Possessed poodles

The one thing you should never say is "Now I've heard it all."

Especially if, like me, you are an aficionado of woo-woo.  If you are a regular reader of Skeptophilia, you have followed me through investigations of Florida Skunk Apes, the discovery of the Millennium Falcon on the floor of the Baltic Sea, plastic cards that will impart "Scalar Energy Fields" to the water you drink, and countless examples of Jesus, the Apostles, the Virgin Mary, and (in one case) Bob Marley showing up on a variety of food items.  And each time, it's been tempting to say, 'Now I've heard it all."

If you did, in fact, say that, you're gonna regret it.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Because now we have a new book, written by New York City artist Olga Horvat, called Paranormal Pooch.  Paranormal Pooch is about her dog, Princess, who was...

... possessed by demons.

I kid you not.  Horvat apparently had a run of devastatingly bad luck a while back, including the following incidents:

• Her apartment was infested by bedbugs, and it cost $7,000 to get rid of them.
• Her husband was in an automobile accident, and afterwards came down with a rare autoimmune disease.
• Her daughter was suspended from second grade for putting on a rubber glove and grabbing a classmate, and then blamed the odd behavior on "hearing voices in her head."

And instead of doing what most of us would do, in such unfortunate situations -- including saying to our kid, "Why the hell did you bring a rubber glove to school?" -- Horvat evaluated the evidence, and came to the inescapable conclusion that the whole thing was due to her poodle being possessed.

Amongst the claims she makes in Paranormal Pooch -- and believe me, there's enough fodder for skepticism in there that I could go on all day -- my favorite is that dogs with pointy ears are more susceptible to possession than dogs with floppy ears, because "The spirit can get in there easier."

Myself, I would think that if a spirit is capable of causing your spouse to get in an automobile accident, it would be capable of lifting a dog's floppy ear to get inside.  But what do I know?

In any case, Horvat solved the whole thing by inventing, and selling (c'mon, you knew she was selling something) "electromagnetic shield pendants" to protect humans and pets from demonic possession.  They only cost $197, which is a comparative steal considering the cost for exterminating bedbugs.  She is also selling her book, which you can order here.  It's received rave reviews, mostly from other wingnuts, including Joshua Warren, renowned psychic investigator:  "A CHILL ran down my spine while reading Olga Horvat’s Paranormal Pooch.  Why?  Because her story is so real and her emotions so palpable."

Well, all I can say is that my definition of "real" and Mr. Warren's seem to differ somewhat.

The sad postscript to the whole thing is that four months after she was successfully cleansed of evil spirits, Princess herself fell down the stairs and died.  Maybe she was grief-stricken after losing her satanic companion, I dunno.

I do know one thing, though; I hope like hell that Horvat is never allowed to own another dog.  Because it sounds, all joking aside, like she is not someone who should be trusted to give appropriate care to a pet.  But I have strong feelings about how animals are treated, and maybe I'm being unfair, here.

Oh, and one other thing:  now I've heard it all.

Majestic 12, anachronistic typeset, and Cigarette-Smoking Man

Yesterday, a former student of mine said, "You haven't yet written about my favorite conspiracy theory -- Majestic 12."  There was a brief moment in which I wondered whether "Majestic 12" might be some kind of sequel to Ocean's Eleven, but then I realized that they've already done that (they're up to what, now, Ocean's Seventeen, or something?), so it had to be something else.

It turns out that Majestic 12 is a code name, which makes it cool right from the get-go.  The story is that during the presidency of Harry Truman, a secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials was formed in order to investigate the Roswell incident and to keep tabs on the aliens.  Since that time, thousands of pages' worth of documents have been "leaked" from this alleged committee, most of them dealing with covert operations by the CIA, and giving highly oblique references to UFO sightings.  A few of the documents have hinted at darker doings -- alliances with evil aliens, and a secret intent to use technology of extraterrestrial provenance to further our military goals and monitor our enemies.

