A miscalculation of scale

In the first pages of Stephen King's book The Tommyknockers, a woman out walking her dog in rural Maine stubs her toe on an object protruding from the ground, and when she kneels down to see what it is, she sees that it is a curved bit of metal that can't be pried loose.  It seems to extend indefinitely as she digs away the loose soil around it.

It turns out to be [spoiler alert] the upper edge of an enormous spaceship that crash landed on Earth millions of years ago, embedding itself nose-downward, and eventually being buried by geological processes until only a little bit of it was above ground.

Kind of an interesting mental picture, isn't it?  A spaceship collides with Earth, only to be rediscovered by archaeologists or paleontologists (or random people walking their dogs) ages later.  It does, however, bring to mind Neil deGrasse Tyson's comment about the Roswell incident: "A super-intelligent alien species knows how to cross the galaxy, but then they can't even land the damn spaceship?  If they're that incompetent, maybe they should just go home."

I bring all this up because of a recent discovery in Russia.  Some coal miners, working at a mine in the Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia, unearthed a strange object that they claim is an extraterrestrial spacecraft.  Boris Glazkov, who found the object, said, "have to say it wasn't hard to see as it was really distinctive and large.  I've never seen anything like this object, which is obviously not natural, out here in the middle of nowhere before.  It is a real mystery."

The Kuzbassrazrezugol Mining Company, Glazkov's employer, confirmed discovery of the object, saying it was discovered at a depth of forty meters.  And everyone associated with the find is in agreement; what we have here is a crashed flying saucer.

So without further ado, let's take a look:

Pretty strange, eh?  You can see why I thought of The Tommyknockers.  Imagine this thing making a fiery plunge through the atmosphere, carrying its panicked alien crew hurtling toward the Earth, then burying itself deep in the ground, killing all that were aboard.

But then the object's discoverers provided a second photograph, one that gave us perhaps a little more information than they intended:

Interesting how big it looks when you have no way of knowing how big it actually is.

And this reminded me of a second book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.  In particular, I recalled a passage about a pair of alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvuntt, that wanted to launch an attack on Earth:

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy... 

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

So the miners who discovered this thing must believe that alien races are really tiny, if that's their spaceship.  Makes you wonder what we've been so afraid of, all this time.  If the aliens show up, waving around their itty-bitty laser pistols, we could just step on 'em.

And of course, there's a completely natural explanation for this thing.  It's what's called a "concretion" -- a symmetrical glob of sedimentary deposits that have become cemented together.  They can look pretty peculiar:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But that doesn't mean they're evidence of aliens.

Also, if this was a "flying saucer," wouldn't it be made out of something other than rock?  But maybe this was a Stone Age spaceship.  Maybe instead of laser pistols, the little aliens inside brandished clubs and flint knives.

Of course, we could still step on 'em.

So that's our latest non-evidence for aliens out of Siberia.  Kind of a pity, really.  It would have been cool if it had been real.  However, I'd prefer it if such a discovery wasn't followed by what happened in The Tommyknockers.  Without giving away any more of the plot, let me remind you that it's a Stephen King novel.  So suffices to say that Bad Shit Happens.  So maybe we should all be glad that what the Russian coal miners discovered was just a big round rock.

Crusader mentality

When I hear people make ridiculous and deliberately inflammatory statements, sometimes I have to resist the temptation to grab them by the shoulders and yell, "Will you listen to what you're saying?"

Not, of course, that it would be likely to do any good.  Although it may sound cynical, I think a lot of these people aren't reacting thoughtlessly and out of anger, which although it may not excuse rage-filled diatribes, certainly would make them understandable.  I think that a lot of these folks are saying and writing these things in a cold, calculated fashion, in order to make others angry, so as to incite their followers toward some political end.

Take, for example, the piece that ran yesterday in Top Right News, entitled "OUTRAGE: Obama Equates Christianity with ISIS at Prayer Breakfast."  Now, before we get to the commentary, let's see what the president said that got these people so stirred up:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.  Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place.  Remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  And our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often were justified in the name of Christ.

Harmless enough statement, you'd think.  "Don't use your religion to justify atrocities; it's been done before.  It was wrong then when they did it, and it's wrong now when ISIS does it."  Hard to see how anyone would argue with that.

