The psychic and the guru

A question I frequently am asked is why I care so much about whether people believe weird, irrational, counterfactual stuff.  What does it matter?  How is it harming anyone if someone believes in ______ (fill in the blank with your favorite from amongst the following: astrology, psychics, homeopathy, Bigfoot, aliens, crystal energies, or about a hundred others).

Rather than answer that question directly, let me tell you two stories.  (Sources: The Orlando Sentinel and JREF)

Priti Mahalanobis is a college-educated mother of two who managed her father's business, Shiv Shakti Enterprises, LLC of Orlando, Florida.  Due to the economic downturn, the business had not been doing very well for about two years.  Add this to the fact that Mahalanobis had been experiencing some health problems, and her brother, to whom she was very close, was having marital problems.  Mahalanobis was understandably depressed, anxious, and stressed.

It would not be out of the ordinary for someone in this situation to seek out counseling, and Mahalanobis went to the Meditation and Healing Center in Windermere when she received a coupon for a $20 introductory session with a "spiritual guide."

The guide she met called herself Mrs. Starr, but her real name is Peaches Stevens.  Stevens, after a brief "psychic reading," told Mahalanobis that there was a curse on her family, which could only be lifted with her assistance.  Over the next few months, Mahalanobis went to Stevens repeatedly, purchased a variety of items from her including seven "tabernacles" that were intended to help lift the curse, and performed a variety of rituals under Stevens' direction.  Stevens reportedly told Mahalanobis that the cure for the curse would be costly, but that the price of leaving it in place would be a dreadful toll on herself and her family.

Mahalanobis opened several new credit cards, sold as many personal items as she could manage without her husband knowing (including a reported $65,000 worth of jewelry), and all told ended up giving over $135,000 to Stevens for her curse-removal services.  By this time, she had put herself into hock up to her eyeballs, her father's business had folded, and she had to find work part time in a school cafeteria to make enough to live on.

She did, however, finally recognize that something was amiss, and hired a private investigator to look into Stevens.  With the information from the investigation, police were finally able to arrest Stevens for fraud last week.

"I learned a lot," said Mahalanobis.  "Not to let fear or guilt control you or your actions.  Also, listen to your gut, your instinct, that little voice in the back of your head.  Because your mind can fool you."


Someone should have given that same advice to Chantale Lavigne, a Québecois woman who followed a self-help guru named Gabrielle Frechette.  Frechette runs seminars and gives advice on life, health, and spirituality, and claims to be able to channel the biblical figure Melchisedek.  According to sources, Frechette has quite a commanding presence and an "air of authority."

Last week, Frechette was running a session called "Dying in Consciousness," and Chantale Lavigne was one of her "students."  As part of the session, the participants were supposed to allow themselves to be covered with mud, wrapped in plastic, and have their heads placed inside cardboard boxes with instructions to hyperventilate.  They were told that they had to remain motionless in this situation...

... for nine hours.

When Lavigne was removed from her mud and plastic cocoon, she was unconscious, and only at that point did Frechette call 911.  When paramedics arrived, her body temperature was 40.5 C (105 F).  She died soon afterwards at a hospital in Drummondville.  Frechette has "denied all responsibility for Lavigne's death."

This is not the first such death from hyperthermia during a quack cure or woo-woo ritual.  Sweat lodges, and overheating to "remove toxins," have become commonplace, and just last year James Arthur Ray was convicted of negligent homicide in the deaths of three participants in his New Age "spiritual warrior" retreat, in which he had encouraged dozens of people (who had paid Ray big bucks for the privilege) to spend hours in an overheated, smoky room in the Arizona desert without drinking any water.  So despite Frechette's denial of responsibility, there is precedent for "gurus" to be found culpable for their followers' deaths -- in the US, at least, and it's to be hoped that Canada will follow suit.