The original members of Majestic 12 were allegedly the following prominent individuals:

• Roscoe Hillenkoetter (first director of the CIA)
• Vannevar Bush (president of the Carnegie Institute, amongst many other titles)
• James Forrestal (Secretary of the Navy)
• Nathan Twining (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)
• Hoyt Vandenberg (Air Force Chief of Staff)
• Robert Montague (Commander of Fort Bliss)
• Jerome Hunsaker (aeronautics engineer at MIT)
• Sidney Souers (first executive secretary of the National Security Council)
• Gordon Gray (Secretary of the Army)
• Donald Menzel (astronomer at Harvard)
• Detlev Bronk (chair of the National Academy of Sciences)
• Lloyd Berkner (prominent physicist)

And because no good conspiracy would be complete without throwing around a few well-known names, the Majestic 12 were supposedly advised by Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, Wehrner von Braun, Albert Einstein, and Cigarette-Smoking Man.

Oh, wait, the last one was fictional.  Silly me.  The problem is, so are the documents.  The FBI has done a thorough investigation of the various Majestic 12 files, and declared them "completely bogus."  Of course, they would say that, claim the conspiracy theorists; the government's response is always "deny, deny, deny."  However, there have been independent studies done, by reasonably objective and disinterested parties (for example, Philip J. Klass, noted UFO skeptic and debunker), and virtually all of them think that the whole thing is a hoax -- probably perpetrated by Stanton Friedman, William Moore, and Jaime Shandera, three UFOlogists who are more-or-less obsessed with the Roswell Incident.  In fact, Moore and Shandera were actually the recipients of some of the Majestic 12 documents -- sent to them by an "anonymous source high up in the government."

How did the skeptics come to the conclusion that the whole thing was a hoax?  One of the main pieces of evidence was the simple, pragmatic matter of how the documents were typed.  In many cases, it's possible to date a document simply by looking at the font, spacing, and ink -- these changed with fair regularity, and even a discrepancy of a couple of years can be enough to prove a document to be fake.  In the case of a number of the Majestic 12 documents, there were font changes and space-justification that were impossible in the late 1940s and 1950s -- the first typewriter capable of this was invented in 1961.

An amusing sidebar:  when Philip Klass was investigating the Majestic 12 claim, he offered $1000 to anyone who could produce government documents that had typefaces matching the ones found in the Majestic 12 papers.  Who popped up to claim the prize?  None other than Stanton Friedman, prime suspect as the chief engineer of the hoax.  As skeptic Brian Dunning wrote, "Don't take the bait if you don't want to be hooked."

One of the frustrations with debunking conspiracy theories, though, is that once someone believes that a conspiracy exists, there always is a way to argue away the evidence.  One of the most popular ones is argument from ignorance -- we don't know what the government was doing back then, so they could have been doing anything.  As for the typewriters -- oh, sure, the first typewriter capable of justification (the IBM 72) was released to the public in 1961, but maybe the Big Secret Government Circles had access to it fourteen years earlier.  Who knows?  (And by "who knows?", of course what they mean is "we do.")

And as far as my aforementioned "objective and disinterested" investigators -- in the conspiracy theorists' minds, there is no such thing as an objectivity.  Anyone who argues against the theory at hand is either a dupe, or else a de facto member of the conspiracy.  Between this and the argument from ignorance, there is no way to win.

But wait, you may be saying; what if the government was engaged in covert nasty stuff?  How would you know, given that the government would certainly deny their involvement, claim it was a hoax?  Well, first, I'm sure that the government is, in fact, engaged in covert nasty stuff.  I just don't think this is it.  We fall back on Ockham's Razor yet again -- what is the simplest explanation that adequately accounts for all of the known facts?

So, anyway, I think we can safely say that the Majestic 12 papers are fakes.  Which is, no doubt, exactly what Cigarette-Smoking Man wants us to think, and will make him smile in that creepy way of his, and walk off into the night until the next episode.

