The child on the road

One of the creepiest urban legends is the tale of the Black-eyed Children.

The whole thing seems to have begun with a Texas man named Brian Bethel, who reported back in 1996 that he had an encounter with what appeared to be a ten-year-old child on the side of a highway near Abilene.  When he stopped to see if the child was okay, or needed a ride or something, the kid came up to Bethel's open window and said, "Please, can you help me?  I'm lost."

But when Bethel looked closer, he saw that the child's eyes were entirely black.  No white, no iris, just solid, glossy black.  Understandably, he gunned the engine and took off.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Megamoto85, Black eyes by megamoto85 (cropped), CC BY-SA 4.0]

Since then, the legend has grown by accretion, with other people pitching in with their own stories of the Black-eyed Children.  The claim is that if you let one into your car or house, you'll never be seen again, although it's hard to understand how they'd know that, given that the only ones who could verify this are the ones who did let them in.

And they were never seen again.  Right?  Or am I missing some part in the logical chain, here?

The plausibility issues notwithstanding, the idea was creepy enough that I made it the basis of my trilogy of novels called The Boundary Solution -- Lines of Sight, Whistling in the Dark, and Fear No Colors.  I hope I did it justice, because whatever else you can say about it, the concept is scary as hell.

The topic comes up because of a report out of Australia, where something really peculiar is alleged to have happened last weekend.  According to a man named Mitch Kuhne, he was driving on the Hume Highway south of Sydney when he saw what looked like a child on the road.  Here's what Kuhne said:

In the video you’ll see what we seen on our way home from racing what looked to be a child on the middle of the highway!

Instantly called 000 as we couldn’t stop as we had a huge toy hauler we were carrying and would have caused an accident, police said they were putting patrols out immediately, I called the local station after realising the dash cam would have footage and called to see where I could send it to help them so they know what it is we saw and could pinpoint the location.  I was told on the phone by the officer that there is no need to send it as the child had been collected safely and was on its way home, I felt absolutely sick when all this happened I instantly felt so much better when I was told the kid had been collected.

If you want to see the dashcam footage, you can check it out at News.com.au, at the link I posted above.  But here's a still:

There's no doubt that the video is creepy.  The figure moves as the car passes it, and you can see its shadow rotating beneath its feet, indicating it's a solid object (i.e. not a lens flare or some camera glitch).  But this isn't as creepy as the postscript -- because the Australian media covering the story contacted the police, and they denied the entire thing.

They'd searched the area after Kuhne's call, they said, and found nothing.  Furthermore, there'd been no reports of a missing person in the area.

Case closed.

If it weren't for the discrepancy, the story wouldn't be that odd; just a kid wandering where (s)he shouldn't, and getting rescued by the police.  But the police at the Macquarie Fields Police Station are now saying there was no child found, and furthermore, that Kuhne was told that after the search was complete.

"The only reason I posted the video [of the dashcam footage on social media] is because I thought the kid was safe and felt okay posting it," Kuhne said.  "Now to see that they are claiming I was never told this makes me sick."

So it's a weird story, I'll give it that.  There may not be anything to it; it could be that Kuhne made up the part about the police having confirmed they'd found a child.  (I don't mean to impugn the honesty of someone I don't know, but we have to admit that as a possibility.)  If it's the police who are lying, the next obvious question is, "Why?"  What would they have to gain by telling Kuhne the child was safe if they hadn't found any child -- or, conversely, denying the existence of the child to the media if they had found one and gotten him/her home safely?  Either way, there's something about this whole situation that doesn't add up.

Take a look at the video, and let me know what you think in the comments.  Skeptics are saying it isn't a child at all, but a bit of rubbish being blown on the wind, an animal, or a statue (although what a statue was doing in the middle of the road is a question in and of itself).  Other, less skeptical types are saying it was a ghost or an alien.

Or, possibly, a Black-eyed Child.  Gotta watch out for those.  And if that's what it was, it's a good thing Kuhne didn't stop.  Maybe that's what happened to the police -- the ones who picked up the child were never seen again.

I hear that happens sometimes.

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When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

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

Toddler teleportation

I understand that wild, spooky, improbable explanations are more interesting than prosaic, ordinary ones, but really, people.

Get a grip.

This comes up because of a video that hit YouTube a couple of days ago that alleges to show a toddler teleporting into existence.  With no further ado, here's the clip:

So after watching this, what do you think is more likely?

