Ancient cultures have produced amazing works, such as the Moai, Pyramids, and Hanging Gardens. Since we don’t know for sure how they managed this, there are some who use this uncertainty for negative evidence that aliens did it. At the other end of the spectrum are those who interpret seeming anachronisms as evidence of innovation among long-ago peoples.

In 1961 a trio of California rock hounds found a specimen whose innards contained a heavily-encrusted metallic object. The discoverers pronounced it to be a spark plug encased in a geode. The inner object was said to be 500,000 years old, which would drastically alter automotive history’s timeline. This mystery find was dubbed the Coso Artifact.

Investigation showed it to indeed be a spark plug, but the geode portion is where the claim fell apart. The website rocksandminerals4u describes a geode as the Tootsie Roll Pop of the geology world. They are hollowed rocks, in the middle of which awaits a surprise, usually quartz. Geodes have thin shells on the outside and crystals on the inside, distinctions nowhere to be found in the Coso Artifact.

Investigators Pierre Tromberg and Paul Heinrich determined that the object became encased in a concretion  of iron, which was caused by the rusting of the spark plug. Still, Tromberg and Heinrich did verify an outstanding claim, confirming that there is something called the Spark Club Collectors of America. These enthusiasts of electric current delivery systems found the plug to be a 1920s Champion version that was used in Model T engines.

Overexcitement led to this archeological misfire, whereas our next object was more a result of pareidolia. Klerksdorp spheres are small objects who believers think could only have been manufactured by intelligent beings. They are buried deep enough under Earth that their creators would had to have lived millions of years ago.

Indeed, the spheres appear manufactured and symmetrical, and even include nearly-perfect grooves that would seem to suggest coming from a factory.  However, they are the result of the normal sedimentary process. Klerksdorp spheres began as concretions that formed in volcanic sediment or ash, and this formation also caused the grooves to form. This is because the concretion is harder than the material it forms around, so that when softer material erodes, the imprint remains.

From possibly genuine, albeit amateur mistakes, we move to outright fraud. Ica Stones vary in size from a pebble to a boulder, but are usually about the size of an arrowhead. They have been superficially scratched to show images of spaceships, humans walking with dinosaurs, and advanced surgery techniques.

Like most manufactured mysteries, the precise beginnings of the Ica Stones is unknown, but we do know when they became objects of mass curiosity. They had been presented as merely pieces of artwork until Dr. Javier Darquea received one for his birthday. He sought more, and Peruvian street merchants were happy to have a wealthy new customer. He collected as many as he could and created a museum based around them, cataloging the Stones and touting them as a window to an ancient enlightened culture. He made no attempt to verify their origin or the artist’s intent. The Stones were not carved, but only had a surface layer of oxidation scraped off, showing the creations were not ancient. What the images lacked in authenticity, they made up for in suppleness, appealing to believers in ancient astronauts, creationism, and Atlantis.

Long before it became a perpetual war zone, Baghdad was home to a wealth of archeological and cultural artifacts. Many of these were housed in the National Museum of Iraq, where Wilhelm Konig worked. He was a painter, not a scientist, which partly explains how he deduced that a ceramic pot housing a copper tube and an iron bar was a battery, about 2,000 years before these were known to exist. While no one knows for sure, this object was likely a clay jar that stored papyrus scrolls. Even if it was something else, there’s no reason to think it was a Mesopotamian alkaline. For the copper tube is insulated from both the iron bar and the outside, meaning no circuit is being made.

In all these instances, the anomalous nature of a highly-advanced technology coming from an otherwise unknown culture speaks to its improbability. The sudden leap in knowledge is another giveaway. In the first three examples, we aren’t even told who these people were. They made a lone, highly innovative contribution, then disappeared. They left us no burial mounds, archeological evidence, artwork, memorials, monuments, maps, written histories, or other sign of their existence. They managed medical, transportation, or manufacturing abilities that would not otherwise be seen for a thousand or a million years. Yet they were incapable of documenting any of this, save for one culture that managed to archive it by mastering  the art of doodling on a pebble.

Pitching for the 1890 Boston Beaneaters seems a rather excellent thing to do. Still better is starting a flight magazine in 1908. Alas, these two career highlights are but blips in the otherwise vain, ridiculous life of Alfred Lawson.

