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“Empty premises” (Hollow Earth)

DIG

While Flat Earthers have welcomed the explosion in articles and videos espousing their cause in recent years, it undercuts their claim that a dangerous truth is being repressed. Logically, a repressed idea is one that is not being heard, which brings us to the idea of a hollow Earth.

There are websites and essays that tout this notion, but these receive a tiny fraction of the notice that those produced by Flat Earthers receive. The proposal has been around in various forms for millennium. Early hollow Earth enthusiasts idealized inhabitants as deeply evolved, supremely healthy beings who were peaceful, prosperous, and rippling with muscles. A few religious movements sprouted from this idea. These days, Earth’s insides are mostly thought to house some combination of superior 12-foot humanoids, wayward Greenlandic Vikings, immortal peace-lovers, the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel, and Third Reich leadership. Those peace-lovers have their work cut out for them if those last two groups are both present.

Those favoring a more rational approach engaged in genuine scientific pursuit to find out if Earth was hollow and at least two excursions were made in the spirit of exploration to try and find the entry point. Edmond Halley wondered if auroras were caused by a combination of ferrous matter and a supple magnetic pole. He pondered that an aurora could be caused by luminous gases spewing from a polar door. To explain anomalous compass readings, Halley also suspected Earth might have a hollow shell about 500 miles thick, followed by two inner concentric shells, then an innermost core.  

Such speculation was admirable, as was his method of using observation and testing using proper protocols. By employing these channels, he and later scientists learned such notions were incorrect, yet some hollow Earthers continue to cite Halley as a supposed proponent. This is what Steven Novella meant when he said that such groups use science like a drunk uses a lamppost: For support, not illumination. About a half century later, mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler talked what would happen if one drilled a hole all the way through Earth and dropped a stone into the opening. He never said Earth was hollow; in fact, drilling all the way through would be unnecessary if it was. Yet he too is sometimes touted by hollow Earth proponents as a believer.

The idea of subterranean realms made appearances in various mythological and religious texts, with it sometimes being the destination of departed souls. Greeks, Celts, Hindus, Nordics, Tibetans, Jews, Mesopotamians, Native Americans, and Christians have all embraced this notion in some form. While the port of entry is usually near one or both poles, prospective entrances have been surmised in locales as diverse as the Amazon, the Himalayas, and downtown Paris. Through an unexplained mechanism, these portals open to enable travel between the inner and outer portions of our planet.

The most common hollow Earth hypothesis in the 19th Century was that we were the ones on the inside. Championed by Cyrus Teed, this idea held that all observed celestial bodies were inside Earth with us. He founded a religious movement based around the idea and sprinkled it with pseudoscientific guesses about light, gravity, and other natural phenomena.

Later, Nazis got in on the act, with Luftwaffe pilot Peter Bender devising another mystical movement whose tenets included a vacuous planet. There exist tiny pockets of both fascists and non-fascists who think Third Reich leaders escaped to these locales, usually aboard flying saucers.

The idea of us being on the outside is more attractive because getting to the other side would be much easier that way. So the concave planet has few adherents anymore and John Symmes was an early promoter of the reverse notion. He wanted to make a North Pole expedition to get inside but was unable to obtain funding. Jeremiah Reynolds did go on such a jaunt in the opposite direction, but if he found an Antarctic opening, he kept the location to himself.

While previous motivations were religion or idealism, those have largely been replaced with a 21st Century conspiratorial flavor. Now, an anonymous, malevolent “they” hides the hollow Earth truth from the populace, with a few brave rebels tirelessly trying to convince the sheeple.

There are a few exceptions. Dianne Robbins, whom I’ve previously profiled, sees inner Earth as a paradise populated by immortal, absolutely peaceful beings with whom she communicates telepathically. And on ourhollowearth.com, the site maintainer likewise considers our planet’s innards to be a terrestrial wonderland, in this case the place where the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel hang out. Tribe members are responsible for flying saucer sightings, as they leave their subterranean sanctuary to ward off dangers to Outer Earthlings.  

Among those who think these truths are being hidden rather than just not widely known, Raymond Bernard claims many early polar explorers were engaged in a secret mission to find these openings and reach the inhabitants. Fellow author Jan Lamprecht writes that evidence for a hollow Earth includes animal migration and early maps having been changed, which he thinks suggests subterfuge.

However, reasons to reject these hollow Earth hypotheses are found in evidence from seismic activity, gravity, and density. 

With regard to the first of those, the time it takes seismic waves to travel through and around Earth is inconsistent with an empty sphere. Such evidence shows Earth is filled first with solid rock, then liquid nickel-iron alloy, and finally solid nickel-iron.

As to the proof provided by gravity, massive objects tend to clump together and create solid objects like stars, satellites, and planets. Such a configuration is a way to reduce the gravitational potential energy of the object being formed. Additionally, ordinary matter is too weak to support a hollow planet against gravity’s ample force.

Finally, we consider density and that’s not a reference to hollow Earthers’ mental acumen. Based on the size of Earth and the force of gravity on its surface, the average density of the planet is 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter. However, densities of surface rocks are only half that. This is crucial because if any sizable chunk of Earth were hollow, its average density would be much less than what the density of its surface rocks is.

While doing background work and compiling my information for this post, I could find no proponents or websites extolling the concept of a flat, hollow Earth. Sounds like repression to me.

  

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“The limit’s the sky” (Astrology)

STEWIE

In a piece this month for Quartz, Ida Benedetto outlined her case for giving astrology more respectability. To help with this venture, I can state that I knew pseudoscience would continue to thrive in 2018, so this is could be a point in favor of correct visions of the future.