(1) the editor of the video cut out a piece of the footage, making it look like a kid appeared out of nowhere.

or

(2) Your favorite of the following:

(a) It's a glitch in the Matrix, showing that we're all in an elaborate computer simulation, which works down to the last detail except for occasionally allowing small children to pop into or out of existence.
(b) The child is an alien who did the "energize, Scotty" thing and appeared on a street in Tewkesbury just in time to get caught in a television interview.
(c) The child is from the future.  Why (s)he came back here is a matter of conjecture, but some have suggested that (s)he is here to intervene and save the United Kingdom from Brexit.
(d) Blah blah blah lizard people blah blah Illuminati blah blah New World Order.

Okay, I have to admit to being a little startled the first time I saw it, but "I was a little startled" doesn't mean "I immediately jumped to the most ridiculous, convoluted explanation I can think of, and because I'm a fiction writer, I'm really good at thinking up ridiculous, convoluted explanations, so this is pretty impressive."

My pointing this out is probably a losing battle, however.  The subreddit r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix has, at present, 305,000 subscribers, and it's unwarrantedly optimistic to think that all of them are there just for the shits and giggles.  And there's got to be at least that many subscribers on subreddits and other websites about the Illuminati and New World Order, but I'm not going to go to said websites and find out, because They Are Always Watching and then They will know I'm checking them out and get suspicious and send the Men in Black to take me out and I'll never be heard from again.

You know how it is.

So this is yet another example of grabbing confirmation bias with both hands and running off the cliff with it, and I can say with some certainty that it makes a lousy parachute.  The bottom line is that most everything has a perfectly simple, rational explanation, and there is really no reason to seek out one that demands the existence of Matrices or aliens or time travel or lizard people.

Although Stephen Miller's most recent attempt at simulating a human being by applying paint-on hair does make me wonder about the lizard people.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Alien vs. moose vs. cameraman

Some friends of mine went on a long backpacking excursion in the Grand Tetons a few years ago.  This couple was (at that point) in their forties, and both strong, fit, and energetic.  They were seasoned hikers who had twenty years' worth of wilderness experience.

Still, they were finding the Tetons a challenge.  Steep, rocky terrain and the desert heat were taking their toll.  And one day they were trudging wearily uphill, each wearing 35-pound packs, legs aching, when they heard a sound.

Both turned.  And running -- no, sprinting -- up the trail was an elderly man of perhaps 75.  Going all out, legs pumping, arms swinging.

And my buddy thought, "Criminy.  Look at that old dude.  Here we are, plodding along like senior citizens, and this guy is running up the trail like it's nothing."

His bemusement turned to mystification when the old guy caught up to them, grabbed them both by the shirt sleeves, and pulled them off the trail and behind a rock outcropping.

My friend said, "What the fuck?"

The old man, gasping for breath, jerked a thumb back toward the trail, so my friend peered around the rock outcropping.  And running full-tilt up the trail was...

... a moose.

Have you ever seen a moose?  They're huge.  No, not huge.  Humongous.  An average full-grown bull moose weighs 1,200 pounds.  That's an average one.  There was one shot by a hunter in the Yukon that weighed 1,800 pounds.  They can stand seven feet high at the shoulder, with a rack of antlers six feet across.

And they're aggressive.  Given (very little) provocation, moose will charge you, then take one of those enormous hooves and attempt to pound you into hamburger.

As the old guy found out.  My friend whispered, "All right, what did you do to piss off the moose?"

The old guy said, "I just took his picture."

The camera went "click," and the moose charged.

It all ended happily enough.  Once they hid behind the rocks, the moose promptly forgot about them, and wandered off to look for other humans to vent its rage at, or failing that, helpless bunnies and squirrels to stomp.  As for the old dude, he probably regretted ever coming on this hike.  I'll bet he never again got more than five feet from his La-Z-Boy.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This all comes up because of a video that popped up on YouTube last week.  It was filmed in Gaspésie, Québec, and the claim is that some tourists stopped to video a moose, and ended up capturing a bipedal humanoid... something.  Take a look:

What strikes me about this video -- besides the fact that it has the obligatory out-of-focusness that all alleged paranormal videos have -- is the fact that here's this gray, skeletal, hollow-eyed guy dancing around next to a moose, and the moose doesn't respond.  "Ho hum," the moose seems to be saying.  "I'll ignore the flailing alien ten feet away from me, and focus on this nice grass by the side of the road."

This is definitely not typical moose behavior.  Typical moose behavior would be to scream, "Teleport this, motherfucker!" immediately before converting the alien into an alien pancake, then to turn toward the people in the car and shout, "Hey!  You!  Whadda you starin' at?  You want a piece of this?  Do you?"

