Faces in the woods

One of the first things I ever wrote about in this blog was the phenomenon of pareidolia -- because the human brain is wired to recognize faces, we sometimes see faces where there are only random patterns of lights and shadows that resemble a face.  This is why, as children, we all saw faces in clouds and on the Moon; and it also explains the Face on Mars, most "ghost photographs," and the countless instances of seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches, tortillas, and concrete walls.

When I first mentioned pareidolia, four years ago, it seemed like most people hadn't heard of it.  Recently, however, the idea has gained wider currency, and now when some facelike thing is spotted, and makes it into the mainstream press, the word seems to come up with fair regularity.  Which is all to the good.

But it does leave the woo-woos in a bit of a quandary, doesn't it?  If all of their ghost photographs and Faces on Mars and grilled cheese Jesuses (Jesi?) are just random patterns, perceived as faces because that's how the human brain works, what's a woo-woo to do?

Well, a recent post at OccultView gives us the answer.

Entitled "Photographing Spirits, Faeries, and Trolls," the writer admits that pareidolia does occur:

Photographing nature spirits is tricky business.  Nature spirits, fairies and trolls don’t exactly resemble human beings.  Any image of such an entity could simply be pareidolia, which is imagining meaningful shapes in random patterns.  Then again, there is always a chance what appears to be a fairy is actually a fairy.

Okay, so far so good.   So how do we tell the difference?  We can't, the writer says, because even if it is pareidolia, the spirits are still there:

There is also a third possibility…intentionally created pareidolia.  Even if non-physical beings can’t necessarily be photographed, perhaps they can manipulate their surroundings to give themselves shape.  Might they use branches and leaves to give substance to their formlessness?  What appears as pareidolia may not always be the result of purely random patterns but the result of serendipity and synchronicity. 

So, in other words -- if I'm understanding him correctly -- even if analysis of the photograph showed that the image we thought was a Forest Troll turned out to be a happenstance arrangement of leaves and branches, it's still a troll -- it's just that the troll used the leaves and branches to create his face?  (At this point, you should go back and click the guy's link, if you haven't already done so -- he includes some photographs of "Woodland Spirits" that he took, and that are at least mildly entertaining.)

Well, to a skeptic's ear, all of this sounds mighty convenient.  "No -- the ghostly image wasn't just a smudge on the camera lens; the ghost created a smudge on your camera lens in order to leave his image on the photograph."  What this does, of course, is to remove photographic evidence from the realm of the even potentially falsifiable -- any alternate explanations simply show that the denizens of the Spirit World can manipulate their surroundings, your mind, and the camera or recording equipment.

The whole thing puts me in mind of China Miéville's amazing (and terrifying) short story "Details," in which a woman admits that cracks in sidewalks and stains on walls and patterns in carpet that happen to resemble faces are just random and meaningless -- but at the same time, they are monsters.  "For most people, it's just chance, isn't it?" the main character, Mrs. Miller, says.  "What shapes they see in a tangle of wire.  There's a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear.  But now... the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me.  It can thrust itself forward.  It makes me see it.  It's found its way through."

It does bear keeping in mind, though, that however wonderful Miéville's story is, you will find it on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore.  For a reason.

Of course, it's not like any hardcore skeptic considers photographic evidence all that reliable in the first place.  Besides pareidolia and simple camera malfunctions, programs like Photoshop have made convincing fakes too easy to produce.  This is why scientists demand hard evidence when people make outlandish claims -- show me, in a controlled setting, that what you are saying is true.  If you think there's a troll in the woods, let's see him show up in front of reliable witnesses.  Let's have a sample of troll hair on which to perform DNA analysis, or a troll bone to study in the lab.  If you say a house is haunted by a "spirit," design me a Spirit-o-Meter that can detect the "energy field" that you people always blather on about -- don't just tell me that you sensed a Great Disturbance in the Force, and if I didn't, it's just too bad that I don't have your level of psychic sensitivity.  Also, for cryin' in the sink, don't tell me that my "disbelief is getting in the way," which is another accusation I've had leveled at me.  Honestly, you'd think that, far from being discouraged by my disbelief, a ghost would want to appear in front of skeptics like myself, just for the fun of watching us piss our pants in abject terror.  ("I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do believe, I do believe...")

