Gravitational blink

To end the week on an appropriately surreal note: no, the Earth will not "lose its gravity" for seven seconds on August 12.

I found out about this rumor, currently making the rounds on social media, from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  The whole thing apparently started with a video posted on Instagram by user @mr_danya_of; the video was subsequently removed, but not before it was reshared thousands of times, downloaded, and posted all over the place.  The claim is that there were gravitational waves emitted from two different black holes equidistant from the Earth, and that they are 180 degrees out of phase with each other, so where they intersect -- here, evidently -- they'll undergo destructive interference.  The result is that it will "cancel Earth's gravity" for the seven seconds it takes them to pass by us, and we all need to, I dunno, make sure everything is tied down securely or something, because otherwise it's going to cause huge amounts of death and destruction.

Whoo.  Okay.  Where do I start?

First of all, the information was alleged to come from NASA (of course), from something called "Project Anchor."  Which doesn't exist.  Of course, over at NASA they would say that, wouldn't they?  So let's move on to a few other, harder-to-argue-with objections.

Second, according to the General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, whereof nothing travels faster, remember?  So if there were gravitational waves headed toward us from a black hole (let alone two of them), we wouldn't have any way of knowing about it ahead of time.  Now, you might be thinking, what about the gravitational waves that have been detected by the interferometer array LIGO?  Well, there, we knew there were two neutron stars that had been orbiting each other and were about to merge, so all we had to do was watch until it happened.  (Okay, I'm making it sound simple; in practice it was a lot more complicated than this, but the point is we did have some advance warning in that case.)  Here, we just supposedly have black holes out there emitting gravitational waves for some undisclosed reason, and we've somehow found out about this eight months ahead of their arrival, which Einstein says is impossible, and on the whole I'm inclined to side with Einstein over "mr_danya_of."

Third, what was immediately obvious is that whoever is taking this seriously has no idea how destructive interference actually works.  Simply put, destructive interference occurs where two waves in the same medium intersect in such a way that the crest of one wave overlaps the trough of the other.  At that point, their amplitudes will cancel.  Here, supposedly these two gravitational waves are exactly 180 degrees out of phase, so they'd cancel completely wherever they intersect.

But if that happened, what we'd see is... nothing.  If the two waves did completely cancel, the result at that point would be an amplitude of zero.  In other words, they'd be undetectable.  This would not somehow "erase Earth's gravity."

Fourth, the Earth's diameter is about 0.04 light seconds, so if a gravitational wave or two passed across us, that's how long the effect would last.  How this person came up with seven seconds as a plausible time duration for something traveling at the speed of light, I have no idea.

Fifth, the gravitational field of the Earth at a given distance is dependent on only one thing: its mass.  As long as the Earth's mass doesn't change, the strength of the field won't, either, regardless how it's jostled by gravitational waves (or anything else).

Sixth, what the actual fuck?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons AllenMcC., GravityPotential, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I mean, it's a good thing the Earth's gravity isn't going to disappear, even for seven seconds.  If you, unlike the people posting this story, passed high school physics, you may recall that the reason we're all happily glued to the Earth's surface is the pull of gravity -- and without it, Newton's First Law (an object experiencing no unbalanced forces continues at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant velocity) takes over.  We're all right now moving at a good clip -- at the Equator, about 1,670 kilometers an hour -- but our tendency to fly off is counterbalanced by the centripetal (center-pointing) pull of gravity.  If gravity suddenly disappeared, we'd continue moving at our original speed, but tangent to the circle we're currently traveling in.  The Earth, presumably unperturbed, would continue to rotate out from underneath us, and when the gravity switched back on seven seconds later, we (and everything else not moored) would come crashing back down.

I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation for my own latitude, just shy of halfway between the Equator and the North Pole, and found that in seven seconds unsecured objects traveling tangent to the Earth's surface would end up about twenty centimeters up in the air.  Falling back to Earth from that height would be a bit of a jolt, and no doubt the sudden change in stress would damage some buildings, but it's far from the carnage mr_danya_of and others are claiming.

But to reassure you that you have no cause for concern, even in that regard... no, NASA isn't "94.7% certain" that the Earth's gravity is going to blink for seven seconds on August 12.  There is no such thing as Project Anchor.  Gravitational waves, and in fact waves in general, do not work this way.  We have far more important things to worry about right now, such as trying to figure out what country FIFA Peace Prize Winner Donald Trump is going to declare war on next.

If you see anyone posting hysterical nonsense about how NASA Admits We're All Gonna Die In August, you should definitely inform them that this is complete horseshit, and suggest that maybe at least reading the Wikipedia pages about the relevant physics concepts might be a good idea before publicly humiliating themselves by pretending they understand science.

So anyway, there you have it.  To the friend who sent me the link, thanks just bunches for further reducing my already-abysmal assessment of humanity's overall intelligence.  Me, I'm going to go back to fretting about real stuff.  Not that this is productive either, mind you.  But at least it's better than making shit up so you have additional imaginary stuff to fret about.

Even I am not that neurotic.

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

Remembrance of things past

Almost all of us implicitly trust our own memories.

Experiment after experiment, however, has shown that this trust is misplaced.  Even if you leave out people with obvious memory deficits -- victims of dementia, for example -- the rest of us give far too much credence to our brain's version of the past.  In truth, what we remember is a conglomerate of what actually did happen, what we were told happened, what we imagine happened based upon the emotions associated with the event, and pure (if inadvertent) fabrication.  And the scariest part is that absent hard evidence (a video, for example), there's no way to tell which parts are what.

It all feels true.

