The sound of thunder

Last Sunday (April 14) we had a series of thunderstorms roll through the region, kind of unusual for upstate New York at this time of year.  We're not particularly stormy in general, but most of the thunder and lightning we do get comes in the heat of midsummer.  On Sunday, though, a warm front brought in turbulent, moist air, and we got some decent storms and rain for most of the day.

At 11:51 AM (EDT), though, something odd happened.  There was a deep, shuddering rumble that repeated three times within the span of about two or three minutes.  (The first was the strongest.)  I grew up in the Deep South, where thunder is a frequent occurrence, and to my ears this didn't feel or sound like thunder.  Immediately I thought of a mild earthquake -- primed, of course, by the April 6 quake, centered in New Jersey, which was felt over large regions of New York and the neighboring states.

The rumble we experienced preceded the arrival of the strongest of the storms; because of that, and the fact that it "sounded wrong," I was convinced that we'd experienced an earthquake.  That conviction intensified when reports began to pour in that the same noise had been heard at the same time -- in locations separated by fifty kilometers or more.  (Thunder ordinarily can only be heard about fifteen kilometers from the source.)  

My wife, on the other hand, was absolutely sure it was thunder, albeit rather powerful and deep-pitched.

Well, let it never be said that I won't admit it when I'm wrong.

I started to doubt myself when the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca (only ten miles from my home) reported on Monday morning that despite numerous people calling in to report noise and shaking, their seismometer had not recorded an earthquake.  That seemed pretty unequivocal -- and after all, there had been storms in the area, even though at the time we heard the rumble, the center of the front wouldn't arrive for over an hour.  But if it had been thunder, how had a single thunderclap (or three in rapid succession) been heard over such a great distance?

The answer turns out to be a temperature inversion.  Ordinarily, temperature decreases as you go up in altitude; but this effect competes with the fact that cool air is denser and tends to sink.  (This is why in winter, the greatest risk of frost damage to plants is in isolated valleys.)  So sometimes, a wedge of warm air gets forced up and over a blob of cooler air, meaning that for a while, the temperature rises as you go up in altitude.

This is exactly what happens in a warm front; the warm air, which carries more moisture, rises and forms clouds (and if there's enough moisture and a high enough temperature gradient, thunderclouds).  But this has another effect that is less well known -- at least, by me.

The difference in density of warm and cool air means that they have different indices of refraction -- a measure of how fast a wave can travel in the medium.  A common example of different indices of refraction is the bending of light at the boundary between air and water, which is why a pencil leaning in a glass of water looks kinked at the boundary.  At a shallow enough angle, the wave doesn't cross the boundary at all, but reflects off the surface layer; this causes the heat shimmer you see on hot road surfaces, as light bounces off the layer of hot air right above the asphalt.

Sound waves can also refract, although the effect is less obvious.  But that's exactly what happened on Sunday.  A powerful lightning strike created a roll of thunder, and the sound waves propagated outward at about 343 meters per second; but when they struck the undersurface of the temperature inversion, instead of dispersing upward into the upper atmosphere, they reflected back downward.  This not only drastically increased the distance over which the sound was heard, but amplified it, changing the quality of the sound from the usual booming roll we associate with thunder to something more like an explosion -- or an earthquake.

So despite the jolt and the odd (and startlingly loud) sound, we didn't have an earthquake on Sunday.  I'm kind of disappointed, actually.  I didn't feel the one on April 6 -- although some folks in the area did -- and despite having lived in a tectonically-active part of the country (Seattle, Washington) for ten years, I've never experienced an earthquake.  I'd rather not have my house fall down, or anything, but given that the pinnacle of excitement around here is when the farmer across the road bales his hay, a mild jolt would have been kind of entertaining.

But I guess I can't check that box quite yet.  Thunder, combined with a temperature inversion, was all it was.

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The "flap" comes to upstate New York

An article today in The Examiner has thrilling news for anyone who lives in upstate New York: we are apparently now at the epicenter of an outbreak of woo-wooness.

This is especially exciting for me, because I live in upstate New York, and heaven knows there's little enough else to be thankful for in this part of the country in January.  Tomorrow's high is supposed to be 4 degrees, and for those of you who think in metric, that's Fahrenheit, not Celsius.  If you convert it to Celsius, using the formula that we all learned in 7th grade and then promptly forgot, you get a fairly significant negative number.  And even if you were to measure it in Kelvin, a scale which tries to fool you into thinking that you are warmer than you really are by setting "zero" at "so cold that all molecular motion ceases," I'm guessing that you would not be tricked for a moment.  Regardless of what scale you put it into, 4 F is in that range that is classified by scientists as "really fucking cold."