In any case, the article on OccultView gives us yet another example of how the worlds of science and woo-woo define the word "evidence" rather differently.  The two views, I think, are probably irreconcilable.  So I'll end here, on that rather pessimistic note, not only because I've reached the end of my post for the day,  but also because I just spilled a little bit of coffee on my desk, and I want to wipe it up before the Coffee Fairy fashions it into a scary-looking face.

Woo-woo accreditation

Some of the things I run into, while doing research for this blog, are simply baffling.

Okay, a lot of them are baffling.  But at least for the majority of them, you can sort of understand why people would believe them, or at least want to.  There's an inherent attractiveness to the concept of an afterlife, a grandeur implicit in the idea of extraterrestrial life, and an inarguable coolness to cryptids like Bigfoot and El Chupacabra.  So even if I don't exactly understand why someone would believe in all that stuff, given the absence of any kind of scientifically admissible evidence, at least I get why someone would want to believe it.

I ran into something yesterday, however, that I find puzzling on a very deep level.  It started when I clicked on an advertisement called "Parapsychology - Online Training Courses."  I guess that on some level, I knew that these sorts of things existed -- there certainly are thousands of books out there that give would-be psychics information (to stretch the definition of the word some) about how it all works, and how to access your inner woo-woo.  But training courses?

Let's consider how that could work by comparing it to training in another field -- medicine.

If you have aspirations to become a doctor, nurse, nurse practitioner, or other medical professional, you enter an accredited training program, and undergo a rigorous set of classes in which you learn how the human body works, how to recognize when systems aren't working properly, and what can be done to return the body to normal functioning.  After several years of courses and labs, you begin to work with real people in a supervised setting -- learning first how to perform simple, and later more complex, treatment modalities.  In the process, experienced medical staff watch you, help you, and correct you when your technique isn't up to par.  Eventually, you gain certification to work, at whatever level of care you were trained for, and are trusted thereafter to give good care to your patients.

How, then, could a parapsychological training course work?

The website states that "Curriculum concepts cover crystals, auras, spirits, ghosts, dreams, psychic abilities... numerology, astral travel, and tarot."  The first part of my analogy to medical training isn't problematic, at least on the surface -- certainly an "experienced psychic" (whatever that means in practice) could teach me all sorts of things about how to use crystal energies or how to project my astral body into another plane of reality.  But however would anyone know if you were doing it correctly?  Being that the sorts of things these courses purport to teach have no valid scientific basis, there's no touchstone of evidence by which anyone could be evaluated.

Parapsychology Course Teacher:  "Take a look at the woman seated in the chair in front of you.  What color is her aura?"

Student:  "Well, it looks to me sort of tangerine-colored, with little streaks of puce and magenta around the edges."

Teacher:  "Wrong!  It's chartreuse!  You are assigned to do twelve more aura-viewings, until you get it right."

Now, you might think that being an online course, students are freer to just play along, to make stuff up (same as their teachers are apparently doing), and as long as they say the right made-up stuff, they get a passing grade and a nice certificate and can go on to hang out their shingles and begin to collect $20 per Tarot card reading.  But another site I found (here) states that some of these programs offer associates, bachelors, masters, and even doctoral degrees... and that the programs listed on the site have all achieved accreditation through the Council for Higher Education Accreditation or the US Department of Education.

And I'm thinking: how can that possibly work?  It would be easy, for example, to tell a bad medical school from a good one; a bad one (for example) might teach that the best method to treat an ulcer is to bleed you using leeches, and a good one would not.  But how on earth could you tell a good parapsychology school from a bad one, given that (to put not too fine a point on it), both of them are engaging you in a course of study of something that doesn't, technically, exist?  On what basis would accreditation be awarded?

So the whole thing has left me more baffled than usual.   I must admit that the schools involved have quite a lucrative racket going; taking students' tuition money and putting them through a training program where the teachers essentially spend four years or longer making stuff up, and give students passing grades when they can make stuff up as well as the teachers can, seems like a pretty clever way to make money.  But it does appall me that the CHEA and USDOE are, on some level, putting their stamp of approval on this stuff.  It wouldn't be the first time that I've been horrified at something that those who oversee education have done, but this seems pretty extreme, even for them.

