A time capsule in amber

Today we're going to turn away from the generally atrocious stories in the news and focus on some science that's just plain cool.

You probably all know by now that bird are dinosaurs.  Not that they're related to, or descended from, dinosaurs; they are dinosaurs, belonging to the clade Dinosauria of the Phylum Chordata, specifically a group called the saurischians ("lizard-hipped" dinosaurs).  As such, they're cousins to such behemoths as Tyrannosaurus rex, and also velociraptors, made famous by Jurassic Park.  (Nota bene: although pack hunters, they probably weren't smart enough to get out of a locked freezer.)

So think of that next time you see a sparrow flitting about.  That, my friends, is a flying dinosaur.

This comes up because of the recent discovery of a bird leg preserved in amber.  These sorts of fossils are pretty uncommon, so this one has really stirred the paleontologists up.  It dates to about 98 million years ago, putting it dead center in the Cretaceous Period, which ended with a (literal) bang, the double whammy of a huge meteorite collision (Chicxulub) and a stunningly huge volcanic eruption (the Deccan Traps).

This bird, however, was comfortably positioned 42 million years before any of that nasty stuff happened, although that probably wasn't much consolation when he got mired in tree sap and probably either starved or was picked off by a predator, leaving his leg encased for us to find.  Here's the fossil itself:

And a reconstruction by artists, courtesy of the journal Current Biology:

I do have to wonder a little about the reconstruction, given that this species -- christened Elektrornis chenguangi ("elektron" is Greek for "amber") -- belongs to a group called enantiornithines.  Speaking of interesting derivations; enantiornithine is Greek for "mirror-image bird," because the group had a reversed orientation of the shoulder articulation.  Anyhow, the reconstruction seems to ignore one of the most prominent features of this group to our 21st-century picture of what a bird should look like:

They had teeth.

Not great big nasty pointy ones, no, but teeth nonetheless.  Here's a skull of a different enantiornithine, Bohalornis:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Fanboyphilosopher (Neil Pezzoni), Bohaiornis skull reconstruction, CC BY 4.0]

So a little more ferocious-looking than the artist's reconstruction might indicate.

The weirdest thing about Elektrornis specifically is that it had a greatly elongated middle toe (which you can see not only in the reconstruction but in the photograph of the fossil itself).  What it was used for is unknown, although the team that did the research -- Lida Xing, Jingmai K. O’Connor, Luis M. Chiappe, Ryan C. McKellar, Nathan Carroll, Han Hu, Ming Bai, and Fuming Lei, of the China University of Geosciences, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, the University of Regina, and the University of New England (Australia) -- speculate that it probably was an adaptation for feeding or for grasping.

Not, probably, for flipping off other dinosaurs, which was my first thought.  But then, I'm a non-specialist.

So a pretty cool discovery in China, elucidating the origins of modern birds and their ties to extinct, more conventionally dinosaur-like species.  Makes me kind of sorry the big toothy birds are gone.  That would add a whole new level of excitement to birdwatching, wouldn't it?

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

A lens on bias

It's astonishing and humbling how hard it is to see bias when you're inside it.

This comes up in matters of privilege.  As a middle-class American white male, I have had conferred upon me privilege so deep that it's a struggle for me even to know it exists.  I have instant, unquestioned entrée to places and situations that would be difficult, if not blocked entirely, if I were a different ethnicity, gender, or nationality.

It's even more unpleasant when you realize how bias colors science.  Because science is supposed to be above that kind of stuff, isn't it?  Objective, rational, logical, and even-handed.  But I ran into an interview in Science a couple of days ago, conducted and written by Kai Kupferschmidt, of German psychologist Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which referenced a paper Haun and others wrote nine years ago about the bias in psychological studies introduced by the fact that the majority of the test subjects were WEIRD -- Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.  (The last word is -- hopefully obviously -- being used in its broader sense of "from a country with democratically-elected leaders," not in the sense of belonging to the American Democratic Party.)

This bias colors everything psychological studies have turned up about human behavior, because it takes as a given what's normal, common, and acceptable as "what is normal, common, and acceptable in WEIRD societies."  Haun starts out with an example having to do with ownership -- something most of us pretty much take for granted as obvious to everyone.

"In the #Akhoe Hai//om community in Namibia," Haun says, "who were hunter-gatherers until three generations ago, everything that is shareable in principle belongs as much to you as it belongs to me. I could tell you to give me 'my' shoes, and the fact that you're currently wearing them does not matter.  The natural consequence is that everybody has about similar amounts of everything."

