The aliens of Mexico

Because my reputation has apparently preceded me, I have now been sent a link five times to a news story about an alleged governmental meeting in Mexico which one-upped the recent U. S. congressional hearing on UAPs/UFOs by bringing out some bodies of mummified aliens.

The story (and the pictures) are now making the rounds of social media, but were supposedly part of a press release from Mexican governmental officials.  So without further ado, here's one of the aliens:

You can't see in this photo, but the alien bodies have three fingers on each hand and foot, and have necks "elongated along the back."  They are said to come from the town of Nazca, Peru, which immediately gave all the Ancient Aliens crowd multiple orgasms because this is also the site of the famous "Nazca Lines," designs drawn on the ground that (when viewed from the air) can be seen to be shaped like monkeys and birds and whatnot.  Alien visitation aficionados claim that the Nazca Lines are an ancient spaceship landing site, although I have no idea why the fuck aliens would build a landing strip shaped like a monkey.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Diego Delso, Líneas de Nazca, Nazca, Perú, 2015-07-29, DD 49, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Needless to say, I'm a little dubious, and my doubt spiked even higher when I read that one of the scientists involved, one Jaime Maussan, was "able to draw DNA data from radiocarbon dating."  This is patently ridiculous, given that DNA extraction/analysis and radiocarbon dating are two completely different techniques.  So Maussan's statement makes about as much sense as my saying "I'm going to bake a chocolate cake using a circular saw."

Maussan also said that his analysis showed that "thirty percent of the specimens' DNA is unknown" and the remains "had implants made of rare metals like osmium."

The problem is (well, amongst the many problems is) the fact that Maussan has pulled this kind of shit before.  Back in 2015 he went public with other Peruvian mummies, which upon (legitimate) analysis turned out to be the remains of ordinary human children.  Some of them looked a little odd because they had undergone skull elongation rituals -- something not uncommon from early Peruvian cultures -- but their DNA checked out as one hundred percent Homo sapiens.  Add to this the fact that Maussan has repeatedly teamed up with noted New Age wingnut Konstantin Korotkov, who claims to have invented a camera that can photograph the soul and specializes in "measuring the human aura," and we have yet another example of someone who has just about exhausted any credibility he ever had.

So while the people weighing in on TikTok and Reddit seem to be awestruck by the Alien Mummies, reputable scientists are less impressed.  There's no evidence these are anything but the remains of human infants, and there are credible allegations that some of them have been deliberately (and recently) altered to make them look more non-human.

I..e., it's a fraud.

If so, the whole thing really pisses me off, because it's hard enough making good determinations based on slim evidence without some yahoos faking an artifact (not to mention desecrating human burials from indigenous cultures) to get their fifteen minutes of fame.  Regarding the whole alien intelligence question, I've generally adopted a wait-and-see policy, but with this kind of bullshit it's really hard not to chuck the whole thing.  We skeptics have sometimes been accused of being such habitual scoffers that we wouldn't believe evidence if we had it right in front of our noses, and there might be a grain of truth there.

But if you really want to fix that, stop allowing the phonies, frauds, and cranks to dominate the discussion.  And that includes shows on the This Hasn't Actually Been History For Two Decades Channel.

Anyhow, I'm thinking the "alien bodies" will turn out to be just the latest in a very long line of evidence for little more than human gullibility and the capacity for deception, including self-deception.  A pity, really.  At this point, if aliens actually do arrive, I'm so fed up with how things are going down here that I'll probably ask if I can join the crew.

****************************************

The demons of Dudleytown

There's a general rule that if you have to lie about the facts to support a claim, you might want to reconsider your stance.

That was my general response to a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia about the "Dudleytown Curse."  Dudleytown is an abandoned village in Litchfield County, Connecticut, which is a favorite of the "haunted places" crowd.  Here's the basic idea of the legend:

The area was first settled by people of European descent in the 1740s and 1750s, by Thomas Griffis and a cluster of either brothers or cousins (the records are uncertain on that count), Barzillai, Abiel, Martin, Obijah, and Gideon Dudley.  Presumably because of the strength-in-numbers principle, it was named Dudleytown even though Griffis had gotten there first.  Allegedly, the ancestor of the Dudleys was  disgraced English royal administrator Edmund Dudley, who had lost his head on Tower Hill in 1510, and the story goes that Edmund's kin had fled England because of some sort of curse the family was under.  (Which in itself is an odd claim.  The family certainly didn't suffer greatly from Edmund's disgrace; they remained wealthy and influential, and his grandson, Robert Dudley, First Earl of Leicester, was a great favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.)

