Searching the fringes

I have a guilty pleasure, and that is that I am absolutely fascinated with the possibility of alien intelligence.

Other fringe science, even if it were proven true, wouldn't excite me nearly so much.  But I live in hope that in my lifetime, there will be a moment like the one in the movie Contact (not coincidentally, one of my favorite movies ever) -- incontrovertible evidence of intelligent life in another star system.  I have posters of UFOs and bug-eyed gray guys on my classroom wall.  My screensaver is SETI@home, which devotes a little bit of my computer's CPU time to searching radio telescope data for meaningful signals when I'm not using it for more important things, like looking at funny pictures of cats.  (And all of you should download the screensaver immediately -- it's way cool.)

And this is why it pisses me off so much when people muck up the whole endeavor by making crazy claims regarding alien life.

Of course, it happens all the time; the number of bogus claims on sites like Supernatural UFO, UFO Digest, UFO Casebook, and The UFO Bureau run to dozens a day, 365 days a year.  Most have as "proof" eyewitness testimony ("and I'm not lying, I swear!") or blurry photographs that could mean anything.  Worse, the majority of the writers for these sites seem to resent skeptics like myself who are genuinely interested in the topic but want some minimal piece of hard evidence before saying, "Okay, this is it, ETI exists."

But it doesn't end there, unfortunately.  Because UFOlogy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence still fall somewhere on the boundaries of science, they attract more than their fair share of kooks and wackos.  And I ran into two excellent examples of this just yesterday.

In the first, we have a guy on UFO Sightings Daily who is claiming that there's a NASA photograph of the Sun's surface, that when you look at it just right, has the picture of an alien saying hello.

Of course, it's always easier to see something when someone points it out, and tells you what it is, isn't it?  Here's the original photo -- which even has the relevant place circled:

A little trickier here, no?  And yet the author of the post says that this is clear evidence of the existence of Michio Kaku's "Type 3 Civilization," that is able to harness the power of an entire star, and that they used this awesome technological power to send us a blurry, warped image of one of their species. "Why display an image if you control the sun?" he writes.  "To commemorate an important person in your species...showing their pride about who they are."

But even this is minor-league crazy with respect to a post by Sean Casteel over on UFO Digest.  Casteel has made appearances on Skeptophilia before, usually for nutty stuff about aliens and time travel and government coverups, but this time he has a doozy, because he's added some wacko Christian mythology to the mix.  UFOs, Casteel tells us, are (1) proof that the bible is literally true, and (2) signs of the Second Coming.  In the article, he interviews one Reverend Barry Downing, who (not to put too fine a point on it) seems to have a screw loose.  Lest you think I'm being too harsh, here is an excerpt:

"One of the possibilities,” (Downing) continued, "is that one of the tasks of UFOs, or the angels, is to collect the souls of people when they die and take them off to another world where they begin the next life that they have. This is not the Second Coming as we usually think of it. But Jesus says in John 14, ‘I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place, I will come again and take you to be where I am.’ For this to be true, I think it has to be true when someone dies. That’s probably how it works.  I think one of the roles of UFOs would be to move us to the point where the Biblical faith is more scientifically plausible. You’ve got a huge split in American culture right now between fundamentalists who believe the Bible just because God inspired the Bible, and therefore it must be true. Then you have university types who don’t see the Bible as different from any other book and pretty much don’t believe that God is any part of the universe. They believe the universe was in some sense ‘self-created’ by ways we don’t yet understand therefore there’s no divine force behind anything that we see.

"So the question is," Downing went on, "how do you get faith back in play? Not based on the Bible alone, but based on modern evidence that says, ‘Hey, the angels may still be here.’ To me, that’s where the UFOs come into the scene. Fundamentalist Christians, of course, tend to see UFOs as demonic. The assumption of fundamentalists is that if UFOs were really the angels of God, they’d show themselves openly. Yet, obviously, the angels of God do not show themselves openly to us. Otherwise, we’d all see them. There’s some part of God that holds God’s self back, that doesn’t reveal God directly to us.