It's easy to say that in both the case of Mahalanobis and Lavigne, they "should have known better."  And in one sense, that's true.  But we live in a culture that celebrates, even encourages, ridiculous beliefs, and in many cases turns them into big business.  Skeptics like James Randi and Michael Shermer are accused of being "narrow-minded" when they call these beliefs what they are -- unscientific, irrational, bogus, potentially dangerous nonsense. 

The question is, why should we handle such beliefs with kid gloves?  Why should we look the other way when psychics are allowed to bilk the public for millions of dollars annually?  Why should homeopathic "cures" be allowed on pharmacy shelves?  Why should the so-called mediums and channelers of the spirits of the dead be on television, raking in money from people made vulnerable by their grief?

Except in a few cases -- such as Ray's case, where deaths occurred and were directly attributable to the influence of a "guru" -- our government has been reluctant to step in.  The only answer that remains, then, is education -- teaching people how to think, giving them a sound backing in the principles of scientific rationality and skepticism.  I'll end with a quote from Carl Sagan, from his wonderful book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (which should be required reading in every high school in the world):

If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power.  But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us.  In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights.  With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit.  In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.

UFO vs. bird

Yesterday, we looked at what I consider to be a typical ghost report; today we'll look at a recent report of a UFO that, similarly, has features in common with most such claims.

According to a story released last Thursday, a man filming two odd, glowing orbs in the sky also caught on video a collision between one of the orbs and a bird.  The bird, which we would presume would have been killed on impact, goes hurtling off toward the right and is soon lost to view.  UFO aficionados have hailed this video as convincing -- stating that it would be "difficult to fake" (one site said "impossible," which I think is a serious overstatement), "evidence of surveillance by a highly advanced species," and "one of the best pieces of video evidence in the past few months."

(Take a look at the video here; the alleged bird collision occurs at 3:30.)

Okay, let's look at the points in favor of the video being authentic.

First, it's otherwise just kind of... boring.  One thing I've noticed, after watching lots of supposed UFO videos, is that fakers go out of their way to make the video cool -- hearing people react, having the UFO do amazing things.  (Remember the Jerusalem UFO video?)  Here, all we have is some guy with a hand-held video recorder tracking some lights in the sky.  The guy himself seems to be stoned; he doesn't even act like it's odd to be watching a pair of pulsating lights in the sky.  (All he says is, "Thar's one" and "Thar's two of 'em now" about five times each.)  When the alleged bird collision comes, he still doesn't even say, "Whoa" -- he tracks the falling object for a little bit, then goes back to the lights and saying "Thar's one."

Another positive point is the way the lights move relative to a jet contrail.  The movement of the objects looked realistic to me -- as far as that goes.

Now, some negatives.

Like with the ghost photograph from yesterday -- what do we actually have?  A video of some lights in the sky.  The lights have no detail at all -- nothing to indicate what they might be.  Even the alleged bird is just a bright point falling across the sky; we're too far away to see anything more.  So, even if we accept for the moment the possibility that the video itself isn't a fake, we're left with emphasizing the "U" in "UFO," and must rule out as an overconclusion that statement that we're under surveillance by a highly advanced bunch of aliens.

Now, could it be a fake?  Of course it could.  To say that I'm no expert in video editing is an understatement of mammoth proportions, but I have been assured by people who do know a bit about the topic that adding a couple of featureless lights to a video of the sky would be pretty simple.  (To quote Neil deGrasse Tyson, "Photoshop probably has an 'Add UFO' function.")  Now, to be sure, most of the fakers get caught because it's nearly impossible to get everything right, and to fool folks who know what to look for.  Real objects have shadows, reflections, and other features that behave in known ways, and your average "Let's Make A UFO Video" hoaxer would have to be awfully smart to get all of that stuff exactly right.  (One of the strongest bits of evidence that the Jerusalem video was a fake was that the UFO, brilliant light source though it was, didn't seem to create a reflection from the gold-covered top of the nearby Al Aqsa Mosque.)

