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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:10
BR: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is Episode 82. I am your host, Ben Radford.

Celestia Ward: And I’m Celestia Ward. And Pascual will be with us for bits and pieces of this episode. We recorded it a little earlier, and he had to kind of pop in and pop out. So you’ll hear him occasionally, almost like a mischievous poltergeist. He’ll pop in and make himself known and then you won’t hear from him for a while.

0:01:02
BR: Yeah, like, who’s the the great Gazoo? Didn’t didn’t he pop in and out in the Flintstones canon?

0:01:08
CW: You’re going back before my time, Ben.

0:01:11
BR: Wow, thanks.

0:01:13
CW: I’m not into the early Hanna-Barbera.

0:01:15
BR: So this week we’ll be sort of doing a grab bag, a look back at 2018. We’re recording this actually on New Year’s Eve, a few hours away from 2019, and we thought that we would take a bit of a look back on the year that was and the year that wasn’t, and the year that was overstated in some ways.

0:01:33
CW: Way to go, Ben, letting everybody know how pathetic our social lives are that on New Year’s Eve, we’re sitting here recording an intro and an outro to a podcast.

0:01:41
BR: Well, yeah, but you know, we do it because because of all the love that we get from all listeners and the donors and the people that write to us and they write these heartfelt letters.

0:01:52
CW: You have a good point. Thank you, listeners.

BR: Yes, thank you very much.

CW: We’re doing it all for you. We hope you guys are having a great New Year’s Eve and hopefully you can remember everything on New Year’s Day. Now this episode will be a little bit jarring. It will be a wild Mr. Toad’s ride through topic after topic after topic. But you know, you’ll get the gist of things. It’s a grab bag. So it’s all over the place.

0:02:16
BR: Keep up with us, folks. Keep up. We’re going fast.

0:02:19
CW: But before we get started, speaking of holidays, I wanted to thank Kenny Biddle for sending all three of us one of the coolest Christmas presents I’ve ever gotten. It’s it’s the first time I’ve gotten anything with a curse on it.

0:02:32
BR: Yeah, I was I was tickled when I first got it. Yes. Thanks, Kenny. So for the listeners who weren’t lucky enough to have friends like Kenny, why don’t you why don’t you describe it?

CW: Well, I got a rock. I opened up a package from Ben and inside of it was a thing that Kenny had sent all three of us via Ben and it was a rock and not like a lump of coal like you would expect Santa to give me but a nice little beige rock from the Bell Witch Cave and he had visited there and he had he had to completely disobeyed orders and collected some items from the Bell Witch Cave because anything you take from there is said to be said to hold a curse and it apparently anybody who takes stuff will immediately want to return it. So we’re going to put that to the test.

0:03:21
BR: Absolutely. That’s very cool. I was at the Bell Witch Cave one time. It was shortly before a conference in Nashville and Blake Smith and I took a quick road trip to the Bell Witch Cave and then we rushed back. I made it with seconds to spare on stage, but it was very cool. I did not brave taking a rock from the cave. So that’s something that Kenny did. And I’m just hoping that, you know, that the doom won’t befall us all.

0:03:51
CW: Yeah, I’ve got a newborn. I can handle whatever doom throws at me. All right. And with that said, let’s head into the podcast.

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BR: This is a sort of grab bag wrap up review. I know there’s it’s there’s reviews spelled two different ways. I think one way is like a showbiz way. One is just sort of normal way. So take whichever one you want.

0:04:28
CW: None of us are getting topless for this, so it’s the other kind of review. Grab bag, potpourri, smorgasbord. And you know, people have liked these kinds of episodes. We’ve done a couple of them in the past and they’ve actually ended up our more downloaded episode when we just jump around and do a bunch of different topics.

0:04:44
BR: You mean we’ve gotten fewer complaints than usual? About those?

0:04:47
CW: Yeah, yeah, exactly, yes. So Ben, is there anything you’re skeptical of this week?

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0:04:52
BR: Yes, I had a strange experience last week. I met honest to goodness Flat Earther. Yeah, it was an odd experience. As you know, I’ve met many, many people who believe in conspiracy theories and chupacabras and ghosts and Bigfoot. There’s no shortage of believers that you come across, but I think this is either the first or second genuine flat earther. He was a guest at the NMSR, which is the New Mexico for Science and Reason, the New Mexico chapter of the Skeptics Group.

0:05:39
CW: Did he find his way there accidentally? What was a guy like that doing there?

0:05:45
BR: Well I think he used GPS using geosynchronous orbits but maybe not. My understanding is that he was invited by the president, a friend of mine, a friend of the podcast, Dave Thomas, who is a physicist and has done all sorts of great work on everything from Roswell to the Bible code, etc. As I understand it, Dave and this guy, I think his name is Bruce Lacy, as many arguments start this began on Facebook and social media. And at some point Dave said, well, Mr. Flat Earther, you seem to be pretty sure in your convictions. You are here in Albuquerque, would you like to come and explain to our skeptics group exactly what your beliefs are? And to his credit, he showed up and he gave an hour and change presentation.

0:06:37
CW: Okay.

0:06:38
PR: Wow. How did that go?

0:06:41
BR: Well it was interesting. You know, I wasn’t really quite sure what to expect, as is often the case when you’re dealing with conspiracy theorists, because of course, Flat Earthers, that’s what that is, it’s a conspiracy. A lot of times, there’s very much a grab bag, sort of the kitchen sink, so he’s thrown in 9-11, and he’s thrown in Hollow Earth, and he’s thrown in, we didn’t land on the moon.

0:07:08
CW: Big Pharma, everything’s out to get you, yeah.

