I contain multitudes

One of the things that even folks conversant in the evolutionary model sometimes don't know is the extent to which we are composite organisms.

On the gross level (and I mean that in both senses of the word), there is the sheer number of cells in us that are not human.  The adult human body has about 10 trillion human cells, and (depending on who you talk to) between 1 and 3 times more bacterial cells -- intestinal flora, bacteria hitching a ride on our skin, in our mouths, in our respiratory mucosa.  Most of these are commensals at the very worst -- neither harmful nor helpful -- but a significant number are in a mutualistic arrangement with us, which is one of several reasons why the overuse of antibiotics is a bad idea.

Then there are the little invaders we can't live without -- namely the mitochondria, those tiny organelles that every high school biology student knows are the "powerhouses of the cell."  What fewer people know is that they are actually separate organisms, descended from aerobic prokaryotes that colonized our cells 2.5 billion years ago (give or take a day or two).  They have their own DNA, and reproduce inside our cells by binary fission the same way they did when they were free-living proto-bacteria.

Mitochondria [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Louisa Howard]

But that's not all. If you're a plant (I'm assuming you're not, but you never know), you have three separate ancestral lines -- your ordinary plant cells, the mitochondria, and the chloroplasts, which are also little single-celled invaders that now plants can't live without.  But even that's not the most extreme example.  The microorganism Mixotricha paradoxa is a composite being made up of five completely separate ancestral genomes that have fused together into one organism.

It's amazing how much these relationships alter behavior, sometimes in ways that blur the definition of the word "organism."  Is Mixotricha one organism or five?  Unsurprisingly, given their history of anticipating scientific discoveries, Star Trek gave a hard look at this question with the character of Jadzia Dax.  Dax is a Trill -- an individual produced by the fusion of a humanoid host and a long-lived symbiont.  Although the symbiont can survive after the death of the host, and go on to fuse with another one, the personalities remain blended, and the symbiont brings to its new host all the memories, skills, and traits it accessed from previous ones.

Weird stuff, but not so far off from what we see down here on Earth.

But back to humans, if you're not already so skeeved out that you've stopped reading.  Because it's even more complicated than what I've already told you -- check out a paper by geneticists Cedric Feschotte , Edward Chuong and Nels Elde of the University of Utah, in which we find out that even our nuclear DNA isn't entirely human.  Feschotte et al. have shown that ten percent of our thirty-thousand-odd genes and three-billion-odd base pairs...

... came from viruses.

We usually think of viruses as pesky little parasites that cause colds, flu, measles, mumps, and so on, but they're more than that.  Some of them -- the retroviruses (HIV being the best-known example) -- are capable of inserting genetic material into the host's DNA, thus altering what the host does.  Certainly, sometimes this is bad; both AIDS and feline leukemia are outcomes of this process.  But now Feschotte, Chuong, and Elde have shown that some of our viral hangers-on have had their genes repurposed to work in our benefit.

These stowaway bits of DNA are called endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), and some of them seem to be associated with cancer.  Others have been implicated in multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia.  But what the researchers found is that not all of them are deleterious; the gene that allows us to digest starch, and (even more importantly) the gene that triggers the fusion of the developing embryo to the placenta, seem to have viral origins.

"We think we’ve only scratched the surface here on the regulatory potential of ERVs," Feschotte said.

All of which is pretty amazing.  And it definitely gives one pause when you stop to think of how we define the word "organism."  Am I a single organism?  Well, not really.  Besides my regular human cells, I've got trillions of mitochondria, each with their separate bacterially-derived genome; and ten percent of what I think of as "my DNA" came from viruses, at least some of which has then been modified into genes that I depend on to survive.  So humans -- and all living things -- are looking more and more like composite colonies of symbiotic life forms, representing a web of interrelationships that is so complex that it's mind-boggling.

So, to hell with the weird, exotic life forms from Star Trek.  I'm too busy being blown away by how bizarre and cool the life here on Earth turns out to be.

