When I was in college, I knew a guy named Mike who claimed to be a solipsist. Holders of this rather peculiar philosophy believe that they are the only thing that exists in the universe, and that the entire cosmos is a figment of their imagination. Therefore, large swaths of the universe vanish when they are not observing them (or thinking about them, which in their minds amounts to the same thing).
You can imagine how well this went down with Mike's classmates. We used to sneak up right behind him and say, "We're still heeeere!" And then duck, because he'd whirl around and try to whap us with the huge briefcase he always carried around. You have to wonder why, if he was manufacturing the world with his magnificent brain, he didn't people it with folks who were less determined to annoy the hell out of him.
All of this comes up, of course, because the Rapture is happening today, and in fact supposedly has already started. Harold Camping et al. used bible passages, dates of a number of historical events, and some fairly abstruse math to calculate the day on which the Righteous will be swept bodily into heaven, leaving behind the rest of us slobs to fall prey to beasts, fire, earthquakes, storms, and various other special offers from the God of Mercy, before Satan comes down on October 21 and turns the Earth into a giant charcoal briquet.
Well, of course, this has resulted in 99% of humanity pretty much reacting like my college buds and I did to Mike's pronouncements. Facebook now has events like "Post-Rapture Looting," which will take place Everywhere on May 22. The Twitterverse has been buzzing with humorous commentary on the situation. At least one person I know is planning on going to the Salvation Army today and buying armloads of old clothes, and draping them on park benches.
None of this has made the slightest difference to Camping and his followers. A news story today describes how some of the true believers are planning on tearful farewell lunches with their families, walks in favorite spots in the woods, and so on. Some have already arranged homes for their pets. A few have blown every cent they owned publicizing the Rapture -- according to a news story I read, one man spent his entire life savings of $140,000 buying billboard space, advertisements on the sides of buses, and so on, with the message, "Repent Now! The Lord is Coming on May 21!"
This kind of thing stirs the compassionate side of my personality. You have to wonder how these people are going to feel tomorrow morning. There are already plans by some churches to offer counseling to Camping's followers when the Rapture doesn't occur. On the one hand, I feel like anyone gullible enough to believe such a ridiculous prediction deserves everything (s)he gets, but then I put myself in the shoes of the believers. What if, for some reason, I did become convinced of some Great Big Cosmic Secret, and put everything I had into it, and then it turned out to be false?
And, of course, that's exactly what a lot of Christians think is going to happen to me when I die. The irony of this isn't lost on me. Not, mind you, that I'm planning to convert. But the point is, I guess we all have our convictions.
The difference, I think, is where they come from. I was asked by a student just a couple of days ago what it would take for me to believe in god. My answer was "hard evidence." Presented with evidence, I would change my beliefs -- but at that point, it wouldn't be belief any more, would it? It would be knowledge.
And that's what I find so baffling about people like Mike, and Harold Camping and his followers. For them, belief is enough. No evidence is needed. Camping says, "Such-and-so is true," and his followers just bleat and accept it all. Of course, they don't see it that way; they call it "faith." I've never quite understood the concept of faith, which is stressed so hard in the bible -- it's always seemed to me like, "Believe despite what you see, despite what you know, despite everything." I once asked a Christian to define the words "faith" and "delusion" in such a way that a non-believer would understand the difference. He just got pissed off and refused to answer (at least he didn't try to hit me with a briefcase).
Anyway, I think the great likelihood is that tomorrow morning we'll be able to sneak up behind Camping and say, "You're still heeeeere!" You have to wonder how he'll explain it all. Were his calculations off? Was the Earth issued a reprieve? Did god tell him that the Rapture had been called because of rain? Or were he and his followers just deluded wingnuts for believing the whole story in the first place?
I'm thinking that somehow, the last is the one he's least likely to say.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Synthetic languages, dolphins, robots, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
I have three students this year who are doing an Independent Study course in linguistics with me. We have spent the year taking apart languages, and looking at the phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, studying how languages have evolved over time, and seeing how children acquire language.
Their final project is to create a synthetic language.
It has to have, like all languages, consistent, rule-based sound and grammar structure (with some exceptions to the rules, because all languages have 'em). They decided, rather early on, to design an agglutinative language -- one in which new words are built by gluing together old ones, rather as German does. Thus, their word for "biology (class)" is "züpobyshada," made up of morphemes (units of meaning) for "life," "study," and "students."
They're finding out how difficult this process is. True synthetic languages, like Klingon and Tolkien's Elvish, are a real challenge to design, because to make them consistent, you have to think through things that most of us take completely for granted. For example, have you ever thought about the rule in English that you can't have an "ng" sound at the beginning of a word? You might be thinking, "Well, of course not. That would be weird." But that's just because English doesn't do that -- not because it's somehow impossible. Plenty of languages do. Consider, for example, the Masai name "Ngorongoro" for the famous crater in Tanzania, and the fact that one of the most common Vietnamese surnames is Nguyen.
So, to design a language, you have to start from the ground up, deciding what the sound inventory of the language is, how those sounds can combine, where in words they can (and can't) occur, and how words and ideas fit together to form sentences -- and realize that the patterns in English aren't sacred, but represent only one of a myriad of possibilities.
Given that this is so complex, it's a wonder we can speak at all, really. And more of a wonder is the fact that if children of normal intelligence are allowed to be together, but are not taught a language, they will just... invent one.
Grace and Virginia Kelly were twins whose parents were told at birth their daughters might be mentally retarded because of problems at birth. The girls were, in fact, mentally normal, but the parents upon finding out the possibility decided that they were retarded and completely neglected them. The girls periodically heard English and German from the parents, and heard Romanian from a nurse who cared for them; and some of the morphemes in their language come from those three sources. Some of them are, however, idiosyncratic and unique to their language. They even made up names for themselves (Poto and Cabengo). (If you're curious, when Child Protection Services found out about them, they were put into a foster home, allowed to attend school, and quickly learned to speak English.)
And now, scientists have taken the first steps to emulating what these children did, and what my students are doing, in robots.
Ruth Schultz and her colleagues at the University of Queensland (Australia) have created what they call "Lingodroids." These robots are equipped with mobile cameras, sonar range finding sensors, and wheels. And -- most importantly -- microphones and speakers, so they can talk to one another.
These robots are capable of doing a simplified version what Poto and Cabengo did -- they have a set of parent syllables and syllable-joining rules, and when they "see" an unfamiliar object, they name it and point it out. If one robot sees a block for the first time, it might say "liko." The other robots, hearing it, will rush up, trying to see if they can figure out what "liko" is, pointing things out and saying the word. If they agree, the connection between the word and the object is reinforced. They then say more words, not for objects, but to describe where they came from and how they got there -- giving them words that map out the space they live in, and words for distances. (For example, after a few interactions, the robots "decided" that "ropi hiza" meant "a short distance to the east.")