But Obama made two mistakes: (1) he mentioned Christians, and (2) he's Obama.  So naturally, the backlash was instantaneous and vitriolic.  Here's a bit of the response from Top Right News:

Muslims began the slave trade in Africa — and still enslave people today.  ISIS is enslaving Yazidi Christians in Iraq and Syria.  Slavery ended here in 1865, and it was a devout Christian, William Wilberforce who began the abolitionist movement that ended slavery in the UK and US.

So, what you're saying is, the evil Muslims forced the Americans own slaves?  The nice Christian Americans struggled against it, only keeping slaves because they had no choice (and probably treating them as members of the family the whole time)?  Until finally good ol' Wilberforce threw off that evil Islamic menace and got Lincoln to free the slaves?

How ignorant of history are you? To take only one example, read what was written by James Henry Thornwell, the leader of the South Carolina Presbyterian Churches, in 1861:

Is slavery, then, a sin?...  Now, we venture to assert that if men had drawn their conclusions upon this subject only from the Bible, it would no more have entered into any human head to denounce slavery as a sin than to denounce monarchy, aristocracy, or poverty.  The truth is, men have listened to what they falsely considered as primitive intuitions, or as necessary deductions from primitive cognitions, and then have gone to the Bible to confirm their crotchets of their vain philosophy.  They have gone there determined to find a particular result, and the consequence is that they leave with having made, instead of having interpreted, Scripture.  Slavery is no new thing.  It has not only existed for aged in the world but it has existed, under every dispensation of the covenant of grace, in the Church of God.

Slavery is condoned over and over in the bible -- even going so far as to say that slaves should obey their masters "in fear and trembling" (Ephesians 6:5).

But Top Right News isn't done yet; they claim that the Crusades were also the fault of the Muslims, that "the Crusades were a direct response to Islamic jihad," with the clear implication that the Crusaders were pure of heart and soul, only doing what was right to "free the Holy Land" from the Muslims.

Funny thing, then, that the Crusaders spent a good bit of time on the way to Jerusalem hacking at Christians who were less than orthodox, and also the Jews, who seemed to have a way of getting the short end of the stick from everyone.  Godfrey de Bouillon, one of the exemplars of the Crusader mentality, famously vowed that he "would not set out for the Crusade until he had avenged the crucifixion by spilling the blood of the Jews, declaring that he could not tolerate that even one man calling himself a Jew should continue to live."  All through what is now Germany the Crusaders slaughtered every heretic and Jew they could find, sometimes with the complicity of local bishops, and sometimes against their orders (the bishops of Cologne and Mainz paid de Bouillon 500 pieces of silver to persuade him to leave their towns alone, which de Bouillon did).

Murder of Jews during the First Crusade, from Bible Moralisée [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Look, I'm not saying that the Muslim caliphate that was ruling Jerusalem at the time was a bunch of nice guys.  But the Crusaders were, by and large, narrow-minded, violent, hyper-pious, obsessive, bigoted assholes.  Painting the Crusades as a justified "response to Islamic jihad" is idiotic.

Of course, the uncredited writer for Top Right News who wrote the piece about Obama's speech probably doesn't care about silly little things like "facts."  All (s)he cares about is turning the Rage Parade against Obama by whatever means necessary.  And as we've seen more than once, this is manifesting as a manufactured and imaginary persecution of Christians in the United States, despite the fact that 3/4 of Americans are self-professed Christians (including the president!), and Christians enjoy an unchallenged hegemony in every political office in the land.

The whole issue here really boils down to "not lying."  Whatever you believe politically, you gain nothing by (1) twisting the words of your opponent to mean something that they obviously didn't mean, and (2) inventing history to support your contention.  It may inflame your supporters, but to the rest of us, it looks more like you have no justification for your stance other than screed, ad hominem, and outright falsehoods.

Haremageddon

A couple of days ago there was a story out of North Dakota that's been making the rounds of the "Weird News" departments of various news agencies.  It's about a housing development in Fargo that has been "swarmed" by "dozens of dog-sized jackrabbits." 

Fargo resident Kayla Straabe told and ABC News reporter, "Every day, I feel like the crazy rabbit lady chasing them out of the yard where they're having a heyday.  There's at least 40 to 50 everyday, and they're in our yards and by a children's park."

The city pest control department claims not to be able to do anything about them, "because they're wild animals."  This strikes me as pretty peculiar.  Aren't all pests wild animals?  I mean, it's not like people are usually bothered by infestations of hamsters, or anything.

