In a surprising coup, scientists in Italy have done a study, sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church, and have concluded that the Shroud of Turin is authentic.
The scientists also announced that they'd done experiments concluding that the Pope was infallible and that confession to a priest really works.
Okay, I made that part up, but really. You're trying to convince me that an experiment could prove that this was the burial cloth of Christ? And that somehow, the fact that the experiments were conducted with the blessing of the Vatican didn't bias the outcome?
Apparently the answer to both of these questions is "yes," because Paolo di Lazzaro, head of the team that did the investigation, came just short of stating it outright. "The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin, has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining ... is impossible to obtain in a laboratory," di Lazzaro told reporters. "When one talks about a flash of light being able to color a piece of linen in the same way as the Shroud, discussion inevitably touches on things like miracles and resurrection. But as scientists, we were concerned only with verifiable scientific processes. We hope our results can open up a philosophical and theological debate but we will leave the conclusions to the experts, and ultimately to the conscience of individuals."
*wink wink nudge nudge*
So what we have here is our old friend Argument from Ignorance, wrapped up nicely in a piece of ancient linen cloth. What evidence do the scientists actually have? Well, after analysis, they concluded that they had no idea how the marks were made. Conclusion: it must have been the burial cloth of Christ.
If you look at the scientific studies of the Shroud, it turns out that it's not quite that simple. Starting with the fact that a carbon-dating study done in 1988 dated the linen cloth to between 1260 and 1390. Various other studies have attempted to account for the stains on the cloth as iron oxide, tempera paint, treatment with acid, or due to a technique called "dust transfer." Some skeptics have attributed the piece to Leonardo da Vinci.
Each of those has been answered by Shroud devotees as false, and the argument has bounced back and forth with the regularity of a tennis ball during Wimbledon. "It is Jesus' burial cloth. Attempting to replicate the image using iron oxide haven't worked!" "No, it's not. The features of the man are wrong. It looks like a Gothic painting, with elongated limbs and narrow facial features! It's a fake!" "No, it's not! It looks like a photographic negative, as if the image was made by light coming from Jesus' body!" "That could be the result of natural processes!"
Oh, c'mon, people. Let's just step back a moment, okay? What do we know?
The Shroud was made from linen, an organic fiber. As such, carbon dating should work fairly well on it. However, the Shroud was nearly destroyed in a fire that occurred in the church that housed it in 1532. Fires produce smoke, smoke contains carbon, and there's some opinion that the soot residues could render the carbon-dating procedure inaccurate. The historical origins of the Shroud are, well, shrouded in mystery -- the earliest reasonably certain mention of it was in 1352. From the 15th century, its whereabouts are well documented.
My point here: what do we really know about the Shroud, in the scientific sense of factual knowledge? Not too bloody much. Therefore, as befits proper skeptics, our position should be simple: we don't know. Espousing either camp's views is unwarranted, given the fact that we've got almost no really hard evidence to go on. Could the fiber be older than the carbon dating tests indicated? Possibly. Is the image's origin enigmatic? Certainly. Past that... we can't say.
It's a source of annoyance to me that so many people seem not to be able to withhold voicing an opinion. It's almost as if everyone has to have an opinion about everything, whether or not they have any evidence, or even a good logical argument, to back it up. My stance has always been that I am perfectly willing to suspend judgment indefinitely if I need to -- until the evidence drives me to one side or the other. Until that time, I'm perfectly comfortable saying, "The jury's still out on that one."
This seems to be intensely uncomfortable for a lot of folks, but the fact is, it's an essential characteristic for a good scientist. There's only one thing that should matter, and that's where the facts lead. Other than that, it's okay to remain in ignorance. In fact, it's the only honest thing to do.
Or, as my dad used to say: The world would be a much better place if there were more facts and fewer opinions.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
The emulation of creativity
In yet another step toward rendering humans superfluous, programmer Selmer Bringsjord of Renssselaer Polytechnic Institute has now programmed a computer to write fiction.
The program, called "Brutus," is designed to take the basics of plot, character, setting, and dialogue, and devise a story. The result, Bringsjord says, is "pretty convincing."
As an aspiring writer of fiction, the whole thing gives me pause. I've often wondered what it was that was going on in my head when I come up with a story -- am I, like Brutus, simply following some kind of internal algorithm, albeit hopefully a more complex one? How would you tell?
"There's a certain bag of tricks that Brutus had for saying things at the right time to convince the reader that 'boy, there is something really deep linguistically going on here,'" Bringsjord said. On the other hand, he isn't convinced that what Brutus is doing is the same as human creativity. "The machine is just doing what you've programmed it to do. If a machine is creative, the designer of the system — knowing the algorithms involved, data structure — is completely mystified by how the output came out. In my opinion, if that's not the case, then we're just cloning our own intelligence."