"It’s a choice you can make," he said. "I think that God is more likely to use the UFO force to get faith back in business in what you’d call the intellectual side of our culture now, which is very atheistic. In any case, if it should be true that UFOs carry the angels of God as we understand them Biblically, then that would certainly seem to be the way in which the Second Coming would happen. If Jesus was taken up into the sky at his Ascension in a UFO, which is what seems to be said in the Book of Acts, Chapter One, then the other thing that’s said in that same chapter is this: ‘This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’"

Well, I think the Christian orthodoxy might have a thing or two to say about that, especially the part about Jesus at the Ascension riding up into the sky in a spaceship. 

All of this might seem like harmless noodling around, but my whole problem about this kind of thing is that it muddies the water.  Just like Ellie Arroway, the astronomer in Contact, I fret over the fact that legitimate scientific research into alien life on other planets (like SETI) won't get funded because the public has become so convinced by wingnuts like Casteel that it's all nonsense that they can't see any value in any of it.  I'd like to say to the UFO website people, who feel obliged to post every single poorly-Photoshopped hoax pic showing a flying saucer, "You are not doing this field of study any favors by approaching the topic this way."

But it's not going to happen any time soon, I'm afraid.  Fringy areas of science attract nuts, and nuts are not well-known for their judicious application of Ockham's Razor.

I just hope that by the time we do get good evidence, we haven't all just given it up as a bad job.

Cometcide

I don't know about you, but for me Comet ISON was a great big disappointment.  I know that predicting the brightness of these infrequent visitors to the Solar System is an inexact science at best, but all of the "Comet of the Century" hype really had me looking forward to ISON putting on a significant end-of-the-year light show.

Comet ISON (image courtesy of the European Southern Observatory and the Wikimedia Commons)

Then, of course, we had the added filigree that ISON was supposed to be an alien spaceship.  Or the planet Nibiru.  Or the Star Wormwood from the Book of Revelation, heralding the start of the End Times, when Satan comes down and turns all of us unbelievers into Heathen McNuggets.  Or, possibly, all of the above.  In any case, it was supposed to be big, the kind of woo-woo event that will never be forgotten, at least until none of the predictions come true, and the next comet comes along, and this time it'll be the real thing, cross our heart and hope to die.

But ISON failed even to show up.  Some time during perihelion, enough of the comet's icy core melted that it fell apart, leaving nothing but a rapidly-dimming cloud of poorly consolidated dust that never was visible to the naked eye.

Or at least that's the official story.  *cue scary music*

Because, you know, that's the kind of thing they'd tell us, to dupe the unwary.  They want to distract us from the real reason that ISON disintegrated:

It was vaporized by a NASA death ray.

Yup.  A YouTube video by a guy who calls himself DarkSkyWatcher74 tells us that ISON was spinning along, all innocent and unsuspecting, and then a NASA-launched satellite shot some kind of Star-Trek-style photon torpedo at ISON and blew it to smithereens.   As proof he has some videos and still photos of fuzzy, streaky lights which, if you squinch your eyes up and look at them just right, look suspiciously like a bunch of fuzzy, streaky lights.  (A particularly wonderful moment occurs around one minute into the video, where he tells us that he should be able to see the comet from where he's standing, but it's being "blocked by a chemtrail.")

Damning evidence, DarkSkyWatcher74 says.  Smoking gun.  The people at NASA (or "NAS-holes," as he calls them) shot down ISON.  Why would they do such a thing?  Well, he seems kind of sketchy on that point.  NASA is a government agency, he says, and "when has the government done you any favors?"  Well, he's got me there, as long as you don't count the police and the fire department and road maintenance and public schools and so on.  But other than that, nothing, right?

Of course right.