What I find fascinating about all of this is how natural the development of language is. Given only a few ground rules, these robots are basically creating a language from the ground up, and thereby providing linguists (and roboticists) with valuable information about how language structure works.
It does make me wonder, however, why humans are the only animals with true language. Language is defined as "symbolic communication using arbitrary sounds or written characters;" as such, a dog barking or a bird singing isn't language (because a bark or a twitter doesn't carry an arbitrarily linked meaning, in the way that the sounds of the word "dog" do). It's possible, of course, that dolphin and whale vocalizations might be language -- we simply don't know. It's hard enough to decode language when we are already certain that it is language (if you have any doubts about this, read the fascinating little book The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick, which describes how linguists figured out how to read a written language for which we had no information about the letter-to-sound correspondence). To figure out if dolphins' clicks, pops, and whistles carry meaning, when we don't even know if it is language to begin with, is an enormously difficult question.
All of which brings up the question of whether we'll be able to understand communications from other planets, should those ever be detected. SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a project of long standing, recently defunded by the government, which uses radio telescopes to search for intelligible signals from space. The task, although breathtaking in its goal, is in practice phenomenally difficult. For it to succeed, a single information-carrying signal would have to be detected from amongst the background clutter of naturally-produced radio noise -- and after that, decoded somehow. Still, it's sad that they've fallen on hard times. But amateurs have risen to the occasion, with SETI@home, which will allow volunteers to analyze the radio signal data on their home computers.
So, that's today's ramble, from synthetic languages to Poto and Cabengo to linguistic robots to dolphins to outer space. Think about all of this when you get to work today, and a friend says, "Hi, how are you doing?" and you answer, "Just fine, and you?", and consider how complicated what you just said actually was.
Try not to let it get you tongue-tied, okay?
Their final project is to create a synthetic language.
It has to have, like all languages, consistent, rule-based sound and grammar structure (with some exceptions to the rules, because all languages have 'em). They decided, rather early on, to design an agglutinative language -- one in which new words are built by gluing together old ones, rather as German does. Thus, their word for "biology (class)" is "züpobyshada," made up of morphemes (units of meaning) for "life," "study," and "students."
They're finding out how difficult this process is. True synthetic languages, like Klingon and Tolkien's Elvish, are a real challenge to design, because to make them consistent, you have to think through things that most of us take completely for granted. For example, have you ever thought about the rule in English that you can't have an "ng" sound at the beginning of a word? You might be thinking, "Well, of course not. That would be weird." But that's just because English doesn't do that -- not because it's somehow impossible. Plenty of languages do. Consider, for example, the Masai name "Ngorongoro" for the famous crater in Tanzania, and the fact that one of the most common Vietnamese surnames is Nguyen.
So, to design a language, you have to start from the ground up, deciding what the sound inventory of the language is, how those sounds can combine, where in words they can (and can't) occur, and how words and ideas fit together to form sentences -- and realize that the patterns in English aren't sacred, but represent only one of a myriad of possibilities.
Given that this is so complex, it's a wonder we can speak at all, really. And more of a wonder is the fact that if children of normal intelligence are allowed to be together, but are not taught a language, they will just... invent one.
Grace and Virginia Kelly were twins whose parents were told at birth their daughters might be mentally retarded because of problems at birth. The girls were, in fact, mentally normal, but the parents upon finding out the possibility decided that they were retarded and completely neglected them. The girls periodically heard English and German from the parents, and heard Romanian from a nurse who cared for them; and some of the morphemes in their language come from those three sources. Some of them are, however, idiosyncratic and unique to their language. They even made up names for themselves (Poto and Cabengo). (If you're curious, when Child Protection Services found out about them, they were put into a foster home, allowed to attend school, and quickly learned to speak English.)
And now, scientists have taken the first steps to emulating what these children did, and what my students are doing, in robots.
Ruth Schultz and her colleagues at the University of Queensland (Australia) have created what they call "Lingodroids." These robots are equipped with mobile cameras, sonar range finding sensors, and wheels. And -- most importantly -- microphones and speakers, so they can talk to one another.
These robots are capable of doing a simplified version what Poto and Cabengo did -- they have a set of parent syllables and syllable-joining rules, and when they "see" an unfamiliar object, they name it and point it out. If one robot sees a block for the first time, it might say "liko." The other robots, hearing it, will rush up, trying to see if they can figure out what "liko" is, pointing things out and saying the word. If they agree, the connection between the word and the object is reinforced. They then say more words, not for objects, but to describe where they came from and how they got there -- giving them words that map out the space they live in, and words for distances. (For example, after a few interactions, the robots "decided" that "ropi hiza" meant "a short distance to the east.")
What I find fascinating about all of this is how natural the development of language is. Given only a few ground rules, these robots are basically creating a language from the ground up, and thereby providing linguists (and roboticists) with valuable information about how language structure works.
It does make me wonder, however, why humans are the only animals with true language. Language is defined as "symbolic communication using arbitrary sounds or written characters;" as such, a dog barking or a bird singing isn't language (because a bark or a twitter doesn't carry an arbitrarily linked meaning, in the way that the sounds of the word "dog" do). It's possible, of course, that dolphin and whale vocalizations might be language -- we simply don't know. It's hard enough to decode language when we are already certain that it is language (if you have any doubts about this, read the fascinating little book The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick, which describes how linguists figured out how to read a written language for which we had no information about the letter-to-sound correspondence). To figure out if dolphins' clicks, pops, and whistles carry meaning, when we don't even know if it is language to begin with, is an enormously difficult question.
All of which brings up the question of whether we'll be able to understand communications from other planets, should those ever be detected. SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a project of long standing, recently defunded by the government, which uses radio telescopes to search for intelligible signals from space. The task, although breathtaking in its goal, is in practice phenomenally difficult. For it to succeed, a single information-carrying signal would have to be detected from amongst the background clutter of naturally-produced radio noise -- and after that, decoded somehow. Still, it's sad that they've fallen on hard times. But amateurs have risen to the occasion, with SETI@home, which will allow volunteers to analyze the radio signal data on their home computers.
So, that's today's ramble, from synthetic languages to Poto and Cabengo to linguistic robots to dolphins to outer space. Think about all of this when you get to work today, and a friend says, "Hi, how are you doing?" and you answer, "Just fine, and you?", and consider how complicated what you just said actually was.
