The Red Menace of "Les Schtroumpfs"

It's been a rough year for cartoon characters.

First, we had a Muslim cleric ranting about how Mickey Mouse was an Unclean Agent of Satan.  Then, the Seal-the-Borders cadre began to howl that Dora the Explorer was an illegal alien.  Not to be outdone, the Catholic church contributed their own little piece of surrealism with the claim that the Simpsons were clearly Roman Catholics.

And now, Antoine Buéno, a university lecturer in Paris, is claiming that the Smurfs are communists.

His treatise, entitled "Le Petit Livre Bleu: Analyse critique et politique de la société des Schtroumpfs," brings up two immediate questions:

1)  Did you know that the French for "Smurfs" was "les Schtroumpfs?"  I didn't.  I also defy you to say "les Schtroumpfs" without laughing.  It makes it even better if you say it with a fruity, Pépé le Pew accent.

2)  Is this guy kidding?  Or what?

In answer to the second question, let's look at his evidence:

• Smurfs take their meals in a communal dining hall.
• They have a single leader, who is a father-figure that they never refer to by name.
• Every effort is done collectively; they rarely strike out on their own, or show private initiative.
• Papa Smurf looks like Stalin.
• "Smurf" could be an acronym for "Small Men Under Red Force."

Well, I think we all have to admit that as evidence goes, that's pretty freakin' persuasive.  When you add the fact that Brainy Smurf looks a little like Leon Trotsky, I think we have what detective agencies call "an airtight case."

Thierry Culliford, son of the late Pierre Culliford, creator of the Smurfs, is outraged, and referred to Buéno's thesis as "grotesque."  Pierre Culliford, who went under the pen name "Peyo," was "not political," his son told reporters.  "When there were elections, he would ask my mother, 'What should I vote?'"

Buéno, of course, dismissed that, saying that Peyo was expressing communist themes in The Smurfs "unconsciously."  Because all cartoonists do that, you know.  Even comic strips are not free from it.  For example, don't you think that "Nancy" in the comic strip of the same name looks like Kim Jong Il?  Let's compare:

So, I think we can safely assume that cartoonists are unconsciously channeling all sorts of scary political themes in their work, and that from now on you should read the funny pages with that in mind.  Who knows what kind of dreadful political ideologies could be creeping into your subconscious while you're looking at "Marmaduke," "Blondie," or, god forbid, "Garfield?"

Buéno, for his part, is not backing down.  He says that his paper is "rigorous and thorough and documented."  About his claim of The Smurfs as having communist overtones, he told reporters, "It's so obvious I didn't think I'd have to spell it out."

So, anyway, there you have it.  Another tour de force from the halls of academia.  And we wonder why people think the members of the intelligentsia are a little bit cracked.

Linear streak artifacts and "BioStation Alpha"

So now, an "armchair astronomer" has used a satellite imaging map to zoom in on what he thinks is a secret alien base camp on Mars.

The video, made by David Martines, can be viewed here.  At last check, it had been viewed over 850,000 times.  Martines is unequivocal; he calls the feature "BioStation Alpha," and thinks it is clearly of alien manufacture.  "It's over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide. It looks like it's a cylinder or made up of cylinders," Martines said.  "I'm just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it."

Actual, non-armchair astronomers disagree.  "It looks like a linear streak artifact produced by a cosmic ray," said Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona.  "[W]ith space images that are taken outside our magnetosphere, such as those taken by orbiting telescopes, it's very common to see these cosmic ray hits.  You see them on optical images and a lot of the infrared images too."  The cylindrical appearance of the feature is because as you zoom in, the image pixillates, so the light streak is exploded into rows of "cylinders."

None of this, of course, is convincing the general public, which tends to look upon scientists as being either Dopey Out-of-Touch Pointy-Headed Pocket-Protector-Wearing Nerdlings or as Evil Super-Genius Conspirators Bent On Destroying Civilization.  Or possibly both at the same time.  So the "BioStation Alpha" story has gone viral, with people even speculating about which of the many alien races built it, how it's being used, whether the aliens have peaceful or malevolent intentions, and if this has anything to do with, god help us, December 21, 2012.

