Thin places

My first trip overseas, back in 1995, was an ambitious one; I did a month-long solo hike across England, starting on the shore of the Irish Sea in Blackpool and ending on a hill overlooking the North Sea in Whitby.  I decided to have a theme for the trip -- a practice I have continued to this day -- and the theme I chose was monasteries.

A great many of the abbeys in England were destroyed during the "Dissolution of the Monasteries," when King Henry VIII decided the church was getting way too rich and powerful and decided to see what he could do to remedy that.  Between 1536 and 1541, over eight hundred monasteries, abbeys, and convents were closed and their property sold off, the abbots, priests, and nuns turned out or arrested outright, the majestic buildings left to sink slowly into ruin.

Along the path I took, which largely coincides with the North York Moors Trail, there were a number of these relics, and I made a point of seeing as many as I could.  They were impressive, beautiful, tragic places, monuments not only to spirituality but to greed (on both sides of the struggle).

Unsurprisingly, the spiritual side of it didn't have a great impact on me, except for my sympathy for the religious men and women who had dedicated themselves to the contemplative life and then had those lives turned upside down by the conflict.  But it all seemed relegated in the distant past, unable to touch my modern experience except as a historical footnote.

Until I got to Rievaulx Abbey, near the town of Helmsley.

My hike into Rievaulx was on a gorgeous day -- one of the few I had during a four-week period that was cold and rainy even by English standards.  That day the weather was mild and sunny, with only a few white clouds in an azure sky. I crested a low line of hills, and looked down into the little valley in which the ruins of the abbey sit, and was dumbstruck.

It was not solely because of the spot's beauty, although beautiful it certainly is.  The place gave me chills, as if I was looking at something that wasn't quite of this world -- a reaction I had never experienced before and haven't experienced since.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons WyrdLight.com, RievaulxAbbey-wyrdlight-24588, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Now, twenty-five years ago, I was every bit as much of a skeptic as I am now, but I couldn't shake the feeling the entire time I wandered around the abbey grounds.  I dropped my pack and shucked my shoes by the side of a little tumbling river that runs through the valley, cooling my sore feet, and kept thinking about the men and women who had lived here -- and whose presence I could still, inexplicably, feel around me.

During my visit, I struck up a conversation with a friendly middle-aged couple, who ended up inviting me to have mid-afternoon tea with them.  I mentioned my odd sensations to them, and the woman immediately smiled.  "Oh, yes," she said.  "Lots of people feel that way about Rievaulx.  One gets the impression not that the place is sacred because it's the site of an abbey, but that the abbey was built there because the place was already sacred."

I have never been able to explain what I felt during that visit, other than my rational side's certainty that the beauty of the day and the history of the place simply got the better of me.  But I keep coming back to the fact that I never had those sensations in any of the other religious sites I saw on that trip -- which included gorgeous, history-laden places such as York Cathedral, Fountains Abbey, Kirkham Priory, and Grey Friars Tower.  There was something different about Rievaulx, but what that something is, I've never put my finger on.

The Scots call spots like Rievaulx "thin places."  We walk side-by-side with the spirit world, the legends go, separated by an invisible veil, but in some places the veil is thin and we get a glimpse, or sometimes just a feeling, that there's something more there than meets the eye.  Places like that aren't haunted in the conventional sense, but true believers will tell you that you can't go there and come away unscathed.

I won't say that my visit to Rievaulx convinced me of some kind of ineffable otherworld; after all here I am, over two decades later, still talking about rationalism and skepticism and for the most part casting a wry eye at claims of the paranormal.  But something happened to me in that little valley, whether I was picking up on a thin spot in the veil or it was simply the product of my senses acting on my often-overwrought imagination.

And while I don't agree with his basic assumptions, the whole experience makes the quote from the Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade have a strange resonance for me: "Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane...  In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural profane world."