0:07:11
BR: Yeah, I mean, so it wasn’t quite that bad, but it was somewhat disjointed. And he used words like, publicated, which I think he meant published. He misspelled Einstein on a slide or two, but whatever, these things happen. But overall, I mean, it was interesting insofar as we got a chance to sort of see somebody who was up there giving his talk and stuff. And everyone was very respectful, but things got a little heated after his presentation because at that point Dave Thomas got up and being a physicist and having astronomers in the room, he sort of proceeded to in many ways debunk many of the claims. And this guy Bruce, he was a little bit agitated. There were some profanities going back and forth, but nobody, no one came to blows. But it was interesting and it was clear that Bruce was a bit out of his depth. A lot of the arguments that Dave was making were very science-based. And that was fine, but Bruce wasn’t really using science that much. So that’s what happened.

0:08:17
CW: So would you say overall, Ben, that his presentation sort of fell flat?

0:08:21
BR: Oh, where’s the sad trombone? It was interesting. I mean again, it was – I think it’s always important to hear these people out and to go to where they are in the world and what they’re thinking about. So you can actually learn quite a bit by actually meeting people who really believe in ghosts and people who really believe they’re psychic and so on. So it was certainly useful for understanding their positions. As someone once said, a person who doesn’t understand the other person’s arguments doesn’t really understand their own.

0:08:55
CW: Yeah, good point. And as Mick West told us when he was on, that was one of my favorite episodes, by the way, conspiracy belief is more rampant than we might think. conspiracies like vaccine denial and JFK assassination conspiracies or 9-11 trutherism, then we’re more and more we’re isolating ourselves from a majority of the population sometimes.

0:09:28
BR: That’s true. And again, he just I mean, Bruce was interesting and he was very animated, but he just was all over the map. You would ask him very simple, straightforward, non-hostile questions. For example, I asked him, well, what about, what about during eclipses? I mean, you can, you can literally see the curve of the earth against the moon. And I was like, I’m not, I’m not criticizing him. She’s talking about how do you explain eclipses? And he started talking about, uh, he, he invoked Hindu mythology.

CW: Okay.

0:09:58
BR: Yeah. And I’m like, let me just make sure I understand you correctly. I don’t want to misunderstand or mischaracterize. You’re saying that some figures out of Hindu mythology create eclipses and then they disappear the rest of the year. He’s like, well, yeah, it’s like, OK, I think we’re done here.

CW: Yeah, you don’t really have a place to go after that.

0:10:16
BR: But anyway, it was it was interesting. And maybe at some point I’ll write up a piece on that.

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0:10:20
CW: Well, my first topic that I found for our grab bag today was actually something that happened in December, fairly recently here, but it caught my eye because it went all over All over the news, The Guardian, Vice, USA Today, a bunch of places reported on this. And it’s about Boris the Robot. Do you recall hearing about Boris the Robot, Ben?

0:10:58
BR: Vaguely, vaguely. Boris, like the Rocky and Bullwinkle, there’s the…

CW: No, not the spy.

BR: That’s… those are the main… and of course, the Mayor of London. I’m not sure that Boris the Robot is on the tip of my tongue.

0:11:17
CW: Well, Boris the Robot, and you’ll probably have a bunch to say about this once I get into it, because it’s kind of media literacy. Boris the Fake Robot was broadcast as part of 2018’s project show and the footage of Boris was part of a three and a half minute reel during which time Boris was described as one of the most advanced robots of Russia. Well, it turns out he wasn’t. He was just a guy in a robot suit. Pretty obviously a robot suit. Bloggers… Now bloggers, to their credit, Russian bloggers, not people in other countries, but bloggers in Russia jumped all over this and the competing TV station jumped on it and a slew of, you know, Russia fake news pretends that guy in suit is advanced robot type headlines popped up here in the register, said, quote, the conference organizers were going to some lengths to imply Boris was a real robot, reacting in real time to questions, and occasionally noting with amazement at how he was, quote, able to learn. Well, I went back and watched the footage, and I don’t speak Russian, but I know a little bit about trade shows and stuff like this. So I’m watching this, and out of the three and a half minutes of footage you only really see Boris for about 30 seconds and You see him dancing in front of a crowd of kids with two other Organizers and it’s pretty clear that the whole event that’s going on is kind of jokey the kids are the kids are dancing along He’s at the robot and the people up on the stage are actually dancing to Skibidi, that song by Little Big. I don’t know if you guys heard it. It’s quite an earworm. It’s enjoyable. It’s like the Macarena if done by the Coen brothers on acid. It’s cute. So…

0:13:23
BR: So in other words, the context was not like Apple unveiling their new watch.

0:13:27
CW: No, no, no, no. Now the rest of the footage, the rest of the show footage, you see Russian inventors holding up like their drones and other things and having little interviews about various things that are not this robot and then they go to this robot dancing in front of school kids who are all wearing matching shirts and you know, the school kids were like high school age still but it was Okay, look it looked cute and jokey to me and I have seen this exact robot in CES here in Las Vegas in previous years. It’s a it as the bloggers were quick to point out, it’s a robot suit available online by a company called Show Robots. The version that was used on the Russian TV thing was called Alyosha, and it retails for about $3,800. Now, for CES in Las Vegas, which I think is the equivalent to this tech show in Russia, this robot suit essentially does what I do. It’s a hired gun to help promote some kind of crap for some booth. And you see, I’m there to draw digital caricatures usually year to year, but you see some guy in a fake robot suit almost every year at CES, and it doesn’t cause this much of a stir. Reading these articles, it was interesting because I’m developing the opinion that this is much ado about nothing. This is as you said Ben sometimes there’s purposefully misleading stuff and then and then there’s just journalistic failures.

0:14:58
BR: Mm-hmm.

CW: And I I think all of this is probably due to Lazy voiceover dubbing they probably shot a bunch of footage at the tech show somebody in the TV studio pieced it together to do a three and a half minute reel, and then somebody else was in charge of doing a voiceover about it. I think the person doing the voiceover just said, oh, we have many advanced robots, when the bit was airing with Boris. And many of the articles that were criticizing this so-called robot hoax, were saying that the TV studio and the presentation called it an advanced modern robot, but they only would put in quotes advanced modern robot. Other versions of the articles I saw online said that the voiceover was actually talking about the school children saying children here have the opportunity to study and learn with the most advanced modern robots.