He left his sport and aviation pursuits behind to dream up an idea that tied everything together. And I’m not talking some piffling, particle physics-only version, but a theory of EVERYTHING that would solve all problems of governance, economics, morality, and science. His self-importance extended to his naming this panacea Lawsonomy.

He claimed his ideas could lead to a lifespan of 200 years. He seems to have taken this secret to his grave, which was dug well short of his two-century mark. He primarily promoted a form of alternative physics, whose main tenet was “penetrability,” which held that objects can only penetrate other objects if their densities were different. From there, he segued into “suction and pressure,” which he meant to supplant the Law of Gravity. He wrote, “No electron, atom, molecule, Earthly formation, or cosmic formation, however large or small, could move at all except by, or through the agency of currents caused by Suction and Pressure.”

He delved into this and other principles in dozens of books, which he had ample time to write, since he never executed his ideas, tested them in the lab, or applied them to scientific pursuits. He invented his own terminology, which made readers even more confused, and he never attempted to provide evidence for his claims. In fact, his 50-plus volumes of work may constitute the most exhaustive case of Begging the Question in logical fallacy history. Rather than explaining his ideas or relating an experiment, he meanders off into something different, then comes halfway back, then abandons it entirely for another tangent. This goes on page after page, chapter after chapter, book after book.

Some other dandy tidbits: He dunked his head in ice water to stimulate brain cells; He espoused an extreme form of reincarnation if which all entities, even nonliving inanimate objects, come back as something else. He claimed that planets eat, with the North Pole being Earth’s mouth, and the South Pole being its other end.

Lawsonomy features one of the lesser-seen pseudoscience signs, the idea that we are almost there on the all-time breakthrough, if only others would do their part to promote it. To get this going, Lawson started the University of Lawsonomy, which never consisted of more than a rural home, and today exists solely as an extremely threadbare website, lawsonomy.org.

When the didactic route didn’t work, he tried making Lawsonomoy a religion, figuring the faithful would more readily swallow the unproven and unprovable. He had the right idea, but blew it by stipulating a 30-year course of study. People want cheap, easy answers, but they want them now. To do this successfully, you have to sell an elementary idea up front, then keep coming up with new reasons for followers to come back. That’s how Scientology and Transcendental Meditation operate.

Whether at his university or church, followers were subjected to this type of unfounded assertion: “Earth is not a solid ball but a network of constructive cells with power of expansion and contraction which hold together and brace it so that pressure from without cannot crush it nor pressure from within explode it.”

He didn’t limit his unsubstantiated ideas to large bodies. He believed in mental microscopic organisms, themselves made up of other mental microscopic organisms, that “supervise the building up and tearing down of material things by the power of suction and pressure.” He gave these organisms names that would have been at home in a 1950s sci fi movie: Menorgs. These Menorgs are responsible for the existence of heavenly bodies and the species which inhabit them. It was sort of a precursor to today’s Intelligent Design movement, except that he wrote his creation tale.

In this Menorg-created universe, there are no light waves or sound waves. Rather, light, heat, sound, all substances, and even our thoughts are drawn to matter by suction, or pushed away from it by pressure.

Atoms are said to eat, have bodily functions, and operate on Lawsonian principles, which means among other things that they have no energy. While Lawson never tested any of his notions, this particular theory was forcefully falsified at Hiroshima.

When Lyall Watson and fellow researchers introduced sweet potatoes to macaque monkeys in the 1950s, one of the younger primates took to washing the vegetables in the ocean. This habit eventually caught on with most of the troop, either through observation or teaching.

There were a couple of distinguishing features about this. First, it was a rare case of the young teaching the old, sort of like when middle schoolers explain the latest computer innovation to their grandparents. Secondly, the oldest members of the troop tended to never pick up the practice. These distinctions could have been the starting point for legitimate study on how groups learn new techniques. Instead, Watson went with the hypothesis that once a certain number of monkeys began washing the sweet potatoes, their kin on nearby Japanese islands began tater-dipping in a cosmic transference of food sanitation protocol. But the only group consciousness demonstrated was by the credulous listeners who lapped up this notion of a spontaneous leap of collective ability once critical mass was reached.

Of course, merely ridiculing this idea is not a valid strike against it; that needs to come from a scientific angle. This was most thoroughly achieved by Ron Amundson in an article for Skeptical Inquirer. He perused five papers Watson and his associates had written on their experiences, and found Watson failed to even attempt the first step in the scientific process, defining the question. He also learned that the papers were in conflict with each other and were inconsistent with claims Watson had made in public. His own sources were contradicting him. In speeches and before reporters, Watson declared that in one spectacular instant, any monkey in the troop who hadn’t washed potatoes suddenly acquired the ability. Even more amazing, monkeys on nearby islands also gained the skill. But the reports written at the time revealed a slower, gradual increase.