Benedetto had two main points, both of which lean on the appeal to antiquity. Her first argument was to blame astrology’s tattered reputation on pop psychology, which she says permeates modern astrology. She lays into modern seers, writing that they rely too much on feel-good platitudes instead of that tough love from above approach she credits the ancients with. She wrote that texts from days of yore show that astrologers told it like it was, not how the customers wanted it to be.

As to the modern-day charlatans, Benedetto wrote, “The nurturing approach psychologists take has polluted modern astrology with watered-down interpretations that seek to protect their clients. Even if an astrological configuration spells trouble, the modern astrologer will describe it as an ‘opportunity for growth.’” Benedetto rejects horoscopes and astrological signs as counterfeit currency in the astrological bank.   

As to the good (really) old days, Benedetto writes that before the Common Era, “Astrology flourished alongside various sciences like mathematics, medicine, and engineering.” Here, she is trying to piggyback astrology on legitimate gains and is committing the division fallacy. This is where one asserts that if something is true for the whole, it must be true for all parts. In this case, Benedetto figures that since disciplines which benefit us today flourished in the Hellenistic period 2,300 years ago, astrology must also be of value since it likewise had its heyday during this place and time.

During that era, Benedetto wrote, “Astrologers based their interpretations on centuries of observations recorded by the Mesopotamians who came before them. They kept careful records of astronomical phenomenon, looking for correlations between what happened in the sky above them and the material world around them.”

However, Steven Novella called this an instance of Tooth Fairy Science. This refers to research done on a topic before that topic has been shown to exist. Novella wrote, “If you carefully documented the amount, denomination, and timing of money left in exchange for children’s teeth, and correlated that information with all sorts of demographic variables, you might create a convincing imitation of doing real science, but none of that data would actually test the underlying premise: Is the Tooth Fairy real?”

“Likewise,” Novella continued, “documenting the position of the stars and planets and then correlating those positions with events on Earth is not science. This type of observational behavior is not capable of asking the important underlying question of if there is a causal relationship between what is observed in the sky and events on Earth.”

To do that, one would need to test a hypothesis through the Scientific Method. That would entail, at a minimum, making an observation, then a prediction, followed by testing it, trying to falsify it, attempting to replicate it, then making one’s data available to other scientists and submitting the findings and methods for peer review.

Novella further wrote that holding ancient wisdom in unjustifiably high esteem serves to minimize the efforts and accomplishments of the visionaries, inventors, and discoverers who have contributed to the wonders of the last thousand years. Persons who have this reverence possess it selectively. Benedetto composed her essay on a word processor and posted it on the Internet, rather than chiseling it on clay tablets and transporting it by donkey.

In this non-equine delivered piece, she claimed, “If we can set modern judgments aside and learn the language of the ancient astrologers we may discover lost insights.” In other words, it’s our fault for being closed-minded, not astrology’s fault for being without a plausible mechanism.

And the truth is the same now as it was in the Hellenistic period. Neither astronomers nor astrologers have uncovered empirical evidence that the positions of stellar bodies impacts Earthly events, other than the comet that obliterated the dinosaurs.

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“Vanilla fudge” (Racist anthropology)

WHITEGIANTS

When I hear someone complain about having to press ‘1’ for English, I can’t help but wonder how the Cherokee and Choctaw feel about having to do it. The irony is that those who fear immigrants taking over are descended from the only immigrants who did come here and seize control of the land and culture. This made it possible for their descendants to become the majority, albeit one that is still subject to indignities like button-pushing.

To deal with the issue of other peoples having gotten here first, some on the far right have embraced concocted tales that Native Americans were preceded by a still earlier band of pale faces. There have been tales of lost tribes and civilizations for a very long time, with Atlantis, Mu, and Thule among the better known. Likewise, there have been genuine lost peoples, such as the Roanoke colonists and Mayans. But our focus here is on only peoples that are both mythical and embraced by the far right to further their agenda.

Getting a jump start on this mindset by nearly two centuries was President Andrew Jackson. In an article on the Southern Poverty Law Center website, Alexander Zaitchik wrote that Jackson defended the relocation and massacre of Native Americans in part because he was convinced the Indians had previously massacred whites. He called the latter “a once-powerful race” that had been done in by “savage tribes.” Jackson likely got this notion from an idea popular at the time, that majestic Caucasian architects had built the large mounds and earthen structures that then dotted North America.

Around the same time, the Book of Mormon likewise promoted the idea that the light-skinned had gotten here first and were responsible for the major technological advances. These ideas mostly center on inhabitants of early North America since that’s the territory the far right is seeking to claim as theirs by ancient birthright. However, there are a few exceptions, such as online writer Patrick Chouinard, who claims that the elongated skulls of Peru belonged to Nordic supermen with massive brains.

Some of the more religiously oriented among the far right assert that the Nephilim giants in Genesis were an early Aryan race, possibly the offspring of demigods and human women. Another favorite tale is that Nazi scientists, being brilliant and all, concocted a type of flying saucer and escaped Europe to take residence in subterranean Antarctica. The fact that our history books are silent on mound builders, Lamanites, and fascists cavorting with penguins is proof of a cover-up, usually perpetrated by or for Jews.