Interestingly, it's the simple videos that are harder to debunk.  Here, we have nothing but a pair of lights in a sky that's featureless except for the jet contrail, so there's nothing in the way of reflections or shadows that might clue us in.  However, there is one thing that crossed my mind while watching the video -- something that probably wouldn't occur to you if you hadn't already been primed to think that the glowing objects were what was moving.

What I noticed was that the two orbs aren't moving relative to each other.  Try watching the video again, and this time tell yourself that the jet contrail is what is moving, against a backdrop of a sky (with stars or planets) that is stationary.  Changes your perception of the whole thing, doesn't it?  Contrails move, just as clouds do, and the apparent motion of the orbs could easily be explained as motion of the only reference point we have -- the contrail.  And as for the bird -- well, it could be a bird, but I see nothing about its motion that convinces me that it struck one of the orbs.  It could just as easily be a bird flying past, who escaped the whole non-encounter without injury.

My vote: it's a video of two stationary bright lights in the sky, possibly Venus and Jupiter, which were quite close together in the sky on that date.  The jet contrail is what was moving, and the guys filming the lights were in a self-induced mental state that resulted in their thinking that four minutes of video of two motionless bright lights in the sky would be interesting.

And relative to UFO claims in general -- if I may conclude by quoting Tyson again:

I'm not saying we haven't been visited.  I'm saying that the evidence thus far brought forth does not satisfy the standards of evidence that any scientist would require for any other claim that you're going to walk into the lab with.  So next time you get abducted... you're there, you're on the slab, because you know how they always do the sex experiments on you when you're on the flying saucer, and so they're poking at you... here's what you do: you say to the alien that's poking you, "Hey!  Look over there!"  And when he looks over there, you quickly snatch something off the shelf.  You put it in your pocket, and then you lay back.  Then, when you're done, you come back, you say, "Hey!  Look what I got!  I stole the ashtray off a spaceship!"  And you bring that to the lab.  And then it's not about eyewitness testimony at that point, because you'll have something of alien manufacture.  And anything you pull off a flying saucer that crossed the galaxy is gonna be interesting.

The ghost in the window

One of the difficulties of being a skeptic interested in claims of the paranormal is to determine what is meant by "credible evidence."

Today and tomorrow we'll take two of the most common paranormal claims -- ghosts and UFOs -- and consider what it would take to turn someone like me into a believer.  Then we'll look at one (of each), representative recent claims of a ghost and a UFO respectively, and see if they meet some kind of baseline of evidential support.

Today's topic: ghosts.

Aficionados of hauntings usually have a variety of arguments in favor of the existence of ghosts.  An experience of seeing the spirits of the dead, they say, is ubiquitous.  Just about every culture on Earth has a tradition of an afterlife, and virtually all of them describe the experience of meeting a relic of the dead.  Anecdotal accounts probably number in the millions.  Ghostly photographs, of course, are also common, and some are undeniably creepy (whatever you can say about their authenticity).  Newer, higher tech methods are cropping up, including the use of electromagnetic field sensors and sensitive audio equipment, and modern ghosthunters claim that both of these tools have yielded positive results.

Okay, now for the skepticism.  Just about every culture on Earth has a tradition of a deity, and even if you accept that some conception of god is right, they can't all be right because their gods differ wildly from each other.  So even accepting, for the sake of argument, that some sort of god exists, 99% of cultures on Earth got the majority of his/her/its attributes wrong.  Simple ubiquity as an argument for a belief is mildly suggestive, nothing more.  As far as photographs, they are becoming increasingly easy to fake (which doesn't mean that they all are fakes, but simply that it might be difficult to tell the fakes from any out there that are real).  And you have to wonder if the claims that new equipment picking up EMF and suspicious sounds aren't mistaking correlation for causation -- perhaps EMF or peculiar sounds exist in a place because of some purely natural phenomenon, and those are then interpreted by us as evidence for a ghostly presence.  (This last statement is pure speculation, of course, but you might want to recall the famous case of a low-frequency standing sound wave in a building causing an illusion of ghosts -- read about it here.)  In order to convince me, I'd have to see a ghost myself, under conditions that precluded the possibility of trickery, or else have some sort of experiment done, with an adequate set of controls, that showed hard data indicating the presence of some sort of "ghostly energy" (a frequent claim by ghosthunters).

