Spirals and ice ages

New from the One Thing Leads To Another department, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia was spurred by yesterday's post to send me a link that spells out why we're headed to another ice age.

Yesterday, you may recall, we learned that the sun is going to go out because solar panels actively suck energy from the sun, in the fashion of giant photonic vacuum cleaners.  Today, we're going to take a look at another problem, which is that we're headed for an ice age regardless, because the current model of the Solar System is "not only boring, but incorrect."

This startling revelation came from a post on the r/Conspiracy subreddit that could be used as an advertisement about why it's critical to take high school physics.  It starts with a video on YouTube called "The Helical Model: Our Solar System is a Vortex," wherein we find out that because the sun is traveling in a (more-or-less) circular path around the center of the galaxy, the planets aren't traveling in circles, they travel instead in a "vortex."  "The Sun is like a comet," the video tells us, "dragging planets in its wake."

Because, apparently, comets do that.  Who knew?

"Rotational motion" and "vortex motion" are, we are told, "completely different things."  Then we're shown all sorts of pretty pictures of spiral stuff like ammonite shells and fern fiddleheads.

But so far, what we've been shown is hardly startling, if you know any physics at all.  Of course the motion of the planets looks different if you're viewing it from a different perspective.  Physicists call this a reference frame, and they know all about them -- the idea of reference frames is what gave Einstein the idea for the Theories of Relativity.  So it's not some kind of earthshattering idea to point out that if you're traveling with the sun, the planets move in ellipses, and if you're not -- if you're at a fixed point above the center of the Milky Way, watching the stars zoom around in circles -- the planets will travel in a spiral-ish fashion.  The motion isn't different; what has changed is your reference frame.

But that's only the beginning.  We're then shown two drawings of "energy fields," one around a human and one around... um, something.  I'm not sure what.  The first one is marked "copyrighted," so out of respect for intellectual property rights (although this may be stretching the definition of the word "intellectual"), I'll just post a link to it.  The second, though, I'll reproduce here:

The original poster on r/Conspiracy called these "Taurus fields."  And I sat there for some time, wondering, "Why Taurus?  Why not Scorpio or Aquarius, or, for that matter, Camelopardalis?"  And then it came to me:  he means "torus."  As in, a donut-shaped thing.  Although I do think that "Taurus" is correct in one sense, in that this seems to me to be a lot of bull.

In any case, this sets us up for the punch line, which I present here in toto:

...we are just on the outside of the Iron Age (the shaded in cone), and entering the Bronze Age. Being we are still in the cone, this is causing us to travel in a spiral, but the spiral is widening. This is causing us to gain speed, like a sling. 

This gain in speed is causing our sun to produce longer solar flares. This will cause our planet to rise in temperature, causing our polar caps to melt. This, of course, will cause major flooding. We've yet to see the worst, and the worst will last about a month to a month and a half. This will flood most of the world. 

And the sun progresses to increase, the planets will pull away (think of gravity like a bungee cord), and this will then cause global cooling, which will introduce us into a new ice age. 

The ice age will take about 300 years to fully manifest, but it will last between 12,000 - 16,000 years. 

This explains all the black projects costing trillions of dollars. This explains all the underground bunkers being built. This explains all the camps, all the militarization of police, all the crack down on rights. This explains why people that seem to have all the money they need seem to need more money.

Wowza.  This may be one of the most concentrated samples of bullshit I've ever seen.  We have: a total lack of understanding of basic physics, apocalyptic stuff, "global cooling," government conspiracy theories, and underground bunkers, all in the space of just five short paragraphs.

We are then directed to two websites for further information.  The first is Half Past Human, which seems to be some kind of conspiracy site (although I did see references to "swirlies in the sky" and "spacegoat farts" on the top couple of entries, both of which I would prefer not to investigate).  The second is DJSadhu.com, which is a blog with lots of videos and articles about how everything we know about physics is wrong.  Oh, and chemtrails and Cliven Bundy and pyramids.

