Go Team Woo-Woo!

I love it when woo-woos team up.

It's a twist on the old maxim that two heads are better than one.  You get several wackos in the same room, all throwing around ideas, and what they come up with is a synergistic explosion of weirdness, far more wonderful than anything they could have come up with working independently.

Take, for example, this article, entitled "Brown Dwarf Star Flyby: Estimated Maximal Earth Impact June-July 2013," written by none other than Skeptophilia frequent flyer Alfred Lambremont Webre.  Webre, you may recall, is the one who said the Earth would be bombarded by "4th dimensional energy" on November 11, 2011.  This would cause the Earth's axis to shift by 90 degrees, meaning that we'd all evolve.  Apparently it would also mean that we'd have to get used to having "4th dimensional sex."

For the record, I'm not making any of this up.

Well, now Webre has teamed up with a variety of other contenders for the Nobel Prize in Wingnuttery, including:

• Andrew Basiago, who claims that he ran into President Obama on Mars
• Courtney Brown, an expert in remote viewing
• Marshall Masters, an "expert on Nibiru"

All we need is Diane Tessman there to add some Cosmic Quantum Vibrational Energy Frequencies, and we'd be all set.

But the foursome of Webre, Basiago, Brown, and Masters did pretty well without her, I have to admit.  Here are a few gems from the article I linked above:

• A brown dwarf star will make a close pass to Earth in summer of 2013, causing great distress to those few of us who survive the Mayan apocalypse.
• This brown dwarf star is also the Planet Nibiru, or, as the scientists refer to it in their scholarly papers, "The Lost Star of Time and Myth."
• Actual astronomers can't see this object coming, because the government has hidden it from sight using chemtrails.
• When the dwarf star passes by, it could be a hazard to Earth because of "electrical discharges between our Sun and the brown dwarf star."
• We have some idea of how bad this event is going to be because Basiago, Brown, and other remote viewers, using a device called a "chronovisor," looked into the future and saw that the Supreme Court building is going to be under 100 feet of water.
• However, other remote viewers said that we have only a 39% chance of our future timeline being "catastrophic."  A full 29% said it would be "non-catastrophic."  Presumably the other 32% just said, "Meh."
• The Global Seed Vault on the island of Svalbard is not a research facility devoted to preserving plant biodiversity; it's actually a huge underground shelter that will host two million Norwegians when Nibiru comes, leaving the rest of us to die horrible deaths.  Of course, given that then the two million survivors will then be stuck on a godforsaken island above the Arctic Circle, I kind of think I'd rather just let Nibiru take its best shot at me.
• Basiago, however, did say that these predictions might not come to pass.  The chronovisor, which was "developed by two Vatican scientists in conjunction with Enrico Fermi," might be showing "an alternate time line that does not show up on our timeline" coming from "somewhere else in the multiverse."  Which makes me think he's been spending too much time watching reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Webre, on the other hand, says that we can make sure we have a safe flyby if all of us work together to create an "intention vortex" to create "proactive consciousness" and keep the brown dwarf star from doing bad stuff.  Because of course we all know how much our thoughts and prayers alter the laws of physics.

 See?  Wasn't that amazing?  I told you it would be awesome.  Teamwork is so important.

But I think there are still some unexplored avenues, here.  Me, I think we should have the whole gang collaborate.  Dirk vander Ploeg and Nick Redfern could throw in some stuff about Bigfoot.  James van Praagh could get in touch with Great Aunt Mildred and find out if she can give us any advice from the afterlife.  Alex Collier and Paul Hellyer could call in some UFOs to pick up the survivors.  David Icke could wind it all up with a two-hour-long talk about how the government is covering the whole thing up.

It'd be a party!

Travelin' and a-livin' off the land

I was listening to the 70s station on satellite radio yesterday, and up pops "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo," a song I haven't heard or thought about in probably twenty years.  In my opinion, this song is right up there with "Signs" (by the Five Man Electrical Band) as the embodiment of the hippie ideal of the late 60s.

The whole thing got me to thinking about the hippie movement, and how much has changed in forty years.  The hippies of the sixties were not thought of as the fringe, the weird, comically out-of-touch characters that they are today.  Back then, the hippies were the cutting edge; the rebels, the Threat to Society -- a little dangerous, and (to the establishment) more than a little scary.  The Flower Children seemed, in the minds of most middle-class Americans, to be part of a smooth continuum whose end was formed by Charles Manson and the Symbionese Liberation Army.  Their rejection of everything that the middle class stood for -- especially property ownership, etiquette, monogamy, and public education -- and their acceptance of drug use, loud music, and commitment-free sex, seemed to be not just a slippery slope, but already to represent the bottom of the pit.

