Worrywarts

It will come as no particular surprise to people who know me that I can be a little neurotic at times.  I'm nervous to the point of not being able to sit still, and get seriously worked up before (for example) races, because I can so vividly envision everything going wildly wrong.  Mental images of me running out in front of a truck or collapsing with heat stroke or simply being the last person to limp across the finish line gain a life of their own, despite the fact that none of those things have ever happened to me.

Traveling is worse.  I say I love to travel, but what I actually mean is that I love being at my destination.  Traveling with me is kind of a nightmare, because I experience gut-clenching anxiety about missing a connection or losing my luggage or worse.  I still vividly recall watching with increasing horror as my wife tried to get through the immigration checkpoint on our way back into the U.S. from our first trip to Ecuador fifteen years ago.  I watched her searching her pockets and backpack for her passport, her expression gradually moving from perplexity to worry to outright panic -- and there was nothing I could do.  I couldn't go back in the line from the other side of the checkpoint and help her; even if I could, it's not like I knew where her passport was.  Images of Carol being hauled off to a windowless room with a bare light bulb to be interrogated as to why she was trying to enter the country illegally flitted through my head.

Of course, in short order she did find her passport, and disaster was averted, but it took me about three weeks to calm back down.

We also ended with nothing more than a serious adrenaline rush the time the drug-sniffing dogs flagged my backpack in Belize, although I did have to find a place to change my pants afterwards.

It's not like I have a history of terrible things happen to me.  I've never had anything worse than getting ill for a day or two, on any trip I've ever taken, and even that has been mild.

So none of this is connected to reality, not that this matters.  If no real crisis presents itself, my brain is perfectly capable of inventing various scenarios on its own.  The fact that these are highly improbable, and many of them are mutually exclusive, doesn't seem to matter.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is why I have now been sent a link three times by various friends and family members about a recent study showing that people who are neurotic live longer.  The study, conducted by Catharine Gale of the University of Edinburgh et al., was huge -- Gale and her team tracked 500,000 people aged 37 to 73 in the United Kingdom for six years, after giving them a personality assessment designed to determine their degree of anxiety and neuroticism.

The results were fascinating.  Even when controlled for typical risk factors -- smoking, heavy alcohol use, genetic predispositions to heart disease, cancer, or stroke -- neurotic people were less likely to die young.  Gale says:

There are disadvantages to being high in neuroticism, in that it makes people more prone to experiencing negative emotions.  But our findings suggest it may have some advantages too...  For some individuals, it seems to offer some protection against dying prematurely. 

At this point, Gale has no idea why this trend exists, so the next step is to figure out whether there's a causative link to something else, either genetic or behavioral.  Their first conjecture was that neurotic people, being worriers, might be less prone to engaging in unhealthy habits, but that turned out to be incorrect.  The percentage of smoking, drinking, and obesity among the neurotic group was not appreciably different from that of the control group.  Gale says:

We had thought that greater worry or vulnerability might lead people to behave in a healthier way and hence lower the risk of death, but that was not the case...  We now have to figure out why [this correlation] exists.

My own supposition is that neurotic people don't actually live longer, it just seems longer to their family and friends.  Heaven knows my wife, who has the patience of a saint, puts up with a great deal from my tendency toward getting anxious about damn near everything.  Amazingly enough, she still likes to travel with me, which I find a little baffling.  Sometimes I even drive myself crazy; I can't imagine what it'd be like for a normal person to put up with my continual twitching.

In any case, the whole thing is pretty fascinating, and I'm looking forward to seeing what more comes out of the study by Gale et al.  But now I need to wrap this up, because I have a race in three weeks and I need to start worrying about it.  What shall I fret about this time?  Maybe being chased and mangled by a Rottweiler.  I don't think I've used that one yet.

Refusing to play by the rules

As a fiction writer, I'm frequently asked where I get the ideas for my stories.  I sometimes respond, "Being dropped on your head as an infant will do that to you," but the truth is, I have no idea.  A few of them have a clear moment of origin (such as my novel Gears, the plot for which first came to me when I read a paper on the Antikythera Mechanism).