So based on the moose's behavior, I'm thinking there's nothing there, and that it's some sort of video artifact... or possibly (gasp!) a hoax.

This didn't stop Sequoyah Kennedy, over at Mysterious Universe, from speculating that the thing might have been a Wendigo, the mythical creature common to the legends of many tribes of Algonquian origin.  The Wendigo is depicted as a skinny, creepy-looking guy with stringy hair that goes around eating people because he's been cursed to always be hungry and never able to satisfy his appetite.  Why he eats people and not something with more meat on them, e.g. moose, I'm not sure.  Maybe even the Wendigo doesn't dare to piss off a moose.

Which makes it even odder that here he would be, doing the macarena right next to one.  Although Kennedy admits that there's a more likely explanation, which is that it's a piece of a reflection from the inside of the car's windshield.  In fact, if you watch closely, you'll see that there's an odd pattern to the movement -- the guy's not holding the camera steady, and when he jitters it to the right, the creature moves a little to the left, and vice versa.

Exactly what would happen if it was a reflection.

I'm not completely convinced of this explanation, however, and I'm far from an expert in video analysis.  What I'm pretty sure of is that this isn't an alien or a woodland monster or whatever else people have been claiming.

Although I must admit that it's kind of creepy-looking.  It's hard to watch it without pareidolia taking over and convincing you that it's humanoid.  So who knows?  It could be real, I guess.  Maybe the moose and the creature are friends.  Maybe they like to collaborate in attacking humans.  Maybe the creature is saying, "Hey!  Moose!  Look over there!  Those guys aren't just taking your picture, like what happened to your Cousin Fred in the Grand Tetons.  They're videotaping you!"

Which could explain why the video is under a half a minute long.  Because at that point, the moose had enough and chased the people off down the road.

Damn presumptuous humans.  Always pointing and aiming cameras, when all moose want to do is have a nice snack and a chat with their dancing alien friends, or perhaps snort angrily and punt some innocent prairie dogs.  That'd also be in character.

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This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Liar-in-chief

I have a basic rule I try to follow, which is: insofar as it is possible, tell the truth.

I'll be up front that I haven't always met this standard.  I'm human, fallible, and swayed by context, emotions, and fear, and those can lead you to commit acts of dubious morality.  But I do my best to follow it, and when I screw up, to admit it and make amends.

That standard should apply even more rigorously to public officials.  They have been elected or appointed to positions of trust, and as such, they should adhere to the truth -- and make their decisions based upon the truth.

Which brings me to Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Sanders, who is White House Press Secretary, has the unenviable position of making Donald Trump's decisions seem reasonable.  What this means is that she not only has to defend him, she has to persuade the press that Trump himself is being truthful.  And considering that a Washington Post analysis has counted 1,628 times the president has publicly lied since taking office a year ago, it's not an easy task.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What that means, of course, is that frequently Sanders herself has to lie.  Or to defend lying, as she did two days ago when there was a public outcry about Trump retweeting links from Britain First, an ultraright nationalist fringe group, including one showing what they claimed was "a Muslim boy beating a Dutch boy on crutches in the Netherlands."

Among the many problems with the president retweeting inflammatory rhetoric was the fact that it came to light pretty quickly that the original claim was wrong.  The video clip was not a fight between a Muslim and a non-Muslim Dutch boy; it was a fight between two Dutch teenagers, one of whom had dark hair and the other light hair.  So it was actually something that should only be relevant to the local police; a video of two teenagers having a fight.

But the fringe elements never miss a chance to mischaracterize something if it suits their ends, so Britain First claimed this an Evil Muslim Refugee attacking an innocent Dutch citizen.  And Trump, for whom "tweet first, think later" has become a mantra, passed it along to all of his 43.7 million followers.

This left Sanders in the position of trying to defend what Trump had done, which she did in a curious way; by admitting the video was fake, but saying the president's point was still valid:

I'm not talking about the nature of the video. I think you're focusing on the wrong thing.  The threat is real, and that's what the president is talking about, the need for national security and military spending, those are very real things, there's nothing fake about that.  The threat is real, the threat needs to be addressed, the threat has to be talked about, and that's what president is doing in bringing it up.

No, what the president is doing is passing along a lie that was deliberately designed to stir up ethnic hatred.  And, worse, not admitting it when he got caught.