Even the normally reliable Space.com couldn't resist jumping on the bandwagon, with a headline that said, "Did an Amateur Astronomer Spot a Secret Mars Base?"  I clicked on the link, hoping that the entire article would be the single word, "NO" in 96-point font, but it wasn't.  They arranged the article in a rather sneaky fashion, putting Martines' testimonial about how he spotted "BioStation Alpha" right below a still image of the feature, then putting some ads, and then placing a full-size link to the YouTube video.  So you get to the video, which of course you have to watch.  If you then come back to the article, and scroll down even further, you finally get to Professor Pointy-Head's explanation about how cosmic rays + pixillation = Mars base -- but only after you've waded through all of the woo-woo stuff first.

The whole thing just makes me sigh heavily, because I just know that today I'm going to get about four hundred questions from very earnest students about how there is an alien staging platform on Mars.  And I'll have to go through the cosmic ray explanation, which they won't like because as explanations go it's not nearly as cool as an alien staging platform, and I'll get the "well, it could be an alien base, right?" question.  And at that point I'm going to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

How to get rid of bagpipe-playing ghosts

One of the downsides of writing about nonsense is that you become the target for more nonsense.  Recently I have received email links for Spirit Rescue International, and also had ads show up for it on Skeptophilia and on my Facebook page.  The link showed a picture of a scared-looking woman, looking over her shoulder, and had the tagline, "Escape the Fear."  So of course I clicked on the link, which undoubtedly explains how these people find me.

Spirit Rescue International is apparently sort of an SPCA for ghosts.  Its leader, Irene Block, is "in touch with the spirit world:"

Irene's compassion not only lies with the spirit but also with the client. The technique she uses comes to her directly from her spiritual helpers/guides, so no one clearing is alike.  Everything Irene knows has been taught to her since an early age by the spirit world. She refuses to learn from people or from books, believing this would contaminate her knowledge.

Who are these spirits, you might ask?  Apparently, they can be demons ("malevolent non-human energies") or earthbound human spirits.  About the latter, Irene explains:

You may call it a ghost, but that is not so. A ghost is a memory or residual energy that replays itself over and over, like a battle taking place in a field or a Scottish piper playing his bagpipes on the battlement of some Scottish castle. An earthbound spirit was a person who is now deceased. A spirit whose mind and consciousness have moved to a different vibration to that of ours. For some reason they have not moved on to the next stage after death, and need to be led to the light. Most of us believe that when we die we will automatically go to what some call Heaven or the next stage in the spirit world. This is not always so, we all have free will and have three choices of what we do next.

So, a ghost and a spirit are different because ghosts play the bagpipes and spirits don't?  If he tried to bring his pipes with him, at least it's clear why he didn't end up in heaven.

What evidence does she have that all this is true?  Well you should ask.  On her "SRI Evidence" link (here) we hear some garbled sound recordings, and see some blurred photographs with fuzzy light blobs on them.  That's enough for me!  Ghosts exist!  Bagpipes and all!

So, now that we've accepted the existence of ghosts and spirits, what do we do about it?  Irene recommends a three-pronged approach; (1) assuring the spirit that it is loved; (2) convincing the spirit that its business here on Earth is concluded; and (3) telling the spirit that it is causing problems by attaching to a place, or a person who is still living.  If that doesn't work, it's time to bring out the big guns, and chant, "St. Michael the Archangel, Prince of Light, wield the Sword of Truth and cut those etheric cords void of love and veneration."  At that point, the spirit will have no choice but to pack up and move on to "a higher dimension."

Upon reading further, one finds that she doesn't even have to enter your house in order to perform "spirit clearing:"

Irene has an astounding ability to clear hauntings and attachments from her location in the UK, either using her abilities to remote view or visualize in any part of the world. Her furthest distance yet was evident with a client in New Zealand - 11,500 miles away! The people she has helped have never met Irene in person; merely, she has been the supportive voice at the other end of the telephone.

Fortunately, with such a strenuous job, she doesn't work alone.  She has help from Alswell and GreenMother in the US, from Bella in New Zealand, and from Elven in Australia.   (Elven is described as a "psychic artist," whatever that means.)  I don't know about  you, but I'm feeling relieved just knowing that GreenMother is on the job.