For most of them, however, the genesis is not so clear.  I've had stories that came from a single powerful image that begs explanation, such as my short story "The Hourglass," which resulted from a vivid mental image of two young men, ostensibly strangers to each other, having a peculiar conversation over pints of Guinness at a dimly-lit bar.  I then had to figure out what they were talking about, and why... and what it all meant.

A lot of my ideas pop into my head at unexpected moments, when my mind and/or body is otherwise occupied.  I've had plot lines (or solutions to plot problems) suddenly appear while showering, while on a run, while mowing the lawn, while trying to get to sleep (the latter is especially annoying, because it necessitates my getting up and writing it down, lest I forget what I'd come up with).

In any case, most of the time, the origins of my own creative expression are as mystifying to me as they are to my readers.  So the most honest answer to the question "Where do you get your ideas?" is "I simply don't know."  But a recent bit of research has elucidated at least a piece of the origin of creativity.

Apparently, you become more creative when your rational thought processes are suppressed.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The study, by Caroline Di Bernardi Luft, Ioanna Zioga, Michael J. Banissy, and Joydeep Bhattacharya of the University of London, which appeared in Nature last month, is entitled "Relaxed Learning Constraints Through Cathodal IDCS on the Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex," and at first probably sounds like something that would only be of interest to serious neuroscience geeks.  Here's how the authors describe their own work:

We solve problems by applying previously learned rules.  The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a pivotal role in automating this process of rule induction.  Despite its usual efficiency, this process fails when we encounter new problems in which past experience leads to a mental rut.  Learned rules could therefore act as constraints which need to be removed in order to change the problem representation for producing the solution.  We investigated the possibility of suppressing the DLPFC by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to facilitate such representational change.  Participants solved matchstick arithmetic problems before and after receiving cathodal, anodal or sham tDCS to the left DLPFC.  Participants who received cathodal tDCS were more likely to solve the problems that require the maximal relaxation of previously learned constraints than the participants who received anodal or sham tDCS.  We conclude that cathodal tDCS over the left DLPFC might facilitate the relaxation of learned constraints, leading to a successful representational change.

In other words, if you suppress the part of the brain that understands and obeys the rules, you have more flexibility with regards to seeing solutions that require lateral, or "outside-of-the-box," thinking.

As an example of one of the problems the researchers gave their subjects that required lateral thinking, try out the following.

You're shown a (false) equation made of matchsticks that looks like this:

III = III + III

How can you make this a true statement with only moving one matchstick?

It turns out that there are two ways to do it, but both involve the expedient of adjusting not the numbers, but the equal or plus sign.  You could do this:

III = III = III

Or you could take any of the matchsticks and lay it across the equals sign to make an "is not equal to" sign -- one possibility of which is:

II ≠ III + III

Both, of course, require a bit of creative thinking.  As Luft put it, "[Problems like this one] are very hard because in mathematics it is not a valid operation at all – we normally don’t decompose the plus sign, you see that as an entire entity."

It turns out that we become better at seeing these kinds of solutions when we are given transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) that temporarily suppresses the activity of the aforementioned left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  Nick Davis, a professor of psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University (and who was not involved in the research), found the study by Luft et al. to be fascinating.  "Creativity is highly prized in most areas of our lives, from work to leisure to politics and war," Davis said.  "When the [left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex] was ‘cooled down’, the brain seems to have stopped applying old rules, and been more successful at finding new rules – this is the essence of creativity in problem-solving."

All of which makes me wonder if the most creative people have less activity in the left DLPFC to begin with, at least intermittently.  And also, if so-called "mindless" activities -- such as running, showering, or mowing the lawn -- naturally slow down the left DLPFC, allowing creative ideas to bubble up unimpeded.

I'd love to see that researched... maybe it's a direction that Luft and her team could go.

From there, of course, the next step would be to find a way to switch the rational, rules-obeying brain module off and on at will.  I, for one, would love that, especially now, because I'm at a point in my work-in-progress where I've kind of painted myself into a corner.  I know I'll find my way out eventually -- I always seem to -- but while you're there, operating within what Luft et al. call "learned constraints" it's pretty damn frustrating.

Bloomin' onions for Satan

As I mentioned earlier this week in my post about the "Majestic 12" conspiracy, once you've fallen down the rabbit hole of seeing conspiracies everywhere, there's no getting out.  Anyone who doesn't see the pattern is a dupe; anyone who tries to argue you out of believing it is a shill, or worse yet...