Now, hippies have evolved into nothing much more than a caricature.  When one of my students calls another "a hippie," usually that just means that the student in question has long, unruly hair, or favors tie-dyed shirts, or has a "Peace Now" bumpersticker on his/her car.  There aren't many people any more that really represent what the hippies did back in the sixties and early seventies.

Honestly, this is probably a good thing, and I'm not saying this because I'm a white, middle class, establishment member with a bank account and a career.  The hippie movement never really could last, because it was founded on a lie -- that it was possible to separate yourself entirely from "the establishment."  The burning of draft cards and drivers' licenses was supposed to represent a severing of bonds with the government -- but as long as you're on American soil, and there is any kind of law enforcement around, you aren't really going to be free of connection to laws and restrictions, regardless of what document you choose to burn.  The ideal of freedom -- as represented in "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" by leaving everything behind and getting "back on the road again" -- is only possible if you own a car, which means that you have to have it registered, purchase gasoline, and so on.  Even the back-to-the-basics idea that came out of the hippie movement turned out not to be very easy to achieve.  The sad fact is that unless you own a lot of land, it is virtually impossible to raise enough food to subsist on, and even if you have enough land, it requires a great deal of expertise and means doing manual labor pretty much 24/7.  Note that in "Me and You" (if you know the song) our free-as-a-bird road travelers get caught robbing a chicken coop for eggs.  The hippies justified this sort of thievery as being a Robin Hood-like "stealing from those who deserve to be stolen from," but in reality this only occurred because in practice, it takes less time and effort to be parasitic on the culture you claim to despise than it does to learn enough skills, and save enough money, to actually become self-sufficient.

I'm not claiming that the hippie movement was all bad, or was all a sham.  Their resistance to the Vietnam War represented a watershed moment in our nation's attitude toward blindly trusting the government; we've never been the same since.  Their stance on civil rights and race relations was twenty years ahead of its time.  It was in part the hippie movement that gave rise to the environmental movement of the 70s and the "Greens" of today.  They were a reaction to a corrupt government, that was pursuing a divisive and bloody war, and as such there was a certain honor to their stance.  But like all reactive movements, it couldn't last.  Vietnam ended; idealism faded in the face of practicality.  Most of the former hippies of the 60s had already cut their hair and settled down by the time I was in college, and the wild radicalism had been replaced by a reluctant acceptance that you can't really change society by refusing to take part in it.

Anyway, these are my musings on a stormy, unsettled morning.  Given that tomorrow's Sunday, it seems appropriate to end with the last verse of "Signs:"

"And the sign says, 'Everybody welcome, come in, kneel down and pray,'
But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all, I didn't have a penny to pay.
So I got me a pen and a paper, and I made up my own little sign,
It said, "Thank you, Lord, for thinking about me, I'm alive and doing fine..."

Higher, faster, stronger

I'm of two minds with regards to the Olympics.

Okay, to be fair, I'm of two minds with regards to most things.  More than two minds, sometimes.  My friends have been known to quote Tolkien at me - "Go not to the Elves for advice, for they will say both yes and no."  I can usually argue both sides of any point, often equally persuasively - and can talk myself into almost anything.

Well, except for the whole evolution thing.  I'm pretty rabid about that.  Other than that, I'm kind of ambivalent by nature.

But I digress.

This evening will be the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics, when the most talented athletes will meet in London to being a series of grueling competitions for the gold.  Most of these young men and women have trained all of their lives for this moment, and a tremendous amount rides on success.  You don't get that far without a huge competitive streak -- and the fact that the majority of the participants will not receive a medal is simple mathematics.  So, my question: is the heartbreak worth it?

I still remember watching an event in the 2010 Winter Olympics.  Some friends and I were in a bar following a Cornell hockey game, and the television was tuned in to the women's hockey game between Canada and Slovakia.  Evidently not having had enough opportunities that evening to watch a puck sliding around, I became glued to the set.

When we came in, it was 13-0 in Canada's favor, with 19 minutes to go in the third period.  As I watched, the score finally climbed its way up to 18-0.