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The house of cards

I was first introduced to the idea that human history has been shaped by climate swings back in 1990, with British science historian James Burke's prescient two-part documentary After the Warming.  In part one, he tracks the (natural) ups and downs that have occurred because of gradual shifts in the Earth's orbit and rotational axis; in part two, he then looks at the effects humans are having because of our out-of-control burning of fossil fuels and use-it-once-then-throw-it-away culture of consumerism.  From my standpoint now, thirty-two years after the documentary was released, his predictions seem nothing short of uncanny, right down to the United States's steadfast determination not to do a damn thing to address anthropogenic climate change.  But he even got a lot of the more specific effects spot-on.  For example, he predicted the crazy spate of Atlantic storms that caused billions of dollars of damage and resulted in the NOAA running out of hurricane names and having to switch over to "Alpha," "Beta," and "Gamma," even getting it right down to the year it occurred (2005).  Watching it now, it's almost like it was made today by someone with a slight penchant for bending the truth, not by someone three decades ago for whom all of these were merely shrewd forecasts.

If I have one criticism of Burke, it's that he gives the impression that everything in history boils down to the climate.  Part one, entertaining and enlightening as it is, is kind of a ninety-minute long exploration of the single-cause fallacy.  That said, it's still a sobering cautionary tale.  We can't discount the effects that shifts in the climate can have on humanity.  Right now in the central and southern United States we're trapped in a heat wave that has already broken records in an area that's accustomed to summer heat; simultaneously the much-more-poorly-prepared people of western Europe are not only facing record high temperatures but droughts and wildfires.

It remains to be seen how long it'll take before the climate naysayers will finally, grudgingly, admit that we've been right all along.

Another of Burke's oversights is an interesting one; although he considers other natural phenomena, he doesn't look at the effects of volcanic eruptions on the climate.  It may be because these are drastic, but usually short-lived; long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall a piece I wrote a while back on the effects of an eruption in Iceland in the sixth century C. E. that was the principal cause of "the worst decade in history" -- a series of plagues, famines, and catastrophically cold winters that killed an estimated sixty million people.  It took nearly a hundred years for the effects to abate, and when they did, they led into an unusually warm period (probably because of the injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by the eruption).  An even bigger eruption, this one in Indonesia about seventy-four thousand years ago, is thought by some scientists to have nearly caused the human species to go extinct -- the "Toba Bottleneck" may have reduced the entire human population of the Earth to under ten thousand individuals.  (This conclusion, however, is still under serious debate amongst scientists.)

The reason all this comes up is because of an article at the site Yale Climate Connections sent to me by a loyal reader, which describes the historical impact of an eruption I'd never heard about -- the eruption of the Alaskan volcano Mount Okmok in 43 B. C. E.  

The caldera of Mount Okmok [Image courtesy of photographer Christina Neal and the USGS]

It was another massive one, with global effects.  Tree ring analysis from the White Mountains of California give evidence of the second-coldest winter on record.  Written accounts from Rome describe cold, dry summers that caused agricultural failures several years running; in Egypt, it manifested as the loss of the annual floods of the Nile River three times in a row, resulting in devastating drought and famine.

This, in turn, contributed to the collapse of the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt, then ruled by the famous and charismatic Queen Cleopatra VII.  

It's a little alarming to see how quickly the climate can change, and the havoc such changes can wreak.  It's why people like me have been sounding the alarm for decades, urging caution instead of what we've been doing, which is blundering about as if everything around us is permanent, as if we're guaranteed a clement climate and plenty of food and water.  All you have to do is to look at history to realize how precarious things are.  While I won't go as far as James Burke did in attributing damn near everything to the climate, there's no denying that in many ways the interlocking systems of our planet have the fragility of a house of cards.  Some things -- such as volcanic eruptions and orbital shifts -- we can't do anything about.  But once you see the effects of climate change on the history and habitability of the Earth, I don't see how you wouldn't come away absolutely convinced that we better do everything we can to protect the part of it we can do something about.

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Cryptids down under

Friday's post, about alleged sightings of a Bigfoot-like creature in Kent, England, prompted a loyal reader of Skeptophilia to send me an email with a link captioned, "Don't forget us Aussies!"

The link was to an article at the site news.com.au, entitled, "'These Things Are Dangerous': Dean Harrison Claims Yowie Responsible For Missing People," wherein we find that the Australian version of Bigfoot -- the Yowie -- is not content with merely scaring the shit out of you, it actually is trying to kill you.

