Jerk analysis

Sometimes there are news stories that I have to feature here simply because they're cool.

This one came from some data collected by a mission called Swarm, consisting of three satellites which were launched in 2013 to study the Earth's magnetic field.  The mission is pretty important -- besides being critical to navigation, the magnetic field of our planet protects us from most of the cosmic particles that strike the upper atmosphere.  And -- somewhat alarmingly -- it appears we may be at the beginning of a geomagnetic pole reversal, when the magnetic field of the Earth flips for reasons still poorly understood.  (We know about 183 such pole reversals in the last 83 million years, which is about as long as we have good data for.  The oddest part is that they are anything but regular.  The shortest duration of a particular polarity was around 400 years -- and we've been in the current one for 780,000 years.)

What the current study looked at is a much more transitory phenomenon called a geomagnetic jerk, which sounds like a derogatory name for a geologist, but isn't.  Actually, it's a sort of hiccup in the magnetic field.  They were first discovered in 1978, when there was a sudden increase in the magnetic field intensity followed by an equally rapid decrease, only lasting a few days.  They can be localized geographically, too; there have been jerks that are measurable in North America and invisible in the magnetic field measured everywhere else.

The new study, released last week in Nature: Geoscience in a paper by Julien Aubert (Université de Paris) and Christopher Finlay (Technical University of Denmark) is called "Geomagnetic Jerks and Rapid Hydromagnetic Waves Focusing at Earth’s Core Surface."  It suggests that what's happening is twofold -- there's a slow convection within our metallic core that, combined with the Earth's rotation, gives rise to the magnetic field on the larger scale; but there are much more rapid, turbulent fluid motions, caused by rising blobs of hot liquid metal.  When those blobs impact the boundary between the outer core and the mantle, it results in shock waves that register on the surface as a jittering of the magnetic flux.

Simulation of the magnetic field within the Earth's core

The weirdest part is that the rising of the blobs (which would make a great title for a horror movie, wouldn't it?) begins a good twenty-five years before it registers on the surface as a jerk.  What process creates the blobs is still not understood, but this is at least a step forward.

"Swarm has made a real contribution to our research, allowing us to make detailed comparisons, in both space and time, with physical theories on the origin of these magnetic jerks," said Christopher Finlay, who co-authored the paper.  "While our findings make fascinating science, there are some real-world benefits of understanding how our magnetic field changes.  Many modern electronic devices such as smart phones, rely on our knowledge of the magnetic field for orientation information.  Being able to better forecast field changes will help with such systems."

All of which makes me wonder, however, how we're going to handle it when the overall magnetic field does its headstand, because the theory is that the field first collapses (or becomes highly erratic) before reforming with the opposite polarity.  I have this strangely hilarious mental image of people with their noses glued to the GPS on their cellphones all heading very efficiently to their destinations, and then suddenly they all start wandering off in random directions, never to be seen again.

Of course, it probably won't be nearly that much fun.

Um, I mean, "catastrophic."  "Catastrophic" is what I meant.

Anyhow, it's nice that we now have another piece of the puzzle as far as what's happening in the core of our planet, which -- as always -- turns out to be far more complex than we realized.  As far as jerks and pole reversals, we'll just have to wait to see what happens and find out if the models hold up under scrutiny.

As always.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

Spins, jets, and wobbles

In the last couple of weeks, I've written about the discovery of colliding neutron stars six billion light years away, the incredible achievement of generating the first-ever photograph of a black hole, and a team that found a white dwarf star which amazingly still had a planet orbiting around it, even though you'd think the process of becoming a white dwarf would obliterate anything nearby.

So the achievements of the astrophysicists have been coming hard and fast lately.  But this week, a team led by James Miller-Jones of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University (Perth, Australia) has found something that might be the weirdest yet: a spinning black hole that is precessing like a top, wobbling so quickly that it actually drags spacetime along with it.

The object is called V404 Cygni, and was first sighted in 2015 when it suddenly began to emit a jet of plasma.  The explanation was thought to be that it had encountered a cloud of matter (or possibly had captured another star) which was slowing being devoured.  It's been known for some times that as matter spirals toward a black hole, it spins faster and faster -- rather like water going down a drain -- and in the process emits particles that are funneled along the magnetic field lines of the black hole and emerge as jets from each pole -- in the case of V404 Cygni, traveling at 60% of the speed of light.

