Female yeti captured?

Attention Yeti aficionados; some folks in Russia have captured a female Yeti, and are holding it in a cage.

At least that's what the video clip (here) seems to imply.  It shows a video taken, apparently with a hand-held recorder, of a television showing a news broadcast.  First, we see the broadcaster, and then it cuts to some scenes outdoors, and finally to a guy speaking Russian -- and in the background is a cage containing what appears to be a Yeti.

The problem for me is that I don't speak Russian, so I have no idea what any of them are saying.  For all I know, they could be saying, "Hey, y'all, take a look at this wingnut we caught walking around in the woods with a gorilla suit!  We threw him into a cage at the zoo to teach him a lesson."  I'm reminded of the story from 2009 that left a lot of news agencies (including some big ones like Fox) red-faced -- the "ghost city" story from Huanshan City, China, that claimed that there was the mirage of a phantom city that appeared in the fog, and was photographed and videotaped from a bridge over the Xa'nan River.  In the video, several Chinese folks were questioned by reporters, and their comments were translated as being amazed, perplexed, mystified -- where did this city come from?  What is it?

Then the woo-woos got involved, as they are wont to do, and it was linked to everything from HAARP to Project Blue Beam, the alleged conspiracy by which NASA is going to create a New World Order with the Antichrist at its head.  (I'm not making any of this up.)  How creating a phantom city in the middle of a Chinese river would further that aim, I have no idea, but rationality is not these people's forte.

In any case, the explanation is far simpler, as you might have guessed.  The buildings and spires and trees in the "ghost city" are actually part of the real city of Huanshan; there is an island in the middle of the Xa'nan River that has an amusement park, and there'd recently been a flood, and there was a lot of mist and fog, and the people on the bridge were saying how surreal it looked.  "Hey, look at the island and amusement park," they were basically saying.  "With all this fog, it looks like a ghost city, or something."  But it was mistranslated, and the whole woo-woo contingent took off at a run.

Here, with the Yeti video -- I don't know.  My general thought is, if they'd really captured a Yeti, it would have been all over the news, not just on an obscure video clip that popped up on Cryptomundo.  Especially considering how hard the Russians have been working lately to prove to everyone that the Yeti exists -- if they had a live one, you can bet that they wouldn't just hush it up.

But I could be wrong, of course.  If any of my readers speak Russian, I'd be curious to find out what they're really saying, rather than just speculating.  Given how far off the beam the Chinese ghost city story went, I'd rather base what I think on firmer knowledge than what we've got.  In any case, keep your eye in this direction, cryptozoology buffs -- it could be that the Russians are about to produce the evidence we've all been waiting for.

"Gotcha" proselytizing

A frequent reader and commenter on Skeptophilia sent me a note a few days ago, with a link and the cryptic comment, "Gordon, I think you need to take a look at this."  At first, I thought the link was to my own website -- but underneath the link was an explanation that the individual had discovered the link by accidentally mistyping the website address as skeptophilia.blogpsot.com.  (Bet it took you a while to notice the misspelling, didn't it?  It did me.)

So, anyway, I clicked on the link, and was brought here.

To say that I found this a little alarming was an understatement.  Had someone gone to the lengths of purchasing a website name one letter off from mine, to catch off guard the unwary (and possibly uneasy) skeptics and agnostics who thought they were going to visit a site devoted to rationalism?  I've been the target of negative comments before, from angry believers in everything from homeopathy to hauntings, and certainly have gotten my share of hate mail from the vehemently religious contingent who are bothered by the fact that I am an atheist who is completely, and confidently, "out," and am unapologetic about teaching evolution in my biology classroom.  But this seemed kind of out there even for those folks.

Fortunately, my wife, who is blessed with a better-than-her-fair-share amount of common sense and a good grounding in technology, suggested that I try to type in SomethingElse.blogpsot.com.  So I did.  I first tried the address for my fiction blog, but put in the deliberate misspelling for "blogspot."  It brought me to the same place.  Then I tried "CreationismIsNonsense.blogpsot.com."  Same thing.

