Squatch of the day

In yesterday's post, we took a look at the latest from the world of extraterrestrial enthusiasts; today, we'll do the same for another topic we haven't visited in a while:

Bigfoot.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Yup, Skeptophilia has been quiet for a while on the subject of our giant hairy cousins.  Which is a shame, because cryptozoology was kind of how I got into all of this skepticism stuff.  I've had a thing for creepy cryptids since I was a kid.  All I can say is, however cheesy Finding Bigfoot is, if that show had been on when I was a teenager, I would not have missed an episode.

Of course, the same would have been true for Ghost Hunters and Scariest Places on Earth and Most Haunted and The Unexplained and probably even Destination: Truth.

Let's just say that I have learned some discernment as I have matured.

Be that as it may, we've had a busy couple of weeks in the field of Yetiology.  So let's take a look at what we've missed while we were focusing on such trivia as educational policy and the role of religion in the public sphere.

First, from British Columbia, we have a story about a hiker who took a video of an alleged Sasquatch.  The video, which is available from YouTube, I append here:

The hiker, who narrates the video, comments, "This is the middle of absolutely nowhere...  If that's human why would you walk up that ridge or that snow line?  Why would he not just go straight down?...  Good thing we brought beers.  Maybe we can lure him over here. I don't know how high we are, but we're probably close to 7,000 feet and this guy's just scampering up snow lines like it's no big deal."

He goes to significant lengths to point out that it is absolutely, totally remote, the middle of nowhere, but doesn't seem to recognize that it can't be all that remote, because after all, they're there.  And brought along beer.  I used to backcountry camp -- and I know from experience that if you are heading to a really remote place, that requires a long, arduous hike, you don't bring along unnecessary weight.  If they brought beer, then they were clearly close enough to civilization there could have been other hikers out there.

Or bears.  Or whatever.  Because the biggest problem is, this image is so tiny that there's no way to tell what it is.  It's not even a Blobsquatch.  It's a Dotsquatch.  Maybe this is the fabled wild hominid of the Northwest, but you certainly couldn't be sure from this video.


Even further out in left field is something from the Discovery channel, which has joined the History channel and Animal Planet in devoting themselves almost entirely to pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But they outdid themselves last week with a press release announcing an upcoming two-hour special about the infamous Dyatlov Pass Incident.

Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may remember that I did a post about this about two years ago, to which I direct you if you're curious about details.  But for our purposes here, it suffices to say that it centers around the mysterious deaths of nine experienced backcountry skiers in the Ural Mountains of Russia back in 1959.

It's an odd set of circumstances, and in my mind has never been adequately explained, although there are some compelling hypotheses about what may have caused their deaths.  But Discovery has added a hypothesis of their own to the list, although instead of "compelling" it is more "ridiculous:"

The Dyatlov Pass skiers were killed by wild Yetis.

I'm not making this up.  Here's the relevant paragraph of the press release:

RUSSIAN YETI: THE KILLER LIVES, a 2-hour special airing Sunday, June 1 at 9 PM ET/PT on the Discovery Channel, follows Mike [Libecki] as he traces the clues and gathers compelling evidence that suggests the students’ deaths could be the work of a creature thought only to exist in folklore.

Oh, hell, if you're going to make shit up, why not go all the way?  I think they should make a two-hour special about how the Dyatlov Pass skiers were killed by the Lovecraftian Elder Gods because some Russian necromancer wannabe opened up a gateway to Yog Sothoth.  The one hiker with the major chest injuries had had his heart sucked out by a Shoggoth.

Makes about as much sense.


Speaking of "not making sense," just last week we had a new proposal out there to explain why Bigfoot photos are all blurry.  It's not because they're fakes, or vague images of something sort-of-Bigfoot-like (i.e. an example of cryptozoological pareidolia).

It's because Bigfoot himself is blurry.

You probably think I'm making this up, but over at Occult View, this has been thrown out there as a serious suggestion in a post called "Bigfoot as a Blurry Vibration That Lives in the Forest."  A short passage should suffice to give you the flavor:

These sightings are not hominids, but something all together different. These Bigfoot are vibrations that live in the forest. Call them blurry beings. 

When these blurry vibrations are spotted, we see something that really doesn’t make sense. Our brains then fill in the blanks; our minds complete the details. We see a creature that looks natural, but if we took a picture of it at the same time it would appear only as a blur or a fuzzy image. 

There really hasn’t been a clear photo of Bigfoot (that I assume wasn’t a hoax). But there have been photos of these blurs, these dark shapes. If I am correct, we’ll never get a clear picture of the semi-rural Bigfoot. Yet it might be worth studying these images of dark shapes and see if we can learn something from them. These blurry images might provide clues to the true nature of the vibrations that live in the forest.