Now for the case study.

A derelict Victorian guesthouse in Kendal, Cumbria, England was scheduled for demolition a couple of weeks ago, and the demolition supervisor took some photographs of it for his company's records.  After having the photographs printed, he noticed something pretty peculiar in one of them:

Let's look at a closeup:

Okay.  So, what is it?  Well, apparently the demolition supervisor, who is named David Armstrong, was pretty creeped out when he saw this.  In Armstrong's words, "There was only a black wall behind the window, we had taken everything out – there were no visible features or anything with a skin color."  Couple this with the claim of one of Armstrong's workmen, Stuart Shan, that the place is haunted:  "The day before we took the photo we were stripping the building inside and I noticed the chandelier swinging on its own.  We said at the time the place felt strange.  My hairs were standing on end when I saw the photo.  I believe it is a ghost."

Given all of the scary stuff happening, Armstrong brought the story (and the photograph) to the attention of the property owner, David Grimshaw.  And Grimshaw took one look at the photograph -- and said that the figure was clearly that of of his deceased mother, Frances Grimshaw, who used to "stand looking out of that very window, and wore large earrings and a bow on her dress just like the figure in the window."

So, what do we have here?  I have to admit that the photograph is pretty odd, whether or not it actually is depicting an old lady's ghost.  Let's, for the moment at least, admit it into evidence.  What about Shan's story of a swinging chandelier?  Well, you'll note from his statement that he made his claim after seeing the photograph, so you have to be at least a little skeptical at this point, wondering if perhaps he wasn't adding a story of a ghostly presence pushing the chandelier to bolster his boss' claim that the photograph was of ghostly provenance (or, possibly, to get in on the publicity that was sure to come -- which worked, didn't it?).

Then, we have the claim by David Grimshaw that the figure looked "just like his mother."  Well, one of the sources I used actually had a photograph of the late Mrs. Grimshaw, so let's take a look:

Well, the first thing that strikes me is that the figure in the window looks nothing like Mrs. Grimshaw.  The figure in the window has what looks like brown hair, possibly pulled back into a bun, and a high forehead, and seems to me to be on the skinny side.  Then we have blonde, curly-haired, stocky Mrs. Grimshaw.  Any resemblance between the two certainly escapes me.

Well, perhaps the figure isn't Mrs. Grimshaw, but could it still be a ghost?  Myself, I just can't take a single photograph, however creepy, and turn it into evidence for an afterlife.  Because, honestly, that's all we have.  Meaning no disrespect to Mr. Shan's reputation, but corroborating the photographic evidence after the fact with a story of the chandelier swinging really doesn't meet what I would consider the minimum standards of reliable evidence.

As far as the photograph, there is just too much chance of fakery, or (failing that) our old friend pareidolia (the tendency of humans to see faces in random patterns of color, light, and shadow) to put too much weight on it as evidence.  So with the Kendal haunting, we're right back where we started; weakly suggestive evidence that really doesn't provide what a true skeptic would consider convincing.

Again, to reiterate: that doesn't mean that ghosts don't exist.  All it means is that the jury's still out.  As befits a true skeptic, we don't have to decide now -- the jury can remain out forever, until we have enough in the way of hard evidence to make a judgment.

Tomorrow:  a UFO collides with a bird?

sOFU dna KFJ

One of the endearing things about woo-woos is that they never, ever, ever give up.  Once they become convinced that their favorite weird idea is real, no power on Earth can shift them, not a mountain of evidence against, not the most flawless argument.