So apparently, the owner of this ultra-fundamentalist website, with its babble about the Rapture and Armageddon and the literal truth of the bible, had just bought the domain name "blogpsot.com," so that any time anyone makes that particular misspelling in heading to their favorite blog, it takes them to that site.  I was relieved, actually; the thought that someone would go to all that trouble to target me in particular was a little alarming.  (And evidently the fact that on the homepage of the "blogpsot" site, there is a link for "The World's Biggest Skeptic" is just a coincidence.)

However, you have to wonder if the person who owns the site really is laboring under the mistaken impression that this is an effective proselytizing tool.  Can you really imagine someone who is trying to check out the latest post on his/her favorite blog on, say, sewing, and lands here -- and then suddenly goes all glassy-eyed, and says, "Good heavens.  I get it now.  The bible is true, the Rapture is coming, and I'd better repent right now."

No, neither can I.

And when you think about it, the door-to-door religion salesmen that periodically show up in our neighborhoods are the same kind of thing, aren't they?  A little less covert and sneaky, that's all.  But they're trying to accomplish the same thing -- catching you off guard, getting a foot in the door, spreading the message. 

And my previous comment about its being an ineffective tool is probably irrelevant, really.  It's like spam emails.  If you send out a million emails, and your success rate is 0.1%, you've still made money, because of the extremely low overhead.  Same here; you get volunteers (in the case of the door-to-door folks) or unsuspecting drop-ins (in the case of the website).  Most of the target individuals say no, or hit the "Back" button -- but the fraction of a percent that don't are your payoff.

The whole thing pisses me off, frankly, because it's so sneaky.  Even if it wasn't targeted at me specifically, it just seems like a skeevy way to get converts.  But to a lot of these folks, how you convert people is unimportant -- the essential thing is to convert them in the first place.  If you can grab people when their rational faculties are not expecting it, all the better -- because, after all, rationality is the last thing they want to engage.

End of the year woo-woo shorts

The year is rapidly drawing to a close, and here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we're entering the lead-up to New Year's Eve by following a few breaking stories.

First, an Ottawa woman who identifies herself only as "Kayla" has reported seeing the ghost of her pet hamster.

In the story, reported in Paranormal Phenomena, Kayla states, "I've had my dwarf hamster for almost two years.  I went up to my room to put food into his little dish.  All of a sudden I saw a brown blurry 'thing' float upwards out of the cage opening.  I thought I should probably make sure he was okay. I checked under the shavings, where he usually sleeps, and found him motionless in the wheel.  I'm devastated, but this was the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me."

Of course, we here at WWW want to be the first to offer our condolences to Kayla on the loss of her beloved pet.  But it does bring up an interesting question.  If hamsters have immortal souls, do goldfish?  How about house flies?  How about tapeworms?  I don't know about you,  but I have a hard time imagine there being a "gray blurry 'thing'" floating up off my arm every time I slap a mosquito.  But maybe I'm just being narrow-minded.


But speaking of dead stuff, check out this story, wherein we find that researchers at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland have just completed DNA testing of a "Yeti finger" from Pangboche Monastery, Nepal.  You may recall the story of the finger; it had resided in the monastery since who-knows-when, but was procured for science when the aptly-named Tom Slick convinced the monks to allow him to take it.  It ended up in the Hunterian Museum in London, but a few months ago a sliver of it was sent to the RZS for analysis.  The conclusion?

The finger is human.  No doubt about it.  So as far as hard evidence of the Yeti goes, we're still waiting.


On the topic of the absence of hard evidence, we have the devastating prediction by noted wingnut Dan Green (no relation, so far as I know, to Dan Brown -- although Dan Green's ideas make The DaVinci Code seem simplistic by comparison).  The whole thing, outlined here, involves Lincoln Cathedral and the prophecy in Matthew 24 15-26: "So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel standing in the holy place let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains."  We have the following pieces of evidence:

• The cathedral close houses the famous Lincoln Imp statue, a marble statue of a demon.
• When the Brits won the World Cup in March 2010, the trophy was brought to nearby Sincil Bank Football Ground for a celebration.  The cup is like the Holy Grail, the blades of the helicopter are like a sword, and "Sincil" sounds a little like "sign, seal."  Like the signs and seals in the Book of Revelation.  Get it?
• There's a mystical link between Lincoln Cathedral and Chartres Cathedral.
• If you scramble the letters of "Chartres," you get "ratchets," which are gears that only turn one direction.