What does it even mean to say that something is a "living vibration?"  I'm assuming that the author is using the term in the usual hand-waving way that woo-woos do -- like the mystics saying that humans are "energy field vibrations," even though I doubt they could define the words "energy" and "field" if I held them at gunpoint.  So we won't press any further with this, except to say that anyone who thinks this is a rational explanation is a little blurry around the edges himself.

To end on an entertaining note, we have another video clip, this one from a gentleman named Larry Surface, that he claims is a recording of Bigfoot vocalizations from Ohio.  Take a listen:

My favorite part of this is the way Surface tries to transliterate what they're saying into English spelling, thusly:  "Hamit mahamit whoop whoop hamit wa wa wa wahit mahamit hondabay hondabay hondabay kaoo mahamit whoh hamit fusayo oa getmuh whoop ma oh."

Okay, I know that there's a possibility (slim, in my opinion) that these are really Bigfoot sounds.  But human perception being what it is, if someone tells you what you're hearing -- subtitles it, even -- you are way more likely to hear "hondabay hondabay hondabay" than you are to hear random animal vocalizations.  Consider how the whole "backmasking" thing works -- the conspiracy guys always tell you ahead of time what message has been inserted backwards into the song or speech you're listening to.  Then, when you listen to it backwards... lo and behold... there it is.

So me, I'm not convinced.  I've heard enough bizarre vocalizations from perfectly ordinary non-cryptids -- animals like foxes and raccoons and skunks and barred owls can make some really peculiar, unearthly noises.  (So if you really want to find out what the fox says, you can listen to hundreds of examples on YouTube.  You will not, for the record, find one recording of a fox saying "gering-a-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.")

Anyway, that's the news from the cryptozoology world.  Dotsquatch, Blursquatch, Russian Skier-Killers, and the strange language of the Ohio Bigfoot.  All in all, about what we'd expect, given the level of evidence that has been heretofore amassed.  So until next time, I'll sign off with a cheerful "Hamit mahamit whoop ma oh," and I hope you feel likewise.

Alien round-up

Yesterday's post, which involved fact-free speculation about UFOs being a "macro-scale quantum effect," made me realize that it's been a while since we looked at what was happening in the world of UFOlogists and alien aficionados.  So I did some research, and I'm glad that I did, because there are three stories that certainly merit a closer look.

First, we have an article over at the wonderfully loony website Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal called "Chatting With the Axthadans," in which we learn about an extraterrestrial species that I, at least, had never heard of.

The Axthadans are sometimes confused with the "Greys," we read, although there are some significant differences.  The "Greys" are much shorter, the author tells us, and come from a planet only thirty light years distant.  The Axthadans, on the other hand, are benevolent aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy.

Upon reading this, I immediately thought, "How can you be from a whole galaxy?"  I mean, it's bad enough that some woo-woos think that there are life forms that come from a constellation, given that this is just a loose assemblage of a few stars that are all at varying distances from the Earth, and only seem to be near each other when viewed from our vantage point.  But an entire galaxy?  Made up, according to recent studies, of one trillion stars?

How could that possibly work?

Also, there's the little problem that the distance from the Earth to the center of the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years.  In other words, so distant that even at the speed of light, it would take 2.5 million years to get there.  I seem to remember that even the writers of the original Star Trek recognized that the Andromeda Galaxy was kind of far away -- in one episode, evil aliens try to hijack the Enterprise and take it there, for some reason that escapes my memory at the moment, and they convert almost the entire crew into little geometrical solids for the duration of the voyage, which saved not only on upkeep but also on salary for hiring actors to portray Red Shirts who were just gonna die anyhow.  But fortunately, the un-converted members of the crew save the day, and prevent the ship from being taken on a voyage Boldly Going Where No One In His Right Mind Would Ever Attempt To Go.

So, however unlikely it is that we've been visited by beings from another star system, it's orders of magnitude less likely that we've been visited by beings from another galaxy.  The distances are simply prohibitive, even presupposing some kind of super-advanced technology.


(Much) closer to home, we have a woman in Wales who thinks that the aliens are abducting Welsh people because of their superior DNA.

Hilary Porter, "UFOlogist and public speaker," says she herself has been abducted so many times that she's lost count.  The first time was when she and her husband were on their way to visit a friend in Llanelli, and had a time-slip after which they found themselves near Cardiff with no memory of what had happened for some hours previous.

"It was damned frightening," Porter said.  "We just blacked out and had no idea how we got there.  I didn’t feel well at all.  My husband thought we must have gone to sleep, but that didn’t explain how we got there...  When we got home I got changed and found triangular suction marks on my stomach, blood suction marks. I thought 'flipping hell, look at that.'"