If you don't believe this, consider what happened to cognitive researcher Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California - Irvine, whose experiments establishing the unreliability of memory are described in neuroscientist David Eagleman's wonderful book The Brain: The Story of You:

We're all susceptible to this memory manipulation -- even Loftus herself.  As it turned out, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother had drowned in a swimming pool.  Years later, a conversation with a relative brought out an extraordinary fact: that Elizabeth had been the one to find her mother's body in the pool.  That news came as a shock to her; she hadn't known that, and in fact didn't believe it.  But, she describes, "I went home from that birthday and I started to think: maybe I did.  I started to think about other things that I did remember -- like when the firemen came, they gave me oxygen.  Maybe I needed the oxygen because I was so upset I found the body?"  Soon, she could visualize her mother in the swimming pool.

But then, her relative called to say he had made a mistake.  It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who had found the body.  It had been Elizabeth's aunt.  And that's how Loftus had the experience what it was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed and deeply felt.

So it's not like false memories seem vague or tentative.  They're so vivid you can't tell them from real ones.

Which brings us to the strange story of an arcade video game called "Polybius."

In the early 1980s, a rumor began to circulate that there was an arcade game that combined some very frightening effects.  Its visuals and sounds were dark, surreal, and suggestive.  Children who played the game sometimes had seizures or hallucinations, and afterwards experienced periods of amnesia and night terrors.  Worse, there was something about it that was strangely addictive.  People who played it more than two or three times were likely to become obsessed by it, and keep coming back over and over.  Some, they said, finally could think of nothing else and went incurably mad.  Some committed suicide.

Some simply... vanished.

The FBI launched an investigation, removing Polybius from arcades wherever they could find it.  The "Men in Black" got involved, and there were reports of mysterious strangers showing up and demanding that arcade owners provide lists of the names (or at least initials) of high scorers in the game.  Those unfortunates were rounded up for psychological testing -- and some of them never returned, either.

There are webpages and subreddits devoted to people's memories of Polybius, their experiences of playing it, and scary things that happened subsequently.  There's just one problem with all this, and you've guessed it:

Polybius never existed.  Despite many, many people searching, there has never been a single Polybius cabinet found, nor even a photograph from the time period showing one.  Oh, sure, we have mock-ups people made long after the fact:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons DocAtRS, Polybius Arcade 1 cropped, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But hard evidence of the real deal?  Zero.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.

So what happened here?

Part of it, of course, was a deliberate hoax; an "urban legend."  Part of it was confabulation of memory with a real event, when an arcade in Portland, Oregon removed a game that had triggered a couple of kids to have a seizure.  There was also an incident in 1981 where the FBI raided arcades that had converted game stations into illegal gambling machines.  There was a 1980 New York Times article citing research (later largely called into question) that playing violent video games predisposes kids to commit violence themselves.  And in 1982, there was a widely-reported incident that a teenager had died while playing the game Berzerk in a Calumet City, Illinois arcade -- the story was true, but his heart failure was caused by a physical defect, and had nothing to do with playing the game.

Put all that together, and there are still people now -- forty-some-odd years later -- who are certain they remember Polybius, and what it was like to play it.

It's another example of the "Mandela Effect," isn't it?  This phenomenon got its name from certain people's memories that Nelson Mandela died in jail -- when in fact, the reality is that he survived, eventually became president of South Africa, and died peacefully in his home in Johannesburg in 2013.  Other examples are that the "Berenstain Bears" -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as Be Nice To Your Siblings Even When You Feel Like Punching The Shit Out Of Them and Your Parents Are Always Right About Everything and Pay Attention In School Or Else You Are Bad -- were originally the Berenstein Bears (with an "e," not an "a"), that the Fruit of the Loom logo originally had a cornucopia (not just a bunch of fruit), and (I shit you not) that Sri Lanka and New Zealand "should be" in different places.

Almost no one who experiences the Mandela Effect, though, laughs it off and says, "Wow, memory sure is unreliable, isn't it?"  Those memories feel completely real, just as real as memories of stuff you know occurred, that you have incontrovertible hard evidence for.  The idea that you could be so certain of something that never happened is profoundly disconcerting, to the extent that people have looked for some explanation, any explanation, for how their memories ended up with information that is demonstrably false.  Some have even cited the "Many-Worlds" Model of quantum mechanics, and posited that there really is a timeline where Mandela died in prison, the cartoon bears were the "Berenstein Bears," Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia in its logo, and Sri Lanka and New Zealand were somewhere other than where they now are.  It's just that we've side-slipped into a parallel universe, bringing along our memories of the one where we started -- where all those things were dramatically different.

That's how certain people are that their memories are flawless.  They'd rather believe that the entire universe bifurcated than that they're simply remembering wrong. 

How many times have you been in an argument with a friend, relative, or significant other, and one of you has said, "I know what happened!  I was there!", often with a self-righteous tone that how dare anyone question that they might be recalling things incorrectly?  Well, the truth is that none of us are remembering things correctly; what remains in our mind is a partial record, colored by emotions and second-hand contamination and imagination, blended so well there's no way to tease apart the accurate parts from the inaccurate.  What our memories for sure are not is a factual, blow-by-blow account, a mental video of the past that misses nothing and mistakes nothing.

I know this is kind of a terrifying thing.  Our memories are a huge part of our sense of self; if you want a brilliant (fictional) example of the chaos that happens when our memories become unmoored from reality, watch the fantastic movie Memento, in which the main character (played to perfection by Guy Pearce) has anterograde amnesia, a cognitive disorder where he can't form any new short-term memories.  To compensate for this, he takes Polaroid photographs of stuff he thinks is important, and if it's really important he tattoos it onto his skin.  But then the problem is, how does he know the contents of the photos and tattoos are true?  He has no touchstone for what truth about the past actually is.