So far, this is impressive, but still very much in line with the predictions of the current model.  But  Miller-Jones and his team found out that V404 Cygni had another feature; the jets of plasma it was emitting were exhibiting such rapid precession that they were flailing around with a period of only a few minutes.

"This is one of the most extraordinary black hole systems I've ever come across," Miller-Jones said, in an interview with Science Alert.  "We think the disc of material and the black hole are misaligned.  This appears to be causing the inner part of the disc to wobble like a spinning top and fire jets out in different directions as it changes orientation."

Here's an image that Miller-Jones's team generated of what this might look like from closer up:

(The Science Alert page I linked above has a very cool animation of what this system in motion -- you should all check it out.)

The strangest part is that the mass and rapid spin of the black hole have generated an effect called frame dragging, wherein spacetime near a massive rotating object becomes distorted, with nearer regions experiencing a drag analogous to what happens if you rapidly stir a glass full of honey.  (It's not truly fluid drag -- it's a relativistic effect that wouldn't be observed at slow rotational speeds -- but has a similar effect.)

"We were gobsmacked by what we saw in this system - it was completely unexpected," said astrophysicist Greg Sivakoff of the University of Alberta, a member of the team who discovered the phenomenon.

So once again, what's out there in deep space has shown itself to be wonderfully weird.  It seems fitting to end with the quote from biologist J. B. S. Haldane -- "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

Hybrids to the rescue

Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news, courtesy of a professor at Oxford University.

The good news is that climate change is being taken care of.  All of the worries about ice sheets melting, sea level rise, and stronger storms can be set aside.

The bad news is that in order for all this to happen, humans have to be willing to have sex with aliens.

I wish I was making this up.  Young-hae Chi, a professor of Korean at Oxford, has published a book called Alien Visitations and the End of Humanity, in which he tells us that there are already some human/alien hybrids walking around.  There are four categories: small, tall and bold, insect-like, and scaly with cold, reptilian eyes.

What I'm wondering is, if there are all these hybrids walking around, why haven't I seen any?  Although I have to admit the first two categories are kind of vague, and Stephen Miller could easily fit into the last one.  But at least there aren't any insect people around, which is a good thing, because that'd be fucking creepy.

Still from "The Web Planet," from season two of Dr. Who.  Okay, these weren't so much creepy as ridiculous, especially considering the really annoying chirping sound they made.

"[T]hey come not for the sake of us, but for the sake of them," Chi says.  "[For] their survival, but their survival is actually our survival as well — the survival of the entire biosphere."

How exactly this works, or the specifics of how making lots of human/alien hybrid babies is going to stop climate change, Chi never says, and it sounds like he may not be clear on this himself.  "I'm looking for more evidence to support my view," he said.

I'll just bet he is.

Of course, even if there are intelligent aliens visiting the Earth, there's a serious problem with the hybridization claim, and it goes beyond supposing that humans and the aliens have the right combination of orifices and pokey-outy-bits to make it work from a mechanical standpoint.  While it's possible that extraterrestrial life would be DNA-based -- DNA and RNA nucleotides seem to be relatively easy to make abiotically, and are likely to be common in the universe -- it is extraordinarily unlikely that they would read it the same way we do.  The "translation chart," from which you can use the sequence of a messenger RNA molecule to determine the amino acid sequence of the protein it makes, is thought to be arbitrary, and there's no reason why even if there is some RNA-to-protein correspondence on the Planet G'zork, it'd be the same one we use.  (I emphasize the word thought in the previous sentence.  How the translation chart evolved, and whether it actually is arbitrary, is one of the unsolved problems of biological evolution.  If the translation chart was constrained to evolve the way it did, it might be that the decoding process is fairly uniform throughout the universe...  but I doubt it.)

So while I like Mr. Spock and Deanna Troi and B'Elanna Torres as much as the next Trek geek, that sort of thing is pretty certainly impossible.

Anyhow, I'm thinking that Dr. Chi is just making shit up, and should focus on his Korean classes and leave the astrobiology to the astrobiologists.

Still, it'd be nice to do something about climate change.  I mean, our current "leaders" are doing bugger-all, so maybe we should all welcome our alien overlords.  Although I draw the line at having sex with them.  I'm open-minded and all, but I do have my limits.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

UFO report overhaul

New from the "Well, At Least They're Going About It The Right Way" department, we have: the US Navy's new guidelines for reporting UFOs.