Try not to let it get you tongue-tied, okay?
Thursday, May 19, 2011
SmartPhone apps for the woo-woos
I suppose it was only a matter of time before the woo-woos went high tech.
Still, I have to admit that I was surprised, which is probably just a reflection of my own biases. I'd always thought that the woo-woo state of mind came with quasi-medieval accoutrements -- things like crystal balls, dowsing rods, decks of Tarot cards, and so on.
So I was fairly stunned to find that the Android/SmartPhone platform has a bunch of apps for conducting paranormal "research." Here are a few of the apps you can purchase, if you want to go on your own ghost hunt:
The Ghost EVP Analyzer. EVP stands for "Electronic Voice Phenomena" and refers to the common practice by devotees of haunted houses, of leaving a tape recorder running in an empty house, and analyzing the tape for voices. Now, you can use the app to analyze your digital recordings, and hear what the dead have to say. You can save files, in case the dead say something memorable; play the recordings half speed, in case the dead have been drinking too much coffee; and play them backwards, in case the dead are listening to songs by Styx.
Then, there's the Entity Sensor Pro-EMF Detector. The description for this one says that "this works just like special purpose EMF Detectors that cost up to several hundred dollars, and are used on the paranormal TV shows to find ghosts." EMF, by the way, stands for "electromagnetic field" -- a perfectly measurable phenomenon, well known to scientists and anyone who has ever used a compass. Ghosts supposedly "disturb the electromagnetic field" in some unexplained way, so this app allegedly allows you to detect these disturbances. It's uncertain why an old-fashioned compass wouldn't work just as well, but I guess I'm to be expected to say that, given that I'm a bit of a Luddite. It's also a little perplexing why, if ghosts disturb the electromagnetic field, no controlled experiment has ever detected one, because EMF detectors have been around for a long time, and are standard equipment in many scientific research facilities.
How about Ghost Radar? The tagline for this one says, "Ghost Radar® analyzes nearby energies. This application does NOT detect EMF nor gravity. Interpretations of the sensor readings are displayed using numeric, textual, and graphical readouts." My question, predictably, is "energies?" What kind of "energies?" This hearkens back to the tired old "psychic energy fields" so often bandied about by people who claim to be telepathic or clairvoyant. At least the makers of this app follow it up by saying "results may vary." I'll just bet they may.
Then, we have the DarkHaunts Haunted Site Locator, which will tell you the nearest "true haunted sites" to your location. It then gives you the latitude and longitude of the site, and "what to look for." I can only imagine this app as a sort of high-tech scavenger hunt for woo-woos. "4.2 miles NE of your present location you will find the ghost of an OLD LADY WEARING BUNNY SLIPPERS. Once you have collected the OLD LADY WEARING BUNNY SLIPPERS proceed 2.8 miles west to the HEADLESS MAN CHOPPING FIREWOOD."
Last, we have Paranormal Apptivity, which gives overviews of some famous hauntings, including the Enfield poltergeist, the Hampton Crown Court skeleton, and hundreds of others. If I actually understood technology well enough to merit owning a SmartPhone, which I don't, I might actually purchase this app. It sounds like it could provide some excellent material for future blog posts.
I know that by describing all of these apps, I'm giving publicity to the woo-woos (and the software developers who are trying to take advantage of them to turn a profit). I guess that's the risk you take by calling attention to purveyors of the paranormal. And I have to admit that the attitude that goofy ideas should simply be ignored into oblivion has its merits. The flip side, however, is that many of these ideas are reluctant to go into oblivion -- they just seem to keep on coming. On the one hand, it's kind of sad that we still have such a long way to go in terms of the public's general understanding of logic and the scientific method.
On the other hand, it's what keeps Skeptophilia in business.
Still, I have to admit that I was surprised, which is probably just a reflection of my own biases. I'd always thought that the woo-woo state of mind came with quasi-medieval accoutrements -- things like crystal balls, dowsing rods, decks of Tarot cards, and so on.
So I was fairly stunned to find that the Android/SmartPhone platform has a bunch of apps for conducting paranormal "research." Here are a few of the apps you can purchase, if you want to go on your own ghost hunt:
The Ghost EVP Analyzer. EVP stands for "Electronic Voice Phenomena" and refers to the common practice by devotees of haunted houses, of leaving a tape recorder running in an empty house, and analyzing the tape for voices. Now, you can use the app to analyze your digital recordings, and hear what the dead have to say. You can save files, in case the dead say something memorable; play the recordings half speed, in case the dead have been drinking too much coffee; and play them backwards, in case the dead are listening to songs by Styx.
Then, there's the Entity Sensor Pro-EMF Detector. The description for this one says that "this works just like special purpose EMF Detectors that cost up to several hundred dollars, and are used on the paranormal TV shows to find ghosts." EMF, by the way, stands for "electromagnetic field" -- a perfectly measurable phenomenon, well known to scientists and anyone who has ever used a compass. Ghosts supposedly "disturb the electromagnetic field" in some unexplained way, so this app allegedly allows you to detect these disturbances. It's uncertain why an old-fashioned compass wouldn't work just as well, but I guess I'm to be expected to say that, given that I'm a bit of a Luddite. It's also a little perplexing why, if ghosts disturb the electromagnetic field, no controlled experiment has ever detected one, because EMF detectors have been around for a long time, and are standard equipment in many scientific research facilities.
How about Ghost Radar? The tagline for this one says, "Ghost Radar® analyzes nearby energies. This application does NOT detect EMF nor gravity. Interpretations of the sensor readings are displayed using numeric, textual, and graphical readouts." My question, predictably, is "energies?" What kind of "energies?" This hearkens back to the tired old "psychic energy fields" so often bandied about by people who claim to be telepathic or clairvoyant. At least the makers of this app follow it up by saying "results may vary." I'll just bet they may.
Then, we have the DarkHaunts Haunted Site Locator, which will tell you the nearest "true haunted sites" to your location. It then gives you the latitude and longitude of the site, and "what to look for." I can only imagine this app as a sort of high-tech scavenger hunt for woo-woos. "4.2 miles NE of your present location you will find the ghost of an OLD LADY WEARING BUNNY SLIPPERS. Once you have collected the OLD LADY WEARING BUNNY SLIPPERS proceed 2.8 miles west to the HEADLESS MAN CHOPPING FIREWOOD."
Last, we have Paranormal Apptivity, which gives overviews of some famous hauntings, including the Enfield poltergeist, the Hampton Crown Court skeleton, and hundreds of others. If I actually understood technology well enough to merit owning a SmartPhone, which I don't, I might actually purchase this app. It sounds like it could provide some excellent material for future blog posts.