You have to admire their tenacity, really.

This comes up because of a recent claim by a gentleman named Jon Kelly, who claims to be an audio analyst.  (I use the word "claims" not to cast any doubt, but simply because I was unable to verify his credentials.)  Kelly was going through some recently declassified recordings of President John F. Kennedy discussing a variety of topics shortly before his death, including the space program, and Kelly claims that Kennedy was speaking in code.  The text of the speeches was about the space program of the time; but the real message, Kelly says, was encrypted, and had to do with contact with aliens.  But you can only discern the real message...

... if you listen to it backwards.  (You can watch his video here.)

Backmasking has been around for a long, long time, and the first accusations of secret messages encrypted backwards were levied by a variety of fundamentalist ministers against rock musicians, notably the Electric Light Orchestra, Led Zeppelin, and Styx.  (When ELO songwriter and singer Jeff Lynne found out that their song "Eldorado" allegedly had the message, "He is the nasty one / Christ, you're infernal / It is said we're dead men / Everyone who has the mark will live," he famously responded, "Skcollob.")  Not ones to take such accusations lying down, many of the musicians began to include such messages deliberately, my favorite one being the inclusion by Styx in one of their songs on their next album the backwards message, "Why are you listening to me backwards?"

In any case, what is ridiculous about all of these claims is that if the intent was to influence the listener's behavior subliminally, it doesn't work.  A study at the University of Lethbridge all the way back in 1985 using a variety of messages played backwards (including the 23rd Psalm) found that listeners showed no ability to pick up the information content of messages played in reverse.

Of course, our friend Jon Kelly is not implying that subliminal alteration of behavior is what JFK was trying to do; he's implying that JFK was deliberately hiding information, encrypting it in such a way that only the ones in the know could figure out the real message was.  (Apparently, it includes such pithy bits as "I found a spacecraft.  I saw a Gray.  Proof aliens landed here.")  What comes to my mind, besides the inevitable thought of "you are a loon," is, does he realize how difficult it would be actually to do that? 

In fact, if you think there is any level of plausibility in this claim at all, I want you to give it a try yourself.  Take a simple message you want to encrypt -- only a few words.  Perhaps, "The aliens have landed in downtown Detroit."  Now, figure out a piece of sensible text that when you say it forwards includes a bit that sounds like that phrase read backwards.

C'mon, let's get on with it, we're all waiting.

*taps foot impatiently*

Not so easy, is it?  The English language is not, to put it mildly, a phonetic system that is read with equal ease, not to mention meaningfulness, forwards and backwards.  Any examples we could find that said one thing forward, and a different (but sensible) thing backwards, would be so contrived that they would significantly limit both what you actually said, and also what the encrypted message could be.

In other words; it's an idiotic conjecture.  But that hasn't stopped it from being made repeatedly, all the way back into the 1970s, by a variety of different woo-woos each with their own theory about why it was done.

So, anyway, that's today's little dose of wackiness.  Yet another example of a repeated claim that is held firmly despite repeated debunking.  You have to wonder what these woo-woos could accomplish if they turned this level of dogged tenacity onto something that really matters, like solving world hunger.  I guess that's too much to ask, however, given that the majority of these people seem to be sekactiurf.

Double stars, SETI, and Luke Skywalker

Continuing to explore yesterday's theme of Life On Other Worlds, today, I thought I'd start with the most recent discovery from the extrasolar-planet crowd; two worlds, both (from our vantage point) in the constellation Cygnus, that orbit double stars.  (See the full article here.)  If you were a resident of one of these planets (which seems unlikely, for reasons I'll discuss in a moment), you would see two suns in the sky.

Luke!  Use the Force, Luke!