Which is a fair enough response, I suppose.  As far as why they abducted her, and why that area of road is an "abduction hotspot," Porter speculates that it's because the aliens want DNA from "the Celtic tribes" because their "DNA is of more interest" and is "compatible for creating human/alien hybrids."

I suppose I should be concerned, given that I'm a quarter Scottish by ancestry.  I'm not sure if the other 3/4 (which is mainly French) outweighs the Celtic-ness, though.  I can understand it if the aliens aren't interested in French DNA, given that a human-alien hybrid that was only interested in sitting around in the intergalactic café drinking red wine and looking smug probably wouldn't be much use.  But if a quarter Scottish is sufficient, I want to invite the aliens to abduct me.  I would love to see the interior of a spacecraft.  Also, meeting an extraterrestrial intelligence is high on the list of things I want to do.  I'd be happy to roll up my sleeve and give them a vial of blood, if that's what they're after, although I'd appreciate it if they'd give me a pass on the whole body-cavity probe thing.

Last, we have word from none other than Pope Francis himself that if aliens exist, he'd not only welcome them, he'd baptize them.

I'm not making this up.  The Vatican has taken a great interest in astronomy in recent years, probably out of guilt feelings over what they did to Galileo and Giordano Bruno.  And the pope himself is deeply intrigued by the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

In his weekly homily, given on Monday, Pope Francis said, "If – for example - tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here... Martians, right?  Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them...  And one says, 'But I want to be baptized!' What would happen?...  When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, 'No, Lord, it is not prudent!  No, let's do it this way'... Who are we to close doors?  In the early Church, even today, there is the ministry of the ostiary [usher].  And what did the ostiary do?  He opened the door, received the people, allowed them to pass.  But it was never the ministry of the closed door, never."

So that sounds pretty open-minded, although I do have to wonder why exactly the aliens would want to be baptized.  I mean, if the pope is right about god and salvation and the whole shebang, presumably the aliens already know about it.  There's no particular reason why they'd have to go to the trouble of coming all the way to Rome (Italy, Earth, Solar System) to get access.

And then, there'd be the inconvenience of the aliens having to fly their spaceships to Mass every Sunday, and sending their kids to catechism classes and all.  Nah, I'm pretty sure they'd just prefer to stay home and keep whatever religious beliefs (or lack thereof) they already had.

But that's the whole problem, isn't it?  According to the UFOlogists, we have all of these aliens, coming here all the time.  To listen to people like Hilary Porter, Earth is a regular Stellar Grand Central Station.  And the people who believe in the Axthadans think that they came all the way to this tiny, insignificant little speck of rock, 2.5 million light years away, to "guide our development" and "prepare humans for possible integration into the universal culture."  And they've been coming for a while, too; apparently the biblical book of Ezekiel, which reads like almost as much of a Bronze-Age bad acid trip as the book of Revelation, was a chronicle of a visit from the Axthadans.

It all seems pretty unlikely to me -- given the distances involved, and the how generally unremarkable our planet and Solar System seem to be.  So sad to say, but I think we probably haven't been visited.  Meaning my DNA and yours (if you have Celtic ancestry) is reasonably certain to be safe from extraction.

Macro-scaled craziness

People send me the oddest links.

In just the last few days, I've received links to the following:

• A website that keeps track of spurious correlations, which includes a graph showing that per capita consumption of cheese correlates almost perfectly with the risk of dying by becoming entangled in your own bedsheets.
• A Venn diagram of irrational nonsense, mapping out the intersection between the different types of bollocks.   Not surprisingly, Scientology lies at the intersection of all of them.
• A book review of the Official Worst Science Fiction Book Ever Written.
• A photograph that a guy took of his dog's ass because he thinks it looks like Jesus.

It's flattering that people think to send me stuff, although the last one did make me wonder why anyone would spend enough time looking at his dog's ass to come to that conclusion.

But the most bizarre ones usually have some kind of vague message attached, such as "I think you'll find this interesting" or "You should read this" or "Maybe you should think about this."  Such as the one that came yesterday, in an email from a stranger, with the message, "I know you won't be able to handle THIS."

Well, I don't know about "handle" it, but given my 'satiable curiosity, I had to click on it.  And I spent the next half-hour perusing "Are UFOs Macroscaled Quantum Effects?" with my jaw hanging slightly open.

The website certainly is... um, interesting.  It starts off with a bang:

In this post I am asking readers to determine for themselves if a theory I have synthesized matches the characteristics of Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomenon.  This theory has been in formulation over a decade in various differing observations but never as a coherent totality.  Is the UFO / UAP phenomenon, a macro-scaled quantum event, a result of the entanglement of matter and energy? 

We know that leading edge science is discovering new relationships all around us.  This concept may or may not explain the reasons why this phenomenon is both transient (very short in duration) as well as appearing in "waves" of activity.