I tried to find out on the website how much all this would cost, but it's not mentioned anywhere.  I suspect that crass topics such as money would not come up until much later, until you had registered with SRI, filled out the "Client Information Form," and so on.  But I can say with some confidence that the great likelihood is that you'd pay hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars to avail yourself of SRI's services.

I know that heaping scorn on hucksters like the "SRI research team" is probably pointless, that anyone who seeks out their services is extremely unlikely to read Skeptophilia.  I know that there have always been, and always will be, gullible people who will spend large quantities of money on charlatans, scams, and quack cures, and nothing I say will stop that.  However, when I receive links like this one, I just have to respond.  It may be an exercise in futility, but I can't help myself.  Like the bagpipe-playing ghost on the battlement in Scotland, I just have to keep playing the same tune, over and over.

I feel pretty

A friend of mine recently sent me a link about beauty treatments.  She wasn't, I think, trying to give me any sort of unsubtle suggestion about my need to use such products.  The reason she thought of me was that the world of cosmetics is no longer a simple matter of cleansers, scents, and body paints of various sorts.  It's now its own little mini-universe of pseudoscience, filled with jargon, half-truths, and outright lies.

The link my friend sent me, which you can view here, is only a small sampling of the types of beauty products that the gullible can spend lots of money on.  If you'd rather not peruse the whole list, I present below a few of the most egregious examples, along with the prices, which I am not making up.

1)  Ina White Gold Detoxifying Crystal Salt ($85).  The advertisement says, "This bathing treat uses Himalayan crystals to draw out toxins lurking in the body.  In fact, a 30-minute soak is equivalent to a three-day detox!"

First of all, you don't have any toxins "lurking in your body" that your kidneys and liver aren't perfectly well equipped to deal with.  Anything toxic your body produces isn't excreted through the skin in any case, so I don't care what you put in your bath water, you're not going to draw much out through your skin except for water.

Which brings me to the next claim:  that this stuff "leaves your skin feeling firmer."  I'll just bet it does.  It's... salt.  Plain old sodium chloride, which is the same regardless of whether it comes from the Himalayas or from the shaker on your dinner table.  ("Ina White Gold" does have some herbal extracts in it to make it smell nice, though.)  And the reason it leaves your skin feeling firmer is because you've dehydrated your upper skin layer -- same as when you've gone swimming in the ocean and not showered off afterwards.  Your lower epidermis has lost water and shrunk a little, and your skin will feel a little too tight for a while afterwards.  It has nothing to do with toxins, toning, or the Himalayas.

2)  The Energy Muse "Miracle Bead" Wearable Scents bracelet ($25).  This one combines energy field nonsense with magic bracelet nonsense and aromatherapy nonsense to create a woo-woo trifecta.  It is a little bracelet with a "natural seed" that emits "positive vibrations," treated with a perfume that will give you "movement, vitality, and confidence."  All I can say is that if spending $25 of your hard-earned cash for a seed on a string gives you confidence, you must come by your confidence a different way than I do.

3)  Origins "For Men" Skin Diver Active Charcoal Body Wash ($19).  Charcoal, as we all know because it's barbecuing season, has purifying properties.  So we're supposed to slather charcoal glop all over our bodies to "draw out pore-clogging toxins."  I'll stick with soap, thanks.

4)  The Organic Pharmacy Detox Cellulite Body Oil ($58).  More detox stuff, this one scented with grapefruit and rose oil.  This one, in addition to "drawing out toxins" again, is supposed to get rid of "cellulite."  What is cellulite, you may ask?  Sit down, children, for a brief biology lesson.

Cellulite is fat.  No different than any other fat.  Why, then, does it look dimply?  Because the distribution of connective tissue on the upper legs and butt is different from that on the stomach.  The skin layers on the lower torso are "pegged down" by heavy collagen fibers, similar to the stitching on a mattress, so when you gain weight there, it creates a puckery appearance.  No diet, no vitamins or herbal extracts, and certainly no "detox body oil" is going to "get rid of cellulite."  The only way to get rid of cellulite is to do what gets rid of every other kind of fat in the body, to wit:  eat less and exercise more.