Zombie awareness training

There's a saying that has been repeated often enough that it is nearly a cliché, and that is: Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.

The Center for Disease Control just found that out.

Last year, you may recall, the CDC posted a page on their website called "Zombie Preparedness."  The creators of this page said that the whole thing was a tongue-in-cheek way of calling attention to the wisdom of knowing what to do during an emergency, and recommended such measures as having an up-to-date first-aid kit, knowing escape routes from the house (and also which roads to take if you need to escape in a bigger way), and teaching younger members of the family what to do when bad things happen.  All of it, they said, could equally well apply to other, more mundane disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like.

Well, I'm sure that all of you have heard about the recent bizarre spate of human mutilations.  First, there was the drugged-out guy in Florida who ate a homeless man's face, putting him in the hospital with life-threatening injuries; the face-eater himself was ordered to stop by the police, but just looked up at them... and growled.  The police shot and killed him.  Then, a guy in Hackensack, New Jersey was holed up in his apartment with a knife, threatening to kill himself, and police ordered him to surrender -- so the guy stabbed himself, and proceeded to hurl pieces of his own intestines at the stunned cops.  Then a Canadian nutjob killed a former lover, ate part of him, and mailed other assorted parts to the Canadian governmental headquarters.  And then, just two days ago, two guys got in a fight in a Staten Island diner, and bit off and swallowed part of the guy's ear.

Not to mention the recent outbreak of "flesh-eating bacteria" in the American Southeast.

All of this has resulted in a flood of emails and calls into the CDC, from people terrified about the ongoing "zombie outbreak."  Sites have popped up all over the internet that we are seeing the beginning of the "zombie apocalypse" -- and that the CDC knew about it ahead of time, and that's what gave rise to the link on the CDC site about "zombie preparedness."  More insidiously, some conspiracy-minded types are suggesting that the CDC engineered the whole thing, and what we're seeing is a zombie-virus outbreak, à la 28 Days Later.

Predictably, I'm not buying any of it.

The truth of the matter is that the whole thing boils down to a standard principle of media; once you've found a catchy idea that causes people to read what you write, continue to riff indefinitely on the same theme.  The Florida face-eater was certainly a wild story, and its release in national media was probably justified.  But once that happened, and people mentioned the z-word, the other stories were cast in the same light, to get the same kind of attention -- the suicidal self-stabber in Hackensack probably wouldn't have reached national media if it hadn't been for the first story, and neither would the ear-biter in Staten Island.  The Canadian killer was certainly big news... but the news agencies that released that story all mentioned the Florida case, cinching up the connection in people's minds between the two unrelated incidents.

And now, the CDC is catching major amounts of flak for their "Zombie Preparedness" site, from people who (1) believe that Shaun of the Dead was a scientific documentary, and (2) wouldn't recognize a joke if it walked up and, um, bit them.  The CDC Zombie Preparedness page itself has had so much traffic that several of the subsidiary links on the site have crashed or have been taken down.

So anyway, let's keep our eye on the ball, people.  There are no such things as zombies.  There have been a lot of movies about zombies, but they're fiction.  (If you're curious, here's the Wikipedia canonic list of zombie movies -- including such obvious winners as Zombie Attack from Outer Space and Violent Shit III: The Infantry of Doom.)  The CDC was just trying to be funny, but also call attention to emergency preparedness, with their site, and are neither covering up a zombie apocalypse, nor are they responsible for one.

Okay, have we got that straight, now?  Because I have to go make sure my shotgun is loaded.

The enduring mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

Despite my claims of being a hard-headed rationalist, I have to admit to being fascinated by a mystery.  There is simply something intriguing about the unexplained.  While most of the sorts of stories you read in books with titles like Amazing Unexplained Mysteries of the Universe can be attributed to hoaxes, urban legends, flawed eyewitness testimony, and the like, there are a few that stand out as being thoroughly documented, researched in depth, and yet which defy conventional explanation.

One of the most curious ones is a story right out of The X Files, and one which I didn't know about until a friend sent me a link a couple of days ago.  It's called the Dyatlov Pass Incident, and occurred in February of 1959.  The mystery -- what caused the deaths of the nine backcountry skiers?

