Glitch report

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a YouTube link with the message, "Okay, so what do you make of this?"

It turned out to be a video from a channel called The Mysteria Archive titled, "The Reality Glitch: People Are Waking Up in the Wrong Timeline."  In it, we hear about folks who had the sudden sense -- often just after waking -- that everything was subtly changed.  Nothing quite looks or feels right.  Sometimes it's just an intangible feeling; other times minor details, like the color of a piece of furniture, the title of a book on the shelf, the brand of coffee you'd purchased, are different from what you remember.

In some cases, though, it's not minor.  In a story that got enough traction that (according to the video) it ended up in Newsweek in July of 2023, a woman decided to return after many years to take a look at her childhood home in northern New Jersey.  When she arrived -- although she recognized the street and the rest of the neighborhood -- the house at the address was completely different from the home she'd grown up in.  Neighbors insisted the house had been there for years, and that there'd never been the two-story colonial-style home there that she remembered; additionally, none of them knew of a family with her last name that had ever lived in the neighborhood.  Shaken, she returned home, and after some online research confirmed that the unfamiliar house now standing at her childhood address had been there for decades.

In another strange account, this one that ended up in Medium, an Australian woman named Elsie Harven was detoured by construction on her way to work in Sydney, and passed an office building with a sign saying "Bellridge Solutions."  She distinctly recalled having worked there as an intern when she was in college -- but when she checked her résumé later, she could find no mention of it.  Friends who knew her at the time had no memory of her having worked there, either.  Understandably freaked out, she decided to return to the building the following week to see if they had record of her -- only to find that the sign saying "Bellridge Solutions" was gone, and the building she'd seen was now completely empty.

Very weird.  Kind of a more personalized version of the Mandela Effect, is how I think of it.

So the narrator then goes into the possibility of it being a side-slip into another timeline -- the old "rip in the spacetime continuum" thing that was the genesis of at least two dozen plot twists in Star Trek alone.  He does admit that human memory is remarkably plastic, but seems convinced that this isn't enough to explain all the hundreds of such accounts there are out there.  The most likely explanation, he says, is that there was a glitch in the Matrix -- the software running the simulation we're all in has developed minor inconsistencies that every once in a while become apparent to someone.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons courtesy of creator Jamie Zawinski]

I have to admit that I've had similar experiences myself.  Nothing so dramatic as finding a different house at my childhood address or having an entire office building more or less erased, of course.  More like feeling things are surreal, like what I'm looking at "isn't quite right."  Not better or worse; just different, as if someone had subtly altered everything while I wasn't looking.  I tried to capture the feeling of this experience in my novel The Accidental Magician:

After hanging up, Carla sat looking out of the sliding glass door into her sheltered back yard, the shadows lengthening as twilight approached.  It all looked so normal.

But things felt off.  It was like those drawings she’d seen in kids’ magazines growing up, the ones labeled, Find twelve things wrong with this picture!  On a glance, everything is as it should be—a brother and a sister in a traditional-looking kitchen, a mom bringing them plates with sandwiches.  But then you looked closer, and the numbers on the clock dial are backwards, the mom is wearing swim fins, the milk-filled glasses on the table are upside down, the cat sitting in the corner is reading a book.

Even as a child, Carla felt a vague sense of unease about those, although they were only drawings.  The problem was that the people in them always seemed completely unaware of the fact that the world around them had gone mad.  Or maybe—they knew.  They knew, and wanted it that way.  The mom wore a reassuring smile, as if to say, No, dear, of course this is normal!  Don’t you know that?  Everything’s fine.  Just eat your sandwich and stop worrying.

So I won't deny the sensation is disorienting and unpleasant.  But what, exactly, is going on here?

I suppose it's unsurprising that I'm inclined to discount the "slipped into a different timeline" response.  This refers, of course, to the famous "Many-Worlds Interpretation" of quantum physics, which attempts to explain the baffling "collapse of the wave function" phenomenon -- the fact that a particle is in a superposition of probabilities until it's observed -- by positing that every possible outcome for the collapse happens, only in different timelines.  The thing is, though, those timelines afterward become completely isolated from one another; Geordi LaForge notwithstanding, it doesn't appear to be possible to jump into a different timeline (more's the pity for most of us here in the United States, who seem to have had our wave function collapsed into the stupidest, cruelest, and greediest timeline imaginable).

The other explanation he offers is the computer simulation one, and to me that's at least marginally more plausible.  Some of these occurrences do have the feel of an elaborate computer game glitching.  But "it feels similar" is light years away from any kind of rigorous scientific explanation.

