what we experience and comparing it to our own mental frameworks, deciding what is important and what isn't. When my wife finished her most recent art piece -- a stunning image of a raven's face, set against a crimson background -- and I was on social media later that day and saw another piece of art someone had posted with a raven against red -- I shrugged and laughed and said, "Weird coincidence."
Quoth the Raven, pen/ink/watercolor by Carol Bloomgarden (2025) [Image used with permission]
But that's only because I had already decided that odd synchronicities don't mean anything. If I had a mental model that considered such chance occurrences as spiritually significant omens, I would have interpreted that very, very differently.
Our mental frameworks are essential, but they can lead us astray as often as they land us on the right answer. Consider, for example, the strange, sad case of Johann Beringer and the "lying stones."
Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer was a professor of medicine at the University of Würzburg in the early eighteenth century. His training was in anatomy and physiology, but he had a deep interest in paleontology, and had a large collection of fossils he'd found during hikes in his native Germany. He was also a devout Lutheran and a biblical literalist, so he interpreted all the fossil evidence as consistent with biblical events like the six-day creation, the Noachian flood, and so on.
Unfortunately, he also had a reputation for being arrogant, humorless, and difficult to get along with. This made him several enemies, including two of his coworkers -- Ignace Roderique, a professor of geography and algebra, and Johann Georg von Eckhart, the university librarian. So Roderique and von Eckhart hatched a plan to knock Beringer down a peg or two.
They found out where he was planning on doing his next fossil hunt, and planted some fake fossils along the way.
These "lying stones" are crudely carved from limestone. On some of them, you can still see the chisel marks.
More outlandish still, Roderique and von Eckhart carved the word "God" in Hebrew on the backs of some of them. Making it look like the artisan had signed His name, so to speak.
One colleague -- who was not in on the prank -- looked at the stones, and said to Beringer, "Um... are you sure? Those look like chisel marks." Beringer dismissed his objections, and in fact, turned them into evidence for his explanation. Beringer wrote, "...the figures... are so exactly fitted to the dimensions of the stones, that one would swear that they are the work of a very meticulous sculptor...[and they] seem to bear unmistakable indications of the sculptor's knife."
They were so perfect, Beringer said, that they could only be the work of God.
So as astonishing as it may seem, Beringer fell for the ruse hook, line, and sinker. Roderique and von Eckhart, buoyed up by their success, repeated their prank multiple times. Finally Beringer had enough "fossils" that in 1726, he published a scholarly work called Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (The Writing-Stones of Würzburg). But shortly after the book's publication -- it's unclear how -- Beringer realized he'd been taken for a ride.
He sued Roderique and von Eckhart for defamation -- and won. Roderique and von Eckhart were both summarily fired, but it was too late; Beringer was a laughingstock in the scientific community. He tried to recover all of the copies of his book and destroy them, but finally gave up. His reputation was reduced to rubble, and he died twelve years later in total obscurity.
It's easy to laugh at Beringer's credulity, but the only reason you're laughing is because if you found such a "fossil," your mental model would immediately make you doubt its veracity. In his framework -- which included a six-thousand-year-old Earth, a biblical flood, and a God who was perfectly capable of signing his own handiwork -- he didn't even stop to consider it.
The history of science is laden with missteps caused by biased mental models. In 1790, a report of a fireball over France that strewed meteorites over a large region prompted a scientific paper -- that laughingly dismissed the claim as "impossible." Pierre Bertholon, editor of the Journal des Sciences Utiles, wrote, "How sad, is it not, to see a whole municipality attempt to certify the truth of folk tales… the philosophical reader will draw his own conclusions regarding this document, which attests to an apparently false fact, a physically impossible phenomenon." DNA was dismissed as the genetic code for decades, because of the argument that DNA's alphabet only contains four "letters," so the much richer twenty-letter alphabet of proteins (the amino acids) must be the language of the genes. Even in the twentieth century, geologists didn't bother looking for evidence for continental drift until the 1950s, long after there'd been significant clues that the continents had, in fact, moved, largely because they couldn't imagine a mechanism that could be responsible.
Our mental models work on every level -- all the way down to telling us what questions are worth investigating.
So poor Johann Beringer. Not to excuse him for being an arrogant prick, but he didn't deserve to be the target of a mean-spirited practical joke, nor does he deserve our derision now. He was merely operating within his own framework of understanding, same as you and I do.