Events began in January of that year, when a group of students at the Ural Polytechnical Institute in Yekaterinburg decided to take a cross-country ski trip across the northern Urals.  It was led by Igor Dyatlov, and was composed of eight men and two women, who took a train to the town of Vizhai, and then went off on skis toward Mount Otorten.  One member, Yuri Yudin, became ill right at the beginning of the expedition and returned to Yekaterinburg via train, leaving the nine others to trek off into the wilderness.

All nine were experienced skiers and backcountry hikers.  All were in excellent physical condition, and had done similar treks before without incident.  By January 31 they had camped in a wooded valley, cached food and supplies, and the next morning headed up toward the pass that would one day bear the name of the leader of the ill-fated group.

On February 1, a snowstorm moved in, and the group lost their way -- instead of maintaining their heading toward Dyatlov Pass, they veered west, toward the peak of Kholat Syakhi.  At some point they realized their mistake, but instead of retracing their path, they chose to camp on the mountainside and wait out the storm.

Then... something happened, and all nine hikers died.

Igor Dyatlov had told Yuri Yudin that they should be back in Vizhai by February 12, and that he would send a message by telegraph when they got there.  When no word from the hikers was sent back to friends in Yekaterinburg by February 20, a rescue expedition was formed.  On February 26, the camp on the side of Kholat Syakhi was found, but there the mystery deepened.  The camp was uninhabited -- but the single large tent had been cut open from the inside.  Within the ruined tent were all of the hikers' supplies -- and all of their shoes.  A line of footprints led from the camp down the side of Kholat Syakhi, and all of the footprints showed that the individuals who made them were barefoot or clad in socks.  Five hundred meters from the camp the rescuers found the bodies of Yuri Krivonischenko and Yuri Doroshenko, shoeless and clad only in their underwear.  Further along, and in similar states of undress, were the corpses of Dyatlov, Zina Kolmogorova and Rustem Slobodin.  The remaining four members of the expedition were not found until May 4, when the thawing snow uncovered their bodies 75 meters further down the hillside.

The bodies were examined by doctors, and the first five were all found to have died of hypothermia.  Slobodin had a minor skull fracture, but not sufficient to be the cause of his death.  The four who were found on May 4, however, were a different story.  Nicolai Thibeaux-Brignolles had major head injuries, and Ludmila Dubunina and Alexander Kolevatov had huge chest injuries, "similar to those that would result from a car crash."  However, none had external damage -- it looked more like "injuries resulting from high, crushing levels of pressure."  Dubunina's tongue was missing.  The hikers who had died from injuries rather than hypothermia showed no signs of having been killed in a fight -- the doctor who examined them, Dr. Boris Vozrozhdenny, stated under oath that the damage could not have been inflicted by a human being, "because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged."

A friend of the hikers, Yury Kuntsevich, who was at the time of the incident twelve years old, recalls that when the bodies of the hikers were brought back to Yekaterinburg, their faces looked "scorched," as if they had "deep brown tans."  Forensic radiation tests found that the hikers' clothing had high levels of radioactivity.

Now, if that wasn't weird enough, another group of hikers who was 50 kilometers to the south of Kholat Syakhi reported that on the night of February 2, they saw "orange spheres" hovering over the mountains in the direction of Dyatlov Pass.  Similar reports continued during February and March in the entire area, sightings that were corroborated by independent witnesses including meteorological services and members of the Soviet military.

The inquest into what had happened to the hikers was closed during the third week of May, because of the "absence of a guilty party."  All that could be concluded, the inquest said, was that the hikers had died because of a "compelling unknown force."  What caused their deaths remains a mystery.

There are a number of rational possibilities, of course.  The Russians were, at that time, testing missiles of various sorts, and it's possible that all of the facts of the case could be explained by a nuclear-powered missile firing gone wrong.  It is curious, however, that if this was the case, the military would have admitted to seeing the "orange spheres" sighted above Kholat Syekhi in February -- the Soviets were not exactly known for openness with regards to their military maneuvers.  It could be that the hikers stumbled upon the remains of an earlier nuclear test, and the combination of radiation poisoning and hypothermia led them to wander off unclad and shoeless -- but how, then, to explain the catastrophic compression injuries of Thibeaux-Brignolles, Dubunina, and Kolevatov?