Be that as it may, the pest control department wouldn't do anything, but suggested that Straabe and others poison the jackrabbits, which she doesn't want to do.  So at the moment, the jackrabbits are still swarming in Fargo.

Which is an unremarkable enough story, until you look at the comments section.

Yes, yes, I know, sane people should never look at the comments section.  But I was curious as to what people thought about the cause, and what steps they thought should be taken, for this "flock of jackrabbits," a phrase which made me picture flying bunnies.  (I looked it up, and the correct collective noun for jackrabbits is a "husk," which to me sounds even weirder.  I suggest calling them a "lope of jackrabbits," which is much more euphonious.)

Some of the comments were reasonable enough.  A bunch of them suggested turning the jackrabbits into stew.  A couple recommended, given that it's Fargo we're talking about, running the jackrabbits through a wood-chipper.  But then things got weird, because people started weighing in on where the jackrabbits had come from in the first place, and it went downhill thereafter.

Here are a few samples.  Spelling and grammar have been left unaltered so you can get the full effect.

The government doesn't want you to see what's really happening with animals going on the rampage and flocks of birds dying and the news writes articles like it's completely normal?  Wake up.  This is only the first signs. 

Its a mutation.  Rabbits this huge, its not normal.  We spray pesticides all over the place and now we're reaping what we sow. 

Rabbits is one thing, what if this had been wolves? 

They can carry rabbies and they let them near a playground?  Bring them to Washington DC and let them go there.  You'll see how fast they disappear, and you won't hear the liberal lame stream media crying about the poor bunnies. 

Before the anti gun crazies got in charge, we would have known what to do about them before it became a problem. 

Giant rabbits, another sign of the unnatural things this government is doing.  Genetic engineering experiments gone wrong, and no one wants to blow the whistle, instead this will become more common until one day it becomes too late to do anything about it and people start dying.

Okay, will you people please just calm the fuck down?

These aren't vicious giant mutant bunnies, they're regular old jackrabbits.  According to the Wikipedia page on jackrabbits, this species normally gets to be two feet long and up to six pounds, which is (as the article said) the "size of a small dog."  No mutations, genetic engineering, or other "unnatural things" necessary.

And the bunnies haven't "gone on the rampage," they don't seem to be carrying "rabbies," and allowing people to run around shooting rabbits near a playground would create a whole different set of problems, you know?

So fer cryin' in the sink, let's take a deep breath, and relax.  This is not the Killer Rabbit of Caer Bannog we're talking about here.

Chances are, the jackrabbits have been driven into residential areas because it's winter and the foraging out in the wild is pretty slim, so they're going for decorative plantings in people's yards, which are more accessible through the snow.  The same thing happens in our area, but with white-tailed deer.  The deer, however, are kind of a nuisance year-round.  In some areas they make it impossible to have a garden unless you surround it by six-foot-high fence topped by razor-wire, and the number of car-deer collisions in upstate New York is astronomical.

On the other hand... maybe the deer are part of this whole evil scheme.  Mutated genetically engineered deer, released by Monsanto, so that we can't grow our own vegetables, and will be forced to purchase genetically-modified crops from grocery stores.  Probably the auto-repair industry is in on it, too, making sure the deer are bred to be attracted to car headlights.

And... and... it all started with Disney.  Remember Bambi?  Making us feel sorry for the poor little deer whose mother was killed by hunters.  And guess who Bambi's best friend was?

Thumper.  *cue scary music*

I guess that's enough evidence isn't it?  I believe we now have what the lawyers would call a "hare-tight case."

Vanished into the wilderness

As I've said many times before: I'm not saying that the paranormal is impossible.  I would really like it, however, if people would consider all of the natural possibilities before jumping straight to the supernatural ones.

This comes up because of a claim over at UFO Sightings Hotspot, where much is being made about the alleged disappearance of people (hundreds of them, apparently) in parks around the world.  The article comes along with a 24-minute video, which is worth watching if you have the time and don't mind doing a few facepalms, but this passage from the post will give you the gist:

The mystery of hundreds of people vanishing in national parks and forests is possible linked to a strange and highly unusual predator that is living in the woods and forests all across the world and is able to overpower someone in an instant. 

People disappear in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Mount Kailash in Tibet, the Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru and in national parks and forests in U.S.A. 