Silence is golden

A while back my cousin Carla from New Mexico brought to my attention a paranormal phenomenon I had never heard of before.  Carla's husband Dan is a geography professor at New Mexico State University, and the three of us basically have the same approach to the paranormal; namely to discuss it, with grave expressions, drawing up maps, passing back and forth grainy, blurred photographs of ghosts, UFOs, and sasquatches ("sasquatchi?" "sasquatchim?" There's got to be a more entertaining plural than "sasquatches."), and examining evidence of Ancient Astronauts Visiting the Earth.  Then we all burst into guffaws because we just can't take it any more.

In any case, Dan (code name: Dr. Monsoon Havoc, B.S., M.S., Ph.D., President, and Director of the Department of Multi-Dimensional Topography) and Carla (code name: Cria Havoc, Vice President, and Director of the Department of Hermetics, Hermeneutics, and Historiography) kindly inducted me two years ago into their organization, ISNOT (Institute for the Study of Non-Objective Theories).  (My code name: Gordon "Whirlwind" McTeague, Director of the Department of Exobiology and Cryptozoology, a.k.a. "The Blond Yeti").  Since then, it's been one adventure after another, as we investigated reports of El Chupacabra, the Connecticut Hill Monster (the upstate New York cousin of Bigfoot), and various sightings of the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.  But now... now, we have a serious matter to look into.

Carla/Cria sent me a link with information about a place called the Zone of Silence.  This spot, located about 400 miles from El Paso, Texas, and near the point where the borders of the Mexican states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, and Durango meet, has a lot of the same characteristics as the Bermuda Triangle.  (Read about it here and here.)  Within this area, "radio and TV signals... are gobbled up," "strange lights or fireballs (maneuver) at night, changing colors, hanging motionless and then taking off at great speed," and there are falls of "small metallic balls... known locally as guíjolas," which are "collected by locals and visitors alike, and treated with great reverence."

My thought on this last part is that if you are the sort of person who might be tempted to treat a small metallic ball with great reverence, you probably should not be allowed to wander about in the desert unaccompanied.

But I digress.

One difference between this place and the Bermuda Triangle is that being dry land (extremely dry, in this case), the Zone of Silence can also host honest-to-Fox-Mulder Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  There have been several reports of meetings with "tall, blond individuals," who spoke flawless Spanish "with a musical ring."  In one case, they were wearing yellow raincoats, and helped some lost travelers whose car was stuck in the mud during one of the area's infrequent, but torrential, downpours.  This is encouraging; most of the other aliens I've heard of seem more interested in evil pastimes, such as infiltrating world governments, dissecting livestock, and placing computer chips in the heads of abducted earthlings, after the obligatory horrifying medical exam on board the spacecraft, about which we will say no more out of respect for the more sensitive members of the studio audience.  Myself, I find reports of helpful aliens distinctly encouraging, and hope you won't think me self-serving if I just mention briefly that if there are any like-minded aliens visiting upstate New York soon, I could sure use a hand cleaning my gutters.

Of course, my more scientific readers will be asking themselves why, exactly, is this spot a "zone of silence?"  Answers vary, as you might expect.  One explanation I've seen proffered is the presence of uranium ore in nearby mountains (because diffuse deposits of radioactive ores clearly attract aliens, cause small metal balls to fall from the sky, and interfere with radio signals).  Another is that this spot represents a "concentration of earth energies."  Whatever the hell that means.  It is also claimed that there is an "astronomical observatory thousands of years old... a Mexican Stonehenge" in the area.  Well, that's enough for me!  Uranium ore + "concentration of earth energies" + anything that can be compared to Stonehenge = serious paranormal activity!  ISNOT is on it!  Mobilize the troops!

Well, not really.  Sadly, we're not able to mobilize in this direction at the present time.  The disappointing fact is that given the current state of affairs in northern Mexico, it's not all that appealing to go down and visit the place.  I mean, tall blond aliens with yellow rain slickers are one thing; dodging bullets from drug dealers is quite another.  I think the field work will have to wait until things calm down a little.

Until then, however, keep your eyes open for any other Non-Objective phenomena that may pop up -- we have three highly trained professionals here at ISNOT who are ready to investigate.  I'll post further research notes here.  You'll be the first to know.