What exactly does a "macro-scaled quantum effect" mean?  Quantum effects are by definition tiny.  Check out the first line from Wikipedia's page on quantum mechanics if you don't believe me:

Quantum mechanics (QM – also known as quantum physics, or quantum theory) is a branch of physics which deals with physical phenomena at nanoscopic scales where the action is on the order of the Planck constant.

So saying a "macro-scaled quantum effect" is a little like saying a "really huge microscopic object."

But how small are we talking about, here?  Physicists define the Planck scale, which is the scale of time and space at which quantum effects supersede ordinary (Newtonian) physics, as involving time intervals of about 5.4 x 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds and lengths of about 1.6 x 10⁻³⁵ meters.

That is to say, not the kind of thing you can observe on a daily basis, even if you have a fast camera or a really excellent magnifying glass.

But this doesn't stop the author, who plows on ahead as if what he said actually had any connection to reality:

Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently – instead, a quantum state may be given for the system as a whole.  One approach to the UAP / UFO enigma is to consider it to be a transitory quantum effect caused by the interaction of several fields that represent a system as a whole. The word "quantum" comes from the Latin "quantus", for "how much" or how many interactions there are as derived from the original meaning of measurement. 

I have tried as best I can to make it easy to read and understandable. I am expressing the very strong suspicion that UAP is a previously unidentified form of transitional energy that arises and is in a feedback loop in conjunction with both an energetic environment and the aggregate sum of the human mind as a energy field. One field is entangled in another.

I think this was the point when my eyes started glazing over.

Specifically, electromagnetic energy.  Students of science are taught that energy is transcribed as information.

Are we really?  Well, that's very interesting.  I...

Is there an intersection wherein energy and atomic structure as well as molecular structure are influenced or steered by the energy of an information field?  A good example is the mind \ brain relationship.  Does this occur elsewhere?  Apparently it does in a macro-scaled manner as demonstrated by scientists through a quantum entanglement effect.  In other words, our natural environment is not a matter of distinct or discrete divisions between matter and energy.  This intersection includes various interacting energy fields.  One field is our atmosphere, another is the human energy field, both of which contain information as energy.

Merciful heavens above, please stop...

Science accepts as foundational that all permutations of matter whether this matter has physicality or not has as one of the characteristics of their manifestation is energy.

*repeated headdesk*

*momentary pause to recover my equilibrium*

Okay, better now.  And I have only one response to all of this, which is summed up in the following picture:

Ex-ZACKLY.

What gets me about sites like this is not that some oddball has a blog.  Oddballs do that, after all, present company very much included.  It's that this guy seems to write along, using all sorts of scientific terminology, with no particular realization that he hasn't the foggiest idea what it means.  Whatever else you can say about me, I generally am aware when I'm ignorant about a topic, and as a result, I refrain from writing about it (which is why I so infrequently get onto the topic of politics).

But here's this dude, blithely making statements like, "Anyone can easily observe our atmosphere is energetic and that radiant energy from our solar star is transcribed into molecular matter through it’s [sic] medium," and evidently expecting all of us science-y types to say, "Bravo!" and nod in agreement.

Anyhow.  To whoever sent me the link, I can only say, "Thanks?" with a slight tilt of one eyebrow.  At least I got a post out of it, which is all to the good.  I'm not sure if that constitutes "handling" the information in the website, but it works for me.  And now I think I'm going to go permutate the energetic liquid in my coffee cup into my mouth, so I can actuate some macro-scaled quantum effects in my pre-frontal cortex when I get to school.  I don't know what my students would do if I was too addled to transcribe discrete radiant energy information onto my white board.  They'd be really disappointed, is my guess.

Let us pray...

In the latest from the Quick Comeuppance department, we have news that only three days after the Supreme Court sided 5-4 with the town of Greece, New York in supporting their right to open town meetings with a prayer, a man in Deerfield Beach, Florida has put in his official request to open a city commission meeting with a prayer...

... to Satan.

My first reaction upon reading this was, and I quote, "BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA."  Surely the Supreme Court justices must have realized what a can of worms they were opening.  Whatever your opinion about whether the United States was a Christian nation at its founding, it's pretty certain that it's not any more -- or at least, Christianity isn't the unified front it once was.  Unbelievers now account for one out of every five Americans, and then there are all of the minority religions, not to mention the fact that Christianity itself has shattered into hundreds of little sects that barely agree with each other on anything but the basics, and sometimes not even that.  So it comes down to the fact that separation of church and state protects everyone; it protects me from being forced to sit through a prayer I don't believe in, and it protects Christians from having to sit through a prayer praising Lucifer.