The most parsimonious explanation is that it's a brain phenomenon.  Most of us remember the past poorly and incompletely, while simultaneously believing that our memories are one hundred percent reliable (and therefore, that anyone who remembers differently is just plain wrong).  I have to admit that remembering your childhood address -- and the rest of the neighborhood -- and having a different house show up there is a pretty major glitch, but it seems like there should be some way to cross-check more deeply than the woman in New Jersey did.  Surely she had to have some record of her address, photographs of her home, school records, something.

Isn't it easier to believe she'd done something like transposed two digits in the address than the entirety of reality being a glitchy computer simulation?

Now, mind you, this isn't a rigorous proof either.  I'm not saying the simulation explanation is impossible, just that the evidence we have doesn't get anywhere near the standard required by science.  At the moment, it's a weird, surreal phenomenon that happens to people sometimes, and that's kind of where we have to leave it.

On the other hand, if we are in a computer simulation, can we have something positive come out of it?  No Agent Smith or evil tracking devices being inserted into Keanu Reeves's navel, nothing like that.  But a targeted lightning strike on a golf course near Mar-a-Lago?

I'd happily reconsider my stance.

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Gone in a flash

Sometimes being a skeptic means answering the question, "So what happened?" with the rather unsatisfying response, "We don't know and may never know."

That was my immediate reaction upon reading a report out of Argentina from a little over a week ago, over at the website Inexplicata.  (Here are the links to part 1 and part 2 of the report.)  The gist of the story is as follows.

On Tuesday, November 15, a woman from the town of Jacinto Araúz went missing.  A search was launched in the area where she was last seen, but there were no traces -- no signs of a struggle, no note, no vehicle missing that she might have taken if she'd run away from home.  The search, in fact, turned up nothing.  Trained search dogs were brought in, and they easily picked up the woman's scent trail near her house, and then abruptly lost it after only 150 meters.  Neighbors said that there was no way she'd simply walked away -- her physical condition was poor, and a leisurely one-kilometer walk was enough to tire her out.

The mystery deepened when several relatives received messages from the woman's cellphone number, but the messages contained nothing but a mechanical buzzing noise and static.

Then, twenty-four hours later, she turned up again -- in Quinto Meridiano, sixty-five kilometers away.  She had a cut on her forehead, but otherwise was physically unharmed.

She seemed to be in a profound state of shock, however, and wasn't able to (or at least didn't) speak a word to authorities.  She was taken to a local hospital, where she wrote down what she claimed had happened to her.  She said that on Tuesday, she'd been in her house when she'd heard a noise.  She went outside, and there was a sudden, blinding flash of light.  When her vision cleared, she was in Quinto Meridiano -- with no apparent lapse of time.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Grelibre.net, Spectre Brocken, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The report, of course, made all the UFO aficionados start jumping up and down making excited little squeaking noises.  The area around Jacinto Araúz is a "hotspot," they said.  I saw a reference to the "Dorado Incident" in the report, but I wasn't able to find a good account of it; apparently it was some sort of UFO sighting nineteen years ago.  The report mentioned other sightings in the vicinity that have included spacecraft that landed, leaving scorch marks on the ground, and a "red-eyed creature" that has been seen more than once nearby.

But that's about all there is to the woman's story.  She's missing for a day, then turns up with a superficial injury, apparent emotional shock, and a strange tale of vanishing in a flash of light.

So what really happened?

Seems to me there are five possibilities:

• Her story is substantially true, and she was teleported (for want of a better word) from Jacinto Araúz to Quinto Meridiano more or less instantaneously by some unidentified, possibly extraterrestrial, agent.
• She's lying -- she made the whole thing up for her "fifteen minutes of fame."  She went to Quinto Meridiano by one of the usual means of transport, and invented the flash-of-light stuff.  The dogs lost her scent because that's the point at which she got in a car and drove (or was driven by an accomplice) away.  The phone calls with the buzzing noise were manufactured.
• She's mentally unbalanced, and got to Quinto Meridiano somehow but doesn't remember how.  Sixty-five kilometers would be a significant walk in twenty-four hours even for someone in good shape, but there's no reason she couldn't have hitchhiked.
• She was kidnapped -- knocked on the head (thus the injury on her forehead, and possibly explaining her perception of a flash of light), and then driven to Quinto Meridiano, where she was dumped by the kidnappers.
• The people who reported the story made it up, and the mysterious and unnamed woman doesn't even exist.