0:15:54
BR: Yeah, I mean that sort of thing is so common where you’ve got you have a photo or a video taken out of context and it’s so easy to do on social media. You have a clip that could be anything. I saw that with the scary clown panic, school lockdowns a couple years back where there would be a photo of a clown somewhere and it would be shared as if this is the clown threatening our school yesterday. It’s like no, this is a still from a movie from 1984.

0:16:25
PR: Yeah, we saw a lot of that with the migrant caravan and the border wall conflicts. I mean, that was a ton of out of context stuff.

0:16:36
CW: Yeah, where you have the image you’re seeing not agreeing with the words you’re seeing, and then you have further reporters quoting only three words from a foreign language report report and you know turning it into the Russian government and the Russian government-owned news stations are promoting this particular robot as the most advanced modern robot Russia has ever made. I’m not sure that’s what actually happened there. Nobody ever said that, shut up! And they have had rebuttals come out where the people who were actually at the conference were like no this is a thing for kids we thought it was pretty clear that it was a thing for kids. We were dancing, you know, with the robot and the kids were asking it questions. And of course, you could hear the guy saying, you know, in a very fake, like human robot voice, I like to do math and I want to learn how to draw, you know, that sort of thing. So, yeah, but I’m torn here because a lot of the articles brought up legitimate points like, yes, Russia is a source of fake news. Yes, the government owned Russian TV station will put things out that aren’t true. And it’s fine if you want to talk about that. But do you have to use the Russian robot as this example? That’s the example. And it provided a really ridiculous flashpoint for journal for journalists to write about what they really wanted to write about, which was Russian propaganda. I just don’t think this is necessarily the the way to the way to do it. Uh, but however, it also reminded me or it also, uh, it also brings up, uh, Similar hoaxes, uh, if you want to call this hoax a guy in a robot suit. It’s certainly not the first one I’m sure listeners have heard of the Mechanical Turk. And I’m not talking about the Mechanical Turk that you use online as a survey collection program. I’m talking about the so-called automaton that could beat people in chess. Ben, you’re familiar with all that, I’m assuming?

0:18:39
BR: Yeah, yeah. That’s one of my favorite all-time historical hoaxes, the Mechanical Turk chess-playing device. Apparently, it was quite the sensation when it was revealed. It was this, you know those fortune telling machines with the very cheesy, non-automatic, you know, Zoltan type things.

0:19:03
CW: I was going to say Zoltan. It looked very much like Zoltan. Like the design was just lifted right off of it.

0:19:09
BR: But apparently in this particular case it was, and we could do a whole show on that, but as I recall the story, it’s been a while since I read up on it, but it was actually a dwarf who was making movements with, apparently, a small chessboard underneath. So it was very convincing if you sort of didn’t look underneath the giant box that it’s standing on, then it’s all very, very convincing.

0:19:34
CW: I read into it and I didn’t find anything indicating it was a dwarf, although at one point there was a woman, there was a female chess player that got stuffed into the box.

0:19:43
BR: I prefer the dwarf story, thank you.

0:19:45
CW: Well, hey, whatever floats your boat. But this went on for decades. This device was constructed by a guy named Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1770, and he was trying to impress a lady, apparently, the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. She had enjoyed a magic show done by an illusionist named Francois Pelletier. And Wolfgang went ahead and sort of copied a little bit of how the illusion was done, and essentially made this mechanical Turk that could supposedly play chess as an automaton. And then he ended up showing it all over the place. Napoleon Bonaparte and Ben Franklin apparently played chess against this machine and lost. Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay inspired by it.

BR: That’s right, I forgot about that.

CW: Yeah, and the Turk ended up actually being owned for a little while by Edgar Allan Poe’s personal physician. He ended up coming into possession of it after Johann Malzl ended up dying while he was at sea coming back from Cuba after exhibiting it there. And so it changed hands a few times, ended up in the Chinese Museum of Charles Wilson Peale in Philadelphia. And there in the museum, it was destroyed by a fire in 1854. But yeah, apparently the bulk of the public did not understand that this was a hoax. It was just a gimmicked box with a person hiding in it for many, many, many years as it toured. I find it hard to believe that Ben Franklin didn’t figure it out.

BR: You would think.

CW: I think maybe he was playing along, but I couldn’t find any particular stories talking about any first-hand accounts of how that chess match with Ben Franklin actually went down.

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0:21:36
BR: I wanted to take a few moments to talk about some of the passings, people who died in 2018 that were relevant to skepticism or science and things like that. I won’t go too far down the somber hole, but there’s a few people I want to just briefly mention. One of them was Barry Williams of the Australian Skeptics.

0:22:09
CW: Oh, yes.

0:22:10
BR: Yes. I don’t know that I met him. I may have met him a long time ago at a skeptic convention, but unfortunately, I’ve never been to Australia. It’s something I hope to rectify at some point soon. But Barry was a stalwart and I often read his pieces both in Skeptic Magazine from Australia and online and he was just a force of nature and he will certainly be sorely missed by the Australian Skeptics. Another one is Ward Hall.

0:22:39
CW: Oh, the carny.

0:22:40
BR: Yes, Ward Hall was a sideshow carny showman and Joe Nickell and I met him many years ago. Joe ended up doing a book called Secrets of the Sideshows. It was great meeting Ward. I think we actually met him a couple of times when he was at the Erie County Fair and elsewhere. And he was just a great old school showman. He had a friend of his, a dwarf named Petey Terhune, a fire-eating dwarf. There’s a photo that I treasure of me and Petey together. He was just a great guy and who had all sorts of stories about his time in the midways and in the 40s and 50s and 60s and his friends, Ronnie and Donnie, the Siamese twins and Ward died this past year.

0:23:28
CW: Yeah, yeah, when Ward passed away, I remember it was particularly interesting on my Facebook feed because I have carny people on my Facebook feed because I’ve done the carnival circuit and I’ve got skeptics on my feed. So I had people lamenting his passing from both worlds, so to speak.