Which, of course, is the point that Chaz Stevens is trying to make with his letter to the City of Deerfield Beach, which reads as follows:

Dear City of Deerfield Beach: 

With the recent US Supreme Court ruling allowing “prayer before Commission meetings” and seeking the rights granted to others, I hereby am requesting I be allowed to open a Commission meeting praying for my God, my divine spirit, my Dude in Charge. 

Be advised, I am a Satanist. 

Let me know when this is good for you. 

Besties 

Chaz Stevens, Calling in from Ring 6 of Dante’s Inferno

Stevens is the same guy who responded to Florida Governor Rick Scott's support of a city-sponsored nativity scene with a demand to place next to it an eight-foot-tall Festivus pole made of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans.

And won.

Then, there is the group who is constructing a ten-foot-tall statue of Baphomet to be placed at the Oklahoma Statehouse -- after State Representative Mike Ritze pushed through a request by a conservative Christian group to erect a monument of the Ten Commandments.  The legislators aren't going to take that lying down, to judge by Representative Earl Sears's response upon hearing of the plans for the statue: "This is a faith-based nation and a faith-based state.   I think it is very offensive they would contemplate or even have this kind of conversation."

So breaking down the wall between church and state is apparently just fine, as long as it's the right church.

Kind of gives new meaning to the phrase, "Be Careful What You Wish For," doesn't it?

What gets me about all of this stuff, though, is the one question you so seldom hear anyone ask: why do people want to have a mandated prayer before a government meeting?  Or, for that matter, a government-funded nativity scene?  No one is saying you can't pray privately all you want, whenever and wherever you want, or have a nativity scene in your own personal yard so garish that the lights blind the drivers of nearby cars.  But what earthly purpose can there be to have such religious gestures carry the government's imprimatur?

Except, of course, to rub it in the faces of people who don't believe.  That, I think, is the tacit goal here -- to say to us atheists (and, probably, to adherents to other religions as well), "Ha ha.  The United States is too a Christian nation.  See?  We showed you, didn't we?"

The teensy problem with this, though, is that by so doing, the Christians who are making such an issue of this aren't even following the precepts of their own holy book.  I turn your attention to Matthew 6:5-6, wherein we read, "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.  Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.  But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

Mmm-hmm.  Wonder what Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority decision, would say in response to that?  Not much, is my guess.  Because take a look what he actually did write: "To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact."

Righty-o.  Well done.  I will be looking forward to hearing how the City Commission of Deerfield Beach likes starting their meetings with a prayer to Satan.  And to anyone who feels so inclined, I would be happy to help you write a nice invocation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to use at whatever public meeting you'd like.

Deepak Chopra and the attractiveness of nonsense

There are a variety of reasons to learn some science.  First is, it's cool, and is the only game in town when it comes to understanding what's actually going on around you in the natural world.  Second, there are some issues we're facing (climate change and genetic modification come to mind) that you can only evaluate properly if you understand the science behind them.  These issues are having an increasing impact on humanity, and most of us are coming around to the idea that handling them properly will require some deep thought -- deep thought that requires you to understand what the research actually says.

The third reason is that some knowledge of science will keep you from falling prey to purveyors of bullshit.

Take, for example, this article from Huffington Post entitled "Deepak Chopra On How to Modify Your Own Genes."  The article begins thusly:

Physician and best-selling author Deepak Chopra has an empowering message: You can actually modify your own genes through your actions and behaviors. 

Well, Dr. Chopra, it may be "empowering," but that doesn't change the fact that it's wrong.  Modifying your gene expression is not the same thing as modifying your genes.  Your body responds to changes in environmental conditions all the time -- but that is altering the expression of the genes you already have, not making any sort of permanent changes to the genes themselves.

Alteration of gene expression happens continuously, throughout our lives.  If you hadn't altered gene expression as you developed from a single-celled fertilized egg, for example, you would right now be an amorphous blob of undifferentiated cells, and you would be unable to read this post, because you wouldn't have a brain.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, lest you think that it's just the writer at HuffPost who got it wrong, and that the passage above was taking something that Dr. Chopra said out of context and making it sound like he believes that experience alters your genes, here's an actual quote that proves otherwise:

“We are literally metabolizing something as ephemeral as experience or even meaning," Chopra said in an interview this week at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California. “If somebody says to me, ‘I love you,’ and I’m in love with them, I suddenly feel great, and I make things like oxytocin and dopamine, serotonin, opiates. And if someone says to me, ‘I love you,’ and I’m really thinking they’re manipulating me, I don’t make the same thing. I make cortisol and adrenaline.”

First off, what does "literally metabolizing... experience" even mean?  Metabolism is one of those words that's used in common parlance in a variety of ways, but for which scientists have a precise definition.  You can metabolize the protein in your dinner, but "metabolizing experience" is a meaningless phrase -- and it's almost funny that he put the word "literally" in front of it.