I wonder what we're missing, simply because we've decided it's irrelevant -- and what we've accepted as axiomatic, and therefore beyond questioning?
Maybe we're not so very far ahead of Beringer ourselves.
After Thursday's post about nonexistent islands, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia asked me if I'd ever heard of the country of Listenbourg.
I said, "Do you mean Luxembourg?" but he assured me he was spelling it right.
"Islands aren't the only thing that can be nonexistent," he said, which is true, but when you think about it too hard is a very peculiar statement.
So I looked into Listenbourg, and it's quite a story -- especially since the whole thing started as a way to ridicule Americans for their ignorance about anything outside the borders of the United States.
In October of 2022, a French guy named Gaspard Hoelscher posted a doctored map of Europe on Twitter that looked like this:
He captioned it, "Je suis sûr que les américains ne connaissent même pas le nom de ce pays!" ("I'm sure that Americans don't even known the name of this country!") One of his followers responded, "Qui ne connaît pas le Listenbourg?" ("Who doesn't know Listenbourg?")
You'd think anyone who'd ever given more than a ten-second look at an actual map of Europe would immediately know this was a joke, but no. Even a closer look at this map would have revealed the curious fact that "Listenbourg" is actually a resized and inverted copy of the outline of France itself, simply pasted onto (and partially covering) the northwest corners of Spain and Portugal.
Apparently, this was not the case, as the original post caused a number of irate Americans to jump up and defend our superior knowledge -- almost none of whom, however, came right out and said that they recognized it was a prank. You could tell that some of them had actually come damn close to saying, "Of course I know where Listenbourg is," but held back at the last minute.
This prompted a flood of hilarity online that the prank's originator, Hoelscher, said "totally overwhelmed" him. Amused Europeans invented a flag, capital city ("Lurenberg"), culture, history, language, and even a national anthem for Listenbourg. It has five regions, they said: Flußerde, Kusterde, Mitteland, Adrias and Caséière. A post saying that Hoelscher himself was the president was met by universal acclaim. Then it escaped social media into the wider world:
An announcement prior to the Paris Olympics of 2024 stated that "The number of Olympic delegations has risen from 206 to 207 with the arrival of Listenbourg."
Amazon Prime in Europe announced that a documentary on the history of Listenbourg was in production -- only careful watchers noticed that the projected release date was "February 31, 2025."
Ryanair said in a press release that they were "Proud to be announcing their new base in Listenbourg."
The French television network TF1 aired a realistic-sounding weather report for the country.
French politician Jean Lassalle said in a speech that he was "just returned from a visit to an agricultural seminar in Lurenberg."
The city of Nice said that they were happy to announce their intention to become a sister city to Lurenberg, and that there would be new inexpensive flights between the two.
I have to admit that as an American, my laughter over all this is coupled with a distinct edge of cringe. I mean, being global dumbasses is not exactly the reputation I'd like my country to have. Sadly, though, I can't really argue with the assessment. You don't have to dig very hard to find highly embarrassing videos of interviewers stopping people in crowds in the United States to ask them tough questions like "What is the capital of England?" and finding numerous Americans who can't come up with the answer. And with the Republicans currently doing everything in their power to destroy our system of public education, the situation is only going to get worse.
Oh, but don't worry. At least we'll have the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom, and students will get Bible lessons every day and won't be exposed to scary books like Heather Has Two Mommies.
Hey, I wonder what would happen if you asked Donald Trump to find Listenbourg on a map? I bet he'd never realize he was being pranked, considering that he once gave a speech to African leaders and confidently talked about the proud country of "Nambia."
Look, I know we all have holes in our knowledge; all of us are ignorant about some subjects. The important thing is not to make ignorance a permanent condition -- or to flaunt it. Stubbornly persisting in your state of ignorance has a name.
It's called "stupidity."
What's worse is when people think they are experts on stuff when they're clearly not, and publicly trumpet their own idiocy. (Donald Trump is absolutely the poster child for this phenomenon.) As Stephen Hawking trenchantly put it, "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." Because if you're convinced you already know everything you need to know -- and that, I'm afraid, is the state of many Americans, including the majority of our elected officials -- you have no incentive to learn more, or worse, to find out you're actually wrong about something.