I know that by describing all of these apps, I'm giving publicity to the woo-woos (and the software developers who are trying to take advantage of them to turn a profit). I guess that's the risk you take by calling attention to purveyors of the paranormal. And I have to admit that the attitude that goofy ideas should simply be ignored into oblivion has its merits. The flip side, however, is that many of these ideas are reluctant to go into oblivion -- they just seem to keep on coming. On the one hand, it's kind of sad that we still have such a long way to go in terms of the public's general understanding of logic and the scientific method.
On the other hand, it's what keeps Skeptophilia in business.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
... and in today's World News...
It's been a busy morning, here at Skeptophilia.
First, we have a report of a giant hole in the ground in Bernards, New Jersey. (See a photograph here.) The crater, reported from an unidentified resident's front yard on May 6, sprayed debris over a hundred-foot radius. My first hypothesis, which I probably thought of from 24 years of working with teenage boys, was that some kid got a hold of a stick of dynamite. Teenage boys love to blow things up. Many grown men, present company included, still do. But I had to rule out this explanation when I found out that no one in the neighborhood heard a thing -- and an explosive device capable of creating a crater that size would have rattled a few windows.
So scientists from the Raritan Valley Community College Planetarium came out and surveyed the area, thinking it could be a meteorite, and found no trace of one. Exit theory number two.
Then, I thought about the creepy vanishing meteorite in H. P. Lovecraft's story The Colour Out of Space. But there was no report of local residents and their pets turning gray and having important body parts fall off, so out the window that idea went.
So, reluctantly, I turned to the prosaic idea of ice buildup falling from an airplane. This periodically happens -- usually because of leaks in the waste tanks from the airplane's lavatories. There have been 27 documented incidents of this rather disgusting form of hail falling from a plane, including one in 2007 in Leicester, England in which a huge chunk of ice took out a large section of a building's roof. Since the ice would melt shortly after impact, it could well leave little trace afterwards. So that one, it seems, has a possible explanation other than the Enormous Man-Eating Mole hypothesis, which is where I was going next.
Then, from Australia, we have a report of a couple who claim to be Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Alan John Miller and Mary Suzanne Luck, of Wilkesdale, in Queensland, have drawn in about forty devotees after publicly stating that they are deities. "Just a little over 2000 years ago, we arrived on the Earth for the first time," Miller says on his website. "Because of my personal desire and passion for God, as I grew, I recognized not only that I was the Messiah that was foretold by ancient prophets, but also that I was in a process designed by God that all humans could follow, if they so desired."
The Anglican and Catholic churches of Wilkesdale are understandably perturbed, rather in the fashion of Mafia bosses when a rival crime family intrudes into their territory. With no apparent trace of irony, their official statement on the matter expressed concern that Miller and Luck were being given support financially by the naive, gullible, and emotionally needy.
Miller himself seems regretful about the stir he's creating. "I don't want to be Jesus," he told reporters. "Who wants to be Jesus? But I love divine truth."
Authorities are said to be "keeping an eye" on the couple, which seems justifiable. I know I'd want to watch them from a safe distance.
Then, we have a report of exploding watermelons in Jiangsu Province, China. It is unclear how violent these explosions are, but I have to admit that I rather like the mental image of farmers and other local residents running for cover as tasty pieces of pink shrapnel fly through the air. But for this one, I didn't even have the chance to run through some hypotheses (teenage Chinese boys with dynamite?) because Chinese scientists have already stated that the phenomenon was the result of a combination of a chemical fruit growth stimulator and a period of very rainy weather. Which is a satisfying, if boring, explanation.
But then I read that the farmers are taking the ruined fruit, which is obviously unfit for human consumption, and feeding it to pigs. Is it just me, or does this seem like a really bad idea? The last thing these people need is a bunch of pigs running around, squealing madly, and finally exploding, showering the area with pork chops. So far, there's no sign of the pigs blowing up, which is a good thing, because I suspect it'd be a good bit messier than a bunch of bursting watermelons.
The next story comes from the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation in New York State. A resident, Adrian McDonald, reported to police that his car had been damaged, and in fact the entire side panel above the passenger side front wheel had been shredded. There was blood on the jagged edges of the panel, which of course opened up the possibility of DNA testing. The testing was done, and the blood turned out to be from...
... a rabbit. I am not making this up. So what we apparently have here is the Bunny from Hell eating people's cars. Get out the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!
Police, sadly, have come up with an alternate, and not nearly so fun, explanation -- that a rabbit was being chased by a large dog, and took shelter in the wheel well of McDonald's car. The dog then basically destroyed the side of the car trying to get at the rabbit. This may seem as far-fetched as the Killer Rabbit of Caer Bannog theory, but I have a dog named Grendel whose jaws seem to be made of spring-loaded titanium, and who given sufficient motivation could destroy a Sherman tank, all the while wagging happily. So I suspect that the police are right, and like the exploding watermelons, this one has a perfectly ordinary explanation.
And of course, no wrap-up of world news would be complete without a Bigfoot sighting. On May 14, near O'Brien, Oregon, a hiker saw a seven-foot white Sasquatch. The "white" part surprised me some, because almost all reports of the hairy hominid describe him as brownish in color, and if it had been closer to the Christmas season I would have wondered if the eyewitness had been watching Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer while swigging tequila straight from the bottle. But apparently, there are periodic reports of what are presumably albino Sasquatches, and a few that are piebald like a Jersey cow.
Then I noticed that the eyewitness was Thomas Graham, of the State of Jefferson Sasquatch Research Organization (see their Facebook page here). So the story doesn't carry the same kind of weight as it would if, say, Michael Shermer or Richard Dawkins were to see a seven-foot-tall white Bigfoot. Graham is not what you might call an unbiased observer. With nothing but his account to go by, we'll have to file this story in the "Don't Think So" drawer.
So we seem to be striking out this week, in the paranormal explanation department. Dreadfully disappointing, I know. But of course, we have the Rapture to look forward to this weekend, so all is not lost. I'm hoping to get in some serious pillage and looting on the 22nd -- won't you join me?
First, we have a report of a giant hole in the ground in Bernards, New Jersey. (See a photograph here.) The crater, reported from an unidentified resident's front yard on May 6, sprayed debris over a hundred-foot radius. My first hypothesis, which I probably thought of from 24 years of working with teenage boys, was that some kid got a hold of a stick of dynamite. Teenage boys love to blow things up. Many grown men, present company included, still do. But I had to rule out this explanation when I found out that no one in the neighborhood heard a thing -- and an explosive device capable of creating a crater that size would have rattled a few windows.