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Tales of a Death Star

One of the most promising areas of study for astrobiologists -- scientists who are interested in the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe -- is the potential for life on the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.  We're beginning to develop the technology to detect biosignatures -- chemical traces of living things in the atmospheres of moons or exoplanets -- but it's a hell of a lot easier to find those in our own Solar System than it is around the barely-visible specks of light that are all we can see of most exoplanetary systems.

Despite their distance from the Sun, due to tidal heating there are several of these moons that are thought to have liquid water beneath a frozen crust.  Four commonly-discussed possibilities are Europa (Jupiter), Enceladus and Titan (Saturn) and Triton (Neptune); the case is nearly certain for Europa and Enceladus, where fly-bys have detected liquid water geysers erupting from surface cracks in the ice sheet.

What could be down there, I wonder?  Single-celled life is the most likely, but with no further information... well, anything's possible.  We only have a sample size of one regarding how life forms and evolves, so trying to predict what it would look like somewhere else is going to be speculation at best.

The conventional wisdom has been that the smaller moons are unlikely places to look for life; being smaller, they lose heat faster, so any heat gains they get from the Sun and from tidal compression are far offset by heat loss from their small thermal mass. 

That assessment will have to be revised, apparently.  A new study -- out this week in Nature -- found that Saturn's moon Mimas, best known for having a huge crater that makes it look like the Death Star from Star Wars, has an ocean of liquid water underneath a crust of ice and frozen methane.  It's only four hundred kilometers in diameter, over eight times smaller than our own Moon.

A photograph of Mimas from the 2010 pass by the probe Cassini [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The frozen crust of Mimas is thought to be so thick (something on the order of twenty to thirty kilometers) that it precludes the cracks that cause the geysers on Enceladus and Europa.  So the liquid water inside is trapped -- but the effects of tidal heating from the enormous planet it orbits are apparently enough to keep it well above freezing, and therefore very likely to enable the convection currents which overturn nutrients in our own oceans and are essential for the maintenance of ecosystems.  

Based on what we know about the formation of moons and their stability in orbit around their host planet, Mimas is estimated to be quite young, something on the order of between five and fifteen million years old.  This seems like a very short time even to evolve simple single-celled organisms, but as I said before -- it's not like we have a bunch of test cases from which to draw inferences.

"Mimas was probably the most unlikely place to look for a global ocean — and liquid water more generally," said study co-author Valéry Lainey, of the Paris Observatory.  "So that looks like a potential habitable world.  But nobody knows how much time is needed for life to arise."

I'm always fascinated when we find this sort of thing, because it seems like every time we get new information affecting the terms of the Drake Equation, the estimates are revised upward.  At first, we didn't know if planet formation was at all likely, or if the Solar System was a fluke; now it seems like exoplanets are kind of everywhere we look, and most stars have planetary systems.  Most stars that have been studied have at least one planet in the habitable zone, and the size of the habitable zone is way bigger than we used to think.  Forming the biochemistry of life turns out to be simple; like exoplanets, complex organic molecules turn out to be all over the place.  And so on.

So could Mimas host life?  Entirely possible.  "Not life as we know it, Jim" -- but life nonetheless.  I still think that Europa and Enceladus are more likely (remember the end of the movie 2010?  "All of these worlds are yours except Europa, attempt no landing there") but life could well be common, not just out in the galaxy but right here in our own Solar System.

And maybe I'll live to see confirmation of it.  What a monumental overturning of our self-importance that would be.  It'd be a total game changer.  Proving once and for all that life is abundant in the cosmos... and that we are not alone.

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The strange story of the Priory of Sion

I'm often astonished at the lengths people will go to to perpetrate hoaxes.

What can possibly motivate them?  Is it just about getting their fifteen minutes of fame?  Or the superior feeling of being able to laugh at the suckers who fall for their shtick?  Or the fun of creating a wild story -- something that, as a novelist, I can certainly understand?