Although Pearce's character has an extreme form of this problem, in reality, all of us have the same issue.  Those neural firings in the memory centers of our brain are all we have left of the past -- that, and certain fragmentary records, objects, and writings.  

So, how accurate is our view of the past?

No way to tell.  Better than zero, but certainly far less than one hundred percent.

And there's not even any need for a cursed arcade game to screw around with your perception.  We're built like this -- like it or not.

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

Cry me a river

Urban legends often have nebulous origins.  As author Jan Harold Brunvand describes in his wonderful book The Choking Doberman and Other Urban Legends, "Urban legends are kissing cousins of myths, fairy tales and rumors.  Legends differ from rumors because the legends are stories, with a plot.  And unlike myths and fairy tales, they are supposed to be current and true, events rooted in everyday reality that at least could happen...  Urban legends reflect modern-day societal concerns, hopes and fears...  They are weird whoppers we tell one another, believing them to be factual.  They maintain a persistent hold on the imagination because they have an element of suspense or humor, they are plausible, and they have a moral."

It's not that there's anything wrong with urban legends per se.  A lot of the time, we're well aware that they're just "campfire stories" that are meant to scare, amuse, or otherwise entertain, and (absent of any further evidence) are just as likely to be false as true.  After all, humans have been storytellers for a very long time, and -- as a fiction writer -- I'd be out of a job if we didn't have an appetite for tall tales.

When it becomes problematic is when someone has a financial interest in getting folks to believe that some odd claim or another is true.  Then you have unethical people making money off others' credulity -- and often along the way obscuring or covering up outright any evidence to the contrary.  And it's worse still when the guilty party is part of the news media.

Which brings us to The Sun and the legend of the "Crying Boy."

Back in 1985 the British tabloid newspaper The Sun reported that a firefighter in Essex had more than once found undamaged copies of a painting of a crying child in houses that had otherwise been reduced to rubble by fires.  Upon investigation, they said, they found that the painting was by Italian painter Giovanni Bragolin.

If that wasn't weird enough, The Sun claimed they'd found out that Bragolin was an assumed name, and that the painter was a mysterious recluse named Franchot Seville.  Seville, they said, had found the little boy -- whose name was Don Bonillo -- after an unexplained fire had killed both of his parents.  The boy was adopted by a priest, but fires seemed to follow in his wake wherever he went, to the extent that he was nicknamed "El Diablo."  In 1970, the engine of a car the boy was riding in exploded, killing him along with the painter and the priest.

But, The Sun asked, did the curse follow even the paintings of the boy's tragic, weeping face?

It's not a headline, but we can invoke Betteridge's Law, wherein we learn that anything like that phrased as a question can be answered "No."  Further inquiries by less biased investigators found that the story had enough holes to put a Swiss cheese to shame.  There was no Don Bonillo; the model for the little boy was just some random kid.  Yes, Bragolin went by the pseudonym Franchot Seville, but Bragolin was itself an assumed name; the painter's real name was Bruno Amadio, and he was still alive and well and painting children with big sad eyes until his death from natural causes in 1981 at age seventy.

As far as the survival of the painting, that turned out not to be much of a mystery, either.  Bragolin/Seville/Amadio cranked out at least sixty different crying child paintings, from which literally tens of thousands of prints were made and then shipped out to department stores all across southern England.  They sold like hotcakes for some reason.  (I can't imagine why anyone would want a painting of a weepy toddler on their wall, but hey, you do you.)  The prints were made on a heavy compressed cardboard, and then coated with fire-retardant varnish.  Investigators Steven Punt and Martin Shipp actually purchased one of the prints and tried to set it alight deliberately, but the thing wouldn't burn.  The surmise was that when the rest of the house went up in flames, the string holding the frame to the wall burned through and the print fell face-down on the floor, protecting it from being damaged.

Of course, a prosaic explanation like that was not in the interest of The Sun, which survives by keeping sensationalized stories alive for as long as possible.  So no mention was made of Punt and Shipp and the probable explanation for the paintings' survival.  Instead, they repeated the claims of a "curse," and told readers that if they owned a copy of The Crying Boy and wanted to get rid of it, The Sun would organize a public bonfire to destroy the prints forever.

How they were going to accomplish this, given that the whole shtick had to do with the fact that the painting couldn't be burned, I have no idea.  But this evidently didn't occur to the readers, because within weeks The Sun had received hundreds of copies.  A fire was held along the banks of the Thames in which the mailed-in prints were supposedly destroyed, an event about which a firefighter who had supervised the burning said, "I think there will be many people who can breathe a little easier now."

This in spite of the fact that the whole thing had been manufactured by The Sun.  There would have been no widespread fear, no need for people to "breathe uneasily," if The Sun hadn't hyped the claim to begin with -- and, more importantly, ignored completely the entirely rational explanation for the few cases where the painting had survived a house fire.

It's probably unnecessary for me to say that this kind of thing really pisses me off.  Humans are credulous enough; natural conditions like confirmation bias, dart-thrower's bias, and the argument from ignorance already make it hard enough for us to sort fact from fiction.  Okay, The Sun is a pretty unreliable source to start with, but the fact remains that thousands of people read it -- and, presumably, a decent fraction of those take its reporting seriously.

The fact that it would deliberately mislead is infuriating.