The most prominent proponent of these alternative archeologies and histories were the Nazis. While they didn’t invent the concept of an exalted, pure Aryan race which deserved restoration to glory, they promoted it more than any other group before or since. The Third Reich version was tweaked so that Pan-Germanism became a more relevant factor than skin color and Heinrich Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe, whose goal was to document Aryans’ archeological and cultural histories. The Nazis’ most blatant attempt to take what they thought was theirs was when they thieved the swastika from ancient eastern religions. They claimed they were only reclaiming it because the symbol had been ­­­­brought to those cultures by a conquering Aryan people.

While their motivations are worse than pseudo-archeologists of the ancient alien and creationist persuasions, proponents of an ancient white North American people use the same tactics.

They inte­rpret paintings and pottery as historical documentation rather than something created in the mind of an artist. They consider similar imagery in more than one place as evidence that one influenced the other. Perhaps most important, they pre-determine what evidence will mean, then finagle found artifacts and discovered sites to support that “conclusion.” And authors ship those findings to a sympathetic website in search of a glowing endorsement rather than to a scientific journal looking for peer review. And the reason given for not submitting for peer review is that that the establishment is against them and the findings would be repressed.

Even if the far right is correct about North America’s anthropological history, who’s to say there wasn’t an ever earlier group of people with large doses of melanin which preceded the Nordic super race? Besides, if Nordics were here first, that means we should be pressing ‘1’ for Old Saxon.

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“Big Farma” (Lysenkoism)

LYS

In the United States, opponents of evolutionary biology education generally limit themselves to trying to sneak Jesus in the back school door while ushering out Darwin. But in the Soviet Union, opponents of the theory added mass murder to their arsenal.

During Stalin’s reign, Trofim Lynseko attempted a highly idiosyncratic and untenable reworking of biology, especially the tenets espoused by Darwin and Mendel. The most basic point of Lysenkoism was that an organism’s acquired characteristics could be inherited. He also felt this could be manipulated, so that plants could be conditioned to acquire desirable traits and pass those onto succeeding generations. But this would be like saying mice could have their tails sliced off and, if this mutilation was done under the right conditions and in the right environment, the offspring of those mice would be without the appendage. The idea doesn’t work any better with plants.

In an article on Lysenkosim, The Atlantic’s Sam Kean wrote that genetics teaches that plants and animals have stable characteristics, encoded as genes, which are passed to the next generation. Lysenko loathed this idea because he felt it denied all capacity for change. Marxists liked the idea of heredity having a limited role because that would mean any characteristics gained by living under communism could be inherited by succeeding generations. Of course, all this is the appeal to consequences fallacy and has no bearing on whether what was taught about genetics was true.

For his competing viewpoint, Lysenko decreed that if plants were placed in the proper setting and exposed to the right stimuli, they could be improved and pass those traits on. He rejected both natural selection and Mendelian inheritance, going so far as to dismiss the notion of genes. Soviet leaders found it attractive to have a homegrown peasant to counter Darwin, so Stalin put Lysenko in charge of the county’s farms, where he was content to attempt practical application of his ideas rather than subject them to experiment and scrutiny.

Lysenko’s notions fit in well with forced collectivist agriculture. He was able to force the farmers to participate in his experiments, which were intended to increase crop yields but which ended up exacerbating a famine. Lysenko made farmers plant seeds close together since his belief was that plants from the same class would never compete with each other. He also had bizarre practices like soaking crops in freezing water, thinking positive traits would result and be passed on ad infinitum. Additionally, he forbid the use of fertilizers and pesticides. These terrible ideas led to most of the planted food dying or rotting.

Farmers and biologists who objected were fired, sent to the gulag, or executed, a policy that makes Ken Ham’s anti-science positions seem almost reasonable. Lysenko fell out of favor and power with Stalin’s death and he remained a footnote a historical footnote for decades.

But like the flat Earth, reports of Lysnekoism’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. It has zombified and is once again infesting the scientific landscape. That these issues have gained hold again staggers belief. At the same time, even if 100 percent of the population were scientifically literate, scientific literacy would still be one generation away from potential extinction. For some persons, being iconoclastic is more important than being right.

The resurgence of Lysenkoism has been fueled by a combination of nationalism, anti-Western sentiment, and unofficial endorsement by the Russian Orthodox Church. There is an attempt to cloak the resurgence with a veneer of scientific legitimacy by piggybacking on the burgeoning epigenetics field, which studies environmental influences on gene expression and phenotype. Epigenetic factors can help shape an organism to its current environment and it’s possible for these factors to be inherited. For example, a wheat crop that has the ability to fight drought may have this property manifest if that condition occurs. However, the parent crops always had those traits, meaning epigenetics does not teach that acquired characteristics are inherited. Moreover, epigenetics centers on the work of genes, which Lysenko explicitly rejected.

The other reason some Russians are embracing Lysenko is because they have an anti-intellectual and paranoid mindset that sees malevolence behind space programs, vaccines, and genetic modification. In this case, that paranoia is combined with anti-Western sensibilities and serves as another way of coping with Cold War defeat.

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“Another bad creationist” (Evolution denial)

MONKEYMAN

Perhaps the most common misperception about evolution from those who deny it is encapsulated by the question, “If man came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” While memes asking this are a Facebook semi-regular, the dozen or so fulltime professional creationists actually know that evolution does not teach this. On the Answers in Genesis website, Tommy Mitchell wrote, “The evolutionary concept of the origin of humans is not based on humans descending from modern apes but argues that humans and modern apes share a common ancestor.” Similarly, John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research noted that, “Evolutionists insist that both man and the apes came from an ape-like ancestor. Also, evolution does not propose that all members of a type evolved into another type, but that only a small group of individuals, genetically isolated from the others, evolved.”

