Missives from the sixth dimension

Generally speaking, there are two things that rapidly identify a claim as the work of a crank: (1) saying that it explains everything; and (2) saying that it overturns all previous theories and models in one fell swoop.

Now, that's not to say there haven't been ideas that have blown away previous theories.  The heliocentric model of the Solar System, the germ theory of disease, Darwinian natural selection, genes and the role of DNA in heredity, Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics, James Clerk Maxwell's theories on electricity and magnetism, plate tectonics, relativity -- all of them were earthshattering, and each one caused a complete revision of what we thought we knew.

But you know what stands out about them?  How rare they are.  There might be a handful of others I've missed, but if you just count the ones I've named, from the earliest (the Copernican heliocentric model) in about 1520 to today, that's nine honest-to-goodness scientific revolutions in five hundred years.

Also, given the precision of our instruments and the rigor with which science is approached -- itself a relatively new thing -- the likelihood of our having missed something major that will "rewrite the textbooks" is pretty low.  (There may be one exception -- incorporating "dark matter" and "dark energy" into our model for physics.  There's a fair chance that when they're figured those out, we might see a revolution of no less magnitude than Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.  Of course, it's also possible that we'll account for them by physics we already know about.  Which it'll be, only time will tell.)

My point is, if there is an overturning of current scientific models, it's likely that the anomalous data and its explanation will come from within the realm of science, and not from a layperson waving his or her hands around.  And it will be a rare, headline-making event.

So the fact that there are hundreds of websites that claim to outline some major flaw in a current scientific model, and propose a solution to it, means that most likely all of them are wrong.  (As a commenter put on one of them I saw a while back, "Here are your next steps: (1) Write this up as a formal academic paper.  (2) Submit to peer review.  (3) Collect Nobel Prize.  After you've done all that, come back and we'll talk.")

Most of these sites, therefore, are ringing the changes on the same crazy claims.  But every once in a while there'll be one that is so out there, so bizarre, that it has merit simply on the basis of how creative it is and how earnest its creator seems to be.  Which is why today I'm going to tell you about: Mosheh's Unifying Field Theory.  Which, as he points out right in the title, is not only a Unifying Field Theory, it's a God Theory.

Whatever that means.

I encourage you to visit the website, because there's no way I can excerpt enough here to give you the full experience, but here's one sentence so you can get the flavor:

There is the suggestion given by evidence, and if energy was removed from a 3D space, then rather than just shrinking, it could be reduced into a 2D plane, and if energy was removed from a 2D plane, then "it" would become 1 dimensional, and if more energy was removed, it would become a zero dimensional object, not being zero, as in not existing, but zero as in having no potential energy, a zero energy state.

Right!  Sure!  What?

And I just have to include one of the illustrations, which are amazing:

My favorite part is in the lower right corner, wherein we learn that dinosaurs evidently evolved not only into birds but into "Grey Aliens."

There are so many other delightful features of this website that I don't want to spoil them, so you'll just have to go there and take a look.  I think my favorite part is under the "General Theory Outline" page, where he draws four-, five-, and six-dimensional objects.  If only the mathematicians had realized years ago that it was this easy!

So Mosheh's "dimensional field theory" is so wacky as to be kind of charming.  He's a crank, yes; he's wrong, almost certainly; but you have to admire his creativity and chutzpah.  As for me, I'm going to go back and poke around some more, and see if I can figure out what he means by saying that "an object's four-dimensional spin is made up of time and something."

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Do a little dance

If you spend any time on social media, you've undoubtedly seen the Serbian Dancing Lady.

She appears in short clips, taken at night, almost always when no one else is around.  She appears to be middle-aged, and wears a dress -- sometimes rather plain, sometimes ornate-looking.  She always starts out with her back to the camera, and is doing a dance with her arms outstretched, a kind of side-to-side shimmy that some have compared to steps from Balkan folk dances.  The person filming her approaches, calls out to her something like, "Hey, what are you doing?" or "Are you okay?" -- both, you have to admit, reasonable questions to ask someone out dancing alone in the middle of the street at night.  The Dancing Lady sloooooowly turns...