While paranormal researcher Stephen Young described Markawasi as a dimensional portal and suggested the strange energy visitors have described feeling there is possibly caused by a confluence of ley lines or the piezoelectric properties of granite, Glenn Canady from BeforeItsNews reported that David Paulidis, a former cop began investigating a story about the hundreds that vanished from National Parks and forests in U.S.A...   David began making his own list and discovered there were over 30 cluster sites where most of these vanishings were happening.  He noticed that the people that vanish often do so right under the noses of others in the area. The missing also shed their clothes right away and they are folded neatly.  One of the Park Rangers said it was like you were standing straight up and you melted away, that’s what it looked like!

So that's the claim.  People are vanishing by the scores, and the only possible explanations are (1) a huge and vicious predator, with apparently worldwide distribution but completely unknown to science, (2) ley lines, (3) dimensional portals, or (4) the "piezoelectric properties of granite."

Let's consider for a moment a couple of other explanations, shall we?  Then I'd exhort you to weigh them along with the supernatural ones, and see what seems to you to be the most likely.

There are two things about hiking in the wilderness that people often fail to take into account.  My perspective from this comes from a long personal history of back-country hiking, starting when I was a kid and my dad and I used to go to the canyon country of Arizona every summer to hunt for rocks and fossils.  Later, after I moved to Washington state, I used to go out in summer for weeks at a time up into the Cascades and the Olympic Range, relishing the silence and the open space after spending the rest of the year in the bustle and noise of Seattle.

If you've never done this yourself, the first thing you need to realize is that the wilderness is freakin' huge.  And empty.  On my trips into the Cascades, there were times that I'd go a week without seeing a single person.  The place is a big expanse of mountains, glaciers, and trees; if I'd gotten lost and gone missing, perhaps been hurt, the chances are very much against my ever being found again.  I ran across a comment on a website about hiker disappearances that seems appropriate, here:

We were out rockhounding in the desert and followed some tank tracks.  Turns out they were WWII tank tracks, and in one gully we found a long dead US Army Jeep, upside down.  We were likely the last people to have seen it since 1940 or so.  We took the shovel.  That's how we know - it hadn't been stripped. A Jeep - lost for 40 years.  So - yes, a body would be easy by comparison, especially since animals would eat most of it. 

Once you get off a trail, it's not hard to be on ground that hasn't been trod for decades.  And get lost.

Add to that the fact that there are countless false trails, some made by animals, some simply natural open spots, that could lead a hiker astray.  This is one reason why hiking manuals recommend always going camping with a friend (not that I listened, of course).  Having two people there doubles the chances that you'll both come back alive.

Baxter Creek Trail, Great Smoky Mountains National Park [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And the "not that I listened" part highlights the second thing that a lot of people don't think about, and that's the penchant for people to do dumb stuff.  Again, I have some personal experience in this regard.  Despite my "be careful if you're out in the wilderness" message, I was known to make really boneheaded choices back in my young and stupid days.  I recall being by myself up in the Cascades, and after a hot hike I decided to strip naked and jump into a little crystal-clear lake I'd come across, not noticing that the lake was fed by melting glacial ice until I was already mid-swan-dive.  I think on that day I may have set the record for fewest milliseconds spent in the water.  I've also loved to climb since I was a kid, and have scaled many a cliff and rock face and tree -- all, of course, without any climbing equipment.  Any of those escapades could have resulted in my being seriously injured or killed.  That I wasn't is more a testimony to dumb luck than it is to skill.

Look at the moronic stuff people will do in front of witnesses, often while right next to gigantic "caution" signs.  Last summer, my wife and I went to Yellowstone National Park, and we saw many members of the species Homo idioticus doing things like walking right up to bison, elk, and bears, stepping off of boardwalks in order to get up close and personal with hot-enough-to-melt-your-skin-off hot springs, and climbing on crumbling rock formations.  At least here, if something bad happened, there were people to help (not that in the case of the grizzlies or hot springs, there'd have been much we could do).  But out in the middle of nowhere?  You're on your own.  And I can use myself as a case-in-point that even in those much more precarious circumstances, people still do dumb stuff.

So you don't need to conjecture predators, ley lines, or anything else supernatural to account for disappearances.  The immensity of nature, coupled with natural human stupidity, is certainly sufficient.  Add to this our penchant for imagining stuff while alone or in unfamiliar surroundings, and you can explain the data, such as it is, without recourse to the paranormal.

