A light into shadow

I think my love of science comes from the joy of unlocking one at a time the pieces of the universe that were mysteries.  It's why I'm such a dilettante -- someone who, as an acquaintance once described me, has knowledge a light year across and an inch deep.  I find it all fascinating.  I was never able to focus on one thing long enough to really become an expert.  I'd start in one direction, but in short order I'd say, "Oh, look, something shiny!" and take off on some unrelated tangent.

I may not have much in the way of academic credentials, but it makes me a force to be reckoned with when playing Trivial Pursuit.

It's okay, really.  I enjoy the fact that my brain makes up for in breadth what it lacks in depth.  Which is why last week we had posts about astronomy, geology, glaciology, paleontology, and cosmology, and today we're on to archaeology.

Because of my love of mysteries, I've always been drawn to trying to understand civilizations whose relics are scanty or poorly-understood.  The Incas, Aztecs, and Mayas.  The ancestors of the First Nations of North America.  The Songhai Empire and the kingdoms of Benin, Congo, and Aksum in Africa.  The ancient history of Southeast Asia and Australia.  And while European history is generally considered to be well-studied and accessible, that's because most of the focus is on the Romans, Greeks, and Norse, who left extensive written records.  The Celts, Slavs, and the southern Germanic tribes, for whom we have far fewer extant records (and many of those were penned by conquering cultures which took few pains to represent them fairly or accurately), have an ancient history that is largely lost to the shadows of time.

Or... maybe not entirely lost.

Archaeologists are now using sophisticated technological tools to discern traces of long-gone settlements, recovering traces of civilizations that have been up till now complete ciphers.  The reason this comes up is a study by a team from University College Dublin, working with colleagues in Serbia and Slovenia, which used aerial photography to piece together the remnants of 3,500 year old settlements in the southern Carpathian Basin -- and found that the area was as thickly-settled as many of the far better known cultures who were at their height around the same time.

"Some of the largest sites, we call these mega-forts, have been known for a few years now, such as Gradište Iđoš, Csanádpalota, Sântana or the mind-blowing Corneşti Iarcuri enclosed by thirty-three kilometers of ditches and eclipsing in size the contemporary citadels and fortifications of the Hittites, Mycenaeans or Egyptians,” said UCD archaeologist Barry Molloy, who led the study.  "What is new, however, is finding that these massive sites did not stand alone, they were part of a dense network of closely related and codependent communities.  At their peak, the people living within this lower Pannonian network of sites must have numbered into the tens of thousands...  Uniquely for prehistoric Europe, we are able to do more than identify the location of a few sites using satellite imagery but have been able to define an entire settled landscape, complete with maps of the size and layout of sites, even down to the locations of people’s homes within them. This really gives an unprecedented view of how these Bronze Age people lived with each other and their many neighbors."

One of the circular hill-forts discovered through analysis of aerial photographs

Of course, this sets the imagination running.  Like the Australian fossilized bird footprints we looked at yesterday, these remnants only tell you so much, in this case tantalizing clues about how their cities were laid out, coupled with hypothesizing the purposes of buildings for which we only have traces of foundations.  But deeper information about the societies who lived there, their political and social structure, religious beliefs, and languages -- the relics we have are silent on all of that.  Who these people were, we can only speculate.

Still, it's a remarkable achievement.  "1200 BC was a striking turning point in Old World prehistory, with kingdoms, empires, cities, and whole societies collapsing within a few decades throughout a vast area of southwest Asia, north Africa, and southern Europe," Molloy said.  "It is fascinating to discover these new polities and to see how they were related to well-known influential societies yet sobering to see how they ultimately suffered a similar fate in wave of crises that struck this wider region."

And for me, looking at it from the outside, it's wonderful to cast some light into the shadows of a culture that heretofore was completely mysterious.  Knowing them, even if only a little, is thrilling.  I'll end with a quote from the inimitable Richard Feynman, from his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:

Fall in love with some activity, and do it!  Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.  Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best.  Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do.

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Birds down under

I've been an avid birdwatcher for many years, and have been fortunate enough to travel to some amazingly cool places in search of avifauna.  Besides exploring my own country, I've been to Canada (several times), Belize (twice), Ecuador (twice), Iceland (twice), England (twice), Scotland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Malaysia.

One place I've never been, though, is Australia, which is a shame because it's got some incredible animals.  And despite a pretty well-deserved reputation for having far more than their fair share of wildlife that's actively trying to kill you, most tourists come back from trips to Australia alive and with all their limbs still attached in the right places.