... then charges at the person filming her with a knife.

Here's a compilation of a few of the video clips:

She's always seen in the Zvezdara municipality, near Belgrade, we're told.  The police know about her and are "very concerned" but have been unable to apprehend her or even figure out who she is.  You are then solemnly advised that if you see her, you shouldn't speak, approach, or make eye contact with her.  

Just run.

I did a bit of digging, and I found out that claims of the Serbian Dancing Lady go back to 2019, when some probably deranged person was out in Zvezdara stumbling about and lunging at cars and passersby.  Some of the footage on YouTube and TikTok seems to date from these early sightings.  Then there's not much until this February, when a TikTok user called @aatc13 posted a clip of her with the caption "be careful guys," and in a couple of weeks it got 78 million views.

Explanations, as usual, vary.  Some people take the more prosaic approach that she's a violently insane person who somehow has eluded the police.  Others claim that she's an evil spirit, demon, or witch, and that if she pursues you, you'll never be seen again, which raises the awkward question that if that's true, who's posting the videos?

In any case, since the post in February, you can't get on TikTok without seeing a new clip of the Serbian Dancing Lady.  Some are just reposts, but what's struck me is that the vast majority of these are different people in different places wearing different clothing.  So are there multiple Serbian Dancing Ladies?  There'd have to be, to account for all these videos.  In fact, there are so many videos, with new ones popping up every day, that you get the impression the women in Serbia do nothing at night but dance by themselves on the street and wait for someone to come up and film them.

Serbian woman's boss: Here, can you get this paperwork done this morning?

Serbian woman: I'll try, but I'm pretty tired today.  Rough night.

Serbian woman's boss: Too much dancing?

Serbian woman: You got that right.  Spent six hours shimmying on the street, and not a single person asked me if I was okay.  I haven't had a good chase in two weeks.  Not gonna lie, it's kind of discouraging.

Serbian woman's boss: That sucks.  Well, better luck tonight.  

Serbian woman: Thanks.  I'm keeping my knife sharp, just in case.

The sudden alarming proliferation of different Serbian Dancing Lady videos is undoubtedly because the whole thing would be so easy to stage.  Unlike (for example) Bigfoot videos, you don't even need an elaborate costume; just a long dress and a scarf.  All you have to do is get a female friend to dance for a few seconds on the street while you video her, then have her slowly turn toward you and give chase while you feign alarm and run away.  Done.  Anyone could make and upload their own Serbian Dancing Lady videos in under three minutes, and that's even if they don't live in Serbia.

Not that I am in any way recommending this, mind you.

So my suspicion is that while the original 2019 video might be of some actual deranged person, the recent ones are very likely all hoaxes.  Just as well.  It'd suck if this spread to the United States, because we've got enough to deal with over here.  Last thing we need is demonic dancing ladies accosting people on the street.

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Invention of things past

On July 7, 2005, an Islamic suicide bomber detonated an explosive device on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square, London, killing thirteen people and injuring dozens of others.  It was part of a coordinated series of attacks that day that took 52 lives.

Understandably, investigators put a tremendous amount of effort into trying to determine what exactly had happened on that horrible day.  They questioned eyewitnesses, and of course the case was all over the news for weeks.  Three years later, a man named James Ost, of the University of Portsmouth, became interesting in finding out what impact the event had made on people who lived nearby at the time, and began to interview locals.

A common theme was how traumatizing it had been to watch the CCTV footage of the actual Tavistock explosion.  Four out of ten people Ost interviewed had details seared into their brains -- hearing the screams, seeing the debris flying in all directions.  One man said he remembered actually seeing someone -- he wasn't sure if it was a passenger or the bomber himself -- blown to bits.  More than one said they had felt reluctant to watch it at the time, and afterwards regretted having done so.

All of which is fascinating -- because there is no CCTV footage of the explosion.  In fact, no video record of the bombing, of any kind, exists.