My dad used to say "there's nothing as dangerous as confident stupidity." I think that's spot-on. And sad that the Listenbourg incident -- funny as it is -- pointed out that in the eyes of many people in the world, that's what the United States represents.
In my Latin and Greek classes, I always warned my students to avoid Google Translate.
It's not that it's a bad tool, honestly, as long as you don't push it too far. If you want to look up a single word -- i.e., use it like an online dictionary -- it's reasonably solid. The problem is, it has a good word-by-word translation ability, but a lousy capacity for understanding grammar, especially with highly inflected languages like Latin. For example, the phrase "corvus oculum corvi non eruit" -- "a crow will not pluck out another crow's eye," meaning more or less the same thing as "there's honor among thieves" -- gets translated as "do not put out the eye of the raven, raven." Even worse is Juno's badass line from The Aeneid -- "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo" ("If I cannot bend the will of heaven, I will raise hell") -- comes out "Could be bent if you cannot bend, hell, I will move."
Which I think we can all agree doesn't quite have the same ring.
But today I found out, over at the site Mysterious Universe, that there's another reason to avoid Google Translate:
At least that's how I interpret it. Some users of Reddit (where else?) discovered that if you typed the word "dog" into Google Translate twenty times and have it translate from Hawaiian to English, it gave you the following message:
Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve. We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus’s return.
Within hours of the message being reported on Reddit, it had vanished, which of course only made people wiggle their eyebrows in a significant fashion.
Which brings up a few questions.
Who thought of putting "dog" in twenty times and then translating it from Hawaiian? It's kind of a random thing to do. Of course, Redditors seem to have a lot of free time, so I guess at least that much makes sense. But you have to wonder how many failed attempts they had. ("Okay, I put in 'weasel' fifteen times and translated it from Lithuanian, but it didn't work. Then I put in 'warthog' seventy-eight times, and translated it from Urdu. No luck there either. The search continues.")
Even if it's a valid message, what did it tell us that we didn't already know? It's not like we haven't all just watched Donald Trump hand over the control of government agencies to a mob of incompetents, degenerates, lunatics, and the downright evil, and nearly all of the Republicans responding by issuing a stern rebuke ("Bad Donald! Naughty Donald! If you do that again, we'll have to roll over on our backs and piss all over our own bellies! That will sure show you!") So we're definitely not hurting for dramatic developments, with or without the message.
Even if the message was real, isn't it far more likely that it's the result of some bored programmers over at Google sticking an Easter egg into the code than it is some kind of message from the Illuminati?
Don't you think the fact that it vanished after being reported is because the aforementioned bored programmers' supervisor ordered that it be taken down, not because the Illuminati found out we're on to them? I see it more like how the Walmart supervisors dealt with Shane:
So I'm not all that inclined to take it seriously. Brett Tingley at Mysterious Universe, however, isn't so sure:
As always though, it’s an interesting thought to think that Google’s vast AI networks might be trying to warn us, finding obscure places to hide these warnings where their human overlords won’t find them. When AI becomes self-aware and starts taking over, will we even know it before it’s too late, or will odd and seemingly meaningless stories like this serve as prescient warnings for those who know where to look?
Somehow, I think if AI, or anyone else, were trying to warn us of impending doom, they wouldn't put it online and wait for Steve Neckbeard to find it by asking Google to translate "dog dog dog dog dog etc." from Hawaiian.
So that's our trip into the surreal for today. I still think it's a prank, although a fairly inspired one. Note that I'm not saying the overall message is incorrect, though. Considering this week's news, I figure one morning soon I'll get up and find out that Donald Trump has nominated Vladimir Putin to be the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and the Republican Congresspersons responded by tweeting that they're "disappointed" and then widdling all over the floor.
At that point, I think I'd be in favor of offering the presidency to Shane.
Mice are kind of ubiquitous, and it's easy to think of them as all being pretty much the same, but the family they comprise -- Muridae -- contains no fewer than 870 different species.
And new ones are being discovered all the time, including the Sulawesi snouter, Hyorhinomys stuempkei. It's a peculiar-looking little thing, with a pointy nose and incisors long even for a rodent, and is (as far as we know) only found in one location on the slopes of Mount Daro in northern Sulawesi.
But the reason the topic comes up isn't mice, nor even anything about this particular mouse's evolutionary history, behavior, or physiology.
It's about its name.