I couldn't take my eyes off it.  Besides loving hockey, it was a little like watching a car crash.  You're seeing it, you know it's going to be bad, but you can't take your eyes off it.  That poor Slovakian goalie was powerless to do anything about facing an offense that basically steamrolled her own defense, and one shot after another went in to the net. When the teams lined up to shake hands afterwards, she was in tears.

Don't get me wrong; I like watching skill.  The Canadians were clearly more talented and better trained, and deserved the win.  But the compassionate side of me hates to watch what amounts to an athletic car crash happening, in full view of millions.

This, of course, isn't the only time this sort of thing has happened.  I still remember some years ago when French figure skater Laetitia Hubert was catapulted from 20-some-oddth place into 5th by a flawless short program, and had to go into the finals against the Big Dogs of the likes of Surya Bonaly and Midori Ito.  The poor kid couldn't take the pressure, and completely fell apart.  The tears of amazed joy from the previous day turned into a performance that was acutely painful to watch, as she tried again and again to land jumps that her nerves just wouldn't handle.  It is the only time I've ever seen the camera cut to a commercial break in the middle of someone's performance -- even the network techs couldn't bear to have her humiliation televised.

It's an odd thing, the Olympics.  We watch it to see the best of the best strut their stuff, to see people do what 99% of us couldn't in a hundred years dream of doing ourselves.  When the inevitable happens, and some of them fail, they sometimes do so in such a spectacular fashion that it makes us want to turn away, to pretend it isn't happening, but we know that we will remember these people as much - or perhaps more - than the ones who get the medals.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not against competition per se.  And I think that our current self-esteem obsessed educational establishment's emphasis on making sure that everyone wins is wrong-headed; true self esteem comes from challenging yourself, working hard, and succeeding at something you didn't think you'd be able to do.  But I do have to wonder if extremely high-stakes competition, from medical schools to American Idol to the Olympics, is more destructive than constructive.

I know that the athletes would say -- most of them, anyway -- that it's the mere fact of making the Olympic team, of getting there, that is the most important, and that the medals are secondary.  I only believe that up to a point.  If we set up a contest whose sole aim is to raise the fastest, strongest, and most skilled to the skies, then the ones who fall will always draw our sympathy.  I honestly don't know if the whole Olympic concept is a good thing or a bad; probably some of both.  But for me, the despairing face of Laetitia Hubert, picking herself up off the ice after the sixth bad fall, and the tears on the face of the Slovakian goalie are as much a part of it as is the joy of the gold medalist.  If you want the one, you have to accept the other.

Wheat, chaff, and alien abductees

My question today is one that haunts many skeptics -- the question of how one would know if a bizarre claim was actually true, especially in the absence of evidence.

The hardest-nosed of us would probably object to the premises of the question; if there is no evidence, they would say, then there is no basis on which to make a judgment in the first place.  And while I agree with that general attitude -- and have applied it myself on numerous occasions -- it always leaves me with the worry that I'll miss something, and just through the weakness of the evidence and my preconceived notions I won't see the grain of wheat in amongst the chaff.

I riffed on this whole idea in my novel Signal to Noise (and if you'll allow me a moment of shameless self-promotion, it is available as an e-book for Kindle from the link on the right side of the page).  In the story, a skeptical wildlife biologist, who had decided that all woo-woo claims were bullshit, is confronted with something bizarre going on in the mountains of central Oregon -- and has to overcome his preconceived notions even to admit that it might be real.  And in the story, it doesn't help that the news is delivered to him with no hard evidence whatsoever, by a total stranger who just "has a feeling that something is wrong."  (I won't tell you any more about it; you'll just have to read it yourself.  And at the risk of appearing immodest, it rocks.)

The reason I bring all of this up is a website called Little Sticky Legs: Alien Abductee Portraits, owned by Steven Hirsch.  On this website, which you should definitely take a look at, there are photographs of a number of people who claim that they were abducted by, or at least contacted by, aliens, and their first-hand accounts (and in some cases drawings) of their experiences.  I thought this was an unusually good example of the phenomenon I've described above, for a variety of reasons.