I'm not so sure. Consider Stephen Thaler's "Creative Machine," an artificial neural net that has composed music, designed snack foods, and solved problems in military science. The Creative Machine is capable of learning -- as Thaler has shown by introducing "noise" into the system to disrupt a rote solution, and watching what the program does. The Creative Machine is able to adapt, and find alternate ways to use the information it has. "And therein is where discovery takes place," Thaler said. "It's not in the rote memories that we have committed to memory, it's in the generalization of all those memories into concepts and plans of action."
I'm beginning to think we're getting close to creating a true artificial intelligence -- a software that can flexibly respond, learn, and create. This idea repels a lot of people, and fascinates others. Some folks believe there has to be more to the human mind -- there's got to be something inside our skulls that is more than just the sum of our neural firings, and therefore would make it impossible to emulate with a machine. The two basic attitudes toward this problem were parsed out by philosopher John Searle and mathematician Alan Turing.
Searle, for his part, thought that artificial intelligence was impossible, and used his "Chinese Room" analogy to illustrate why. Imagine a man in a sealed room, with an English/Chinese dictionary and a book of the grammatical rules of Chinese. His task: he will be handed a string of Chinese characters through a slot in the wall; he will use the dictionary and rule book to convert it to a string of English characters and stick the result out through the slot. This is what Searle said that computers do; they are simply converting one string of characters to another in a rote fashion, however complex it might look from the outside. Because there's nothing "more" in the computer's circuits -- just as there's no true understanding going on in the man translating the characters -- there is no real intelligence there.
It doesn't matter, says Turing; all that matters is the output. The Turing test hinges on whether a sufficiently smart human could be fooled. We have no access to our own wiring, either; what's going on in our brain might just be a sophisticated set of electrical signals. Or maybe there's something "more." Whatever it is, we don't have access to it at its fundamental level. So we have to judge by the output -- same as we do with our fellow humans. Therefore, if a computer program could respond to a questioner in a way that fools him/her into thinking that the program is an intelligent human responder -- it is by definition intelligent.
I've always been in Turing's camp, personally; I don't think it's ever really been demonstrated that the "something more" that Searle says computers don't have actually exists in my brain, much less what that "something more" might be. I know that I'm often mystified as to where my own creative impulses come from -- when I write, I feel like the characters and story come from some enigmatic source, and they often feel like they spring from my head fully-formed. There is seldom a feeling of "working it out," the way you might a math problem. The ideas are just... "there." (Or not. Some days, the ideas won't come, for equally puzzling reasons.)
But whatever the truth of human intelligence and creativity, machines have just taken one further step toward emulating it. And I, for one, find that fascinating. I wonder -- by creating these machines, and studying them, what might we learn about how our own brain works?
The program, called "Brutus," is designed to take the basics of plot, character, setting, and dialogue, and devise a story. The result, Bringsjord says, is "pretty convincing."
As an aspiring writer of fiction, the whole thing gives me pause. I've often wondered what it was that was going on in my head when I come up with a story -- am I, like Brutus, simply following some kind of internal algorithm, albeit hopefully a more complex one? How would you tell?
"There's a certain bag of tricks that Brutus had for saying things at the right time to convince the reader that 'boy, there is something really deep linguistically going on here,'" Bringsjord said. On the other hand, he isn't convinced that what Brutus is doing is the same as human creativity. "The machine is just doing what you've programmed it to do. If a machine is creative, the designer of the system — knowing the algorithms involved, data structure — is completely mystified by how the output came out. In my opinion, if that's not the case, then we're just cloning our own intelligence."
I'm not so sure. Consider Stephen Thaler's "Creative Machine," an artificial neural net that has composed music, designed snack foods, and solved problems in military science. The Creative Machine is capable of learning -- as Thaler has shown by introducing "noise" into the system to disrupt a rote solution, and watching what the program does. The Creative Machine is able to adapt, and find alternate ways to use the information it has. "And therein is where discovery takes place," Thaler said. "It's not in the rote memories that we have committed to memory, it's in the generalization of all those memories into concepts and plans of action."
I'm beginning to think we're getting close to creating a true artificial intelligence -- a software that can flexibly respond, learn, and create. This idea repels a lot of people, and fascinates others. Some folks believe there has to be more to the human mind -- there's got to be something inside our skulls that is more than just the sum of our neural firings, and therefore would make it impossible to emulate with a machine. The two basic attitudes toward this problem were parsed out by philosopher John Searle and mathematician Alan Turing.
