Do a little dance

One of the unfortunate things about having a skeptical approach is that sometimes, you have to admit you simply don't have an explanation.

I get that it's frustrating.  I used to run into this sometimes with students, and have conversations like the following:

Student: Do you think there's intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy?

Me:  I don't know.

Student: But what do you think?

Me:  I don't think anything.  I simply don't know.  We have one example of a planet with intelligent life, and only vague guesses about how likely the conditions are that would select for intelligence.  It might be extremely common, or it might be extraordinarily rare.  We just don't know.

Student:  Doesn't that drive you crazy?

Yes, sometimes it does drive me crazy.  But if you're approaching the world scientifically, you better get used to it, because you're going to be spending a lot of time standing right up against what astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson calls "the perimeter of our own ignorance."

And you don't have to go to the outer reaches of the galaxy to find phenomena that we've yet to explain -- ones for which, if you consider them honestly, you have to admit you may never have a good explanation.  The universe is big and weird and chaotic and complex, and frankly, we're lucky we've been able to explain as much of it as we have.

Which brings us to the Dancing Plague of 1518.

In July of the year 1518, in the town of Strasbourg, Alsace, a woman known to us only as Frau Troffea suddenly felt compelled to dance.  Unable to stop herself, she left her house and began to dance on the street, resisting all attempts to get her to stop.

Keep in mind that this was a highly superstitious time, when such behavior wouldn't have been considered comical; the early sixteenth century was the era of witch burnings and the heresy-hunters of the Inquisition.  To the onlookers of the time, Frau Troffea didn't seem funny, she looked as if she'd been possessed by a demon.

Worse, several other people joined her over the hours that followed.  During the next week, three dozen people were dancing; by mid-August, the numbers had risen to four hundred, and the illness -- whatever it was -- had spread to nearby towns.  At first, both the doctors and religious authorities suggested the victims be encouraged to dance themselves to exhaustion, to "dance free of it," and even hired musicians to keep them going.  But as the "dancing plague" spread through the countryside, panic ensued.  The powers-that-be reversed course, and forbade musicians from egging the dancers on.  The priests and bishops declared that the dancers were being punished by Saint Vitus, the patron saint of dancing, but what they'd done to merit that was never clear, as the dancers came from all walks of life.  Despite that, and probably driven by a desperation to do something, the religious authorities forced the dancers to wear shoes blessed with Holy Water, which had crosses embroidered on them, in the hopes that this might make the saint happy and stop the strange affliction.

Unsurprisingly, this had no effect whatsoever.

A depiction of some of the dancers in an engraving by Hendrik Hondius (1564) [Image is in the Public Domain]

By September, the whole thing began to die down.  Some contemporaneous sources say a few of the dancers danced themselves to death, but the number of fatalities (if any) are uncertain.  In the third week of September, the afflicted (now over their bad case of Boogie Fever) were sent to the shrine of Saint Vitus to receive absolution, and the whole episode ended.

So, what caused this bizarre outbreak?

If you're discounting the Demonic Possession Hypothesis and the Pissing Off Saint Vitus Hypothesis, there are two explanations that are most commonly proffered to account for the Dancing Plague, but both of them are not without their problems.

The first is that it was ergotism -- a condition caused by eating ergot-infected wheat and rye.  Ergot is a fungus that produces a chemical analog to LSD, and when consumed, it can cause bizarre hallucinations.  While this is a possibility, there are two main arguments against it.  First, an LSD trip doesn't last for weeks, and some of the people affected danced through most of July and August.  Second, severe ergotism -- consumption of large quantities of the fungus-infected grain -- triggers another effect of the chemical, which is vasoconstriction.  People with severe ergotism can have blood vessel constriction bad enough to cause gangrene in their extremities.  Considering how long the Dancing Plague went on, it's odd that if it was ergot, no one showed the other symptoms that usually come along with it.

The second is that it was an example of mass psychogenic illness.  This occurs when groups of people start exhibiting similar symptoms because of being part of a cohesive group and sharing similar biases and living conditions.  Put simply, it was superstition, hysteria, and the power of suggestion at work.  Examples of other illness thought to be caused by this phenomenon are the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of Tanzania and the "June Bug" incident in the southern United States, both of which (coincidentally) happened in 1962.  More controversially, some have explained Havana syndrome and Morgellons disease as psychogenic in origin -- but there are plenty of people who dispute both of those.

But as far as the Dancing Plague goes, there is one odd fact that argues against it being psychogenic in origin.  Almost every victim of the outbreak lived near water -- particularly along the Rhine and Moselle Rivers.  The farther away you were from the rivers, the less likely you were to be affected.  This gives the appearance of some sort of water-borne disease, but there's no known germ that has these effects.

Whatever caused the Dancing Plague -- and we still don't have an explanation that accounts for all of the known facts -- at least the authorities of the time didn't do what you might expect, which is to turn against the victims.  Considering the medieval tendency to see Satan hiding in every dark corner, it's kind of surprising they didn't.  There's no indication that, even after having spent a few weeks gettin' down, the victims were treated any differently afterward.