Both its common name of "snouter" and the species name, stuempkei, come from zoologist Harald Stümpke and his most famous work, The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, an exhaustive study of Order Rhinogradentia. The members of the order lived on a small archipelago in the Pacific Ocean which had no human occupants. However, the island chain was known to the natives of nearby islands, who gave each of the eighteen islands their names (Annoorussawubbissy, Awkoavussa, Hiddudify, Koavussa, Lowlukha, Lownunnoia, Mara, Miroovilly, Mittuddinna, Naty, Nawissy, Noorubbissy, Osovitissy, Ownavussa, Owsuddowsa, Shanelukha, Towteng-Awko, and Vinsy; the entire chain was called Hyiyiyi). Other than occasional visits from Polynesians, the first person to go there and do a thorough mapping of the archipelago was Swedish explorer Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist in the 1940s, but it fell to Stümpke to do a biological survey.
Unfortunately, the story doesn't end well. Stümpke's book is the only remnant of them that survives. Stümpke and his assistants, along with all the snouters they studied, were wiped out by nuclear bomb testing on a nearby atoll. Fortunately, before his death he'd mailed a proof copy of his manuscript to German zoologist Gerolf Steiner, or we might not know anything about these unique mammals at all.
Sad story, yes?
However, if by now you are -- pardon the expression -- smelling a rat, you're not alone.
Some questions you might be asking yourself:
If all the "rhinogrades" were wiped out, where did the "Sulawesi snouter" come from?
And how can one be from Sulawesi if they all lived on the archipelago of Hyiyiyi?
Those island names don't sound very Polynesian. ("Annoorussawubbissy"? Really?)
Then there's "Hyiyiyi," which is the noise an elderly family friend used to make when he was annoyed.
How come you never hear anything about an entire group of zoologists being killed in the bomb testing?
Aren't all mice in Order Rodentia? Where the hell did Order Rhinogradentia come from?
I mean seriously, what the fuck?
The truth is that the entire thing -- the mysterious island chain of Hyiyiyi, both Harald Stümpke and the intrepid Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist, Order Rhinogradentia and the book detailing their biology, and the tragic bomb test that wiped all of 'em out -- were the invention of Gerolf Steiner (who was a very real biologist with a puckish sense of humor). However, not only were some people taken in by the joke at the time, Order Rhinogradentia (and the fictitious Harald Stümpke) still occasionally find their way into real publications -- sometimes without any notes making it clear that neither one exists.
Fortunately, by now most zoologists know about Steiner's role in the story, so it's unlikely anyone these days is really taken in by it.
However, in celebration of one of the most elaborate pranks in the history of biology, a recently-discovered (real) mouse species on Sulawesi was named by its discoverer, zoologist Jacob Esselstyn, not after Steiner, but after the fictitious Stümpke! And even its common name -- the Sulawesi snouter -- is an hommage to Steiner and his masterful monograph.
Keep this story in mind if you ever are inclined to think of scientists as humorless, dry-as-dust pedants.
Eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson made a trenchant and amusing observation apropos of people who see something moving across the night sky and forthwith declare that they've seen an alien spacecraft from another star system:
Remember what the "U" in "UFO" stands for. It stands for "unidentified." People see a light in the sky, and they say, "I don't know what it is... therefore it must be a spaceship piloted by an intelligent being from another planet." Well, if you don't know what it is, that's where the conversation should stop. You don't go on to say that it "must be" anything.
I was reminded of this when, quite by accident, I ran into an account of something that happened in England in November of 1977, but which is still causing aficionados of aliens to wiggle their eyebrows in a meaningful manner nearly fifty years later.