... one of the conspirators.

And the power of a conspiracy theory seems completely unrelated to its plausibility.  After all, we still have people believing that HAARP is creating hurricanes and tornadoes and blizzards and earthquakes, despite the fact that (1) it was shut down completely two years ago, (2) it never could do that stuff in the first place, and (3) if it could have done that stuff, there's no way in hell the government would have shut it down.

But logic doesn't stop people from yammering on as if what they were saying made sense.  Which is why a tweet a week ago about Outback Steak House having ties to the Illuminati has gone viral.

It all started with Twitter user @eatmyaesthetics, who noticed that if you mapped out the positions of five Outback Steak House in various cities, you could connect them with lines to form a pentagram -- a five-pointed star.  Of course, the emphasis here was on the sinister connotations of this symbol, especially when it's upside-down, which it was if you turned the map the right way.

Then the retweet machine got started, and within short order the tweet had been reposted tens of thousands of times.  Undoubtedly some of the people who retweeted it did so because of the humor value, but some of them evidently believed that @eatmyaesthetics was on to something, because people started mapping out the positions Outback in their own cities, and lo and behold, found the same scary pattern.

Then Lauren Evans over at Jezebel threw her two cents' worth into the mix, saying, "Now that I know the truth, it's impossible to see it any other way.  And you don't get a ten-ounce steak for twelve dollars without at least a little help from the devil."

Which was tongue-in-cheek.  I think.

Then Outback itself got involved, first stating that that their official position was that they "neither would confirm nor deny" Illuminati involvement in their restaurants, following it up with a tweet that "If the Bloomin' Onion is evil, then we don't want to be good."  They added a winky-face emoji after the tweet, which could alternately be interpreted as "we're kidding, of course" or "we are an evil agency allied with the Forces of Darkness to engage in mind control via drugs sprinkled on your medium-rare ribeye steak."

All of which induced multiple orgasms in the conspiracy theory world.

But here's the thing, of course; what shape did they expect you'd get by connecting five dots with lines?  Here's an experiment I want you to run: get a sheet of paper, and draw five dots on it.  The only requirement is that no three of the dots can be in a straight line.  See if you can find a configuration of dots that you can't inscribe with a pentagram.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

So this isn't so much a conspiracy theory as it is a test to detect who failed 10th-grade geometry.  In fact, any business that has more than five locations in a city can be connected with at least a reasonably recognizable pentagram.  So if Outback is an arm of the Illuminati, then so are McDonald's, Dairy Queen, and Taco Bell.

Although now that I come to think of it, I've been suspicious about Taco Bell myself for a while.

So as usual, we've got a case of what Michael Shermer calls "You can't miss it when I tell you what's there."  The upshot is that if you like Outback, you don't have to worry that part of the money you spend for dinner is going to support the New World Order.  Your biggest concern is that there have been people whose arteries have clogged up just looking at "Bloomin' Onions," but I doubt seriously whether that has anything to do with the Illuminati.

Our alien ancestors

A friend and long-time faithful reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link a few days ago to a webpage entitled, "Expert Says Humans Are Aliens -- and We Were Brought to Earth Hundreds of Thousands of Years Ago."

Now, I hasten to state for the record that this friend didn't send me this because she believes it; she clearly sent me this so I would do a faceplant on my desk so hard that it would leave a comical impression of my computer keyboard on my forehead for the rest of the day.  But I have to admit it starts out with a good question, to wit: "What if Humans are the aliens we've been looking for all along?"

To which I would answer: "What if C-A-T spelled 'dog'?"  Even if you were to entertain seriously the possibility that the ancestors of today's humans were dropped off here from another planet, which I am not for a moment suggesting you should, there's the pesky little problem of human DNA showing 70-80% homology with that of other mammal species, presuming of course that those species didn't come from other planets, too.

I mean, I'm a little suspicious about platypuses, myself, because it's hard to imagine how evolution would produce something so completely ridiculous looking.  It's not so hard to believe that aliens deposited platypuses in Australia as some kind of bizarre prank, and we humans just haven't gotten the joke yet.

But I digress.