This makes for one of the stranger tales in pseudoscience history. Usually the perpetrator will coin some silly term or act evasively when defending his work. Instead, Watson readily admitted to patching his hypotheses together with third-hand reports, constructed memories, and folklore. He conceded Amundson was right when he accused Watson of basing his conclusions on undocumented conversations, improvisations, and intuition. And while most pseudoscientists are hostile to criticism Watson wrote, “I accept Amundson’s analysis of the origin and evolution of the Hundredth Monkey without reservation. It is a metaphor of my own making, based as he rightly suggests, on very slim evidence and a great deal of hearsay.”

The next logical words from Watson’s mouth should have been the ones fully rejecting his original hypothesis. Instead, he said, “I still think it’s a good idea.” Well, he can think it without it being true. And a critical mass of people can think it without it being true, which contradicts the whole idea.

After poring over the documentation, Amundson pieced together what really happened. Relatively young monkeys saw the benefit of washing the sweet potatoes and this method was passed onto still younger members of the troop through observation or tutoring. Older monkeys mostly did not gain the skill. As the older monkeys died and more monkeys were born, the percentage of the troop that washed the potatoes grew. After nine years, all monkeys in the troop were doing it. No sudden increase in the ability occurred and there was certainly no indication of knowledge transference through psychic means.

Since the proposed Hundredth Monkey Effect bypassed the Scientific Method, it was a nonstarter among zoologists. But it was happily embraced by those in the New Age movement who were unburdened by the need for an explanation of how things work.

Ken Keyes Jr. pushed the idea that we should think peacefully in order to avoid nuclear war, a notion whose nobleness is outweighed by its implausibility. And as psychologist Maureen O’Hara observed, what would be the point of activism regarding nuclear disarmament or any other issue when it’s more efficient to silently dwell on it?

Meanwhile, Rupert Sheldrake cited the Hundredth Monkey Effect as evidence of morphic fields. He never quite explains what these fields are, but they seem to be a railway network of memories and animal telepathy that people can draw from, be it to gain strength, to have clearer insight, or to bolster a pseudoscientific notion of psychic primates. Others considered the Effect to be validation of Carl Jung’s theory of collective unconscious.

The website mindopenerz.com goes a little further and asserts it is evidence of a collective consciousness: “The monkeys across the other islands started washing their potatoes in the ocean as well as if it was understood on a higher level of consciousness. This brings to light the idea of a Collective Consciousness, where as if only a few individuals know a new idea, it remains the conscious property of all.”

Meanwhile, spiritualdynamics.net informs us that, “When enough people’s primary attention becomes focused through their heart chakras, the hundredth monkey effect will occur.”

If you still haven’t met your daily quota of begging the question examples, here’s another: “The mechanism for this transference of ideas works the same way for monkeys as it does for all sentient beings. We exist within a global atmosphere of consciousness.”

The website references what it considers an example of the Effect. In 1941, Les Paul and Leo Fender independently invented a solid-body electric guitar, a form of the six-string which had never been produced. According to the site, this is the Hundredth Monkey Effect in action.

However, per the Effect, there should have been many more than two people perfecting this instrument innovation simultaneously. In truth, this occurrence requires only a mundane explanation. By 1941, guitars had evolved to the point where what Paul and Fender did would have been a next logical step, especially when being conceived by musical geniuses whose careers were dedicated to the very idea improving this instrument.

Because potato washing was observed on different islands, Watson inferred that it had traveled in some paranormal way from one location to another. But independent innovation is not unusual among a species whose members are spread out. It’s similar to backyard basketballers deciding to play PIG without realizing that many others have previously come up with this shortened version of HORSE.

Watson’s ideas are more akin to those embraced by believers in ancient aliens, Zermatism, and similar notions, where alleged patterns are said to indicate a common mysterious teacher. Macaque monkeys didn’t even have potatoes to wash before 1952, when provisioning began. Within 10 years, monkeys on at least five islands had learned to wash them. This indicates a similar level of ingenuity one would expect among members of the same species, as opposed to being proof of a magic monkey mind meld.