[Image is in the Public Domain]
People in southern England watching television on the evening of November 26 suddenly had their regular programming replaced by a deep buzzing noise, followed by a distorted voice claiming to be Vrillon, a representative of the "Ashtar Galactic Command," who said the following (I've shortened it somewhat to keep it to a reasonable length):
For many years you have seen us as lights in the skies. We speak to you now in peace and wisdom as we have done to your brothers and sisters all over this, your planet Earth. We come to warn you of the destiny of your race and your world so that you may communicate to your fellow beings the course you must take to avoid the disaster which threatens your world, and the beings on our worlds around you. This is in order that you may share in the great awakening, as the planet passes into the New Age of Aquarius... Be still now and listen, for your chance may not come again. All your weapons of evil must be removed. The time for conflict is now past and the race of which you are a part may proceed to the higher stages of its evolution if you show yourselves worthy to do this. You have but a short time to learn to live together in peace and goodwill. Small groups all over the planet are learning this, and exist to pass on the light of the dawning New Age to you all. You are free to accept or reject their teachings, but only those who learn to live in peace will pass to the higher realms of spiritual evolution... Be aware also that there are many false prophets and guides at present operating on your world. They will suck your energy from you – the energy you call money and will put it to evil ends and give you worthless dross in return... You must learn to be sensitive to the voice within that can tell you what is truth, and what is confusion, chaos and untruth... We have watched you growing for many years as you too have watched our lights in your skies. You know now that we are here, and that there are more beings on and around your Earth than your scientists admit. We are deeply concerned about you and your path towards the light and will do all we can to help you. Have no fear, seek only to know yourselves, and live in harmony with the ways of your planet Earth. We here at the Ashtar Galactic Command thank you for your attention. We are now leaving the planes of your existence. May you be blessed by the supreme love and truth of the cosmos.
Well, first let me just state up front that Vrillon sounds like a pretty swell guy, and frankly, I'm kinda deeply concerned about us, too. I'd love it if we'd all put away our weapons and live together in peace and goodwill. But we've been told since the 1960s that the New Age was upon us and soon everyone would ascend to a higher plane and the world would be all rainbows and flowers and fluffy bunnies forever afterward, and if you'll look around you, you'll see that none of that happened. Worse, it turns out even the astrologers can't agree on when the Age of Aquarius is supposed to start, despite the song by The 5th Dimension making it sound like it was some kind of exact science. An astrologer named Nicholas Campion did a study of different people's calculations, and found that about two-thirds of the astrologers said we were already in the Age of Aquarius, while the other one-third said it wasn't going to happen until the 24th century.
Kind of large error bars you got there.
In any case, after the broadcast interruption, the UK's Independent Broadcast Association was understandably torqued that someone had overridden their signal that way and gotten a huge number of television-watchers seriously stirred up, so they launched an investigation, wherein they concluded that someone had used a small unauthorized transmitter to hijack the IBA's Rowridge Transmitter on the Isle of Wight.
In other words: it was a prank. If that wasn't already obvious.
The problem was, it wasn't obvious to a lot of people, and apparently still isn't. This story is still making its way around websites, podcasts, and television shows about aliens, usually with the subtext of "What if Vrillon was real?" One asked, "[How] can the IBA – or anyone else – be sure that the broadcast was a hoax?"
Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by "sure." The culprit was never caught, so there is no concrete proof that it was a signal hijack by a waggish human prankster. And I guess since Vrillon said he was "leaving the planes of [our] existence" it's unsurprising we haven't heard from him again. But there's the awkward fact that none of the stuff he predicted ended up happening, which is kind of problematic if you believe the voice was coming from a super-intelligent galaxy-traveling alien who had the inside scoop on where humanity was heading.
So the great likelihood is someone with a transmitter on the Isle of Wight read a goofy speech on-air and shook up most of southern England in 1977. At the very most, all we can say is that the origin of the signal is unidentified.
And recall what Neil deGrasse Tyson said about that word.
Back when I was a teacher, I was often the first person to arrive at the high school in the morning. Not only am I a morning person, but it was really critical for me to have that quiet time to get prepared for class, get my thoughts together, and (most importantly) have a cup of coffee before the noisy hordes of students arrived.
I think it was about eight years ago, near the end of a school year (so mid-June-ish), that I parked my car in the otherwise empty parking lot and made my way into the dark, quiet hallway of the science wing. My mind was in drift-mode, not thinking about much at all, when I unlocked my classroom door and switched the lights on.
And stopped dead in my tracks, my mouth agape.
In the front of my classroom was a large black monolith, just shy of three meters tall. As I stood there, staring, there came over the loudspeakers the unmistakable first chords of the iconic theme music to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It is one of the only times in my life that I have been wide awake and given serious consideration to the possibility that I was dreaming.
I walked to the front of the room as the brass instruments reached their crescendo and the timpani started its rhythmic booms, and that was when I started laughing. The monolith was made of painted wood, and I had obviously been pranked -- very successfully, I might add -- by some creative students who knew of my love for science fiction.