Anyhow, the curse supposedly followed the Dudleys across the Atlantic, as curses are wont to do.  Abiel Dudley went mad and had to be confined to his home.  Gershon Hollister, who lived next door to Abiel in a home owned by William Tanner, was murdered.  Tanner himself also went insane, babbling about wild animals and demons attacking him.  After Abiel Dudley's death, his home belonged to Nathaniel Carter, who died along with his wife and three children when the settlement was attacked by Natives.  Heman Swift, a general in the American Revolution and a native of Dudleytown, lost his wife to a lightning strike and shortly afterward lost his mind as well.  The wife of Horace Greeley, unsuccessful candidate for president in 1872, was also a Dudleytown native -- when visiting her home town, she hanged herself for no apparent reason.

People started fleeing the area because of its bad reputation.  Soon there was hardly anyone left.  The place is so haunted even animals don't go there; visitors in the 1960s report not hearing so much as a single bird.  It is currently privately owned by a mysterious group called the Dark Entry Forest Association, and they're determined to stop anyone else from dying or going mad (or, if you'd like a more sinister version, to stop anyone from finding out what's really going on there).  They monitor the property and prosecute any trespassers to the fullest extent of the law.

The remnants of a railway station platform near Dudleytown

So, pretty creepy, right?

There's just one problem.

Almost none of the above is true.

So let's do this again, shall we?

There's no proof that the Connecticut Dudleys are descended from King Henry VIII's unfortunate counselor Edmund.  Abiel Dudley didn't go mad; he lived in relatively good health into his nineties.  Gershon Hollister wasn't murdered -- the records of the time show that he was participating in a barn raising and accidentally fell from the rafters, breaking his neck.  The Carter family massacre didn't happen in Dudleytown -- it happened along the Delaware River, and in fact all three of Nathaniel Carter's children survived (one became a State Supreme Court Justice).  Heman Swift did live in the nearby village of Cornwall, but didn't go mad and lived to be eighty-one.  Horace Greeley's wife, on the other hand, seems to have had nothing whatsoever to do with Dudleytown, and didn't commit suicide.  She died in New York City of lung disease.

Oh, and as far as the birds; the lack of birds in the 1960s had to do with the fact that all the farms in the area had been sprayed with DDT.  Northwestern Connecticut was hardly unusual in that regard (Cf. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.)  And like many areas, now that DDT is no longer used, the wildlife has rebounded nicely, and the area around Dudleytown is as birdy as anywhere else in the Berkshires.

As far as why people left the area, it seems to have had more to do with the fact that the rocky soil was terrible for farming.  Records show that most of the people who left Dudleytown relocated to the Midwest, where there was lots of good farmland for sale.  The Dark Entry Forest Association is hardly mysterious -- it was founded in 1924 by a New York City physician, Walter Clarke, who had bought the property and hoped to reforest it (it had been largely clearcut in a forlorn hope of turning it into farms), and use it both for recreation and for logging.  For a while it was successful -- there were skiing and hiking trails, and organized canoeing and rafting trips on the nearby Housatonic River.

But then in the 1970s a couple named Ed and Lorraine Warren (the ones who did the famous investigation of the Amityville Horror) created a documentary supposedly chronicling all the supernatural terrors of the Dudleytown region, inventing out of whole cloth the various lies and half-truths I've mentioned above.  They said it was "demonically possessed" and "controlled by something terrifying."  It attracted huge amounts of attention from ghost hunters and tourists who wanted to see such an evil region...

... and the visitors proceeded to trash the place.

The residents of the nearby town of Cornwall finally got fed up, and petitioned the Dark Entry Forest Association to do something.  So they did; in 2011, they closed the property to visitors permanently.  These days, even if you ask permission to go, the answer will be no.

Harriet Clark, former president of the Cornwall Historical Society, wrote in her book The True Facts of Dudleytown, "Today’s owners and taxpayers of Dudleytown are professional people who live there for privacy and seclusion.  They do not welcome tourists or those seeking tales of chilling or wild experiences.  Please do not come.  There are no ghosts, no spirits and no curse."

Which, of course, dissuaded absolutely no one.  People are still trying to get in and still getting arrested and fined for trespassing.  And even if there's a persuasive argument that the demons of Dudleytown are entirely of human manufacture, the dismissive words of Clark and others are looked upon as more indication that there is something sinister there that they're trying to cover up.

