Ancient UFOs

One argument against UFOs being alien visitors from other star systems is that the number of UFO sightings has risen in direct proportion to our knowledge and awareness that there are other star systems -- suggesting that they're largely a combination of overactive imagination and misinterpreting natural phenomenon (or such human-made creations as satellites and military aircraft).  The whole UFO craze, in fact, really took off during the 1940s and 1950s, when our scientific knowledge of space was accelerating rapidly.

And unsurprisingly, this was also when science fiction tropes in fiction really caught on in a big way.

Prior to the Enlightenment, the conventional wisdom in the Western World was that the skies were the domain of God and the angels, and as such were ceaseless and changeless.  (Which is why such transient phenomena as comets and novae got everyone's knickers in a twist.)  The planets weren't even considered to be places, as such; they were manifestations of powers or forces.  And if you think all that, there's no particular reason you'd look up and expect to see visitors from there, right?

So what we see, perhaps, turns out to be what we expected to see.

But it turns out that a handful of very peculiar UFO-ish incidents do come from the pre-technological world.  Now, I'm not saying any of these are actual extraterrestrial visitations, mind you; I still very much come down on the side of there being natural, no-aliens-required explanations for these phenomena.  But the fact remains that they're interesting accounts, even so.

Let's start with one observed in the days of the Roman Republic.  In 73 B.C.E., Rome was involved in the Third Mithridatic War against King Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus and his allies.  The Roman senator Lucius Licinius Lucullus was charged with overseeing the war effort, and had decided to engage the Pontic army near Nicaea despite being outnumbered.  But then -- according to Plutarch -- the following happened:

But presently, as they were on the point of joining battle, with no apparent change of weather, but all on a sudden, the sky burst asunder, and a huge, flame-like body was seen to fall between the two armies.  In shape, it was most like a wine-jar (pithos), and in color, like molten silver.  Both sides were astonished at the sight, and separated. This marvel, as they say, occurred in Phrygia, at a place called Otryae.

Understandably, both sides decided this was an omen worth paying attention to, and called off the battle.  (I guess there was no indication of who the omen was against, so they both decided to play it safe.)  The delay didn't help Mithridates, ultimately; the Romans under Lucullus went on to fight on another day when there were fewer flaming wine-jars in the sky, and Pontus was resoundingly defeated.

So, what was this apparition?

Well, the likeliest answer is that it was a bolide -- a meteor that bursts in midair.  It's understandable how in those highly superstitious times, when omens were detected even in the entrails of slaughtered animals, such an occurrence would have sparked quite a reaction.

An even stranger one is the tale of the "Airship of Clonmacnoise," an account of a sighting that occurred in around 740 C.E. near Teltown, in County Meath, Ireland.  Here, the problem is sorting out what people actually saw from later embellishments.  The earliest versions of this story simply state that several "flying ships with their crews" were seen in the skies, but very quickly it grew by accretion.  In later iterations, the multiple ships coalesced into a single huge one, which was halted over the Abbey of Clonmacnoise when its anchor snagged on the roof of the abbey church.  A "sky sailor" climbed down a rope ladder to free it (shades of the Goblin Ship in the most recent episode of Doctor Who!), and told the astonished monks he was "in danger of drowning in the thicker air of this lower world."

Here's an account from thirteenth century monk and scholar Gervase of Tilbury:

The people were amazed, and while they discussed it among themselves, they saw the rope move as if [the crew] were struggling to free the anchor.  When it would not budge for all their tugging, a voice was heard in the thick air, like the clamor of sailors vying to recover the thrown anchor.  Nor was it long until, hope in the effectiveness of exertion having been exhausted, the sailors sent down one of themselves – who, as we have heard, dangling from the anchor rope, came down it hand over hand.  When he was about to disengage the anchor, he was seized by bystanders: he gasped in the hands of his captors like a man lost in a shipwreck, and died suffocated in the moisture of our thicker air.  But the sailors overhead, surmising that their comrade had drowned, cut the anchor rope after having waited for an hour, and sailed away leaving the anchor.