The main reason for Australia's unique ecosystems is that it's been isolated for a very long time.  During the breakup of Pangaea, the northern part (Laurasia, made up of what is now Europe, North America, and most of Asia) separated from the southern part (Gondwanaland, made up of what is now Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia, and India), something on the order of 180 million years ago.  The other pieces gradually pulled apart as rifting occured, but Australia remained attached to Antarctica until around thirty million years ago.  At that point, the whole thing had a fairly temperate climate, but when the Tasman Gateway opened up during the Oligocene Period, it allowed the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, isolating and cooling Antarctica and resulting in the extinction of nearly all of its native species.  Australia, now separate, began to drift northward, gradually warming as it went, and carrying with it a completely unique suite of animals and plants.

The reason all this comes up is a sharp-eyed Australian loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link to a news story about a recent discovery by a dedicated amateur fossil hunter and birdwatcher, Melissa Lowery, who was looking for fossils on the Bass Coast of Victoria and stumbled upon something extraordinary -- some 125 million year old bird footprints.

Lowery's bird footprints [Image by photographer Rob French, Museums Victoria]

At that point, the separation of Australia and Antarctica was some 65 million years in the future, the sauropod dinosaurs were still the dominant animal group, and Victoria itself was somewhere near the South Pole.  Lowery's find led to a full-scale scientific investigation of the area, and uncovered a great many more bird tracks, including some with ten-centimeter-long toes.  Also in the area were the footprints of dozens of kinds of non-avian dinosaurs.

"Most of the bird tracks and body fossils dating back to the Early Cretaceous are from the Northern Hemisphere, particularly from Asia," said Anthony Martin, of Emory University, who led the study.  "Our discovery shows that there were many birds, and a variety of them, near the South Pole about 125 million years ago."

Of course, being a birdwatcher, I'm intensely curious as to what these birds looked like, but there's only so much you can tell from a footprint, or even fossilized bones.  It's simultaneously intriguing and frustrating to think about the fact that these animals -- and all the other animals and plants that lived alongside them -- had every bit of the diversity, all the curious and wonderful and beautiful adaptations and behaviors, that our modern wildlife does.

Imagine what it would be like to transport yourself back to Australia in the early Cretaceous, and witness all of that with your own eyes and ears.  (With, of course, a guarantee of coming back alive and with all your limbs still attached in the right places.  Back then, Australia was a rougher place than it is now.)

So thanks to the reader who sent me the link -- it's renewed my desire to visit Australia.  If I can't see the amazing birds they had 125 million years ago, at least I can have a look through my binoculars at some of the ones they have today.

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Strange new worlds

Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in January of 1992, astronomers have identified over 5,500 of them, with nearly a thousand of the systems analyzed having more than one detected planet.  It now appears that at least one of the variables in the Drake equation -- f_p, the fraction of stars that have planets -- is far higher than anyone might have expected. 

What has come as an additional surprise is how varied these worlds are.  Having grown up on a steady diet of Lost in Space, Star Trek, and Star Wars, I kind of had exoplanets pictured as mostly Earth-like, with lots of big rocks and maybe an odd-colored sky:

The truth is, every new one we find holds some sort of surprise.  Some of the odder ones are:

• TrES-2b, which holds the record as the least-reflective planet yet discovered.  It's darker than a charcoal briquet.  This led some people to conclude that it's made of dark matter, something I dealt with here at Skeptophilia a while back.  (tl:dr -- it's not.)
• CoRoT-7b, one of the hottest exoplanets known.  Its composition and size are thought to be fairly Earth-like, but it orbits its star so closely that it has a twenty-day orbital period and surface temperatures around 3000 C.  This means that it is likely to be completely liquid, and experience rain made of molten iron and magnesium.
• 55 Cancri e, nicknamed the "diamond planet."  Another "hot super-Earth," this one is thought to be carbon rich, and that because of the heat and pressure, much of the carbon could be in the form of diamonds.  (Don't tell Dr. Smith.)
• PSR J1719−1438, a planet orbiting a pulsar (the collapsed, rapidly rotating core of a giant star).  It has one of the fastest rates of revolution of any orbiting object known, circling its host star in only 2.17 hours.
• V1400 Centauri, a planet with rings that are two hundred times wider than the rings of Saturn.  In fact, they dwarf the planet itself -- the whole thing looks a bit like a pea in the middle of a dinner plate.