And if you haven't already blown enough money on stuff like the above, you can go to the Shizuka Day Spa in New York City ($180) and have them paint nightingale poop extract on your face, the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel Reliquary Spa ($225) and have them drum on you with bamboo reeds to "balance your energy flow," or The Peninsula Spa of Beverly Hills ($275 and up) to have a massage with "gem oils," which is massage oil colored to look like emeralds, rubies, or sapphires.

I wish I was making this stuff up.  Even the cheap beauty products, the kind you can find on grocery store shelves, are advertised using pseudoscience; look at the shampoos which are "enriched with protein and vitamins," as if humans are some kind of alien life form that can somehow absorb nutrients through our hair.  I suppose the drive to look youthful and vibrant is strong enough to induce people to drop serious quantities of money on whatever they think will work -- but besides the lamentable gullibility factor here, there's the sheer greed of the manufacturers for misleading these people about what these products do.  The gullibility is unfortunate; the lying should be outright illegal.

The pseudoscience that wouldn't die

I was chatting with a couple of students yesterday, and the subject turned to aliens.  Conversations seem to get steered that way when I'm around.  It's odd.

Anyhow, one of the students said, "Let's say humans developed interstellar space flight.  And we went to another star system.  And let's say that on one of the planets in that star system there was intelligent, but non-technologically advanced, life.  Don't you think that humans would appear like gods to them?"

I said that was probably so, and quoted the line from Arthur C. Clarke, that "To the primitive mind, any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic."

"So," the student said, "if advanced aliens had come to Earth, thousands of years ago, wouldn't they have appeared like gods?  And become the focal points of religions?"

A little more hesitantly, I said, "Well, yes, probably."

And then he said, "Don't you think it's hard to believe that a bunch of primitive humans were able to build the pyramids, and Stonehenge, and all?"

And at that point, I said, "Good lord, you haven't been reading Chariots of the Gods, have you?"

This book, written by Erich von Däniken in 1968, is like the Creature That Wouldn't Die.  Like the Hydra, it just keeps regrowing heads and coming back at you again.  In fact, Chariots of the Gods was only the first of a series of books by von Däniken, all claiming that the Earth had been visited by Ancient Astronauts.  When Chariots of the Gods hit the bestseller list, he followed it up with repeated riffs on the same theme, to wit:  Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else.

Obviously, I made the last one up, because von Däniken at age 76 is still blithering on about the Gods.  His books have sold 62 million copies, have been translated into 32 languages, and his ideas formed the basis of a theme park in Switzerland, thus further reinforcing my belief that skepticism will never be the lucrative profession that woo-wooism is.

You might ask what von Däniken's evidence is, other than the argument from incredulity ("wow!  The pyramids are really big!  I can't imagine making a pyramid, myself.  Therefore they must have been designed and constructed by aliens!").  Here are a few pieces of evidence that von Däniken claims support the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis.

• The Antikythera mechanism.  This complex "mechanical computer," found in a shipwreck dated to about 150 BCE, contains a series of nested gears and was used to calculate astronomical positions.  Von Däniken claims it is of alien manufacture, despite the fact that similar devices are mentioned in Greek and Roman literature, including Cicero's De Re Publica, in which its invention is credited to Archimedes.
• The Piri Reis map.  This map, dating to 1513, "could only have been drawn using an aerial perspective," von Däniken claims.  In other words, it was drawn looking down from a spacecraft.  Unfortunately for von Däniken's theory, human sailors were quite good at drawing maps, because those who weren't quickly became fish bait.  The antecedents of the Piri Reis map have been identified, and include ten maps of Arab origin, four of Portuguese origin, and one map drawn by Christopher Columbus himself.
• The Moai, or Easter Island statues.  These are pretty cool, but in my mind only demonstrate what you can accomplish with a lot of slave labor.
• A "non-rusting" iron pillar in India, that supposedly didn't rust because it was some kind of alien alloy.  When von Däniken's books became popular, naturally skeptics wanted to go to India to check out this story.  They found the pillar, and you'll never guess what it was covered with?  Rust.  If you can imagine.  Being that this was kind of conclusive, von Däniken backed off from this claim, and said in an interview with Playboy, "We can forget about this iron thing."