So we're off to a rocky start, but it gets worse.  The author goes on to describe how the development of written communication is an indication that we're different from other species, and the only possible reason for this is that we're aliens.  But the problem is that you can do this with damn near any species on Earth.  For example: the archer fish of Southeast Asia has evolved the ability to spit water at insects on overhanging leaves and branches, to knock them into the water, whereupon the archer fish has dinner.  To my knowledge, no other animal can do this.

Does this mean the archer fish is also an alien?

Argument #2 goes something like, "Humans can't be evolved from other terrestrial life forms, because if you took a typical human and put him/her in the jungle, in short order (s)he would become jaguar chow, if (s)he didn't starve to death first."  But again, consider other earthly species; of course if you stick some unlucky individual into an environment that's hostile, or radically different from where it evolved, it's gonna die.  I'm guessing if you took a spider monkey and put it on the coast of Greenland, you would very quickly have a monkeysicle.  But that doesn't mean that monkeys aren't from the Planet Earth; it just means they're not from Greenland.

Oh, and then there's the argument that since we can't look at the sun directly without hurting our eyes, we must be from a planet where the sun is dimmer, or it's cloudy all the time.

For fuck's sake.

A photograph of my Cousin Fred, taken at last year's family reunion on the planet Gzork.  I told him to smile, but this is the best he could do.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then the "expert" gets on board, in the person of Dr. Ellis Silver, who has written a book called Humans Are Not From Earth: A Scientific Evaluation of the Evidence.  The first thing I did was to look up Dr. Silver's book on Amazon, and I found it had received 115 reviews, which follow the usual horseshoe-shaped distribution typical of wacko ideas; lots of 5s, lots of 1s, and not a hell of a lot in between.  In other words, either you're a true believer or a doubter right from the outset, and the book itself didn't make any difference to either group.  Here is a sampler of the reviews:

• [T]here is not a shred of logic, science, empricism, or plausibility in this book.  It is SO bad that I'm almost inclined to think it's a hoax.
• This author seems to have no understanding of either evolution or the scientific method.  On the bright side, whenever I go outside now and find myself squinting at the sun, I take comfort in the notion that on my home planet it's always cloudy.
• If you're thinking of buying this book save yourself the time and money and don't.  More evidence to support my opinion: study the book cover for a few moments and tell me it wasn't made up in MS Paint in 2 minutes.
• The author really should take a couple anthropology classes at a community college.

So not exactly ringing endorsements.  The author then goes on to cite a different "expert," one Robert Sepehr, who has written his own book (of course), this one called Species With Amnesia: Our Forbidden History.  So of course I had to check that one out.  The basic idea here is apparently that the Rh-negative blood type allele is weird, therefore we have to be the descendants of technologically advanced aliens who have forgotten where we came from and are now in the process of reinventing everything our ancestors knew.  Which, I think we can all agree, is what lawyers call an "air-tight argument."

Only one review for Sepehr's book stood out:

• [T]his author is obviously creating multiple Amazon accounts to leave favorable rankings and reviews on his books.  Click on the hyperlinks of the names of the people leaving five star reviews; all of them have left reviews on Sepehr's books only, all 5-star, and most left on the same day!  The author's credentials seem nonexistent, and with 5 minutes of research I could plainly see that the majority of praise for his work online is fake.

So there's that.

On the other hand, my mother was Rh-negative, meaning she has not just one, but two Rh-negative alleles, so she's alien on both sides of her family.

Which, now that I think about it, explains a great deal about my mother's relatives.

In any case, the whole thing seems to be a non-starter, which is kind of a shame.  I'd love nothing better than to discover that I'm an alien, especially if it meant that at some point my extraterrestrial cousins would whoosh down on their hyper-light-speed spaceship and pick me up to return to our home world, light years away from Donald Trump.  But I suppose that's too much to hope for, even if I do have at least some Rh-negative alien DNA.

Majestic 12, anachronistic typeset, and Cigarette-Smoking Man

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia said, "You haven't yet written about my favorite conspiracy theory -- Majestic 12."  There was a brief moment in which I wondered whether "Majestic 12" might be some kind of sequel to Ocean's Eleven, but then I realized that they've already done that (they're up to what, now, Ocean's Seventeen, or something?), so it had to be something else.