And I haven't even mentioned the wind chill factor.

So right about now, we upstaters are looking for any possible reason to be optimistic.  And it appears that we have one; according to an article entitled "Yes, New York, You're Seeing Things," this part of the world is currently in the middle of a "flap," which means that all sorts of weird things can be expected to happen.

The term "flap" was coined by author John Keel, whose biggest claim to fame is the truly terrible book The Mothman Prophecies.  I tried to read The Mothman Prophecies once, and got only about halfway through it before I gave up.  And it bears mention that I have a fair tolerance for goofy paranormal writing.  I grew up on books that had titles like Twenty True Tales of Terror, and I still proudly own a copy of Ivan T. Sanderson's Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life.

But Mothman defeated me.  Maybe it was the rambling, incoherent prose; maybe it was the fact that very little of it turned out to have anything to do with the Point Pleasant Mothman.  But I just couldn't do it.

I also found out, when researching Keel, that he wrote several scripts for Lost in Space.  And given that this was one of the most completely abysmal shows ever to hit the airwaves, I suppose it all makes sense.

But I digress.

A "flap," according to Keel, is "any geographical region where a large number of strange sightings and experiences are clustered over a period of time, usually about 12-18 months."  The problem is, Keel said, that investigators in various areas of the paranormal -- UFOs, say, or ghosts, or Bigfoot, or psychic manifestations -- don't usually communicate much with one another.  So a UFO enthusiast might not be aware if there'd been an outbreak of ghosts nearby, for example.

But these flaps are real things, said Keel, and so does Keel's successor (Keel himself died in 2009) Andy Colvin.  Here's how Colvin describes a "flap:"

People who previously had no odd experiences at all will suddenly find themselves deluged...  Similarly, regions that are suddenly awash with UFO reports will also be awash with an increase in reports of hauntings, Bigfoot sightings, even mysterious fires and other odd events.  In correlating reports over a couple of decades from all over the country, Keel was eventually able to determine that these 'waves' of flaps occurred in a broad swath that moved pretty regularly through the same areas of the country every few years.  His clues to whether a true flap was going on include: Are parallel events happening at approximately the same time in different parts of the country? And, are a wide variety of phenomena being reported all at once in the 'target areas?'

And apparently, Colvin thinks that upstate New York is currently flapping like a flag in a hurricane:

(T)here has been a sharp increase in the number of odd nocturnal lights being observed up and down the Hudson Valley, from New York to Albany with some up to Rochester.  These numbers can be found at this national data base which simply collects reports, records them and chooses some of the more complicated ones for further study.  It has always been true that most UFO reports are basically reports of strange lights in the sky.  What's important about this information is the relative increase...  (J)ust in the last six months, there have a sharp increase in the number of people reporting encounters with Cryptids, in this instance, possible Bigfoot type creatures, in the Hudson Valley and Catskills proper.  While many of these reports could also be bear sightings, a number of them are quite interesting and include reports of associated sound and electromagnetic disturbance (cameras and phones suddenly not working, odd electrical outages), the classic terrible stench (which is not associated with bear) and some intriguing thermal imaging.  Many of these reports are collected and posted regularly at this Facebook page.

So there you are, then.  My general attitude is: bring it on.  There's nothing like actual evidence to convince me, and if we're in the middle of a flap, it should mean that someone will be able to get some hard data.  Unless, of course, it's all a bunch of nonsense, which could well be.

There's just one downside to all of this, though, and we're warned about it later in the article:

Finally, and most disturbingly, Keel noted that true flaps are often signaled by the untimely, sudden deaths of individuals who are known to have investigated these phenomena. The deaths often occur at the peak of the flap or right as the flap is beginning a sharp increase to reach its climax. In a number of his writings, Keel lists the individual researchers who passed on during clustered reports of the very things that most interested them. A few of these unusual deaths are recounted at this site, even though it's not as reliable as Keel.