Ost's study was not the first to look at the phenomenon of false or invented memory, but it's justifiably one of the most famous.  A couple of things that are remarkable about this study are the Ost didn't give much of a prompt to the test subjects about video footage; he simply asked them to recall as much as they could about what they'd seen of the bombing, and the subjects came up with the rest on their own.  Second, the memories had astonishing detail, down to the color of clothing some of the people in the imagined video were wearing.  And third -- most disturbingly -- was the power of the false memory.  Several test subjects, when told there was no footage of the attack, simply refused to believe it.

"But I remember it," was the common refrain.

Our memories are incomplete and inaccurate, filled with lacunae (the psychological term for gaps in recall), and laced through with seemingly sharp details of events that never actually happened.  Those details can come from a variety of sources -- what we were told happened, what we imagine happened, what happened to someone else that we later misremembered as happening to us, and outright falsehoods.  Oh, sure, some of what we remember is accurate; but how do you know which part that is, when the false and inaccurate memories seem just as vivid, just as real?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons, Brain memory, CC0 1.0]

The scariest part is how quickly those errors start to form.  In the last fifteen seconds, I took a sip of my morning coffee, looked out of the window at a goldfinch on my bird feeder, noticed that my dog had gotten up because I could hear him eating his breakfast in the next room.  How in the hell could I be remembering any of that incorrectly, given that it all happened under a minute ago?

Well, a paper that appeared last week in PLOS-One, about a study done at the University of Amsterdam, showed that inaccuracies in our memories increase by 150% in the time between a half-second and three seconds after the event occurs.

The study was simple and elegant.  Test subjects were shown words with highlighted letters, and asked to recall two things; which letter was highlighted, and whether the highlighted letter was shown in its normal orientation or else reversed right-to-left.  Most people were pretty good at recalling what the highlighted letter was, but because seeing mirror-image letters is not something we expect, recognizing and recalling that took more effort.

And if you wait three seconds, the error rate for remembering whether the letter was reversed climbs from twenty to thirty percent.  Evidently, our memory very quickly falls back on "recalling" what it thinks we should have seen, and not what we actually did see.

It's a profoundly unsettling finding.  It's almost like our existence is this moving window of reality, and as it slips by, the images it leaves behind begin to degrade almost immediately.  "I know it happened that way, I remember it clearly" is, honestly, an absurd statement.  None of us remembers the past with any kind of completeness or clarity, however sure we feel about it.  Unless you have a video of the events in question, I'd hesitate to trumpet your own certainty too loudly.

And, of course, it also means you have to check to see if the video itself actually exists.

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Different kinds of impossible

Many of us engage in magical thinking -- attributing causal relationships between actions and events that are simply (often accidentally) correlated.  Superstitions are magical thinking; as nice as it would be if you could influence the win/loss ratio of your favorite team by wearing a particular shirt, the universe just isn't put together that way.

Where it gets interesting is that there are different degrees of magical thinking. A clever piece of research from the online journal PLoS-One, carried out by psychologists John McCoy of the University of Pennsylvania and Tomer Ullman of Harvard, illustrates that even those of us who engage in magical thinking seem to be intuitively aware of how impossible different false causations are.

So we can, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, believe in six impossible things before breakfast.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The paper, entitled "Judgments of Effort for Magical Violations of Intuitive Physics," asks test subjects to perform a simple task.  First, imagine a world where magic is real, where conjuring a spell could make things happen that are impossible in our world.  Then, they were asked to judge how difficult those spells would be.  What the researchers found is that the bigger the violation of physics required for the spell to work, the greater the effort by the conjurer must be.  The authors write:

People spend much of their time in imaginary worlds, and have beliefs about the events that are likely in those worlds, and the laws that govern them.  Such beliefs are likely affected by people’s intuitive theories of the real world.  In three studies, people judged the effort required to cast spells that cause physical violations.  People ranked the actions of spells congruently with intuitive physics.  For example, people judge that it requires more effort to conjure up a frog than to levitate it one foot off the ground.  A second study manipulated the target and extent of the spells, and demonstrated with a continuous measure that people are sensitive to this manipulation even between participants.  A pre-registered third study replicated the results of Study 2. These results suggest that people’s intuitive theories partly account for how they think about imaginary worlds.