The reason all this comes up is that we just had a new addition to the "weird exoplanet" list thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope.  It's called WASP-107b, and it has a number of bizarre characteristics.  First, it is "fluffy" -- that's actually how the astronomers describe it -- having one of the lowest overall densities of any exoplanet known.  It has about the mass of Neptune, but a diameter closer to that of Jupiter.

Second, it has a retrograde orbit -- it moves the opposite direction from the rotation of its host star and the revolution of the rest of the planets in the system.  Its orbit is highly eccentric (elliptical), and is actually tipped 118 degrees away from the ecliptic (the plane of revolution of the rest of the system).  Astrophysicists believe that it got this way because of interaction with the much more massive WASP-107c, but the truth is, they've never seen anything like it, so that's a surmise.

The atmosphere has high quantities of water vapor -- kept gaseous by the high temperatures (the upper atmosphere has an average temperature of 500 C) -- and sulfur dioxide.  A bigger surprise was that the "highly dynamic atmosphere" (scientist-speak for "wind speeds that would blow your ass into the middle of next week") creates clouds of superheated silicate sand.  The overall result is that being on WASP-107b would be like living inside a permanent pyroclastic flow.

"The fact that we see these sand clouds high up in the atmosphere must mean that the sand rain droplets evaporate in deeper, very hot layers and the resulting silicate vapor is efficiently moved back up, where they recondense to form silicate clouds once more," said study co-author Michiel Min.  "This is very similar to the water vapor and cloud cycle on our own Earth but with droplets made of sand."

"JWST enables a deep atmospheric characterization of an exoplanet that does not have any counterpart in our Solar System," added study lead author Achrène Dyrek.  "We are unravelling new worlds."

What's shocking is how bizarre some of these new worlds are.  It was natural enough to look at the planets in our own Solar System and assume that they kind of ran the gamut of planetary types -- thus the predominance of rocky worlds and gas giants with zillions of moons that you find in early science fiction.  What continues to astonish is just how wrong that was.  Wherever we look, we see an incredible variety of planets and star systems, and the great likelihood is that despite how many we've found, we've only scratched the surface.

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The non-mystery of the Dendera Light

One of the things that has always struck me about woo-woo types is how little it takes to get them going.  I suppose when you've already decided what you believe, the amount of evidence you require to support that belief can asymptotically approach zero without changing your stance one iota.

I ran into a particularly good example of that yesterday -- the Dendera Light.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Olaf Tausch, Dendera Krypta 48 (cropped), CC BY 3.0]

The Dendera Light is a motif found in the carvings in the Temple of Hathor in Dendera, Egypt.  The design is of a giant snake emerging from a lotus flower.  It appears in at least six different places, accompanied by texts that are all rather similar -- so its meaning is fairly well understood.  It is part of the creation myth, showing the god Harsomtus (an incarnation of Horus, in the form of a snake) being born and going out into the world.  This is supported by the inscriptions, one version of which reads:

Speaking the words of Harsomtus, the great God, who dwells in Dendera, who is in the arms of the first in the night-barge, sublime snake, whose Chentj-statue carries Heh [the personification of eternity], whose crew carries in holiness his perfection, whose Ba [spirit] caused Hathor to appear in the sky, whose figure is revered by his followers, who is unique, encircled by his forehead-snake, with countless names on the top of Chui-en-hesen, the symbol of power of Ra in the land of Atum, the father of the Gods, who created everything.

The Dendera Light motif almost always appears on lists with names like "Ten Unexplained Mysteries From Ancient Egypt" despite the fact that except insofar as we still have a fairly fragmentary understanding of Egyptian mythology, beliefs, and practices, it's not very mysterious at all.

Why?

First, someone noticed that the oval container (or halo) surrounding the snake was the same basic shape as a Crookes tube, an early version of the cathode-ray tube invented by British physicist William Crookes in 1870:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons D-Kuru, Crookes tube two views, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT]

The second thing was a passing comment by British astronomer and polymath Joseph Norman Lockyer, who had gone to Egypt to investigate the alignment of ancient temples and monuments with astronomical objects.  He and a colleague noticed the absence of soot deposits in the interior of some of the temples -- something you'd expect with the use of torches or oil lamps -- and the colleague jokingly said that this could be explained if the ancient Egyptians had electric lights.  Lockyer, clearly recognizing that it was a joke, mentioned it to a friend, and that was all it took.

In a classic example of adding two and two and getting 318, we have "vaguely oval shape in a religious motif" plus "humorous comment about the lack of soot in Egyptian temples" equaling "the ancient Egyptians had high technology, including electricity and who-the-hell-knows what else."