Of course, it's worth mentioning that by now the scene of the incident had shifted to London, because there's no way a good Englishman like Gervase could let such an exciting tale take place in a remote spot like central Ireland.

This one is probably just a tall tale -- although I do find the bit about the air down here being "thicker" curious, because that certainly wasn't widespread knowledge back then.

Then we have the events of the morning of April 14, 1561, when "many men and women of Nuremberg" witnessed something very peculiar.  The incident caught enough attention to be written up in a widely-circulated broadsheet the following week.  Here's how it was described by the witnesses:

In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the Sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country – by many men and women.  At first there appeared in the middle of the Sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the Moon in its last quarter.  And in the Sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color.  Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the Sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone.  In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.  These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the Sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the Sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the Sun.  Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour.  And when the conflict in and again out of the Sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the Sun down upon the Earth 'as if they all burned' and they then wasted away on the Earth with immense smoke.  After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west.

Like the apparition that stopped the Roman/Pontic battle, this was interpreted as an omen -- in this case, that God was even more pissed off than usual, and everyone should immediately repent and promise not to be naughty hereafter.  So once again, everyone interpreted what they saw based on their cultural context -- which, honestly, is pretty universal.  But from a more scientific standpoint, what the hell was this?  

An illustrated news notice from April 1561, showing a drawing of the phenomenon [Image is in the Public Domain]

Unlike the Airship of Clonmacnoise (or Teltown or London or wherever they finally decided it happened), it's hard to dismiss this one as a tall tale.  The accounts are numerous, detailed, and -- most important, from a scientific standpoint -- all agree substantially with each other.  Skeptic Jason Colavito says that he believes the account is consistent with the atmospheric phenomenon called sun dogs, in which high-atmosphere ice crystals cause light refraction when the Sun is low in the sky, creating two bright spots (sometimes with a rainbow sheen, and often with a partial or complete halo) on either side of the Sun.

The problem is, I've seen many sun dogs, and nothing about them moves -- they can be kind of eerie, but they just hover near the horizon and eventually fade.  I've never seen a sun dog that "fell from the Sun down upon the Earth and then wasted away with immense smoke."  So for me, this one is in the "unknown" column.

Perhaps the strangest of all is the event that happened in February of 1803 in the Hitachi Province of the east coast of Japan.  Called Utsuro-bune (虚舟, hollow boat) the story was recorded in at least four separate written accounts.  The story goes that fishermen saw a strange object drifting in the ocean, and upon approaching it, found that it was a peculiar vessel "shaped like an incense burner," about 3.3 meters tall by 5.5 meters wide.  They said that the top half was "the color of lacquered rosewood," with windows made of glass or crystal, and the bottom half made of metal plates.  They towed it to land, and found that inside was a very small (but apparently adult) woman, only about 1.5 meters tall, with pale pink skin and red hair with white tips.  She spoke to them in some strange language, and could neither speak nor understand Japanese.  She clutched a rectangular metal box covered with strange inscriptions, and wouldn't let anyone touch it.

A drawing of the Utsuro-bune by Nagahashi Matajirou, ca. 1844 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Understandably, everyone in the area was pretty freaked out by this.  After numerous unsuccessful attempts to communicate with her, or at least see what was inside the box, they gave up and decided she was too creepy to keep around.  Ultimately, they put her back into her strange vessel, towed it back out to sea, and let it drift away.

UFO aficionados naturally are predisposed to interpret this as a Close Encounter with an alien.  Certainly her odd appearance and tiny size make that explanation jump to mind.  But can we infer anything more solid from it?

The story itself is strangely open-ended -- they never find out anything more about their weird visitor, and ultimately send her back to her dismal fate in the ocean.  It hasn't the tall-tale aspects of the Clonmacnoise Airship story, nor the obvious astronomical explanation of the flaming wine-jars over Nicaea.  Some have suggested that she was simply some poor soul -- possibly Russian or western European -- who had been cast adrift.  Unfortunately, no one thought to copy the odd symbols inscribed on the metal plates of her craft; at least that'd give us information about whether we're talking about an object of terrestrial manufacture, or something more exotic.