The result is that the legend still persists today.  There are online sites for discussing curses, and The Crying Boy comes up all too frequently, often with comments like "I would never have that in my house!"  (Well, to be fair, neither would I, but for entirely different reasons.)  As Brunvand points out in The Choking Doberman, one characteristic of urban legends is that they take on a life of their own.  Word of mouth is a potent force for spreading rumor, and once these sorts of tales get launched, they are as impossible to eradicate as crabgrass.

But what's certain is that we do not need irresponsible tabloids like The Sun making matters worse.

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

The forest primeval

New from the "I Thought I'd Heard Everything" department, we have: a warning that you should look out for a specific kind of tree, because if you see one, you have slipped through a portal in space-time.

The tree is a Lepidodendron, and the good thing about it is at least it's pretty distinctive-looking:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tim Bertelink, Lepidodendron, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So it's unlikely you'd mistake it for anything else.  Here's one account (of many) that have shown up all over social media, especially Reddit and TikTok:

I was on a hike in central Pennsylvania with some friends, and went off from the others to explore.  I grew up not far from there and know the area pretty well, but after about a half-hour things started looking weird.  The area is kind of rocky and hilly, but the path I was on kept heading down, and soon I was in a swampy terrain I'd never seen before.  I spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid and I know the kind of trees that grow there, and I'd never seen ones like this.  Tall and skinny, kind of like a stretched-out pine tree, but the bark was weird, with a pattern like the scales of a fish.  There were other plants, too, but I didn't recognize a single one.  Something about the place "felt wrong," like I'd stumbled into somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.  By this time I was completely freaked out.  I tried to retrace my steps, but the undergrowth was really thick with these strange-looking plants of all kinds.  Eventually I found my way to drier ground, and pretty soon found the path again.  Now all around me I saw maples and oaks and hickories, just ordinary trees, and the weird out-of-place feeling disappeared.  After another fifteen minutes of walking I found my friends again, and everything turned out okay, but to this day I can't let go of the feeling that I had a narrow escape from being lost forever.

The guy said he looked for pics online of "weird skinny trees like pine trees" and eventually found one that was an exact match to what he'd seen.

You guessed it.  The Lepidodendron.

The problem with all this is that the Lepidodendron has been extinct for over 250 million years.

They had their heyday in the Carboniferous Period, and in fact are only (very) distantly related to pines; the extant plants most closely related to the Lepidodendron are club mosses, most commonly found in the understory of deep, undisturbed forests.  And at least the unnamed storyteller got the place and climate right; a lot of rocks in Pennsylvania are of Carboniferous age, and it was in general a hot, humid, rainy period of Earth's history.

The thing is, though, if the people who say they've seen Lepidodendrons actually have wandered through a fold in the space-time continuum and found themselves back in the Carboniferous Period, it wouldn't be apparent only because they'd see strange scaly trees and be calf-deep in mud.  If you were suddenly transported to the mid-Carboniferous, (1) it would be absolutely unambiguous, and (2) you'd be damn lucky to last fifteen minutes.  The temperatures were an average of ten degrees Celsius warmer than they are today, with oxygen levels at around 30% (as compared to today's 21%).  The higher oxygen favored the evolution toward larger size in animals that are limited by the efficiency of their respiratory system -- most notably arthropods.  In those same swamps where you'd find Lepidodendron trees, you'd find the dragonfly Meganeura, with a 75-centimeter wingspan; the 2.6-meter-long millipede Arthropleura; and the 70-centimeter-long scorpion Pulmonoscorpius.  If that's not bad enough, you'd have to avoid being eaten by the three-meter-long, sixty-kilogram predatory reptile Sphenacodon, which came equipped with a long row of big, nasty, pointy teeth.

Sphenacodon ferox skull in the Field Museum of Chicago [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smokeybjb, Sphenacodon ferox 1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So as interesting as it is, the Carboniferous Period is not a place you'd want to go in your time machine.

Anyhow, I got curious about why all of a sudden people are seeing an obscure genus of extinct trees in downtown Harrisburg or wherever, so I did some digging.  After wading through a bunch of accounts of the "YES I SAW ONE OMG I WAS IN ANOTHER DIMENSION AND IT WAS SOOOO SCARY" type, I found out that the whole thing started three years ago when someone posted the following on Reddit:

You should know two things about this, though; (1) the person who posted this originally is an actual paleontologist, and (2) for fuck's sake, he meant it as a joke.  It didn't get much traction beyond a few har-de-hars from people who were fossil enthusiasts until fall of last year, when a TikToker with the handle @jese2063 posted images of spooky trees that look vaguely like Lepidodendrons, with an equally creepy-sounding soundtrack and scary text about how if you see one, you've gone back in time and are in horrific danger.  (It's hard to tell whether he believed it himself; my sense is not, but I have an unfortunate habit of giving people the benefit of the doubt when they don't deserve it.)

In any case, that opened the floodgates.  @jese2063's video got over 4.5 million views, and now there are hundreds of similar claims, many of them from people like the Pennsylvanian hiker who said they'd actually visited the Carboniferous Period and lived to tell the tale.

The problem is, like with @jese2063, it's difficult to discern how many of these are true believers, and how many are simply adding their contributions to a growing Carboniferous creepypasta.  I have nothing against scary fiction -- after all, I've written my fair share of it -- but you have to wonder if some of these people are deadly serious.

I mean, the benefit of the doubt only goes so far.

In any case, that's the latest frightening thing to look out for.  If you're ever in, say, Scotland, and suddenly you find yourself in a hot fern-filled rainforest, now you'll be prepared.  Can't honestly tell you what to do about it, however.  Just enjoy looking around for fifteen minutes until you're eaten by a Sphenacodon or attacked by enormous millipedes, I guess.