And trust me.  Whatever the explanation, it has nothing to do with the "piezoelectric properties of granite."

Science as gossip

One of the things that really bugs me is when people accept the vague hand-waving fears of laypeople over the hard evidence and research of actual scientists.

I suspect it's because we've been taught to respect common, down-home, folksy talk more than the esoteric vocabulary of the ivory-tower intellectuals.  We read articles online, and they seem to have been written by "ordinary folks like us," and after all, "ordinary folks like us" wouldn't lie, right?  Add that to the fact that scientific papers are often confusing and difficult to follow, many of them using abstruse mathematics to support their conclusions, and I suppose it's not really that surprising that we're more likely to trust The Daily Mail than Nature.

But for criminy's sake, at least try to understand what the scientists are saying.  Otherwise we'll be stuck forever with nitwits like Jenny McCarthy altering national vaccination rates, and mental midgets like James Inhofe driving environmental policy.

This tendency, I suspect, is also why you see articles like the one that appeared a few days ago on Intellihub called "Yellowstone Supervolcano On Verge of Eruption: USGS Suppressing Information."  The title is self-explanatory; we have more fear-mongering over the potential for a catastrophic eruption, one which (according to the article) would "destroy a 1000-mile swath of the United States."

But this article is different, because it claims that the eruption is going to happen in the next two weeks.

Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park [image courtesy of photographer Clément Bardot and the Wikimedia Commons]

First, the article states that the warning came from one Hank Hessler, a park geologist.  This sounds pretty authoritative; and, in fact, Hessler is a real guy with real credentials.  But if you listen to the YouTube video where the whole nonsense started, you find that what Hessler actually said was that regarding what the volcano is doing, he "can't see past two weeks" -- in other words, the conditions in the magma chamber shift quickly and unpredictably, so making a prediction about what this or that hot spring will do is impossible more than two weeks out.  But how this was interpreted by the YouTube commentator, and every other damn blogger and news source that picked this up, was that Hessler couldn't see past two weeks because after that, we'd all be dead.

The Intellihub article goes further; there's a massive coverup by the United States Geological Survey, designed to keep us in the dark about all of this.  Why?  Who knows?  Because it's government, that's why, and obviously government exists only to kill us all.  But this is where it gets interesting, because Shepard Ambellas, author of the article, starts waving his hands around like mad to support the claim.  "Although no one knows for sure if Hessler’s prediction will come true," Ambellas writes, "it does set an eerie overtone for people located within a 1000 mile swath of the park."

Why is it eerie if no one knows if it's true?  How about we check with a scientist that Ambellas hasn't had a chance to misquote, like Ilya Bindeman of the University of Oregon:

Our research of the pattern of such volcanism in two older, 'complete' caldera clusters in the wake of Yellowstone allows a prognosis that Yellowstone is on a dying cycle, rather than on a ramping up cycle. Either the crust under Yellowstone is turning into hard-to-melt basalt, or because the movement of North American plate has changed the magma pluming system away from Yellowstone, or both of these reasons.

Based upon his studies, he believes that the next Yellowstone eruption might actually happen...

... in one or two million years.

But let's go back to Ambellas:

On March 4, 2014, Intellihub came across information, by an unnamed source, who reported that the White House had ordered the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to suppress earthquake swarm data within the region to hide what may be coming from the general public.

Oh, those unnamed sources.  So much more reliable than actual scientists.

And we're already overdue, Ambellas says, because clearly volcanoes are like trains and run on schedules:

In fact reports suggest that ancient Helium4 gas has breached the surface layers of Yellowstone’s crust and is now escaping into the earth’s atmosphere.  Coupled with the recent and abrupt ground level rise in the park we may be looking at a recipe for disaster...  In fact, the last Yellowstone eruption was thought to have happened around 630,000 years ago, meaning we are about 30,000 years overdue, literally putting us in the hot seat, front row.

Ooh, helium-4!  That sounds terrifying.  And "30,000 years overdue" definitely equates to "a catastrophic eruption in two weeks."

But the best part comes right at the end:

And it gets even worse. Although there is no way I can vouch for the information, I simply can’t. But according to a random individual who posted a video on YouTube, the USGS has likely been ordered by Washington to suppress information regarding recent seismic activity and gaseous releases in and around the Yellowstone region as a possible ELE [extinction-level event] is on the way.