0:23:44
BR: Sort of a conflict of worlds.

0:23:45
CW: Yeah. Ward sounded like the kind of guy who would have taken the mechanical Turk with a with a dwarf stuffed inside of it around the world.

0:23:51
BR: Absolutely. Ward was awesome. And I have an autographed book of his and stuff. And anyway, he was great. Another person from that realm was Johnny Fox. He actually died in 2017, so about a year ago, but it was close enough to 2018, I’m going to call it. And Johnny was a, I met him at a Renaissance fair. Johnny was a fire eater and a sideshow performer, Ren Faire performer, and just a fun guy, you know, as many of those folks are. I have a particular connection to him because there’s a photograph in my book, Tracking Chupacabra, on page 69 of an alleged Chupacabra foot, which he had in his, what was called his Moseo Loco in New York City. It’s unfortunately defunct now, but it was an awesome little 10-in-1 dime store type place with two-headed pickled punks and all that. Also Michael Persinger, the Canadian-American neurologist, neurosurgeon, researcher who was famous for creating the God Helmet. I’ve written some about him in my books. Michael Shermer discussed his work as well.

CW: The God Helmet, refresh my memory, that was a helmet basically device that would stimulate part of the brain that would make you have religious experiences, is that right?

0:25:24
BR: Yeah, basically Persinger made the argument that at least some, if not many of the experiences that people have, say for example of ghosts or out of body experiences, things like that, were a result of electromagnetic stimulation of different parts of the brain. And this has been picked up by many ghost hunters and I talked about that in my last book because the idea is that well, maybe some of these ghosts are not really ghosts, they are actually hallucinations that are induced by a particular frequency. It is really interesting, we do not have time to go into it, we could do a whole show on that.

0:25:59
CW: There we go.

BR: But it was interesting research going back and forth in terms of whether it could be counted by the placebo effect. Some people put on the God helmet under these controlled conditions in, I think it was in Thunder Bay or somewhere in Canada, Ottawa I think, and they did in fact have these sort of odd out-of-body experiences. Other people didn’t have them at all, but he died this past year. And finally, I mean, there’s others as well. And I’m always reluctant to sort of, you know, make a complete list because there will always be skeptics and other important people who fell through the cracks. And this is not at all not at all complete. But another one is Harlan Ellison.

0:26:40
CW: Oh, yeah.

0:26:40
BR: And Harlan died this past year. And I met him once or twice at skeptics conventions. And he was a he was a crusty sort, but he was fun and of course he was very influential, not only in science fiction, but also in skepticism as well.

0:26:58
CW: I saw him actually last year, not 2018, but back in 2017, speaking at the Star Trek convention. As you know, he wrote the episode, one of the most famous episodes, City on the Edge of Forever. So Harlan Ellison was well beloved by Trekkies everywhere.

0:27:14
PR: And another, I mean, huge one, of course, is Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame. He created many of the most beloved characters in comic book and film history.

CW: Not so much a skeptic per se, but he’s highly influential in nerd culture. And I walked by him once and it gave me the shivers to just walk 10 feet in his presence there.

PR: Yeah, when I was shooting the show Rad Girls in Los Angeles, we were doing a segment in Beverly Hills and he walked right through one of our shots.

0:27:49
CW: Did he mean to or he was just like walking around? There goes Stan.

0:27:54
PR: He just walked by, you know, we weren’t, we didn’t have permits to cordon off the sidewalk or anything. So he was, he was just walking around with a friend or someone he worked with and just right through our shot And so, you know we had to call cut real quick and then we’d jump up and and Jason our director and I just look at each other. We’re just like oh my god and so of course we ran up and introduced ourselves and he was a very very friendly guy and very nice and he asked us what we were shooting and you know, it was really neat. It was a very short interaction, but I’m glad it happened.

BR: And that’s exactly like Spider-Man, right? His Stanley cameo. That’s awesome.

0:28:39
PR: But I will say one kind of skeptical thing that he said once that I always thought was a cool quote is that the greatest superpower is luck.

0:28:48
CW: Oh, that’s nice.

0:28:50
PR: I always thought that was kind of interesting.

0:28:52
CW: If I was still doing the skeptical fortune cookies, there’s quite a few things Stanley has said that you could pull out. He did the Stan’s soapbox columns for quite a while in the Marvel comics, and there’s a bunch of things you could lift from there that are just wise, thoughtful things to note, to keep in mind. Nice little precise bits of wisdom that actually make really good skeptical fortune cookies. Maybe I’ll start doing those again, guys.

0:29:18
BR: You should. You should.

PR: Yeah, that’d be awesome.

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0:29:21
CW: Are you fascinated by ghosts, but kind of find yourself hating ghost hunting shows? Are you interested in the history of ghost detection and the ideas behind the pursuit of the otherworldly? Are you a ghost hunter yourself who wants to up your game and make sure what you find is real evidence rather than noise mixed with adrenaline-fueled hopes? old hopes. Well, Ben Radford’s 2018 book Investigating Ghosts, The Scientific Search for Spirits, is now available on audiobook. Learn the common mistakes famous ghost hunters make and see how real investigation techniques can eliminate those errors. Winner of the 2018 New Mexico Arizona Book Award for Science, this volume is a great addition to your library of the strange and it would also make a great gift for any paranormal fans in your life. Available in paperback and now audiobook format on Amazon, Audible and other retailers.

0:30:34
BR: Looking back at 2018 and sort of perusing a handful of the investigations I did, I’ll just mention a couple of them briefly. One of them was there was a miracle weeping Virgin Mary statue here in Hobbs, New Mexico. Not here in Hobbs, but here in New Mexico.

0:30:58
CW: That’s never happened. I’ve never heard of anything like that ever happening before. A weeping statue?

0:31:05
BR: Crazy stuff. Yeah, and it’s even more strange. It was weeping olive oil.

CW: Oh.