Invasion of the star jelly

Skeptics and rationalists hear the accusation rather frequently that their assumption that everything has a rational explanation is as much a faith as any religion is.  Our conviction that all allegations of paranormal phenomena -- aliens, precognition, ghosts, witchcraft, and so on -- are probably bunk is based on an assumption about how the world works, and because it is an assumption, it is by definition an irrationally held unprovable assertion.

Take the case of Star Jelly.  The Lake District, in northern England, just had a bout of Star Jelly a few weeks ago, following a wind and rain storm.  What is it, you might ask?  Not something, I hasten to state, that you'd want to use to accompany your peanut butter sandwich.  Star Jelly is a whitish, gelatinous substance, sometimes found in great globs, out in the woods and hillsides -- usually discovered in the early morning, as if it had appeared suddenly at night.  It was first recorded in the 14th century, and has since shown up hundreds of times -- most famously as a two-meter wide disk that showed up near Philadelphia in 1950, inspiring the movie The Blob.  (You can read an article about Star Jelly, and see some photographs, here.)

What is it, though?  This is where it gets interesting.  Because apparently scientists have not been able to come up with a definitive answer.  The two most common answers -- that it is a mucusy material made by slime molds, or by a species of cyanobacteria called Nostoc -- are unproven.  Analysis of bits of Star Jelly have failed to show any traces of DNA, which you would expect to find if either of the above explanations are true.  Then the woo-woos get involved.  Star Jelly is, they say, one of the following:

• a substance from outer space that falls to Earth during meteor showers.
• an extraterrestrial life form.
• the residue left behind when an alien probe self-destructs.
• ectoplasm.
• a toxic waste from top-secret government research programs.
• alien semen.

None of those explanations appeal to me, frankly, especially the last one.  You'd think that if aliens spent all of this time and effort to get to Earth, they'd have better things to do once they got here than to masturbate outside during a rainstorm in the Lake District.

I'm the first to admit, however, that the scientific explanations that have been proffered thus far haven't really knocked my socks off.  But nonetheless, I'm still convinced that there has to be a reasonable explanation for the appearance of the mysterious substance.  Why is that?

A study published in 2008 in the neurology journal Cortex made the interesting claim that rationalism and a belief in the paranormal both arose from an underlying brain structure issue -- specifically, that belief in paranormal explanations was correlated with a high degree of cerebral asymmetry.  People who held paranormal beliefs, said lead researcher Günter Schulter, had undergone "perturbations in fetal development" that led to differences in the way the cerebrum was wired.  A study the following year at the University of Toronto showed that the religious and non-religious also showed a difference in brain activity, particularly in the region called the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain adapted for coping with anxiety.

So is rationalism merely a product of brain physiology, and do the critics of skepticism have a point in saying that it is itself a religion?  While our assumption that everything has a rational explanation is just that -- an assumption -- we do have one very powerful argument for our views:  Rationalism works.  There are countless examples of phenomena that were once unexplained (or given paranormal explanations) that later were, by the application of basic scientific principles, successfully accounted for with no need for recourse to the paranormal.  To cite one example, which got a lot of airtime with the woo-woos -- remember the orange glop that washed ashore in huge quantities near Kivalina, Alaska this past summer, prompting speculation very similar to the aforementioned Star Jelly theories?  (No one, however, seemed inclined to attribute its appearance to masturbating aliens, but otherwise the explanations were much the same.)  Well, the scientists kept saying, "We don't know what it is yet, but it has to be a naturally-occurring substance."  And after study, guess what they found?  It was eggs -- the eggs of a perfectly natural marine invertebrate species.  Rationalism wins again!

As far as the Star Jelly -- I'm not troubled by the fact that they haven't figured it out yet.  I'm confident that with study, this will fall to the methods of science just as so many other mysteries have in the past.  So if my skepticism is just a product of my brain's symmetry, or its overactive anterior cingulate cortex, that's okay by me -- because whatever the cause, it has a pretty good track record of leading me to the right answers.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live

Yesterday the Saudis beheaded a woman for sorcery.