It was long surmised that double (and triple) star systems would not have planets in stable orbits -- that a gravitational field generated by two heavy objects would have an odd enough shape that it would make it impossible for a planet to settle into a regular path around them.  The new study, however, surmises that such combos are "common" in the universe, however incomplete our understanding of the classical mechanics of the situation.

However, neither of these worlds is a good candidate for being Tatooine -- both of the planets, named Kepler 34b and Kepler 35b, are large, gaseous worlds, more like Saturn than like Earth.  Additionally, astronomers suspect that both of these planets, and probably most planets that orbit double stars, would have wildly changing climates due to the varying proximity of the planet to each of its stars at different times during its year.

Be that as it may, I'm blown away by how many planets these folks have discovered, since the first evidence of an extrasolar planet several years ago.  The current total stands at 728, and every week more are found.  This further bolsters the conjecture I've had all along -- that planets, and very likely life, are common in the universe.

The exciting part of all of this planet-finding is finding out how similar the rest of the universe is to our own cozy little solar system.  The more we look out there, and the better our instruments get, the more planetary systems we find.  The Drake equation, named after astronomer Frank Drake, is a way of estimating the number of planets with intelligent life, by boiling the entire argument down to a few parameters, estimating the probability of each, and then multiplying the probabilities.  One of the parameters - f(p) - is the fraction of stars which have planetary systems.  Back in the 70s, when I was in college, f(p) was thought to be quite low.  The general consensus was that the formation of our own planetary system was something of a fluke, and that the likelihood of there being such systems around other stars was small.  However, as astronomy, and its associated technology, has improved, we are now finding that many - perhaps most - stars have planetary systems.  Estimates of f(p) start at around a very conservative 20% and, according to some scientists, might range as high as 50 or 60%.

Still, "planets" does not equal "life," and "life" does not equal "intelligent life."  We currently have no way to figure out if there is intelligent life out there - the distances are so amazingly huge that any contact is prohibitive. Even if Kepler 34b and 35b were hospitable places, which they're not, they're 4,900 and 5,400 light years away, respectively.  If we sent a focused radio signal saying "hello" to the Luke Skywalker, we'd have to wait a minimum of a little under ten thousand years to receive a message saying, "Help me, I'm caught in a trash compactor!" in response, which might be a little too late to do anything helpful.  The closest star to ourselves, other than our own sun, is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.3 light years away.  There, the lag time, assuming an immediate response, would still be 8.6 years.

And that's for radio signals, traveling at the speed of light, which is three hundred million meters per second.  Our fastest man-made vehicle, the Voyager space probe, is moving at about fifteen thousand meters per second - twenty thousand times slower than the speed of light.  At that speed, and not counting relativistic effects, it would take Voyager 86,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri, if it were heading that direction, which it's not.

All of this makes any kind of contact by whatever intelligent life is out there very unlikely indeed, regardless how common I might suspect it is.  Now, I strongly believe that the combined forces of abiotic production of organic chemicals, coupled with evolution by natural selection, make it virtually inevitable that intelligent life has arisen many times in the history of the universe.  On the other hand, however thrilling the scene in Contact was, in which Elly Arroway finds the transmission from an alien culture, however exciting the final moments of Star Trek: First Contact were, when the Vulcan walks out of the spacecraft and the people of Earth finally find out that they are not alone, I think that such an occurrence is monumentally unlikely.  The distances are much too big, and Einstein's general theory of relativity, along with its requirement of the speed of light as a permanent speed limit, seems to be strictly enforced everywhere except possibly Switzerland.   But even if they're not likely to contact us, I'm still virtually certain that we're not alone in the universe.  As a biologist, I find this incredibly exciting, and it is a shame that projects like SETI have such a low likelihood of succeeding.

Astronomers are pioneering novel ways of finding extraterrestrial life, including developing methods for detecting biotically produced compounds in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.  These techniques are in their infancy, but at least give hope that we might be able to answer the question of the existence of extraterrestrial life without having to receive a radio transmission or an actual visit.