It's a general rule of thumb that whenever some n00b comes down the pike, without any scientific training whatsoever, and claims to have discovered a Grand Theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything, (s)he is (1) probably insane, and (2) definitely wrong.  Scientists do make mistakes; as British science historian James Burke put it, in the episode "Worlds Without End" from his amazing series The Day the Universe Changed, "The so-called voyage of discovery has, as often as not, made landfall for reasons little to do with the search for knowledge."  Science sometimes backtracks, makes missteps, pursues what ultimately turn out to be dead ends.

But scientists do understand the method by which you achieve understanding, and because of that, the overall body of science becomes better refined, and closer to grasping the actual truth, as time goes on.  The bottom line: we may not understand everything, but we have a pretty good idea of how to explain a lot of what we see.  The likelihood of anyone finding anything that completely overturns our understanding of any branch of science is slim indeed.

The solar vacuum cleaner

Poe's Law has claimed another victim.

Well, more than one.  Lots more than one, to judge by Facebook and Twitter over the last couple of days.  This particular iteration of the rule that any sufficiently well-done satire is indistinguishable from the real thing comes at the hands of The National Report, which shares the stage with The Onion as a hysterically funny source for completely fake news.

This time, The National Report has taken aim at the solar power industry with a stunning exposé called "Solar Panels Drain the Sun's Energy, Experts Say."  In the article, we find out about a study done at the Wyoming Institute of Technology that showed that solar panels suck energy from the sun in the fashion of giant leeches:

Scientists at the Wyoming Institute of Technology, a privately-owned think tank located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, discovered that energy radiated from the sun isn’t merely captured in solar panels, but that energy is directly physically drawn from the sun by those panels, in a process they refer to as "forced photovoltaic drainage." 

"Put into laymen’s terms, the solar panels capture the sun’s energy, but pull on the sun over time, forcing more energy to be released than the sun is actually producing," WIT claims in a scientific white paper published on Wednesday.  "Imagine a waterfall, dumping water.  But you aren’t catching the water in buckets, but rather sucking it in with a vacuum cleaner.  Eventually, you’re going to suck in so much water that you drain the river above that waterfall completely."

WIT is adamant that there’s no immediate danger, however.  "Currently, solar panels are an energy niche, and do not pose a serious risk to the sun.  But if we converted our grids to solar energy in a big way, with panels on domestic homes and commercial businesses, and paving our parking lots with panels, we’d start seeing very serious problems over time.  If every home in the world had solar panels on their roofs, global temperatures would drop by as much as thirty degrees over twenty years, and the sun could die out within three hundred to four hundred years."

And to make the article even funnier, the study was supposedly commissioned by none other than Halliburton:

"Solar panels destroying the sun could potentially be the worst man-made climate disaster in the history of the world, and Halliburton will not be taking part in that," the company stated in a press release issued Friday morning.  "It’s obvious, based on the findings of this neutral scientific research group, that humans needs to become more dependent on fossil fuels like oil and coal, not less."

My mirth over this story dwindled, however, when I noticed that almost every person who posted this story had done so because... they thought it was true.

[image courtesy of photographer M. O. Stevens and the Wikimedia Commons]

I wish I were making this up.  Here's a selection of the comments that I saw appended to the link.  You may want to put a pillow on your desk for the inevitable faceplant:

Green technology my ass.  The liberal pseudo-environmentalists are selling us out as usual. 

Pass this link along!  Don't let this get swept under the rug! 

Just another way they're going to make money off the fake climate change agenda. 

Alot [sic] more believable than what you hear about the "greenhouse effect" bullshit. 

I wonder how long it will take for the warmists to suppress this.

*sits, hands over face, sobbing softly*

I don't know, folks.  I think that this one may have pushed me over the edge.  "Warmists?"  "Liberal pseudo-environmentalists?"

What, because we have the brainpower to recognize that you can't suck up sunlight with a fucking vacuum cleaner?