Apparently, this rewrite was spurred by an uptick in reports of strange sightings, although the powers-that-be state in no uncertain terms that they're not saying any of these are alien spacecraft.   "There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years," the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO.  "For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.  As part of this effort, the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities.  A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."

While I do tend to agree with Neil DeGrasse Tyson's view that the eyewitness testimony of pilots, policemen, ships' captains, and other people wearing uniforms isn't inherently better than that of the rest of us -- "it's all bad," he says -- I do have some niggling doubts about including pilots on that list.  After all, Tyson goes on to say that the frequency of reports of UFOs from astronomers is lower than that of the rest of the population because -- another direct quote -- "We know what the hell we're looking at!", ignoring the fact that pilots spend a lot of time looking up, too.  My guess is that a seasoned pilot wouldn't be taken in by such uncommon but perfectly natural phenomena as noctilucent clouds, lenticular clouds, sun dogs, sprites, STEVE (strong thermal emission velocity enhancement), and fallstreak holes.

And honestly, much of what pilots have reported don't admit of easy explanation.  According to Chris Mellon, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, a large percentage of the sightings were of objects "flying in formation" and "exceeding the speed of the airplane."

I'm in agreement that those sightings deserve investigation, and there needs to be a lessening of the stigma of even making the report.  Mellon says that a lot of pilots who've seen UFOs have chosen not to report them because of fear of ridicule or of actually hurting their careers.

So far, so good.  But then Luis Elizondo, who runs the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, got involved, and took the new recommendations and leapt right into hyperspace.  "If I came to you and said, ‘There are these things that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will,’ that would be a matter of national security," Elizondo said.  "This type of activity is very alarming, and people are recognizing there are things in our aerospace that lie beyond our understanding."

Now just hang on a moment.

There's about a light year's distance between "I saw an unexplained light in the sky" and "this is a spacecraft that defies the laws of physics and is just waiting to deploy a nuclear device against us."  I mean, on the one hand, I think what Elizondo is saying is that by the time an alien spaceship did deploy a nuclear weapon, it'd be too late to do anything about it, which is true as far as it goes; but don't you think the first step would be to establish that what people have seen are alien spaceships before we go into collective freak-out mode?

And I am absolutely sick unto death of people claiming that these alleged aliens can "defy the laws of physics" and "are beyond our understanding."  Maybe I'm being a little cocky and defensive, here, but the laws of physics are pretty damn well established, and I'd be willing to bet cold hard cash that if there are aliens out there, they obey the same laws of physics we do.  I'd also be willing to wager that even if there is some hitherto-unknown bit of physics that is allowing the aliens to do their aerial gymnastics, it's not "beyond our understanding."  Physicists are by and large pretty smart women and men, and my guess is they would be perfectly capable of understanding it, if the aliens would just land their spaceships and sit down and discuss it with them.

So simultaneously mythologizing and catastrophizing these sightings isn't very productive, or even very realistic.  Yes, they should be investigated.  I'm also with Michio Kaku that if even one in a hundred credible UFO sightings are unexplainable as natural terrestrial phenomena, that 1% is worth looking into.  But we need to keep our heads on our shoulders and not assume that everything we haven't explained will turn out to be something we can't explain.

I think the US Navy has the right idea, though, in making it part of their policy to take UFO sightings by pilots seriously.  And hell, maybe one of the reports will turn out to be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.  Believe me, no one would be more thrilled than I am if this turned out to be the case.  But it's important to keep looking at these things skeptically, always questioning and looking for alternate (natural) explanations, especially if the more out-there explanation is something we'd very much like to be true.

Because everyone -- even pilots, astronomers, and people in the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program -- are subject to confirmation bias.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

Trouble brewing

A general rule of historical anthropology is that societies only last so long, and inevitably go into decline and are superseded.

The causes, though, are numerous and often mysterious, which is why your typical one-line explanations -- like "classical Rome collapsed because of the invasion by barbarian tribes" -- are inaccurate oversimplifications at best.  Sure, the barbarians didn't help matters, but centuries of misrule, overreach by emperors greedy for land (leading to revolt in outlying provinces they no longer had the military strength to control), unfavorable alterations in climate, and repeated outbreaks of the plague were all major contributors to the downfall of the Pax Romana.