Chopra, of course, has become notorious for this kind of thing.  He once said, in a talk, "We are each a localized field of energy and information with cybernetic feedback loops interacting within a nonlocal field," a phrase that is kind of admirable in how tightly it packs meaningless buzzwords together.  He specializes in a style of speech and writing that I call "sort of science-y or something" -- using words like frequency and quantum and resonance in vague, handwaving ways that have great appeal to people who aren't trained in science, and who don't realize that each of those words has a precise definition that honestly has nothing to do with the way he's using them.  In fact, he's so well-known for deep-sounding bullshit that there is an online Deepak Chopra Quote Generator, that strings together words to create an authentic-sounding Chopra Quote.  (Here's the one I just got: "The secret of the universe arises and subsides in descriptions of truth.")

This hasn't diminished his popularity, though.  RationalWiki says that he has millions of followers, has a highly lucrative speaking circuit, and has written 57 books to date.

As we've seen so many times before, bullshit sells.

But back to the HuffPost article.  Here's where you have to be on your guard -- because people like Chopra and his pal Rudy Tanzi, who is a professor at Harvard Medical School and clearly should know better, have a true gift for bait-and-switch.  Throw out a little bit of science fact, hook the unwary listener, and then reel him into WooWooWorld.

The bait that Chopra and Tanzi use in the article, and also in their new book Super Brain (of course the article is free advertising for a book!), is epigenetics -- inheritable changes in gene activity that are not caused by changes to the DNA itself.  It is a new, and rapidly advancing, subfield of molecular genetics, and there have been some tantalizing experiments done that have elucidated how this can happen.  Most of them seem to have to do with phenomena such as methylation, chromosome remodeling, and RNA interference -- but the science is new and changing, and in ten years it may well be that we'll know a great deal more about how it happens, and how it effects gene expression.

I find it interesting how slyly Chopra and Tanzi slip this in.  They cite a paper by Michael Skinner et al. called "Epigenetic Transgenerational Factors of Environmental Factors in Disease Etiology" as supporting their viewpoint -- and I suspect the authors of the paper would probably cringe to find out that they'd been linked to someone like Chopra.  But if you read the actual paper, which I doubt many people did, you find the following statement:

Epigenetic transgenerational phenomena generally require the involvement of the germline to allow the transmission of an epigenetic abnormality down several generations. The ability of environmental factors or toxicants to alter the epigenome will be common in somatic tissues, but is less common for the germline because of the limited developmental period it is sensitive to reprogramming.

Put more simply: in order to be passed down, epigenetic changes have to affect your eggs or sperm, it's likely that most epigenetic changes in the organism don't.  So it's probable that some diseases are epigenetic in origin, but most of those epigenetic changes won't become inheritable.

That's a far cry from "when my brain is happy, it changes my genes," isn't it?

Okay, I know that Chopra and his ilk probably fall into the category of "what's the harm?"  He's peddling a lot of feel-good woo-woo nonsense, but so what?  Who is he really hurting?

Myself, I consider "selling an untrue view of the world" to constitute harm.  What he's telling you, at its foundation, is simply a false understanding.  And he's getting filthy rich in the process.

But if you're content to buy what he's got for sale, I suppose you have that right.  My own opinion is more in line with what Carl Sagan said years ago: "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

Tales of the Black Knight

New from the One Thing Leads To Another department, yesterday's post about crazy stories growing by accretion prompted an email from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia asking me if I'd heard about the "Black Knight satellite."

At first, I thought it was some kind of obscure Monty Python reference, and asked if I was going to end up getting my arms and legs chopped off.  He said no, it had nothing to do with Monty Python, and expressed surprise that I hadn't heard of it, and provided me with several relevant links to explore.  Once again proving that trying to sound the bottom of the ocean of wacky bullshit ideas out there is an exercise in futility.  No matter how much nutty stuff I write about on a daily basis, there is always more out there.

So pop some popcorn, sit back in your recliner, and let me tell you about what I learned today in school.

Ham radio buffs know about the phenomenon called a long-delayed echo, which is when a radio transmission is bounced back to its origin a significant amount of time after it is sent.  There is, of course, a completely natural explanation; that the signal becomes trapped between two layers of the ionosphere, and travels around the Earth many times until it finally "falls out" through a gap in the bottom layer, to be picked up by receivers on the Earth's surface.  This idea isn't proven -- and there are some examples of LDEs that don't seem to be explainable through this mechanism -- but it's thought that this probably accounts for the majority of them.