Like the Nuremberg incident, this one was widely-enough recorded that it's hard to dismiss it entirely as a myth.  But who the woman was, and where she'd come from, are still a mystery and probably always will be.

So there are four old tales that are widely touted in UFOlogical circles as evidence of visitation.  Predictably, I'm not convinced, although I have to admit they're curious stories.  But my reaction is tempered by the fact that "it's a peculiar tale" isn't enough to append, "... so it must be aliens."  Before we jump to a supernatural or paranormal explanation, it's critical to rule out the natural and normal explanations first -- and, critically, to determine if there's even enough hard evidence to draw a conclusion.

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Going against the flow

Two of the most extensively-tested laws of physics are the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics -- and in the nearly two centuries since they were first formulated, there has not been a single exception found.

The First Law is the less shocking one.  It's sometimes called the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, and says simply that in a closed system, the total amount of matter and energy does not change.  You can turn one into the other, or change its form, but the total quantity doesn't vary.  Unsurprising, and in fact can seem a little circular given that this is how a closed system is defined in the first place.

The Second Law is where things get interesting.  It can be formulated a variety of ways, but the simplest is that in a closed system, the amount of entropy (disorder) always increases.  If entropy is being decreased somewhere (the system is becoming more orderly) it always requires (1) an input of energy, and (2) that somewhere else entropy is increasing, and that increase is larger than the localized decrease.  An example is the human body.  When you develop from a single fertilized egg cell to an adult, your overall entropy decreases significantly.  But in the process, you are taking the food molecules you eat and (1) extracting their energy, and (2) increasing their entropy monumentally by chopping them up into little pieces and strewing the pieces about.  So you're able to locally decrease your own entropy, but you leave behind a trail of chaos wherever you go.

Or, as my thermodynamics professor in college put it, a lot of years ago: the First Law says you can't win; the Second Law says you can't break even.  Explaining why the United States Patent Office's official policy is that any application that claims to have a working model of a perpetual motion machine goes directly into the trash without being read any further.

The Carnot Heat Engine [Image is in the Public Domain]

All of this is by way of background for a paper that I ran across in Science, called, "Heat Flowing From Cold to Hot Without External Intervention by Using a 'Thermal Inductor," by Andreas Schilling, Xiaofu Zhang, and Olaf Bossen of the University of Zürich.  Because in this paper, the three physicists have demonstrated the passage of heat energy from a colder object to a warmer one, without any external energy input -- something first shown as impossible by French physicist Sadi Carnot in 1824.

The authors write:

The cooling of boiling water all the way down to freezing, by thermally connecting it to a thermal bath held at ambient temperature without external intervention, would be quite unexpected.  We describe the equivalent of a “thermal inductor,” composed of a Peltier element and an electric inductance, which can drive the temperature difference between two bodies to change sign by imposing inertia on the heat flowing between them, and enable continuing heat transfer from the chilling body to its warmer counterpart without the need of an external driving force.

When I read this, I sat up, squinted at my computer screen, and uttered an expression of surprise that I will leave to your imagination.  In my AP Biology class, I always described the Laws of Thermodynamics as two of the most unshakeable laws of science -- two rules that are never, ever broken.  The idea that three scientists in Switzerland had taken a simple Peltier element -- a type of heat pump often found in refrigerators -- and made it run without expending any energy was earthshattering.

But before you dust off your plans for a perpetual motion machine, read the next lines in the paper:

We demonstrate its operation in an experiment and show that the process can pass through a series of quasi-equilibrium states while fully complying with the second law of thermodynamics.  This thermal inductor extends the analogy between electrical and thermal circuits and could serve, with further progress in thermoelectric materials, to cool hot materials well below ambient temperature without external energy supplies or moving parts.

I'm not going to claim I fully understand how this all works, and how despite the system's bizarre behavior it still obeys the Second Law, but apparently the key point is that despite the heat energy flowing the "wrong way," the system still gains entropy overall.