Some civilizations have collapsed more suddenly, and for a few of them, we have no real idea why.  Mycenaean Greece, the "Golden Age of Heroes," went into decline around 1200 B.C.E., and by 1100 was erased entirely, their cities and palaces abandoned.  From a hastily-scrawled clay tablet found at the Palace of Pylos, one of the main Mycenaean strongholds, we get the impression that invasion (in this case by the Dorians, a tribe from northern Greece) may have been a contributor:

The enemy grabbed all the priests from everywhere and without reason murdered them secretly by simple drowning.  I am calling out to my descendants (for the sake of) history. I am told that the northern strangers continued their (terrible) attack, terrorizing and plundering (until) a short time ago.

[It may interest other linguistics geeks that the above passage was translated by Michael Ventris, who along with Alice Kober finally deciphered Linear B -- a script which beforehand was entirely mysterious, even as to what language it represented and which characters stood for which sounds.  In fact, it wasn't even known whether the characters stood for single sounds, syllables, or entire words.  Imagine facing that as a task...]

Anyhow, it's unlikely that the Dorian invasion is the sole reason Mycenae fell.  After all, these are the people who kicked some major ass during the Trojan War; a bunch of invading barbarians wouldn't have successfully eradicated the Mycenaean civilization unless there had been other factors at work as well.

My point is, what destroys civilizations, not to mention what keeps them alive, is seldom a single factor.  But some anthropologists working in South America have identified one that seems to be critical to a society's survival:

Beer.

I'm not making this up.  Patrick Ryan Williams (Field Museum), Donna Nash (Field Museum and University of North Carolina Greensboro), Josh Henkin (Field Museum and University of Illinois at Chicago) and Ruth Ann Armitage (Eastern Michigan University) are the authors of a paper in Sustainability that was released last week, looking at the role of breweries in the Wari society, which flourished in what is now the western half of Peru for over five hundred years.  The authors write:

Utilizing archaeometric methods, we evaluate the nature of production of feasting events in the ancient Wari state (600–1000 CE).  Specifically, we focus on the fabrication of ceramic serving and brewing wares for the alcoholic beverage chicha de molle.   We examine the source materials used in the creation of these vessels with elemental analysis techniques. We then assess the chemical traces of the residues present in the ceramic pores of the vessels to detect compounds indicative of the plants used in chicha production. While previous research has identified circumstantial evidence for the use of Schinus molle in the production process, this research presents direct evidence of its existence in the pores of the ceramic vessels.  We also assess what this material evidence suggests about the sustainability of the feasting events as a mode of political interaction in the Wari sphere.  Our evaluation indicates that regional resource use in the production of the ceramic vessels promoted locally sustainable raw material procurement for the making of the festivities.  Likewise, drought resistant crops became the key ingredients in the beverages produced and provided a resilient harvest for chicha production that was adopted by successor groups.

"This study helps us understand how beer fed the creation of complex political organizations," said study lead author Patrick Ryan Williams in an interview in Science Daily. "We were able to apply new technologies to capture information about how ancient beer was produced and what it meant to societies in the past...  It was like a microbrewery in some respects. It was a production house, but the brewhouses and taverns would have been right next door...  People would have come into this site, in these festive moments, in order to recreate and reaffirm their affiliation with these Wari lords and maybe bring tribute and pledge loyalty to the Wari state...  We think these institutions of brewing and then serving the beer really formed a unity among these populations, it kept people together."

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons http://www.pdphoto.org/PictureDetail.php?mat=&pg=8748]

Which makes total sense to me.  I don't know about you, but getting together with friends for a nice pint is often the high point of my weekend.  And yeah, we could get together and have soda and Shirley Temples, but... it just wouldn't be the same, somehow.

So next time you have a beer, keep in mind that you're not just drinking a fizzy, mildly alcoholic beverage, you're actually helping society to cohere.  Which, I think, is a noble thing we're all doing.

Bottoms up!

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The view from afar

One of the strangest phenomena in the universe -- and there's a lot of competition in that regard -- is the neutron star.

This is the ultimate fate of stars of mid-range mass -- between 10 and 29 solar masses.  With stars this size, when they exhaust their hydrogen fuel, the outward pressure from fusion of hydrogen into helium stops, and the core collapses, heating it up catastrophically.  The result is a supernova, in which the outer atmosphere of the star is blown away completely.  The remnant of the core is crushed inward, forcing the electrons into the nuclei of the atoms -- literally squeezing all the space out of the matter inside.  The electrons and protons, presumably present in roughly equal numbers, are smashed together, canceling out their net charge and resulting in a great big ball o' neutrons.