And even if light did work this way, we'd have a slightly larger problem than solar panels, you know?  Namely: plants.  As light-suckers go, the plants are a hell of a lot more efficient than solar panels, and there are a great many more of them.  So, what should our slogan be?  "Down with photosynthesis?"  "Pave the forest, save the planet?"

I know all too well, first hand, the state of science education in the United States.  And this is despite teaching in a pretty good school system, where there are a great many opportunities for in-depth study in science.  I know that between school budgets cutting staffing to the bone, and the purely ideological hacking of science education standards to remove controversial topics like climate change and evolution, it's a wonder kids don't graduate thinking that all matter is composed of the four elements Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.  (And interesting, too, that according to the article I linked, the first state to reject public school science standards explicitly because of the issue of climate change was the state of Wyoming -- a point that no doubt the writers of the satire in The National Report were trying to make by siting the fake "study" in Cheyenne.)

But really, people.  How ignorant about the world around you can you get?  This goes way past "dopeslap" territory, right into "please don't breed."

And to the people over at The National Report:  I'm uncertain whether to applaud, or ask you to publish a retraction.  Poe's Law notwithstanding, we really don't need more people voting against clean energy.

The woo-woos go to Wales

Some of you may remember that three years ago, just as the Mayan Apocalypse nonsense was beginning to get some traction, a cadre of nutjobs associated with J. Z. Knight's "Ramtha School of Enlightenment" descended on the little village of Bugarach in the southwest of France because they had somehow become convinced that it was the only place on Earth that wasn't going to be destroyed.  The mayor of Bugarach was understandably dismayed when thousands of dubiously sane apocalyptoids showed up and started camping out all around the village.  They were, they explained, expecting that when the End Times came, the nearby mountain (the Pic de Bugarach) was going to pop open in the fashion of a jack-in-the-box, and an alien spacecraft was going to come out and bring all of the assembled woo-woos to their new home in outer space.

Except, of course, that none of this happened, and the woo-woos eventually gave up and went home.  Same as the Harmonic Convergence people and the Rajneeshees did a generation earlier.  As mystifying as it seems, repeatedly failing in every single prediction they make never discourages the loyal following.  They disperse temporarily, but always resurface later, once again holding hands and chanting while barefoot and wearing daisy chains...

... and this time Wales is the lucky winner.

Our most recent iteration of this story comes to us courtesy of the "Aetherius Society," which hales back to 1958, when London cab driver George King was instructed by an "alien intelligence" to become a religious leader.  "Prepare yourself!" the voice told him.  "You are to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament."  The alien intelligence said his name was "Aetherius" and that he lived on the planet Venus, despite the fact that Venus is basically a cross between an acid bath and a blast furnace, with a surface hot enough to melt lead.  Be that as it may, Aetherius did a lot of talking to and through King, delivering messages that included a cautionary note that if people didn't listen to the "Cosmic Masters," evil space guys were going to destroy the Earth.  However, with the help of Aetherius and others (including the same Krishna that the Hindus worship, except that the Aetherius people say that Krishna is from Saturn), everything would be just hunky-dory.

Oh, yeah, and Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tse were aliens, too.  Just to be clear on that.

But then, there's also this fixation on mountains, which is how Wales comes into the picture.  George King/Aetherius said that there were nineteen mountains around the world that were "holy places" that were "charged with spiritual energy," and these include Pen-y-Fan in the Brecon Beacons and Carnedd Llewelyn in Snowdonia.  And it is to the latter that the Aetherius Society members are going to be heading in August.

"Carnedd Llewelyn is one of nineteen mountains around the world that the Aetherius Society revere as holy," society member Richard Lawrence said.  "On August 23 we are arranging a pilgrimage...  The purpose of going up is to send out spiritual energy for world peace and to pray for the betterment of humanity.  The climbs are quite demanding, I find, and then at the top we raise our hands and join in prayer.  When I feel a burst of energy it could be strong heat in the palms or a tingling sensation throughout the body."