It was some combination of all of those that motivated the main characters in my all-time favorite novel, Umberto Eco's twisty, labyrinthine masterpiece Foucault's Pendulum.  We meet three cynical, bored book editors who work for Manutius Press, a publishing company that specializes in esoteric woo.  None of the three believe a word of what they publish; it's a job, pure and simple.  But then they realize that having done this for years, the three of them can come up with a better book than any of the writers they publish.  Skip the middle-man, out-woo the woo-practitioners.  So using their extensive knowledge of history and esoterica, they cook up the be-all-end-all conspiracy theory, involving the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, Nostradamus, the Roman Catholic Church, the Bogomils, the Crusaders, and the final resting place of the Holy Grail.  Their book leaves the reader hanging, though -- implying that part of the mystery was too catastrophically powerful and dangerous to reveal in print.

But their plan backfires spectacularly, because the book catches the attention of a (very serious) secret society, who believe it's all true -- and they kidnap one of the editors and threaten to kill him if the three don't reveal the rest of their secret.

Which doesn't exist, remember?  Because they made it all up?

But, of course, the more they protest, the more convinced the secret society is that they are hiding something.  Why else would they be arguing so vehemently?

I was immediately reminded of Foucault's Pendulum when I stumbled across the (true) story of Pierre Plantard (18 March 1920 - 3 February 2000), a French artist who is best known for perpetrating one of the most byzantine hoaxes I've ever heard of.  It's called "The Priory of Sion," and what strikes me is the lengths to which he went to create it, and the number of apparently intelligent people he suckered into believing.  Like the creation of the jaded editors in Eco's novel, the whole thing kind of turned into a juggernaut -- although there's no indication anyone ever threatened to kill Plantard to force him to reveal more of his secrets.

In fact, calling them "secrets" is kind of inaccurate, given that he pretty much never talked about anything else.

Plantard himself seems to have been a rather unsavory character.  During World War II he established himself as an ultranationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Masonic agitator.  In fact, he offered to help out Philippe Pétain, the leader of the collaborationist Vichy Régime, but apparently his views were too out there even for Pétain, and he was refused.  So Plantard decided to strike off on his own and founded the Alpha Galates, an "order of knighthood" with sacred rites and the whole shebang, but despite his best efforts, according to Paris Police Prefect Claude Charlot who investigated it, it "only ever had four regular members."

But hey, if at first you don't succeed...

After the war ended, Plantard decided to give it another shot, and this time, it took off beyond his wildest dreams.

The gist is that Godfrey de Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade, had created a secret society called "the Priory of Sion" in 1099 as he stood atop Mount Zion in Palestine, which was dedicated to making certain that the bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty would be installed on all the thrones of Europe.  The reason, you see, is that the Merovingians weren't (as you may have learned in history class) the leaders of the Franks, a confederation of Germanic tribes from northern Europe.

Oh, no.  They are actually the direct descendants of Jesus Christ and his wife, Mary Magdalene.

Yes, I know, there's no mention in the Bible of Jesus being married, much less to Mary Magdalene.  Just play along, okay?

Plantard tells us that clues include some paintings by seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin, whose mythological studies Plantard interpreted as representing such themes as the reincarnation of the assassinated Merovingian king Dagobert II, who in Plantard's scheme was a "holy martyr" who had been killed by the Bad Guys because (1) he knew too much, and (2) he was Jesus's descendant and the Bad Guys couldn't have that.

Et in Arcadia Ego by Nicolas Poussin (1630), one of the paintings that supposedly has hidden messages about the Priory of Sion [Image is in the Public Domain]

Since then, the Big Secrets had been perpetuated through a lineage of Grand Masters, which includes some famous names, such as Nicolas Flamel, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Claude Debussy. 

Well, the problem with Plantard's scheme is that there's no hard evidence for it, because he made the entire thing up.  But hey, that's no problem!

Because you can always make that up as well.