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

Well, hell.

Whenever I post anything about goofy beliefs, urban legends, and superstitions -- like my piece Monday about spells to summon up demons -- it always impels my loyal readers to send me links with messages that say, "Yeah, okay, you think that's ridiculous, have you heard about this?"

One of those spurred by yesterday's demon-conjuring post was about a claim that Russian geologists had created a fourteen-kilometer-deep borehole in Siberia, and broke into a cavity underground.  The temperature of the cavity was measured at a toasty 1,000 C.  The leader of the team, a "Mr. Azakov," decided to drop a high-temperature microphone down the shaft -- because he had one of those with him (along with fourteen kilometers of cable) out in the middle of absolutely nowhere in Siberia, and besides, listening to superheated rocks is obviously what geologists do -- and when it reached the cavity, Azakov and the others heard the horrifying sounds of the screams of the damned.

So they forthwith concluded they'd drilled a Well to Hell.

There are a couple of things that are interesting about this one, once I get past the obligatory "but none of this actually happened" disclaimers.  Back in 1989 the Russians had drilled a pretty damn deep hole, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, but (1) it's twelve kilometers deep, not fourteen, (2) didn't hit a cavity of any kind, (3) was drilled on the Kola Peninsula, which is all the way on the other side of the country from Siberia, and (4) was associated with no supernatural phenomena whatsoever.  Oh, and the "screams of the damned" turned out to be a looped and digitally-altered recording grabbed from the shitty 1972 horror movie Baron Blood.  Of course, what are a few factual details between friends?  But the most interesting thing about this story is how -- and why -- it took off.

The first place the story was printed was in the Finnish newspaper Ammennusastia, which is run by a group of Pentecostal holy-rollers in the town of Leväsjoki.  From there it was grabbed by the American Trinity Broadcasting Network, an evangelical media source based in Costa Mesa, California, who claimed it was proof of the literal existence of hell, and broadcast it along with edifying messages along the lines of "We tried to warn you, but would you listen?  Nooooooo.  Well, here's what the all-loving and merciful God has in store for the likes of you."

It likely would have ended there, with scaring the fuck out of a few Bible-thumpers, if it hadn't been for Åge Rendalen, a Norwegian teacher.  Rendalen heard the versions from Finland and California and got pissed off at how gullible people are (a sentiment I wholeheartedly share), but decided the best response was to make the story even more ridiculous.  His reasoning was that if he exaggerated it, surely that would wake people up to how insane the claim is.  So he said that shortly after "Mr. Azakov" heard the screams through his high-temperature microphone, a "bat-like apparition" had exploded out of the borehole, "leaving a blazing trail across the Russian sky."  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gronono57, DeviantArt, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/]

What Rendalen then did was to take a completely unrelated article from a Norwegian newspaper (it was actually about a local building inspector), and claimed that his English-language story of flaming demons was the correct translation of the article.  He submitted both to the Trinity Broadcasting Network, along with his name and contact information -- planning on having a good laugh at anyone who got a hold of him, and then telling them what he'd done, along with a suggestion to learn some goddamn critical thinking skills, and possibly some elementary Norwegian while they were at it.

No one did.  Instead, the Trinity Broadcasting Network printed his English "translation" without the Norwegian version, claiming that it was proof that the original story was true.

The result is that the claim is still out there.  Despite the fact that:

• the original story was full of factual errors, including getting the location of the borehole wrong by over nine thousand kilometers;
• the soundtrack was swiped from a horror movie;
• the embellishments all came from a smartass Norwegian teacher who admitted up front he was lying; and
• the proof that the first story was true came from the second story, which was based on the first story.

Circular reasoning (n.) -- see reasoning, circular.

So if you're concerned that hell is a real place fourteen kilometers underneath Siberia, you can relax.  I have no doubt it's hot down there, but I'm pretty certain there are no tortured souls screaming in agony anywhere nearby.

As far as whether hell exists anywhere else, I expect I'll find out eventually.  I'm guessing that given my history, my chances of being welcomed by the Heavenly Host after I die are slim to none.  It's okay, harps aren't really my thing.  Maybe down in hell there'll be an infernal bagpipe band.  That'd be cool.

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

Well, actually...

American economist Thomas Sowell famously said, "Endless repetition does not make something true."

I used to run into examples of this principle all the time when I was a teacher -- widely-accepted, and rarely-questioned, incorrect statements that still somehow classified as "stuff everyone knows."  One that immediately pops to mind, and that I had to debunk just about every year, was that daddy-longlegs (also called "harvestmen"), those familiar arachnids in just about everyone's cellars and attics, are "actually deadly poisonous but their fangs are too small to pierce human skin."  There's no truth to this whatsoever; they don't even have poison glands, and their chelicerae ("fangs") aren't hollow like a spider's.  They are, in fact, entirely harmless.

In the interest of making at least a minuscule inroad into ridding the public consciousness of some of the most egregious of these, today I present to you an extremely incomplete list of commonly-accepted falsehoods that have spread by word-of-mouth and now become ubiquitous.

The Latest Gossip by François Brunery (ca. 1900) [Image is in the Public Domain]

How many of these have you heard -- and how many did you believe?