All of these explanations, however, leave some serious unresolved problems.  In order:

• Instantaneous transport, or even something very close to it, seems to break just about every law of physics we know. 
• This all seems like quite an ordeal to put oneself through just to give UFO enthusiasts multiple orgasms.  Not only do we have an apparently weak, unwell woman taking off for the next town for a day, but giving herself a deep cut on the forehead, for no other reason than to fool a bunch of people and worry the absolute shit out of her friends and family.
• If she is simply mentally ill, and hitched a ride from Jacinto Araúz to Quinto Meridiano, why hasn't anyone turned up saying that they'd seen her or given her a lift?  According to the sources, her disappearance was widely publicized -- it seems like someone would have reported seeing her.
• Why was she kidnapped?  There's no mention of her being robbed or raped.  It seems like there's a complete lack of any plausible motive for kidnapping.
• It's possible the story is made up from stem to stern, but there's been enough mention of it in other news sources (such as here and here), with enough details about which police departments were involved in the search, that if it was an out-and-out hoax, it would have been debunked by now.

As I asked before: so, what really happened?

The answer is: we don't know.  Perhaps more evidence will surface that will allow us to eliminate one or more of the explanations in the list, but given all we know at the moment, there's no way to narrow it down further.  We have to fall back on the ECREE principle -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- which would suggest that the supernatural/paranormal explanation (#1) is less likely than the natural ones (#2-#5), but "less likely" doesn't mean "impossible."

As I used to tell my Critical Thinking classes, you don't have to have an opinion about everything; being a skeptic means that in the absence of conclusive evidence, we have to accept the rather unsatisfying outcome that we need to hold off making a conclusion, perhaps forever.

So that's our exercise in frustration for the morning.  A peculiar story out of Argentina with no clear explanation.  It'd be nice if everything was neat and tidy and explicable, but we have to accept the fact that there are things we don't know -- and may never know.

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I've always loved a good parody, and one of the best I've ever seen was given to me decades ago as a Christmas present from a friend.  The book, Science Made Stupid, is a send-up of middle-school science texts, and is one of the most fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious things I've ever read.  I'll never forget opening the present on Christmas morning and sitting there on the floor in front of the tree, laughing until my stomach hurt.

If you want a good laugh -- and let's face it, lately most of us could use one -- get this book.  In it, you'll learn the proper spelling of Archaeopteryx, the physics of the disinclined plane, little-known constellations like O'Brien and Camelopackus, and the difference between she trues, shoe trees, and tree shrews. (And as I mentioned, it would make the perfect holiday gift for any science-nerd types in your family and friends.)

Science education may never be the same again.

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

It is your mind that bends

Yesterday I was in my car on the way to an appointment in Ithaca, and I was listening to some classical music on satellite radio.  The announcer came on with some of the usual sort of background information before a piece is played.  In this case, she said, "Next, we're going to hear from one of the masters of the classical guitar."  And immediately, I thought, "it's going to be Narciso Yepes."

And she continued, "... here's Narciso Yepes, playing Bach's Lute Suite #1."

Now, it's odd that I thought of Yepes at all.  I don't know much about classical guitar players -- the two I've heard the most often are Andrés Segovia and Christopher Parkening, but even them I only listen to intermittently.  I think I have one CD of Yepes, but I'm not sure where it is and I don't think I've listened to it in years.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kirkwood123, Matao MC-1 classical guitar 01, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the certainty of my thought is peculiar from a couple of standpoints, even if you believe that it wasn't a premonition (which, predictably, I don't).  The first is that I came up with the name of a guitarist I barely know at all, as soon as the announcer mentioned "classical guitar;" and the second, of course, is that it turned out to be right.

Interestingly (and you might consider this another synchronicity), just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a subreddit called Glitch in the Matrix which is devoted to exactly these sorts of occurrences.  The name, of course, comes from the movie The Matrix, in which odd coincidences and experiences of déjà vu are indicative that the Machines are making minor alterations to the computer simulation inside which we all live. 

The fact that we all have these experiences now and again certainly deserves some consideration. Let's take a look at three excerpts from the subreddit:

For about 5 or 6 years now (I'm 21 as of now), I've noticed that, whether it's the time that I check my phone, or it's a donation on a Twitch stream, or any number of other things, there's a decent chance that it'll be the number 619.  It's nothing I'm too worried about, but it pops up every so often naturally that it just doesn't seem like a simple coincidence anymore.  It's something that I noticed happened, and then it continued to happen long after that... 

I'll notice the time as 6:19 every once in a while, and at first I chalked it up to being stuck in the same routine, but it continued to occur after several changes in sleep schedules and school/work schedule.  Again, it's not only the time of day either, but I'll notice it in a phone number, or any number of places.  It's gotten to be like my own private joke that people or places attached to the number must mean something to me, although I never act on it... 