Maybe it was the trip to Saint Vitus's shrine that did the trick.

In any case, we really don't know what caused it.  Frustrating, but -- to come back around to my initial point -- given how weird and complicated the world is, that's gonna happen.  And as good skeptics, we have to be okay with it.  We can't explain everything, and even given all the facts at hand, there will still be times we have to shrug our shoulders and admit we don't know.

Even if it does drive us crazy.

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

Sounding off

Noodling around on Wikipedia, sometimes you run into the oddest stuff.

I was looking something up yesterday and saw an associated link to a page called "List of Unexplained Sounds."  Well, I couldn't pass by something like that, so off I went down that rabbit hole.  As advertised, the page is a compendium of odd noises that have been heard (many have been recorded, so we know that those at least aren't someone's overactive imagination).  There are sound clips for a few of them, so I highly recommend going to the page and checking them out.

Here are a few of the ones listed -- with some possible explanations.

Upsweep is the name given to a sound consisting of a repeated series of rising tones that sound to my ears a little like a siren.  The source of the sound has been identified as being somewhere near 54° S latitude, 140° W longitude, placing it a little less than halfway from New Zealand and Cape Horn.  This, to put it mildly, is the middle of abso-fucking-lutely nowhere; in fact, it's not far from Point Nemo, also known as the "oceanic pole of maximum inaccessibility," which at 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W is the point on Earth that is maximally distant from land.  There's a conjecture that Upsweep might be some kind of sound generated by underwater volcanic activity, but it's not exactly convenient to go out there and check, so that hypothesis is unproven.

The Bloop is a famous noise, once again heard in the Pacific Ocean, that is ultra-low frequency and extremely high amplitude -- meaning it can travel thousands of miles from its source.  The guess here is that the Bloop is a sound made by large icebergs breaking up (or scraping the seafloor), but I've heard an alternate hypothesis that I like better, which is that it's Cthulhu snoring.  Cthulhu, as you probably know, is the octopoid Elder God who was put into a charmèd sleep in his underwater city of Rl'yeh, where he's waiting for his followers to summon him back.  Why anyone would want to do so remains to be seen, because if you've read any H. P. Lovecraft, you know that the ones who try to reawaken him always end up dying in nasty ways, so it seems to me it might be better to leave him blooping peacefully in Rl'yeh.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dominique Signoret (signodom.club.fr), Cthulhu and R'lyeh, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Some sounds have only been heard once, but are weird enough to bear mention.  These include Julia, which was given its name because it sounds like someone saying the name in a weird, hooting voice.  This is another one that is probably due to icebergs; its origin was pinpointed to somewhere near Cape Adare, Antarctica, but it was loud enough to be recorded by the entire Equatorial Pacific Autonomous Hydrophone Array.

The Ping is much more local; it's only been reported from the Fury and Hecla Strait between Baffin Island and the Melville Peninsula, Nunavut, Canada.  Although it's likely to be from some kind of marine animal, it's strange enough (and has been reported enough times) that "the Canadian military is investigating."

Not all of them are oceanic sounds.  One of the weirdest is the Forest Grove Sound, heard multiple times near Forest Grove, Oregon in February of 2016.  It was variously described as "a mechanical scream," "a giant flute played off pitch," and "akin to a bad one-note violin solo broadcast over a microphone with nonstop feedback."  There was an investigation, and it was never satisfactorily resolved -- and has not been heard since.

Last, there are the Moodus Noises, heard near Moodus, Connecticut, which unlike the Forest Grove Sound, have been heard for centuries (the indigenous people of the area, mostly from the Narragansett Tribe, supposedly have a long tradition of weird noises coming from nearby Cave Hill and Mt. Tom).  The Moodus Noises have a different Lovecraftian connection -- apparently they were the inspiration for the strange noises that came from Sentinel Hill in the spine-chilling story "The Dunwich Horror."  The more prosaic explanation for the Moodus Noises is that they come from microquakes, but -- needless to say -- there are a lot of people who don't buy that, and think the region is haunted.

So there you have it; a sampler of weird and unexplained sounds.  You should definitely check out the page and listen to some of the clips, which are goosebump-inducing.  While I do think they all have perfectly ordinary natural explanations, being a diehard skeptic doesn't mean I'm immune from getting the creeps now and again.

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

Lights in the Ozarks

I was chatting with a good friend and long-time reader of Skeptophilia about the difficulties of finding topics to write about six days a week, and right off the bat she came up with one I'd never heard of.

She's another novelist, so I probably shouldn't have been surprised that she had heard about local legends in the Ozarks, near her home in northwestern Arkansas.  Her name is K. D. McCrite -- she's a versatile and creative writer, writing children's books, romances, and cozy mysteries, but also (under her pen name Ava Norwood) writes domestic thrillers that'd knock your socks off.