Namibian child [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mosmas at http://www.retas.de/thomas/travel/namibia2008/index.html, Namibia Child 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

These "givens," of course, turn out to be not so given when you look at other societies. 

He follows up with another example from the #Akhoe Hai//om (whom Haun has studied extensively).  "We assume that concepts true in our own cultural context are true generally," he said.  "For example, Marie Schaefer, a former member of my group, led a study on fairness norms. Let's say a friend and I go to the beach and look for shells.  I spend a lot of time searching and find a lot.  He spends his time laying on the beach.  If we divide up the shells, I get a lot more than he will, and that's fair, right?  That's what German children mostly do.  But #Akhoe Hai//om children distribute the goods equally most of the time, no matter who contributed how much.  Everybody has this emotional gut response to being treated 'unfairly.'  But depending on where you grew up, the gut feeling you develop might be completely different."

I recall being in a cultural anthropology class in college and running into this idea the first time.  The professor recounted the interactions between northeastern Native American tribes and Europeans in the early colonial period.  When the Europeans staked out land and said, "This is my land," the Native Americans couldn't even make sense of what they were trying to say.  The concept of land ownership simply didn't exist for them.  The idea you could draw an arbitrary line around a piece of something that had been there long before you arrived and would still be there long after you were dead, and call that piece "mine" in the same sense that you said "this shirt is mine," was so ludicrous as to be laughable.

It wasn't long, of course, before they found out what the implications of the concept of land ownership were -- to their own undoing.

Haun is well aware that studies like his might have the opposite effect of what he intends -- not that cultures (including our own) must be studied on their own terms, but that some cultures are literally better than others.  (And guess whose would probably come out on top?)  Haun says this specter of cultural superiority should not be ignored.  "[It must be dealt with] by confronting it head on," Haun said.  "Scientists can be careful in interpreting their data and engage in the debate.  I don't think racism goes away if we avoid the fact that there is variation as well as similarity across humans.  And the drivers of variation might give us some answers about fundamental questions of who we are and how we work."

I've always thought that the best way to eradicate prejudice is to have people interact with others of different ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, and nationalities -- that it's hard to remain prejudiced against someone who is smiling and chatting with you over a cup of coffee.  Our country's current determination to pull the cloak of insularity around us will have the opposite effect, further demonizing what the phenomenal science fiction writer Nisi Shawl calls "the other" and making us even blinder to our own biases.  Instead of holing up in our little towns, where everyone thinks and looks like ourselves, we should be going to other countries, seeing our common humanity despite our very real differences.

It puts me in mind of a quote from Mark Twain that seems like as good a place as any to conclude.  "Travel is fatal -- it is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

Rising from the waters

Keeping with an archaeological bent after yesterday's post on Stonehenge, today we're going to take a look at a newly-discovered site in Iraq that was only uncovered -- literally -- because of a terrible drought that made the level of a reservoir drop.  The result was the reappearance of a 3,400-year-old Bronze Age city that was part of a little-known culture that (in fact) I had never heard of -- the Mittani Empire.

The Mittani ruled over a large part of northern Mesopotamia and what is now Lebanon, Syria, and the eastern parts of Turkey, for about two hundred years (1,500 to 1,300 B.C.E.).  They were overthrown by attacks from the much-better-known Hittite and Assyrian Empires, and were broken up into small disjoint settlements that were subsumed into the conquering people.

For a linguistics geek like myself, the coolest thing is that the language they spoke -- Hurrian -- is a linguistic isolate, unrelated to all the surrounding languages as far as we can tell.  In that way, it's rather like Basque -- surrounded by widely-spoken Indo-European languages to which they have no affinity whatsoever.  (There has been speculation that Hurrian is related to the Caucasian languages such as Armenian, but that is controversial and, honestly, has little support amongst the linguists who have studied the languages.)

The Mittani did leave a scattering of place names of Hurrian origin, a bit like the Picts did in Scotland, virtually all of which were eventually superseded by Assyrian, Persian, Hittite, and Arabic names, and their original names mostly forgotten.  Even the capital city -- Washukanni -- was more or less erased from history, and in fact its location is still uncertain.

But now archaeologists have some new information to work with.  Due to a drought, the water behind the Mosul Dam in Iraq has fallen drastically, and much to everyone's amazement the receding waters revealed a city that was part of the mysterious Mittani Empire.  The site is called Kemune, and preliminary work has dated it to about 1,600 B.C.E., although this is tentative at best.