Turns out it was a team effort between five students and the principal, who is a notorious practical joker. They placed the monolith in my room and hightailed it back to the principal's office, where they watched for me over the security cameras so they could get the timing of the music right. It really was an inspired prank, and I kept the monolith in the corner of my classroom for several years until it finally fell apart.
The reason all this comes up is because of a news story I have now been sent five times, about a peculiar discovery in the Utah desert. Turns out some state employees, who were doing a survey of bighorn sheep populations in a remote region of the state, spotted something mighty peculiar -- a rectangular piece of metal sticking straight up out of the dirt. The metal seems to be steel or something of the sort, and its polished surface stood out immediately against the reddish rock face behind it.
They landed the helicopter and investigated. The metal plate was perfectly vertical -- ruling out something that had fallen from the sky and embedded itself -- and had no distinguishing marks of any kind.
One of the state employees standing next to the Utah monolith
Well, as soon as the announcement was made, the furore started. There were immediate comparisons to the alien monolith in 2001, some tongue-in-cheek, some apparently serious. Conspiracy theorists had a field day with it, giving "explanations" -- to use the term loosely -- that included:
it's a listening device planted there by the Illuminati. Why the Illuminati would put a listening device in a place where there's no one to listen to but sheep is an open question.
it's an alien marker left behind from when the Anasazi were in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
it's a weather modification device, perhaps a signal amplifier for HAARP. (You thought the woo-woos had stopped yapping about HAARP. You thought wrong.)
it's a focal point for cosmic energy, blah blah blah Age of Aquarius blah blah fourth-dimensional spiritual ascension blah blah.
The discoverers are refusing to give details about the monolith's exact location, which of course makes all of the aforementioned so-and-sos waggle their eyebrows in a meaningful manner. The alleged reason for the secrecy is that the monolith is in a remote region and if a bunch of loonies went to find it, which you know they would, they'd get lost and need rescuing.
But of course, that's what they would say.
I have to admit to some curiosity about why someone would do this. I mean, it's pretty clearly a prank, along the lines of my students' Big Black Box, although it occurs to me to ask why you'd carry out your prank in a place where there was at least a passing likelihood no one would ever see it. Even so, it's impressive; a piece of steel that big must weigh a lot, and that's not even including the bit that's buried. Then there's the digging tools and cement and other stuff you'd have to haul in to install it, out there in the scorching heat of the desert, and you're looking at a significant effort.
So it is a little puzzling. Perhaps at some point someone will 'fess up to being the perpetrator -- or maybe it'll stay a mystery, like the strange and fascinating Georgia Guidestones. In the unlikely eventuality that there's anything more to this than some unusually committed and hardworking practical jokers, well, I suppose we'll just have to wait and see, given that the state employees who found it aren't giving us any details about where it is. And the Utah desert is a big place to start searching if your only clue is "it's near some sheep and a big red rock."
Of course, my hunch is that there's nothing much to this, but that's hardly surprising. And if I'm wrong, well, let's just hope this isn't the final act of the bizarre theater that has been 2020.
On the other hand, if it really is a communication device to summon Our Alien Overlords, maybe that'll be a good thing. They can't fuck things up any worse than we've been doing lately.
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I'm fascinated with history, and being that I also write speculative fiction, a lot of times I ponder the question of how things would be different if you changed one historical event. The topic has been visited over and over by authors for a very long time; three early examples are Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" (1952), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), and R. A. Lafferty's screamingly funny "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967).
There are a few pivotal moments that truly merit the overused nametag of "turning points in history," where a change almost certainly would have resulted in a very, very different future. One of these is the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which happened in 9 C.E., when a group of Germanic guerrilla fighters maneuvered the highly-trained, much better-armed Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Roman Legions into a trap and slaughtered them, almost to the last man. There were twenty thousand casualties on the Roman side -- amounting to half their total military forces at the time -- and only about five hundred on the Germans'.
The loss stopped Rome in its tracks, and they never again made any serious attempts to conquer lands east of the Rhine. There's some evidence that the defeat was so profoundly demoralizing to the Emperor Augustus that it contributed to his mental decline and death five years later. This battle -- the site of which was recently discovered and excavated by archaeologists -- is the subject of the fantastic book The Battle That Stopped Rome by Peter Wells, which looks at the evidence collected at the location, near the village of Kalkriese, as well as the historical documents describing the massacre. This is not just a book for history buffs, though; it gives a vivid look at what life was like at the time, and paints a fascinating if grisly picture of one of the most striking David-vs.-Goliath battles ever fought.