I kid you not; read the story here. And while you're reading it, don’t forget that (1) we are the Saudis’ friends and allies; (2) Islam is the religion of peace, and deserves to be taken seriously as a worldview; and (3) it is the responsibility of governments to protect the souls of its citizens from the evil actions of people in league with Satan.

I’m (almost) speechless.  Every time I think that humans have plumbed the lowest depths of medieval zealotry, I find out that I’m wrong.  What’s worse, I’m quite certain that American Christians will be outraged at the bloodthirstiness of the Muslim judges who sent this woman to the sword, while simultaneously not batting an eye when people like Rick Perry tell them that gays in loving, committed relationships are going to be tortured in horrific agony for all eternity by direct orders from The God of Love.

A while back one of my coworkers sent me an article on the history of witches.  This article was about how when the weather turned fairly miserable during the Little Ice Age (1350-ish through 1650-ish), it was a trigger to a rash of witch-burnings.  Apparently first the Catholics, but then (and especially) the Lutherans in Germany, took the climatic alterations as a sign that the locals were selling their souls to Satan, who was making it rain on the parades of the holy.  Of course, the only way to fix the weather was to torture and kill anyone who was odd or ill-tempered or mildly mentally retarded, so they put thousands of said individuals on "trial" (not that these were legal proceedings in any sense of the word, as the verdict was "guilty" as soon as the accusation was made), and the majority were burned at the stake.

Now, am I missing some part of the logical sequence here?  There's a bad storm; roofs leak, trees fall down, maybe even a few people get killed.  And your response is to toast old Mrs. Hassenpfeffer?  This is supposed to take care of the problem?

Of course, all of this would just be a historical tragedy, a crazy and regrettable thing that our distant ancestors did, except for the fact that I'm not all that sure that your average modern day human is thinking much more clearly.  There are the aforementioned Saudis, whose so-called religion is deserving of about as much respect as the Ku Klux Klan.  But wait, they're from the Middle East, and everyone knows what a hotbed of craziness that is, right?  We're Americans; we are more rational than that.

Right.  Sure.  So explain Pat Robertson.  The fact that his skull seems to be filled with cobwebs and dead insects has unfortunately not disabled his mouth; remember when he said that Hurricane Katrina was caused by "god sending his wrath upon the godless people of New Orleans" (never mind that Louisiana is one of the most heavily Christian states in the US), asked god to "smite Dover" (the town in Pennsylvania that voted creationism out of the science curriculum -- fortunately for the people of Dover, apparently god was otherwise occupied that day), and claimed that he can leg press an automobile?  Okay, the last part was harmless; but tens of thousands of people listen to him, and I don't think it's just for the entertainment value.  So you've got a guy who's a certifiable fruit loop, and there are people in the United States who believe whatever comes out of his mouth.

Remember when John McCain came under fire during the 2008 election for calling the late Jerry Falwell an "agent of intolerance?"  Now, I'm not a big McCain fan, but he nailed it that time.  Of course, the Republican base cried bloody murder, and McCain had to backpedal like mad and finally make nicey-nicey with Falwell.   Intolerant?  No, not Falwell, leader of the former "Moral Majority," who stated, "If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being."  By far my favorite Falwell quote, however, is, "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools.  The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them.  What a happy day that will be!"  Well, Jerry, I'm glad you thought you'd enjoy it.  Me, I'll be living in Ecuador.  And lest you think that Falwell's views died with him, allow me to point out that at least two of the current presidential candidates -- Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann -- are Jerry Falwell's spiritual children, openly espousing Dominionism and a collapse of the church/state barrier.

And we’re supposed to give these people respect, to treat them as if their views were somehow reflective of reality, to handle their religious ideologies with kid gloves?  Bullshit.  If the Saudis' bloodthirsty, medieval zealotry is worthy of scorn, then so is the nonsense spouted by the likes of Robertson, Falwell, and those who follow them.  Why is one of them a travesty, but the other a glorious religion?  If my Invisible Friend tells me what to do, it’s perfectly reasonable; if your Invisible friend tells you what to do, it’s ridiculous, a pagan superstition, possibly blasphemous.  Maybe it’s even inspired by Satan -- just in case you felt the need to supplement your Invisible Friend with an Invisible Enemy.