I remember learning about this when I took an astronomy class in college, and asking the professor in some astonishment, "So, neutron stars are basically enormous atomic nuclei?"

He said, "Essentially, yes. They're degenerate matter -- made up entirely of neutrons pushed as close together as possible."

There are a couple of mind-blowing results from this.  One is that because ordinary matter is largely empty space and the degenerate matter in neutron stars isn't, neutron stars are dense beyond what you can imagine.  The estimate is that a matchbox-sized chunk of a neutron star would weigh three billion metric tons.  The other thing that is bizarre about them is that because most -- probably all -- stars spin, as the core collapses into a neutron star, reducing a spinning ball that was on the order of two million kilometers in diameter to one that is ten kilometers across, its spin rate increases.  A lot.  The Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum implies that if a spinning body decreases in radius, it has to increase in rotational rate -- something seen when figure skaters bring in their arms, making them spin faster and faster.

But that increase is peanuts compared to what happens here.  One of the first neutron stars discovered, at the center of the Crab Nebula, is spinning thirty times a second.  This makes it seem to flash off and on at that rate as beams of radiation aligned with its magnetic field sweep across the Earth like the beam from a lighthouse.  This is so hard to imagine that when they were first identified by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967, pulsars -- the name she gave to these flashing stars -- were thought to be signals from an extraterrestrial intelligence, and went by the code name LGM (Little Green Men).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESA/Hubble, Moving heart of the Crab Nebula, CC BY 4.0]

All of this is by way of background for a news story that astronomers have observed, for the second time ever, the merger of two neutron stars.

The first time, you might recall, was almost two years ago, when two neutron stars in tight orbit finally coalesced, resulting in a pulse of gravitational waves that gave powerful support to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.  This time, the merger was caught on x-ray camera -- as the collision occurred, it caused a shower of x-rays and left behind a single larger neutron star with an unimaginably huge magnetic field -- called a magnetar.

"We’ve found a completely new way to spot a neutron star merger," said Yongquan Xue, astronomer at University of Science and Technology of China and lead author of a paper on the subject that appeared two weeks ago in Nature.  "The behavior of this X-ray source matches what one of our team members predicted for these events."

I haven't told you what's the coolest thing about this.  The colliding neutron stars Xue et al. are studying aren't even in our own galaxy.  What they've done is develop a way to study the collision of two blobs of highly peculiar matter from a distance of six billion light years.

Which is not only an unimaginable distance, but means that the collision happened six billion years ago.  At that point, the Earth hadn't even completely coalesced from the primordial ring of dust and debris that formed it.  Six billion years is just shy of half the time between the Big Bang and now.

So I think you can label my mind blown.

Despite some of the stupid things humans do sometimes, you have to admire our ingenuity.  Sitting on this little speck of rock orbiting an ordinary star in the edge of one arm of an ordinary galaxy, we've found a way to probe the deepest secrets of the cosmos.  Or, as Carl Sagan put it:  "We are a way for the universe to know itself."

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A map from the home world

One of the most persistent -- dare I say, canonical -- stories of alien abduction is the tale of Betty and Barney Hill.

The gist of the story is that the Hills, a couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were driving home from their vacation in September of 1961, and near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire they saw a UFO that seemed to be following them.  After observing it for a while, including through binoculars, they experienced a time-slip -- they found themselves back home without any memory of how they'd gotten there.  The following day, they noticed some oddities -- Barney's new dress shoes were scuffed, the leather strap on his binoculars was broken, neither of their watches worked, and there were several shiny concentric marks on the hood of their car.

They were puzzled, but no explanation seemed forthcoming, so they forgot about it -- until Betty started to have dreams about being aboard a spacecraft.  This eventually led to some hypnosis sessions in which both of them claimed to have suppressed memories of being abducted and examined (our lore about aliens doing, shall we say, rather intimate examination of abducted humans comes largely from Barney's claims under hypnosis).