While Mitchell and Morris disagree with these conclusions, they do acknowledge that these positions accurately reflect what evolution teaches and they stress that the field does not hold that monkeys turned into men. However, they and other Young Earth Creationists ask an equally misinformed question, which could be paraphrased as, “If evolution has been proven, why are there still evolutionary biologists?” They consider the expanding and refining of evolutionary knowledge to be a weakness. As Ken Ham Tweeted, “I’m glad the Bible’s not a textbook like those used in public schools, as it would change all the time.”

That’s because, while Darwin nailed the basics that random mutation and nonrandom natural selection cause species to adapt to their environment and evolve over succeeding generations, his theory has received periodic upgrades. That is consistent with how science works. The finding of transitional fossils, the discovery of DNA, and Mendel’s experiments with heredity helped further our knowledge of evolution. Yet YECs insist the theory’s adaptability and refinement show it to be flawed, and they sometimes dub these changes “Revisionist Darwinism.”

However, the Wright Brothers are not invalidated because today’s jets fly 100 times faster and 5,000 times farther than their original creation. Alexander Graham Bell is not a fraud because we carry a small phone that can perform multitudinous functions, while his bulky stationary contraption served just one purpose. Antibiotics, vaccines, and open-heart surgery should not be avoided as “revisionist medicine” just because physicians once treated patients with trepanation, bloodletting, and homeopathy.

Science is not static, an unbending set or rules, but is the continual search to refine, expand, and yes, revise knowledge. It is an unending cyclical process that is self-correcting and self-criticizing, which invites scrutiny, and which changes when warranted by the evidence.

And this owning up to previous errors is laudable. I wrote a post about the hunt for Bigfoot and included a tidbit that no North American primate fossil has ever been found. A reader pointed out this was in error and she included a link to reputable source, Popular Science. The article quoted a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History as saying a 43 million-year-old primate fossil was discovered in Texas. I thanked the reader for bringing this to my attention. I want all nonsense exposed, even if that nonsense appears on this blog. I have adjusted my thinking with regard to North American primate fossils and will never make this claim again. I will not deny what the paleontologist said, nor declare him corrupt, inept, or a Sasquatch hunter’s shill. I will not posit that he was wrong, then seek out evidence to support this preconceived conclusion.

By contrast, Young Earth Creationism relies on faith and the rejection of facts its proponents find unpleasant. Not only can they not accept evidence that contradicts their religion, they are incapable of incorporating newfound knowledge into their belief system.

Brian Dunning at Skeptoid compared the reactions from biologists and creationists when scientists learned DNA was the genetic material by which inheritance passes from one generation to the next. The response of the former, Dunning wrote, was to welcome and celebrate the news: “The discovery of DNA and the understanding of genetics, unknown in Darwin’s time, was a huge windfall. Whole chapters of proposed mechanisms were thrown out of the evolution textbook, volumes of new chapters were added, and unanswered questions were explained by the thousands. The theory of evolution improved immeasurably. Genetics was the single most important discovery in the history of biology.”

Meanwhile, the creationists fittingly refused to evolve their thinking. Dunning wrote, “Did anyone go back and improve Genesis? Did they add a footnote or a verse to explain how the thing with Adam’s rib worked, given the new understanding of genetics? No. The most important and significant discovery in the history of biology was completely ignored.”

Even though religion is the central feature of their lives, YECs criticize the concept of faith by declaring evolution to be just another belief system. Yet if that were true, things like the DNA discovery that expanded knowledge would be rejected.

YECs confuse faith with trust. Trust is accepting what reputably-sourced, continually proven evidence shows. Faith is believing something regardless of the truth, facts, or proof. Something that one believes on faith could be true, but this truth is not necessary for the belief to continue.

As an example of the difference between trust and faith, Dunning explained why he believes what calculators tell him. These instruments have been so reliable and consistent that he can reasonably trust their conclusions. By contrast, if the calculators’ long-term performance was spotty, Dunning’s uncompromising acceptance of the revealed equation would be faith.

He added that humans used to think Earth was flat and supported on the back of a giant turtle. Scientific breakthroughs have since shown our planet to be round and orbiting a star. Most people accept this, though a few deny it. But some who accept these truths still use the previous delusions regarding Earth’s shape and motion as reasons to reject what biologists teach today.

What science has previously taught should be rejected if the reason for the revision was arrived at through the Scientific Method of observation-hypothesis-prediction-experiment-analysis-interpretation-publication-replication. But it should not be rejected if the reason for doing so is to hold onto an unbending position in order to protect a pet cause.

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“Dead with the water” (Raw water)

WATER

Anti-vaxxers may soon be challenged in their role as the most prominent spreader of preventable diseases. Another science-challenged trend focuses on what adherents call raw water. It is based on the idea that any treatment of H2O is detrimental and that water should be consumed untreated, unsterilized, and unfiltered. And if you don’t live near a river or stream, companies like Live Water and Tourmaline Spring will deliver raw water to you.

The trend is driven in part by distrust of tap water, particularly its fluoridation and the lead pipes which deliver some of it. Proponents also contend that filtration removes beneficial minerals.

The lead pipe issue is the one concern grounded in reality. Flint, Mich., is the most hideous example of what can happen if the problem is inadequately addressed. But better regulation and bottled water would fix this, while raw water would not. Another concern is that water treatment facilities are unable to remove all trace pharmaceuticals, but these levels are so low as to be innocuous. And even if they did pose a danger, that hazard would not be alleviated by raw water, which by nature goes through no treatment process.