Which, I must say, was a bit of a relief.

It's still a pretty fantastic discovery.  "With this very simple technology, large amounts of hot solid, liquid or gaseous materials could be cooled to well below room temperature without any energy consumption," study co-author Andreas Schilling said, in a press release from Phys.org.  "Theoretically, this experimental device could turn boiling water to ice, without using any energy."

So don't believe any of the hype that I'm already seeing on dubiously-accurate websites, to the effect that "An Exception Has Been Discovered to the Laws of Thermodynamics!  Physicists Dismayed!  Textbooks Will Have to be Rewritten!"  It's a curiosity, sure, and pretty cool, and sounds like it will have a good many applications, but you shouldn't discount everything you learned in physics class quite yet.

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Paleobling

We are hardly the only animal species that sports adornments, but most of the others -- bright colors, flashy feathers, ornate fins, and so on -- are created by genes and produced by the animal's own body.  We're one of the only ones who fashion those adornments out of other objects.

It's a curious thing when you think about it.  Virtually everyone wears clothes even when there's no particular necessity for purposes of protection or warmth; and a great many of us don such accessories as ties, scarves, hats, necklaces, bracelets, and rings.  The significance of these objects is largely culturally-determined (e.g. in western society a guy wearing a tie is a professional, someone with a ring on the fourth left finger is probably married, and so on).  Some have ritual meanings (clothing or jewelry that marks you as belonging to a particular religion, for example).  Others are simply for the purpose of increasing attractiveness to one's preferred gender.

But the odd fact remains that in the animal world, such items are almost entirely confined to the human species.

However such practices got started, what's certain is that they go back a long way.  A study that came out in Nature this week, by a team led by Jack Baker of the University of Bordeaux, has shown that not only does jewelry-making and wearing go back at least 34,000 years, the jewelry styles of prehistoric Europe belong to nine discernibly different styles -- suggesting that beads, necklaces, and the like may have been used as markers for belonging to particular cultures.

A few of the shells, beads, teeth, and other trinkets used in the Baker et al. study

The study was comprehensive, analyzing artifacts from Paviland, Wales east to Kostenki, Russia, and covering a period of nearly ten thousand years.  "We've shown that you can have two [distinct] genetic groups of people who actually share a culture," Baker said.  "In the East, for example, they were very, very much more focused on ivory, on teeth, on stone.  But on the other side of the Alps, people would have adorned themselves with really flamboyant colors: reds, pinks, blues, really vibrant colors.  If you were to see one person from each group, you could say, ‘He's from the East, and he's from the West,’ at a quick glance."

The intricacy and complexity of a particular adornment, Baker said, were probably reflective of wealth or social status -- just as they are today.

Interestingly, there was no particularly good correlation between the genetic relatedness of two groups and the similarity in their jewelry.  As Baker put it, "This study has shown really nicely that genetics does not equal culture."

Given its ubiquity -- there are very few cultures that don't wear some sort of jewelry -- you have to wonder how it got started.  Who was the first early human who thought, "Hey, I could string this shell on a piece of leather and hang it around my neck"?  Why would that thought have occurred to him/her?

And how did the other early humans react?  I picture them looking at their necklace-wearing friend and saying something like the Gary Larson/The Far Side line, "Hey!  Look what Zog do!"

It's interesting to try to consider it from the standpoint of an alien scientist studying anthropology.  How would you answer the question, "Why are you wearing that bracelet?"  Okay, you think it looks good, but why?

I'm not sure I have an answer to that.

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Conspiracy crackpots

Okay, y'all, can we agree to stop calling them conspiracy theories?  A theory is a scientific model backed up by experimentation and/or observation, which is consistent with everything we know about the topic in question.

These are not theories.  We need a new term.

Maybe conspiracy batshit lunacy.  I dunno, that's more accurate, but it's a little clunky.  I'll keep thinking on it.

