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.

0:00:12
BR: Welcome back to Squirting the Strange. This is episode 188 and I am one of your co-hosts, Ben Radford. And with me is/are…

Celestia Ward: Ben’s back. Hi, welcome.

BR: That would be Celestia.

0:00:52
CW: Celestia Ward here and…

0:00:54
Pascual Romero: Pascual Romero.

BR: With no enthusiasm to my return. Thank you.

0:00:58
CW: Wow. Okay.

0:01:00
PR: Wait, you went somewhere?

BR: Yes. Yes. If you’re an observant listener, you may have noticed that I’ve been a bit absent the past two months or so.

0:01:12
CW: But you miraculously return for every main segment.

0:01:15
BR: Yes, well that’s a…

0:01:16
CW: It’s almost as if we banked them ahead of time.

0:01:20
BR: That’s a plausible explanation, yes.

0:01:23
CW; Spoken like a true investigator.

0:01:25
BR: Yeah, I was in fact, the rumors are true, or at least some of them. I was in fact gone, I was out of the country. I was actually backpacking in South America and Africa. I won’t bore listeners with all the mundane details, but I began the trip by doing a four-day hiking tour in the jungles of northern Colombia to go to the Ciudad Perdida, the lost city, which is in the mountains in northern Colombia. I went with my friend Chris and we had a good time. It damn near killed me. Both of us were ruing the day that we agreed to do this thing. And I think Chris is still pissed at me, but we we survived.

0:02:07
CW: Yeah. None of that sounds like a vacation to me. None of it.

0:02:09
BR: Well, it was, you know, four days in the jungle. And it was we were hiking for between five and eight hours a day, mostly uphill. But it was pretty cool. The lost city is actually sort of a lost city of sorts. And if you have seen Colombian currency, the Lost City actually appears on some of the currency. It’s this city deep in the jungle that it’s not quite like Machu Picchu, but it’s sort of Colombia’s version of Machu Picchu. So it’s pretty cool.

0:02:42
CW: Were there mosquitoes?

0:02:43
BR: There were mosquitoes.

0:02:45
CW: Yeah, no, never going to do it then.

0:02:48
BR: Fair number of mosquitoes. Yeah, that was actually the least of our problems.

0:02:52
CW: Well, we’re glad you’re back and I’m assuming you have all your organs with you.

0:02:56
BR: Mostly, I did break a rib or probably broke a rib. I was in a double-decker bus crash near Lake Titicaca in Peru. It was an odd situation. Again, it was a double-decker bus. I actually went airborne and crashed into a home.

0:03:14
CW: Were you on the upper deck or the lower deck?

0:03:15
BR: I was on the upper deck.

0:03:16
CW: Oh, yikes.

0:03:18
BR: Yeah, and you can imagine how fast a bus has to be going to go airborne into a building.

0:03:24
CW: I would never trust the drivers near Lake Titicaca because I’m assuming they giggle every time they see a sign.

BR: Well, I’m pretty sure this one was sleeping. We were on a bus called Peru Hop. There’s some dispute about what exactly happened, but it’s pretty clear that the driver probably fell asleep just before four in the morning. Five people went to the hospital. The driver was pretty badly injured. I think he can now walk. Anyway, it was a big production, but to this day, my ribs are a bit sore.

CW: When you travel, you don’t go small, you go big.

BR: As listeners know, I do enjoy roughing it a bit in the South American jungles and all that. I did go scuba diving in Mozambique. I actually got to scuba dive not with, but near whales. So I got to hear whale sounds while I was…

0:04:20
CW: You can actually hear it?

0:04:21
BR: Yeah.

0:04:22
CW: Oh, I didn’t know that. Because I know you hear the recordings, and I’m always assuming that’s like, you know, if you could hear on the whales register, you know, if you could hear something many octaves lower than humans here, you’d be able to hear this, but you can actually hear them?

0:04:40
BR: Yeah, yeah. It was pretty remarkable. I mean, one of the cardinal rules of scuba diving is don’t hold your breath, especially when you’re going up. But yeah, in between with the respirator, it was odd because I was breathing in, breathing out and that, you know, it’s a lot of bubbles and you’re hearing stuff. But then I heard something, I’m like, let me hold my breath just for a second. And just, you know, what is that sound? And sure enough, it was whales. That was, that was pretty cool. The other main thing I did was, and I’ll talk about this on a future show, is I went to Malawi where I interviewed and investigated a case of witchcraft accusations. And I interviewed some police officers who were injured protecting a couple from witchcraft accusations.

0:05:26
CW: Oh, wow.