What's most stunning about this discovery is the degree of preservation, considering that not only did it have to deal with the ordinary ravages of time, it's been under water for forty years.  The archaeologists studying the site have found (relatively) intact wall paintings on plaster, not to mention ten clay tablets using a cuneiform script but in the extinct Hurrian language.

In a press release from the University of Tübingen, which led the research, we read:

The palace ruins are preserved to a height of some seven meters.  Two phases of usage are clearly visible, [team leader Dr. Ivana] Puljiz says, indicating that the building was in use for a very long time. Inside the palace, the team identified several rooms and partially excavated eight of them.  In some areas, they found large fired bricks which were used as floor slabs.  Ten Mittani cuneiform clay tablets were discovered and are currently being translated and studied by the philologist Dr. Betina Faist (University of Heidelberg).  One of the tablets indicates that Kemune was most probably the ancient city of Zakhiku, which is mentioned in one Ancient Near Eastern source as early as the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1800 BC).  This indicates the city must have existed for at least 400 years.  Future text finds will hopefully show whether this identification is correct.

What the whole thing highlights for me is how little we honestly know about our own ancestors, how much has been erased by conquest and suppression -- or simply forgotten over the centuries.  That we could find something about a culture from 3,400 years ago, whose language is extinct and whose ethnic affiliations are completely unknown, is nothing short of spectacular.  You have to wonder how many more sites are out there, drowned or buried, and are waiting for archaeologists to discover, and what they might tell us about the people who lived so long ago.

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

Stonehenge revisited

If you're into paranormal research, the word "Stonehenge" is enough to make you shudder.

It's not that it's not an impressive monument, historically important, and culturally unique.  It's definitely all of those things.  It's just that the strangeness of the structure, out there on the bleak Salisbury Plains, invites woo-woo speculation and just plain blather like no other.

With the possible exception of the Pyramids, of course.  Google "secrets of the Pyramids" if you don't believe me, but only click on the links if you have a high tolerance for nonsense.  You have been warned.

Anyhow, whenever I see sites that say "mysteries of Stonehenge decoded!" I always roll my eyes a bit.  But as I've commented more than once, rejecting claims out of hand is just as lazy as accepting them out of hand; cynicism is no better than gullibility, and both are excuses not to think.  So I got my comeuppance at the hands of the Brussels Times with an article called "Belgian Archaeologist Discloses Mysteries of Stonehenge," which turns out not only to be completely legitimate, but truly fascinating.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wigulf~commonswiki, Stonehenge, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The article is about archaeologist Christophe Snoeck, of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, who has been working on the archaeology of Stonehenge since he was a graduate student at Oxford.  He's studying the remains of individuals who were cremated at the site, and his analysis of the bone fragments (and the genetic makeup thereof) has shown that they were not part of the native population of Wessex, but seem to have come along with the stones themselves -- which have been known for years to have come from quite a distance, the Preseli Mountains of western Wales.

"By working directly on the human remains found at the site we hoped to gain insight, not on the origin of the stones, but on the origin of those using the site and being buried there," Snoeck said.  "Most research on Stonehenge focused on the stones.  Little was known about the humans buried at the site.  This is mostly due to the fact that they were cremated and only small cremated bone fragments remained.  It is only very recently that new methods have been developed to study cremated human remains."

Snoeck's research gives us a lens into a pre-literate people (or at least one for whom we have no written records), who have therefore been essentially silent for millennia.  Despite what you hear from aficionados of pagan religions, there is almost nothing known about the culture of the early Celts.  Most of the druidic trappings are the results of the 19th-century "Celtic revival" that mysticized -- invented, really -- a religion for these mysterious people.  The little real data we have comes from contemporary accounts; but those writings (such as descriptions by the invading Romans) are not only unflattering, but are almost certain to be largely incorrect, if you judge by other examples of conquerors describing the conquerees.

"By gathering more information about [the early Celts]," Snoeck says, "we can start to understand the place of such sites in the wider landscape and how they shaped societies and beliefs through time and space.  We were very excited to see that not all individuals lived near the site and that many actually moved over quite large distances to come to Stonehenge...  [U]nderstanding how people and societies changed trough time and space helps us understand current societies and how they might change and interact."