1. Turkey meat is not high in the amino acid tryptophan -- or at least, no higher than any other protein source.  Tryptophan isn't why you're sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner; it's much more likely to be overeating, consumption of wine, and the general energetic letdown we all experience after a big event.
2. The pronunciation of words with an s, c, or z in Castilian Spanish, where the usual sibilant is sometimes replaced by a coronal fricative /θ/ (usually written in English as "th"), did not occur because there was a king who lisped and all of his fawning courtiers wanted to make him feel better by imitating him.  In fact, the phonetic shift seems to have been gradual, spreading across the region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and may have been driven by the need to differentiate words (like siento "I feel" and ciento "one hundred") that otherwise would have been pronounced identically.
3. The seasons are not caused by the Earth being closer to the Sun in summer; in fact, during the Northern Hemisphere's summer the Earth is actually farther away from the Sun than it is in winter.  The seasonal changes in temperature are almost all due to the twenty-three degree axial tilt of the Earth.  Nor is it true, as I've seen claimed in some hyper-religious posts, that "if the Earth was only a few feet closer or farther away from the Sun than it is, it would be boiled or frozen" -- so, goes the claim, God placed the Earth in exactly the right spot, and can I get a hallelujah?  In fact, the Earth's orbit is elliptical enough that it's about five million kilometers closer to the Sun at perihelion than it is at aphelion, and we neither roast at one nor are flash-frozen at the other.  So you may well think that God directs the universe, but if that's your proof, you might want to reconsider.
4. Despite what you may have learned from such historical documents as Hagar the Horrible, Vikings did not go into battle wearing horned helmets.  Horns (or antlers) on headgear would have been a serious hindrance to fighting, and the Vikings were way smarter than to do anything that slowed down the highly lucrative plunder and pillage.  Extant horned or antlered headgear seems to have been mostly ceremonial in use, probably by shamans to invoke animal spirits.
5. Lemmings don't engage in mass suicide by diving off cliffs or swimming out into lakes and drowning when they get overcrowded.  This complete fabrication became a popular belief because of a 1958 Disney movie called White Wilderness which depicted it happening; it turns out that the scene was filmed using lemmings that had been purchased from Inuit children for a quarter a piece, and the unfortunate rodents were shoved off a cliff repeatedly to get enough footage for the film.
6. Albert Einstein did not fail high school mathematics; in fact, by fifteen he had mastered both differential and integral calculus.  He did fail his first entrance exam for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, but this was probably because he was two years younger than most of the rest of the students who attempted it.  (He did really well on the science and math portions.)  He did, however, as an adult say to a frustrated physics student, "Do not worry about your difficulties with mathematics; I can assure you that mine are far worse," but this was more overly modest of the great man than it was accurate.
7. Apologies to Pink Floyd, but there is no permanently dark side of the Moon.  Because the Moon is tidally locked, the same side faces the Earth all the time; put another way, its periods of rotation and revolution are the same.  Any given spot on the Moon is (like the Earth) in sunlight at some times and in darkness at others, and what length of time it spends in each depends on latitude and where the Moon is in its orbit.
8. There is absolutely no mention that Mary Magdalene in the Bible was a prostitute (reformed or otherwise), nor that she was the same person as the unnamed woman who anointed Jesus's feet in Luke chapter 7, or the adulterer whom Jesus saved from being stoned in John chapter 8.
9. People don't "use only ten percent of their brain."  There's no way evolution would have favored the production of a huge, complex organ like the brain, and then we only ever get to use ten percent of it.  In fact, over the course of your life you use pretty much the whole thing, even if at any given time only a fraction of the neurons are firing.  If you could get your whole brain to fire at once, the result wouldn't be superpowers, it'd be a body-wide and probably fatal seizure.
10. Sharks can, in fact, get cancer.  The mistaken belief that they never do was popularized in a book by William Lane and Linda Comac with the creative title Sharks Don't Get Cancer, and was used as part of a campaign to sell shark cartilage capsules as a cure-all.
11. Speaking of fish, three South American fish with scary reputations are pretty close to harmless.  Piranhas rarely attack humans, and while they'll bite, there are no recorded incidents of people (or other large animals) being "skeletonized" by them, Vashta Nerada-style.  The strong-jawed pacu fish do not wait for male skinnydippers and bite off their testicles; that claim started as a joke when a biologist commented that the pacu has grinding teeth capable of chewing (tree) nuts.  Last, the infamous candiru catfish of the Amazon does not swim up people's urethras and get lodged there.  They parasitize other fish, hooking onto the gills, but (like most parasites) are very host-specific.  The likelihood of having a candiru go up your urethra, even if you were urinating while submerged in a stream where candiru live, is (according to American marine biologist Stephen Spotte) "about the same as being struck by lightning while simultaneously being eaten by a shark."
12. Catherine the Great, empress of Russia in the eighteenth century, did not die while attempting to have sex with a horse.  Admittedly, she was apparently very fond of sex, but with people.  She died at age 67 of what was clearly a stroke.  The rumor started because of some attempts to discredit her (and Russians in general) published in Germany, and there's no truth to it whatsoever.
13. Cracking your knuckles doesn't cause arthritis.  Like any repetitive motion, it can cause inflammation if you do it compulsively, but done occasionally, it's completely harmless.
14. The word crap did not originate as back-formation from the name of nineteenth-century businessman Thomas Crapper, who improved the design of (but did not invent) the flush toilet.  Crap traces its origins to medieval Latin; and Crapper's name is actually an altered version of cropper, meaning farmer.
15. Somewhat along the same lines: fuck is not an acronym for either "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" or "Fornication Under Consent of the King."  The former is supposedly what was written above the heads of adulterers confined to the stocks; the latter, what was allegedly stamped on marriage documents, giving a couple the right to lawfully do the deed.  Neither is even close to true.  Nor does "fuck you" originate as a corruption of "pluck yew," supposedly an expression meaning to draw a longbow made of yew-wood.  And while we're at it, the middle finger as a sign of contempt has nothing to do with archery, either, despite the story that Welsh bowmen captured by the English supposedly had their index fingers cut off so they couldn't draw, but showed those Silly English Types-uh by drawing their bows using only their middle fingers.  In fact, "fuck" is a good old Indo-European root with a very long history (from the reconstructed word *peuk, meaning "to prick" or "to jab", and therefore a cognate to words like "poke," "point," "punch," and "pugnacious").  The middle finger has been used as a rude gesture at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, where it meant -- as it still does today -- "fuck you" or "stick it up your ass."