One thing that bothers me, though, is that the woo-woos went out of their way to get our knickers in a twist over how ISON was some kind of evil omen or spaceship full of extraterrestrials on their way to vaporize Earth.  You'd think that they'd be delighted that it was destroyed.  But no.  You can't please 'em no matter what you do.  NASA uses their ultra-high-tech energy weapons, that they developed somehow despite this year's projected $200 million in budget cuts, to blow up the incoming omen (or spaceship, depending on which version you went for earlier), and the woo-woos are all upset. 

It's funny how they want to hang onto their worldview, regardless of what happens.  Whatever we see in the sky is evil.  The government is evil.  When the government appears to interfere with what happens in the sky, that's evil too.  It's all evil, with the sole exception of DarkSkyWatcher74, who is the only one enlightened enough to let us know what's going on.

But will we listen?  Nooooooooo.

So, anyhow, that's today's exercise in frustration.  I probably shouldn't expect these people to be logically consistent; after all, they've never done it before, so why start now?  And ISON is gone, however it died, whether just from natural forces at perihelion, or because NASA committed an act of unjustifiable cometcide.  But we should move on, because we've got bigger things to worry about, such as the arrival of Ragnarök on February 22 of next year.  And yes, I mean the whole Norse-god thing, with Frost Giants and Fenrir the Wolf and Midgard's Serpent and Heimdall blowing the Giant Trumpet of Doom.

Should be good times.

Cosmic doorways

A question that frequently arises when I am perusing writings from the Wide World of Woo-Woo is, "Do these people recognize it when they're just making shit up?"

You'd think they would, wouldn't you?  I mean, I get how suggestible we humans are, how subject to bias, how susceptible to misinterpreting sensory input.  Not only that, we are perhaps more emotional beings than we are cerebral ones, a fact that was brought home to me rather vividly one evening last week when my wife heard a noise downstairs, meaning the choice was "go down and investigate" or "surrender your Man-Card immediately."  So I went downstairs.  And there was no one down there, but by the time I had figured that out, and that we were not in danger of being knifed to death by a psychopath, I had broken out in a serious cold sweat, despite (1) being armed with a pair of fireplace tongs, and (2) the fact that my wife felt sorry for how obviously terrified I was and went with me.

So like I said: I get that we can let our minds get carried away, in a variety of fashions.  But what I don't get is how it can happen without your being aware of it.  So many woo-woos are doing what clearly appears to me to be crafting highly complex works of fiction, and yet the entire time, they seem to be entirely convinced that what they're saying is true.

This comes up because of a site I stumbled upon called Cosmic Doorways, wherein I found the following image:

We have a few problems here right from the get-go, not least being their representation of Nelson Mandela as a skinny half-naked white guy with blond hair.  And wings.  But the crazy doesn't even end there, more's the pity; they connect Mandela with the Chinese moon lander, and throw in Paul Walker for good measure.  Some time today, they say, Walker and Mandela are going to go through a "cosmic doorway" that will transport them from South Africa to the galactic core.

If I've been wrong all along, and there are immortal souls, I hope like hell this isn't true, because in the middle of the galactic core is a big-ass black hole.  How unfair would that be?  Walker just died in a fiery car crash, and Mandela passed away at age 95 after a long life filled with strife and struggle against oppression.  So they die, and their souls are floating around the place, looking forward to heaven, or at least something better than car crashes and solitary confinement, and WHOOAAAA they both get sucked, feet-first, down a black hole.

I'd like to be able to tell you that there is evidence that the Cosmic Doorways people are joking, but they appear to be entirely serious, despite the fact that damn near everything on the site seems to have been made up.  They show stills from the movie Stargate as if it were some kind of historical documentary.  They have photographs of every last object on the Earth that is shaped like a ring, along with captions indicating that these are secret high-energy portals.  There are lots of images of the Virgin Mary, because "she is a vessel that allows beings to come and go between dimensions."  They say that the "Four Corners" region of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona is magical because the "Four Corners" make a cross shape, even though I can't think of another shape that the junction of four more-or-less rectangular states could possibly make.  They have lots of quotes from the songs of The Doors, because, hey, doors, right?  They claim that the way to use these cosmic portals is by sharpening up your pineal gland, and/or taking hallucinogenic drugs, the latter of which may explain a good bit of the content of the site.