First, the accounts are weird, rambling, and disjointed, and many of them seem to have only a loose attachment to reality.  Second, the photos don't help; whether Hirsch deliberately set out to make his subjects look sketchy is a matter of conjecture, but my sense is that he was playing fair and this is the way these people actually look.  And some of them, not to put too fine a point on it, are a little scary.  And third, of course, the content of the accounts is fairly contrary to what most scientists think is realistic.  So, all of these things combined seem to put them squarely into the category of most of the subjects of this blog; bizarre, possibly delusional, nonsense.

But reading the earnest narratives of these supposed contactees left me feeling a little uneasy.  Part of it was a sense that if their stories aren't true, then these people are either lying or else are the victims of hallucinations that could qualify as psychotic breaks.  And although I am rather free about poking fun at people who generate strange ideas, I just don't feel right about including as targets people who have genuine mental illnesses.

My unease, however, had another source, and one that haunts me every time I see something like this; what if one of these stories is actually true?

A person who had been abducted, but was left with no physical trace of the experience, might well describe it in just these terms.  And if the victim was someone who wasn't highly educated, there's no reason to expect that (s)he would remember the details, or explain them afterwards, in the way a trained scientist would.  The general vagueness and lack of clarity is, in fact, exactly what you'd expect if an ordinary person experienced something shockingly outside their worldview.

Now, please don't misunderstand me.  I'm not, in any sense, committing to a belief in alien abductions in general, much less to any specific one of the stories on Hirsch's website.  My hunch is that none of these stories is true, and that whatever these individuals is describing has another source than actual experience.  But it is only a hunch, and an honest skeptic would have to admit that there is no more evidence that these claims are false than there is that they are true.  My only point here is that if one of them was telling the truth, this is much the form I would expect it to take... which means that it behooves all of us, and especially the skeptics, not to discount odd claims without further investigation.  Skeptics tend to rail against the superstitious for jumping to supernatural explanations for completely natural phenomena; we should be equally careful not to jump to prosaic explanations when an odd one might be correct. 

The best thing, of course, is to withhold judgment completely until the facts are in, but that is pretty solidly counter to human nature, and is probably unrealistic as a general approach.  And given the ephemeral nature of some of these claims, the facts may never come in at all.  So all we can do is keep thinking, keep watching and listening and investigating... and not be afraid to push the envelope of our own understanding when the time comes.

Time lapse

Well, the first thing I need to do in today's post is to figure out if I can correct the timestamp, which is clearly wrong.  Hmmm... let's see... no, it won't let me do it.  Okay, then, I'll just have to state for the record that today you should date all of your checks, documents, and correspondence with "July 25, 1715."

What?  How can that be true, you ask?  1715... so, J. S. Bach would still be alive, King George I would just have been crowned king of England, and the USA wouldn't exist for another sixty-odd years?  To which I chuckle gently, and explain: of course that's not what I mean.  You can't just jump backwards in time, that would be ridiculous.  What I'm saying is that the calendar is wrong, not because we've leapt back to the 18th century, but because...

... the years between 614 and 911 C.E. did not exist.

Yes, according to the Phantom Time Hypothesis (sources here and here), devised by Hans-Ulrich Niemitz and Heribert Illig, time actually went from the year 613 directly to the year 912.  Any events that occurred during those years, or people who are alleged to have lived then are:
1) legends being misunderstood as reality;
2) misinterpretations of documents that refer to events or people from other time periods;
or 3) deliberate fabrications by a bunch of calendar conspirators.

Some of the people who therefore didn't exist are King Harald I Fairhair of Norway, King Alfred the Great of Wessex, the writers Alcuin, Caedmon, Li Po, and Bede... and Charlemagne.

Why, you might ask, do Niemitz and Illig believe this?  Apparently it's based on hiatuses in historical records (the Early Middle Ages in Europe was a chaotic time, and most of the few records that were written during that time have been lost), coupled with perceived gaps in building in Constantinople.  Niemitz and Illig also believe that the development of religious doctrine in Europe goes into a stall between the 7th and 10th centuries, as does the progress of art, language, and science.  All of these gaps, they say, can be explained if those three centuries didn't exist -- they were inventions of a conspiracy of church fathers in the 11th and 12th centuries, that originated with Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II, and has continued lo unto this very day.

Well, let me see here.  Where do I start?