In fact, piece after piece of von Däniken's "evidence" falls apart if you analyze it, and try not to be swayed by his hyperdramatic statements that always seem to include phrases like "can only be explained by," "scientists are baffled by," and "a mystery beyond human ken."  In fact, von Däniken's books were written because they make money, and are, simply put, pseudoscientific tripe.  The best debunking of his claims was Ronald Story's 1976 book The Space Gods Revealed, which is a page-by-page refutation of all of von Däniken's claims, and remains to this day one of the best skeptical analyses of pseudoscience ever written.

So, sad to say, my student's faith in the Ancient Gods is ill-founded.  A shame, really, because I would like nothing better than concrete evidence of alien civilizations.  But if you want me to accept the extraordinary claim of alien visitations in Earth's distant past, you're going to have to give me evidence a little more extraordinary than a rusty post, a map, and some big stone statues.

The problem with satire

It's an odd thing, satire.  The literary practice of pretending to take the side of those with whom you disagree, and exaggerating their views ever-so-slightly to point out their foolishness, has been around for millenia.  Aristophanes' play The Birds satirized prominent politicians and philosophers of his time, without once coming out and saying "these people are morons."  The Roman poet Juvenal ruthlessly lampooned just about everyone in power -- from emperor to senator to high priest.  In a later age, Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" neatly poniarded British policies on Ireland by the mock-serious suggestion that both the Irish famine and the Irish "troubles" could be fixed simultaneously by instituting a policy requiring that the Irish eat their own children.

There are a variety of problems with satire.  One, of course, is that being a particularly sharp-edged form of criticism, it can get you into serious trouble.  Dictators tend to particularly loathe satirists -- in the early days of the Nazi regime, a comedian had a routine in which he'd snap into a Nazi salute, and say "Heil...  um."  Then he'd do it again.  Finally he'd scratch his head, and say, "What was that guy's name, again?"  It was a simple little thing, harmless enough, you'd think -- but it so effectively pointed up the lunacy of requiring that people greet each other by saying "praise Hitler" that no one was really surprised when the comedian disappeared, permanently.

The other problem with satire is that it straddles a very fine line.  On the one hand, it can't be too far over the line, or it is either too obvious or it becomes offensive (or both).  Witness the brouhaha over the cover of the New Yorker which showed the Obamas in the Oval Office, dressed up like terrorists.  The whole thing, of course, was supposed to lampoon the ridiculous ideas that the Obamas were (1) Muslims, and (2) anti-American.  The satire was so over-the-top that it actually offended a lot of people, because they felt that the allegations against the Obamas already were being taken seriously enough that you couldn't even joke about it.

The opposite problem, of course, occurs when the satire is so subtle that people fall for it.  Amazingly enough, there are people who think that Stephen Colbert is an actual conservative; many of you probably remember the extraordinary Presidential Press Dinner during George W. Bush's last term when a staffer (who probably disappeared as fast as the German comedian did) hired Colbert to be the keynote speaker, and Colbert proceeded to skewer everyone in the room, without once breaking out of his ultra-right-wing persona.  (After that performance, no one made that mistake about Colbert again, I'll bet.)  More recently, we have the people who've taken various stories in The Onion seriously, including:

• A story in which J. K. Rowling was alleged to have been responsible for the induction of over a million children into the Church of Satan.  This prompted an angry letter to Reader's Digest after they interviewed Rowling -- a reader was outraged that a nice conservative magazine like Reader's Digest would interview a horrible evil pagan devil-worshiper like Rowling, and she had proof of Rowling's wicked ways, because she'd "read it in The Onion."  The editor, showing admirable restraint, responded only with, "The Onion is a satirical news website, and is not intended to be taken seriously."
• A recent story called "Prince William Divorces Kate Middleton After Five Weeks," which caused a firestorm of angst on Facebook and Twitter.  One poster, illustrating perhaps the reason why she took the story seriously, ended her screed against Prince William with the statement, "What will he say when he's crowned king?  Probably 'London is a horrible country and I don't want to be king anyway.'"
• A story headlined "Final Minutes of the Last Harry Potter Movie to be Split Into Seven Separate Films."  You can just imagine how the people who took this one seriously reacted.
• However, not only the gullible and unintelligent get hoodwinked.  In the most famous instance of The Onion scoring a satirical win, a 2002 article which described how the US was moving governmental offices out of the Capitol Building because it was "dilapidated," and "didn't have enough bathrooms," was picked up by the Beijing Evening News.  The embarrassed editors of BEN apologized for the error the following day, and said that the writer of the story, Huang Ke, had been told to "be more careful next time."