Conclusion: we're irreversibly heading toward fulfilling the prophecy in Matthew, not to mention Revelation, and pretty soon there will be a cataclysm that will result in the treasure of the Templars being found beneath Lincoln Cathedral.

C'mon, you knew the Templars had to show up, somehow.  They always do.  Every time you think they're safely tucked away, never to be seen again, they're back.  They're kind of the Britney Spears of secret societies.


And last, apropos of not much, we have a wonderful post called "Proving Atheists Wrong With Science."  Given that I'm sure that you want to preserve a few brain cells to kill with your favorite libation on New Year's Eve, let me just summarize this stunning argument:

If the average person drinks two liters of water a day, that's about 14 billion liters of water, give or take, consumed per day.  If, as the evolutionists claim, the Earth has hosted life for about three billion years, "we would have drunk about 9.5 times the amount of water on the planet."  Since the oceans aren't empty, this proves that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old.

The post ends with the statement, "Now what, atheists?"  (You'll have to imagine the threatening arm movements that go along with this.)  And we have to admit, the logic of this leaves us speechless, largely because it's hard to talk when you're face down on your keyboard.


So, that's a wrap, here at Worldwide Wacko Watch.  Hamster ghosts, Yeti finger disproved, Templar treasure in Lincoln Cathedral, and the presence of the oceans proves Young Earth Creationism.  We're always on the job, bringing the stories to your doorstep, even if occasionally we have to take a pause for a collective *facepalm.*

Good morning, Starseed, the Earth says hello

Have you always felt kind of out of place, like you didn't quite belong?  Do you have a particular affinity for astronomy?  Most importantly, do you have a fairly tenuous grip on reality?

The answer is here.  You may be an alien.

Of course, they don't like that term; it sounds fairly negative.  They prefer to call themselves "Starseeds."  They are Intelligences that have come to Earth and taken on the guise of humans, and walk among us.  The problem is, because of the pervasive brainwashing that our culture promotes, and the difficulty of being immersed amongst the "energy fields" of so many other beings, many Starseeds have forgotten about their origins, and think they're human.

Are you one?

If you're like to find out, here's a bit of advice posted by Yshatar InaEanna, a Starseed who evidently comes from the Planet of Unpronounceable Letter Combinations, and who writes for a website called International Starseed Network:

The first answer is usually the correct answer. The more you think about it the less you will know. I would say the most important thing is to go within. Familiarize yourself with who you truly are. Then and only then can you begin to seek information of this nature. It is more powerful to validate your own beliefs. All information should always come from within anything else is just a reference. Once you have understood the above figure out what it is you want to know. Always trust your gut instinct. If the information doesn't feel right then it is not your truth. you are your own best guide. Naturally we want to know where we come from.

Um... okay.  My gut instinct tells me that My Truth is that I'm from Louisiana.  But maybe I thought about it too much.

Once you've determined that you are a Starseed, of course the next thing to do is to figure out what star system you're from.  There are a number of highly (and inadvertently) amusing methods that the website suggests in order to determine this.  One simple one is to stare at a star map until one appeals to you, and that's where you're from.  I wish this worked for earthly venues, because given that it's the dead of winter in upstate New York, I've stared at a map and I find Maui really appealing.  So far I haven't vanished in a flash of ectoplasm, to show up on the beach clad in nothing but swim trunks, holding a drink with a little umbrella in it.  But maybe it only works if you're a Starseed, not an, um, "Mauiseed."