I don't know about you, but I would not consider a "tingling sensation" an adequate reward for busting my ass climbing a mountain.  But that's just me.  And at least, unlike the Pic de Bugarach, Carnedd Llewelyn isn't all that near any towns whose inhabitants the "pilgrims" will bother.  The nearest good-sized village is Bethesda, fourteen kilometers distant, which is quite a hike.  Plus, Bethesda is said by Wikipedia to be "infamous for its pubs," so maybe our pilgrims might oughta think about other accommodations in any case.

I suppose that the whole thing is harmless enough, but you have to wonder how it keeps happening.  I mean, if I were considering becoming an Aetherian, or whatever the hell they call themselves, I'd do some research first.  I'd start by looking up "alien UFO fringe groups" online, and after the first ten articles about the Heaven's Gate Cult and the Raëlians and (it must be said) the Scientologists, I'd pretty much go, "Well, fuck that."

So I won't be joining them in Wales, much as I think it's a lovely place that I'd like to visit again.  I'm not much for daisy chains and chanting.  Instead, I think I'll see what I can do in the way of achieving "tingling sensations" in the comfort and privacy of my own home.

Ebenezer's shame

Coming right on the heels of yesterday's post, wherein I mused over the question of whether the woo-woos are actually just kidding, and are seeing how outlandish their claims can become before we skeptics catch on, we have a story today that makes me ask the same question about the creationists.

It will probably come as no great shock that the latest bizarre salvo from the biblical literalists has come from none other than Ken Ham, whose trouncing by Bill Nye the Science Guy in a debate that brought to mind the phrase "having a battle of wits with an unarmed man" seems not to have dampened his convictions.  Now, according to a story that I first saw in (of all places) the Pakistan Daily Times, Ham is claiming that an extraordinarily well-preserved Allosaurus specimen is concrete proof of the biblical creation story.

Yes, I know that Ham et al. believe that everything is proof of the biblical creation story.  But does it seem to you that deliberately choosing a 150 million year old fossil as proof of their mythology is a little... crazy?  They're on shaky enough ground with all of the "look at the pretty butterflies and fascinating fish, god musta did it" stuff that the Creation Museum excels at; why would they deliberately pick a Jurassic-era dinosaur?

[image courtesy of photographer Andy Tang and the Wikimedia Commons]

And it's not like it came cheap, either.  According to Ham's own site, Answers in Genesis, the Creation Museum shelled out $1.5 million for the privilege of displaying something that conclusively disproves their entire raison d'être.  Not that that's the way they put it, of course.  Ham was quoted in the article as saying that the allosaurus skeleton "fulfills a dream I’ve had for quite some time. For decades I’ve walked through many leading secular museums, like the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and have seen their impressive dinosaur skeletons.  But they were used for evolution.  Now we have one of that class, and it will help us defend the book of Genesis and expose the scientific problems with evolution."

I read that entire passage with the following expression on my face:

But it only got worse from there, because then Michael Peroutka weighed in.  Peroutka is the guy who sold Ham the skeleton, and he said that the allosaurus "is a testimony to the creative power of God in designing dinosaurs, and that it also lends evidence to the truth of a worldwide catastrophic flooding of the earth in Noah’s time."  Dr. Andrew Snelling, the Creation Museum's staff geologist, said that "Ebenezer" (as they're calling the allosaurus) "most likely died in Noah’s Flood, over 4,300 years ago.  In fleeing the rising waters... Ebenezer was swept away in a debris flow and buried rapidly under massive amounts of sediment, preserving many of its bones," adding that the whole story "will be published in AiG’s peer-reviewed Answers Research Journal."

I think that this was the point that I said, "... wait a minute."  "Peer-reviewed?"  By whom?  By other bible-toting, science-ignoring creationists?  I suppose, to be fair, that's what "peer" means in this context, as in telling a kindergartner that he needs to "interact with his peers" even though they are peers mainly in the sense that they aren't reliably avoiding wetting their pants on a daily basis.