Besides these deficiencies, raw water claims are awash, so to speak, in the appeal to nature and antiquity fallacies. The Live Water website boasts, “Earth constantly offers the purest substance on the planet as spring water. We celebrate this ancient life source that humanity flourished from, since the beginning of our existence. We trust it’s perfect just the way it is.”  

The website also recommends consuming the product within one lunar cycle of having purchased it. This is more appeal to nature, for even if drinking the water within 29.5 days was optimal, the company could just say that rather than mentioning the moon and pandering to the nature crowd.

Singh acknowledges that reverse osmosis gets rid of most of the nasty stuff in water, but says it also makes the water “dead.” He fails to explain precisely what that means, but seems to allude that the process robs water of probiotics and beneficial bacteria. He likewise asserts that this good bacteria will kill its bad counterpart. It’s true that good bacteria sometimes vanquishes the bad, but there’s no evidence this is occurring in the raw water being peddled. Besides, bad bacteria is already filtered out in the treated and bottled water Singh is campaigning against.

Which leads to the issue of ingesting harmful bacteria. Drinking raw water could be your chance to be on TV, specifically Monsters Inside Me. Waterborne disease is still rife in some places. Giardia, amoebic dysentery, cholera, hepatitis A, salmonella, shigella, and e. coli caused many deaths before the advent of sewage and water treatment systems. These tragedies continue in the Third World, with its abundant supply of natural, raw water.

Singh and other advocates are correct when they say customers might get more minerals from their product, but those minerals may include arsenic. Flowing spring water, while appearing pristine and pure, will contain animal feces and possibly deadly microbes. Therefore, disinfecting this water if planning to drink it is crucial to preventing the spread of dangerous viruses, bacteria, and parasites. Drinking water in the wild should only be done in a last-ditch effort to avoid dehydration and if doing so, the CDC recommends boiling it first, or if that’s impossible, chemically treating and filtering it.  

Since Singh and other enthusiasts appeal to antiquity, allow me to point out that civilizations have been trying to clean their water for 3,500 years. For instance, the Egyptians and Greeks used charcoal, sunlight, boiling, and straining to try and filter out impurities. Fast forward a few millennium and by the early 20th Century, public water utilities were removing disease-causing microbes via chlorine disinfection. This helped to substantially reduce instances of typhoid and cholera.

While apparently being OK with cholera-causing bacteria in his drinking water, Singh draws the line at fluoride. He asserts without evidence that fluoridation is designed not to fight tooth day, but to accelerate brain decay. Sing told The New York Times, “Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health.” I won’t bother calling him a conspiracy theorist since he took care of that himself. But I will call him the latest in a sad line of anti-science lowlifes that threaten to reverse centuries of progress and knowledge.

  

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“Aye in the sky” (UFO surveillance)

L

Late last year, The New York Times and Politico both published stories confirming that the U.S. government had conducted a long-running, furtive study of unidentified flying objects.

Called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, it collected video and audio recordings of UFO incidents. An anonymous senior intelligence official quoted by Politico revealed that the main reason was to determine if Russia or China was using military technologies the U.S. was still unaware of.

The Times piece included images of a Navy jet being surrounded by a glowing aura that traveled at high speed while rotating. While the preferred inference of some readers was that it was an alien spacecraft, a more terrestrial explanation suffices.

John Lester Miller, who impressively managed to write an entire book on infrared imaging, described what caused the seeming UFO during an interview with Robert Schaeffer of the Bad UFOs blog. Miller explained that the image resulted from a processing byproduct known as ringing:

“When in white hot, you will see that the aura around it is dark and when in black hot, it is brighter than the background. This is the image processing algorithm compensating for the large signal on neighboring pixels where the signal is not there. The algorithm doesn’t know the shape of the object and over-processes the neighboring pixels.” He added this happens when the captured image is of an object over a cold background, which would describe jet engines obscured by high altitude clouds.

The results were also another example of the stagnant quality of UFO imagery. In a world of increasingly vibrant colors, stunning clarity, and 4K ultra-high definition resolution, the standard candid of Invaders From Mars remains blurry photos and shaky, out-of-focus videos.

The program ran from 2007 to 2012 and today one of its researchers, Luis Elizondo, heads an organization dedicated to UFO research. It was his statement to CNN that most got UFO buffs excited. He said, “These aircraft are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory, nor in any foreign inventory that we’re aware of.” These supposed limitations on American technology and our ignorance of other countries’ systems were extrapolated by Elizonda into a personal belief that it counts as evidence of alien visitation.

But Dave Mosher of Business Insider interviewed Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, who took a more measured approach. Certainly the military wants to know what’s going on when it sees aircraft above its airspace it can’t identify. But that doesn’t equate it to being Zontar, the Thing From Venus.

Probably the most sizable obstacle to overcome would be distance. If one could devise a spacecraft that could get to the moon in an hour, this ultra-swift mode of cosmic transport would need to maintain this pace for 27 years to reach Neptune and for nearly three millennium to reach the next closest solar system. This hypothetical journey also assumes managing the logistics of repair, refueling, medicine, and food, all while avoiding the perils of deep space.

Shostak said there are about 1,400 solar systems within 50 light years of us Earthlings. This seems to offer plenty of opportunities for the construction of flying saucers or wormhole-threading devices, but the number is actually quite tiny when thinking about one of them being advanced enough to visit us. These systems could house microbial life, which if found, would be the biggest science story of the 21st Century. But that find would have no bearing on supposed UFOs. Discovering the rough equivalent of a goat on an exoplanet would be more noteworthy and carry more profound consequences, but it would still not explain glowing aerial orbs. And even a civilization advanced as what Earth will be in 4018 would likely be insufficient to manage this interplanetary journey.