So any theories on my special little number?  Does anyone else have a number or idea "follow" them around like this?  Or is this an underlying symptom of a mental disorder that I've been ignorant of for 21 years?

Here's another:

One of the most terrifying experiences I've ever encountered was with my friend Gordie last summer and to this day still makes me feel uncomfortable to talk about because I genuinely can not explain what happened on any logical level.

We were driving to Mission and on the way back I noticed I had forgotten something at the store.  By this time we were in downtown Maple Ridge and considering we had nothing to do so we went back.  It's about a 20 minute drive to Mission from where we were.  The clock read 3:23.

The clock reads 3:37. Gordie and I look at each other.  And he asks me "what happened?"  Neither of us remember the drive between Maple Ridge and Mission.  We lost 15 minutes of lives and we have no idea where it went.  All we know is that in between post A and B nothing or probably something happened.

Not a single word was said.  The last thing we remember talking about was how Skyrim will never have a follow up.  Then at the snap of a universal finger.  Nothing.  15 minutes gone.

The rest of the ride was very quiet and we were both very much on edge and uncomfortable.  We have both experienced something completely unexplainable but yet at the same time we experienced nothing.

I'm the grand scheme of things, 15 minutes seems inconsequential and minimal to the many minutes in our life.  But nevertheless it remains unknown as to where time went.

My only explanation is that I passed though a wormhole and somehow ended up on the other side.

And one last one:

I had a problem with a programming question, so I googled it, and I went to the forum Stackoverflow (in which I had signed up 2 years ago).  I found an excellent answer that solved my problem, and I told myself "Oh...  So many intelligent people out there...  I would have never been able to write something like that."  

And then I realized... the author of the answer is my account.  It's me...  

I am convinced this is caused by a glitch in the matrix.  Most probably, many answers on the forum are generated by the matrix, and the glitch was to attribute my username to it.  Of course, a couple of seconds after that, I was getting a vague idea that I may have written the answer (false memory), but I am not fooled!

So, given that we are starting from the standpoint of there being a natural explanation for all of this, what is going on here?

I think the key is that all of these rely on two things; the general unreliability of perception and memory, and our capacity for noticing what seems odd and ignoring pretty much everything else.  Starting with our 619-noticer, consider how many times (s)he probably looks at clocks, not to mention other sources of three-digit numbers, and it's not 619.  Once you have a couple of precedents -- most likely caused, as the writer noted, by being in the same routine -- you are much more likely to notice it again.  And each subsequent occurrence reinforces the perception that something odd is going on.

As far as the time-slip friends, I think what happened here is a simple failure of attention.  I've driven on auto-pilot more than once, especially when I'm fatigued, and suddenly sat up straight and thought, "How the hell did I get here?"  I honestly had no memory at all of driving the intervening distance.  But a mysterious time-slip is less likely than my brain being elsewhere (leaving some portion of my attention still focused on my driving, fortunately).

And the last one, the person who answered him/herself on an internet forum, certainly has to be a case of a lost memory.  I have a friend from college who has an excellent memory for details from the past, and periodically reminds me of things that happened to the two of us -- and more than once I've had to admit to him that I have no recollection of the events whatsoever.  It's disconcerting, but our memories are far less thorough and accurate than we think they are.

My own premonition-like decision that the radio announcer was going to be playing a piece by Narciso Yepes is clearly something of the sort.  Considering how often I listen to the radio, and hear the announcer give a bit of information about the next selection, it's likely I have thoughts like, "I hope she plays something by Scarlatti next!" several times a day.  Most of them, of course, are wrong predictions, and because that's the norm, such events are immediately forgotten.  It's only the coincidental ones, the outliers, that get noticed -- yet another example of our old friend dart-thrower's bias.

But even so, I think I'll dig up that Yepes album and put it on.  Whether or not it was a glitch in the matrix, he's a pretty damn good guitarist.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about one of the most terrifying viruses known to man: rabies.

In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, we learn about the history and biology of this tiny bit of protein and DNA that has, once you develop symptoms, a nearly 100% mortality rate.  Not only that, but it is unusual amongst pathogens at having extremely low host specificity.  It's transmissible to most mammal species, and there have been cases of humans contracting rabies not from one of the "big five" -- raccoons, foxes, skunks, bats, and dogs -- but from animals like deer.

Rabid goes through not only what medical science has to say about the virus and the disease it causes, but its history, including the possibility that it gave rise to the legends of lycanthropy and werewolves.  It's a fascinating read.

Even though it'll make you a little more wary of wildlife.

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