So it's nice that we have someone researching the site with a serious eye toward gathering scientifically-relevant data.  Heaven knows there's enough silliness out there on the topic.  It'll be fascinating to see what Snoeck and other archaeologists uncover about Stonehenge's builders, and other related sites such as the dolmens in Brittany.  All of it will give us a window into a long-dead people, whose knowledge, language, and culture vanished beneath the sands of time over two thousand years ago.

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

Roswell redux

Sometimes, I swear the universe is listening to me.

In my post yesterday, a story about the "Falcon Creek Incident" in Manitoba, I mentioned that the story was a lot more credible than Roswell.  So it is only fitting that less than an hour after I hit "publish," I found that Jocelyne LeBlanc over at Mysterious Universe had just posted a story...

... that UFOlogists are reopening the Roswell case.

My first thought was that I've read a lot of accounts by UFOlogists, and my impression was that the Roswell case was not, and in fact never will be, closed.  You've all seen the famous "alien autopsy" video, which was sold to television stations in thirty-three different countries by a guy named Ray Santilli (who said he had gotten the film from an anonymous military officer), but what you may not know is that a filmmaker named Spyros Melaris admitted that he and Santilli had faked the entire thing.

All this got from the UFO enthusiasts was a wiggle of the eyebrow that says, "of course you know that if someone admits it's a hoax, it has to mean that they've been threatened by the Men in Black."  In other words, evidence against something is actually evidence for it, if you squinch your eyes up and look at it sideways.

My visit to Roswell.  I'd tell you more, but I've been sworn to secrecy.

But you should prepare yourself for the whole thing rising from its shallow grave, ready to swallow the brains of True Believers everywhere, because there's just been a claim of a 2001 "leaked memo" involving physicists Kit Green and Eric Davis, and aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow, and the memo says the autopsy video was real.

Green supposedly was briefed three times on the subject of the crash and the video, and was shown photos back in 1988 of the alien cadaver taken at the crash site.  The memo concludes, "The Alien Autopsy film/video is real, the alien cadaver is real, and the cadaver seen in the film/video is the same as the photos Kit saw at the 1987/88 Pentagon briefing."

Better yet, Bigelow et al. claim there are still tissue samples from the alien being held at the Walter Reed-Armed Forces Institute for Pathology Medical Museum, located in Washington, D.C.

But I haven't told you how all of this stuff became public:

Linda Moulton Howe.

As soon as I saw this name, my eyes rolled back so far I could see my own brainstem.  Howe is one of the "ancient alien astronauts" loons, a protégé of Erich von Däniken, about whom RationalWiki has the following to say:

Howe's gullibility and deceptive "reports" have caused even staunch Ufologists to give her extremely low marks for credibility... She occasionally asks real scientists for opinions on these matters, but then promptly dismisses or rationalises them away.

In fact, the site UFOWatchdog.com is even more unequivocal:

Someone once summed up Howe very well with two words: ' Media entrepreneur '.  While having been a major player in the cattle mutilation mystery, Howe's credibility has gone way downhill as she sensationalizes everything from mundane animal deaths to promoting Brazilian UFO fraud Urandir Oliveira and the Aztec UFO Crash Hoax while selling alien books, videos and lectures.  Howe dabbles in all things strange including Bigfoot, crop circles, alien abductions, and UFOs.  Howe also sits on the board of advisors to the Roswell UFO Museum along with the likes of Don Schmitt.  See Howe's site, which she actually charges a subscription for in order to access some stories.  Also see Howe turning an explained animal death into an encounter with Bigfoot.  A leap not even Bigfoot itself could make.

So yeah.  There's that.  I know I was pretty charitable with the Falcon Lake Incident yesterday, but this one is just making me heave a heavy sigh of frustration.  No one would be happier than me if alien intelligence did turn out to be real; in fact, it might even make me feel better about the lack of intelligence I so often see down here on Earth.  But much as (in Fox Mulder's words) I Want To Believe, this one's just not doing it for me.

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

UFOs at Falcon Lake

My friend and fellow writer Andrew Butters (whose blog Potato Chip Math is a must-read) has been the source of a good many topics for posts here at Skeptophilia, so when I get an email from him saying "You gotta check this out," I know I'm in for something good.

A couple of days ago, Andrew sent me a link about something (that even with my perpetual digging for ideas) I'd never heard of -- the "Falcon Lake Incident."  The article is plenty eye-opening, and credibility-wise, this one beats Roswell hands-down.

Without stealing the author's thunder (the article appears over at CBC and was written by Darren Bernhardt, and you should all read the original), here are the bare bones of the story.