It turns out that Majestic 12 is a code name, which makes it cool right from the get-go.  The story is that during the presidency of Harry Truman, a secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials was formed in order to investigate the Roswell incident and to keep tabs on the aliens.  Since that time, thousands of pages' worth of documents have been "leaked" from this alleged committee, most of them dealing with covert operations by the CIA, and giving highly oblique references to UFO sightings.  A few of the documents have hinted at darker doings -- alliances with evil aliens, and a secret intent to use technology of extraterrestrial provenance to further our military goals and monitor our enemies.

The original members of Majestic 12 were allegedly the following prominent individuals:

• Roscoe Hillenkoetter (first director of the CIA)
• Vannevar Bush (president of the Carnegie Institute, amongst many other titles)
• James Forrestal (Secretary of the Navy)
• Nathan Twining (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)
• Hoyt Vandenberg (Air Force Chief of Staff)
• Robert Montague (Commander of Fort Bliss)
• Jerome Hunsaker (aeronautics engineer at MIT)
• Sidney Souers (first executive secretary of the National Security Council)
• Gordon Gray (Secretary of the Army)
• Donald Menzel (astronomer at Harvard)
• Detlev Bronk (chair of the National Academy of Sciences)
• Lloyd Berkner (prominent physicist)

And because no good conspiracy would be complete without throwing around a few well-known names, the Majestic 12 were supposedly advised by Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, Wehrner von Braun, Albert Einstein, and Cigarette-Smoking Man.

Oh, wait, the last one was fictional.  Silly me.  The problem is, so are the documents.  The FBI has done a thorough investigation of the various Majestic 12 files, and declared them "completely bogus."   Of course, they would say that, claim the conspiracy theorists; the government's response is always "deny, deny, deny."  However, there have been independent studies done, by reasonably objective and disinterested parties (for example, Philip J. Klass, noted UFO skeptic and debunker), and virtually all of them think that the whole thing is a hoax -- probably perpetrated by Stanton Friedman, William Moore, and Jaime Shandera, three UFOlogists who are more-or-less obsessed with the Roswell Incident.  In fact, Moore and Shandera were actually the recipients of some of the Majestic 12 documents -- sent to them by an "anonymous source high up in the government."

How did the skeptics come to the conclusion that the whole thing was a hoax?  One of the main pieces of evidence was the simple, pragmatic matter of how the documents were typed.  In many cases, it's possible to date a document simply by looking at the font, spacing, and ink -- these changed with fair regularity, and even a discrepancy of a couple of years can be enough to prove a document to be fake.  In the case of a number of the Majestic 12 documents, there were font changes and space-justification that were impossible in the late 1940s and 1950s -- the first typewriter capable of this was invented in 1961.

An amusing sidebar: when Philip Klass was investigating the Majestic 12 claim, he offered $1000 to anyone who could produce government documents that had typefaces matching the ones found in the Majestic 12 papers.  Who popped up to claim the prize?  None other than Stanton Friedman, prime suspect as the chief engineer of the hoax.  As skeptic Brian Dunning wrote, "Don't take the bait if you don't want to be hooked."

One of the frustrations with debunking conspiracy theories, though, is that once someone believes that a conspiracy exists, there always is a way to argue away the evidence.  One of the most popular ones is argument from ignorance -- we don't know what the government was doing back then, so they could have been doing anything.  As for the typewriters -- oh, sure, the first typewriter capable of justification (the IBM 72) was released to the public in 1961, but maybe the Big Secret Government Circles had access to it fourteen years earlier.  Who knows?  (And by "who knows?", of course what they mean is "we do.")

And as far as my aforementioned "objective and disinterested" investigators -- in the conspiracy theorists' minds, there is no such thing as an objectivity.  Anyone who argues against the theory at hand is either a dupe, or else a de facto member of the conspiracy.  Between this and the argument from ignorance, there is no way to win.

But wait, you may be saying; what if the government was engaged in covert nasty stuff?  How would you know, given that the government would certainly deny their involvement, claim it was a hoax?   Well, first, I'm sure that the government is, in fact, engaged in covert nasty stuff.  I just don't think this is it.  We fall back on Ockham's Razor yet again -- what is the simplest explanation that adequately accounts for all of the known facts?