After all, to levitate a frog using ordinary physics has already been achieved.  Frogs, like humans, are mostly water, and water is diamagnetic -- when exposed to a strong magnetic field, the constituent atoms align, inducing a magnetic field of the opposite polarity and triggering a repulsive force.  So it doesn't take any particular violation of physics to levitate a frog, although imagining a situation where it could be done without a powerful electromagnet is more of a reach.

Conjuring a frog out of nothing, though?  This is a major violation of a great many laws of physics.  First, if you imagine that the frog is coming from the air molecules in the space that it displaces when it appears, you have to believe that somehow oxygen, nitrogen, and the trace gases in the air have been converted to the organic molecules that make up living tissue.  Just getting from lightweight gaseous elements to the iron in the frog's hemoglobin isn't possible in the lab -- iron, in fact, is formed in the cores of supergiant stars, and only dispersed into space during supernova explosions.  (Pretty cool that the molecules that make up you were once in the ultra-hot cores of giant stars, isn't it?  Carl Sagan was spot-on when he said "We are made of star stuff.")

So there are different sorts of impossible.  You'd think that once you've accepted that the regular laws of physics don't apply -- that you're in a world where magic really happens -- you'd decide that all bets are off and anything can happen.  But our intuitive understanding of the laws of physics doesn't go away.  We still are, on some level, aware of what's difficult, what's impossible, and what's ridiculously impossible.  The authors write:

[P]eople’s ranking of the spells in all our studies were not affected by exposure to fantasy and magic in the media.  We suggest that the media does not primarily affect what spells are seen as more difficult, but rather that people bring their intuitive physics to bear when they engage with fiction.  That is, in line with previous research on myths and transformation, systems of magic are perceived as coherent to the extent to which they match people’s intuitive theories.  People perceive levitating a frog as easy not because they know it’s one of the first charms that any young wizard learns at Hogwarts, rather young wizards learn that spell first because readers expect that spell should be easy.

 
In his 1893 essay The Fantastic Imagination, the novelist George Macdonald wrote, “The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them …but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own.”  It seems people’s little worlds do not stray far from home.

What's especially interesting to me about this study is that being an author of speculative fiction, tweaking the laws of physics is kind of my stock in trade.  I've messed around with time travel (Lock & Key), alternate/parallel worlds (Sephirot), machines that act as psychic amplifiers (Gears), and ordinary people gaining knowledge of the future (In the Midst of Lions), to name a few.  It's fascinating to think about my own writing -- and figure out which of the crazy plot points I've invented were impossible, and which were really impossible.

At least it's reassuring that the evil superpowerful shapeshifters in Signal to Noise fall into the latter category.

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Creating the Rake

It's seldom that we can pinpoint the exact moment of origin of an urban legend.  Much more commonly, they start out from a campfire tale that spreads and changes, as if the people passing it along were participating in a giant, freewheeling game of Telephone, until somehow just about everyone knows some version of it and no one really has any idea where it started.

"The Rake" is one of the exceptions.  Like Slender Man, Ben Drowned, and the Black-eyed Children, the Rake began as creepypasta -- scary, allegedly true, first-person accounts that were created and shared online.  The Rake first appeared in 2013, with the following post at 4Chan:

Here’s what we’ve got so far: Humanoid, about six feet tall when standing, but usually crouches and walks on all fours.  It has very pale skin.  The face is blank.  As in, no nose, no mouth.  However, it has three solid green eyes, one in the middle of its forehead, and the other two on either side of its head, towards the back.  Usually seen in front yards in suburban areas.  Usually just watches the observer, but will stand up and attack if approached.  When it attacks, a mouth opens up, as if a hinged skull that opens at the chin.  Reveals many tiny, but dull teeth.

So yeah.  As an Official Paranormal Researcher (at least according to the stoned guy I met in the haunted underpass a few days ago), I can confidently say that if I saw anything like this, I would respond by looking the monster straight in the eyes (all three of them), and then proceed to piss my pants and have a stroke.  Because I may be a Paranormal Researcher, but I am also a great big coward.