This should come as no surprise, because Australia has a well-deserved reputation for having dangerous wildlife.  Not only do they have six-meter-long saltwater crocodiles and abundant great white sharks, Australia is home to four of the top-ten deadliest snakes in the world (the Eastern Brown Snake, the Mainland Tiger Snake, the Coastal Taipan, and the Inland Taipan), the most venomous jellyfish known (the box jelly), and the most aggressive and dangerous bird in the world (the cassowary).  For fuck's sake, they even have a plant (the gympie-gympie) with hypodermic-needle-like hairs that inject a neurotoxin, resulting in excruciating pain that can last months.

"Don't forget about the Drop Bears," an Australian friend of mine told me.  "You visit Australia, you have to be constantly on the lookout for Drop Bears."

So I guess the Australian Bigfoots have to be pretty fierce just to fit in.

Harrison doesn't just collect Yowie sightings from other people, he's actually seen them himself.  On one occasion, he says, he barely escaped unscathed.  He was out for an evening run in the town of Ormeau, on the Queensland coast, and suddenly heard a terrifying noise.

"I heard all this crashing coming through the bush behind me and it sounded like a group of kids just trashing the place," Harrison said.  "The sound of snapping branches and crushing leaves started to get closer until a large figure emerged about ten meters behind me.  I got these unexplainable chills which are what we call the nameless dread … and like a rabbit in spotlights, basically, my whole body just locked up."

I dunno, "unexplainable" is not the word I'd use for being scared if a huge creature emerged from the underbrush near me at night.  Myself, I think it'd have been entirely explainable if he'd pissed his pants and then had a brain aneurysm.

"I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew I was in danger… and I knew that if I turned around and made direct eye contact, things would get exponentially worse." Harrison said.  So he broke into a sprint, and the creature started chasing him.  "He’s yelling and he’s roaring and he’s doing some sort of almost like a talk over the top and on every footstep … his diaphragm in his chest would bounce."  Which is pretty good detail to notice when you're running away from a giant proto-hominid at night.

"Before I knew it, he’s right next to me.  I thought, this is it, this is the end of my life.  I’m about to die right now."

Fortunately, though, he spotted a streetlight in the distance, and hauled ass toward it.  The Yowie for some reason decided not to pursue, and Harrison lived to squatch another day.

One of Harrison's infrared shots of a Yowie near Gold Coast, Queensland

The Yowie has a long history, and legends of encounters go back to Indigenous Australians far predating European colonization.  But the sightings persist, and Harrison says he gets a new report from somewhere in the country "every second day."

He's still waiting for unequivocal hard evidence, though (as are we all).  At least here we have a big country with a huge amount of wilderness and lots of places to hide.  So the idea of a significant population of some large mammal species living there and not leaving behind any traces is at least more plausible than the same thing existing in, say, southeastern England.

But the article concludes rather sadly that we still don't even have a clear photograph of a Yowie, and we'll have to keep looking.  It ends with an adjuration for Yowie-seekers not to confuse Yowies with the Bunyip, another bizarre denizen of the Outback.

Myself, I don't see how you could.  The Yowie is a three-ish meter tall apelike creature, while here's a 1935 illustration of the Bunyip, by Gerald Markham Lewis:

I'm not seeing much similarity, although there is the commonality that either would inspire you to think, "Holy shit, I'm gonna die."

In any case, that's our exploration of cryptozoology in The Land Down Under.  If I'm ever lucky enough to visit Australia, I'll make sure to do some Yowie-hunting.  I'll also keep a weather eye out for Drop Bears.

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Living crystals

Starfish are odd creatures in just about every respect.

They belong to a phylum called Echinodermata, which is Greek for "spiny skin" and also includes such weird animals as sea urchins, sand dollars, brittle stars, sea cucumbers, and crinoids (also called "sea lilies" or "stone lilies" because they look more like some kind of weird undersea plant than they do animals).  One of the big surprises for my AP Biology students, during the unit on zoology, was that echinoderms are our closest non-vertebrate relatives.  The old distinction of vertebrate versus invertebrate turns out to reflect less of a real genetic and evolutionary split than the distinction between protostome and deuterostome; the former includes insects, crustaceans, arachnids, mollusks, annelids (e.g. earthworms), and nematodes (roundworms), while the latter is just the echinoderms and vertebrates such as ourselves.