But still.  Even considering that the author may well have taken more DMT and ayahuasca than his neurotransmitters could handle, it still strikes me that he must, on some level, be aware that what he's writing can't possibly be true.  For example, he identifies the following as a "stargate:"

[photograph courtesy of photographer Mike Russell and the Wikimedia Commons]

Despite the fact that it is actually not an intergalactic portal at all, but the Michigan Labor Legacy Landmark in Detroit's Hart Plaza, and hundreds of tourists walk through it every day without being transported anywhere much but the other side of the monument.

So.  Yeah.  Anyhow.  I read things like this, and I keep saying to myself, "Is this guy joking?  Or what?"  But in this case the answer, sadly, appears to be "No."  He really does think that Nelson Mandela and Paul Walker are going to be transported to the galactic core today.  And furthermore, he apparently views this as a good thing, as is Mandela's miraculous ethnic transformation.

As for me, I think I'll stick with reality.  It's not nearly as psychedelic, but at least I'm reasonably sure that the doorway of my office won't suddenly send me to the core of a distant star, or anything.  You can see how that'd be unpleasant.

Aliens visit Bulgaria

It's been a while since we've had any interesting reports of UFO or alien sightings, so I was tickled to find a post yesterday on Paranominal that claims that some hikers near Plovdiv, Bulgaria snapped a photograph of an "alien Grey" while walking through a forest.

The photograph is put into a sort of montage format on a video in the post, but I'll post the photograph itself here:

What I find interesting about this photo is that it shows the alien, who appears to be about five meters tall, clearly visible between two trees maybe ten meters further on in the woods, and yet the hikers are still walking toward it in an apparently unconcerned fashion.  I don't know about you, but if I were hiking through the woods and stumbled upon a scary-looking alien creature who was over twice my height, I would not just stroll right on up to it.  At the point this photograph was taken, I would already be running in a comical, Looney Tunes manner in the opposite direction, with my feet only visible as a circular blur.

If I had not immediately died of a brain aneurysm when I spotted the thing.  Which is probably more likely.  I may be a skeptical scientific type, and all, but I am also a great big old coward.  I believe that it is our duty as rationalists to evaluate claims of the paranormal, but I am much more comfortable evaluating them from a safe distance, which in this case would be about fifty miles.

Be that as it may, I'm a little skeptical of this claim.  For one thing, if you watched the video, you'll notice how the alien face becomes way scarier when they isolate and magnify it.  While this may seem like a "duh" statement, part of the reason that alien and ghost photographs become more convincing in close-ups is because they get grainier when you do that -- the image "pixillates."  (For a creepy example of how the brain imposes meaning on grainy data, take a look at this optical illusion.)  Now, as we've seen many times before, humans are great at imposing meaning on patternless images, and we especially like to turn those images into faces (a phenomenon called pareidolia, about which I have written many times before).  But the fact that we become more convinced as the data gets grainy is a little suspicious, and exactly the opposite of what should happen to a scientist.  We should be convinced by precision, not by imprecision.

The last nail in the coffin, for me, came at the end of the video, when I saw who had put it together.  The creator of the video -- and probably the photograph as well -- was one Stephen Hannard, of England, who is also the one who claimed that the Martian probe Curiosity found a fossilized shoe, human finger, and woodchuck on the surface of Mars, and that the International Space Station had captured footage of a giant space slug.  It's not like this guy has any kind of solid track record for veracity.  So I'm perhaps to be forgiven if I find anything coming from Hannard a little suspect from the get go.