[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]
In my Latin and Greek classes, I always warn my students to avoid Google Translate.
It's not that it's a bad tool, honestly, as long as you don't push it too far. If you want to look up a single word -- i.e., use it like an online dictionary -- it's pretty solid. The problem is, it has a good word-by-word translation ability, but a lousy capacity for understanding grammar, especially with highly inflected languages like Latin. For example, the phrase "corvus oculum corvi non eruit" -- "a crow will not pluck out another crow's eye," meaning more or less the same thing as "there's honor among thieves" -- gets translated as "do not put out the eye of the raven, raven." Even worse is Juno's badass line from The Aeneid -- "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo" ("If I cannot bend the will of heaven, I will raise hell") -- comes out "Could be bent if you cannot bend, hell, I will move."
Which I think we can all agree doesn't quite have the same ring.
But today I found out, over at the site Mysterious Universe, that there's another reason to avoid Google Translate:
At least that's how I interpret it. Some users of Reddit (where else?) discovered that if you typed the word "dog" into Google Translate twenty times and have it translate from Hawaiian to English, it gave you the following message:
Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus’s return.
Within hours of the message being reported on Reddit, it had vanished, which of course only made people wiggle their eyebrows in a significant fashion.
Which brings up a few questions.
Who thought of putting "dog" in twenty times and then translating it from Hawaiian? It's kind of a random thing to do. Of course, Redditors seem to have a lot of free time, so I guess at least that much makes sense. But you have to wonder how many failed attempts they had. ("Okay, I put in 'weasel' fifteen times and translated it from Lithuanian, but it didn't work. Then I put in 'warthog' seventy-eight times, and translated it from Urdu. No luck there either. The search continues.")
Even if it's a valid message, what did it tell us that we didn't already know? It's not like we didn't all just watch Donald Trump wink at Vladimir Putin and then commit high treason in full view on television, or witness all of the Republicans respond by issuing a stern rebuke ("Bad Donald! Naughty Donald! If you do that again, we'll have to roll over on our backs and piss all over our own bellies! That will sure show you!") So we're definitely not hurting for dramatic developments, with or without the message.
Even if the message was real, isn't it far more likely that it's the result of some bored programmers over at Google sticking an Easter egg into the code than it is some kind of message from the Illuminati?
Don't you think the fact that it vanished after being reported is because the aforementioned bored programmers' supervisor ordered that it be taken down, not because the Illuminati found out we're on to them? I see it more like how the Walmart supervisors dealt with Shane:
So I'm not all that inclined to take it seriously. Brett Tingley at Mysterious Universe, however, isn't so sure:
As always though, it’s an interesting thought to think that Google’s vast AI networks might be trying to warn us, finding obscure places to hide these warnings where their human overlords won’t find them. When AI becomes self-aware and starts taking over, will we even know it before it’s too late, or will odd and seemingly meaningless stories like this serve as prescient warnings for those who know where to look?
Somehow, I think if AI, or anyone else, were trying to warn us of impending doom, they wouldn't put it online and wait for Steve Neckbeard to find it by asking Google to translate "dog dog dog dog dog" from Hawaiian.
So that's our trip into the surreal for today. I still think it's a prank, although a fairly inspired one. Note that I'm not saying the overall message is incorrect, though. Considering this week's news, I figure one morning soon I'll get up and find out that the US has been renamed the "Amerikan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republik," and the Republican Congresspersons responded by tweeting that they're "disappointed" and then widdling all over the floor.
At that point, I think I'd be in favor of offering the presidency to Shane.
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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment. The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth. Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans. It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read. [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]
A couple of days ago, we had the conspiracy theory on the part of the pro-Trump side of things that moderator Lester Holt had thrown the debate in favor of Clinton because she was giving him threatening coded hand gestures. So because the watchword around here is fairness, today we're going to look at another conspiracy theory, this one dreamed up by members of the pro-Clinton faction:
Donald Trump isn't really Donald Trump, he's Andy Kaufman in disguise.
Andy Kaufman, as most people my age know, was the disturbingly odd comedian who played the vaguely Eastern European Latka Gravas on the sitcom Taxi, and then went on to have a bizarre career doing standup comedy. His comedy shtick frequently involved wrestling women, Elvis Presley impressions, and (occasionally, if the audience wasn't sufficiently appreciative) reading to them from The Great Gatsby until they gave up and left.