Working with two guys named Philippe de Chérisey and Noël Corbu, Plantard created fake documents -- medieval-looking parchments that had information supporting the whole scheme.  He then planted them all over, in churches and in libraries specializing in ancient texts -- including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.  But he and his collaborators weren't content to just sit back and wait for them to be discovered, so he enlisted the help of author Gérard de Sède to write a book about the forged manuscripts, alleging that a Catholic priest in the late nineteenth century, Bérenger Saunière, had found them while supervising the renovation of his church at Rennes-le-Château, but had recognized how dangerous they were and hid them again.  

The book became a bestseller.

At this point, it becomes hard to sort out who actually fell for the hoax, who simply thought it was entertaining fiction, and who had nothing to do with it but was accused of being an initiate and so got tangled up in it unfairly.  The whole thing even ensnared a couple of close associates of President François Mitterand and Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy.  Even after Plantard's death in 2000 at the age of 79, the claim lived on -- in fiction such as Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code and in (supposedly) non-fictional form in books like The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the Guardians of Christ's Sacred Bloodline, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, and "documentaries" like Bloodline.

It is, in fact, the conspiracy theory that refuses to die.

But to go back to my original point: the whole thing was made up.  We know this for a fact.  The documentary evidence was forged; the story of those manuscripts being found in a church by a Catholic priest in 1891 was a lie invented by a novelist Plantard had hired to help him.

So how does this still have momentum?  I guess the answer is that you can't convince people who don't want to know the truth.  That, at least, is the conclusion Eco had his character Casaubon come to at the end of Foucault's Pendulum:

I left Paris this morning.  I left too many clues.  They've had time to guess where I am.  In a little while, They will be here.  I would have liked to write down everything I thought today.  But if They were to read it, They would only derive another dark theory and spend another eternity trying to decipher the ancient message hidden behind my words.  It's impossible, They would say; he can't only have been making fun of us.  No.  Perhaps, without his realizing it, Being was sending us a message through its oblivion.

It makes no difference whether I write or not.  They will look for other meanings, even in my silence.  That's how They are.  Blind to revelation.

But try telling Them that.  They of little faith.

So I might as well stay here, wait, and look at the hill.

It's so beautiful.

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Wings over Skye

I know it seems like I keep ringing the changes on this topic over and over, but... it never fails to astonish me how much the Earth has changed over geologic history.

Part of my fascination, I think, comes from the fact that this knowledge is so at odds with how it feels to be an actual inhabitant of the planet.  When you look around, it seems like things are pretty static.  Oh, there are changes -- volcanoes and earthquakes come to mind -- but however catastrophic those can be for local residents, the fact remains that they are, on a planetary scale, tiny effects.  To see the big shifts requires a much longer time axis, but if you have the perspective of one...

... wow.

Take, for example, the discovery of new species of pterosaur in one of the last places I can picture a pterosaur flying -- the Isle of Skye, Scotland.  Now a cool, windswept, rocky island chain with few trees and lots of grass and heather, the Hebrides (and the rest of the British Isles) were, during the Jurassic Period, a lush subtropical land only separated from what would become North America and Greenland by a shallow strait of ocean.

The configuration of the continents at the mid-Jurassic [Image credit: Ron Blakey, NAU Geology]

And flying over the forests of Jurassic Scotland were some of the coolest prehistoric beasts ever, the pterosaurs.

Dubbed Ceoptera evansae -- the genus name means "mist flyer," from the Gaelic word ceò, mist, which also gives the Isle of Skye its Gaelic name of Eilean a'Cheò, "misty island" -- the newly-discovered fossil was found in the Kilmaluag Formation and dated to about 167 million years of age.  Ceoptera was a smallish pterosaur, measuring about sixty centimeters from beak to tail tip:

[Image credit: Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone et al., Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology]

The era when Ceoptera was flying over the Isle of Skye was a point of great diversification amongst the pterosaurs, a process which would accelerate during the rest of the Jurassic and into the Cretaceous, ultimately resulting in species from fifty-centimeter-long Sordes pilosus to the six-meter-wingspan Quetzalcoatlus northropi.  Eventually, however, the entire taxon would be wiped out in the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of sixty-six million years ago.