So anyhow, I doubt this is really a photograph of an alien, which is kind of a shame.  I'd love it if there was, during my lifetime, incontrovertible evidence of intelligent alien life.  I realize that's easy for me to say sitting here safely in my office thousands of kilometers from Plovdiv, Bulgaria, but I really do mean it.  If an alien spaceship landed in my back yard, I'd even try to overcome my urge to run away or die of fright in order to be the first human to shake their gray, seven-fingered hands upon their arrival on Earth.

Jesus, Santa, and Megyn Kelly

I like a fair fight.  It's actually fun for me to have a good, riproaring intellectual discussion, in which both my opponent and I know a lot about what we're saying and are willing to bat the ideas around for a while.  Even if we start out disagreeing, and end up no closer together at the end, there is something profoundly satisfying about a purely cerebral dispute.  (And it's a bit of a lost art, frankly.)

On the other hand, sometimes quarrels can be so unequally weighted that it seems unfair.  My dad used to call such arguments "shooting fish in a barrel."  While I don't shy away from those when I see them -- after all, the entire gist of this blog has to do with discussing illogical, irrational, and counterfactual ideas -- I don't get much satisfaction out of saying, basically, "Wow.  This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen."

This comes up because of a link a friend sent me to a news story on the site Crooks & Liars, entitled, "Fox News Host Megyn Kelly Assures Children: Jesus and Santa Were Both White Men."  And my response to him was:  "Oh, they are just making it way too easy for me."

Kelly came up with this bizarre bêtise in response to a column in Slate by Aisha Harris that criticized the depiction of Santa as white, because such practices marginalize non-white children.  She proposed that it might be time to represent the "spirit of Christmas" as an animal, instead:  "For one thing," Harris wrote, "making Santa Claus an animal rather than an old white male could spare millions of nonwhite kids the insecurity and shame that I remember from childhood."

Well.  Far be it from Fox to take such an affront lying down.  Kelly was outraged.  Santa is white, she says.  "For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white," Kelly said.  "But this person is just arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa. But Santa is what he is.  Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean it has to change, you know?  I mean, Jesus was a white man too.  He was a historical figure, that's a verifiable fact, as is Santa -- I just want the kids watching to know that."

Let's just clear up a couple of things, okay, Megyn?

The historical basis for the Santa Claus legend is St. Nicholas of Myra, who was a fourth-century bishop in Asia Minor who was revered for giving gifts to the poor.   He was of Greek descent but lived most of his life in what is now Turkey.   It's pretty unlikely that he looked even remotely like the chubby, rosy-cheeked greeting-card Santa.  Chances are, he looked a lot more like this guy...

Patriarch Gregory IV of Antioch (1906)

... than he did this guy:

(Photograph courtesy of photographer Douglas Rahden and the Wikimedia Commons)

And then, of course, there's Jesus, who is often depicted this way:

(image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

Despite the fact that he wasn't, technically, Swedish.

The thought did cross my mind to wonder, however, if Megyn Kelly had come to her conclusions about the ethnicity of Jesus and Santa after doing some research in primary sources:

So.  Anyhow.  Like I said, all of this has me wondering how the people at Fox News still have any audience left.  And I'm not even talking about their political leanings -- as I've said before, I'm neither well-informed enough nor, frankly, interested enough to comment on politics most of the time.  But given their track record for accuracy on the facts, and their commentators' regrettable tendency to utter statements that are (not to put too fine a point on it) moronic, it's no wonder that people have started referring to the network as Faux News.

So that's our fish-shooting exercise for the morning.  But if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Kelly, or anyone else at Fox, to retract the statement.  "Death before retraction!" seems to be the motto over there.  Worse, actually; they often follow up the most boneheaded of their utterances with defenses that dig the hole even deeper.  So in the next couple of days, look for further idiocies from Kelly, including a statement that Moses was white, too, and she knows because she's seen pictures of him and he looks just like Charlton Heston.