0:05:27
BR: Sort of on behalf of Leo Igwe and his advocacy for alleged witches and also Malawi humanists. So, again, I’ll probably do a show on this at some point, but that was the other another another highlight of the trip.

0:05:42
CW: Well, I can’t top that. Pascual, have you done anything cool to talk about?

0:05:47
PR: Not lately.

0:05:48
CW: No, you haven’t defended anybody from witchcraft accusations or heard whale song or broken a rib on a Peruvian.

0:05:56
PR: There’s a couple of weeks left. I can see if I can jam it in.

0:06:01
CW: Yeah, well, I was gonna talk about CSICon which happened in Vegas here, and I’ve I Neglected to due to scheduling and recording and being in a hurry I did not really go into anything last episode, but I don’t really have I mean you can’t really encapsulate a three-day conference into Hey, here’s a quick roundup. What happened but In short pre bunking is the new debunking. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one smooth guy, and he was so generous with his time just talking to people, and he gave everybody a free book, his brand new book Starry Messenger, autographed. Everybody got one who bought a ticket to PsiCon, which was fantastic and generous and wonderful. And I got to see wonderful people in real life. I got to see Susan Gerbic and Brian Dunning and Ross Blocker and Wendy Hughes and Adrian Hill and Rob Palmer and Leonard Tramiel and Margaret Downey and Matt Loftus, who’s the Incredible Hulk, and all their plus ones. And so it was a lovely time to spend. And that’s my wrap up of CSICon. If you want to know more, you know, check around the CSICon website if possible. They might have some videos up later, if not now. And speaking of CSIcon, we have to give heartfelt congratulations to Kenny Biddle.

0:07:19
BR: Yes, finally a formal official, capital O official member of CSI, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. So welcome aboard, Kenny. Great day.

0:07:28
CW: Yes, he’s like the head investigator or something now, isn’t he? I know it was a neat title. He showed me his badge. It was wonderful. And he did a lovely presentation on how to approach investigations and how to kind of get in there and talk to the people who could benefit from a little skepticism the most. He also gave you a shout out while he was up there. He talked about being part of a dunking booth, and I took note that he pointed out he’s like, you can say anything up there like, hey, yeah, your grandmother’s talking to me from the dead. She says you’re not going to be able to hit the target, you know.

0:08:07
BR: Wow.

0:08:08
CW:He’s like, you can get away with anything up there. So, it just reminded me of, it’s kind of mixing your bad clowns book with skeptical outreach. I love it.

0:08:17
BR: That’s right. That’s right. I have a section on the dip, the dip clown, the dunk tank clowns.

0:08:22
CW: Yes. Yes. But it’s not all good news with CSI and CFI. You have some more somber news to report, right Ben?

0:08:31
BR: Yes. A few days ago, Ken Frazier who is the long-time editor, was the long-time editor of Skeptical Inquirer and my ostensible boss and a friend and colleague and a fine writer died. He’d had health issues over and over throughout the years, although this one sort of came back with a vengeance. And I’d worked with Ken for 25 years or something, and so I’d always been, he’s been the editor since basically, essentially since day one. That’s not quite true because in the early days when it was called the Zetetic, I had another editor. But basically, as a practical matter, he’s always been the editor of the magazine. I was fortunate enough to be hired on as a managing editor and then now deputy editor working with him. Just a wonderful man, funny, thoughtful, kind, generous with his time. He loved science writing. He was editor of Science News, an amateur astronomer, and more than once, he, like me, lives here in Albuquerque. And so I would go to his house and his wife, Ruth, and we had dinner on many occasions, and I got to know his kids. And we would sometimes, I remember going up on his roof one time, and he had a telescope out, and he was showing me the stars. And I was, I like astronomy. I know nothing about it. I’m sort of, you know, this is cool, but what am I looking at? And anyway, Ken will be sorely missed, but yes.

0:10:12
CW: Well, sympathies and condolences to you and all his friends and his family and SI in general. So we’ll see how the magazine goes forward, and I’m sure you’ll have a hand in it, no matter what direction they end up going.

0:10:27
PR: Well, with people stepping into new roles, I look forward to seeing how SI evolves going into the future.

0:10:35
CW: Yeah, there was also a lot of talk about going into the future at at CSIcon, and Susan Gerbic said one of the most wonderful things, I wanted to repeat it, in how she encapsulated it. She talked, there was quite a bit of remembering Randi, and she got up there and said, no one can replace Randi so everybody has got to replace Randi and I thought that that’s perfect. That’s the way to summarize a skeptical legend like that. Everybody’s got to step up and do what you can. But the world is turning and things are happening. A lot of interesting things are happening. I mean we just had the elections and lots of stuff. I don’t suppose there’s anything in the news that makes you guys skeptical this week, is there?