Of course, there could be a super-advanced civilization that has managed warp speed travel. And maybe even a civilization still more super-advanced which has attained beyond warp speed travel. And everyone except you could be a hologram, but until evidence surfaces indicating this, that notion should be dismissed, as should these sci-fi transportation scenarios.

Furthermore, these supposed travels would seem to be serving little point. They do not involve the mid-20th Century Hollywood staple of requesting an audience with our leader. The landings are in the Nevada desert or on a remote hilltop, never in Times Square. While there are alleged eyewitnesses that board these crafts, no souvenirs are collected, no clear imagery of the visit is obtained, and no goodwill ambassador stays behind.

So these interplanetary interlopers travel all this way and are content to flatten crops, maintain an extensive rectal probing program, and make cameos in wobbly cellphone videos. Some extreme believers say aliens are with us in disguise and are interbreeding with humans while taking the form of shape-shifting reptilians who occupy executive leadership and high government positions. They makes these extraordinary claims without satisfying Carl Sagan’s stipulation that they be accompanied by extraordinary evidence.

These claims are also a reflection of the times. There were no reports of these close encounters by contemporaries of Socrates, Leif Ericson, or Jane Austen because the idea in those eras would have been so absurd no one would have ever dreamt it. Only with the advent or rocket technology and the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne did the notion of interstellar travel come along, and with it, the idea of trips coming from the other direction.

Shostak rejects the notion that the most recent video equates to proof that these trips have been made. He said 90 percent of sightings can be identified and he told Mosher they usually involve “issues with camera hardware, unfamiliar optical effects, atmospheric phenomena, bright stars and planets, and the presence of unmanned aerial vehicles.”

The other 10 percent are of undermined origin, meaning that they are unexplained, not that the explanation is extraterrestrial. To make the E.T. deduction is to commit a logical fallacy by claiming that absence of evidence equals evidence of absence. Specifically in this case, the assertion is that since the flying object cannot be explained terrestrially, that means it must have come from outer space. This is not a sound conclusion. For one, it fails to consider that the object may have come from inside a hollow Earth. 

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“Code violation” (Voynich manuscript)

KLINGHOB

The Voynich manuscript is a book with lavish illustrations, beautiful calligraphy, and not one word that has made sense to anyone since the 1400s, if then. Its 240 pages are written in an alphabet and language unknown to ever exist anywhere outside its pages.

The book is also noted for its detailed drawings of plants and flowers which nobody has been able to identify and which likely arose from the author’s imagination. The work additionally features astrological drawings, circular and concentric diagrams, and sketches of naked women dancing poolside.

As to what it all means, there have been many hypotheses, none convincing. My impromptu idea of it being an early version of wingdings, a notion that came to me while writing this sentence, has about as much validity as some of the speculations.

Many persons believe it’s written in code, but efforts to decipher it have failed. Some think it’s an artificial language, which is one that is deliberately created in a relatively short time by a few people, rather than evolving from a parent language over centuries while borrowing from other tongues. Examples of constructed languages include Esperanto, Klingon, and Tolkien’s Elvish vocabulary. This idea seems the most likely to me, but it raises the question as to the purpose behind producing it. Esperanto’s creator said his goal was to enable communication between persons of any nationality. Klingon and Middle Earth speak are appealing to specific geek categories. But the incentive behind artificially constructing the Voynich language, if that’s what was done, is long lost to history.

Some have speculated the manuscript is meant to be used with a Cardan Grille, a hole-filled paper the reader uses as an overlay to reveal the letters meant to be read. However, this is very unlikely, as none of the letters have ever been shown to be anything other than an invention of the author.

Since the pages feature no edit marks or corrections, many assume the Voynich manuscript is a copy or a final revision. This seems logical, but there could be another reason for the lack of editing: An author writing in a language that didn’t exist would be incapable of grammatical errors.

Whatever it means, if anything, it was likely written by an accomplished linguist. Extensive computational analysis has been repeatedly performed and the manuscript has been compared to many languages. No translation has resulted, but researchers have deduced that letter frequency, word frequency, and word length are all similar to verified languages. Further, patterns of word usage and word relationships unique to each of the manuscript’s six sections have been detected.

One nefarious possibility is that whoever wrote the manuscript had the same incentive as did Joseph Smith when translating golden plates, Catholic priests when speaking Latin to parishioners who couldn’t understand it, and psychics relating their vision. In these cases, the speakers are the only ones who know what they are revealing, so they can never be disproven. They have secret knowledge that only they can impart, interpret, and explain – all for a price. Similarly, the Voynich author may have used his work in an attempt to demonstrate that he alone possessed valuable insight that could be shared in return for glory, gold coins, and an exalted position.

This fall, artist and historian Nicholas Gibbs made the latest claim that purported to solve the mystery, though really he just sought to replace one mystery with another. He asserted that each letter in the manuscript is an abbreviation. Exactly what each letter is supposed to be short for is unexplained, except for two lines he allegedly translated. 

His conclusion falls flat upon cursory scrutiny. First, there is no peer review. Gibbs presented his solution not to a linguistics journal, but as a guest piece in the Times Literary Supplement. Bypassing peer review and takings one’s claims straight to the public is a pseudoscience giveaway.