BR: Which I had actually predicted. I wrote a piece of on it in Skeptical Inquirer magazine and in my initial write-up, which you can probably find online, I predicted it would probably be olive oil because that’s the most common non-drying oil that you find in these weeping statues and sure enough, the results came back olive oil.

CW: Was is near an ovile oil processing plant?

0:31:44
BR: Well, I’ll just put it this way. It has not been a proven hoax. Nobody has been caught on camera doing it. Is it almost certainly a hoax, yes. Has the hoaxer come forward or been caught or admitted to it? No. So it’s one of those where you can call it inconclusive if you really, really want to, but as a practical matter, it’s pretty clear what happened.

0:32:16
CW: I was just trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. I mean, they had that weeping statue in India where nobody was actually putting anything on the statue. It just happened to be sewage that was just collecting from the sewage plant.

0:32:31
BR: I also was asked to investigate a series of attacks by genies or djinn. I haven’t written that up yet and I didn’t really do too much with it, but a couple of months back, I was contacted by a man in Morocco who sent me photos and claimed that a person that he knew had been attacked by the djinn. He knew that, he said, because there were a series of fires and mola. I’m hoping to, I don’t think we’ve covered djinn in any depth, so I’m hoping to tackle that on an upcoming episode.

0:33:02
CW: I’ve, I’ve woken up some mornings, felt like I was attacked by the djinn and I vowed to never drink it again. Sticking a vodka next time.

0:33:09
BR: There’s also, let me think, there was a, there was the, the Atamami, which is a six-inch figure, a little miniature figure found in the Atacama Desert in Peru, which like many things of their nature had been claimed to be alien.

0:33:27
CW: Oh, I remember this image. It was very striking to look at.

0:33:32
BR: Yeah, it’s creepy stuff and eventually science solved it. It turned out to be through DNA testing, it turned out to be a deformed fetus, which again, that was not entirely unexpected, but that was a science result that people showed. And of course, last year I also went to, I gave a talk at a folklore conference in Belgium, in Brussels, speaking on a topic that I actually first discussed here on the podcast, the blue whale game.

0:34:01
CW: You know, I can’t help but think of you. The Blue Whale Game. You know, I can’t help but think of you every time I see something with blue whales on it. And they’re everywhere. I see them on tote bags and posters and stationery. Blue whales are actually all over the place in terms of design.

0:34:17
BR: Well, it just shows you how much the conspiracy has spread. I’ll just mention one other one, which is the COSO Artifact. Do you guys remember this one? No, how do you spell that? It was claimed to be an ancient, sorry this is stupid, it was claimed to be evidence of ancient aliens. It appeared to be a spark plug that was encased in stone and some people claimed it was encased in a half million year old geode. How can a spark plug be inside this thing? Well, it was recently, in fact, just in the past few weeks, it was definitively identified as a 1920s era champion spark plug that had simply had stone basically come around it through a process called accretion. So it was not ancient, it was not from millennia ago. It was just a spark plug from the 20s that they got some rocks over it.

0:35:18
CW: Oh, OK. That doesn’t sound nearly as exciting.

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CW: So, Pascual, I know you’ve had a busy, busy year with all your child wrangling and work stuff, but have you noticed anything on your skeptical radar over the whole year that has stuck with you?

0:35:47
PR: Yeah, I, this has been pretty recent, but it’s funny, and some of our listeners who might be friends with me on Facebook may have noticed that I’ve been back on Facebook a little bit in the last couple of months, and strangely, something that I’ve noticed that seems to be a little more present than when I left is that geocentrists are starting to pop up. I’m not saying they weren’t always around. I mean, they’ve definitely been a few, but they’re starting to strike me as the early days of the new resurgence of flat earthers. And I’m starting to see memes and things about how the way the Earth rotates in the 24-hour day doesn’t jive with us going around the sun. And I just thought it was really striking that we’ve kind of made that evolution, as it were, from kind of flat Earth to now we’re getting to this geocentrism. And I think it’s really, really strange.

0:36:48
CW: We’ve come full circle, as it were. Back to the Middle Ages.

0:36:50
PR: Yeah, full globe. But no, it’s just really interesting to me because it’s like, I’d love to see some overall social research on these sort of resurgences of these dark age beliefs, kind of showing up and then people kind of trying to jam the science into it. I couldn’t really understand the meme that I saw last, but it was basically saying that with a 24-hour cycle in the day, that at the speed that the Earth revolves around the Sun, it would mean that day and night would flip at some point. There was no science in the meme. It was just like, this is how it is, as most of these people are.

0:37:42
CW: You don’t exactly go to a meme for citations and sources.

0:37:46
PR: Yeah, you don’t get the formulas. But yeah, it was just very strange to me. But the thing is that it’s almost like we’re getting this sort of contrarian group of people. I do think that people honestly believe these things, but I also think that a lot of what pushes it forward are people that just don’t want to, or they just want to be contrarian and they want to have the opposite opinion for whatever rebellious reason it is. Because a lot of this stuff just seems to be shared by people who have no idea what it’s trying to say, but they know that, they like the idea that, oh no, I think the sun revolves around the earth, you know, and it’s a very weird kind of like rebellious thing to me with a lot of these people.

0:38:38
CW: You don’t have to be dumb to fall for conspiracy belief or something like flat earth. Oftentimes they are people who have enough intelligence to pick and choose to cherry pick from all this data they can look at and find a way that it might conceivably work and then they’re able to fool themselves or you know convince themselves that yes this is this is what’s going on or as you point out there’s quite a lot of people who don’t necessarily believe in any of it they just enjoy figuring out a way it might actually be this way right and then public publicizing it in a flashy meme I you know I’m reminded of a friend of mine back in college who was very logical like a non-supernatural atheist didn’t believe in any kind of weirdness at all but he was into astrology. And he said, he was in, I was like, why are you, why do you care about science? He’s like, he’s like, I don’t, I don’t think that any of it is real. It’s just super complicated. If you look at the way that the planets move, if you look at the way that, if you look at the way that astrology actually is set up with all the numerology and this and that, it’s super complicated. And he just really, really got jazzed about how complicated it was to figure out. And it was almost like a really intricate D&D game to him. It was total fantasy, but he enjoyed following it because of that.