Yet the AiG people do have scientists.  There is the aforementioned Andrew Snelling, who has a Ph.D. in applied geology from the University of Sydney.  Even more mystifying is Georgia Purdom, whose Ph.D. in molecular biology has not stopped her from making bafflingly wacky statements like "From the creation perspective, all bacteria were created 'good,'" presumably only becoming evil pathogens after the Fall of Adam.

And this, I have to admit, is the point when I am overtaken by incredulity.  How could people become sufficiently knowledgeable in geology and molecular biology (respectively) to receive doctorates, and simultaneously hold the belief that the entire universe is 6,000 years old?  And, furthermore, the belief that the science itself supports that view?  The whole thing is a little like my pursuing a medical degree while claiming that diagnosis and treatment should be based on the "Four Humors" model of human health. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Finkwhistle, but your stomach pains are clearly caused by an imbalance between your phlegm and black bile.  We're going to fix it by cutting your arm to let some blood out."

The sad fact, of course, is that like our crop circle "astronomologer" in yesterday's post, these people are serious.  So as much as I'd like to think that Ham and Co. are playing some kind of elaborate prank, not only on us skeptics but upon their tens of thousands of followers in the United States and elsewhere, it appears that they're sincere.  Hard though it is to fathom, they will now have a $1.5 million allosaurus skeleton with which to make their point to the gullible public.  And I can't help but think that Ebenezer the allosaurus would be ashamed if he knew his bones were being used for such a purpose.

Fooling the astronomologers

There are times that I think the woo-woos are engaging in an elaborate game of self-parody, just to see how far they can push us skeptics before we realize that it's all a huge joke.

Or at least, I live in that hope, because it's better than the alternative, which is that these people are serious whackjobs.  Take, for example, the case of the astrologer who recently commented on a crop circle that occurred in 2011 near Stonehenge.

Those of you are are aficionados of punk rock may recognize this as the logo of Crass, a punk rock band formed in the 1970s that was involved in the anarchic/political end of the punk spectrum, and which produced several albums, including the memorable Penis Envy.  For reference, here's their actual logo, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Not much doubt, is there?  Some wag with a taste for punk and way too much free time decided to make a crop circle as an homage to his (or her) favorite band.  As we've seen before, crop circles can be generated in short order as long as you have some kind of device to orient yourself and a piece of plywood with which to flatten the crops.  No other explanation necessary, not that we'd be likely to look for one given that it'd be an odd alien race that would come all the light years to Earth and leave behind a punk rock logo as their only communiqué.

That point, however, apparently flew past astrologer Donna Provancher so quickly that it didn't even ruffle her hair.  Excuse me, though; Provancher isn't an astrologer, she says she's an "astronomologer."  What, exactly, is an "astronomologer," you may be asking?  In her words, "astronomology is the practice of astrology using astronomy to build the chart and supply new insights."

Which doesn't sound that different from astrology, frankly.  It's as if I decided to open a practice doing Tarot card readings and started calling it "Tarothematics" because the Tarot cards have numbers on them, and expected that people should take me more seriously than the ordinary Tarot card readers because of it.

Be that as it may, Provancher was just enthralled by the crop circle, and had a wonderful explanation of what it meant.  None of which, I hasten to say, had anything to do with punk rock.  Here's Provancher's explanation, courtesy of the wonderful site Dangerous Minds:

You know those pictures of the Gods and Goddesses with eight or eighteen or a thousand arms? That’s what we are when we work together. You can tack thousands of pairs of eyes and ears to that image while you’re at it. Nothing escapes our notice. 

Roving Astronomologer eyes and ears (thanks again Solar Ophiuchus Raya King—that makes two Gold Stars for you) directed my attention early this morning to a crop circle reported June 20, 2011 near Stonehenge.Crop Circle Connector is calling this area “Stonehenge (1)” whatever that means. I have a Facebook Wall ping out to Philip Peake (visit his blog Thoughtsoftheguru.com) my longtime Friend (with a capital F), Web Host and Webmaster who is from the U.K. Maybe he can tell me where this is in relation to the megaliths. The map wasn’t revealing of that little detail...