Therefore, of course, you-know-who had to be involved:

Needless to say, this claim has actual archaeologists tearing their hair out.  Kenneth Feder, professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University, who is a vocal debunker of ancient aliens claims and the like (he is the author of The Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology) points out correctly that if the ancient Egyptians had electricity and light bulbs, it's a little odd that we've never found a single trace of a wire, socket, filament, generator, or battery -- not so much as a glass shard from a broken bulb.

I get that the ancient Egyptian culture is fascinating and, in one sense, mysterious.  As I mentioned earlier, our understanding of how these people lived and what they believed is incomplete at best.  The monuments and temples and relics we still have today are beautiful and evocative.

But none of that is an excuse for making shit up.

So let's keep a sense of perspective, here.  The inscriptions and designs we don't yet understand do not imply that ancient aliens had anything to do with it.  "We don't yet understand" means only one thing; "we don't yet understand."

And as far as the Dendera Light, I'm afraid that's where we have to leave it.

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When the volcano blows

It's a point I've made here more than once; if you're trying to convince someone of something, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it.

The reason this comes up today is the horrible situation in Iceland, where (at the time of this writing) the people of the little village of Grindavík on the south coast of the Reykjanes Peninsula, due south of the capital city of Reykjavík, have been evacuated and are waiting for a volcanic eruption that stands a good chance of destroying the town completely.  The buildings and roads in the town have already sustained heavy damage from nearly continuous earthquakes, and the latest estimate is that there are places where the magma is only five hundred meters below the surface.  An eruption is nearly certain -- how extensive it will be is unknown.  (The village is only a few kilometers away from Fagradallsfjall, the volcano I got to see erupting when I visited Iceland in 2022.)

A photograph I took in August 2022

This is certainly awful.  But the whole situation is made worse because every time there's a volcanic eruption, it brings the climate change deniers howling from the dark corners where they hide, claiming that (as one of them put it) "the Climate Scammers conveniently ignore that a single volcanic eruption puts hundreds of times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than cars do.  Climate ups and downs happen all the time, and natural processes account for nearly all of it.  Wake up!"

Which would be a good argument if anything about it was true.

The "hundreds of times more" statistic is about the right factor -- but the inequality points the other direction.  Here's the actual situation, as per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

You might not spot the volcanic carbon dioxide output on this graph right away, because it's the light blue line hugging the x-axis.  In fact, as Mark Gongloff points out, writing for Bloomberg, the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens spewed ten million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which seems like a lot until you find out that our burning of fossil fuels does that every two and a half hours.  Geologists estimate that even a cataclysmic eruption like the Yellowstone Supervolcano emitted on the order of thirty gigatons of carbon dioxide -- about what our fossil fuel use accomplishes every single year.

So not only are the climate change deniers coldly and callously capitalizing on the horrible situation unfolding in Iceland, they're doing so by crafting outrageous lies about it.

The fact that this claim is wildly wrong has not stopped it from being circulated all over the place by people who would very much like it if we didn't have to face head-on what we're currently doing to the planet we live on.  I get it; it's a hard conversation to have.  I have an electric car and solar panels and solar hot water, but even so, I very much live an affluent First-World lifestyle, with all that comes along with it.  I'm better situated than most if it came to a serious cutback in fossil fuel use, and it still would force me and my family into some difficult changes.

But we can't keep going as we are.  If this past year's insane weather didn't convince you of that fact, you're being willfully blind.

And the whole thing is not helped by circulating wildly wrong information whose sole intent is to lull everyone into further inaction.  I have no doubt that at least some of the people who are posting this stuff don't know it's wrong, and are guilty of the rather common sin of neglecting to fact-check.  But the ones who write these posts and create these memes -- they know it's a lie, and they do it anyway.

Which is somewhere beyond reprehensible.

So please, please, please... if you see someone posting this claim, tell them they're wrong.  Link this blog post if you like, or (better still) send them to the NOAA and USGS sites that lay the data out in unarguable form.  Because this is a falsehood with serious repercussions -- like endangering the long-term habitability of our own home world.

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A galactic rabbit hole

It was over ten years ago that I ran into the bizarre claim that the Rh negative allele -- the gene that gives people type-negative blood -- comes from aliens.  According to Roberta Hill, who wrote a book about it, Rh-negative blood also comes along with a lot of other characteristics, such as a love of science, psychic abilities, unexplained scars on the body, and having an extra rib.