0:40:12
PR: Yeah, that is really, really fascinating. And I think a lot of people are like that because I actually, I too know someone who kind of has that same fascination with astrology and is not a magical thinker by any real stretch, but is just super versed in how it all works. And honestly, I don’t even know to what extent he believes it. He just seems to, you know, he’s like, he understands all those rising signs and things like that. And it’s fascinating. And I can get, you know, there’s sort of a nerd culture thing to it, you know, it’s like getting really into the mythos of something.

0:40:52
CW: Yeah, they said that the millennials are getting more into astrology than previous generations have been, except maybe the generation of the 60s and 70s, but the boomers, I guess. But I think there’s a difference. There’s a nuance to saying somebody believes in X versus somebody is really into X. You could be into something without really believing it.

0:41:17
PR: Ben, you’re pretty much into all the things that you research, I would say.

BR: Yeah, I was thinking about that the other day. I mean, when people come to my house, and they look at my bookshelves, I mean, I have dozens and hundreds of books on witchcraft, and astrology and grimoires and conspiracy theories. I would love for somebody who has never met you and doesn’t know anything about you to write your obituary just based on a tour of your house. That would be great. But no, but it’s a fair question, right? I mean, in most cases, it’s an interesting question, right? In most cases, if you go to someone’s house and you see a bunch of books on astrology, you assume that they’re into astrology. I mean they probably believe it, I mean not necessarily, but probably. Or magic or divination or whatever else.

CW: Well there’s that difference between being into something and then being a believer. Right, right, absolutely.

PR: Yeah, I would almost say that you get more out of it being into it at the level that we are on the show, you know, in that, I mean it’s fascinating and it’s interesting and it’s entertaining. And because we don’t have to build a worldview around it, we can just kind of take it as entertainment and take it as interest, you know. So I really, you know, feel fortunate that we can be into these things without believing them, you know.

0:42:39
CW: We’re woo watchers.

0:42:41
PR: Yeah.

0:42:43
CW: We’re a woo watcher. Well, I mean, I really hope that the rise that you have picked up on with people saying that there’s a way that the Earth can be the center of the solar system, I guess it would be the geosystem not the solar system in that case. I really hope that’s just due to people who are kind of into it and playing around with it and you know, although man, there are certainly people who believe crazy things.

0:43:10
PR: Yeah, I mean next year Ben you’re probably going to be arguing with the geocentrists, so just prepare for that. That’s okay, I’m ready to go. I’m locked and loaded, baby. Bring it on. I mean, if when I ask you about the eclipses, your response is, well, we need to look at Hindu mythology, then…

0:43:29
CW: No, we don’t!

0:43:30
PR: No, we don’t.

(MUSIC)

0:43:41
BR: So, I’ve given a couple of obituaries for the past year and I did want to single out one additional one. I think it’s especially important to make note of. And it’s one that probably none of our listeners have heard about. And as listeners know on the podcast, one of the things we often discuss are rumors and sometimes the deadly consequences of rumors. And we’ve talked, for example, about some of the child abduction rumors that have led to businesses being firebombed and in in that vein Recently talked and written about some of the rumors that have been spread on the what’s app Apple which is owned by Facebook, I believe in India and this isn’t just happening India It’s also happened in Mexico and elsewhere. I won’t we talked about the other shows I won’t I won’t get into it.  But suffice to say that there have been dozens of people who have been attacked and in some cases killed because of false rumors of child abductions, primarily in India. It happened in February. There were many in May and June and some in July. But in addition to that, there was also a skeptic that was killed in the process of trying to debunk the rumors. And his name was Sukanta Chakraborty. And what happened was that in the state of Tripura in India, because the the officials there were so concerned about innocent people being attacked on the basis of these false rumors of child abductions that weren’t actually going on, they hired locals to go around and spread the word, say, look, this is not true. Don’t believe this. This is rumors. This is there’s no basis to it. Yeah, voices of reason. Yes, voices of reason. And they hired a local activist, Sukanta Chakraborty, to drive through villages with a loudspeaker debunking fears that a gang of child kidnappers were on the loose and trying to take their children.

0:45:52
CW: Oh, I can already see where this is going.

0:45:54
BR: On June 29th, Chakraborty and two others were beaten to death by a mob. There are reports saying the mob was angry at the men for downplaying what they perceived to be the very real threat of child kidnappers in the area. And I’m upset about this. You know, it’s these people are skeptics. They’re trying to debunk damaging rumors. And it’s one thing to have had these rumors go on and people being attacked and reviled. It’s another thing for the belief that the moral panic, the boogeyman threat to be so real, that people who are doing nothing more than trying to be the voice of reason, who are doing nothing more than trying to stamp out false and vicious rumors, are beaten and killed just for that.

0:46:51
CW: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you can’t help but but, you know, say, you know, there but for the grace of geography go I.

0:47:00
BR: Absolutely, absolutely. And it just goes to talk about, you know, the mob mentality and the sureness with which people will believe in conspiracy theories, because that’s essentially what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the, you know, gangs of child kidnappers going around. And I’ve written about some of that when I was researching organ theft legends. And in fact, I have a slate to do a show on that. I interviewed a woman here in New Mexico who was beaten by a mob in Guatemala because they believed that she was trying to abduct kids for their organs. And this happened in the 1980s. And I just I just want to remind people the dangers of misinformation and rumors, because it’s very real. It’s not a joke. It’s not funny. And these these beliefs have consequences. Well, we have talked, you know, Ben and Pasquale and I talk regularly about what shows we should do in the future.