So scientists from the Raritan Valley Community College Planetarium came out and surveyed the area, thinking it could be a meteorite, and found no trace of one. Exit theory number two.
Then, I thought about the creepy vanishing meteorite in H. P. Lovecraft's story The Colour Out of Space. But there was no report of local residents and their pets turning gray and having important body parts fall off, so out the window that idea went.
So, reluctantly, I turned to the prosaic idea of ice buildup falling from an airplane. This periodically happens -- usually because of leaks in the waste tanks from the airplane's lavatories. There have been 27 documented incidents of this rather disgusting form of hail falling from a plane, including one in 2007 in Leicester, England in which a huge chunk of ice took out a large section of a building's roof. Since the ice would melt shortly after impact, it could well leave little trace afterwards. So that one, it seems, has a possible explanation other than the Enormous Man-Eating Mole hypothesis, which is where I was going next.
Then, from Australia, we have a report of a couple who claim to be Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Alan John Miller and Mary Suzanne Luck, of Wilkesdale, in Queensland, have drawn in about forty devotees after publicly stating that they are deities. "Just a little over 2000 years ago, we arrived on the Earth for the first time," Miller says on his website. "Because of my personal desire and passion for God, as I grew, I recognized not only that I was the Messiah that was foretold by ancient prophets, but also that I was in a process designed by God that all humans could follow, if they so desired."
The Anglican and Catholic churches of Wilkesdale are understandably perturbed, rather in the fashion of Mafia bosses when a rival crime family intrudes into their territory. With no apparent trace of irony, their official statement on the matter expressed concern that Miller and Luck were being given support financially by the naive, gullible, and emotionally needy.
Miller himself seems regretful about the stir he's creating. "I don't want to be Jesus," he told reporters. "Who wants to be Jesus? But I love divine truth."
Authorities are said to be "keeping an eye" on the couple, which seems justifiable. I know I'd want to watch them from a safe distance.
Then, we have a report of exploding watermelons in Jiangsu Province, China. It is unclear how violent these explosions are, but I have to admit that I rather like the mental image of farmers and other local residents running for cover as tasty pieces of pink shrapnel fly through the air. But for this one, I didn't even have the chance to run through some hypotheses (teenage Chinese boys with dynamite?) because Chinese scientists have already stated that the phenomenon was the result of a combination of a chemical fruit growth stimulator and a period of very rainy weather. Which is a satisfying, if boring, explanation.
But then I read that the farmers are taking the ruined fruit, which is obviously unfit for human consumption, and feeding it to pigs. Is it just me, or does this seem like a really bad idea? The last thing these people need is a bunch of pigs running around, squealing madly, and finally exploding, showering the area with pork chops. So far, there's no sign of the pigs blowing up, which is a good thing, because I suspect it'd be a good bit messier than a bunch of bursting watermelons.
The next story comes from the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation in New York State. A resident, Adrian McDonald, reported to police that his car had been damaged, and in fact the entire side panel above the passenger side front wheel had been shredded. There was blood on the jagged edges of the panel, which of course opened up the possibility of DNA testing. The testing was done, and the blood turned out to be from...
... a rabbit. I am not making this up. So what we apparently have here is the Bunny from Hell eating people's cars. Get out the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!
Police, sadly, have come up with an alternate, and not nearly so fun, explanation -- that a rabbit was being chased by a large dog, and took shelter in the wheel well of McDonald's car. The dog then basically destroyed the side of the car trying to get at the rabbit. This may seem as far-fetched as the Killer Rabbit of Caer Bannog theory, but I have a dog named Grendel whose jaws seem to be made of spring-loaded titanium, and who given sufficient motivation could destroy a Sherman tank, all the while wagging happily. So I suspect that the police are right, and like the exploding watermelons, this one has a perfectly ordinary explanation.
And of course, no wrap-up of world news would be complete without a Bigfoot sighting. On May 14, near O'Brien, Oregon, a hiker saw a seven-foot white Sasquatch. The "white" part surprised me some, because almost all reports of the hairy hominid describe him as brownish in color, and if it had been closer to the Christmas season I would have wondered if the eyewitness had been watching Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer while swigging tequila straight from the bottle. But apparently, there are periodic reports of what are presumably albino Sasquatches, and a few that are piebald like a Jersey cow.
Then I noticed that the eyewitness was Thomas Graham, of the State of Jefferson Sasquatch Research Organization (see their Facebook page here). So the story doesn't carry the same kind of weight as it would if, say, Michael Shermer or Richard Dawkins were to see a seven-foot-tall white Bigfoot. Graham is not what you might call an unbiased observer. With nothing but his account to go by, we'll have to file this story in the "Don't Think So" drawer.
So we seem to be striking out this week, in the paranormal explanation department. Dreadfully disappointing, I know. But of course, we have the Rapture to look forward to this weekend, so all is not lost. I'm hoping to get in some serious pillage and looting on the 22nd -- won't you join me?
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Come as you were
Last weekend was the Reincarnation Conference in New York City, and I missed it.
Of course, tickets were $139 a pop, and I suspect Carol would have had words with me if I'd blown that kind of money on such a thing. But still. It featured talks, workshops, and opportunities for hypnosis sessions in which you were guided through "Past Life Regression." One woman found out she drowned in the sinking of the Titanic. Another remembered a life in which she saw Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount. I'd bet we also had some Babylonian princesses in there. There always seem to be Babylonian princesses.
A recent poll indicated that one in five Americans believes in reincarnation. One in ten claims actually to recall a past life. This is grist to the mill of Dr. Brian Weiss, organizer of the conference. "I define [reincarnation] as when we die physically, a part of us goes on," he said, "and that we have lessons to learn here. And that if you haven't learned all of these lessons, then that soul, that consciousness, that spirit comes back into a baby's body."
Well, that all sounds just nifty. But the difficulty, of course, is the usual one; there's no evidence whatsoever that this actually happens. The human mind, as I've mentioned before, is a remarkably plastic, and scarily unreliable, processing device. Experiments have conclusively shown that given enough emotional charge, an imagined scene can actually become a memory, and thereafter be "remembered" as if it had actually happened. In a context where a subject was being hypnotized by a professional-looking individual with "Dr." in front of his/her name, and perhaps was even being given subtle suggestions of what to "recall," that impression, and its retention as a memory afterwards, would become even more powerful.
And then, there's just the statistical argument, that because there are more people alive today than at any time in the past, not all of us can be reincarnated. Some believers solve this problem by allowing reincarnation from "lower animals." In that case, it's funny how no one seems to remember being, say, a bug. "Boy, life sure was boring, as a bug," is something I'd bet you rarely hear anyone say in a Past-Life Regression.