Since I only have one copy of the gene, maybe that's why I only hit one out of four, there.

Given that evolutionary genetics is kind of my thing, I happen to know that the actual origin of the Rh negative allele is a mutation that occurred something like fifteen thousand years ago in the Basque region of Spain, where the gene is still most common.  (My mom's ancestry is mostly from western France, so her being Rh-negative is no real surprise.)  

Anyhow, I proceeded to forget all about my alleged alien ancestry until yesterday, when a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a site called Galactic Anthropology, which (1) expanded the alien blood type thing to include everyone with type O blood, and (2) launched me down a rabbit hole that it took me over an hour to escape from.

The post in question contains information from someone called "Myrah," who is supposedly a "Sirius B/Pleiadian hybrid" and who is "a medical specialist specializing in interdimensional implant technologies."  Whatever the fuck that means.  As far as her having ancestry from Sirius B, allow me to point out right here that Sirius B is a white dwarf star, the companion star to the (much) brighter Sirius A (from our perspective, the brightest star in the sky other than the Sun).  Being a white dwarf, it's the leftover core of a large-ish star that burned through its fuel and then went nova, so it's a little hard to figure how any inhabitants of planets orbiting it would have survived.

Maybe Myrah's family escaped because they're "interdimensional," I dunno.

Then, there's the problem that the other half of her ancestry is from the Pleiades, which is an entire cluster of stars, so I don't know how that'd work, either.

Anyhow, there's an illustration of Myrah on the site, and she looks a little like the love child of Uma Thurman and one of the aliens from Avatar:

What Myrah says is that the O blood type is extraterrestrial, and got into humanity because the Annunaki came here and had lots of sex with humans, but then they found out that O-type blood was "not compatible with other Terran blood types."  Notwithstanding that it's the most common blood type on Earth, and seems not to be associated with health issues of any kind.  But this didn't stop Myrah and her friends from engineering the Rh antigen, because supposedly that would stop people with O-type blood who mated with other types from having sterile children.

Which, of course, runs up against the minor difficulty that this never happens.

I'm a case in point, in fact.  My mom was O-negative, meaning she had O-type blood but lacked the Rh antigen.  My dad was A-positive.  If Myrah was right, I'd be sterile, and I have two boys who are completely normal except for the fact that they both look like me, which is unfortunate but not life-threatening.

Oh, and I also found out that if you are O-negative, you are less likely to be eaten by Reptilian aliens, because they "dislike consuming their own blood."  Probably accounting for how my mom made it to 84 without being eaten by Reptilians.

So because the whole blood type thing was kind of a non-starter, I decided to peruse the site a little more.  And that's when I vanished down a rabbit hole of weirdness that I still haven't recovered from.  Here are a few of the articles I found:

• How to be Reshuffled into a Higher-Density Avatar Body
• An Altean Ship as the Foundation of Atlantis
• Living Near Betelgeuse in the Orion Constellation
• Crystals As Bridges Between Densities
• An Atomic Toilet in Space

I swear I didn't make any of these up, even the last one, which includes the sentence, "After you’re done, some kind of haze comes up from below to make sure everything is very hygienic, and it leaves a nice smell behind, perhaps the smell of the Erran Oshksha flowers?"

Ha-ha, sure!  Erran Oshksha flowers!  Just like my grandma used to grow in her garden near Betelgeuse!

In any case, apparently O-type blood and Rh-negative blood both come from aliens.  Possibly explaining why my family is weird as fuck.  To the loyal reader who sent me the link, I just want to say thanks for convincing me that I understand my fellow humans even less than I thought I did.  But if "Myrah" has any more missives from Sirius B and/or the Pleiades, I'd just as soon not know about them.  I'm still going to have a while before I'm done processing what I learned about Atlantis, interdimensional implant technologies, and atomic space toilets.

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The wolves of Skinwalker Ranch

One of the problems that crops up in discussions of cryptids is that a lot of people consistently fall back on arguments based upon the number of alleged sightings.  "It's been seen hundreds of times," they'll say.  "It's got to be real.  All those sightings can't be wrong."

This argument is backwards, and the reason why has to do with a misunderstanding of statistics.  Let's consider two species, a common one and an extremely rare one.  It's no stretch to assume that the common one should be sighted more often than the rare one.  But you'd also surmise that if you set out to do so, hard evidence of the common one should be way easier to come by.  If you set out traps, you should catch more of the common one than the rare one.