The reason the topic comes up (again) is because of mega-pop-star Taylor Swift and her boyfriend Travis Kelce, tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, who will be playing in the Superbowl on February 11.  Well, Swift and Kelce made two huge mistakes, at least if you're a MAGA type; Swift endorsed Joe Biden for president in the 2020 election and is expected to endorse him again in 2024, and Kelce has appeared in commercials promoting the idea that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective.

Well.  You'd think they... I dunno.  I was gonna say "stomped all over the Constitution," but Trump himself basically did that.  Then I was going to say "threatened to drown small children," but Texas Governor Greg Abbott did that.  Then I was going to say "wanted to restrict freedom of speech," but Florida Governor (and failed presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis did that.

So comparisons kind of fail me.  Let's just say "You'd think they were really really really bad" and leave it there.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons va Rinaldi creator QS:P170,Q37885816, Taylor Swift 2012, CC BY-SA 2.0]

In any case, the ultra-right-wing types couldn't just shrug and say, "Taylor Swift is an American citizen and can vote for whom she likes, and Travis Kelce is free to promote the vaccine if he thinks it's the right thing to do."  Oh, no.  There has to be more to it than that.  The firestorm started almost as soon as Swift and Kelce announced they were dating, and Swift started showing up to Kelce's games.  Then Swift was named Time magazine's 2023 Person of the Year, and things really started rolling.

Here are a few quotes, to give you the idea of what sort of things are being batted about on far-right media:

• "I 'wonder' who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month.  And I 'wonder' if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.  Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next eight months." -- Vivek Ramaswamy
• "The Democratic Party and other powers are gearing up for an operation to use Taylor Swift in the election against Donald Trump." -- Jack Posobiec
• "Taylor Swift is an op.  It’s all fake.  You’re being played." -- Benny Johnson
• "The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open.  It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.  They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign." -- Laura Loomer
• "All the Swifties want is a swift abortion." -- Charlie Kirk
• The NFL is totally RIGGED for the Kansas City Chiefs, Taylor Swift, Mr. Pfizer (Travis Kelce).  All to spread DEMOCRAT PROPAGANDA.  Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield.  It’s all been an op since day one."  -- Mike Crispi
• We're declaring a Holy War on Taylor Swift if she publicly backs the Democrats." -- an "unnamed source" quoting Donald Trump
• "Who thinks this country needs a lot more women like Alina Habba, and a lot less like Taylor Swift?" -- unsurprisingly, Alina Habba
• "Taylor Swift is a Pentagon psyop and a front for a covert political agenda." -- Jesse Watters

I could go on, but I probably don't need to.

What is astonishing to me is that very few folks listen to this and then say, "Okay, have you people been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars?  Or what?"  Evidently a significant fraction of Americans hear this stuff -- and think that it makes perfect sense.

Look, it's not that I don't know politics can get nasty, and that people -- certainly on both sides -- can do some really underhanded stuff to get elected.  But when a celebrity endorses Your Guy, and that's all hunky-dory and an example of a True American Standing Tall, but when a celebrity endorses The Other Guy it's gotta be a covert Pentagon psyop worthy of launching a Holy War, you might just want to check your thought processes for bias.

At least some mainstream media outlets are branding this wingnuttery for what it is.  CNN, in its article on the issue (linked above), labeled this stuff "loony thinking bearing little resemblance to reality," and that's not bad considering that CNN doesn't exactly have a sterling track record of calling out lunacy when they see it.  In fact, there's a good case to be made that back in 2015 the mainstream media created Donald Trump as a viable candidate by treating him as if he were one, instead of labeling him what he is right from the get-go -- an incompetent compulsive liar, a serial philanderer, a sexual predator, and a "businessman" who has a list of failed businesses as long as my arm.  But because his incendiary theatrics got listeners and readers, they uncritically publicized everything he said and did in order to keep readers and viewers engaged -- and that's a large part of why we're in the situation we now are.

At least -- maybe -- some media sources have learned their lesson.