Okay, so that's the first piece of the puzzle.  Add to that the radio signals that Nikola Tesla picked up, that I wrote about only last week.  As I pointed out in that post, there's something about Tesla's name that ups the woo-woo quotient significantly, so we'll just leave that there.

Next, put in a report from February 1960 from the United States Navy, of a "dark, tumbling object" that was showing up on radar.  It had an odd and highly eccentric orbit -- inclined at 79° from the equator, with a period of 104.5 minutes, an apogee of 1,728 kilometers, and a perigee of 216 kilometers.  Mysterious -- until the Navy stated that it was a casing from the Discoverer VIII satellite, which had been lost while following a similar strange orbit.

Of course, that's what they would say.  *cue scary music*

That brings us to 1973, when Scottish science fiction writer Duncan Lunan revealed that he had been looking through old radio transmission logs from Norway and the Netherlands from the 1920s, and had come across a radio message in a LDE that could be translated as follows:

Start here. Our home is Upsilon Boötes, which is a double star.  We live on the sixth planet of seven, coming from the sun, which is the larger of the two.  Our sixth planet has one moon.  Our fourth planet has three.  Our first and third planets each have one.  Our probe is in the position of Arcturus, known in our maps.

The report evidently carried enough weight that it was published in Spaceflight, the journal of the British Interplanetary Society, and eventually in Time magazine and on the CBS Evening News.   Lunan later withdrew his support for the claim, stating three years later that the evidence didn't support it -- once again making the conspiracy theorists wiggle their eyebrows significantly.  How could a message have been translated, resulting in such precise information, and then later the man who broke the story simply backs off from it?

Someone must have... gotten to him.  *music gets even scarier*

Of course, there's the problem that Lunan is still alive and kicking, and still periodically churns out weird claims (such as his stating that the "Green Children of Woolpit" were alien children who were transported to Earth by a malfunction in a Star Trek-style matter transporter.  But that's a story for another post).  So if They got to Lunan, they didn't do a very thorough job of silencing him.

But even that's not all.  We have an incident in 1998, where an object photographed during the STS-88 space shuttle mission was alleged to be the same object that the Navy had seen on radar in 1960, even though NASA said that it was just a piece of a thermal blanket that had been lost during an EVA "spacewalk."

But that was it.  By this time, the accretion had reached a critical mass.  All of this stuff, people said, must be connected.  You can't just have random echo messages, lost satellite casings and thermal blankets, allegations of alien messages, and the name "Nikola Tesla," and not have it mean something.

So what does it mean, you're probably asking?  Here we go.  You ready?

It's a 13,000 year old extraterrestrial Mayan spacecraft called the "Black Knight satellite" that is still up there and relaying messages back to its home base on Upsilon Boötes.

At this point in my research for this post, I gave a quizzical head-tilt look at my computer, rather the way my dog looks at me when I try to explain a complex concept to her, such as why she can't bring the squirrel she just killed inside.  "Extraterrestrial Mayans?" I said to my computer.  "The Mayans aren't extraterrestrials.  They're just... people."

So I began to investigate this, and I found out how wrong I was.  There was this Mayan dude, K'inich Janaab' Pakal, who had his own spaceship, if you can imagine.  Here's a picture of him flying in it, a drawing of the design from the lid of his sarcophagus:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But who says that this is a guy in a spacecraft?  Who says it's not just a Mayan dude leaning back in some kind of Mesoamerican easy chair?

Erich von Däniken, that's who.

Yes, the whole thing leads us to none other than the venerable Swiss author of Chariots of the Gods?, a book that reads like a bible of Ancient Alien Wingnuttery.  The guy who Giorgio Tsoukalos and the rest of the raving wackmobiles on the This Really Has Nothing To Do With History Channel consider to be nearly a god himself.

So here we have another good example of crackpot idea accretion, not to mention an illustration of the fact that if you could get Erich von Däniken, Alex Jones, and The Weekly World News to shut the hell up, the world would be a significantly less interesting but a significantly saner place.

Anyhow, there it is: another nutball claim that I hadn't heard of.  Once again, a hat tip to the reader who sent it along -- it was a fun bunch of threads to follow, although I must say that the headdesk I did when I found out that von Däniken was involved is going to leave significant bruise.

Accretion, eruption, and paranoia

Astrophysicists talk about the process of accretion, where microscopic particles of dust and ice stick together (largely through electrostatic attraction), leading to the formation of disks of matter around the parent star than can eventually form planets.  As the clumps of dust get larger, so does their gravitational attraction to nearby clumps -- so they grow, and grow, and grow.

Conspiracy theories also grow by accretion.

One person notices one thing -- very likely something natural, accidental, minor, insignificant -- and points it out.  Others begin to notice other, similar phenomena, and stick those to the original observation, whether or not there is any real connection.  And as the number of accreted ideas grows, so does the likelihood of attracting other ideas, and soon you have a full-blown gas giant of craziness.