Drowned cities and drowning mythologies

Yesterday, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece.  After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical city of Ys, built on the coast of Brittany behind a seawall.  Princess Dahut the Wicked tempted fate by engaging in all sorts of depravity therein, despite the warnings of Saint Winwaloe that god was watching and would smite the crap out of her if she didn't mend her ways.  (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit, here, but that's the gist.)  Anyhow, Dahut wouldn't listen, and one night a storm rose and broke through the seawall, and the ocean flowed in over the city.  Dahut's father, King Gradion, escaped on a magical horse with Dahut riding behind him, but Winwaloe shouted at him, "Push back the demon riding with you!"

So Gradion did what any good father would do, namely, shove his daughter into the sea, which "swallowed her up."  The sea also swallowed the rest of Ys, which kind of sucked for the inhabitants, given that it wasn't really their fault that the princess was a little morally challenged.  As for Princess Dahut herself, she became a mermaid, and is still hanging around to tempt sailors into jumping into the ocean to their deaths.  And according to legend, on windy days, you can still hear the bells of the drowned cathedral of Ys if you stand along the shore of Douarnenez Bay.

The Flight of King Gradion, by Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1884 (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France)

Kind of a cool story, in a ruthless, Grimm's Fairy Tales sort of way.  And whatever else you think, you have to admit that Debussy's piece is gorgeous (go back and give a listen to the recording of it I linked above, if you haven't already done so).

What I haven't told you, yet, though, is the other thing I found out while looking up the Legend of the Drowned City of Ys...

... which is that he über-Christians are now using the story to support creationism.

I'm not making this up.  If you don't believe me, check out the page called "Submerged Ruins" at the site Genesis Veracity Foundation.   Here's how they launch the idea:

Have you ever seen a map showing the bronze age port cities of the world? You certainly have not, because the darwinists will tell you sea level at circa 2000 B.C. was little different than today, yet the presence of hundreds of submerged ruins’ sites from the Gulf of Chambay to Bimini, and from Cornwall to Nan Madol, certainly belie that notion, with most of the submerged ruins worldwide in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, right where you’d expect them to be, where Sidon, Peleg, Javan, Tarshish, and Atlas plied the waters, building their port facilities, now submerged since the end of the Ice Age. Here is a partial list of the submerged ruins worldwide, with pictures where available, to be soon updated as more photos will undoubtedly roll-in from interested “submergie” aficionados, so help out if you can, hard as it may be for a darwinist to do, but certainly not for a soon-to-be ex-darwinist, we shall see.

Well, I've never known a "Darwinist" to make any definitive statement regarding the sea level staying the same.  Most "Darwinists" are pretty well-versed in science, meaning they know all about ice ages and interglacial periods and sea level fluctuations, as opposed to creationists, who think that the entire world was flooded and that afterwards the water just "went away," presumably through some kind of giant floor drain in the Marianas Trench.

Anyhow, we soon get to the legend of Ys, in a single-sentence paragraph that should win some kind of Olympic gold medal in the Comma Splice Event:

Submerged ruins have been reported off Cornwall’s Isles of Scilly, in Cardigan Bay, off Tory Island, and off the Brittany coast of the Kingdom of Ys, also known as Keris, all these submerged ruins part of Atland as it’s called in the ancient book Oera Linda of the Frisians, that empire was also known as Atalan, don’t bet against Avalon, the story adapted two thousand years later.

What on earth does this have to do with the bible, you may be asking?  Well, the writer is happy to explain with another single sentence:

So the popular notion that the empire of Atlantis was some continent-sized island now submerged way out in the Atlantic ocean is proven ridiculous, because that empire was demonstrably a vast ice age maritime empire of the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic coastlines, which comports with the biblical timeline, that the Ice Age ended circa 1500 b.c. at the time of the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, their patriarch having been Canaan, the father of Sidon (Posidon).