Second, Gibbs wrote that he was tasked to concoct a solution by a television network (unnamed, but likely the “History” Channel). This means that his conclusion was the result of solo work done in a relatively short period, rather than being the culmination of lengthy scholarly study and corroboration with experts in linguistics and anthropology.   

There is another reason to doubt his conclusions. One would be hard-pressed to imagine a writer penning a book that no one could ever read. Even the author himself could forget what each letter was supposed to stand for. And as we saw earlier, the fabricated language of the Voynich manuscript features letter frequency, word length, and word frequency that are similar to known languages. These distinctions would be extraordinarily unlikely to have resulted if the work was what Gibbs described.

Next, he purports these abbreviations are code talk for medicinal recipes, yet he “decodes” just .001 percent of the text. And his interpretation is likely the result of having seen drawings of plants rather than his having thoughtfully analyzed the text.

Finally, while these “decoded” lines are supposedly herbal cures, Gibbs offered no translation for any words in the manuscript to represent illnesses or plants. His explanation for this is that there was an index where this information was included, but that the index has been lost. Joseph Smith would be proud.

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“Down in the dumps” (Colon cleansers)

PAPER

We regularly brush our teeth, wash our hands, and shampoo our hair, so some advocates consider it a natural extension of hygienic protocol to frequently clean our colons as well. They further assert that the colon’s (obviously relative) cleanliness can be determined by the length, color, texture, buoyancy, and aroma of one’s toilet deposits.

This isn’t a subject I want to spend a whole lot of time contemplating, so I will rely heavily on the surgeon blogger Orac. He wrote that what proponents call the sign of a healthy colon may in fact be describing the opposite.

First, he explained, excrement shouldn’t be floating: “If your stool floats, it may have too much fat in it, which may mean that you’re not absorbing enough fat, which can be a sign of various diseases. It could also mean that you’re not absorbing the nutrients other than fat in your food, thus letting more nutrient- or fat-rich material reach the colon, where bacteria feast on it, producing gas bubbles in the stool. These gas bubbles make the stool more likely to float.” As to the color, even small amounts of red meat consumption will see a resultant dark brown dump. If it’s too light, Orac says, it could be the result of liver or pancreatic disease.

In the interest of equal time, here is some input from dayspaandcolonicctr.com, a proponent of keeping one’s colon clean, fresh, and sparkly: “If you’re not eliminating approximately the same amount that you are eating, the accumulation of old, hardened feces sticks to the colon walls, inhibiting its proper function of absorbing the remaining nutrients from the fecal matter. It is forced to absorb toxins from the build-up and from the parasites that make this debris their breeding ground.”

The silliest part of this screed is that if a diner eliminated all that he or she ate, nothing would be stored for energy, sustenance, or nutrition. Secondly, as is almost always the case with alt-med detoxing products, there are no specifics on which toxins are being removed or how the product is managing this.

Some websites go even further and claim that EVERY chronic disease is due to “bacterial poisons absorbed from the intestine.” But the winning entrant in this hyperbole competition still goes to dayspaandcolonicctr.com, which writes that a colon left to fend for itself will “distill the poisons of decay, fermentation and putrefaction into the blood, poisoning the brain and nervous system so that we become mentally depressed and irritable; it will poison the heart so that we are weak and listless; poisons the lungs so that the breath is foul; poisons the digestive organs so that we are distressed and bloated; and poisons the blood so that the skin is sallow and unhealthy; dull eyes and a sluggish brain overtake us; the pleasure of living is gone.”

The truth is, the stuff that tumbles out of us is leaving the body because it’s time for it to go, which means the colon and other organs are doing their jobs. Even if the colon cleansers worked as advertised, there is no benefit to increased bathroom visits by persons not constipated.

These products also boast about getting rid of bacteria, but regular bowel movements will manage that just fine. On a related note, bacteria has a poor PR department. Some bacteria, such as e. coli, are harmful to humans (although none of those will be impacted by colon cleansings). Then there are bacteria that have a neutral impact on humans and others that are beneficial, such as bacteroides thetaiotamicron, which breaks down plant food molecules and aids in digestion.

While there are parasitic diseases of the colon, they are rare in the Western world and even if one contracts them here, colon cleansers again won’t help. Only drugs specifically made to kill these parasites will be effective.

As with nearly 100 percent of alt-med products, colon cleansers come with anecdotes and photos a plenty, but no double blind studies. The associated pictures feature what are touted as the result of successful colon cleanses. One of the claims is that bentonite clay is responsible for rope-like stools that are touted as evidence of a poisoned colon being cleared. However, Orac writes that this shit happens, so to speak, when gastrointestinal tract liquid mixes with psyllium in the colon cleanser. In other words, the ropelike stool isn’t the result of an ignored colon, it’s the result of the product that is allegedly treating the condition.  

As to the assertions that rotting feces stuck inside us will poison the body, fuel disease, and damage organs, Orac writes this is true only in rare cases, cases in which the cause is something other than an ignored colon. Persons in these conditions need to see an ER physician or proctologist rather than quaffing colon-cleansing pills, powders, and oils.

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“A suspicion of clouds” (Chemtrails, climate change denial)

CHEMGRAM

The rejection of science fact and the embrace of science fiction is perhaps best encapsulated by those persons who think manmade climate change is a hoax while believing that chemtrails are real.