So far, nothing very surprising.

A cryptid -- or, in fact, any paranormal phenomenon -- with more anecdotal reports should also leave behind more in the way of hard evidence.  If the Omaha Weasel Man has only ever been seen once, okay, maybe it's not so surprising we don't have any proof of his existence.  But if there are hundreds, or even thousands, of sightings, shouldn't there be something in the way of scientifically-admissible evidence?  A bone, a tuft of hair with DNA not from any known species, something?

Zero hard evidence along with lots of anecdotal reports strongly suggests a different answer -- gullibility, misinterpretation of what witnesses have seen or heard, or outright fraud.

Which brings us to the infamous Skinwalker Ranch.

The Skinwalker Ranch is a 512-acre plot of land in a remote region of Uintah County, Utah.  It gets its name from the Navajo legend of the yee naaldlooshii (which translates to "it goes on all fours"), which is an evil magician who can take the shape of a non-human animal at will.

Skinwalker Ranch has been the site of literally hundreds of bizarre claims, including:

• UFOs (lots of these)
• vanished or mutilated cattle
• glowing orbs hovering over the ground/"ball lightning"
• invisible objects emitting sparks and powerful magnetic fields
• large animals with glowing red eyes that are alleged to be unharmed by gunfire

The last one is what gave the place its name, and comes along with a legend of uncertain provenance -- that the Navajo who lived there were attacked and enslaved by Ute warriors, and the Navajo cursed the place, saying whoever settled there afterward would be plagued by an evil spirit who could take the form of a wolf.  Several successions of modern owners of the property have claimed to have seen this thing, most notably Gwen and Terry Sherman and their family, who owned it from 1994 to 1996, and Robert Bigelow, who bought it from the Shermans in 1996 and owned it until 2016.  The Shermans are the first ones who made a big deal about bizarre happenings on the place, including seeing strange, wolf-like animals, and a sighting of an "orb filled with a glowing blue fluid" that supposedly killed three of their dogs.  Bigelow, a prominent businessman, is deeply interested in UFOs and other sketchy phenomena, and bought the ranch because of the Shermans' stories; he can be credited with bringing the site to national attention.

So, naturally, people have tried to figure out what's going on there, with some of the more scientifically-minded saying that the strange animal sightings, at least, have a natural explanation -- they're a surviving population of dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus).  There are two problems with this, of increasing difficulty: first, that the most recent dated remains of dire wolves is from almost ten thousand years ago, and second, if there is an extant population somewhere in the Uintah Basin, they've left exactly zero evidence.

Artist's reconstruction of a dire wolf [Image is in the Public Domain]

In fact, that last bit is the sticking point about Skinwalker Ranch in general.  Robert Bigelow founded a group he called the National Institute for Discovery Science, whose sole raison d'être was to find evidence for claims of the paranormal, and after a long investigation of the claims from Skinwalker Ranch, they concluded -- and this is a direct quote -- they had "difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication."

Which is a euphemism for "we found fuck-all in the way of proof."

So the problem here is, we have a place that -- to listen to the hype -- has UFOs out the wazoo, strange meteorological phenomena, and wild animal sightings that are (depending on who you believe) something like a werewolf, or a ten-thousand-year prehistoric holdover.  And despite all that, there has not been a single piece, not the tiniest shred, of hard evidence.  To me that argues strongly that the whole thing is a publicity stunt.  It may well have started out with some odd observations that were misinterpreted -- the Shermans certainly seem to have been earnest enough -- but after Bigelow got involved, it's become one tactic after another to keep people's attention on the place.  UFOlogist Barry Greenwood, who investigated the ranch earlier this year and also came up empty-handed, said Bigelow was "always in the business of selling belief and hope."

Belief and hope aren't the only things he's selling.  It's telling that in 2020, Bigelow, filed for -- and was approved for -- a trademark on the Skinwalker Ranch name, for the purpose of "providing recreation facilities; entertainment services, namely, creation, development, production, and distribution of multimedia content, internet content, motion pictures, and television shows...  cups and mugs, shirts and short-sleeved shirts, sports caps and hats."

Gullibility is, as always, big business.

So once again, we're faced with the difficulty that just the sheer quantity of anecdotal reports doesn't mean there's anything real behind it; in fact, without hard evidence, it can actually argue for the opposite.  The wolves of Skinwalker Ranch are very likely to be nonexistent.  As much as I, like Fox Mulder, "want to believe," this one appears to be a non-starter as anything but a way to make money.

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