Searle, for his part, thought that artificial intelligence was impossible, and used his "Chinese Room" analogy to illustrate why. Imagine a man in a sealed room, with an English/Chinese dictionary and a book of the grammatical rules of Chinese. His task: he will be handed a string of Chinese characters through a slot in the wall; he will use the dictionary and rule book to convert it to a string of English characters and stick the result out through the slot. This is what Searle said that computers do; they are simply converting one string of characters to another in a rote fashion, however complex it might look from the outside. Because there's nothing "more" in the computer's circuits -- just as there's no true understanding going on in the man translating the characters -- there is no real intelligence there.
It doesn't matter, says Turing; all that matters is the output. The Turing test hinges on whether a sufficiently smart human could be fooled. We have no access to our own wiring, either; what's going on in our brain might just be a sophisticated set of electrical signals. Or maybe there's something "more." Whatever it is, we don't have access to it at its fundamental level. So we have to judge by the output -- same as we do with our fellow humans. Therefore, if a computer program could respond to a questioner in a way that fools him/her into thinking that the program is an intelligent human responder -- it is by definition intelligent.
I've always been in Turing's camp, personally; I don't think it's ever really been demonstrated that the "something more" that Searle says computers don't have actually exists in my brain, much less what that "something more" might be. I know that I'm often mystified as to where my own creative impulses come from -- when I write, I feel like the characters and story come from some enigmatic source, and they often feel like they spring from my head fully-formed. There is seldom a feeling of "working it out," the way you might a math problem. The ideas are just... "there." (Or not. Some days, the ideas won't come, for equally puzzling reasons.)
But whatever the truth of human intelligence and creativity, machines have just taken one further step toward emulating it. And I, for one, find that fascinating. I wonder -- by creating these machines, and studying them, what might we learn about how our own brain works?
Monday, December 19, 2011
The strange case of the glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl
In the past week, I've written about a few cases for which an application of the sharp edge of Ockham's Razor would be advisable -- such as blaming your troubles on your poodle's being possessed by demons, deciding that a shadow on a NASA photograph is a cloaked alien spacecraft, and giving credit to stories of a "zone of silence" inhabited by blond alien guys wearing yellow rain slickers.
There should be a name for the opposite of Ockham's Razor, shouldn't there? Taking the available evidence, giving it careful consideration, and then running right off the cliff with it -- coming up with the weirdest, most convoluted, most difficult-to-swallow explanation you can.
Take the case of the the strange observations of a flying creature reported last week by a woman in Pennsylvania. She states that she saw a "strange glowing thing at night" that flew over her car while she was driving. It was "quite large," she said, and "was not too terribly high off the ground;" and "(it) seemed to be lit, or glowing."
Okay, that's the evidence; one woman's claim of a strange sighting. From this, what hypotheses can we devise?
On second thought, there is a name for the opposite of Ockham's Razor; it's called confirmation bias -- the acceptance of miniscule pieces of evidence to support a theory you already had decided was true. It's why believers in astrology will crow about the one newspaper horoscope a year that happens to be reasonably accurate, and ignore all the ones that aren't; it's why the religious will proclaim it a miracle when the ill person they prayed for got better, and ignore all the people who were prayed for and died in horrible agony. Maybe at this point I should tell you the website the glowing pterodactyl story appeared on.
It's called LivePterosaur.
Yup, there's an entire website devoted to the idea that pteranodons and other pterodactyloids have survived through the millions of years since the last fossil evidence, conveniently leaving not a trace behind in all of the geologic strata from the intervening eras, and now are gliding their way over the wilds of Pennsylvania. A lot of the evidence, if you can call it that, comes from native legends, just as the totality of the "evidence" for Mokele-Mbembe and the Bunyip being dinosaur survivals comes from tales from the natives of central Africa and Australia, respectively. The pterodactyl legend is apparently especially to be found in Papua New Guinea, where a flying creature called the "Ropen" supposedly haunts the rain forest; but there's the "Wawanar" of western Australia and the "Kongamato" of Africa, and also the unnamed sighting in Cuba where it presumably was called the "holy mother of god what the hell is that thing?", only in Spanish.
Did these people actually see something strange? Could be. There are plenty of big birds around; in the tropics, we also have fruit bats, one group of which (the "flying foxes" of the genus Pteropus) can have a wingspan of five feet. Could they have been lying? Drunk? Crazy? Sure. Could it just be a story, and no more true than tales of unicorns and dragons? Sure. And I think any of those is more likely than it being a pterodactyl.