However you look at it, the Dyatlov Pass Incident remains a perplexing and terrifying mystery.  I am still certain that there is a rational explanation for the whole thing, but even after reading a great deal about the facts of the case, I'm damned if I can see what it is.  All we know, 53 years later, is what we knew then -- that nine hikers died, under bizarre circumstances, on a snowy mountainside in the Urals, and no one knows why.

Jinn, witches, and bad behavior

A couple of days ago, I speculated that woo-woo beliefs stem primarily from three human psychological causes: (1) wishful thinking, (2) paranoia, and (3) a reluctance to consider alternative, and unpleasant, explanations.  I submit to you that there is a fourth reason -- some woo-woo beliefs give people an excuse for their own bad behavior.

A marginal example of this is the recent upsurge in fraudulent "professional psychics," who bilk people for thousands of dollars to predict futures, give personal advice, and get in touch with deceased family members.  I call this a "marginal" example because I'm pretty sure that the charlatans are aware, deep down, that they are charlatans -- that really, they're just doing convincing magic tricks and swindling the gullible.  As such, it doesn't really qualify as a true belief.  There might be some people who are convinced that they really are psychic, but I suspect that most of those do not include the big money-makers, who go on tours and perform their acts in front of thousands.

I ran into another example of woo-woo-ism used as a justification for antisocial behavior just yesterday, with the story of the young Saudi Arabian guys who went berserk and demolished an abandoned hospital because it was "haunted by jinn."  (Source)

Riyadh's Irqa Hospital, which treated Gulf War combatants twenty years ago, was left empty because of ill-repair and safety issues, and (as is common with abandoned buildings) got a reputation for being haunted.  The haunting, however, was not by the spirits of the dead; no, Irqa Hospital was haunted by jinn, who are malevolent spirits from Middle Eastern mythology, whose presence can tempt people into sinful behavior.

Well.  Evidently a bunch of people never learned the basic concept of "Mythology means it isn't true."  Of course, the fact that the jinn are mentioned several times in the Koran didn't help.  So they decided to take action.  First, an anti-jinn article appeared in the Saudi Gazette recommending the formation of a committee to decide what to do about jinn.  The article ended with the facepalm-inducing statement, "It would be no understatement to say that we are sick and tired of evil sorcerers."

Then, things escalated.  Twitter feeds from Saudi users began to buzz with recommendations that the anti-jinn cadre needed to take matters into their own hands.  And finally, a raid was organized on Irqa Hospital, and hundreds of young men descended on the place, smashing windows, punching holes in walls, and ultimately burning 60% of the building.

So, what did all of this accomplish?  My sources said nothing about hordes of dismayed, defeated jinn retreating in disarray.  My guess as to the number of jinn that were encountered that night is right out of Monty Python's "Camel Spotting" sketch; I'll bet they saw almost... one.  Given the lack of success, in the typical definition of the word, what possible motivation for the raid could these guys possibly have?

Well, it allowed them to do an activity that young men, world-wide, seem to love to do; to get together at night, in large numbers, and smash stuff up.  But unlike most places, where smashing stuff up that doesn't belong to you is considered a relatively antisocial thing to do, here the woo-woo belief system is invoked -- "Hey!  We're not just demolishing random hospitals; we demolished a hospital to save you all from the evil jinn!  You should thank us!"

It's the same sort of tendencies that lead to even worse behavior -- such as the people whose fundamental disdain for their fellow human beings, coupled with an enjoyment of causing suffering, drives them to participate in the persecution of "witches."  (And lest you think that all of that went out of fashion in the 18th century, allow me to point out that a recent news release from the Legal and Human Rights Center stated that 642 people were lynched in Tanzania last year for "practicing witchcraft.")

It's hard to face this dark side of human nature -- and once understood, it is even harder to do something to combat it.  The only thing that can conquer this kind of behavior is education; knowledge is, perhaps, the opposite of fear.  In understanding how the world actually works, we can leave behind superstitious fears and prejudices -- that jinn haunt abandoned buildings, or that people deserve death because they can cast evil spells.  Progress is slow, plodding, incremental, and there is a significant fraction of the world's population that still espouses these sorts of beliefs.  Still, we are progressing.  When you consider that it was not so very long ago that witches were hanged right here in the United States, it gives you some cause for optimism.