She then goes on to explain what the crop circle means, as follows:

—As Above, So Below (opening greeting) 

—An equal-armed or Tau-Cross (the balancing of Earth’s energies) 

—A double-headed serpent wrapped around one of the axial poles of the planet — we’ll have to assume it’s the poles of the planet since East-West doesn’t have an axial pole. The piece on top (the double-headed serpent) is bolted to the Tau-Cross, so at this point, Raya’s vision of the Staff of Asclepius is partially correct; she just didn’t finish it. 

The 2-headed King-snakes I used to see at the San Diego zoo had tails. This one isn’t like that. But then it’s not imitating a snake, it’s picturing a new concept. The new Planetary Caduceus. It needs to be finished. This is something else I haven’t discussed yet but it looks like this is one more Agenda Item on the Table I’ll put this on my To-Do list to discuss.

Well, I don't know about you, but my little heart is just going thumpety-thump in anticipation of more discussion of the "planetary caduceus."  Whatever that is.

All the while I was reading this, I kept thinking... "come on.  When is the other shoe going to drop?  Surely she doesn't think this is really some kind of mystical symbol... like, aliens?  Or Gaea communicating with us?  Or... or...  No, merciful heavens above, she really doesn't realize it's a prank."

Anyhow, I'd like to thank Dangerous Minds for the best laugh I've had in days, and Donna Provancher for inadvertently being the cause.  I guess she's really not engaging in self-parody, as comforting an answer as that would be -- she really does believe what she's saying.  And now, I need to wrap this up -- I need to go study.  Pretty soon I'll be taking my licensing exam, after which I'll be a certified homeopathophysiolomedicopsychic-ologist.

Beat that.

Crystals, children, and exploitation

In the latest from the You Don't Even Know What Those Terms Mean, Do You? department, we have a video on the site Spirit Science called "This 8 Year Old Kid Uses Crystal Grids to Transmute Negative Energy."

I know that taking anything from Spirit Science is kind of a cheap way to get a Skeptophilia post at this point.  This site first gained attention from a video that was narrated by an animated character whose voice sounds like Alvin the Chipmunk on quaaludes, and that basically told us that Everything Is Connected and Energy Flows Through Us and other vapid New Age platitudes, every once in a while throwing in a nice science-y word to keep us thinking that what they were saying actually meant something.

But so far, all we have is a flashy woo-woo take on Science, The Universe, and Everything, very much in the tradition of What the Bleep Do We Know? (the latter produced by none other than the infamous J. Z. Knight, of Ramtha fame).  Spirit Science, therefore, is kind of low-hanging fruit, and I've never felt all that inclined to address their claims.  If you can even call them "claims."  (For a funny response to the video link I posted, take a look at this one.)

Of course, the fact that Spirit Science is 100% USDA Grade A Bullshit hasn't dissuaded people from watching the Spirit Science channel on YouTube in huge numbers, and as a result, there are now 26 (or more) videos narrated by Alvin.  All of which seemed more depressing than interesting, until the article about the eight-year-old started showing up all over Facebook and other social media sites.

What bothers me about this one is not, strictly speaking, the woo-woo aspect of it.  The idea of "crystal energies" has been around for a long time.  I remember a woman coming over to my house in response to For-Sale ad I'd placed in the newspaper, and her picking up one of the quartz crystals that had been collected years earlier by my dad on one of his rockhounding trips.  "Ooh," the woman said, caressing the crystal.  "This one is lovely!  I can feel it focusing my energy in such a positive way!"

It was an effort not to guffaw directly into her face.

So what bothers me about this story isn't the bullshit aspect of it, but the exploitation aspect -- given that it must be the kid's parents who (1) taught him all of this nonsense, and (2) set up this "interview."  At the end, too, the kid says that he'll be happy to set up a "crystal grid appointment" for anyone interested, hinting at a monetary side of the whole thing that I'm sure will come as no great shock to anyone reading this.

And yet the people interviewing him never mention anything about exploitation.  They treat his fancies as if they were entirely real, starting with the guy who introduces the segment saying, "What you're about to see is a perfect example of the consciousness of today's children."  Then we're shown the kid and his crystal arrangement, and the interviewer treats him with great seriousness, asking him how it works.