The names protostome and deuterostome, if you're curious, are also Greek; they mean (respectively) "first mouth" and "second mouth," referring to the order in which the openings of the digestive tract form.  In protostomes, when the beachball-shaped early embryo forms an inpocket that will lead to the formation of the gut, that first opening will eventually become the mouth; the anus forms when the inpocket tunnels its way through and comes out of the other side.  In deuterostome, it happens the other way around, but early embryologists evidently thought that "mouth second" sounded more genteel than "ass first," and that's how we ended up called "deuterostomes."  (I remember the shocked look on one of my students' faces when I told the class about this fun feature of embryonic development.  She said, wide-eyed, "So, at some point, all humans are just... a butthole?"  I deadpanned back, "Yup.  Unfortunately, some people never get past that stage.")

You might wonder how echinoderms can look so different from vertebrates if we're actually on the same branch of the animal family tree.  In fact, echinoderm larva are clearly bilaterally symmetric, just like vertebrates are; they largely lose that symmetry as they mature, although the apparent pentaradial symmetry of a starfish is kind of an illusion, because they do have organs (like the water intake organ, or sieve plate) that are offset to one side.  But they lose more than their symmetry; the adults have no true circulatory system (all they end up with is a set of what are essentially water pipes), no central nervous system (just a nerve ring and branched peripheral nerves), and the simplest of digestive tracts.  This despecialization seems to underlie their wild ability to regenerate lost or damaged limbs -- a capacity that has been under intensive study because of the possible applications to medical science.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Copyright (c) 2004 Richard Ling, Blue Linckia Starfish, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The reason all this comes up is because of yet another bizarre and beautiful feature of starfish, just discovered at MIT.  When they're still very early in embryonic development, and resemble spherical glass beads, they exhibit a peculiar behavior -- they spin, creating tiny vortices in the water and drawing other nearby embryos in.  Eventually they self-assemble into a living crystal -- a regular, tightly-packed lattice of embryos all spinning in the same direction.  They undergo peculiar ripples that the researchers call "odd elasticity" -- odd because the oscillations aren't damped down by the water's drag, but continue to propagate through the entire crystal, like some sort of biological standing wave pattern.

"The spontaneous, long-lasting ripples may be the result of interactions between the individual embryos, which spin against each other like interlocking gears," said Alexander Mietke, who co-authored the paper on the phenomenon that appeared last week in Nature.  "With thousands of gears spinning in crystal formation, the many individual spins could set off a larger, collective motion across the entire structure."

The benefit to this behavior isn't known.  One possibility is that the formation of these crystals makes it less likely that the embryos will be eaten by predators, but that's just speculation.  At the moment, though, it's enough to wonder at the intricacy and beauty of these odd creatures, our distant cousins on the evolutionary family tree.

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A modern Mary Celeste

There's something compelling about a story with no definitive answers.  It's no wonder a lot of our favorite works of fiction have an element of mystery, and in some of them, the loose ends are never completely tied up.  Think of how many of our spooky Tales Around A Campfire end with a line like, "... and no one ever found out what happened to the missing teenagers."

In real life, though, unsolved mysteries have a way of inviting wild speculation, usually based on evidence for which even the word "slim" is an overstatement.  Consider, for example, the off-the-rails "explanations" people came up with to account for the fact that even powerful telescopes couldn't see any surface detail on the planet Venus.  Here's how Carl Sagan described one of these lines of thought, in the episode "Heaven and Hell" of his wonderful series Cosmos:

I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus.  Why not?  Because it’s covered with a dense layer of clouds.  Well, what are clouds made of?  Water, of course.  Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.  Therefore, the surface must be wet.  Well, if the surface is wet, it’s probably a swamp.  If there’s a swamp, there’s ferns.  If there’s ferns, maybe there’s even dinosaurs.

Observation: I can't see a thing.  Conclusion: dinosaurs.

What got me thinking about this tendency is a curious story out of Cambodia that hit the news earlier this week.  On Koh Tang Island, in Preah Sihanouk Province, on July 12, a "ghost ship" ran aground -- no sign of the captain and crew, no markings indicating where the ship had originated.  Three lifejackets were found washed up on a nearby beach, but there are no bodies, nothing to indicate what happened to the ship and its passengers.  Stormy conditions have made further investigations impossible for the time being.