In May 1967, an industrial mechanic and amateur geologist named Stefan Michalak went into the wilderness about 150 kilometers east of Winnipeg, searching for seams of silver and quartz.  He had along with him (fortuitously, as it turned out) a set of welders' goggles that he used as eye protection while he was hammering at rocks.

He was near a place called Falcon Lake when he was startled by a sudden commotion that turned out to be a flock of geese taking off from the water en masse.  When he went down to the water's edge, he found out why; there were two "cigar-shaped" UFOs hovering over the water.

One descended and landed on a rock nearby, while the other soared off and disappeared.  He made a quick sketch of the object:

After making the sketch, he approached it, noting that the air around it was warm and smelled of sulfur.  That's when he noticed the open door on the craft's underside.

He made his way closer, and heard voices from within.  He called out to them in English, then in his native Polish -- then in Russian and German.

No response.

So he went aboard, pulling on his welding goggles to shield his eyes from the brightness of the interior.

They couldn't, however, protect him from the heat.  Once inside, he touched a panel that burned his glove.  After a few moments on the craft -- during which he didn't see anyone, human or otherwise -- he was suddenly hit in the middle of the chest with a blast of air from a grille in the wall, and he stumbled his way back out of the door.  Shortly afterward, the ship began to turn in a counterclockwise direction and took off, disappearing into the sky.

Michalak wandered, disoriented and in pain, finally finding his way back to Winnipeg, where he was treated for burns on his chest in a pattern of a grid of circles.  He was ill for weeks afterward -- but never varied from his story up to his death in 1999 at age 83.

So that's the claim.  There are a few things to me that are in favor of this being a legitimate story (as opposed to a hoax or an outright lie):

• Michalak never claimed it was an extraterrestrial craft, and never saw any aliens (or inhabitants of any kind) while on the craft.  He thought it was probably a secret military aircraft -- although it doesn't sound like any technology I've ever heard about that was available in 1951.
• Investigators were sent to the site, and found a fifteen-foot circular burn mark where Michalak said the craft had landed.  Further investigation found metal -- that turned out to be radioactive -- melted into seams of rock at the site.
• Psychologists evaluated Michalak after the incident, and not only did the man adhere to his story in every detail, the doctors found him to be pragmatic and honest.

I do have one question, though, that jumped out at me the first time I read the article:  Who uses welding goggles to protect their eyes while hammering rocks?

The purpose of welding goggles is to shield your eyes from bright light that could damage your retinas, and as such they have (very) dark lenses -- so dark that they're almost impossible to see through in ordinary light.  Any amateur geologist on a trek would simply bring along a pair of lightweight safety glasses, not a heavy welding headset that you couldn't see through anyhow.  And given that Michalak was an industrial mechanic, it's not something he'd be likely to mix up -- nor bring along on a hike "just in case."

I would think that it was something the author of the article got wrong, but he's included a photograph of Michalak wearing the goggles in question.  And you can see his eyes.  In the photograph is what looks like a hinged additional frame that probably holds the dark lenses -- the clear glass shown would be no protection at all from an arc welder -- but it still raises the question of why he brought along something that clunky in the first place.  I've done a great deal of back-country camping, and the one cardinal rule is: lighten the load wherever possible, because you're going to be carrying the lot of it on your back for a long while.

So that's peculiar.  Not a fatal flaw, exactly; it could be that the welders' goggles were all he owned, so he brought them along even though they were heavy.  It just struck me as odd.

But that's a small point.  The story has an appealing open-endedness to it; no one ever explained what had happened, there's ample evidence (including a piece of metal now owned by Michalak's son, which is still radioactive), and the man himself seems like about as credible a witness as you could hope for.

If you're interested in reading more, go to the article, which is outstanding, and you'll find information on a newly-released book about the incident, written by Stan Michalak, Stefan's son, and Canadian UFO researcher Chris Rutkowski.  It sounds worth a read.  I'm definitely going to order it, and looking forward to seeing what they have to say -- and what the readers of Skeptophilia think about the whole incident.

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

History by proxy

In a new study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we learn something simultaneously fascinating and a little alarming; humanity's fingerprint on the globe is so clear that it can even track our wars, famines, and plagues -- back twenty-five centuries or more.

The whole thing was done using proxy records, which involve using indirect sources of evidence about the past to infer what conditions were like.  A commonly-used one is using the constituents of air bubbles in amber and ice to make inferences about the global average air temperature at the time -- a technique that shows good agreement with the measurements of the same variable using other methods.