So there you have it.  Only a drop in the bucket, I'm quite sure -- as James Randi put it, the reason we need debunkers is because there's so much bunk out there.  But perhaps this cleared up a few things?

One can only hope.

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

The missing day

Can I make the not-very-earthshattering observation that if you are explaining evidence supporting a belief, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it?

Especially if that belief is that your own personal religion is not only superior morally, but one hundred percent true?

I'm referring to a story of dubious provenance that has been showing up all over the place lately, mostly on Christian apologetics sites, and then forwarded by people who (1) don't understand how science works, (2) don't know how to do a Google search to check for accuracy, or (3) would prefer something sound good than be correct.  Or all three.  I ran into it via the site Calvary Pilot ("Piloting Souls to the Cross"), but other versions I've seen are substantially similar.  Here are a few excerpts, edited only for length:

For all you scientists out there and for all the students who have had a hard time convincing these people regarding the truth of the Bible – here’s something that illustrates God’s awesome creation and shows He is still in control.

 
Did you know that NASA’s space programmes are busy proving that what has been called ‘myth’ in the Bible is true?  Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore, and a consultant in the space programmes, relates the following incident: "One of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland.  They were checking out the positions of the sun, moon and planets out in space where they would be 100, and 1000 years from now. We have to know this as we do not want a satellite to collide with any of these in its orbits."

So we're off to a flying start, with the claim that NASA has to be very careful to make sure that satellites in orbit around the Earth don't collide with the Sun or Neptune or anything.  You can see how that could happen.

Computer measurements and data were run back and forth over the centuries when suddenly it came to a halt, displaying a red signal, which meant that either there was something wrong with the information fed into it, or with the results as compared to the standards.  They called in the service department to check it out, and the technicians asked what was wrong.  The scientists had discovered that somewhere in space in elapsed time a day was missing.  Nobody seemed able to come up with a solution to the problem.

Which brings up the awkward question of how you'd discover that a day was missing.  Were the technicians sitting around, monitoring the satellite transmissions, and suddenly one of them got this horrified look on his face and said, "Wait... where the fuck did I put last Tuesday?"  Then all of the other technicians and engineers and physicists and so forth all start searching under desks and in storage closets and behind garbage cans and so on, but to no avail.  Last Tuesday is definitely AWOL.

Finally one of the team, a Christian, said: “You know, when I was still in Sunday School, they spoke about the sun standing still…”  While his colleagues didn’t believe him, they did not have an answer either, so they said: “Show us.”  He got a Bible and opened it at the book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anyone with ‘common sense’.  There they read about the Lord saying to Joshua: “Fear them not, I have delivered them into thy hand; there shall not be a man of them stand before thee.” (Joshua 10:8).  Joshua was concerned because the enemy had surrounded him, and if darkness fell, they would overpower him.  So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still!  That’s right – “And the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is this not written in the book of Ja’-sher?  So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole day.” (Joshua 10:13).

The astronauts and scientists said: "There is the missing day!"

So there was much rejoicing.  But then one of them pointed out that it wasn't a whole day that had been found -- it was only 23 hours and 20 minutes. Which left forty minutes unaccounted for, "which could mean trouble 1000 years from now."  Why it isn't trouble now, I have no idea, but concern for our distant descendants sent the NASA folks back on a search for the missing two-thirds of an hour.

And you'll never guess where they found it.

The Bible.  See, I told you you'd never guess.

As the Christian employee thought about it, he remembered somewhere in the Bible which said the sun went backwards.  The scientists told him he was out of his mind, but once again they opened the Book and read these words in 2 Kings.  Hezekiah, on his deathbed, was visited by the prophet, Isaiah, who told him he was not going to die.  Hezekiah asked for some sign as proof. Isaiah said: “Shall the sun go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?”  And Hezekiah answered: “It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; nay, but let the shadow return backwards ten degrees.”  Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” (2 Kings 20:9 -11).  Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes!  Twenty-three hours and twenty minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in 2 Kings accounted for the missing day in the universe!

Which would have been the cause for even more rejoicing, if the whole thing hadn't been made up.  I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (a real one,  I mean, like they have at NASA) to find the story eye-rollingly ridiculous, but it has been so widely circulated -- I've seen it three times on Facebook just in the last week -- that it actually has a Snopes page dedicated to it.  In it, we find out that Harold Hill was the president of Curtis Engine Company of Baltimore, but that's pretty much the only thing in the story that is true.  First off, Hill wasn't a NASA consultant.  It turns out that Hill was an evangelical Christian with a fairly loose interpretation of the word "true," because he'd read about the "lost day" legend in a book by Harold Rimmer entitled The Harmony of Science and Scripture and decided that the story would carry more punch if he claimed he'd witnessed the whole thing happening.  He embellished his account -- adding, of course, accolades such as "NASA consultant" for himself -- and repeated it many times in public speeches.  He even devoted a whole chapter to it in his 1974 book How to Live Like a King's Kid, apparently because by then, he'd told the tale so many times that he actually was beginning to believe it.