Immediate comparisons were made to the most famous of all "ghost ships," the Mary Celeste.  The Mary Celeste set sail from New York City on November 7, 1872, headed for Genoa, Italy.  Being in the days before shipboard radio, nothing more was heard from it until it was found drifting in the Azores a month later.  It was completely deserted.  The last entry in the ship's log was ten days earlier, and indicated nothing amiss.  It was amply provisioned with food, and none of the crew members' belongings were disturbed, as you'd expect if it had been captured and boarded by pirates.  There was no damage to the ship itself; it looked as if somehow, the captain and crew had simply... evaporated.

And to end the tale in appropriate campfire story fashion: no one ever found out what happened to the crew, and none of them was ever seen again.

The story of the Mary Celeste is certainly puzzling and creepy, but most rationalists still think there's a logical (and natural) explanation for what happened to it.  The same is true in the case of the Cambodian ghost ship.  Here, the most plausible answer is probably either that it was a ship that had been put out of service (the lack of markings and identifications suggests that the "service" might have been hauling illicit cargo, possibly drugs), and either had accidentally slipped its moorings and drifted off, or had been scuttled deliberately.

But just as with Carl Sagan's "I can't see anything = dinosaurs" example, the lack of anything definitive has touched off a lot of wild speculation about what happened to the ship.  Amongst the "explanations" I've seen:

• the Bermuda Triangle has opened a branch office in the Indian Ocean, and the crew went through a portal to parts unknown
• the crew were abducted by aliens
• the ship got too close to an island run by the Illuminati, so the crew had to be eliminated
• the ship was attacked, and the crew eaten, by (choose one): a giant squid, a marine version of the Loch Ness Monster, beings from Atlantis, Cthulhu

Okay, just hang on a moment, here.

Let's stop and consider another quote, this one from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for...  If something is 'unidentified,' then that's where the conversation should stop.  You don't go on and say 'so it must be' anything."  There's (at present) no real evidence for what happened to the ghost ship, so we should put any further speculation on hold for as long as need be.

And keep in mind that here, it's not even like most UFO sightings, which are one-offs that leave behind no traces and no chance of a repeat performance; the Cambodian authorities have the actual ship, meaning at some point when the conditions improve they'll be investigating further.  All we have to do is wait a while and see what they discover.  Chances are they'll find evidence that it's an illicit/unregistered cargo ship that was used in drug-running.  Which will send the aficionados of the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, and Cthulhu sulking off to their rooms...

... until the next mystery, at which point they'll all come roaring back.  Like they have every other time something odd happens.

It'd be nice if sometimes we could just let mysteries be mysteries.  Saying "we don't know, and might not ever know" isn't satisfying, but as good skeptics we have to be willing to say it when it's warranted.  I won't say that I'm not fascinated by cases like the Mary Celeste, where there really seems to be no plausible explanation, but intellectual honesty forces us to put aside our wild imaginings and accept that sometimes, there may never be a definitive answer.

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The Beast of Sevenoaks

It's been a while since we've looked at anything of a cryptozoological nature here at Skeptophilia, so I'd like to rectify that with a story from an unexpected location.  Most of the Bigfoot sightings come from two areas -- the remote regions of the United States (particularly the Pacific Northwest), and the Himalayas.  This time, though we've got a report of a sighting in southeastern England.  The Brits, who evidently did not wish to be outdone by either the Nepalese or a bunch of upstart Americans, are claiming their own Bigfoot-clone, according to a recent article by Brent Swancer at Mysterious Universe.

Nicknamed "The Beast of Tunbridge Wells" or "The Beast of Sevenoaks," this cryptid is described as an eight-foot-tall creature, human-shaped but covered with hair, with "long arms" and "demonic red eyes."  Some locals are afraid to go outside at night because there have been so many sightings in the past six months.  There are a number of highly entertaining eyewitness accounts in Swancer's article, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.  Indeed, the story claims that the Beast has been seen for more than a hundred and fifty years, and include an excerpt from a local newspaper describing a sighting that occurred in 1858.  More recent ones come from such credible witnesses as "an elderly lady" and someone "known only as J. Smith of Sevenoaks."

Well, far be it from me to doubt anecdotal reports from J. Smith of Sevenoaks, but I feel obligated at this point to mention that my personal trainer, Kevin, actually grew up in Sevenoaks, so I asked him what he thought about the possibility of there being Bigfoots in that part of the world. 