The phrase "not as reliable as Keel" strikes me as strangely hilarious, given that most people tend to think that the stuff he wrote about ranked right up there with Lost in Space in terms of technical accuracy.  So I'm not really worried, despite my (1) having a deep and abiding interest in paranormal phenomena, while (2) not really believing much of any of it, and (3) living more or less in the center of the "flap."  Oh, yeah, and (4) being basically a big coward.  I am not the person you'd want by your side if there were some sort of real paranormal occurrence, because I'd faint and then you'd have to drag me to safety, unless you decided to save yourself and leave me to be eaten by zombies.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

 

Logic and reason, not to mention friendship, only get you so far.

But anyway.  I'm happy to hear that for once, I appear to be where the action is.  I'm sick and tired of the Pacific Northwest and the Himalayas getting all of the Bigfoot sightings, and the UFO visitations favoring the American Southwest.  Maybe I'll finally have a shot at seeing something weird happen.  And when I do, trust me -- you'll be the first to know.

As soon as I regain consciousness.

Aquatic cryptid update

It is amazing to me, after all of these years of having a (rather guilty) fascination with cryptozoology, that I still can run into cryptids that I've never heard of.  This week, for example, I discovered two that were new to me -- one veritably in my own back yard.

The first came up because it's the 25th anniversary of its alleged appearance.  Back in 1988, farmers in Rhyader, Wales, began to report that their large animals -- especially sheep -- were being killed by "a single bite to the sternum."  One farm, owned by the Pugh family, lost over three dozen of its sheep to the attacker.

The article summarizing the events of a quarter-century ago states that the townspeople initially attributed the attacks to a "black panther."  This is somewhat amusing given that the only black panthers in Wales are in zoos, and if one went missing, the zookeeper would probably have noticed.  On the other hand, reports of giant marauding felines in Britain are common enough that the phenomenon has its own Wikipedia page, so I guess if we Yanks can have our Bigfoots, then the Brits can have their panthers.

Be that as it may, the Ginormous Kitty Theory received a serious credibility blow when it was found that the evidence left behind by the Beast of Rhyader, as it came to be known, showed that the creature had not been walking on four legs -- but had, instead, slithered up from the River Wye.  So rather than modifying their guess to the Ginormous Aquatic Legless Kitty Theory, the townspeople settled on a new model, namely the Ginormous Aquatic Serpent Theory.

Not an actual photograph of the Beast of Rhyader

The author uses the term "Lovecraftian" to describe the beast, which is apt only in that it killed things.  Most of the creatures in Lovecraft's stories also sucked out their victims' souls, ate their faces, or converted them to puddles of sticky goo.  So I think we can say that the resemblance, if any, was purely coincidental.

In any case, the attacks suddenly ceased of their own accord in December of 1988, never to be repeated, and the mystery was never solved.


But if that's scary enough, little did I know that there was a similar beast only a few miles away from me.  In Cayuga Lake, a long, narrow glacial lake that's only five miles (as the crow flies) from my front door, there is a creature called "Old Greeny" that resembles the Beast of Rhyader in that (1) it's aquatic, (2) it's reptilian, and (3) it almost certainly doesn't exist.  But this last isn't going to stop the reports from coming in, one of them from an "unnamed resident of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania," who was visiting our fair region back in 2009, and had the following to say:

I’ve been face to face with Old Greeny; not more than 100 feet away from me as I stood on the northern shore of Lake Cayuga looking south across the lake; eight or nine years ago. It raised its triangular-tooth-filled jaws with aquatic plants hanging from it’s half-open mouth to break surface for only about three seconds before once again submerging. I will never forget that large, unblinking eye staring to the west at nothing in particular; never acknowledging my presence. Don’t let anyone tell you I saw a floating log or a beaver! I know I saw an animal that is not supposed to exist!  By what I observed I can tell you it was standing on the bottom when it raised its head for me to see; not swimming; but stationary!

Not an actual photograph of Old Greeny

The same story reports that a local resident, one Steven Griffen, was bitten on the arm so hard by Old Greeny in 1974 that it broke his arm.  This might actually discourage me from swimming in Cayuga Lake if I was actually willing to swim in it in the first place, given that our climate is not exactly conducive to running around outside clad in nothing but swim trunks (this year, summer occurred on a Thursday).

But even so, I'll keep my eyes peeled when I'm down near the lake, and report back here if I see anything that is definitely not a beaver.

I'll also make sure that I'll listen for reports of local sheep being killed by "a single bite to the sternum."  That's gotta hurt, even if the attacker doesn't turn out to be "Lovecraftian."

Dream job

Are you interested in research?  Do you like hiking and camping?  Are you knowledgeable about technical equipment?  Do you have a desire to spend your time looking for a creature that may not, technically, exist?