Not a "random individual who posted a video on YouTube!"  Those guys know everything.  Certainly more than the evil scientists, who are in the pay of the USGS and the NSF and the NOAA and all sorts of other agencies whose names are made up of a bunch of scary letters.

But the part that jumped out at me was "there is no way I can vouch for the information, I simply can’t."  If you can't vouch for the information, then for fuck's sake, why are you writing about it?  This is science you're talking about, not the latest gossip on the Kardashians.  There are ways to verify science, and you don't do it by looking at what Mr. Random Individual posted on YouTube.  You read scientific papers (like this one and this one).  You (gasp!) learn some actual geology.

So sorry, Mr. Ambellas (because you actually sound like you're looking forward to it): the US is not about to be destroyed by a volcanic eruption.  The only scientist you even considered in your article, you misquoted and misinterpreted (and if I were Hank Hessler, I'd be pissed).  You're getting a lot of non-scientists stirred up, which I have no doubt was your goal.

But I wish you'd stop.  Because the last thing we need is to give the general public a more jaundiced view of science.  And that's what's going to happen, you know?  When two weeks passes, and we're all still here, unvaporized, your average layperson is much more likely to say, "Those dumb scientists, forecasting gloom and doom, and wrong as usual" than the correct response, which is, "Shepard Ambellas lied to us so that we'd click on his website."

Space horse

For this last Christmas, my son got me the second season of the bizarrely campy 1960s television show Lost in Space (I already had the first season; there's one season left, if I survive watching the second with my brain intact).  It's pretty wacky stuff, and I have to wonder, sometimes, if they were really trying to do science fiction, or engaging in an elaborate parody.  Thus far, we've met a cosmic cowboy, a space pirate named Alonzo P. Tucker (complete with an electronic parrot), the CEO of the Celestial Department Store, Kurt Russell in his first role (unsurprisingly, a hyperagressive little boy named "Quano" who wanted to fight everyone he met), and some space hillbillies.

But no episode was quite as loony as the one where Dr. Smith, Will Robinson, et al. ran into Thor.  Yes, that's the Thor, as in the Norse god of thunder.  Dr. Smith happens to be there when Thor's gloves and hammer fall from the sky (Thor having dropped them, apparently).  Dr. Smith dons the gloves, and finds that while wearing them, he can use the hammer to destroy bit-part actors wearing gorilla suits.

But the pièce de resistance of the whole episode was Brynhilde, who appears in a burst of flame and puff of smoke, riding on a massive plastic horse.  No one in the show, including Brynhilde, seemed to notice that the horse never moved, just kind of stood there staring blankly into, um, space.

The reason I bring all of this up is because of something that happened a few days ago in Mexico.  A volcano called Mt. Colima erupted (as volcanoes are wont to do), and a webcam caught an image of a UFO flying around the mountain.  The UFO, they say, looks like a giant flying horse.

Here's a still, so you can judge for yourself:

An "alien enthusiast," Eufrasio Gonzales Carrasco, is quoted as saying that "there has been UFO activity around volcanoes and the latest sighting of the horse-shaped UFO near the Colima volcano adds up to the list...  there is something about volcanoes that probably attracts the attention of aliens." The UFO, he says, "was shaped like a horse with a large body and two legs."

Because, apparently, two-legged horses are a common thing.

But of course, when I saw this I started thinking about space horses, and that led directly to Brynhilde and "The Space Vikings" (which was the name of the episode).  You have to wonder if anyone heard a shrill soprano voice singing "Ho yo to HO!" as it zoomed past the volcano.

But seriously.  The most likely explanation for this appearance of a Valkyrie in Mexico is (1) a semi-distant bird, or (2) a much closer bug.  Both of these have been responsible for UFO sightings in the past.  Because of issues like focal length, when you have a camera focusing on a distant object, nearby objects become blurred and unrecognizable, and this is almost certainly what we're seeing here.

A pity.  I was almost hoping for Odin to go riding by on Sleipnir, his eight-legged flying steed.  And if the whole Norse mythology thing was real, I'd even brave the cold for a visit to Niflheim to see the Frost Giants.  How scary can it be?  Dr. Smith went to Niflheim, and all he met were a couple of creepy little elves who repeated everything he said.