Now, don't mistake me; no one would think it was cooler than I would if it turned out that some kind of pterodactyloid actually had survived all these years. I'm also fully aware of the times that it's turned out that something has made it to the present day, after years of only being known from the fossil record. (The most famous being the coelacanth, the prehistoric lobe-finned fish that turned out not to be so prehistoric after all.) I just don't think that it's all that likely that somehow a giant bioluminescent pterodactyl is gliding around in the woods of Pennsylvania, and has escaped all notice of the biologists until now. It's slightly more likely that one could live in the forests of Papua New Guinea, or central Africa, given the remoteness and the dense woods; but only slightly. The likelihood of it being a tall tale is orders of magnitude greater.
So, sorry to be a party-pooper, but I really do think that the lady in Pennsylvania saw a barn owl. Or else should be more careful to take her medication regularly. Whatever it was she saw, I'd be willing to bet a significant amount of money that it wasn't a glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl.
There should be a name for the opposite of Ockham's Razor, shouldn't there? Taking the available evidence, giving it careful consideration, and then running right off the cliff with it -- coming up with the weirdest, most convoluted, most difficult-to-swallow explanation you can.
Take the case of the the strange observations of a flying creature reported last week by a woman in Pennsylvania. She states that she saw a "strange glowing thing at night" that flew over her car while she was driving. It was "quite large," she said, and "was not too terribly high off the ground;" and "(it) seemed to be lit, or glowing."
Okay, that's the evidence; one woman's claim of a strange sighting. From this, what hypotheses can we devise?
- She saw an ordinary flying creature -- possibly a barn owl, whose silent flight and all-white underside could easily trick the eye into thinking that it was a glowing creature in the air.
- She was making up the story for her own reasons, possibly for the attention or because she likes to tell weird stories -- i.e., she was lying.
- She's a wingnut.
- She saw a glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl.
On second thought, there is a name for the opposite of Ockham's Razor; it's called confirmation bias -- the acceptance of miniscule pieces of evidence to support a theory you already had decided was true. It's why believers in astrology will crow about the one newspaper horoscope a year that happens to be reasonably accurate, and ignore all the ones that aren't; it's why the religious will proclaim it a miracle when the ill person they prayed for got better, and ignore all the people who were prayed for and died in horrible agony. Maybe at this point I should tell you the website the glowing pterodactyl story appeared on.
It's called LivePterosaur.
Yup, there's an entire website devoted to the idea that pteranodons and other pterodactyloids have survived through the millions of years since the last fossil evidence, conveniently leaving not a trace behind in all of the geologic strata from the intervening eras, and now are gliding their way over the wilds of Pennsylvania. A lot of the evidence, if you can call it that, comes from native legends, just as the totality of the "evidence" for Mokele-Mbembe and the Bunyip being dinosaur survivals comes from tales from the natives of central Africa and Australia, respectively. The pterodactyl legend is apparently especially to be found in Papua New Guinea, where a flying creature called the "Ropen" supposedly haunts the rain forest; but there's the "Wawanar" of western Australia and the "Kongamato" of Africa, and also the unnamed sighting in Cuba where it presumably was called the "holy mother of god what the hell is that thing?", only in Spanish.
Did these people actually see something strange? Could be. There are plenty of big birds around; in the tropics, we also have fruit bats, one group of which (the "flying foxes" of the genus Pteropus) can have a wingspan of five feet. Could they have been lying? Drunk? Crazy? Sure. Could it just be a story, and no more true than tales of unicorns and dragons? Sure. And I think any of those is more likely than it being a pterodactyl.
Now, don't mistake me; no one would think it was cooler than I would if it turned out that some kind of pterodactyloid actually had survived all these years. I'm also fully aware of the times that it's turned out that something has made it to the present day, after years of only being known from the fossil record. (The most famous being the coelacanth, the prehistoric lobe-finned fish that turned out not to be so prehistoric after all.) I just don't think that it's all that likely that somehow a giant bioluminescent pterodactyl is gliding around in the woods of Pennsylvania, and has escaped all notice of the biologists until now. It's slightly more likely that one could live in the forests of Papua New Guinea, or central Africa, given the remoteness and the dense woods; but only slightly. The likelihood of it being a tall tale is orders of magnitude greater.
So, sorry to be a party-pooper, but I really do think that the lady in Pennsylvania saw a barn owl. Or else should be more careful to take her medication regularly. Whatever it was she saw, I'd be willing to bet a significant amount of money that it wasn't a glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
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:
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.
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."
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.
Friday, December 16, 2011
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:
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.
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)
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.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
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 guÃjolas," 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.
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 guÃjolas," 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.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
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:
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.
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.
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.
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