Not only does no one remember being a bug, few of them, it seems, were even just ordinary humans. "The skeptical part of me about the past life thing is that, just statistically, the odds are that in my past life, I was a Chinese peasant, right?" says Dr. Stephen Prothero, a professor of theology at Boston University. "But hardly anybody ever is a Chinese peasant. Everybody is Cleopatra or Mark Antony or Jesus, you know?"
Dr. Weiss, however, continues to believe, probably largely because at $139 a ticket, he's making a lot of money by believing. "We're not going to be able to extract a blood sample and get DNA and say, 'Oh, I see you were alive in the 11th century,' no," he stated. "It's people remembering it, so it's clinical proof."
So, once again, we have someone whose definition of "proof" differs considerably from mine. And I'd be willing to say, "Well, what harm if these people believe that they were once Eleanor of Aquitaine?" except that people like Weiss are bilking the gullible out of large quantities of money. On one level, perhaps people who are that credulous deserve bilking, but the compassionate side of my personality feels like it's just wrong to take advantage.
In any case, I rather regret missing last weekend's "Come As You Were" party. It could have been fun. I would have loved to see what they'd have made out of trying to do a Past-Life Regression with me. I think I'd have said... "I'm... I'm flying through the air. Free. Wild. I'm... crap, I just got splatted on a windshield."
So it's kind of a pity I didn't get to go. Oh, well, as the reincarnated are wont to say, I suppose there's always next time.
Of course, tickets were $139 a pop, and I suspect Carol would have had words with me if I'd blown that kind of money on such a thing. But still. It featured talks, workshops, and opportunities for hypnosis sessions in which you were guided through "Past Life Regression." One woman found out she drowned in the sinking of the Titanic. Another remembered a life in which she saw Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount. I'd bet we also had some Babylonian princesses in there. There always seem to be Babylonian princesses.
A recent poll indicated that one in five Americans believes in reincarnation. One in ten claims actually to recall a past life. This is grist to the mill of Dr. Brian Weiss, organizer of the conference. "I define [reincarnation] as when we die physically, a part of us goes on," he said, "and that we have lessons to learn here. And that if you haven't learned all of these lessons, then that soul, that consciousness, that spirit comes back into a baby's body."
Well, that all sounds just nifty. But the difficulty, of course, is the usual one; there's no evidence whatsoever that this actually happens. The human mind, as I've mentioned before, is a remarkably plastic, and scarily unreliable, processing device. Experiments have conclusively shown that given enough emotional charge, an imagined scene can actually become a memory, and thereafter be "remembered" as if it had actually happened. In a context where a subject was being hypnotized by a professional-looking individual with "Dr." in front of his/her name, and perhaps was even being given subtle suggestions of what to "recall," that impression, and its retention as a memory afterwards, would become even more powerful.
And then, there's just the statistical argument, that because there are more people alive today than at any time in the past, not all of us can be reincarnated. Some believers solve this problem by allowing reincarnation from "lower animals." In that case, it's funny how no one seems to remember being, say, a bug. "Boy, life sure was boring, as a bug," is something I'd bet you rarely hear anyone say in a Past-Life Regression.
Not only does no one remember being a bug, few of them, it seems, were even just ordinary humans. "The skeptical part of me about the past life thing is that, just statistically, the odds are that in my past life, I was a Chinese peasant, right?" says Dr. Stephen Prothero, a professor of theology at Boston University. "But hardly anybody ever is a Chinese peasant. Everybody is Cleopatra or Mark Antony or Jesus, you know?"
Dr. Weiss, however, continues to believe, probably largely because at $139 a ticket, he's making a lot of money by believing. "We're not going to be able to extract a blood sample and get DNA and say, 'Oh, I see you were alive in the 11th century,' no," he stated. "It's people remembering it, so it's clinical proof."
So, once again, we have someone whose definition of "proof" differs considerably from mine. And I'd be willing to say, "Well, what harm if these people believe that they were once Eleanor of Aquitaine?" except that people like Weiss are bilking the gullible out of large quantities of money. On one level, perhaps people who are that credulous deserve bilking, but the compassionate side of my personality feels like it's just wrong to take advantage.
In any case, I rather regret missing last weekend's "Come As You Were" party. It could have been fun. I would have loved to see what they'd have made out of trying to do a Past-Life Regression with me. I think I'd have said... "I'm... I'm flying through the air. Free. Wild. I'm... crap, I just got splatted on a windshield."
So it's kind of a pity I didn't get to go. Oh, well, as the reincarnated are wont to say, I suppose there's always next time.
Monday, May 16, 2011
The hundred-year flood
Are there some places in the world that people just shouldn't live?
I am watching with some horror as the floodwaters of the Mississippi River continue their slow progression down into my home state of Louisiana. The opening of the Morganza Spillway, done ostensibly to protect the much larger population of New Orleans, will release those floodwaters into the Atchafalaya Basin, home of thousands of people in little towns like Morgan City, Henderson, and Butte Larose.
All of this, of course, demands a question that few of us are willing to ask. Should people be living in these areas in the first place? New Orleans included?
The levy and spillway system, designed by the Army Corps of Engineers in the early 20th century, was intended to keep the Mississippi River in its course. The Mississippi has been "trying" to change course for hundreds of years -- this is a completely natural process, in which progressive silting and extension of the delta effectively raise the mouth of the river, slow down water flow, and gravity impels the river to find a shorter course. That shorter course is through the Atchafalaya Basin Swamp and out into the Gulf of Mexico through Atchafalaya Bay.
Of course, such a switch would leave New Orleans high and (relatively) dry, commercially irrelevant as a seaport. Politicians and business leaders declared that there was no way could that be allowed to occur. So levies were built to hold the river to its present path, with spillways to accommodate periodic flooding.
This created more problems than it solved. The levies didn't stop the silting; in fact, it made it worse, because silt that would have been deposited on the lands surrounding the river during floods was now deposited on the river bottom and delta, further raising the bottom of the river (and thus its water level). So the levies had to be raised to match. Simultaneously, the installation of huge pumping systems to deal with the saturated soil in New Orleans caused the entire city to subside, just as a sponge shrinks when it dries out.
The city is sinking; the river is rising. The response? Raise the levies again. When you're done, raise them some more. There are parts of New Orleans that are now over ten feet below the level of the river.
And then Katrina came along, and showed that the people who had said fifty years ago that this was a bad idea were actually right.