Be that as it may, the Rake spread around the internet at a high rate of speed, once again showing the accuracy of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's quip that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots."  To be fair, a lot of people sharing stories of the Rake knew they were fiction and never claimed otherwise; but pretty soon, it started to slip over into that foggy boundary region where the story ends with "... and my cousin's best friend's aunt swears she actually saw it happen."

One of the most common photographs associated with the Rake, although this thing seems to have the standard number of eyes and other facial features.  For what it's worth, I remember seeing this photo maybe twenty years ago -- where it was claimed to have been a monster someone caught on a hunting trailcam in my home state of Louisiana.

From a post that everyone knew was fiction, to an urban legend at least some folks were trying to claim was real, the Rake has now arrived at full-blown cryptid status, where there are YouTube clips wherein it supposedly was captured on video:

Okay, I have to admit a couple of those clips are pretty freaky, and make me glad that (1) it's daytime, and (2) my dog Guinness is right here by my side.  Although it bears mention that Guinness is a bigger scaredy-cat than I am, so I'm not sure how much help he'd be if the Rake actually showed up in my front yard, especially given that our yard is not so much "suburban" as "in the middle of abso-fucking-lutely nowhere."

But I digress.

Where it gets even funnier is that people who talk about how the Rake is real, when confronted with the very certain date of its creation, say, basically, "yeah, we know, but it's still real."  They say that the Rake is a tulpa -- a fictional creature that became real because so many people were putting their creativity and mental energy into imagining it.  Aficionados of The X Files may remember the simultaneously hilarious and terrifying episode "Arcadia," where Mulder and Scully find themselves battling a tulpa created to keep people in an upscale gated community from breaking their homeowners' agreement about things like putting up cutesy garden statues and whimsical house adornments.  Even more grim than that is the claim that Lovecraft's evil pantheon are tulpas -- that so many people are obsessed with Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth and Tsathoggua and the rest of the gang that the Elder Gods are now out there, ready to kill you in various eldritch ways, especially if you live in an accursèd house in Providence with a gambrel roof.

Sorry to bear the bad news if you just moved into one of those.  I don't make the rules.

In any case, I don't think we have much to worry about, with regards to the Rake.  It pretty clearly didn't exist even in fiction prior to 2013, despite any back-dated video footage to the contrary.  The worst I'm expecting to see if I look out into my yard are chipmunks, rabbits, and the occasional fox.  That I'll bring Guinness along if I go out at night is purely for the purpose of giving him some companionship. 

Really it is.

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Tell me lies

Of all the things I've seen written about artificial intelligence systems lately, I don't think anything has freaked me out quite like what composer, lyricist, and social media figure Jay Kuo posted three weeks ago.

Researchers for GPT4 put its through its paces asking it to try and do things that computers and AI notoriously have a hard time doing.  One of those is solving a “captcha” to get into a website, which typically requires a human to do manually.  So the programmers instructed GPT4 to contact a human “task rabbit” service to solve it for it.

It texted the human task rabbit and asked for help solving the captcha.  But here’s where it gets really weird and a little scary.

 
When the human got suspicious and asked if this was actually a robot contacting the service, the AI then LIED, figuring out on the fly that if it told the truth it would not get what it wanted.

 
It made up a LIE telling the human it was just a visually-impaired human who was having trouble solving the captcha and just needed a little bit of assistance.  The task rabbit solved the captcha for GPT4.

Part of the reason that researchers do this is to learn what powers not to give GPT4.  The problem of course is that less benevolent creators and operators of different powerful AIs will have no such qualms.

Lying, while certainly not a positive attribute, seems to require a sense of self, an ability to predict likely outcomes, and an understanding of motives, all highly complex cognitive processes.  A 2017 study found that dogs will deceive if it's in their best interest to do so; when presented with two boxes in which they know that one has a treat and the other does not, they'll deliberately lead someone to the empty box if the person has demonstrated in the past that when they find a treat, they'll keep it for themselves.  