You can't win with these people.

But to go back to my original point -- you'd think if there was anything to this kind of claim, they wouldn't find the need to make shit up in order to support it.  As always, I'm open to being convinced about claims of all sorts -- but don't expect me to accept what you're saying if the only thing going for it is a boatload of fabrications.

****************************************

Light speed

There's a claim I've now seen three times on social media that claims the ancient Egyptians knew the speed of light.

This is a pretty outlandish claim right from the get-go, as there is no evidence the Egyptians had invented, or even had access to, any kind of advanced technology.  Plus, even with (relatively) modern technology, the first reasonably decent estimate of the speed of light wasn't made until 1676, when Danish astronomer Olaus Roemer used the difference in the timing of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter when the Earth was moving toward them as compared to when the Earth was moving away from them, and came up with an estimate of 225,300,000 meters per second -- not too shabby given the limited technology of the time (the actual answer is just shy of 300,000,000 meters per second).

But there's something about those ancient Egyptians, isn't there?  There have been "secrets of the Pyramids" claims around for years, mostly of the form that if you take the area of the base of the Pyramid of Khufu in square furlongs and divide it by the height in smoots, and multiply times four, and add King Solomon's shoe size in inches, you get the mass of the Earth in troy ounces.

Okay, I made all that up, because when I read stuff about the "secrets of the Pyramids" it makes me want to take Ockham's razor and slit my wrists with it.  But I was forced to look at the topic at least a little bit when the aforementioned post about the speed of light started popping up on social media, especially when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia said, "You have got to deal with this."

The gist is that the speed of light in meters per second (299,792,458) is the same sequence of numbers as the location of the Pyramid of Khufu (29.9792458 degrees north latitude).  Which, if true, is actually a little weird.  But let's look at it a tad closer, shall we?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jerome Bon from Paris, France, Great Pyramid of Giza (2427530661), CC BY 2.0]

29.9792458 degrees of latitude is really specific.  One degree is approximately 111 kilometers, so getting a measurement of location down to seven decimal places is pretty impressive.  That last decimal place -- the ten-millionths place -- corresponds to a distance of 0.0111 meters, or a little over a centimeter.

So are they sure that last digit is an 8?  Measuring the position of the Great Pyramid to the nearest centimeter is a little dicey, given that the Great Pyramid is big (thus the name).  Even if the claim is that they're measuring the position of the top -- which is unclear -- the location of the top has some wiggle room, as it doesn't come to a perfect point.

But if you're just saying "somewhere on the Great Pyramid," there's a lot of wiggle room.  The base of the Pyramid of Khufu is about 230 meters on an edge, so that means that one-centimeter accuracy turns into "somewhere within 23,000 centimeters."

Not so impressive, really.

There's a second problem, however, which is that the second wasn't adopted as a unit of time until the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656.  The meter as a unit of length wasn't proposed until 1668, and was not adopted until 1790.  (And some countries still don't use the metric system.  I'm lookin' at you, fellow Americans.)  So why would the ancient Egyptians have measured the speed of light -- even assuming they could -- in meters per second, and not cubits per sidereal year, or whatever the fuck crazy units of measurement they used?

So as expected, this claim is pretty ridiculous, and not even vaguely plausible if you take it apart logically.  Not that there was any doubt of that.  The bottom line is that the ancient Egyptians were  cool people, and the pyramids are really impressive, but they weren't magical or advanced or (heaven help us) being assisted by aliens.

No matter what you may have learned from the historical documentary Stargate.

Oh, and for the record, I didn't invent the unit of "smoot" for length.  A smoot is 1.70 meters, which was the height of Harvard student Oliver R. Smoot, who in 1958 got drunk with his fraternity buddies and decided to measure the length of Harvard Bridge in Smoot-heights.  It turned out to be 364.4 smoots long, plus or minus the length of Oliver R. Smoot's ear.

And considering they were drunk at the time, it's pretty impressive that they thought of including error bars in their measurement.  Better than the damn Egyptian-speed-of-light people, who couldn't even get their measurement to within plus or minus 230 meters.

**************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a charming inquiry into a realm that scares a lot of people -- mathematics.  In The Universe and the Teacup, K. C. Cole investigates the beauty and wonder of that most abstract of disciplines, and even for -- especially for -- non-mathematical types, gives a window into a subject that is too often taught as an arbitrary set of rules for manipulating symbols.  Cole, in a lyrical and not-too-technical way, demonstrates brilliantly the truth of the words of Galileo -- "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."