Okay, so I sound hostile and cynical.  Maybe I am, although I really do try to avoid cynicism if I can.  I just am constantly astonished at how, despite our veneer of technology and civilization, most of us are still not much further along than Ogg and Thak, sacrificing mammoths on the altar of the Thunder God, and bashing the other cavemen on the heads with clubs when they say the words of the Mammoth Sacrifice Rite in the wrong order.

Death by urban legend

A recent article on LiveScience, the science blurb news site, asks the question, “Can You Really Die in Your Nightmares?”

The answer is “probably, but how on earth would anyone know?”  It’s a little like the urban legend that if you dream you’re falling, and you hit the ground in your dream, you’ll die.  Okay, that could be true, but the only way to verify it would be to chat with people who’ve had it happen, which would be a little hard to do because they'd all be dead.

The article goes on to describe SUNDS, or Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome.  This rare disorder, affecting for some reason mostly Southeast Asian males, basically is exactly what it sounds like – in the middle of sleep, these people simply die because their heart stops.  The article implies that the disorder could arise from an abnormality in the neural circuitry between the brain and the heart.  However, a headline saying, “A Few People Die Because The Nerves To The Heart Stop Working” doesn’t have nearly the cachet as implying that the affected individuals died in the midst of a scary dream, à la Nightmare on Elm Street.

I have some issues with sensational headlines and pointless speculation.  It may seem like harmless entertainment, but think about it from the standpoint of a science teacher.  I spend enough time in class trying to disabuse people of “facts” they learned from various sources of dubious credibility without having sites like LiveScience make it worse.  Besides the dying-if-you-dream-you-hit-the-ground thing, here are a few other urban legends that retain currency despite repeated debunking:

1) Daddy-longlegs have a really horrible venom, enough to kill you INSTANTLY, except that fortunately their fangs are too weak to penetrate human skin.  But if they could, they’d be the deadliest spider in the world.

2) Don’t throw rice at weddings, because if birds ate it, it would expand in their stomachs and they would explode like little feathery grenades.

3) The appearance of a “dark circle” around the moon means that we are going to have a period of acid rain.  Being caught in acid rain will give you skin cancer.

4) Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners cause lupus erythematosis and multiple sclerosis, and there is a systematic government cover-up to keep the public from knowing about it.

5) Pepperoni, and other salted/preserved meats, contain ground-up earthworms, and it SAYS SO RIGHT ON THE LABEL.


Okay, I’m hopeful that none of my readers actually believed any of these, even prior to this post, but in the interest of taking no chances, here are my standard responses to students who make these claims:

1) Apparently the whole daddy-longlegs thing apparently came about because there is a mildly toxic spider native to western Europe that is called the daddy-longlegs, and its superficial resemblance to the North American daddy-longlegs (actually not even a true spider, more accurately a harvestman) led to the confusion.  North American daddy-longlegs are harmless to anything larger than a mosquito.

2) Seed-eating birds in their natural environment eat all sorts of grains, including rice; in fact, in Asia, birds are a major pest in rice fields.  I have yet to hear of a single one exploding messily in mid-air.

3) I have also yet to hear of the moon at night not having a dark circle around it.  The night sky is, more often than not, dark.  There’s no connection between it being dark at night, and an incoming bout of acid rain.  Nor does acid rain cause skin cancer.  Lemonade, for example, is far more acidic than most acid rain, and I have never heard of anyone getting skin cancer from being splashed with lemonade.

4) Some people consume aspartame and get lupus or MS.  Some people consume aspartame and don’t get either.   Some people don’t consume aspartame and get lupus or MS.  Some people don’t consume aspartame and don’t get either.  There you are.  Also, I seriously doubt that the government is involved in some massive artificial-sweetener conspiracy.  They have much better things to do with their time and the public’s money, such as holding a Senate hearing to determine whether the pace of the economic recovery is "dismaying," "distressing," or just "disappointing."