So, anyway, I think we can safely say that the Majestic 12 papers are fakes.  Which is, no doubt, exactly what Cigarette-Smoking Man wants us to think, and will make him smile in that skeevy way of his, and walk off into the night until the next episode.

The strange case of the glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl

In the past week, I've written about a few cases for which an application of the sharp edge of Ockham's Razor would be advisable -- such as claiming that clouds are produced by UFOs as camouflage, deciding that the common perception of having less time to do stuff is because time itself is actually speeding up, and warning people about the pleasures and possible hazards of "astral sex."

There should be a name for the opposite of Ockham's Razor, shouldn't there?  Taking the available evidence, giving it careful consideration, and then running right off the cliff with it -- coming up with the weirdest, most convoluted, most difficult-to-swallow explanation you can.

Take the recent case of the the strange observations of a flying creature reported by a woman in Pennsylvania.  She states that she saw a "strange glowing thing at night" that flew over her car while she was driving.   It was "quite large," she said, and "was not too terribly high off the ground;" and "(it) seemed to be lit, or glowing."

Okay, that's the evidence; one woman's claim of a strange sighting. From this, what hypotheses can we devise?

• She saw an ordinary flying creature -- possibly a barn owl, whose silent flight and all-white underside could easily trick the eye into thinking that it was a glowing creature in the air.
• She was making up the story for her own reasons, possibly for the attention or because she likes to tell weird stories -- i.e., she was lying.
• She's a wingnut.
• She saw a glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl. 

Now, the story that I read told little more than the bits and pieces I've quoted, and I very much got the impression that that was all there was to it -- she had no evidence, no photographs, not even a sketch of what she saw.  Just a report of a flying creature that was glowing.  I'm the first to admit that I have no particular reason to conclude that she was lying -- I don't know her, and have no desire to impugn the motives of a total stranger.  But take our four hypotheses, and you rank them for plausibility.  I ask even the wooiest woo-woo out there in the studio audience; don't you think it's more likely that she saw a barn owl, or made the whole thing up, than...  Oh, come on.  Really?  A bioluminescent pterodactyl?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

On second thought, there is a name for the opposite of Ockham's Razor; it's called confirmation bias -- the acceptance of minuscule pieces of evidence to support a theory you already had decided was true.  It's why believers in astrology will crow about the one newspaper horoscope a year that happens to be reasonably accurate, and ignore all the ones that aren't; it's why the religious will proclaim it a miracle when the ill person they prayed for got better, and ignore all the people who were prayed for and died in horrible agony.  Maybe at this point I should tell you the website the glowing pterodactyl story appeared on.

It's called LivePterosaur.

Yup, there's an entire website devoted to the idea that pteranodons and other pterodactyloids have survived through the millions of years since the last fossil evidence, conveniently leaving not a trace behind in all of the geologic strata from the intervening eras, and now are gliding their way over the wilds of Pennsylvania.  A lot of the evidence, if you can call it that, comes from native legends, just as the totality of the "evidence" for Mokele-Mbembe and the Bunyip being dinosaur survivals comes from tales from the natives of central Africa and Australia, respectively.  The pterodactyl legend is apparently especially to be found in Papua New Guinea, where a flying creature called the "Ropen" supposedly haunts the rain forest; but there's the "Wawanar" of western Australia and the "Kongamato" of Africa, and also an unnamed sighting in Cuba where it presumably was called the "holy mother of god what the fuck is that thing?", only in Spanish.

Did these people actually see something strange?  Could be.  There are plenty of big birds around; in the tropics, we also have fruit bats, one group of which (the "flying foxes" of the genus Pteropus) can have a wingspan of five feet.  Could they have been lying?  Drunk?  Crazy?  Sure.  Could it just be a story, and no more true than tales of unicorns and dragons?  Sure.  And I think any of those is more likely than it being a pterodactyl.