"Have you ever heard of the Joplin Spook Lights?" K. D. asked.

Well, it sounded a bit like a minor league baseball team, but I told her I hadn't.

"It's actually not in Joplin that it happens," she told me.  "It's across the border into Oklahoma, near Quapaw.  But lots of people have seen them.  Lights floating in the sky.  They were reported long before there were any cars and airplanes, so whatever they are, they don't seem to be that."

I was intrigued, of course, and she did a little digging and found some references for me.  It's a pretty peculiar phenomenon, whatever it is.

It was allegedly first noticed by Native Americans during the Trail of Tears, but just about every time something like this comes up you hear that the "Native Americans had legends" corroborating it, so I'm not inclined to give that a lot of credence.  But after that, things get pretty weird, and way harder to dismiss out of hand.

In 1881, a publication came out called The Ozark Spook Light claiming it had been seen repeatedly by locals.  It's a ball of light that hovers over the road, and that it "sways from side to side, like a lantern being carried by some invisible force."  It apparently can be seen on most any dark night, seems impervious to wind and rain, and has even been studied by the Army Corps of Engineers -- still leaving us without an explanation.

Initially I thought it might be ball lightning, but on further research it doesn't seem to fit with the descriptions.  Ball lightning -- itself a verified but unexplained phenomenon -- has several common characteristics, which include sizzling discharge when it nears a metal object, and a (usually loud) explosive finish.

The Joplin Spook Lights, on the other hand, are silent.  They don't seem to be electrical in nature, although that's speculation.  Some have linked the phenomenon to the New Madrid Fault -- one of the only potentially dangerous faults in the middle of the continent -- which in 1811 and 1812 suffered a series of earthquakes that changed the course of the Mississippi River, and which if they occurred today, would have flattened every town within a hundred mile radius.  But that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because the New Madrid Fault is on the other side of the state, over five hundred kilometers away.

If the New Madrid Fault is causing lights in the sky in Quapaw, Oklahoma, the skies over the town of New Madrid itself should look like Fourth of July fireworks show.

But whatever they are, the Spook Lights are a completely local phenomenon.  K. D. put me in touch with a friend of hers who lives near where they're regularly seen, and in fact, has seen them herself, as had her husband.  Here's what she had to say:

I’ve seen it a handful of times over the years.  My first husband saw it up close and personal when he was a teenager.  He said it was a common pastime to hang out there.  I believe it must have been more active and brighter then, which would have been late forties, early fifties, if I’m figuring the time right.

He said he sat on the hood of his car and read a comic book from the light it projected.  It would come up close and sometimes bounce on the top of the cars in front of him.  He said it would split into two, three, four lights, and some were different colors.  Not bright but subtly different shades.  I imagined it like a pale prism.  I don’t know if that’s what it was.  I think he did say it would sometimes be a pale red.

My own experiences were less exciting but they did give me chills a time or two.  I have seen it divide and bounce in the tree tops.  It has seemed to diminish in size and brightness over the years.  I haven’t heard of anyone seeing it in years but maybe people have lost interest.  Too much else to do these days.  The last time I was there was around 2000, 2001.  My husband and I went down with some friends, but that time we didn’t see it at all.

Pretty creepy stuff.  I don't know that if I'd been there and seen spectral lights bouncing off the hoods of cars, I would have been calm enough to sit there and read a comic book.  Although I'm a skeptic and a scientist, I'm also a great big coward, and I suspect if I were on a lonely country road at night and saw weird lights in the sky, I'd either faint or else wet my pants.

Possibly both.

Be that as it may, the lights are still seen today (although perhaps less frequently, as K. D.'s friend mentioned).  In 2016, three friends went investigating, and caught the Spook Lights on film (they call them the "Hornet Spook Lights," after the nearby town of Hornet, Missouri, six miles southwest of Joplin, but it's the same local phenomenon by a different name).  The video they took is strangely convincing -- if you're as impatient as I am, though, you might want to advance it to 9:30 and skip all the introductory conversation.  But the people filming it point out other flashes as distant billboard lights or car headlights, and what they say are the Spook Lights are definitely something different.  My feeling after watching the video is that whatever the three guys captured on video, it wasn't some kind of elaborate hoax.

In any case, the Spook Lights remain unexplained.  Apparently they're one of the best-documented "lights in the sky" in the world, which makes me wonder why I hadn't run across it till now.  I'd still put money on there being a natural explanation, but despite investigation, no one -- including the Army Corps of Engineers -- has been able to figure out what it might be.

So thanks to K. D. and her friend for putting me onto this.  It's certainly a curious phenomenon.  I think maybe next time I'm in the Ozarks (I go there every year for my publisher's annual authors' retreat), I might just head up to Quapaw and see what I can see.  I'll have my camera at the ready, and will certainly report anything I see here.

I'll also have a change of underwear at the ready.  You can't be too careful.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.