All of this would be nothing more than your usual Close Encounter story -- lots of wild claims, nothing in the way of hard evidence -- if it weren't for one thing that Betty revealed.  While she was on the spaceship, she said, she was shown a star map that had the aliens' home world and various other star systems with lines between them showing "trade routes."  She attempted to reconstruct a two-dimensional drawing (she said the map she'd been shown was three-dimensional), and here's what she drew:

Now, potentially, this could be interesting.  One of the more eye-opening things I learned when I was a teenager watching the original Cosmos series was that the constellations in our night sky only seem 2-D from our perspective, but there's actually a third dimension -- depth -- that we can't see from Earth.  If you add that third dimension, it becomes obvious that what we call "constellations" are actually random assemblages of stars that only seem near each other from our perspective, but are actually at greatly varying distances from us.  This means that if they were observed from a different vantage point the constellations would look nothing like they do here at home, and in fact, many of the stars that appear to be close together would be widely separated in the sky.  (One of the coolest animations from the series was looking at the stars of the Big Dipper, first from the Earth, then making a huge circle around it -- it doesn't take much of a difference in angle to make it look nothing at all like the Big Dipper.)

So if Betty Hill's recollection of the alien star map was real, then it'd be pretty convincing -- because the aliens presumably would have drawn the stars from the perspective of their home star system, not ours.  This would be mighty hard to fake now, much less 58 years ago.  So the race was on to try and figure out whether the map Betty Hill drew conformed to any known configuration of stars as viewed from somewhere else in the galaxy.

The person whose answer is the most commonly accepted by UFO enthusiasts is Marjorie Fish, who identified the home world of the aliens as Zeta Reticuli (thus kicking off all of the claims that the Annunaki, the "Greys," and various other superintelligent species have come here from that star system).  Starting from that star, Fish said, there are nearby stars that could represent the ones on the Hill map.

Which brings up the problems with the claim.

Recall that the map is the only hard evidence -- if you can call it that -- to come out of the Hill story.  Brian Dunning, of the brilliant blog Skeptoid, is critical of the claim right from the get-go:

Several years [after the alleged abduction], a schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish read a book about the Hills.  She then took beads and strings and converted her living room into a three dimensional version of the galaxy based on the 1969 Gliese Star Catalog.  She then spent several years viewing her galaxy from different angles, trying to find a match for Betty's map, and eventually concluded that Zeta Reticuli was the alien homeworld.  Other UFOlogists have proposed innumerable different interpretations.  Carl Sagan and other astronomers have said that it is not even a good match for Zeta Reticuli, and that Betty's drawing is far too random and imprecise to make any kind of useful interpretation.  With its third dimension removed, Betty's map cannot contain any useful positional information.  Even if she had somehow drawn a perfect 3D map that did exactly align with known star positions, it still wouldn't be evidence of anything other than that such reference material is widely available, in sources like the Gliese Star Catalog.

The problem runs deeper than that, though.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall a piece I did a while back on ley lines -- the idea that there are towns and sacred sites that are aligned because there are "energy currents" beneath the ground that flow in straight lines, and were the why the ancients chose to build on those specific sites.  The trouble is (as my post describes), in any arrangement of random dots, you can find strings of dots that are close to falling in a straight line, just by random chance.  No "energy currents" required.

Here, the difficulty is magnified by the fact that we don't just have a couple of hundred dots (or, in this case, stars), but tens of thousands, and that's just counting the relatively nearby ones.  Also, they're not on a flat surface, as with the ley lines; they're in a three-dimensional grid, which you're allowed to look at from any perspective you want to.

If those are were Marjorie Fish's constraints, it's actually astonishing that she took years to find a group of stars that matched Betty Hill's map.

We're pattern-finding animals, we humans.  As with pareidolia -- our capacity for seeing faces in inanimate objects like clouds, walls, and grilled-cheese sandwiches -- if there's no pattern there, our brains will often invent one.  Add to that confirmation bias and just plain wishful thinking, and it's not hard to see that the Hill map -- still considered the best evidence for the Hills' story -- is actually not much in the way of evidence at all.

Allow me to emphasize that I'm not saying Betty and Barney Hill weren't abducted.  It's just that -- to end with quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson -- "As a scientist, I need more than 'you saw it...'  If you have an actual object taken from a spacecraft, though, you'll have something of alien manufacture, and anything that has crossed interstellar space to get to Earth is going to be interesting.  So show me an object you've taken from the spaceship, and then we can talk."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]