The "deny-deflect-distract" strategy has worked well for him in the past.  It reminds me of the anti-evolution screeds by the inimitable Duane Gish, originator of the so-called "Gish Gallop."  Gish became famous for "winning" debates by inundating his opponents with questions, irrelevant tangents, and demands for minute details, leaving even the most talented and intelligent debaters foundering.  Here, Trump piles one lie on another so fast that we can't keep up with them, and shrieks "fake news" at anyone who dares to call him on it.  And, with Sarah Huckabee Sanders standing there and telling us that he didn't lie, but if he did lie it doesn't matter, and if it matters, well, too bad -- he's insulated from the impact of his complete disregard for the truth.

At least so far.  One has to wonder how long it'll be before the entire house of cards starts to collapse.  Because the lies are no longer just about evil immigrants and wicked, America-hating liberals; now he's lying about the outcome of his plans for tax and health care reform.  You have to wonder how his followers will look at him him when they realize that they elected a scam artist who has no more regard for the "little guy" or "middle-class workers" than Marie "Let Them Eat Cake" Antoinette did.  He operates out of two motives: (1) gain praise however he can, and (2) feather his own nest and those of his rich donors.  And the "tax reform" bill is a thinly-disguised giveaway to the very, very rich.

The bottom line here is that truth matters.  Lies are "alternative facts" in the same sense that my index finger is an "alternative gun."  People on both sides of the aisle who care about the truth need to be calling the president out on every lie, and demanding that our senators and representatives not give him a pass just because of partisan loyalty.  We cannot afford to have a liar-in-chief -- even if his toadies try to give those lies a coating of whitewash.

99 red balloons

In today's episode of "Studies in Confirmation Bias," we have a story in The Examiner claiming that someone captured a UFO refueling in a chemtrail.

What cracked me up about this one is the way the author of the story, Tom Rose, seems to take it as given that (1) chemtrails exist, and (2) UFOs exist, so clearly they must have some connection.  Here's how Rose introduces the topic:

An incredible UFO video was uploaded to YouTube on Oct. 12, showing what appears to be an unidentified flying object "refueling" itself in the chemical contrail of a jet flying high above it.  The strange object, which resembles no known aircraft, and flies in a decidedly non-aerodynamic manner, seems to intentionally head directly into the chemtrail of the passing jet and hovers for a moment before moving on.

The "chemical contrails" of jets are made almost entirely of water vapor and carbon dioxide, so it's a little hard to see how the UFO would be "refueling" itself with them.  Rose is right, however, insofar as water vapor and carbon dioxide are both "chemicals."

He goes on to write:

The nearly two minute video shows the original, unedited footage, without enhancement, in the opening segment, before switching to a magnified and slowed down version, which doesn't help to clear up the mysterious behavior of the unidentified aircraft.  In fact, the closeup reveals that, although there seems to be a flashing, navigational beacon on the UFO, its shape and configuration resembles no known aircraft, such as a helicopter, airplane or even a drone.

True, and there's a reason for that, which I'll get to in a moment.

He finishes up with a bang:

The chemtrail controversy has been raging for a few years now, with conspiracy theorists arguing there must be some secret meaning behind their sudden proliferation.  Could this incident explain the phenomenon?  Is it possible that alien aircraft are using the chemical exhaust fumes of high flying aircraft to refuel spacecraft in Earth's atmosphere?

 The last sentence would be the odds-on favorite in a contest for the statement that caused the fastest simultaneous guffaw and facepalm.  But let's not be hasty, here.  Here's a still from the video, showing the strange, non-aerodynamic craft, of no known configuration, sucking up chemtrail fumes:

But to get the full effect, you should definitely watch the video, which is in the article I linked.  I watched the video twice through, because I was pretty certain I knew what the UFO actually was by twenty seconds in, but I wanted to be certain.  I'm no video analysis expert, mind you, but I'm still pretty sure.  You ready?

It's a red mylar balloon.

The first thing I noticed is that the "UFO" is clearly much lower in altitude than the jet is.  Rose even seems to have noticed that, and let it slip in his first line, in which he states that the jet is "flying high above" the mysterious craft.  So even if Rose is right that chemtrails exist, and UFOs exist, and chemtrails have some sort of mix of chemicals that could be useful to the pilots of UFOs, this particular UFO is probably a couple of miles too low to accomplish its goal in any case.

Second, the "UFO" isn't so much flying as it is drifting.  As balloons do.  The flashes you occasionally see are when bits of it are turned at the right angle toward the sun, and reflect some glare back toward the guy with the videocamera.  They're not "flashing navigational beacons."

So anyway, watch the video yourself, and see if you agree with me.  I'm willing to admit that there may be other explanations, even though I seriously doubt that there's any alien mischief (or, for that matter, evil chemtrail mischief) going on here.

On the other hand, perhaps it's the red mylar balloons we should be watching out for.  Those things are probably up to no good.