Now, don't mistake me; no one would think it was cooler than I would if it turned out that some kind of pterodactyloid actually had survived all these years.  In fact, the pterodactyloids are somewhere in my top five favorite categories of extinct animal.  I'm also fully aware of the times that it's turned out that something has made it to the present day, after years of only being known from the fossil record.   (The most famous being the coelacanth, the prehistoric lobe-finned fish that turned out not to be so prehistoric after all.)  I just don't think that it's all that likely that somehow a giant bioluminescent pterodactyl is gliding around in the woods of Pennsylvania, and has escaped all notice of the biologists until now.  It's slightly more likely that one could live in the forests of Papua New Guinea, or central Africa, given the remoteness, dense woods, and low population density; but only slightly.  The likelihood of it being a tall tale is orders of magnitude greater.

So, sorry to be a party-pooper, but I really do think that the lady in Pennsylvania saw a barn owl.  Or else should be more careful to take her medication regularly.  Whatever it was she saw, I'd be willing to bet a significant amount of money that it wasn't a glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl.

Picture perfect

Neil deGrasse Tyson once quipped that photographic evidence was no longer reliable because Photoshop probably had an "Add UFO" button.  It's an exercise I like to demonstrate with my Critical Thinking class; after watching a documentary about fake ghost photographs, they have an optional assignment to try to create the most realistic-looking and/or scary UFO, ghost, or other paranormal photograph they can.

The results are so creepy -- and so easy to make, if you have access even to rudimentary digital image modification software -- that the wall of photographs we display afterwards makes a real impact.

"I'll never believe a photograph is real again," one student said in an awed voice while looking at the collection of ghosts, spacecrafts, and Bigfoots.

Mont St. Michel is beautiful, isn't it?  Yes, but the water and the reflection were all added to the image via Photoshop.  [image courtesy of photographer Andrés Nieto Porras and the Wikimedia Commons]

While that is honestly a bit of an overreaction, it's always best to be on the suspicious side whenever anyone claims a photograph as proof for a claim.  Not only are altered images easy to make -- as a paper just released last week in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications shows, humans are kind of lousy at differentiated between retouched and unretouched photos.

In "Can People Identify Original and Manipulated Photos of Real-World Scenes?", authors Sophie J. Nightingale, Kimberley A. Wade, and Derrick G. Watson set up a series of tests in which subjects were asked if they could detect digitally-altered photographs that had impossibilities -- shadows pointing the wrong way, geometrical inconsistencies, features missing (such as removing the crosswise structural supports from a suspension bridge) or added (such as tables with extra legs).  They were given ten photographs, some altered and some not, and as much time as they wanted to study them, and then were asked to identify which (if any) had been manipulated, and if so, how.

And people, in general, were terrible at it.  The authors write:

In two separate experiments we have shown, for the first time, that people’s ability to detect manipulated photos of real-world scenes is extremely limited.  Considering the prevalence of manipulated images in the media, on social networking sites, and in other domains, our findings warrant concern about the extent to which people may be frequently fooled in their daily lives.  Furthermore, we did not find any strong evidence to suggest that individual factors, such as having an interest in photography or beliefs about the extent of image manipulation in society, are associated with improved ability to detect or locate manipulations. 

Recall that we looked at two categories of manipulations—implausible and plausible—and we predicted that people would perform better on implausible manipulations because these scenes provide additional evidence that people can use to determine if a photo has been manipulated. Yet the story was not so simple...  [E]ven when subjects correctly identified the implausible photo manipulations, they did not necessarily go on to accurately locate the manipulation.  It is clear that people find it difficult to detect and locate manipulations in real-world photos, regardless of whether those manipulations lead to physically plausible or implausible scenes.

Which, of course, should be enough to give anyone pause.  Our capacity for recognizing when we've been fooled is far poorer than we tend to believe.

And the more sophisticated the digital manipulation software gets, the worse this problem will become.  Early digital photography programs were nothing short of crude, and attempts to mess around with the image always left traces that a discerning eye could see.  But now?  It's telling that a bunch of inexperienced high school students could, in short order, produce images that were absolutely convincing.

Think of how much could be done by people who were experts in digital image modification.

There's even an iPhone app that adds six-pack abs and broader shoulders to your photo.  Wouldn't it be nice if it were this easy in real life?

So we might well be approaching the "Trust Nothing" stance of my student from last year.  I hate to promote cynicism, but honestly, casting a wry eye on any photographic evidence is probably a smart thing place to start.   We're not quite at the point of having an "Add UFO" button -- but it's not far away.