Well, a nonprofit in upstate New York has a job for you.  [Source]

Apparently, a Bigfoot research group based in Whitehall, New York, has an advertisement in the "Help Wanted" section of Craigslist, inviting interested parties to apply for a position as a research assistant.  Here's the main body of the ad:

Not for profit organization, located in Whitehall, NY is a high-energy, team-oriented research entity that is involved in the tracking, documenting, and study of cryptozoological creatures, with a deep interest in the study and search of bipedal primitive apes.

We seek an experienced researcher with a deep understanding of cryptozoology, primatology, with a good background with scientific research and interest in great apes. The ideal candidate must be able to work both autonomously and as part of a large team. The individual must also be able to solve problems creatively, communicate effectively, and collaborate well with project leaders and team members.

Duties and Functions:

• Develop actionable tracking program in designated geographic area.

• Investigate, document and interview individuals with reported Bigfoot sitings.

• Occasional travel to remote areas of Adirondacks including spending several nights in the wilderness, checking motion cameras, collecting hair and dung samples for laboratory analysis amongst other related activites.

• Must have own transportation, four-wheel drive a plus.

** Serious Inquiries only **
Compensation: based on experience, this is a grant funded position and is expected to last 6 months with the possibility of renewal.

This sounds like a job made in heaven for me -- the combination of the hiking and backpacking aspects, the biological research aspects, and the cryptozoological aspects, not to mention that this is veritably in my back yard, seem to cry out that I apply.  Of course, there's the downside that this job is only guaranteed for six months, and I'd have to quit my other gainful employment, which I suspect both my principal and my wife would have an opinion about.  But come on -- a Bigfoot research assistant?  In the Adirondacks?  How cool would that be?

Of course, I do have some questions.  First, the salary is based on experience?  Experience with what?  Actually finding Bigfoot?  Because if so, this is looking like it could be a volunteer position.  Also, you have to wonder who is actually funding this whole thing.  I tried to find out more about it, but whoever is behind it seems to be keeping their names out of sight.

Also, I had no idea that the Whitehall area was as much of a hotspot for Sasquatches as it is.  I knew about the Connecticut Hill Monster, which is even closer to my home (a mere thirty miles) than the Adirondacks; but I hadn't heard of the sightings around Whitehall.  But evidently this is a seriously squatchy area, with tales of giant apelike creatures going back at least a hundred years, perhaps more.  In 2008, the Glens Falls Post-Star did a story on the whole phenomenon:

For Whitehall, the pivotal year for sightings seems to be 1976. The country was celebrating its bicentennial, but Bigfoot was the local center of attention that summer and fall.

[Paul] Bartholomew details the encounters in his book.

On Aug. 24, three Whitehall teens reported seeing a 7-to-8-foot-tall brown, hairy creature in a field off Abair Road. The teens allegedly saw the figure two times that night. They also claimed to hear a noise that sounded like a "cross between a woman screaming and a pig squealing."

The next day, a farmer found "big, human footprints" nearby and a ravaged deer carcass.

That night, a local off-duty police officer, who was a brother of one of the teens, went to the site with a New York State Trooper.

Around midnight, the police officer spotted a pair of red eyes reflecting off his headlights. He shut off his lights and radioed the trooper, who put a spotlight on some nearby bushes.

The police officer said he turned his headlights back on when he heard something crashing through the shrubs. He claims to have seen an almost 8-foot-tall creature that he estimated weighed 400 pounds.

He didn't fire his gun because he said the figure looked too human. The creature then vanished into the bushes.

Later that year, a village police sergeant reported hearing an "eerie, high-pitched yell" while hunting in the same area.

A few days later, a man from Granville reported shooting at "Bigfoot."

For the record, Paul Bartholomew is also the guy who spearheaded the successful effort ten years ago to get Whitehall to pass a law designating the forests around the village "protected Bigfoot habitat."

So anyway, the whole thing sounds pretty interesting, and I'm bummed that I won't be able to apply.  I do wish the best of luck to whoever gets the job, and hope that they get some hard evidence, something that has been sorely lacking in all previous efforts.  As I've said before, I see nothing scientifically impossible about the existence of Bigfoot, but I'm certainly not going to throw myself in with the True Believers with only uncorroborated eyewitness testimony and fuzzy photographs as proof.  If more data surfaces, however, I'm perfectly willing to consider it, in the spirit of skepticism, and also because it would be wicked cool if it actually was true.