5) The only explanation I’ve heard for the earthworms-in-pepperoni thing is that some semi-literate or another thought that sodium erythrorbate, a preservative, was the chemical name for earthworms.  My general opinion is that if you think that sodium erythrorbate is the chemical name for earthworms because “erythrorbate” and “earthworms” contain some of the same letters, you are dumb enough that my feeble attempt herein to combat your ignorance is doomed to failure.


Anyway.  I realize that I’m coming off as a grumpy curmudgeon here.  This is partly because I am a grumpy curmudgeon.  It is also because I feel like I spend enough time in class attempting to remedy ignorance without the media making it worse.  So if you have ever been guilty of forwarding a link to a website which implies that spiders will explode if they eat artificially-sweetened ground-up earthworms when there’s a dark circle around the moon, I’d appreciate it if you’d just cease and desist.  Thank you.

Woo-woo weekend shorts

Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch it's shaping up to be a busy weekend.

First, we have a report from Quebec of a UFO abducting someone's dog.  The report, which was filed with MUFON (The Mutual UFO Network) yesterday, reads as follows:

I was outside shoveling snow when I heard a weird sound. That's when i looked in the air and saw something hovering above my house.  It was clearly a UFO because it was too close to be anything else. It was a coppery, golden color with flashing red lights.  I felt privileged that I was witnessing this rare event.  Then my dog went around front and the UFO took it up through a beam and dropped it backed down about a half hour later. Weirdly my dog was completely unharmed and shortly after the UFO left leaving a tail as it flew away.

I find a few things interesting about this report.  First, isn't it interesting how "UFO" has ceased being an acronym and has become a word?  The eyewitness states that the "something" seen hovering above the house was "clearly a UFO," as if (s)he has forgotten what the "U" in "UFO" stands for.  It's as if I saw something sitting in my front yard, and I called the police, and when asked to describe it I said, "It was clearly something sitting in my front yard."

To be fair, (s)he goes on to give more details, including a "coppery, golden color" and "flashing red lights."  But the fun part is when the dog gets abducted.  I think that if aliens ever came to our house, they might well decide that our Border Collie, Doolin, was in fact the Resident Intelligent Life Form, because she spends most of her time herding the rest of us around and looking extremely worried that she may have Forgotten Something Important.  Doolin doesn't have OCD; she has CDO, because if she had OCD she'd worry because the letters weren't in alphabetical order.  It would be truly terrifying if aliens actually abducted her, though, because within minutes she'd have all the aliens corralled into a corner of the spaceship, and would be handling the controls herself.  The next thing you know, we'd have reports of flocks of sheep being herded from the air by a dog flying a spacecraft, and the Air Force would have to be called out to stop her.

Which, now that I think of it, sounds like a great plot for a movie, if any of my readers are scriptwriters. 


Next, we have a report from Phu Yen province in Vietnam, where students in a school dorm are complaining about a haunted toilet.

Phan Van Tho, headmaster of the Son Hoa Ethnic Boarding High School in Son Hoa District. has reported that one of the dorm toilets is causing students to act oddly if they use it.  The first victim, a student named Pa Ho Luon, was coming back to his room after using the toilet, and suddenly fell down, started scratching at the wall, and "spoke in a nonsense language no one could understand."  Then he fainted.  After being taken to the hospital, Luon recovered, and told authorities that his strange behavior was because he had "seen a ghost in the toilet."

Since Luon's experience, twelve other students have had similar symptoms after using the "haunted toilet."