Another way is to use "Star Cards," which are these little icons you click on after meditating for a while, and it tells you where you are from.  When I did it, I got Andromeda, along with a lovely photograph of the constellation of Andromeda, and the Andromeda Galaxy.  This caused me to shout at my computer, "Andromeda is a constellation!  Which is a group of stars that only appear to have anything to do with one another from our vantage point here on Earth!  How can you be from an entire constellation?  And the galaxy that's pictured there is 2.5 million light years away, and is composed of millions of stars!"  This tirade caused my border collie, Doolin, to slink around looking extremely guilty.  But, come to think of it, I wonder if she was acting oddly because she knew I'd inadvertently stumbled upon the Starseed Network thing, and thinks I'm on to her.  I've always wondered if she's an alien, given the fact that she's the least doggy dog I have ever known.  She could well be a Canine Starseed, possibly from Sirius if not from the entire constellation of Canis Major, doing a rather poor impression of a terrestrial dog.  It would explain a good bit of her behavior.

But I digress.

The Starseed webpage has a lot of other helpful advice, including How To Tell Your Family You're A Starseed (key point: remember that in the moment of telling them, you're a human, not an extraterrestrial), how to figure out what your mission is (most of them seemed to concentrate on love, selflessness, and empowerment, none of which I can argue with), and not to be worried if your Auric Field interferes with car alarms, cellphones, and street lights.  I encourage you to peruse it.

So, anyway, that's this morning's quick dip into the deep end of the swimming pool.  As for me, I'm going to have another cup of coffee, because I'm expecting a call from Andromeda and I need to have my wits about me.  Also, StarDog here wants me to throw the frisbee for her, probably because it looks like a UFO and reminds her of home.

An atheist considers religious music

During a spare moment when I was not cooking, cleaning, or visiting with family on Christmas Day, I got onto the computer to see what was happening in the world, and found that a friend on Facebook had posted a stunning music video of Annie Lennox performing "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen."  (If you'd like to watch it, which you should, go here.)  This performance is amazing on a number of levels, not the least of which is the use of ancient instruments (hurdy gurdy, tin whistle, tabor); and the fact that I've been secretly in love with Annie Lennox for about twenty years is really only a small part of my appreciation of it.

In any case, a friend of mine pointed out the irony of an outspoken atheist posting a song with an uncompromisingly Christian message on Christmas, and the point wasn't lost on me.  The truth is, however, that I've been known to do the like many times before -- including this incredibly lovely video of 700 singers performing Thomas Tallis' 40-part motet Spem in Alium ("Hope in Another").

It's an interesting question to consider; why an atheist wouldn't be so turned off by the religious message that he wouldn't be able to appreciate the music.  But the truth is, when a piece of music is beautiful, the twining of the lyrics and melody sublime, the performance skillful and passionate, for me the religiosity of the message doesn't get in the way at all.  (It may be easier with performances in other languages -- if you don't understand the Latin, for example, Spem in Alium probably sounds like pure tonality to you, devoid of meaning.)

The fact that I don't think that the tenets of the Christian religion are true does not make me unable to appreciate the beauty it spurred its devotees to create, nor does it somehow make the beautiful ugly.  I was awestruck with the grandeur of York Minster Cathedral, the day I walked the 400-some-odd steps up the central bell tower to the top; the art of such luminaries as Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, Tintoretto, and Bellini are no less brilliant if you think that their subject is myth, not reality.  But music has always spoken to me the most intensely, and if yesterday I listened to Bach's Christmas Oratorio from beginning to end (just as I make a point of listening to The St. Matthew Passion near Easter), I'm not somehow exposing a chink in my atheistic armor.

But just as there's bad popular music, there's bad religious music.  Lots of it.  I find most of the hymns sung in churches these days simply to be devoid of any musically redeeming features whatsoever; call me a medieval throwback, but I don't think religious music has ever achieved the grandeur of the great choral works of Bach and his contemporaries.  (Although Arvo Pärt comes close; listen to this performance of his Magnificat and prepare to be transported.)  So it really is the beauty of the music, and not the message, that matters.

Well, mostly.  Even to me, the majesty of works like Bach's Magnificat in D (still my favorite of all of his choral works; here is a lovely performance of the opening chorus) depends partly upon the fact that the message is religious.  It evokes the unquestioning faith and devotion of a bygone day, with its soaring cathedrals, rainbows of stained glass, and the sonorous vibrations of pipe organs.  The fact that the music is evocative of a different place, culture, and time is part of its loveliness, and even if I am not part of that culture and do not share its beliefs does not make me insensitive to the beauty it created.