0:47:49
CW: And of course, we have talked a number of times about doing a whole show dedicated to people who have lost their lives, essentially in the service of skepticism, like this gentleman in India recently did. And there are there’s a number of bloggers out of Bangladesh who have been murdered. There’s a number of ways that a well-meaning skeptic can meet their end in many parts of the world and it’s an unfortunate reality that it is happening in the modern day and age. You think a lot of this mob mentality getting out of control is a thing of the middle ages. We don’t have people being persecuted as witches anymore, people being burned. No, we do.

0:48:40
BR: We absolutely do.

0:48:40
CW: We still do.

0:48:41
BR: Absolutely do.

0:48:42
CW: And it’s a thing to remember when we’re sitting here laughing over a silly flat earther meme, there’s a very serious side to skepticism in many parts of the world.

0:48:53
BR: Absolutely. I actually feel badly. I mean, this happened at the end of June, and I’ve just been so busy with other things, I meant to sort of do a bigger piece on it. When I get a chance, and I’m embarrassed to even say that phrase, but I might look into trying to track down the family of this man and maybe donate money or do a GoFundMe or something to help him out.

0:49:16
CW: Oh, that’s a good idea.

(MUSIC)

0:49:18
BR: Of course, 2018 was also the year that a friend of the podcast, the awesome Kenny Biddle, solved the mystery of the Home Alone Elvis. Oh, yes. the awesome Kenny Biddle solved the mystery of the Home Alone Elvis.

0:49:31
CW: Oh yes, yeah, that was a fun episode.

BR: Yes, and so again, shout out to Kenny Biddle for doing that. I’m a little annoyed that he got to it before we could, but that’s… these things happen.

0:49:43
CW: I have a feeling it won’t be the last time we say, that darned Kenny Biddle beat us to it!

BR: Exactly. Meddling kids. And I also wanted to sort of briefly touch on my top five notable episodes of Squaring the Strange in 2018. When I was going through the show, I was actually surprised at the diversity of the topics. I don’t know why I was surprised. I was on the shows, but it just, I was pleasantly like, wow, that’s really cool. We’ve covered all sorts of stuff, not just things that would be obviously in the skeptics’ purview, UFOs, Bigfoot, things like that.

0:50:29
CW: I like how you put that. You were surprised by the diversity of topics. Sounds a whole lot more complimentary than, man, we were really all over the map.

BR: We didn’t know what the hell we were doing.

0:50:40
CW: We had no guiding principle there, just whatever we wanted.

0:50:44
BR: Exactly, and apparently we fooled them. But I’ll just go through five of my top notable past episodes in no particular order. One of them was episode 65 on Benjamin Franklin. That was just a fun one. It was nice going back and looking at, you know, the founding father and all the different complexities and stories and rumors and stuff and the kite experiments and the mesmerism and that was, it was just a fun episode.

0:51:10
CW: I’ve always enjoyed reading about Ben Franklin and we brought him up with the Mechanical Turk on this episode.

0:51:15
BR: We did. Also, episode 46 on misleading documentaries. The three of us are fans of documentaries and we see them and it’s fun to sort of go and do a little behind the scenes, you know, is this real? Is this not real? And of course, as we discussed before, nothing you see on a screen is real. There are editing choices no matter how self-evident you think what you’re seeing is there’s an element of artifice to it. But that was a fun one. And also, speaking of films, Butterfly Kisses. That was a fun show with Erik Meyers going over the urban legendy horror film, one of my favorite scary urban legend horror films of the last few years.

0:52:01
CW: Yes.

0:52:02
BR: Also, one that, another one that I think I’m especially proud of is On Being Believed.

0:52:09
CW: I was actually going to bring that one up if you didn’t.

0:52:11
BR: Yeah, yeah, I just, well, my, it was just, I think it’s, again, it’s something that isn’t obviously in the skeptics’ purview, but I think that there are lots of angles into it and I think that, I humbly think that we may have done some good with that one. What do you think?

0:52:28
CW: Well, yeah, that was that was like way back in February of this year. And I know I certainly put quite a few hours into reading police reports and statistics and you know, hard data that I could bring to the very contentious topic of whether or not women are believed when they report sexual assault and and to what degree? Because I mean you can’t just, as you know, working in numbers and skepticism, there’s no such thing as getting all the way to zero or getting all the way to a hundred. You’re never going to have zero instances of women being disbelieved. If you have one police officer looking askew at a woman who’s reporting her rape in one precinct in one city in America in over the year it’s too many blah blah blah you know that’s just that’s an unreasonable expectation number one but I want to know the actual numbers you know if I if I am assaulted and I go to the police to report it I want to know all right is it a 50-50 chance here whether or not I’m going to be believed is it a hundred is it 99% chance that I’m going to be laughed at and sent home without being able to make a report? Because there’s definitely certain angles you pick up from news stories about it and then there’s the facts. And I want to know the facts. We didn’t catch nearly as much flack for that episode as I feared we might, but that’s one of the reasons why with statistics and actual data. And hopefully, you know, hopefully it did some good.

0:54:06
BR: Well, speaking of episodes that didn’t catch as much flak as we feared or expected, my investigation into the Pulse nightclub shooting was another one. I won’t go into the whole thing. Listeners can listen to the episode if they like. It’s episode 61.

0:54:27
CW: That’s a topic that should not be summarized. I can’t cover it in one sentence.

0:54:30
BR: Right. Exactly. But essentially, I took a closer look at the assumption, the widespread assumption that Omar Mateen, when he shot up the Pulse nightclub in 2016, that it was obviously anti-gay hate crime. And there’s there’s some evidence suggesting it is, but there’s very compelling evidence suggesting otherwise and I don’t claim to have solved that but I took a long hard critical look which was frankly missed by most of the news media.

0:55:02
CW: I remember when you pitched that topic to me, I was very uncomfortable by it and I had to examine why I was uncomfortable and you did a great job of sort of walking through bit by bit.

0:55:14
BR: Well, thank you. I’ve actually had comments from two gay friends of mine who listened to it and they said, you know, I think you’re right. So that’s just an anecdote. It’s not evidence, but it’s a…

0:55:27
CW: It’s a data point of two.