"The time period that Ceoptera is from is one of the most important periods of pterosaur evolution, and is also one in which we have some of the fewest specimens, indicating its significance," said Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone of the University of Bristol, who led the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "To find that there were more bones embedded within the rock, some of which were integral in identifying what kind of pterosaur Ceoptera is, made this an even better find than initially thought.  It brings us one step closer to understanding where and when the more advanced pterosaurs evolved."

For me, the coolest part is trying to picture what the world looked like back then.  Even with our knowledge of plate tectonics and the fossils we have available for study, we still have only the shadowiest image of the Jurassic world.  Consider what doesn't fossilize -- colors, sounds, smells, behavior.  We can make some guesses about what those were like based upon modern organisms, but guesses they will always be, and many of them significantly off the mark.  (If you want a good laugh some time, look into "prehistoric animals that were reconstructed wrong" and find out how wildly inaccurate even the experts can be.  Fortunately, science self-corrects, and the fact that we now know they were wrong comes from better fossils and more sophisticated analysis -- but even so, we still have a vague and incomplete picture of what things were really like back then.  Oh, for a time machine...)

So that's our flight of fancy for today.  Prehistoric wings over the Isle of Skye.  Makes you wonder what things will look like in another 160 million years or so.  We'll have a whole new set of "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful," to use Darwin's trenchant words -- ones we could not even begin to predict.

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The airburst

Many indigenous tribes of eastern and central North America have legends about a catastrophic explosion in mid-air in the distant past.

"The Miami tell of a horned serpent that flew across the sky and dropped rocks onto the land before plummeting into the river," said University of Cincinnati anthropologist Kenneth Tankersley, himself a member of the Piqua Tribe of Alabama.  "The Shawnee refer to a 'sky panther' that had the power to tear down a forest.  The Ottawa talk of a day when the Sun fell from the sky."

Tankersley led a team of researchers who believe they know why these legends exist.  Some time between 252 and 383 C.E., they say, a comet hit the upper atmosphere over eastern North America and exploded.  The impact rained micrometeorites over most of the continent -- and, they say, would have scorched an area the size of New Jersey.  The results would have looked like the aftermath of the Tunguska Event of June 1908, in which a similar airburst flattened an estimated eighty million trees in an area of over two thousand square kilometers.

The tipoff was similar to what the father-and-son team of Luis and Walter Alvarez found in the clay layer marking the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, and which caused them to suspect an asteroid collision as the cause of the Cretaceous Extinction: a layer of material that is high in two rare heavy metals, platinum and iridium.  Iridium, especially, is far more common in asteroids and comets than it is on Earth, and its presence in a dust layer is suspicious, to say the least.

The impact, Tankersley et al. theorize, is part of what led to the decline and eventual collapse of the Hopewell Culture, an interconnected network of tribes that extended from what are now Manitoba and Ontario all the way down to northern Florida.  They were characterized by a particular style of pottery, jewelry, and arrowheads, but even more by the distinctive mound-building that we still see traces of in Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere.

An 1848 map of the Chillicothe Earthwork in Ohio [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution]

Something, however, triggered this confederation of cultures to go into rapid decline.  By 500 C.E. mound-building had ceased completely, and there's evidence that the trade routes that linked the different member groups were no longer being used.  The constituent tribes themselves appeared to decrease dramatically, and it took centuries for the population to rebound.

The cause, say Tankersley et al., is an airburst -- which would have destroyed completely any communities within a hundred or so miles, but would have caused extensive damage much farther away, likely triggering crop failures.  Given the fact that in most pre-technological cultures, one bad harvest was all that it took to trigger famine and starvation, something like this would have been catastrophic.

It's fascinating that like the Cascadia rupture and subsequent tsunami that made its way into the legends of the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, an entirely different cataclysm seems to have been recorded in the oral histories of the people of central and eastern North America.  The day the sky exploded -- with the result that an entire civilization collapsed.