But this hasn't stopped the building and reinforcement of levies; it hasn't stopped politicians in Louisiana from pretending that this is a problem that is fixable. What no one wants to say is that maybe it's time to make the politically inexpedient call that there are places in this world where people just shouldn't live. The canyon walls of California, the sides of volcanoes in Indonesia, the barrier islands of the Carolinas -- all are places where the risks are known, and excessive, and yet we still live there, crossing our fingers and hoping that nothing bad will happen.
Don't get me wrong; I am far from immune to the emotional side of the tragedy that is unfolding in Louisiana. I haven't lived there for thirty years, but I remain a Louisianian to the core still. The idea of abandoning places where my ancestors have lived for two hundred years is a devastating idea. But shouldn't knowledge sometimes trump sentiment? There is no way to fix this problem; that is certain. Also certain is the fact that what we are currently doing is progressively making the problem worse. A "hundred-year flood," like the one currently occurring, or (worse) another major hurricane, could exact a human toll that is unacceptable given our prior knowledge of the risks.
We have a poor track record for listening to the people who know the most about the problems we face. Scientists who warn of inconvenient and expensive potential disasters on the local, national, or global scale become Cassandras, warning of dangers and going unheard. Perhaps in this case, it's time to listen. The politicians may be cheered for saying "New Orleans will rise again" -- but unfortunately, the reality is that it is sinking. Are we prepared to see "hundred-year floods" become a yearly event?
I am watching with some horror as the floodwaters of the Mississippi River continue their slow progression down into my home state of Louisiana. The opening of the Morganza Spillway, done ostensibly to protect the much larger population of New Orleans, will release those floodwaters into the Atchafalaya Basin, home of thousands of people in little towns like Morgan City, Henderson, and Butte Larose.
All of this, of course, demands a question that few of us are willing to ask. Should people be living in these areas in the first place? New Orleans included?
The levy and spillway system, designed by the Army Corps of Engineers in the early 20th century, was intended to keep the Mississippi River in its course. The Mississippi has been "trying" to change course for hundreds of years -- this is a completely natural process, in which progressive silting and extension of the delta effectively raise the mouth of the river, slow down water flow, and gravity impels the river to find a shorter course. That shorter course is through the Atchafalaya Basin Swamp and out into the Gulf of Mexico through Atchafalaya Bay.
Of course, such a switch would leave New Orleans high and (relatively) dry, commercially irrelevant as a seaport. Politicians and business leaders declared that there was no way could that be allowed to occur. So levies were built to hold the river to its present path, with spillways to accommodate periodic flooding.
This created more problems than it solved. The levies didn't stop the silting; in fact, it made it worse, because silt that would have been deposited on the lands surrounding the river during floods was now deposited on the river bottom and delta, further raising the bottom of the river (and thus its water level). So the levies had to be raised to match. Simultaneously, the installation of huge pumping systems to deal with the saturated soil in New Orleans caused the entire city to subside, just as a sponge shrinks when it dries out.
The city is sinking; the river is rising. The response? Raise the levies again. When you're done, raise them some more. There are parts of New Orleans that are now over ten feet below the level of the river.
And then Katrina came along, and showed that the people who had said fifty years ago that this was a bad idea were actually right.
But this hasn't stopped the building and reinforcement of levies; it hasn't stopped politicians in Louisiana from pretending that this is a problem that is fixable. What no one wants to say is that maybe it's time to make the politically inexpedient call that there are places in this world where people just shouldn't live. The canyon walls of California, the sides of volcanoes in Indonesia, the barrier islands of the Carolinas -- all are places where the risks are known, and excessive, and yet we still live there, crossing our fingers and hoping that nothing bad will happen.
Don't get me wrong; I am far from immune to the emotional side of the tragedy that is unfolding in Louisiana. I haven't lived there for thirty years, but I remain a Louisianian to the core still. The idea of abandoning places where my ancestors have lived for two hundred years is a devastating idea. But shouldn't knowledge sometimes trump sentiment? There is no way to fix this problem; that is certain. Also certain is the fact that what we are currently doing is progressively making the problem worse. A "hundred-year flood," like the one currently occurring, or (worse) another major hurricane, could exact a human toll that is unacceptable given our prior knowledge of the risks.
We have a poor track record for listening to the people who know the most about the problems we face. Scientists who warn of inconvenient and expensive potential disasters on the local, national, or global scale become Cassandras, warning of dangers and going unheard. Perhaps in this case, it's time to listen. The politicians may be cheered for saying "New Orleans will rise again" -- but unfortunately, the reality is that it is sinking. Are we prepared to see "hundred-year floods" become a yearly event?
Sunday, May 15, 2011
A Comprehensive Field Guide to Aliens
That people believe all sorts of weird things without any hard evidence is so obvious as to barely merit saying. What never fails to astound me, however, is how complex some of these beliefs are.
Witness the website that a student of mine was kind enough to send me, which gives information about all of the different alien races that are currently visiting Earth. Me, I thought there were only a couple -- the bug-eyed gray guys featured on various historical documentaries (for example, The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and the shapeshifting reptilian dudes called the Annunaki that are the favorites of conspiracy theorists. These last have supposedly infiltrated world governments, and many prominent human leaders have been replaced by heartless, cold-blooded scaly extraterrestrials, bent on world domination. Apparently the trained eye can still recognize which are the real humans, and which are the Annunaki replacements. Personally, I'm suspicious about Dick Cheney. Doesn't he look a little like someone who has only recently learned the rule, "when you smile, raise your lips and expose your teeth," and still can't quite manage to make it look authentic?
In any case, imagine my surprise when I learned that the bug-eyed gray aliens and the Annunaki are only two of a whole petting zoo's worth of different alien species. And I'm not talking about your typical Star Trek type alien, who looks like a guy speaking in a fake Russian accent while wearing a rubber alien nose. I'm talking some serious non-humans here.
For example, consider the Arcturians. These guys are only three feet tall, but are super-powerful, telekinetic aliens with turquoise skin, enormous almond-shaped eyes that are entirely glossy black, and only three fingers per hand. Visiting Earth is rough for the Arcturians because "Earth's vibrational energy is harmful to their fifth-dimensional frequency." Whatever that means. But that's apparently why you see so few of them around.
Then, there are the Dracos, who hail from, amazingly enough, the constellation Draco. Even more coincidentally, they look kind of like dragons. While I was reading this, I started talking to my computer. "You... you can't be... from a CONSTELLATION!" I yelled, alarming my neurotic border collie, Doolin, who began to pace around and look for something to feel guilty about. "A constellation is a random assemblage of stars! And Draco only looks vaguely like a dragon if you see it from this vantage point! From somewhere else in space, it would look ENTIRELY DIFFERENT!" Then I had to go get a cup of coffee and calm down for a while. So perhaps we should just move on.