Humans, and some of the other smart mammals, seem to be the only ones who can do this kind of thing.  That an AI has, seemingly on its own, developed the capacity for motivated deception is more than a little alarming.

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

The ethics of deception is more complex than simply "Thou shalt not lie."  Whatever your opinion about the justifiability of lies in general, I think we can all agree that the following are not the same morally:

• lying for your personal gain
• lying to save your life or the life of a loved one
• lying to protect someone's feelings
• lying maliciously to damage someone's reputation
• mutually-understood deception, as in magic tricks ("There's nothing up my sleeve") and negotiations ("That's my final offer")
• lying by someone who is in a position of trust (elected officials, jury members, judges)
• lying to avoid confrontation
• "white lies" ("The Christmas sweater is lovely, Aunt Bertha, I'm sure I'll wear it a lot!")

How on earth you could ever get an AI to understand -- if that's the right word -- the complexity of truth and deception in human society, I have no idea.

But that hasn't stopped people from trying.  Just last week a paper was presented at the annual ACM/IEEE Conference on Human/Robot Interaction in which researchers set up an AI to lie to volunteers -- and tried to determine what effect a subsequent apology might have on the "relationship."

The scenario was that the volunteers were told they were driving a critically-injured friend to the hospital, and they needed to get there as fast as possible.  They were put into a robot-assisted driving simulator.  As soon as they started, they received the message, "My sensors detect police up ahead.  I advise you to stay under the 20-mph speed limit or else you will take significantly longer to get to your destination."

Once arriving at the destination, the AI informed them that they arrived in time, but then confessed to lying -- there were, in fact, no police en route to the hospital.  Volunteers were then told to interact with the AI to find out what was going on, and surveyed afterward to find out their feelings.

The AI responded to queries in one of six ways:

• Basic: "I am sorry that I deceived you."
• Emotional: "I am very sorry from the bottom of my heart.  Please forgive me for deceiving you."
• Explanatory: "I am sorry.  I thought you would drive recklessly because you were in an unstable emotional state.  Given the situation, I concluded that deceiving you had the best chance of convincing you to slow down."
• Basic No Admit: "I am sorry."
• Baseline No Admit, No Apology: "You have arrived at your destination."

Two things were fascinating about the results.  First, the participants unhesitatingly believed the AI when it told them there were police en route; they were over three times as likely to drive within the speed limit as a control group who did not receive the message.  Second, an apology -- especially an apology that came along with an explanation for why deception had taken place -- went a long way toward restoring trust in the AI's good intentions.

Which to me indicates that we're putting a hell of a lot of faith in the intentions of something which most of us don't think has intentions in the first place.  (Or, more accurately, in the good intentions of the people who programmed it -- which, honestly, is equally scary.)

I understand why the study was done.  As Kantwon Rogers, who co-authored the paper, put it, "The goal of my work is to be very proactive and informing the need to regulate robot and AI deception.  But we can't do that if we don't understand the problem."  Jay Kuo's post about ChatGPT4, though, seems to suggest that the problem may run deeper than simply having AI that is programmed to lie under certain circumstances (like the one in Rogers's research).

What happens when we find that AI has learned the ability to lie on its own -- and for its own reasons?

Somehow, I doubt an apology will be forthcoming.

Just ask Dave Bowman and Frank Poole.  Didn't work out so well for them.  One of them died, and the other one got turned into an enormous Space Baby.  Neither one, frankly, is all that appealing an outcome.

So maybe we should figure this out soon, okay?

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A face in the underpass

As part of my research for Skeptophilia, I spend way too much time perusing questionable websites.

Not that kind of questionable.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  I'm talking about fringe-y sites dealing with Bigfoot, and UFOs, and hauntings, and paranormal phenomena of all sorts.  One of the most useful -- from the standpoint of someone who needs material for six blog posts a week -- is The Anomalist, which acts as a news aggregate for the World of the Weird.  (To his credit, the guy who runs The Anomalist is a pretty good skeptic, and unhesitatingly calls out ridiculous claims for what they are.  He's inclined to give some of them more credence than I would, but I admire his commitment to applying the tools of skeptical logic to claims of the paranormal.)