Here is, in as near as I can get to a direct quote, what Kevin said:

If there are Bigfoots all over the fucking place, why hasn't anyone gotten a good photo?  Here we are, all carrying around the equivalent of a thousand-dollar point-and-shoot camera in our pockets, and the photos we get are still crap.  And another thing is, you have to look at where the people from Monster Hunters and Finding Bigfoot always go.  It's places like the Appalachians, right?  Notice that this is also moonshine country.  Give me enough to drink, I'll not only see Bigfoot, I'll see the Queen, the Pope, and Jesus.  So if there were Bigfoots in a densely-populated place like Kent, someone would have gotten a good photo by now.  And I can tell you that growing up there, I saw lots of drunk people, but I never once saw Bigfoot.

Hmm.  Let's take a look at the circumstances during which J. Smith saw Bigfoot, as described in Swancer's article: "The witness... claims that he had gone out to a pub with some friends, after which they had gone off to chat and a BBQ..."

Well, alrighty, then.

But of course, mere scoffing isn't enough, however often I engage in it myself.  So let's interject a bit of a science lesson that may raise some questions in your mind.

There's a concept in ecology called "minimum viable population."  This is the number of organisms needed in a population to assure that (assuming nothing changes) the birth rate equals or exceeds the death rate.  It is quite difficult to estimate, and depends on a great many factors, including the number of offspring per mating, mortality in the young, dependency on available resources, size of the territory, and so on.  To give two extreme examples that will illustrate this: the MVP for mosquitoes is probably pretty damn close to two, as long as one was male and one was female, and they were near enough to find each other and had a source of food and water.  Mosquitoes can produce so many young from one mating that it's likely you could rebuild a sizable population in short order from those two survivors.  Elephants, on the other hand, reproduce very slowly, and the young are slow to reach sexual maturity; in order to have a population large enough for the birth rate to equal or exceed the death rate (from natural causes, predators, poaching, and so on), you would need hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals in the population.

Get it?  Now, let's consider how many Britsquatches we'd need to have a viable, sustainable population.

To get a handle on this, I referred to the paper "Estimates of Minimum Viable Population Sizes for Vertebrates and Factors Influencing Those Estimates," by David Reed, Julian O'Grady, Barry Brook, Jonathan Ballou, and Richard Frankham, which appeared in the Journal of Biological Conservation in 2003.  The paper is lucidly written but relies on some rather specialized models and technical mathematics; if you want to give it a go, you can access it here.  The main thing of interest for our purposes is in the Appendix, wherein Reed et al. use their techniques to make an upper and lower bound estimate for MVP; the lower bound is just using raw birth and death rates, the upper bound generated from a mathematical formula that estimates the number of individuals required to give a 99% likelihood of the population sustaining for forty generations.  Interestingly, there is a large primate species listed -- the Mountain Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla beringei).  And Reed et al. place the lower bound for MVP for the Mountain Gorilla at 849, and the upper bound at somewhat over 11,000 individuals.

So assuming the Sevenoaks Britsquatch (Sasquatchius anglicus kentei) has a similar MVP, and has been wandering about the highways and byways of southeastern England since time immemorial (or at least since 1858), you can't just claim that there are two, or four, or even a dozen of them... you have to believe that there are thousands.

Maybe someone can explain how there could be a thousand (or more) eight-foot-tall hairy hominids hiding out down there southeast of London, doing all the things animals do -- feeding (and an animal that size would need a lot of food), making noise, sleeping, mating, dying, and so on -- and they've only been seen a handful of times near Sevenoaks, have left behind zero actual evidence, and no one has gotten a photograph.  That such a thing could happen in the trackless woods of the Pacific Northwest, or the icy reaches of the Himalayas, I might be able to believe.

But Kent?  Really?

I'm sorry, but I'm with Kevin; this just sounds preposterous to me.  As much as I'd love to see some cryptid discovered, and confirmed by science, I'm betting this won't be the one.  In fact, I think what we should be doing is looking for some prankster in Sevenoaks with a gorilla suit.

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Potions 101

One of the coolest things about writing Skeptophilia has been the connections I've made with other skeptics.  The friendly comments, and (even better) the suggestions for topics, have been a continual source of cheer for me, far outweighing the outraged rantings of various woo-woos I've offended, not to mention the occasional death threat.