First, let’s deal with anthropogenic global warming. I have seen Sean Hannity and others challenge climate change believers on exactly what percentage of global warming it is that humans are responsible for. While not responding directly to that challenge, Brian Dunning penned an excellent piece for Skeptoid which showed how simple observation reveals that average annual global temperature is rising and that human activity is the overwhelming reason why. He noted this can be done without use of “climate models, politics, predictions, economics, or how many scientists agree.”

The key point is that CO2 levels are rising as the result of human activity. From here, it gets a little more technical, but stay with me. Carbon dating is done by comparing the amounts of carbon-12 and carbon-14 in a sample. When organisms die, carbon-14 decays and no new carbon-14 comes in. This means eventually only carbon-12 remains. Fossil fuels come from plants that died millions of years ago so they have no carbon-14. Hence, the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels contains only carbon-12.

The one natural source of carbon-12 is volcanoes and volcanologists measure their output and know that each year, worldwide volcanic activity contributes about 200 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. This accounts for .006 percent of the 29 billion tons of carbon-12 that enters our atmosphere each year. The only source for the other 99.994 percent is fossil fuel burned by humans. So when observers carbon date the CO2 in the atmosphere, it reveals precisely how much of it comes from people burning fossil fuels. Oceans and plants can only absorb about half of that 29 billion tons, with the rest ending up on our atmosphere, where it remains.

Now we will address how we know that those 14.5 billion tons of carbon-12 is causing an increase in average global temperature. There are five gases that are primarily responsible for the greenhouse effect: CO2, methane, water vapor, nitrous oxide, and ozone. Through a method called spectroscopy, observers can measure how much of these are present. Earth’s surface is warmed by the sun and our planet emits that same heat back as infrared radiation. When aiming a spectrometer skyward, observers see peaks and valleys in the infrared spectrum and can determine which greenhouse gases are trapping Earth’s radioactive heat. This method provides clear evidence that excess heat energy is being trapped in our atmosphere because of increased CO2, which we saw earlier is the result of humans burning fossil fuels.

Those who dismiss AGW are denying what scientists are able to see through their analysis of carbon dating and spectroscopy. Meanwhile, some of those same persons say that what is really dangerous for the planet and its inhabitants are strings of fluffy white smoke.

They are convinced that harmless water vapor left in the wake of flying aircraft is a weaponized agent that will do something nefarious, though it’s not agreed on precisely what that is. Speculation includes poisoning, sterilization, mind control, and unleashing tornadoes. Believers will often point to geoengineering, cloud seeding, or attempts to control the weather, all of which have happened, but are unrelated to airplane exhaust. All this was explained in a pair of Washington Post essays by Matthew Cappucci and Dennis Mersereau.

Like the current warming trend, contrails are man-made. They are clouds that form under ordinary environmental conditions and follow the physical processes that occur with any other cloud. In the specific case of contrails, they form when hot, moist aircraft exhaust condenses after coming into contract with extremely cold temperatures in the upper atmosphere. A long, narrow cloud results.    

There is usually little water vapor present because air’s ability to hold moisture wanes as the temperature drops, and temperatures at this altitude are around minus -40 Fahrenheit (which is also -40 Celsius, I’ve always liked that). Cappucci wrote that despite those frigid numbers, water vapor remains a gas or liquid and does not become ice because water must have something to latch onto in order to become an ice crystal. He further explained, “When the airplanes emit aerosols, sulfates, soot, carbon dioxide, hydrocarbons, water vapor, and so on, the particles in its wake can serve as the nuclei for cooled water droplets and vapor to condense and freeze on,” and a contrail is born.

There is variety in the contrail family and some paranoids say these differences distinguish contrails from chemtrails. Believers concede that some airplane exhaust is harmless but insist that at other times airplane emissions represent the deliberate sabotaging of our lungs and minds. As this has zero evidence in reality, there are differing assertions as to which is the key factor that gives away chemtrails. Some say duration determines it, some say thickness, and others go with color. But science explains why all these ideas are mistaken.

Altitude and the air’s wetness determine how long contrails are. If an airplane is flying through wet air, it leaves a contrail; if it is flying in dry air, it does not. Airplanes that appear to be at the same height from ground level may actually be 5,000 feet or more apart in terms of altitude. Chemtrail detectives love to show an airplane leaving little or no contrail, while another plane in the same frame is bellowing out a lengthy cloud, but this is the result of altitude and air conditions, not because government agents are dispatching death from above.

With regard to duration, how long contrails last depends on the humidity level and how favorable the atmosphere is for sustaining them. These are the same factors that help determine whether a day is cloudy or sunny.  

As for their color, the key elements are the contrails’ height and the planet’s curvature (convincing Flat Earth chemtrailers is an especially challenging undertaking). Contrails are dispatched at nearly 40,000 feet and when natural clouds closer to the ground look dark in the waning daylight, contrails will still glow for a few minutes after sundown. Also, when an airplane flies directly away from a setting or rising sun, a contrail may block out much of the sun and this gives the contrail a blackened appearance.

Another reason to discount the chemtrails conspiracy theory relates to an airplane’s travel weight. Mersereau noted that a fully-loaded 747 flying from London to Hong Kong would require almost 60,000 gallons of fuel. That would weigh nearly 200 tons and along with passengers, cargo, and luggage, would leave precious little room for weapons in a mind control program.

As to all this, one Post reader umed, “What a joke. Our government has been involved in weather modification since the 1940s. Do a little research.”

The U.S. government may have made previous attempts at weather modification but there is no connection between that and airplane exhaust. And by research, the reader does not mean retreating to one’s laboratory, employing the Scientific Method, and submitting results for peer review. He is talking about clicking on the YouTube link he provided.