Interesting, if three centuries fell out of historians' pockets somewhere along the way, that astronomical records (especially records of comets and solar eclipses kept by the Chinese) agree precisely with back-calculations done by present day astronomers.  The Tang Dynasty -- which coincides almost perfectly with Niemitz and Illig's lost centuries, and which they consider a "Golden Age Myth" -- not only produced art and artifacts, but kept intricate records of observations of events in the sky.  It's a little hard to explain the solar eclipses that occurred during that time, and which line up perfectly with when astronomers know they occurred, if (1) those three centuries never happened, and (2) the Tang Dynasty astronomers were themselves later fabrications.

We also have the problem that this is the period during which Islam spread across the Middle East -- so we're supposed to believe that we jump right from 614 (Muhammad is still alive, but has yet to make his pilgrimage to Mecca) to 911 (the Muslims are in control of territory from southern Spain to Arabia and beyond)?  And I guess they should revoke my master's degree, because the subject of my thesis (the Viking conquest of England and Scotland) occurred during those years... and so is an elaborate fiction, as is the linguistic and archaeological evidence.

Or, maybe I'm one of the conspirators.  I've been accused of that before.

Anyway, this whole hypothesis seems to be a lot of nonsense, and is yet another good example of Ockham's Razor, not to mention the ECREE Principle.  So, you can relax, and cancel any plans to go back and yell at your high school history teachers -- Charlemagne was almost certainly a real person.  As were Alfred the Great and the rest.  Me, I'm glad.  I have a hard enough time remembering to write the correct year on my checks when January 1 rolls around; I don't know what I'd do if I had to remember that it was a whole different century.

Cryptid menagerie

It's been a busy week, here in the cryptozoological wing of the Skeptophilia research offices.  We're currently tracking three stories about alleged spine-chilling, bizarre, non-human life-forms, and we're not even talking about the cast of Jersey Shore.

First, we've got a story from The Examiner about an old man in the Philippines who was attacked by a shape-shifting monster called an "aswang" or "manananggal," which attacks humans and eats their livers.  The still photographs show, lo and behold, an old man being confronted by someone who looks like he's wearing one of the rubberized monster heads from the movie Alien:

So, anyway, the story goes on to say how there's a video of the incident but it "hasn't been released yet," which sounds kind of fishy right from the get-go.  Also a bit sketchy is the lack of detail; the victim wasn't named, although it does say that the victim's brother "José" filmed the entire incident.  Which raises the question of why he didn't run to help, instead of standing there with a video camera while his brother had his liver eaten.

Then, I noticed that the guy who went to the Philippines to gather information for the report was none other than Blake Cousins, who appeared in Skeptophilia just last week -- as the "investigative reporter" who did the video clip about the 12-year-old boy from Australia who made himself an "Atlantean copper headband" that allowed him to talk to spirits from inside the Hollow Earth.  In fact, even the site Phantoms and Monsters, not generally the most skeptical of sources, called this story "possible buffoonery."  (Here)  So given those two strikes against it, this story is almost certainly a non-starter, especially considering the credibility Cousins has, or the lack thereof.  So let's move on to our next story, which takes us to the dry hillsides of Utah.


The UK Daily Mail is reporting on a story about some hikers near Ben Lomond Peak in Weber County, Utah, who saw... a goat man.

In fact, one of them, Coty Creighton, took a photograph of Goat Man:

Creighton told reporters at the Utah Standard Examiner that he "...thought it was a deformed goat. It was clumsy, not nimble…  He was on his hands and knees, crawling along the mountainside."

In a separate communication with Salt Lake City's CityWeekly.Net, Creighton said, "I was racking my brain trying to figure out what other type of animal it could be.  An albino bear?  A honky Sasquatch?"

At this point, I had to stop for a moment to clean the coffee spatters off my computer screen.

Creighton, however, got out binoculars and took a closer look, and found out that it was none of those things.  It was...

... a guy in a custom-made goat suit.

Creighton stared at the guy for about five minutes, and at some point, the Goat Man realized he was being observed, and stopped moving -- and just stared back.  Creighton got creeped out, and said he wasn't going to get any closer, because "Something was definitely off with that guy."

I'd say that's a major understatement.  So if you're going to be in Utah any time soon, make sure you keep your eyes peeled for Goat Man.


Our third report comes all the way from the Moon, via MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) and the site Ghost Theory.  (Source)  It shows a still photograph, and a video clip, of a pulsating, cloudlike "anomaly" hovering over a lunar crater.  Scott McMan, of Ghost Theory, writes, "The person who submitted the video seemed as confused as I was because he could only make the following statement: 'I don’t know what to make of this object.'"  People who've analyzed the video say that the "entity... moves in a lifelike fashion."