0:55:28
BR: It’s a data point of two, but it’s better than nothing. And then the last one, this is actually number six. So I said the top five, but you know, whatever, it’s my show, it’s our show. Pseudo experiments.

0:55:39
CW: Oh yeah, that was a fun one.

0:55:40
BR: That was a fun one. You know, I enjoyed sort of looking at, you know, fake experiments and their role in informing public opinion and, you know, the breastfeeding video and the idea that people are just outraged by this and like, well, really? This is like kind of a fake experiment. Is this real?

0:56:00
CW: Yeah. Yeah, and advertising and how many… That was one episode where we did hear some fun feedback from listeners, and I remember Susan Gerbic in particular let us know that she hadn’t really taken note that much before about pseudo-experiments, but after we broke them down and talked about what they were and pointed out examples, she’s like, I see them everywhere now. And that’s good. That’s what we want. We want people to be able… We want people to be able to have to suffer the same fate that we have, which is you see all this stuff everywhere and it’s going to bother you from now on.

0:56:33
BR: That pleases me. That pleases me. I’ve been thinking about writing an article on pseudo experiments. Obviously we did a lot of preparation for the show, but I don’t think I’ve actually officially published it. So maybe in 2019, I’ll dig deeper into that.

0:56:48
CW: I wrote one. If anybody wants to check out my article on the the Joey Salads breastfeeding pseudo experiment That’s how you did you did an excellent job on that.

BR: Yeah, I went long, but if anybody wants a long read describing Joey Salads and how Unbelievably fake he is feel free to search it. So what are some of your other favorite episodes?

0:57:06
CW: I think you covered the ones that I that I that I would have brought up the on being believed and the pseudo experiments were two of my favorites.

0:57:16
BR: But they’re all they’re all fun. They’re all brilliant. Except for the ones I’m on.

0:57:20
CW: It’s like choosing your favorite child. How could you possibly?

0:57:24
BR: Well, by the way, just for our listeners, I want to be I feel compelled to give this update. As you recall, the History Channel aired a program on Neely Earhart and there was quite a bit of a hubbub and there was a photograph, a smoking gun photograph, that proved, asterisk, that Amelia Earhart did not in fact ditch into the Pacific but was recovered alive. That turned into a huge fiasco. I won’t go into it here because you can hear on previous episodes, but I wanted to update everyone. The History Channel still has not clarified exactly how that show went so far off the rails into bungled pseudoscience and conspiracy theory and conjecture. After the show came out, it was widely criticized, rightly so, and they actually issued a tweet which I have printed out and saved that says, we don’t know what happened. We have our crack team looking into it And we want to be fully transparent in our findings to find out how it could have gone so wrong Still waiting. Yeah, if our show if squaring the strange takes off and we end up doing the show for 10 years on that 10th year anniversary Ben will bring up the Amelia Earhart thing just to warn you all there Okay until such time as the history channel completes its investigation into how their special smoking gun could have been so badly bungled.

0:58:56
CW: Oh, they’ve completed their investigation.

0:58:58
BR: Oh, I don’t think they have.

0:58:59
BR: They promised complete transparency.

0:59:03
CW: I think their investigation took all of about three minutes and then they took the results of it and dropped it and kicked it under the sofa and that’s the last we hear of it.

0:59:12
BR: I’m not going to be happy until I’m actually blocked on Twitter by the History Channel. I send them a reminder every few months. I tweet back to them, their tweet saying, and I have it right here, their tweet saying that, oh, we’ll be looking into this. I send it to them every few months just saying, hey, how’s that going? I’m sure one of these days some interns could say, you know what, just block this dude.

0:59:35
CW: You are a gadfly.

0:59:37
BR: Someone’s got to do it.

0:59:38
CW: Okay.

(MUSIC)

0:59:39
CW: Well, listeners, we hope you enjoyed our little romp through a grab bag of topics that we just kind of pulled out of our recesses of our memory palaces over the year of 2018. So Ben, is there anything we’re forgetting?

1:00:13
BR: Yeah, I wanted to, I forgot to mention one other passing of note. Sandra Mansi, Sandra Mansi died.

1:00:20
CW: Oh yes, yeah.

1:00:21
BR: She is, of course, the woman that took the most famous photograph of any lake monster. This is of Champ in Lake Champlain. It was taken in 1977 and published in 1981. As you know, Joan Nickell and I and others went and investigated it and interviewed her about her sighting and her story. Even though I am virtually certain that she photographed a floating log. I enjoyed meeting her and I think that she was sincere and I have always defended her against people who say that, well, it was all a big publicity stunt or she did it for the money, whatever else. I don’t think they know what they’re talking about. I think that she’s a sincere, lovely woman who just happened to see something from a weird angle that any of us could have mistaken.

1:01:09
CW: Yeah, you got to respect the sincerity there. There’s definitely multiple classes of people that see strange things and some of them are just in it for the profit and some of them are very sincere and it sounds like Sandra Mansi was a very nice lady.

1:01:22
BR: Yes.

1:01:24
CW: Well, next week or I should say in two weeks, we, looks like speaking of lake monsters, we’re going to be taking a look at another famous lake monster because we haven’t done a cryptozoological episode in a while.

1:01:36
BR: We have not. I figure it’s probably about time to revisit the monstery realms, as it were. And yes, I figured maybe we’d talk about one of my favorite lake monsters, Ogopogo of Lake Okanagan. Yes, Canada’s most famous lake monster.

1:01:53
CW: Excellent, excellent. Well, we’ll look forward to seeing what slithers out of the watery depths with that.

1:01:59
BR: Yes.

1:02:00
All right, take care listeners. Enjoy 2019. Bye bye.

1:02:04
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1:02:48
Squaring the Strange is a production of Two Heads Studio, LLC, copyright 2018. Theme music by Shriekback, additional music by Memory, Keytard and Feathered, and Pasquale Romero. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, Robert Sundin, and of course our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Head Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Head Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry,

1:03:18
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