But realistically speaking, I'm doubtful that the gates of Niflheim are in Mexico.  Seems a little warm, especially near a volcano.  Maybe we'd have a better chance of meeting Surt, the lord of the Fire Giants.  That'd be kind of cool.  He sounds like a badass.

Apocalypse ad absurdum

I just love it when woo-woos try to blend ideas together.

After all, reading about the same crazy claims over and over gets to be a bit of a bore.  So it's wonderful when I find a site that is a marvelous mélange of misguided mishegoss.  (Like that?  I spent ten minutes trying to see how I could make that one (1) multilingual, and (2) alliterative.  Oh, the things that make a linguistic nerd happy.)

Yesterday, I stumbled upon such a bubbling bouillabaisse of bollocks (okay, I'll stop now) that I had to tell you about it.  In it, we find out that there's a connection between the Book of Revelation, Bigfoot, UFOs, El Chupacabra, astrology, the Illuminati, and giant bugs.

So strap yourself in.  It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

The author, one Greg May, starts off with bang.  His piece, entitled "Monsters & Armageddon," begins thusly:

Armageddon – or World War III – is just a matter of a few more political pages being turned when the world sees God destroy the nations that have tormented Israel and her people. Armageddon is the battle the Bible describes where the blood rises to the bridles’ of the horses' mouths and one third of the world’s population is destroyed in a single day (Revelation 9:15).

Which I can say with some authority is a crapload of blood.  How will the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons run around killing people, if their horses have to swim?

Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But then, instead of launching off into the usual End Times craziness, May speculates that there may be some connection to cryptozoology:

Do these fallen angels include Bigfoot and other monsters? 

The Hebrew word for devil or demon is ‘sayer’ meaning ‘hairy ones’. According to the Book of Enoch, the Nephilim were condemned to be evil spirits of the Earth. In his fascinating book THE NEPHILIM AND THE PYRAMID OF THE APOCALYPSE Patrick Heron writes: “We have no knowledge of what happened to the fallen angels who caused the second contamination of the Earth after the Flood. Perhaps they are still wandering the Earth, hiding out in some dark, evil forest, wary of the advance and onslaught of man.”

Does this not describe Bigfoot and other hairy bipeds?

Yes, I suppose you could say that the Nephilim and Bigfoot are similar, in that both of them are nonexistent.  But otherwise, I'm not sure there's much similarity.  Oh, wait... they're both "big."  So if that's sufficient for you, then I guess we have a match.

After this we hear about El Chupacabra in Assyria, and how lunar eclipses (which May calls "blood moons") means that "god is going to pour his wrath out upon us," because apparently lunar eclipses are a new thing.  But by far the most alarming thing May reveals in his post is that the US has ordered "a shipment of between 30,000 and 60,000 guillotines from China" in order to kill everyone who won't take the Mark of the Beast.

When I read that, I was just horrified.  I mean, how are we supposed to get the American economy back on its feet if we're outsourcing guillotine production to China?  We should have our guillotines manufactured right here in the good old U. S. of A.  We have carpenters who can build the frames, and steel plants to manufacture the blades, here on American soil.  Let's stop buying the weapons that the Antichrist will use to cut all of our heads off from overseas sweatshops!  Can I hear an "America, Fuck Yeah!"?

Um, okay.  So there's that.  Then we hear that when the time of Tribulation is upon us, we're going to be attacked by huge bugs:

The Book of Revelation tells us during the Tribulation the Pit (Abyss) will be opened and locusts will be released to ‘torment men for five months’ (Revelation 9:1-5). Don’t you think it is interesting how some ETs appear in the guise of a praying mantis - which is a type of locust? Remember all those conspiracy stories about government employees working side-by-side with aliens - many of them looking like praying mantis - in the undergound base near Dulce, New Mexico?

Well, first, a praying mantis isn't "a type of locust."  And I went through Dulce, New Mexico a while back, and there wasn't an underground base there, just a lot of sagebrush and rocks.  (Of course, that's what I would be, evil disinformation specialist that I am.  I'm making an Illuminati hand gesture in your direction right now, in case you were wondering.)

And the whole thing ends with some references to the Roswell Incident, Mothman, the Church of Satan, and how a story about fig trees somehow caused the Holocaust.

At that point, however, my eyes were spinning so badly I couldn't read any more.  But the link to the page is up at the top of this post, if you're interested in further delving into this delectable decoction of déliriant dreck.

Sorry, I said I would stop.  I'm really done this time.