But to return to my original point, these are not theories.  They are one of two things:

1. deliberately crazy-sounding ideas thrown out by cynical individuals who don't actually believe what they're saying, but say it anyhow because they know it'll keep the public tuned in; or
2. wild ramblings from people who think this stuff actually makes sense, in which case -- to borrow a line from C. S. Lewis -- "they're on the level of a man who says he is a poached egg."

And in neither case should we give them the slightest bit of attention, short of laughing directly into their faces.  Which is, honestly, what I'm hoping to accomplish here.

How about the Conspiracy Comedy Channel?  That at least captures the spirit of it.

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The fingerprints of the Manatee

Cosmic ray is a catch-all term for the high-energy particles that constantly bombard the Earth's upper atmosphere.  The majority of them are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field or absorbed by the atmosphere, but a very few are energetic enough to reach the surface of the planet.  About 90% of cosmic rays are protons; a good chunk of the remaining ten percent are alpha particles (helium nuclei, consisting of two protons and two neutrons bound together).  The rest are varying mixes of particles from the subatomic zoo, sometimes even including positrons and antiprotons -- particles of antimatter.  They were discovered in 1912 by Austrian-American physicist Victor Hess in 1912, for which he won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The lion's share of cosmic rays that strike the Earth originate from the Sun, but some come from much farther away.  As we've seen here several times at Skeptophilia, the universe is an energetic and often violent place, not lacking in mechanisms for sending bits of matter careening across the universe at a significant fraction of the speed of light.  As you might expect, supernovae produce cosmic rays; so do gamma ray bursters, Wolf-Rayet stars, and quasars.  The last-mentioned are thought to be supermassive black holes surrounded by an inward-spiraling accretion disk of gas and dust, which accelerates as it tumbles toward the event horizon and gives of one final death scream of radiation.  This makes quasars one of the brightest objects in the known universe, with luminosities tens of thousands of times that of the Milky Way.

Trying to pinpoint the origin of particular cosmic rays is tricky.  Being mostly made of charged particles, they're deflected by magnetic fields; so even if you find one and know the direction it was traveling when it hit your detector, you can't just trace the line backwards and assume that's the point in the sky where it originated.  So scientists who are interested in figuring out where the highest-energy cosmic rays come from -- ones that almost certainly weren't created by our placid, stable home star -- have a difficult task.

A team led by Laura Olivera-Nieto of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics has tackled this problem, and in a paper published last week in Science, came up with an answer for at least some of these mysterious particles.  Working at the High-Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS -- a nice nod to the discoverer of cosmic rays) in Namibia, Olivera-Nieto and her team are studying a curious source of cosmic rays -- black holes that are in a binary system with another star.

The current study is of an object called SS 433, a source of x-rays so powerful it's been nicknamed a "microquasar."  It lies in the middle of the Manatee Nebula in the constellation Aquila, a shell of gas and dust blown outward when a star went supernova between ten and a hundred thousand years ago.  The supernova resulted in a black hole as the doomed star's core collapsed, but its companion star lived on.

The Manatee Nebula [Image credit: B. Saxton, (NRAO/AUI/NSF) from data provided by M. Goss, et al.]

Well, after a fashion.  The enormous gravitational pull of the black hole is siphoning off matter from the companion star, and as that plume of gas spirals inward, it accelerates and gives off radiation -- just as the accretion disk of a quasar does.  The result is a jet of cosmic rays, including not only the typical charged particles but x-rays and gamma rays, which (unlike charged particles) are unaffected by magnetic fields.  This allows astronomers to pinpoint their sources.

So in the midst of this seemingly placid bit of space is a whirling hurricane of gas and dust that is accelerated so strongly it creates jets of particles moving at nearly the speed of light.  (Exactly the speed of light, in the case of the x-rays and gamma rays.)  Some of those particles eventually reach the Earth -- a few of which are picked up by Olivera-Nieto's team at HESS.

And those cosmic rays allows us to discern the fingerprints of an incredibly violent process taking place eighteen thousand light years away.