Carol and I were discussing satire over dinner last night, and we concluded that it when it works, it's extremely effective... but that it requires a certain level of discernment for it to work.  And the pitfall, of course, is that if you're doing it convincingly enough, people will be... convinced.  And being that I sometimes lapse into satire, let me go on record as saying that I don't believe in Bigfoot, UFOs, Mothman, appearances of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches, psychics, ghosts, gods (all of them), and most of the other things I blog about.  Please refer to this paragraph if you're ever in doubt on any of that.  Thank you.

Not Finding Bigfoot

New from the "Well, I'm Just Shocked" Department come allegations that Animal Planet's latest series, "Finding Bigfoot," includes faked segments and stories that are hoaxes.

The show, which is billed as a riveting adventure about "four eccentric but passionate members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers," was supposed to be a skeptical look at the whole weird pastime of Bigfoot-hunting.  But as I know all too well, skepticism doesn't sell, but sensationalism does.  And it's damn hard to sensationalize something for which you have no hard evidence at all.  So faced with having hour-long riveting footage of nothing, and doing a little creative editing, guess what the makers of "Finding Bigfoot" did?

The first episode included a segment on the alleged "signalling technique" used by Bigfoots to communicate with each other, in which they knock on trees.  So, we are treated to video footage of a wooded area at night, and lo and behold, we hear knocks.  And then the "researchers" tell us about loud, eerie Bigfoot vocalizations, called "call blasting," and back we go to the woods at night, and egad! we hear a howl.

The knocks and the howl, of course, were added in later.  They are, in fact, some people knocking on wood and a guy going "Awoo."  Of course, nowhere does it say "video recreation" on the show; you're led to believe that it's all real, that the "researchers" actually got good recordings of Bigfoot howls.

Not only was the audio faked; some of the video was, too.  A video clip taken in Lumpkin County, Georgia using a car dashboard camera, alleged to be of a Bigfoot, turned out to be a college kid in a gorilla suit.  Even so, the intrepid "researchers" went to northern Georgia, and the video was used in the show -- without any mention of the fakery.

Of course, now the "researchers" are doing handstands trying to convince us that they knew nothing about all of the hocus-pocus.  The leader of the "researchers," who is named (I am not making this up) Matt Moneymaker, said, "We heard both the scream and knocks in the field, but they didn’t get a good recording of either so they inserted their own simulations during editing, apparently.  We didn’t know what they were going to do in that regard. They wouldn’t tell us whether they actually recorded the sounds we heard, and they wouldn’t let us see the finished episodes either."  Um, sure.  Right.  You recorded a segment about how you had an audio track you didn't have, and you didn't know it?  Allow me, at this juncture, to remind you how well lying about altered tapes worked for Richard Nixon.

As far as the college kids in the gorilla suit, Moneymaker accuses Sheriff Stacy Jarrard of making up the hoax story to "quell any fear that local people might have about a monster in the woods."   "No one from the sheriff’s department went out to speak with any of the neighbors after the incident," Moneymaker told reporters.  "We spoke with the neighbors though when we were shooting the episode.  There was never any college students living in the area, and there was no photo of college kids with a gorilla costume."

Moneymaker stopped just short of saying, "I am not a crook."

Allow me to state for the record, as I've done before, that I don't think that it's impossible that Bigfoot exists.  Of all the cryptids reported, I think it's the one that has the greatest likelihood of being true, certainly better than the Loch Ness Monster, El Chupacabra, or "Mothman."  The lack of any shred of hard evidence is troublesome, but I'm still hoping some will turn up eventually.  Until then, the jury's still out.

On the other hand, no one should be surprised that on increasingly sensationalized networks such as Animal Planet, Syfy, and The Not Actually History Channel, producers rely on cheesy editing to convince the viewers that the "Ghost Hunters" have seen ghosts, the "MonsterQuest" people have seen monsters, and now, that the "Finding Bigfoot" people have found Bigfoot.  Given that no one would watch a show in which nothing happens, we shouldn't expect these programs to be anything but fiction.  If we believe them, we have no one to blame but ourselves.