"It captures the dark energy in these three webs," the kid tells her, "and then disposes of it using this (crystal) turning it into my energy... it goes all the way around the world.  And the universe."

Mmm-hmm.  Sounds completely plausible.  We hear a lot more about crystals focusing energy (never, of course, defining the terms "focus" or "energy"), and light and dark energies shooting around, and so on.  Eventually, the interviewer gets to what really was the only germane question she asked:  "How did you know how to make this web design?"

The kid's response:  "I knew... because the rocks know exactly how to dispose of dark energy...  they told me.  I go up to one rock, and find the key, put my finger on it, and then I put it up to my ear and hear what it's saying...  a key is a part of the rock, every rock has it, that is the energy key point of it."

Now, I raised two boys, who were both imaginative and creative youngsters, always making up games and let's-pretend worlds.  My older son, especially, always has had a wildly creative mind, and we still have stories he wrote and board games he dreamed up, the latter of which had rules so abstruse that they make Magic: The Gathering look like a tic-tac-toe game.

Here, though, we have parents (never seen on the interview, but you know they're there) who are feeding this young person with the impression that his fantasy world is real -- as if I had told Lucas when he was little that the plastic dinosaurs he loved to play with actually were alive and aware, because he had somehow made them so.  This is, put simply, exploiting a child's imagination for fame and (probably) money, all the while leading him to believe that his naturally blurred boundary between reality and fantasy isn't just hard to delineate, it doesn't exist.

And they're doing so with the complicity of the people who interviewed him, and with the encouragement of thousands of people who commented and have now passed this story all over the place.  While it's heartening that the first comment was appropriately snide...  "a kid arranges his parent's mineral collection and repeats a bunch of nonsense and now he is a guru.  namaste" -- note that this commenter was immediately shot down with responses like "Get a brain."  And most of the other comments were wildly positive:

We are in the Age of Aquarius now....for those of you that don't get this...why are you even watching it if it isn't your "thing"? ...this kid is truly gifted...and if you don't understand it....you might wanna wake up to the New Age....Just saying! 

Too bad for all of those brothers and sisters who speak ill of what they do not know. It is understandable though. Not every being on this earth is connected to the great planet. 

Children like this that can see through the illusions of what we believe to be true give me hope that we just might not end up destroying the Earth.

This kid is, on the surface, doing what kids do; playing with stuff and making up stories.  But the adults who are currently turning him into a mini-celebrity amongst the woo-woo crowd are doing him no favors.  It's to be hoped that he'll eventually figure out that what he's saying is nonsense.  I just hope that by that time, he hasn't been so suckered in by the lucrative side of woo-woo that he becomes the next J. Z. Knight, channeling 20,000-year-old guru spirits from Atlantis in front of adoring crowds, and becoming filthy rich in the process.

Dark shadows

I find myself wondering, sometimes, how the fans of television shows like Monster Quest don't get frustrated and stop watching after a while.

I mean, you have these guys running around, week after week, shouting about footprints and eyewitness accounts and blurry photographs, and in the end they always catch exactly zero monsters.  But somehow, this lack of success never discourages the monster hunters, nor their fans, nor (apparently) the sponsors, because cryptozoological television series are multiplying like bunnies.

Which, unlike the cryptids, are actually real.

Take, for example, the latest trailer from Mountain Monsters, which you can watch over at Cryptomundo.  The trailer tells us about a "Shadow Creature," a "massive beast" who is actively hunting humans, which sounds terrifying.  But then, when you watch the video, it turns out to be a bunch of bearded guys wearing plaid running around at night, and making noises that sounded to me like "HURR A DURR HERPLE!  HURK A DURK DURK SNURFLE DURR!" as some unidentified snarling noises sound in the background.  I don't know about you, but I couldn't understand a single thing these people were saying.  I'm assuming it was English, since it was filmed in West Virginia, but it could equally well have been in Lithuanian or Swahili.  And I'm from the Deep South, so I'd think I'd be able to decipher an accent from that part of the world, however much of a twang it had.