You have to wonder how the discovery of incontrovertable proof of the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would change our worldview.  It certainly would knock askew our sense of being at the center, left over from the Judeo-Christian idea of humans as God's Favorite Species.  It would confirm what biologists have claimed for years, that the abiotic genesis of life and organic evolution are common and universal.  And, most importantly, it would give me a much-needed excuse to brush up on my Klingon.

Life in the cauldron

Despite being rather adamant about wanting evidence for everything, I've always had a hunch that the universe is inhabited, probably rather thickly.  I am aware that it's just a hunch, however.  I'm not translating a gut feeling into anything like certainty.  But given what I know about the conditions necessary for generating organic molecules, and the power of natural selection even on the molecular level, I'd be mighty surprised if Earth turned out to be the only inhabited planet.

It does, however, demand a question -- one I remember my son asking a while back.  Why is there any necessity that life (however we define that term, and it's far harder to define comprehensively than you'd think) has the same chemistry that it does here on comfortable old Earth?  I still remember the first time I ran into that idea, back on the old Star Trek -- if you're my age, you probably remember the famous episode "Devil in the Dark," in which the intrepid crew of the Enterprise ran into the Horta, a creature whose biochemistry was based upon silicon instead of carbon.  This is not as outlandish as it might seem.  Silicon, like carbon, has four valence electrons, allowing it to form sheets, chains, rings, and other complex molecules rather readily.  Most silicates don't dissolve much in water, which would require that any silicon-based life form have a different carrier in its vascular system; in the case of the Horta, it was hydrofluoric acid (which doubled nicely as a defensive weapon in dissolving any unfortunate red-shirted security officers it happened to run into).

My point here, and I'm hardly the first to make it, is that a life form with a dramatically different biochemistry might well be hard to recognize as life.  In our search for extrasolar planets, we tend to get most excited about the earthlike ones, because of a sense that those are the only ones that could harbor life.  But is this necessarily true?

The whole topic comes up because of a recent statement, by Russian astronomer Leonid Ksanformaliti, that he has discovered evidence of life on Venus.  Now, Venus was one of the first solar planets that was ruled out as possible site for life when it was discovered exactly how inhospitable is is.  Clouds cover the surface, the discovery of which led many to speculate that it had liquid water, oceans, and possibly a breathable atmosphere (H. P. Lovecraft and C. S. Lewis both wrote stories about an inhabited Venus), but now it is known that the clouds are largely made up of sulfuric acid, and the surface temperature is a balmy 850 degrees Fahrenheit, with a barometric pressure 92 times higher than Earth's.  The conditions are so hellish that the first probes dropped onto the surface fried before they returned much useful data back to scientists here at home.

So, Ksanformaliti, who made his claim in Russian journal Solar System Research, is making what appears to most scientists a pretty outlandish claim.  Ksanformaliti and his team analyzed photographs from earlier missions, some dating back to 1982, and found what he calls "biological forms" -- he nicknames three of them "black flaps," "disks," and "scorpions."  “What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus?" Ksanformaliti told reporters for The Daily Caller.  "Let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to say that they are living.”  (See a photo of one of them here.  Don't get your hopes up about the video clip, however -- it's just a gradual zoom-in on the object in the still, along with hyperdramatic music.)

Of course, this makes most of us raise our eyebrows.  Organic compounds as we know them fall apart when subjected to conditions like those on Venus, so life should be impossible there.  But we are, of course, basing that judgment on the life we know.  Is it possible that even considering the high-pressure inferno that is Venus, that something may be down there that qualifies as life?

Possibly -- but I need more than a bunch of fuzzy photographs before I'm ready to join Team Leonid.  As I've had reason to comment before, humans are just too prone to attribute lifelike qualities to non-living objects to trust that we would recognize life here on such flimsy evidence.  And, for the record, I still think our best bet for life in our own solar system is one of the larger moons of either Jupiter or Saturn.