Kaufman's routines were so weird, and he was so secretive about his own personal life, that many people began to wonder if the line between his acting and his actual personality was becoming blurred -- that maybe it wasn't an act, that the man was mentally ill. He did nothing whatsoever to discourage this perception, and in fact it was the subject of the 1999 biopic Man on the Moon (starring Jim Carrey as Kaufman). But because of his penchant for dubiously tasteful pranks, when he died in 1984 at the age of 35 of a rare form of lung cancer, not a few of his fans wondered if he'd faked his own death -- and in fact, there are still people who believe that Kaufman is alive and in hiding under an assumed identity.
Which is strange enough. But just last week Zach Schonfeld did a piece over at Newsweek that apparently there are people who take this idea one step further -- that not only did Andy Kaufman survive, but he survived as Donald Trump.
Andy Kaufman shortly before his death. Yes, I know he looks absolutely nothing like Donald Trump. [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]
Never mind that Trump himself is older than Kaufman; Trump was born in 1946, Kaufman in 1949. So Trump was out there doing stuff while Kaufman was still alive and performing. Easy, say the conspiracy theorists; either the real Trump died shortly before Kaufman's faked death, or... maybe... Kaufman killed him and took his place.
The sole evidence, if I can dignify it by that name, that is trotted out to support this nutty idea is that people point out the similarity between Trump's bombastic, blustering style and the persona of one of Kaufman's characters, lounge singer Tony Clifton, who would shout abuse at audience members in a New York-accented voice that Schonfeld says "resembled a coked-up Bugs Bunny's." One of the proponents of this theory -- a science writer named Erik Vance -- says that the similarity is so striking they must be the same person.
"All you gotta do is watch one Tony Clifton video and you realize, this is Trump!" Vance told Schonfeld. "He’s saying these audacious horrible things that he’s not serious about, but he doesn’t care! It’s just one big joke for him. And it’s brilliant. You watch Donald Trump and you can’t help but think, ‘No one can think this stuff!’ I imagine Trump going home at night and putting on a beret and listening to Rachmaninoff and discussing postmodern theory."
I kept thinking that Vance would, somewhere in the story, say, "Ha ha! Not really! Of course I don't think Kaufman and Trump are the same person! They don't even look alike!" But Vance seems... really serious. When he created a blog to give his theory more visibility, he was swamped with positive feedback, despite the fact that he said stuff like this:
I believe that Kaufman created his Donald Trump character sometime around 1972, as a precursor to his equally jarring Vegas lounge singer, Tony Clifton. As the comedian gained fame and money, he worked doggedly to build a backstory for Trump, making him the son of a New York real estate agent, a graduate of the Wharton School, and giving him a stint in military school.
As both Kaufman and his Trump character became more successful, the comedian had to increasingly rely on his brother Michael and collaborator Bob Zmuda to take turns playing Trump. In 1983, exhausted and frustrated that he couldn’t dedicate more time to the Trump project, he made a decision. He would fake his death, undergo reconstructive surgery, bleach his hair into an elaborate comb-over, and become Trump full time.
What this illustrates -- besides the fact that people believe some seriously wacky shit, a point that hardly needed emphasis, especially for regular readers of Skeptophilia -- is that engaging in nutty conspiracy theories is not confined to people of one political stripe. It's easy to conclude that of course we are seeing everything clearly, it's the other side that subscribes to goofy notions about how the world works. They believe in conspiracy theories; we are perceiving reality.
What's becoming apparent is that the lunatic fringe on both sides is prone to bizarre counterfactual thinking. So once again, if behooves us to recall Kathryn Schulz's dictum of being able to look at our own beliefs and say, "I don't know, maybe I'm wrong."
Of course, the likely truth is that Hillary Clinton was not engaging in threatening nose-scratching to intimidate Lester Holt, Donald Trump is (for better or for worse) Donald Trump, and Andy Kaufman died at the young age of 35 way back in 1984. I know that Ockham's Razor is just a rule of thumb, and sometimes the world does turn out to be weird and convoluted; but in this case, I strongly suspect that the simplest explanation is actually the truth -- regardless of what people on either side of the aisle would like to believe.