So, I was thinking, "Wait.  Is he talking about Poseidon?  Like, the Greek god?  Because, you know, polytheism doesn't exactly square with the traditional interpretation of the bible, right?"  But in fact, yes, that's who he's talking about... and he claims that Poseidon was mentioned in the bible:

Plato wrote that Posidon (Canaan’s son Sidon, Genesis 10:15) bestowed ten districts of atlantean empire governorship to his sons, one son Atlas having gained the kingship of the district of the concentric canal ringed city of Atlantis, his namesake (along with the Atlantic ocean and the Atlas mountains), that legendary capital city of Atlantis where the worship of Posidon was centered and practiced for perhaps forty generations until the Ice Age ended (when the sea level rose to consume 25 million square miles of coastal real estate worldwide).

Except that in the bible, Sidon was Noah's great-grandson, and was born after the Flood.

Oops.

But creationists never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of their conclusions.  He finishes up his explanation, if I can dignify it by that name, thusly:

Very important to remember is that Noah’s Flood did not cover today’s mountain ranges (contrary to what the bibliophobes mockingly insist), because the global flood of Noah’s day totally covered and obliterated the low mountains of the pre-flood supercontinent Pangea, those mountains not having been formed by tectonic plates crashing together by runaway plate tectonics as was the case for the orogenies of our current mountains ranges formed at the close of Noah’s Flood. So now when skeptics come to comprehend the solid science confirming the global flood vividly described in the book of Genesis, solid science here http://detectingdesign.com/fossilrecord.html, the reasons to believe all of the Bible become even more apparent, much to the darwinists’ woe.

Yup, I have to admit that reading this made me experience some significant woe, but not for the reason he probably thinks.

Is it just me, or do the creationists seem increasingly desperate lately?  The evidence for evolution, the antiquity of the Earth, and the accuracy of paleontology just keeps mounting, and yet they continue to flail around, like a drowning citizen of Ys trying to cling to anything in order to stay afloat.  They've shifted their tactics from "The Bible Says It, I Believe It, and That Settles It" -- which is an inherently unarguable position -- to looking at the actual evidence.  And that moves the game solidly onto our turf, because evaluating evidence is what scientists do.

So I suppose sites like this, however they are kind of an embarrassment to read, are actually a good thing, because it means that on some level, the biblical literalists are sensing that they're losing. 

And in celebration, let's indulge in a little more Debussy, shall we?  How about his orchestral work, The Sea?  That seems a fitting way to end this discussion, doesn't it?

Earth angel

Having taken on, in recent posts, topics such as how buying into conspiracies makes you doubt facts, the role of paranoia in American politics, and Monsanto and its role in creating GMOs, today I'd like to turn to an even more pressing issue, to wit:

Is the Earth being controlled by mentally retarded Nordic alien angels?

That is the contention of the author of the site Montalk.net, the link for which was sent to me by a frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, and that introduces the concept thusly:

There is far more to this world than taught in our schools, shown in the media, or proclaimed by the church and state. Most of mankind lives in a hypnotic trance, taking to be reality what is instead a twisted simulacrum of reality, a collective dream in which values are inverted, lies are taken as truth, and tyranny is accepted as security. They enjoy their ignorance and cling tightly to the misery that gives them identity.

Yup, that's me, clinging to my ignorance over here.  But what should I believe, then?  We find out a bit under "Key Concepts," which starts out innocuously enough -- some stuff about the nature of god, spirit, souls, and so on, not too very different than you might find on a number of religious or quasi-religious sites.  But then we hit the concept "Evolution," and if you're like me, there's the sense of an impending train wreck:

Evolution

• physical evolution is due to natural selection, random mutation, conscious selection, and conscious mutation

• human evolution is mostly artificial; either DNA mutates to conform to alien soul frequency, or else DNA is artificially altered through advanced genetic engineering by certain alien factions

• because body must match soul, the death of a species means loss of compatible bodies for purposes of reincarnation. Thus physical life seeks physical survival and propagation of genes.

• the purpose of physical evolution is to accommodate and serve spiritual evolution

If I could evolve consciously, I'd evolve wings.  Great big feathery wings from my shoulder blades.  I know it'd make it hard to put on a shirt, but that's a downside I'd be willing to accept, in order to be able to fly.