But no such luck.

And of course, we never get to see the monster.  As far as hard evidence -- if I can call it that -- all you get is a single footprint in the snow, and some broken ice that the creature allegedly stepped in.  Other than that, all we see is a lot of growling, intermingled with excited cries of "DERP DERP FNURR" as they run about carrying flashlights.

But naturally, I had to find out more about what they were chasing, so I did a Google search for "shadow monster Braxton West Virginia," and found out that what they're after is most likely the "Flatwoods Monster."  The Flatwoods Monster has antecedents that go back at least fifty years, back to a sighting in Braxton County in 1952.

According to an article in The Skeptical Inquirer, here's what happened:

About 7:15 p.m. on that day, at Flatwoods, a little village in the hills of West Virginia, some youngsters were playing football on the school playground. Suddenly they saw a fiery UFO streak across the sky and, apparently, land on a hilltop of the nearby Bailey Fisher farm. The youths ran to the home of Mrs. Kathleen May, who provided a flashlight and accompanied them up the hill. In addition to Mrs. May, a local beautician, the group included her two sons, Eddie 13, and Freddie 14, Neil Nunley 14, Gene Lemon 17, and Tommy Hyer and Ronnie Shaver, both 10, along with Lemon’s dog. 

There are myriad, often contradictory versions of what happened next, but UFO writer Gray Barker was soon on the scene and wrote an account for Fate magazine based on tape-recorded interviews. He found that the least emotional account was provided by Neil Nunley, one of two youths who were in the lead as the group hastened to the crest of the hill. Some distance ahead was a pulsing red light. Then, suddenly, Gene Lemon saw a pair of shining, animal-like eyes, and aimed the flashlight in their direction. 

The light revealed a towering "man-like" figure with a round, red "face" surrounded by a "pointed, hood-like shape." The body was dark and seemingly colorless, but some would later say it was green, and Mrs. May reported drape-like folds. The monster was observed only momentarily, as suddenly it emitted a hissing sound and glided toward the group. Lemon responded by screaming and dropping his flashlight, whereupon everyone fled.

Most skeptics think that what the group saw was a Barn Owl, which has reflective eyes and makes weird hissing noises when disturbed, but of course, the True Believers doubt that.  Here's a depiction of the Monster, drawn by a professional artist from descriptions by the people who allegedly saw it:

Which is certainly pretty creepy.  But people's imaginations being what they are -- especially when those imaginations are being fueled by generous doses of adrenaline -- I'm a little doubtful.  And I'm still doubtful even after reading about the aftermath of the incident, in which several of the witnesses, especially Gene Lemon (pictured on the left above), had physical symptoms after the sighting, including throat soreness, nausea, and vomiting.

To me, Lemon's symptoms could easily be explained by a bout of stomach flu, and/or simple hysteria over a bad fright.  No monster necessary.

But that didn't stop the Mountain Monsters people from running about, shouting incomprehensibly, and pointing off into the darkness.  Whatever floats their boat, I suppose.

You know, I wonder what will happen if ever they do catch a monster?  What will they do?  Will they be so surprised that they finally succeeded that they'll end up getting eaten?  Will the show be over, in the fashion of a miniseries that reaches its conclusion and resolution?  "Yup!  We finally got the monster!  Now we can all go home to our families and regular jobs!"

Or I wonder if it'll be like the old television series The Incredible Hulk, you know?  The Bad Guys always got really close to capturing David Banner, or at least proving that he was the Hulk, but they never quite did.  He always got away at the last possible minute.  I think that's what they'd do here.  They'd stage it so that they nearly catch the monster, but then... improbably... it gets away.  "Dammit!" the Intrepid Monster Hunters will say.  "Maybe next week!"

And people will keep tuning in, week after week, in hope.  Me, I'll just watch Gilligan's Island.  At least there, you knew they'd never succeed.