Well, I'm a bit at a loss myself, but my initial reaction is that it looks like a stationary object whose image is being distorted by the passage of the light rays from it through the Earth's atmosphere.  This effect, similar to the heat shimmer you see above a hot roadway on a clear day, is caused by light bending as it passes through media with different indices of refraction, warping the image, and (if the medium itself is moving) making it appear that the object itself is moving.  I'll admit, though, that it's pretty bizarre-looking.  And even though I strongly suspect that this has a perfectly natural explanation that has nothing to do with an alien entity moving in a lifelike fashion, at least it doesn't shout out "hoax!" to me.

Which is more than I can say for the "aswang" photographs and the Utah Goat Man.

Lemmings, hockey fans, and fire pits

Friday, the Silicon Valley Mercury reported that 21 people were treated at a local hospital for burns after participating in a firewalking activity at an event organized by inspirational speaker Tony Robbins.  (Source)

My first reaction was that I find it hard to fathom how 21 people were injured.  One or two, okay.  But 21?  You'd think that even by person number 5, the rest of the crowd would see that persons number 1 through 4 were writhing on the ground, screaming with agony, and would say, "Hmmm.  Maybe not.  I think I'll just watch from the sidelines, thanks."  But that's not what happened.  Mr. Robbins kept telling the participants, "C'mon!  You can do it!  This time it's really going to work!", and for some reason they kept believing him.  Perhaps he had them lined up in reverse order of IQ, so that each person in line was incrementally stupider than the previous one.

The interesting thing is that even now, Robbins and the events staff aren't admitting that walking on hot coals is basically a stupid thing to do.  "We have been safely providing this experience for more than three decades, and always under the supervision of medical personnel," a spokesperson told reporters after the fiasco on Friday.  "We continue to work with local fire and emergency personnel to ensure this event is always done in the safest way possible."

And even the injured firewalkers aren't willing to say that the problem is that "hot things will burn you."  One participant, Andrew Brenner, told reporters that he did get burned, but it was his own fault, for not having enough "faith and concentration."  "I did it before, didn't get into the right state and got burned," Brenner said.  "I knew I wasn't at my peak state.  I didn't take it as serious."

What strikes me about all of this -- besides the general observation that given a contest between "faith and concentration" and "extremely hot object," the hot object is going to win every time -- is how this is indicative of the lemming-like aspects of human behavior.  All of us, when in large groups, tend to participate in behavior that we would never dream of doing while alone or in smaller groups.  Look at the kinds of things that can happen at athletic events, concerts, and festivals.  I think it unlikely, for example, that I would paint my face, shoulders, and chest red-and-white (Cornell colors, for those of you who are non-New Yorkers) in any group with less than ten members, and the number might rise to 25 if we were talking about a freezing cold day in early March.  However, at the ECAC hockey finals, buoyed up by the energy of thousands of cheering Big Red hockey fans...?  But perhaps I've incriminated myself enough already.

It all comes from being a social primate, really.  We do what the group does, for a variety of reasons.  Most of such behavior is probably pretty harmless, honestly, and the sociologists would point to its importance in group cohesion and our sense of belonging.  Of course, the dark side of this tendency is the capacity for mob violence.  In groups, people will often break their own moral and ethical precepts, not then (if ever) recognizing the point where they crossed that line, because a sort of group mentality takes over.  As Stanislaw Lec said, "Every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty."  And from one of my own personal favorites, Terry Pratchett: "The IQ of a mob is equal to the IQ of its stupidest member, divided by the number of people in the mob."

Leaders, from corporate CEOs to high school principals to motivational speakers, take advantage of this tendency, often with the best of motives.  Get the group stirred up; get them excited about something.  Identify a few of the major power brokers in the group (the Head Lemmings), and get them on your side.  At that point, you can propose damn near anything, and the whole group will follow you.  I've seen it accomplish great things; in my own school, five years ago, the creation of our highly successful electives program was accomplished using just such a method.  Of course, it's also resulted in riots, crusades, and wars.  Any tendency in human nature can be used for good or for evil.

Or just to make people do stupid stuff, like walking across a fire pit after the first twenty people burned their feet up, just because some silly motivational speaker was shouting, "do it! I believe in you!"