But I will maintain that regardless, if Ksanformaliti makes us reconsider our assumptions about life, that's all to the good.  If SETI and other projects like it have a prayer of a chance, it will only come from thinking outside the box -- and from being willing to redefine what we mean by the words "life," "organism," and "intelligent."

Fake out

Woo-woos will fool you, sometimes.

Last night I was doing my typical evening's scouring of news stories for this morning's post, and I bumped into an article about the alleged recent spate of "weird noises" that seemed like about the most reasonable thing I've read on the topic.  (See the article here.)  Now, I don't know if you've heard about the whole issue with the noises, but to make a long story short there have been about a dozen reports from places as widely separated as England, Costa Rica, and Arnaudville, Louisiana (a stone's throw from my home town), mostly of booming or thunder-like noises, and one of "loud, trumpet-like noises."  (The article linked above includes links to YouTube videos purporting to be recordings of the noises.  Others can be easily found with a quick YouTube search.)

Well, the author, Tony Elliott, does a pretty good job of taking apart the whole phenomenon, and unhesitatingly calls it a hoax.  He lays the blame at the feet of the Mayan calendar enthusiasts and other apocalyptic wingnuts, who (he says) are trying to build up the tension as the Big Year arrives, and also bolster their contentions that Things Are Happening.  Apart from the author's conjecture that the origin of the "noises" phenomenon can be traced back to one man, a Baptist minister from Indiana named Paul Begley -- it is seldom, I think, that hoaxes like this are attributable to one person's efforts -- Elliott makes a pretty good case for the side of skepticism.  In fact, the article ends:

In today's world, we must all become aware of how to determine fact from fiction.  This can only be done through the research of topics, in finding the evidence needed to either legitimize a claim or toss it, because it is baseless.

Not bad, eh?  Particularly given that his article appeared on the online site UFO Digest!

So, anyway, I'm feeling pretty good at this point, and made it all the way to the end of the article wondering how something so logical made its way onto a website usually devoted to wild woo-woo speculation.  Even Elliott's "About This Author" was impressive; he has (he says) worked for several newspapers in Oregon, and most recently was a political columnist for the Cimarron News Press in Cimarron, New Mexico.  All sounds pretty reasonable...

... and then I read the list of "Other Articles By This Author."  To wit:

Human Beings the TRUE Extraterrestrial Reptilian Race

The Sinister Global Warming/Climate Change Plot

Explanation of Fireballs, Ghost Rockets and the Dangers They Present

NASA Wrong Again As Usual --> With a Rebuttal From Shawn D. Goldman

Henry Kissinger's OPEC Deal A Sinister NWO Plot?

I looked at the first one, at the cost of thousands of valuable brain cells I will never ever have again, and found claims such as the following:

• The human race was created when beings from Mars came to Earth and integrated dinosaur DNA into their own to make them more suited to Earth's environment.
• Mars lost most of its atmosphere when its planetary neighbor exploded (the cause of this explosion wasn't mentioned); this catastrophe generated the asteroid belt.
• Insects have reptilian DNA because they both have "scales."
• Octopuses and birds are related because both of them have beaks.

 So, I'm reading this, my jaw hanging lower and lower, and I'm thinking, "Wait... wait!  What about 'separating fact from fiction?'  What about 'finding the evidence needed to legitimize a claim?'  Why would you fake me out like this, Tony?  Why?"  So I closed the link, a sadder, wiser skeptic.

I didn't even look at the one about the "Sinister Global Warming Plot," or the one about "ghost rockets."

It is a mystery to me that someone can (on the one hand) be so reasonable, so logical, so completely sane sounding, and (on the other) write articles that are filled with claims that are ridiculous even by comparison to your typical woo-woo.  Don't people have one consistent standard for evaluating claims?  If one set of conjectures falls because of the poor quality of evidence, how can another succeed based on an even poorer quality of evidence?

No, I don't know, either.