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The forest primeval

A couple of days ago my friend and fellow writer Andrew Butters sent me a link about a new fossil discovery.  He hastened to point out that he'd thought of me because he knows I'm interested in paleontology, not because my name comes to mind when he thinks about antiquated relics.  There may have been a touch of local pride involved as well, because the discovery was made in his home province of New Brunswick, Canada.

There's no doubt that it was a remarkable find.  The fossil was unearthed in a quarry near the town of Norton, where there is a layer of 350-million-year-old sandstone deposited when Atlantic Canada was a tropical swamp.  This was near the beginning of the Carboniferous Period, a time when the Earth was significantly warmer and wetter than it is now.  The high temperatures and carbon dioxide levels boosted plant growth, causing the oxygen levels to rise to an estimated 35% (compared to today's 21%).  This had the effect of allowing animals that had previously been held back by their inefficient respiratory systems, especially arthropods, to become huge, leading to millipedes 2.5 meters long and dragonflies with 75-centimeter wingspans.

The plants, though, were also pretty different from what we've got around now; by far the most common ones today are flowering plants, which make their first unequivocal appearance in the fossil record about 130 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous Period.  So when the New Brunswick sandstone was being deposited, the first flowering plants were still 220 million years in the future.

The dominant plants back then were distantly related to today's ferns, horsetails, and club mosses, although as you'll see we don't have anything left that looks much like what you'd see in a typical Carboniferous forest.  But the fossil discovered in the Canadian quarry was bizarre even compared to a lot of the strange vegetation from that time -- and has drawn comparisons to something you might see in a book by Dr. Seuss.

"What it really does look like is one of those truffula trees from The Lorax," said Olivia King, of St. Mary's University in Halifax, who was part of the team that discovered the fossils.  The most remarkable thing about the fossil, though, is its amazing state of preservation.  It's thought to have been entombed in an upright position when a landslide caused part of the bank of a lake to collapse.  The entire tree was dragged down to the bottom of the lake and buried in sediment, where it's lain for 350 million years -- and now has been excavated carefully to reveal what it looked like when it was alive.  Dubbed Sanfordiacaulis densifolia, after quarry owner Laurie Sanford who has been instrumental in allowing the investigation to progress, it had a mop of spiky leaves topping a spindly trunk:

A reconstruction of Sanfordiacaulis densifolia [Image credit: artist Tim Stonesifer]

With the acceleration of plant growth during that time period, there was extreme competition to access light, leading to dramatic increases in plant height and canopy size.  Eventually, there were club mosses (genus Lepidodendron) fifty meters tall -- taller than the oaks and maples in an average hardwood forest.

A sampler of ancient trees, from Robert Gastaldo et al., Current Biology.  [Note: "Mississippian" and "Pennsylvanian" are two divisions of time usually lumped together as the Carboniferous Period.]

Of course, the good times -- at least if you were a weird club moss tree or a 2.5-meter-long millipede -- couldn't last forever.  Around 305 million years ago, the climate turned from hot and humid to cool and arid, probably because by that time the plants had locked up so much atmospheric carbon dioxide underground -- what would eventually become our coal deposits -- that the greenhouse effect decreased and the temperature fell.  In essence, the plants sowed the seeds of their own destruction, and in the Carboniferous rain forest collapse that followed, the enormous forests and many of the animals that depended upon them became extinct.

It also set the fuse for the largest mass extinction ever.  All that organic matter sequestered underground was tinder just waiting to burn, and when the Siberian Traps erupted 252 million years ago, the lava ripped through a huge chunk of the Carboniferous coal and peat, using up oxygen (dropping it to an estimated 12%) and dumping that excess carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.  The temperature spiked, the oceans became anoxic, and something like 95% of life on Earth became extinct.

But at the point that the Sanfordiacaulis tree was growing in what would become New Brunswick, that cataclysmic event was still a hundred million years in the future.  Think about what a thrill it'd be to get to wander amongst those bizarre forests, so unlike anything we have today.

Even if it meant dodging enormous dragonflies.

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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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