So, I realize that it seems contradictory that my CD shelves have so many religious choral works -- and if you find the irony of that to be too hard to manage, I guess that's just the way it goes.  To quote Walt Whitman:  "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)."

Kim Jong Il and the origins of credulity

The death of Kim Jong Il a few days ago has brought the country of North Korea into the news, and a lot of time has been devoted to exploring how the people of this country saw their odd, probably delusional leader -- and how they are viewing his son and heir, Kim Jong Un.

All of it has made me wonder about the origins of credulity.  Is it really possible to brainwash a whole nation?  What fraction of the people of North Korea honestly believe all of the nonsense they're saying -- and how many are just saying it because it's expedient, given the nature of the brutal, repressive regime they are subject to?

Let's look at a few of the things that have been claimed, regarding Kim Jong Il:

• He was born on the sacred mountain, Mount Paektu, and as a baby was recognized as the future "savior of the North Korean people."  At his birth, soldiers inscribed his name on trees and rocks to celebrate his coming ascendancy.
• The first time he ever picked up a bowling ball, he bowled a 300 -- a perfect game.
• He's also miraculously good at golf -- in his first-ever golf game, he hit five holes-in-one, scoring 38 under par.
• The day he died, a Manchurian crane, a traditional symbol of longevity, circled a statue of his father in the city of Hamhung for hours, and then landed, hung its head, and then flew off toward Pyongyang.
• At the moment of his death, the glacier at the top of Mount Paektu "cracked with a deafening roar," and the skies glowed red.

So, I'm reading all of this, and I'm thinking, "They actually believe this stuff?"  Any one of these would have made me say, "Oh, come on," and probably burst out laughing, which is why I would probably not last long if I lived in North Korea, especially given the fact that I'd have followed it up with, "That pudgy little guy with the blotchy face and the weird hair and the gigantic glasses did not score a 38 under par golf game."

I know that mythologizing famous figures is a frequent practice; what I wonder is why common sense doesn't kick in at some point.  You get the impression that all it would take is one person guffawing, and shouting, "That's bullshit!" to blow the whole thing away.  But no one ever does, do they?  Now, I'm not trying to claim that the North Korean people are stupid; and I just don't believe you can brainwash someone so as to remove all traces of common sense without leaving them incapable of functioning.  Somehow, the intensive training these people receive as children, to consider their "Dear Leader" as a god, must create a peculiar blind spot in their logical facilities.  It's as if the principles of rationality work just fine in all venues except for one.

It's fine to use your brain in everyday life; at your job, at the grocery store, while you're driving, while you're home with family.  Everything there operates by the normal rules, science works, common sense works, logic works.  But Dear Leader?  No, Dear Leader can cause birds to fly around, and trigger bizarre geological and atmospheric phenomena, not to mention performing miraculous athletic feats.  And apparently, they all just nod their heads and say, "Yup.  Good old Dear Leader," despite the fact that all of it is clean contrary to the way they know the world works.

Of course, it'd be nice if such holes in rationality were limited to North Korea, but it's not just them, is it?  Mythologizing is hardly limited to the odd figure of Kim Jong Il; it just stands out in starker relief because we haven't been indoctrinated into that particular cult.  We have our own ways of straining credulity to the limit -- specific areas in which so many of us hear impossible, counter-rational nonsense, and sit there nodding and saying, "Yup.  Makes perfect sense."

And here, having thus skated to the edge of the thinnest of thin ice, I will leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Attack of the gargoyles

A couple of days ago, Skeptophilia investigated claims of a glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl in Pennsylvania.  Keeping in the same vein, today's post is about: gargoyles in Chile.

Yes, gargoyles, those scary, weird creatures that adorn many a Gothic church roof.  Bat wings, snarling, fanged muzzle, large eyes with a diabolical leer... what are they, really?