Speaking of wings and flying, we really get into deep water when he starts talking about angels.  Because according to this guy, angels are real -- again, not thus far so very different, at first, from what a lot of people believe.  But wait until you hear what he thinks angels are.  (Do NOT attempt to drink anything while reading this.  I will not be responsible for ruined computer screens or keyboards.  You HAVE been warned.)

Mankind is unwittingly caught in a war between hidden superhuman factions who select, train, equip their human agents to participate in that war...  There is warring among these beings, indicating they are not all unified. At the very minimum they are polarized into opposing sides, if not split into numerous independent factions. Some factions have a strong fascist orientation.

The Nordic aliens are genetically compatible with us, and some of their females have engaged human males for sexual encounters and even long term relationships. Through interbreeding their genes can enter our gene pool and vice versa. Therefore some human individuals and bloodlines would have more of their DNA than others, and their angelic alien DNA would likely show under analysis to be basically human, albeit rare and unusual.

So, we could tell that a human had angelic alien DNA because if we analyzed his DNA, we'd find it was... human?

Alrighty then.

We then hear about what these beings are not: these misidentifications include hoaxes (don't be silly), "metaphysical entities," members of the Galactic Federation, and Super Nazis.  So thank heaven for that, at least.

We also get to read lots of stories about alien abductions, many of which include some serious bow-chicka-bow-wow with blond-haired Nordic aliens aboard their spaceships, and which presumably allowed the lucky abductee to claim membership in the Light-Year-High Club.  But then we hear the bad news, which is that the aliens who have visited us, and who have apparently engaged in a great deal of cosmic whoopee with humans, are actually mentally retarded:

The members of the Nordic alien civilization are not all homogenous in standing or understanding. Composition ranges from a two-tier system of “lower retarded ones” and “higher advanced ones” to caste-like systems with many tiers similar to the Indian caste system.

The retarded members of their kind are the ones who interact with the most advanced of humans. Why? Maybe because of their evolutionary closeness, and also because such an interaction could be mutually beneficial. Despite their seeming superhuman qualities, those aliens who interact most with select humans may, in fact, be the most flawed of their race.

The problem... is that their most flawed ones are not only the creators and users of demiurgic technology, but they are also most involved in human affairs. This means we suffer their errors, which are graver in consequence than any mistake we could commit, just as our errors are more severe than those possible by animals.  The consequences of these errors and grave transgressions have cascaded back and forth throughout the timeline. They are now converging toward a nexus point representing the potential for a cataclysmic shift. Alien factions who were responsible for initiating these consequences are likely the same ones who are now involved in the final outcome. A thread of continuity exists between the most ancient and modern of human-alien encounters. The alien disinformation campaign is an effort by one set of such factions to prepare mankind for enthusiastic acceptance of their overt control.

Well, hell.  This is even worse than the Illuminati-in-the-government thing, or the Evil-Reptilian-Alien thing, or even the Comet-ISON-is-a-spaceship thing.   We're being controlled by mentally deficient aliens, who can screw things up even worse than plain old humans could?  All because they've come to Earth looking for some hot human/Nordic alien action?

I don't know about you, but I don't like this at all.

There is more on the website, of course, including stuff about the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the North Pole, Adam and Eve, alchemy, dimensional portals, the ether, the Pyramids, zombie computers, and snakes.  I encourage you to peruse it.  I would have read more myself, but it seems a little early in the day to start drinking, and I just don't think I could have managed it without a glass of scotch.

So, anyway, there you have it.  As if we didn't have enough to worry about, now we find out that the rulers of the world are blond-haired moronic alien angels, and (worse still) that some of us are descended from them.  I'm guessing I'm not, though.  I am blond, but I've got my family tree pretty well mapped out, and I haven't run into any records that show my great-great-great grandma getting knocked up by the Archangel Derpulus.  That's okay with me, honestly.  If I don't get wings out of the bargain, to hell with it.