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The writing on the stone

It can often be difficult to sort fact from fiction, especially when multiple people become involved, each with his or her own agenda -- and varying determination to adhere to the truth.

Take, for example, the Brandenburg Stone.  It's a 74 by 39 centimeter slab of oolite (a sedimentary rock) that appears to have writing-like marks scratched into the surface.  Without further ado, here's a photograph of the alleged artifact:

It was found in 1912 near Brandenburg, Kentucky by a farmer named Craig Crecelius.  Crecelius clearly thought the marks were writing -- and you can see for yourself that they look like it -- and he made a good effort to contact linguists who might be able to identify the script, but without success.  He exhibited the stone several times in nearby towns, but wasn't able to drum up much in the way of interest.

In 1965, the stone passed into the hands of one Jon Whitfield, and that's where things start to get interesting.

Whitfield thought he knew what the script was.  The letters, he said, were Coelbren y Beirdd (Welsh for "Bard's Lot"), a script for writing the Welsh language that in the early nineteenth century was the center of a linguistic controversy regarding its origins.  The man who promoted it, one Edward Williams (more often known by his "bardic name" of Iolo Morganwg), was absolutely obsessed with ancient Welsh history and traditions, and achieved fame as a collector of rare medieval Welsh manuscripts.

But why would there be Welsh script on a stone in Kentucky?

Whitfield thought he knew the answer.  There was a story circulating that the medieval Welsh prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd had crossed the Atlantic in around the year 1170 C. E. with a handful of friends, and the lot of them had stayed in North America and intermarried with Native Americans.  (Fans of Madeleine L'Engle will recognize this legend from her book A Swiftly Tilting Planet.)  This, said Whitfield, was proof that the legend was true -- and that Welsh-speaking Natives who descended from Madoc and his comrades had gotten as far inland as Kentucky.

There's only one problem with this.  Coelbren y Beirdd almost certainly wasn't an ancient script at all, but had been invented by Iolo Morganwg in 1791 -- who then passed it off as authentic.

It's pretty clear that despite his legitimate work in preserving ancient Welsh manuscripts, Williams/Morganwg also was a champion forger.  He was exposed as such long after his death by Welsh linguist and poet John Morris-Jones, who decried Williams's dishonesty, saying "it will be an age before our literature and history are clean of the traces of his dirty fingers."  Several of the works he "transcribed" were apparently written by him -- weaving his own fiction and philosophy into allegedly ancient legends and poetry, thus confusing the hell out of scholars who simply wanted to know what historical cultures actually believed.

So even if the marks on the Brandenburg Stone are actually Coelbren y Beirdd, it can't be any older than 1791, and probably much more recent than that.  Skeptic Jason Colavito points out that Morganwg's writing became really popular in the mid to late nineteenth century, when his son Taliesin began publishing and promoting his father's works.  Colavito writes:

The alphabet was widely published in the 1830s and 1840s, and whoever forged the Brandenburg Stone (it was not actually either Williams, who were never in Kentucky) almost certainly used such publications, possibly Taliesin Williams’s widely-read book about the alphabet, in forging the stone.  The younger Williams’s popular book was published to scholarly acclaim in 1840 (having won a prestigious prize two years before) and the alphabet was exposed as a hoax in 1893 (though suspicions had been raised earlier, until Taliesin successfully combated them), which makes it much more likely that the stone was actually carved between 1840 and 1912, though a date as early as 1792 cannot be excluded.  In the United States, libraries had dozens of different volumes on Coelbren y Beirdd, including the Iolo Manuscripts (1848), Bardaas (1862 and 1874), etc., but I am not able to find evidence that the alphabet itself would have been widely available in rural America prior to Taliesin’s book, though it is possible that some of Edward’s specialist publications imported from Britain were available in some places.  After 1862, the largest collection of the Williams forgeries was in print and the alphabet was at the height of its popularity.  Thus, the latter nineteenth or early twentieth century seems the best candidate for the time of forgery.