Well.  First, I have to say that if I was a ghost, I can't imagine why I would hang around in a toilet.  Presumably being a ghost, you have a choice of where to haunt, and I certainly can think of better places to park yourself.  But given that I'm not really an expert regarding the criteria by which ghosts choose sites to haunt, I'll let that go.  A more interesting question is to consider what would have happened in the US had a student babbled incoherently and then passed out, and then woke up with a story of meeting a ghost; we'd have guffawed in his face and then said, "No, really, what kind of drugs were you on?"  But being that this is Vietnam, where drug use is frowned upon (and by "frowned upon" I mean "something you can get hanged for doing") it's no real wonder that the students and the schoolmaster were all eager to jump at the "ghost in the toilet" theory.


If you think I'm wrong about how people would react to this kind of thing in the US, just ask Mount Gilead (Ohio) police officer Joseph Hughes, who was arrested for stealing public property, including an air conditioner that said "Auditor's Office" on it.  When put on trial for the thefts, he mounted a novel defense; the basement where the stolen goods were found had a "paranormal presence," and that "paranormal presence" had "forced him to take the items unconsciously, and bring them back to the basement."  (Read the whole story here.)

I think the whole contention is screamingly funny.  So, a specter told this guy, "Bring me... an AIR CONDITIONER," and the guy went and did it, coming back to the basement carrying it like some kind of sacrificial offering.  "Here is the air conditioner you requested, O Great Paranormal Presence.  What else do you require?"  "Bring me... a COFFEE MAKER.  And not one of those pathetic little two-cup jobs, either.  Let it be...  A TEN-CUP PROGRAMMABLE MR. COFFEE.  And hurry up, because I need a cup and I'm getting kind of cranky."

Not surprisingly, the jury wasn't buying it, and Hughes was found guilty, and is currently serving time in the Mount Gilead Jail.


It's no surprise that they caught the guy, honestly.  If you looked at the story, you saw that he's bald, and bald people simply don't have the intuition that the rest of us hairier folk have.  At least that's the contention of the United Truth Seekers, who believe that long hair helps us to "channel psychic energy" and acts as "exteriorized nerves," that relay "vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex."  This, they say, is why the Native Americans used to let their hair grow long, and is what gave rise to the story of Samson and Delilah.  (Read the whole story here.)

Well, from my own personal experience, I can say that I have had more than one bout of long hair.  I am blessed with unusually thick hair, so when I say I had long hair, you shouldn't think "neat ponytail;" you should more think "lion's mane."  And I can unequivocally say that when I had long hair I felt younger, stronger, and healthier than I do now, so I think we can check off this theory as proven.

What I found especially wonderful about this article was the series of comments from readers that followed.  I'll excerpt several of the better ones below:

Much food for thought here.  Such as a study on the fashion of haircuts through the ages and how it impacted on the enlightenment or otherwise of that particular society?  For instance, in these days of short haircuts for men and covered hair for women, how many wars are we involved in at the moment?

Maybe this explains why women are more intuitive than men... Also, when cutting the hair of female beings became widespread, a proportionate increase was observed everywhere in what they call 'women's diseases,' that is, various sorts of inflammation of the sexual organs, such as 'vaginitis,' 'uteritis,' 'ovaritis,' as well as 'fibrous tumors' and 'cancer.'

Cutting of hair is a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems.  It is also a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds.  It contributes to sexual frustration.

Bald guys would seem to be at a disadvantage here, but bald guys have more body hair, so it all evens out in the gene pool.

I'm a mind body and spirit teacher and would like to add that the human hair is also where we store surplus energy or chi for our body.  When you reach great states of peace/enlightenment the body starts to secrete what Taoist masters call the golden elixir.  This is literally the fountain of youth in spirituality.

So, you can acquire from all of this a number of take-home lessons, the most important of which is, "You people are wingnuts.  Please don't reproduce."


So anyway, there we have it... the weekend wrap-up from Worldwide Wacko Watch.  Canine abductions, haunted toilets, spirit-prompted thefts, and the hair as a psychic antenna.  Thanks to the faithful readers who sent me the links to those stories... keep those cards and letters coming.  As for me, I think I'm going to go make sure my dog is still asleep in her bed.  My hair just picked up a disturbance in The Force.   Of course, that may just be the ghost in the upstairs bathroom demanding that I bring him an air conditioner.