It seems to be, for example, how the whole nonsense about "chemtrails" started.  A reporter for KSLA News (Shreveport, Louisiana) in 2007 was investigating a report of "an unusually persistent jet contrail," and found that a man in the area had "collected dew in bowls" after he saw the contrail.  The station had the water in the bowls analyzed, and reported that it contained 6.8 parts per million of the heavy metal barium -- dangerously high concentrations.  The problem is, the reporter got the concentration wrong by a factor of a hundred -- it was 68 parts per billion, which is right in the normal range for water from natural sources (especially water collected in a glazed ceramic bowl, because ceramic glazes often contain barium as a flux).  But the error was overlooked, or (worse) explained away post hoc as a government coverup.  The barium was at dangerous concentrations, people said.  And it came from the contrail.  Which might contain all sorts of other things that they're not telling you about.

And thus were "chemtrails" born.

It seems like in the last couple of months, we're seeing the birth of a new conspiracy theory, as if we needed another one.  Back in 2011, I started seeing stories about the Yellowstone Supervolcano, and how we were "overdue for an eruption" (implying that volcanoes operate on some kind of timetable).  At first, it was just in dubiously reliable places like LiveScience, but eventually other, better sources got involved, probably as a reaction to people demanding information on what seemed like a dire threat.  No, the geologists said, there's no cause for worry.  There's no indication that the caldera is going to erupt any time soon.  Yes, the place is geologically active, venting steam and gases, but there is no particular reason to be alarmed, because volcanoes do that.

Then, last month, we had people who panicked when they saw a video clip of bison running about, and became convinced that the bison had sensed an eruption coming and were "fleeing the park in terror."  And once again, we had to speak soothingly to the panicked individuals, reassuring them that bison are prone to roaming about even when not prompted to do so by a volcano (cf. the lyrics to "Home on the Range," wherein the singer wishes for "a home where the buffalo roam," despite the fact that such a home would probably face animal dander issues on a scale even we dog owners can't begin to imagine).

[image courtesy of photographer Daniel Mayer and the Wikimedia Commons]

But the accretion wasn't done yet.  The bison were too running from the volcano, people said.  So were the elk.  And then the real crazies got involved, and said that the government was already beginning to evacuate people from a wide region around Yellowstone, and relocating them to FEMA camps where they are cut off from communicating with anyone.  And when there was an explosion and fire at a gas processing plant in Opal, Wyoming two weeks ago, 150 miles from Yellowstone, and the whole town was evacuated, the conspiracy theorists went nuts.  This is it, they said.  It's starting.  The government is getting people out, because they know the whole freakin' place is going to explode.

Never mind the fact that the residents of Opal were all allowed back two days later, once the fire was under control.  Facts never seem to matter much, with this crowd.

So once again, the scientists are trying to pour oil on the waters.  An article in Wired yesterday describes recent research by an actual geologist (i.e. not just some crank with a videocamera) that has shown that the magma beneath the Yellowstone Caldera is mostly a semisolid, and is far below the threshold of 40% liquefaction that most volcanologists think is necessary for an eruption.  And we're not talking about some hand-waving layperson's "the volcano is overdue for an eruption" foolishness; this is a peer-reviewed technical study that merited publication in the prestigious journal Geophysical Research Letters.  And about the conspiracy theorists, the article in Wired minces no words at all:

As usual, people are trying to rabble rouse when it comes to the Yellowstone Caldera. All these rumors that the government is trying to hide evidence of an impending eruption are pure fantasy, but that doesn’t stop some people from acting out their delusions to the detriment of others who fall prey to this misinformation. Yes, the Yellowstone Caldera is a massive volcano that has the potential to produce huge eruptions, but no, there are no indications right now that any sort of eruption will happen any time soon — and I’d be surprised if we see an eruption in our lifetime (just like any volcano that hasn’t had a confirmed eruption in the last ~70,000 years).

Of course, this will probably turn out to be shouting into a vacuum, as arguing with conspiracy theorists usually turns out to be.  Witness the fact that despite all of the research and debunking of chemtrails, the whole thing still has a considerable cadre of true believers, who claim that anyone who argues to the contrary is a blind fool at best and an evil shill at worst.

So look for more Yellowstone paranoia to be zinging about the interwebz over the next few weeks.  As for me, I'm grabbing the fleeing bison by the horns and going to Yellowstone in July.  We'll see if there's anything to all the hype.  I'm hoping to do some sightseeing and birdwatching and hiking, and simultaneously hoping not to be killed in a massive volcanic eruption or shot by a FEMA operative or hustled away into some godforsaken refugee camp.

Always the optimist, that's me.