So we have Craig Crecelius, the farmer who found the stone, and who appears to have been genuinely unaware that it was a forgery; Jon Whitfield, who was the one who identified the writing as Coelbren y Beirdd, but was too young to have been responsible for the creation of the stone, and seems to have thought it was authentic as well; and Edward Williams, who created the fake script but never went to Kentucky and so can't have been the stone's creator, either.

In the end, we're left with a mystery.  An unknown person scratched some mysterious letters on a stone, probably in the last half of the nineteenth century, and left it for someone to find.  And someone did... starting a domino effect of speculation that still shows up on television shows specializing in archaeological weirdness.  The fact remains, though, that everything about it is certainly a forgery -- not only the artifact itself, but the script in which the inscription is written.

But as far as who perpetrated the hoax, we'll probably never know.

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Missing the target

Lately I've been seeing a lot of buzz on social media apropos of the Earth being hit by a killer asteroid.

Much of this appears to be wishful thinking.

Most of it seems to focus on the asteroid 2007 FT3, which is one of the bodies orbiting the Sun that is classified as a "near-Earth object" -- something with an orbit that crosses Earth's, and could potentially hit us at some point in the future.  It bears keeping in mind, however, that even on the scale of the Solar System, the Earth is a really small target.  This "deadly asteroid," we're told, is "on a collision course with Earth" -- but then you find out that its likelihood of its actually striking us on the date of Doomsday, March 3, 2030, is around one in ten million.

Oh, but there's "an altogether more sinister estimate" that 2007 FT3 could hit us on October 5, 2024, but the chances there are one in 11.5 million.  Why this is "altogether more sinister," I'm not sure.  Maybe just because it's sooner.  Or maybe the author of the article doesn't understand how math works and thinks that the bigger the second number, the worse it is.  I dunno.

Then there's the much-hyped asteroid 99942 Apophis, which was first thought to have a 2.7% chance of hitting the Earth in April of 2029 (more accurate observations of its orbit eliminated that possibility entirely), and then gets a second shot at us in April of 2036.  The 2036 collision depends on it passing through a gravitational keyhole during its 2029 close approach -- a tiny region in space where the pull of a much larger planet shifts the orbit of a smaller body in such a way that they then collide on a future pass.  Initially, the keyhole was estimated to be eight hundred kilometers in diameter, and this caused the physicists at NASA to rate Apophis at a four out of ten on the Torino Impact Scale -- the highest value any object has had since such assessments began.  (A rating of four means "A close encounter, meriting attention by astronomers.  Current calculations give a 1% or greater chance of collision capable of regional devastation.  Most likely, new telescopic observations will lead to reassignment to Level 0.  Attention by public and by public officials is merited if the encounter is less than a decade away.")  If it hit, the impact site would be in the eastern Pacific, which would be seriously bad news for anyone living in coastal California.

The close approach in 2029 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Phoenix7777, Animation of 99942 Apophis orbit around Sun, CC BY-SA 4.0]

This, of course, spurred the scientists to try to refine their measurements, and when they did -- as the scale suggested -- they found out we're not in any danger.  The gravitational keyhole turns out to be only a kilometer wide, and Apophis will miss it completely.

In fact, there are currently no known objects with a Torino Scale rating greater than zero.

It's always possible, of course, that we could be hit out of the blue by something we never saw coming.  But given that we're talking about an unknown risk from an unknown object of unknown size hitting in an unknown location at an unknown time, I think we have more pressing things to worry about.  Sure, something big will eventually hit the Earth, but it's not going to happen in the foreseeable future.  NASA and the other space monitoring agencies in the world are doing a pretty good job of watching the skies, so maybe we should all just turn our attention on more important matters, like trying to figure out how nearly half of Americans think the best choice for president is a multiply-indicted, incompetent compulsive liar who shows every sign of incipient dementia.

In any case, I'm not concerned about asteroid impacts, and all the hype is just more clickbait.  So if you live on the West Coast and were planning on moving inland, or are considering cancelling your plans for a big Halloween bash this year, you probably should just simmer down.

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