The rising stars of politics

If you're a Democrat, I have good news for you: President Obama is going to win reelection in November.

I'm not saying this because of any sort of expertise in politics.  In fact, saying that I am ignorant about political science is a little like saying my dog is ignorant of differential calculus.  I find politics baffling and frustrating to the extent that when I read political editorials (seldom), I usually come away feeling like I've been trying to comprehend something that my brain simply isn't built for.

So, no, the above prognostication is not based upon any kind of sophisticated political punditry.  It is based upon something that is baffling for an entirely different reason: astrology.

Yes, the astrologers have weighed in on the presidential race, and what they have come up with is going to be cheering news to any Democrats who are dumb enough to believe in astrology.  Last weekend there was a conference of "top astrologers" in New Orleans, and a panel of them put their heads together and drew lots of abstruse-looking charts, and they were unanimous in concluding that Obama would win.

Nina Gryphon, a Chicago astrologer who also has a practice as a corporate lawyer, said her conclusion was based upon the timing of the Aries ingress, the moment that the Sun enters the constellation Aries.  "It's obvious," she said. "Obama stays where he is without a change in status."

Denver astrologer Chris Brennan agreed.  He said that both Obama and Romney "are entering into peak periods of eminence in the next few months."   However, his chart-drawing turned up a difference that he said will turn the tide in Obama's favor.  "Obama's peak period stays consistent throughout the election, whereas Romney's seems to falter a few weeks before the election."

Brennan did go on to say that even though the stars are of the opinion that Obama will win, they do contain a warning that things might not stay smooth for the incumbent.  "The ingress of Saturn into Scorpio may trouble him," Brennan said to reporters.  "It won't cost him the election, but it may indicate difficulties in the first half of his second term."

Brennan hedged a little, though, when asked how sure he was about his results.  There was one other factor that could play a role, he said; "We should all be aware of the Mercury retrograde that will occur on election day.  Most astrologers are pretty certain that this could cause problems similar to what happened in the 2000 election."  The retrograde, Brennan said, "seems to imply that there's something up in the air about the election until sometime later in the month."

Oh.  Okay.  Saturn ingressing into Scorpio and Mercury retrograde means trouble.  This last one I find particularly bizarre -- not that the whole idea of thinking that there's some significance to the apparent motion of planets relative to random groupings of stars that are actually nowhere near each other, and that this motion could possibly have any bearing on a political election, is exactly sensible.  But the retrograde motion of Mercury (and Venus) are just optical illusions -- caused by the fact that they move in closer circles around the Sun than the Earth does, so at times (because the Earth is "overtaking" them in orbit) they spend a short while appearing to move backwards.  They're not actually moving backwards -- it's a total trick of perspective, similar to the apparent backwards motion of a slower-moving car relative to a distant mountain as you pass it on the highway.  So now we've moved into the realm of attributing events on Earth to a motion of a planet that isn't even happening.

Not, of course, that any astrological claim is within hailing distance of scientific validity.  Astrology makes about as much sense as thinking that a person's future could be foretold by the random patterns of lines on their hands.  Oh, wait!  People believe that, too, don't they?

I mean, come on.  How could astrology possibly work?  And don't start babbling to me about forces and energies unless you have the equations from physics to back you up.  If you think astrology is science, explain to me how the science works.

I know I'm engaging in a futile exercise, here.  It's not like my feeble attempts are going to convince the die-hard astrologers -- they are too invested in it (both philosophically and financially) to be willing to give it up.  So I suppose I should go back to doing something marginally more likely to meet with success, like teaching my dog differential calculus.

Mermaid evolution

There should be a law that if a news story has a title that is a question, the article that follows must read, in its entirety, "No."  For example:

"IS THE YELLOWSTONE SUPERVOLCANO ABOUT TO ERUPT?"

No.

"DID A PSYCHIC OCTOPUS PREDICT THE OUTCOME OF THE WORLD CUP?"