I've recently (and more or less by accident) achieved quite a following amongst some of my former students.  I certainly never believed in proselytizing during class; not only is this unprofessional and ethically questionable, given that they are a captive audience, I always preferred keeping my own views about most things out of the scope of my lectures.  It was far better, I found, to present the facts of the matter, and give students the tools to think critically, and allow them to make up their own minds.  But it was inevitable that a few of them would discover Skeptophilia, and once that happened, the news spread, leading to the formation of what I think of as a sort of junior branch of Worldwide Wacko Watch.

One particularly enthusiastic young man that I taught the year before I retired has taken it upon himself to become something of a research assistant, ferreting out crazy stories and loopy websites in his spare time, and sending them to me.  And just yesterday, he found a real winner, that has all of the hallmarks of a truly inspired woo-woo website: (1) a bizarre worldview, (2) no evidence whatsoever, and despite (1) and (2), (3) complete certainty.

So allow me to present for your consideration the Lucky Mojo Free Spells Archive.

The first fun bit about this site is that it's run and maintained by someone named "Cat Yronwode."  Having a background in linguistics, I have deduced that the latter combination of letters is an attempt to spell "Ironwood" in a vaguely medieval fashion, but who the hell knows for sure?  In any case, Ms. Yronwode has requested that the spells contained therein not be copied, because some of them are copyrighted material, and I have honored this, so if you want more details about exactly how to concoct the magic potions described below, you'll have to take a look at the site yourself.  (Who knew that pagans could be so legalistic?  I didn't.  But better to play along with her request than to find myself hexed with, for example, "Confusion Oil #3."  Heaven knows I'm confused enough, most days.)

In any case, what the "Lucky Mojo Free Spells Archive" turns out to be is a set of recipes for magic potions, and instructions in their use.  Thus we have the following:

• "Seven Holy Waters" -- allegedly invented by Marie Laveau, the "Witch Queen of New Orleans."  Contains whiskey, which I've never found to be especially water-like, but given that the word "whiskey" comes from the Irish uisge beatha, meaning "water of life," we'll just let it slide, because arguing with both the Witch Queen of New Orleans and the entire nation of Ireland seems like a losing proposition.  In any case, it's supposed to bring you peace, and is "very old-fashioned and Catholic."
• Three different recipes for "Money-drawing Oil."
• Two recipes for "Love Bath," one of which is called "Courtesan's Pleasure," and about which I will not say anything further in the interest of keeping this blog PG-13 rated.
• Something called "John the Conqueror Oil."  Made, predictably enough, with "John the Conqueror root."  We are warned to "beware commercial John the Conqueror and High Conquering Oil" because they "rarely have the root in them," especially if it was made in a factory.  This made me ask, in some astonishment, "There are factories for making this stuff?"  Notwithstanding that I'm supportive of anything it takes to keep Detroit solvent, you have to wonder how you could mechanize making magic spells.  Don't you have to be all pagan and ritualistic and druidic and so forth while you're making up potions?  I can't imagine that you'd get the same results from cooking up your potions in a cauldron in the woods as you would if you made them using electric blenders, pressure cookers, conveyor belts, and so on.  At least one has to hope that the machinery is operated by certified witches.
• "Haitian Lover Oil," "for men only," about which we are told that it is "not to be used as a genital dressing oil."  Okay, we consider ourselves duly warned.
• "Damnation Powder."  Used to hex someone you don't like.  "To be used with extreme caution."  Don't damn anyone lightly, is the general advice, which seems prudent to me.
• And the best one: "Harvey's Necromantic Floorwash #1."  Just the name of this one almost made me spit coffee all over my computer.  But hey, I guess even necromancers need to scrub the linoleum in their kitchens every once in a while, right?

So anyway, there you have it, a concise formulary for concocting magic spells and potions.  All of which puts me in mind of one of my heroes, depicted below:

If you are, like me, a Looney Tunes fan, you might remember that he got out of this particular fix by chanting such powerful spells as "Abraca-pocus" and "Hocus-cadabra."  It worked, but I bet he'd have defeated his vampire captor even more quickly had he had access to some "Damnation Oil," or even better, "John the Conqueror Root."

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