If you said "fictional," tell that to Teresa Abett de la Torre.  De la Torre tells a story (read the entire thing here) of heading from Fuerte Baquedano, the military base where her husband was stationed, to the town of Arica at the north end of the country to visit family.  De la Torre and her husband and kids piled into their car for the long, monotonous drive across the arid Pampa Acha, an especially desolate stretch of the treeless, flat Atacama Desert.  The weather, as usual, was sunny and clear, and they expected to have nothing more than bored children to cope with on the trip.

The first one to notice something odd was one of the daughters, Carmen.  In Carmen's words:

I looked out of the window, and there were two creatures floating in the sky.  I was traveling in the back seat with my brothers, talking, and suddenly everything went dark. Then I told my brother what I was seeing and he told me to keep quiet, because Mom gets nervous. Later I looked through the window and saw some things that looked like birds, with dogs’ heads and back swept wings. My father said they were like gargoyles.

If I saw two flying gargoyles, I think "nervous" would be an understatement.  But that's just me.

But Teresa eventually noticed the creatures, despite the dad and kids' efforts to keep her from getting "nervous."  She described them as "dog-faced kangaroos."  And the day was about to get a whole lot worse, because watching some gargoyles from the air is one thing; having them attack your car is another thing entirely.

According to Teresa, they were all watching the things in the sky when suddenly her husband, Carlos, swerved, and they looked over to see that he'd narrowly missed two more of them, that had "jumped in front of the car."  They avoided colliding with the creatures by a narrow margin, and the creatures gave chase, bounding after them on "strong hind legs."  Carlos, alarmed, sped up.  "Eventually," Teresa said, "we left all four of the beasts behind."

Teresa related that she and the family were terrified to make the return trip, but eventually they had to, and it was uneventful.  At that point, they decided not to tell anyone what they'd seen.  However, when a fellow officer at stationed at Fuerte Baquedano reported seeing a dinosaur on the same stretch of road, the de la Torre family decided to go public, apparently figuring that at least their story wasn't that ridiculous.

By the way, just for the record, I'm not making any of this up.

The story was broken by Scott Corrales of the Institute of Hispanic Ufology.  When it hit the public media, reporters were quick to try to explain away the sightings as bats or ostriches, because we all know how often bats leap around on the ground in front of cars, and how often ostriches fly.

To me, the most interesting part is when the "Mysterious Universe" people got a hold of the story, because then we have an interesting chain of reasoning used; because the two explanations that have been suggested thus far are obviously wrong, our only remaining option is to assume that something paranormal is going on.

We see this in reports of ghosts all the time.  "I heard the noise of footsteps upstairs," our eyewitness says.  "My parents were out for the evening, and I went and looked in my brother's room, and he was asleep in bed.  Therefore, it must have been a ghost!"

Really?  There's no other option you can think of?  We're going to think of two rational, natural explanations, rule them out, and then leap into the supernatural?  I'm reminded of King Arthur pulling the pin on the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch and then counting, "One!  Two!  Five!"

But that's what they do, here.  What did the de la Torre family see?  Was it bats?  No.  Was it ostriches?  No.  Therefore, we are only left with the following possibilities:

1) A flying Chupacabra.
2) A southern relative of the Jersey Devil.

That's it?  It's not possible that they made it up?  That they were the victims of a hoax?  Because they didn't see giant airborne ostriches, we are forced to the conclusion that they were seeing the Jersey Devil?

Touchingly, the report in Mysterious Universe concludes with an ecological message: Given that there was no sighting of the gargoyles in Chile prior to 2004, it may be that human damage to the ecosystem was at fault.  "...might we surmise," the author writes, "that jungle deforestation or some other manner of likely human encroachment has forced these critters out of hiding and into the public eye?"

Because clearly the Atacama Desert was heavily forested with jungle until 2004, at which point it became as desolate as the Land of the Lorax after all of the Truffula Trees were cut down.  (Greenpeace's new motto: "Save the Gargoyles.")

Anyway, as it is probably apparent by now, I'm not sold on the story.  As I've discussed before, even if we won't go as far as to accuse the de la Torres of lying outright, eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable.  Given that there's never been a gargoyle hit by a car, no one's ever found a skull or wing bone, and no one in the de la Torre family even thought of taking a photograph of this amazing event, we'll have to file this one under "Probably Not."