No.

"DOES THE MAYAN CALENDAR SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN DECEMBER?"

No.

I ran into an especially good example of that yesterday, an article entitled, "DO MERMAIDS EXIST?"  Unfortunately, however, the article that followed consisted of more than one word, because the aforementioned law has yet to be passed in the Senate, and also because it was written by noted wingnut and Skeptophilia frequent flyer Dirk Vander Ploeg.

Apparently, the question of whether mermaids really exist is the subject of a recent show on Animal Planet.  Myself, I have to question this choice of topics.  Given that there's no way they can have already featured each of the ten million species of real animals, there's no reason to move on to the fictional ones quite yet.  Be that as it may, they did an entire episode during "Monster Week" on the subject of mermaids, and this just thrills Dirk Vander Ploeg to pieces.

Vander Ploeg is always good for inadvertent humor, and he doesn't fail us here, starting with the first paragraph:

The new documentary, which aired on Sunday night as part of Animal Planet’s “Monster Week,” pieces together a few interesting facts to come to the improbable conclusion that mermaids, like bigfoot, the chupacabra, and vampires, may exist.

Yup.  Mermaids exist just like Bigfoot, Chupacabra, and vampires do.  Exactly that way, in fact.

So, where's the evidence?  Vander Ploeg doesn't shy away from this question, and he blames the dearth of evidence for mermaids on the entity that is responsible for so many of the world's problems -- the US government:

In fact, “Mermaids: The Body Found,” claims that several scientists have proven the existence of mermaids. But thanks to the shady government, the evidence has been hidden or destroyed.  One of the whistle-blowing scientists said, “The feeling was like something out of Orwell. This was Big Brother. They were rewriting history. Basically writing this creature out of existence.”

Oh, okay, that's plausible.  I can just see the Joint Chiefs of Staff coming together and saying, "Enough with this nonsense of addressing the economy, international trade policy, and terrorism.  We have a much more pressing problem -- how do we cover up the evidence for mermaids?"

Vander Ploeg then goes on to address the origins of mermaids, and here he quotes Charlie Foley, who directed the "Mermaids" episode on Animal Planet:

Charlie Foley, who wrote and directed the film, bases his theory largely on the amount of mermaid references in old sea-tales.  "The seafaring Greeks described (Mermaids). As did the Vikings, as did the Chinese during their greatest period of maritime exploration. They are recorded in medieval manuscripts, and even into the 19th century."

Because obviously, things recorded in old Greek, Viking, and Chinese manuscripts have to be real.  Like the Cyclops, Midgard's Serpent, and the Celestial Dragon.  But wait -- there's the scientific angle to the whole thing.  We don't just have to rely on mythology, Foley says:

The fact is there are animals that have moved from the land into the sea. Could it have happened to humans? And with aquatic ape theory, if there’s anything to it, what is the logical extension of it if we continued going in that direction. The idea is that people pulled back and we stopped evolving into a marine animal, into an aquatic animal. But what if we kept going? And that to me, knowing that it’s happened before knowing that it’s real science with other animals. Could it have happened with one branch of the human family tree?

I'll simply invoke my proposed law here:  "No."

Vander Ploeg, of course, can't resist adding his own two cents' worth regarding the origins of mermaids:

I have come to believe that Mermaids and Mermen do exist or at least did exist. I believe that they were created by the Annunaki to mine gold below the waves, perhaps in the deep oceans of the world. If gods did create us, as I believe, then it makes sense, in fact its seems probable that ancient astronaut scientists altered various species' DNA to create creatures: perhaps 50 per cent human and 50 per cent fish. If this hypothesis is correct that perhaps the minotaur and other alleged fabled creatures also existed.

Ah, it's all becoming clear.  A race of aliens that doesn't exist created a species of humanoid that also doesn't exist by splicing together human and fish DNA.  I get it now.  I only have one more thing to say, and the more sensitive members of the studio audience might want to plug their ears:

WILL YOU NIMRODS STOP BLATHERING ON ABOUT SCIENCE AS IF YOU ACTUALLY UNDERSTOOD IT?  BECAUSE YOU'RE PISSING OFF THOSE OF US WHO ACTUALLY DO.  THANK YOU.