John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still over Gideon (1816) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And now with the amazing bullshit conduit that is the internet, the story has roared into life again.  What's funny, though, is that the claim is so ridiculous even Answers in Genesis is saying Christians shouldn't use it as an argument for the Bible having a scientific basis, and heaven knows AIG isn't exactly an exemplar of factual accuracy.  Snopes writer David Mikkelson says about it:

To those who've given over their hearts to God and the Holy Word, this is a deeply satisfying legend.  Faith is, after all, the firm belief in something which cannot necessarily be proved, a quality that can leave believers (especially those who find themselves in the midst of non-believers) feeling unsatisfied.  As steadfast as their certainty is, they cannot prove the rightness of the path they tread to those who jeer at their convictions.  And this is a heavy burden to shoulder.  A legend such as the "missing day explained" tale speaks straight to the hearts of those who yearn for a bit of vindication in this life.  Being right isn't always enough: sometimes what one most longs for is sweet recognition from others.

Which may well be the case, but doesn't take away from the problem of a devout follower of a religion that considers "Thou shalt not bear false witness" as one of its fundamental teachings passing along a story that is essentially one long lie.  It makes me wish that as a corollary of the ninth commandment, Yahweh had seen fit to add, "And this meaneth that thou shalt spend five minutes and do a Google search before thou postest this shit on Facebook."

So anyway.  No, NASA is not spending its woefully tiny budget paying scientists to verify the Old Testament.  There's no evidence whatsoever of a "lost day," because against what clock would you be able to verify that time had stopped three-thousand-odd years ago?  I'd be much obliged if the people who think that God is going to bless them if they pass along this nonsense would just stop already.  Thank you.

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

Smile, and the world smiles with you

In the menagerie of weird creatures from urban legends we have such entities as the Men in Black, Slender Man, the Black-eyed Children, not to mention older creatures of the night such as the Evil Serial Killer With A Hook For A Hand that has been scaring the absolute shit out of kids around campfires for generations.

I just ran into a new member of the zoo yesterday, thanks to crypto-maven Nick Redfern over at Mysterious Universe.  Called "Grinning Man," he's a tall guy in an old-fashioned suit and fedora, with a creepy smile on his face.  His skin is supposedly "plastic-like," so believers think he's only masquerading as a human.  Redfern says he's an operative of the Men in Black; me, I'm thinking more of The Gentlemen from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

But Grinning Man isn't followed around by guys with long, flailing arms who rip your ribcage open and steal your heart.  Apparently, Grinning Man just kind of stands there... grinning.  Thus the name.  Redfern tells the tale of a California family who saw a UFO while out driving, and the following day had a visitor.  He writes:

It was while one of the teenage children was sat [sic] on the porch and playing music that she caught sight of a man on the other side of the road.  He was dressed completely in black, aside from a white shirt.  He even wore black gloves, on what was a bright, summer day.  The girl was particularly disturbed by the fact that the man sported a weird grin and was staring right at her.  So unsettled was she that she went back into the home and told her father of what had just happened.  He quickly went to the door but – no surprise – the smiling MIB was gone.

John Keel, of "Mothman" fame, describes another encounter, this one near Point Pleasant, West Virginia (home of the original Mothman story):

[A] sewing machine salesman claims to have been stopped on a highway by a strange looking automobile.  A man appeared from a hatch on the side of the vehicle, and a tall, bald man wearing a blue metallic suit approached the man.  He could see the "man" had "slightly elongated" eyes and a demented grin that could be seen glinting in the cars headlights.  The grinning man identified himself as Indrid Cold, and the two had a bizarre telepathic conversation before the entity left, saying they would see each other again.

"Indrid Cold," eh?  A cousin of Mr. Freeze, perhaps?

Now that I think of it, the resemblance is pretty striking.

But unlike Mr. Freeze, "Indrid Cold" was a true alien, Keel said:

The salesman, Woodrow Derenberger, would go on to claim that Indrid Cold would visit him, and would reveal that he was an alien from a planet called Lanulos, situated in another galaxy.  Derenberger claimed to have visited Cold on his homeworld, and met many other beings like Indrid Cold in his travels.  He would write a book about his experiences, but would lose his job, his wife and some say his sanity in the years after, dying in 1990, some saying his obsession with his grinning friend cost him his life.

So that's kind of unfortunate.

Once again, we have the common thread that Grinning Man doesn't seem to do anything.  He doesn't freeze people, he doesn't abduct their children (like Slender Man), he doesn't threaten to kill them if they talk to the authorities (like the Men in Black), etc.  So as extraterrestrial villains go, he's pretty lame, although I have to say in all honesty that if I looked out of my window at night and saw a creepy, pasty-faced guy in a fedora grinning back at me, I'd probably have an aneurysm, so I guess that counts for something, evil-wise.

Anyhow, that's latest member of the Pantheon of Creepiness.  As I've mentioned before, it's kind of amazing that given how long I've been writing Skeptophilia (twelve years as of last November), I still run into weird beliefs I'd never heard of before.  I still think for pure terror, you can't beat the Black-eyed Children, which is why I wrote a trilogy of novels based on the legend (Lines of Sight, Whistling in the Dark, and Fear No Colors).  Whether I did the Children justice is up to you to decide.

But maybe I'm thinking about this wrong.  Maybe Grinning Man is grinning because he is planning something he hasn't carried out yet.  If so, he'd better get at it, because Derenberger's encounter with "Indrid Cold" happened back in the 1960s.  If he wants people to keep being scared of him, he probably should wipe the silly smile off his face and get on with it.

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