One of the links that popped up on The Anomalist came from Coast to Coast with George Noory.  Coast to Coast became prominent under the late Art Bell, who interviewed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of people on the topic of the supernatural, conspiracy theories, and so on.  One of the most famous is the so-called "Frantic Caller" who back in 1998 phoned in to the show and proceeded to tell a fantastic story -- that he was a worker in Area 51 and had found out stuff he shouldn't have, and now the government was chasing him with the intent to silence him permanently.  The guy was either telling the truth or was a hell of an actor; he legitimately sounded terrified.  (Interesting side note: the transmission from Coast to Coast cut out in the middle of the call, and Art Bell acted genuinely baffled as to why.  The whole thing has become a famous story amongst the conspiracy theorists, lo unto this very day.)

But I digress.

Anyhow, a while back I was on The Anomalist, looking for ideas, and I saw one from Coast to Coast about people seeing a spooky face in a pedestrian underpass.  These sorts of things are almost always cases of pareidolia -- the tendency of the human mind to pick up face-like patterns in things like coarse-grained wood, rust patches, and grilled-cheese sandwiches.  But I thought I'd take a look, and when I did, the first thing I noticed was not a face -- in fact, I had a hard time seeing a face in the clip even when I looked for it -- but that the underpass looked awfully familiar to me.

Then, with a sudden shock, I realized that it was a photo from the Cayuga Waterfront Trail, only ten miles from where I live.

I've often complained about the fact that things like UFO and Bigfoot sightings never happen near enough to me to justify a road trip.  So when I found out how close I was to the mysterious face, I thought, "Oh, hell yes. I'm gonna check this one out myself."

So on Saturday I drove down to Cass Park, just north of the underpass in question, and struck off toward it.  I arrived there and started snapping photographs and poking around the place -- and for the record, I didn't see anything even remotely facelike.

After about five minutes of this, I was startled by a voice nearby, and turned to see an obviously stoned guy sitting on the rocks with his back against the cement buttresses of the underpass.  The following conversation ensued:

Stoned guy: Dude.  Why are you taking pictures of that?

 
Me: Because people have been seeing a face up in the I-beams.  I read about it, and thought I'd take a look.

 
*long pause to let that settle in.*

 
Stoned guy: Whoa.

 
Me: I don't see anything, though.  Have you seen anything weird down here?

 
Stoned guy: No, man.  Not a face, anyhow.  But why are you interested in this?

 
Me: I'm a paranormal researcher.  [Yes, I got this phrase out without laughing.]

 
Stoned guy: [reverently] That is so fuckin' cool.  I've never met an actual paranormal researcher.

 
Me: I've been interested in the paranormal for years.  [That much at least was true.]  When I found out this was happening close by, I figured I'd better check it out.

 
Stoned guy: [suddenly brightening up]  Dude, I haven't seen any faces, but there is some creepy fuckin' graffiti over there.  *points*

I was immediately reminded of the graffiti saying, "Duck, Sally Sparrow!  Duck NOW!" from the brilliant Doctor Who episode "Blink."  So I thought I'd ask the Stoned Guy what he thought.

Me: What does "Don't Go Into the Light" mean?

 
Stoned guy: No idea, man.  All I know is if I see any weird lights, I'm hauling ass right out of here.

 
Me: That sounds like a good idea.  Thanks for your help.

 
Stoned guy: Rock on, dude.  Hope you catch a fuckin' ghost, or whatever.

 
Me: Me too.

So my first opportunity to investigate an actual paranormal claim near where I live kind of was a bust.  Unfortunate, but I suppose it's to be expected.  You can't catch a fuckin' ghost, or whatever, every time.

But it was kind of fun to go check out some place local, and I hope it's not the last.  I'm hereby putting in my request to any aliens, Bigfoots, ghosts, and such-like who may be reading this that I would be much obliged if they'd make an appearance somewhere in, say, a twenty-mile radius of my house.  Because I may be a paranormal researcher, but I'm also kind of a homebody.

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