Then there are the Els, or Anakim, which is a race of giant red-haired humanoids, who "ran the Garden of Eden" and built the pyramids. And when I say "giant," I do mean seriously height-enhanced. Some of them, this website claims, were 250 feet tall. The description of the history of the Els on this website runs to several pages, and I won't even attempt to summarize it, except to mention that it involves Scotland, the Jews, the Templars, the Merovingians, L. Ron Hubbard, the Masons, J. R. R. Tolkien, the Three Wise Men, and clams. It's worth reading. I recommend doing it while drinking single-malt scotch.
Then we have the Ikels, which are like little hairy humans with cloven feet. The Ciakars, or Mothmen, one of whom was featured in the historical documentary Godzilla vs. Mothra. The Pleaidians. The Hyadeans. The Cetians. The Orions. The Lyrans. The Weasel-People of Wahoonie-3.
Okay, I made the last one up. But really... it's no weirder than their actual claims. The people who wrote this website obviously believe it all; it has none of the hallmarks of a spoof. It's full of links to pages describing how various malevolent aliens are plotting to take over Earth, with intricate details of which alien races are in league with which, who might tentatively be on our side, which ones have already established bases on Earth, and so on. You have to wonder if the people responsible for this are simply paranoid and delusional -- which, as a mental illness, I can have some sympathy for -- or if they are making the whole thing up to see how many people they can bamboozle. (Speaking of L. Ron Hubbard...)
Sad to say, I've known people who actually believed in alien conspiracies, so the idea of someone falling for this nonsense is not as outlandish as it may seem. And as I've commented before, once you've accepted that there's a Big Scary Evil Conspiracy, everything afterwards is seen through that lens. My attempts to convince the alien believers that what they were claiming was complete horse waste were met with very little success. In fact, afterwards, I sort of sensed that they acted a little suspicious of me -- as if my arguing with them just proved that I was in alliance with the aliens.
Or maybe... that I AM an alien!!!
I wonder which kind I am? I don't want to be a little turquoise guy, and the reptilians are becoming a little passé, frankly. Maybe I could be a Horlock, which are sort of like the Men in Black. I look good in black. Besides, they can disappear at will, and alter people's memories, which seem like pretty damn cool superpowers to have.
Witness the website that a student of mine was kind enough to send me, which gives information about all of the different alien races that are currently visiting Earth. Me, I thought there were only a couple -- the bug-eyed gray guys featured on various historical documentaries (for example, The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and the shapeshifting reptilian dudes called the Annunaki that are the favorites of conspiracy theorists. These last have supposedly infiltrated world governments, and many prominent human leaders have been replaced by heartless, cold-blooded scaly extraterrestrials, bent on world domination. Apparently the trained eye can still recognize which are the real humans, and which are the Annunaki replacements. Personally, I'm suspicious about Dick Cheney. Doesn't he look a little like someone who has only recently learned the rule, "when you smile, raise your lips and expose your teeth," and still can't quite manage to make it look authentic?
In any case, imagine my surprise when I learned that the bug-eyed gray aliens and the Annunaki are only two of a whole petting zoo's worth of different alien species. And I'm not talking about your typical Star Trek type alien, who looks like a guy speaking in a fake Russian accent while wearing a rubber alien nose. I'm talking some serious non-humans here.
For example, consider the Arcturians. These guys are only three feet tall, but are super-powerful, telekinetic aliens with turquoise skin, enormous almond-shaped eyes that are entirely glossy black, and only three fingers per hand. Visiting Earth is rough for the Arcturians because "Earth's vibrational energy is harmful to their fifth-dimensional frequency." Whatever that means. But that's apparently why you see so few of them around.
Then, there are the Dracos, who hail from, amazingly enough, the constellation Draco. Even more coincidentally, they look kind of like dragons. While I was reading this, I started talking to my computer. "You... you can't be... from a CONSTELLATION!" I yelled, alarming my neurotic border collie, Doolin, who began to pace around and look for something to feel guilty about. "A constellation is a random assemblage of stars! And Draco only looks vaguely like a dragon if you see it from this vantage point! From somewhere else in space, it would look ENTIRELY DIFFERENT!" Then I had to go get a cup of coffee and calm down for a while. So perhaps we should just move on.
Then there are the Els, or Anakim, which is a race of giant red-haired humanoids, who "ran the Garden of Eden" and built the pyramids. And when I say "giant," I do mean seriously height-enhanced. Some of them, this website claims, were 250 feet tall. The description of the history of the Els on this website runs to several pages, and I won't even attempt to summarize it, except to mention that it involves Scotland, the Jews, the Templars, the Merovingians, L. Ron Hubbard, the Masons, J. R. R. Tolkien, the Three Wise Men, and clams. It's worth reading. I recommend doing it while drinking single-malt scotch.
Then we have the Ikels, which are like little hairy humans with cloven feet. The Ciakars, or Mothmen, one of whom was featured in the historical documentary Godzilla vs. Mothra. The Pleaidians. The Hyadeans. The Cetians. The Orions. The Lyrans. The Weasel-People of Wahoonie-3.
Okay, I made the last one up. But really... it's no weirder than their actual claims. The people who wrote this website obviously believe it all; it has none of the hallmarks of a spoof. It's full of links to pages describing how various malevolent aliens are plotting to take over Earth, with intricate details of which alien races are in league with which, who might tentatively be on our side, which ones have already established bases on Earth, and so on. You have to wonder if the people responsible for this are simply paranoid and delusional -- which, as a mental illness, I can have some sympathy for -- or if they are making the whole thing up to see how many people they can bamboozle. (Speaking of L. Ron Hubbard...)
Sad to say, I've known people who actually believed in alien conspiracies, so the idea of someone falling for this nonsense is not as outlandish as it may seem. And as I've commented before, once you've accepted that there's a Big Scary Evil Conspiracy, everything afterwards is seen through that lens. My attempts to convince the alien believers that what they were claiming was complete horse waste were met with very little success. In fact, afterwards, I sort of sensed that they acted a little suspicious of me -- as if my arguing with them just proved that I was in alliance with the aliens.
Or maybe... that I AM an alien!!!
I wonder which kind I am? I don't want to be a little turquoise guy, and the reptilians are becoming a little passé, frankly. Maybe I could be a Horlock, which are sort of like the Men in Black. I look good in black. Besides, they can disappear at will, and alter people's memories, which seem like pretty damn cool superpowers to have.
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