Here, in a team effort from the Desert Research Institute, the University of Oxford, the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Rochester, and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, researchers studied ice cores from thirteen different locations in the polar northern hemisphere, and found that the levels of one contaminant in the ice -- lead -- was enough to parallel all of the major plagues and wars that occurred in Europe and northern Asia back to 800 B.C. E.

What they found is that lead concentrations in the ice rose when things were quiet and prosperous, probably due to an expansion of smelting operations for items like lead seams for stained-glass windows and impurities in silver ore processing.  The signature of wars was clear, but the signature from plagues was blatantly obvious; the years following the Plague of Justinian (541-542 C.E.) and the two spikes of the Black Death (1349-1352 and 1620-1666 C.E.) were two of the lowest points on the graph.

"Sustained increases in lead pollution during the Early and High Middle Ages (about 800 to 1300 CE), for example, indicate widespread economic growth, particularly in central Europe as new mining areas were discovered in places like the German Harz and Erzgebirge Mountains," said study lead author Joseph McConnell of the Desert Research Institute.  "Lead pollution in the ice core records declined during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (about 1300 and 1680 C.E.) when plague devastated those regions, however, indicating that economic activity stalled."

Silver smelting plant in Katowice, Poland, ca. 1910 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The authors write:

Lead pollution in Arctic ice reflects midlatitude emissions from ancient lead–silver mining and smelting.  The few reported measurements have been extrapolated to infer the performance of ancient economies, including comparisons of economic productivity and growth during the Roman Republican and Imperial periods.  These studies were based on sparse sampling and inaccurate dating, limiting understanding of trends and specific linkages.  Here we show, using a precisely dated record of estimated lead emissions between 1100 BCE and 800 CE derived from subannually resolved measurements in Greenland ice and detailed atmospheric transport modeling, that annual European lead emissions closely varied with historical events, including imperial expansion, wars, and major plagues.  Emissions rose coeval with Phoenician expansion, accelerated during expanded Carthaginian and Roman mining primarily in the Iberian Peninsula, and reached a maximum under the Roman Empire.  Emissions fluctuated synchronously with wars and political instability particularly during the Roman Republic, and plunged coincident with two major plagues in the second and third centuries, remaining low for >500 years.  Bullion in silver coinage declined in parallel, reflecting the importance of lead–silver mining in ancient economies.  Our results indicate sustained economic growth during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, terminated by the second-century Antonine plague.

Of course, there's nowhere in the ice cores that has as high a level of lead contamination as recently-deposited ice does.  "We found an overall 250 to 300-fold increase in Arctic lead pollution from the start of the Middle Ages in 500 CE to 1970s," said Nathan Chellman, a doctoral student at the Desert Research Institute, and co-author on the study.  "Since the passage of pollution abatement policies, including the 1970 Clean Air Act in the United States, lead pollution in Arctic ice has declined more than 80 percent.  Still, lead levels are about 60 times higher today than they were at the beginning of the Middle Ages."

As an aside, the Trump administration has steadily rolled back regulations requiring industry to conform to reasonable pollution standards, including allowable levels of air pollution.  So look for the contaminants in ice -- and in your lungs -- to spiral upward once again.

But hey, it means the economy's good, so nothing to worry about, right?

Of course right.

So as I've pointed out (repeatedly), what we are doing does have a measurable, quantifiable effect on the environment, and studies like McConnell et al. should be a significant wake-up call.  And as I've also pointed out, it probably won't.  It's all too easy for people to say, "Meh, what do I care about a little lead in Arctic ice?  So it bothers a few seals and polar bears.  Too bad for them."  And continue with our throw-away, gas-guzzling, conspicuous-consumption lifestyles.

It's cold comfort knowing that when the aliens come here in a thousand years to find out why the Earth is barren, they'll be able to figure it out by looking at the traces we left behind in the ice, soils, rocks, and air.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun for anyone who (like me) appreciates both plants and an occasional nice cocktail -- The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart.  Most of the things we drink (both alcohol-containing and not) come from plants, and Stewart takes a look at some of the plants that have provided us with bar staples -- from the obvious, like grapes (wine), barley (beer), and agave (tequila), to the obscure, like gentian (angostura bitters) and hyssop (Bénédictine).

It's not a scientific tome, more a bit of light reading for anyone who wants to know more about what they're imbibing.  So learn a little about what's behind the bar -- and along the way, a little history and botany as well.

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