(MUSIC)

0:11:16
BR: I’ll just, I just noted that unless I’m missing something, Alex Jones was ordered to pay nearly half a billion dollars more.

0:11:36
CW: Was that more? I heard that earlier today and I wasn’t sure. It was just a quick in passing thing. And I thought, oh, no, they reduced the they reduced the amount that he was.

BR: Yeah. Yeah. Another four hundred seventy million.

0:11:51
PR: That’s the punitive. And then I’ve got to pay the lawyers.

CW: That’s beautiful.

0:12:01
PR: A great place to start.

CW: Well, we’ve talked about polls a number of times on this podcast, and the midterms are certainly shining a spotlight on polling and how it’s done and how it can fool people and how you need to have appropriate measures in place to take a proper poll that actually reflects reality. So I did catch a little soundbite from Norman Ornstein, who’s the Emeritus Scholar at the Center-Right American Enterprise Institute. And he said there’s a bunch of factors as to why the polls led everybody to believe there was going to be a huge red wave. And people were also relying on really bad polls. Like the examples they gave were Insider Advantage and Rasmussen, which I haven’t heard of those polling things, but they’re probably right wing sources, I’m guessing. Have you guys heard much about the polls in general being so very wrong?

0:13:01
PR: I’ve heard the name Rasmussen, but I am not. Yeah, I believe you might be correct. I think they’re a pretty heavily skewed group. Historically I’ve always been a little skeptical of polls in general, because even with the best intentions, you have certain things that are just impossible to control for, like how you’re doing it. Like it used to be, I recall that, you know, it was like they’d call people on landlines and it’s like, you’re going to get a very specific, you’re going to exclude a certain group of people pretty quickly with that. Like, I don’t have a landline.

0:13:34
CW: Yeah, or even just if you’re calling cell phones now They said one of the one of the news stories I caught said that when you’re calling people in general to do polls on their cell phones There’s a huge swath of America that just won’t pick up. Oh, that’s a number I don’t recognize not gonna pick it up.

0:13:54
PR: You’re only gonna be getting the sociopaths that answer unknown numbers.

0:13:58
CW: So yeah the same people oddly enough that skews the same population that’s more often taken advantage of by telemarketer schemes. So you’ve got an older crowd, most likely. And so I guess many news sources and political pundits were surprised that younger crowds voted more than people were expecting. There’s also a ton of headlines that start with the phrase, what the media got wrong about, and they’re coming out like today. So you can find tons of recap from experts that are quoted ironically in the media, talking about how the media ran with a herd mentality, predicting this red wave that turned out to be, as Mueller, she wrote, put it, just a light spotting. And also the desire that many of the news media has right now to not appear like they have a liberal bias, that might that’s a bias in itself when you look at it. So that might have swung the pendulum to a different sort of angle of like, oh, well, we don’t want to appear like we’re favoring the Democrats or the liberals. And yeah, a lot of that was probably driven by constant, constant accusations, not necessarily true accusations of, you know, oh, the media has a liberal bias. So what are they going to do?

0:15:22
PR: And I always wonder at the end of the day, what, um, what effect polls have on the voting itself, because, you know, you see a lot of reporting on it and you see this thread of a red wave and you kind of have to wonder, um, you know, how much that may change the motivation of certain groups of people to vote.

0:15:44
CW: Yeah, yeah, it might have convinced some folks in who were going to be part of the red wave to be like, oh, I’ll let everybody else vote. They got this. You know, it could go either side. It could be affecting, you know, and of course, the elephant in the room. Well, I guess that that makes perfect sense. The elephant in the room in this case, is Republican sources and Donald Trump beating the drum constantly that it’s rigged and your vote’s not going to matter because it’s going to get stolen anyway. That’s not a way to rally the voters out. That’s a way to make them stay home and type conspiracy theories on Reddit and stuff.

PR: Yeah, yeah, I kind of wonder about that because it sounds like it was, you know, it might be an unintended thing, but at the same time, it’s almost like, you know, if they just keep repeating the line that it’s rigged, then they don’t have to worry about how it looks when they lose, you know, or at least they can, they’ve got their excuse. “I told you!”

0:16:37
CW: It’s a multi-purpose lie.

0:16:39
PR: Yeah.

0:16:40
CW: But there was a guy, I saw one in the wild when I was waiting in line because I was a dope and waited until 6pm on election day because I had a bunch of other stuff tightly packed and scheduled and I didn’t vote early, but I’m waiting in line and like three or four people ahead of me, there’s this guy yammering on about how I don’t know why I’m here waiting in line. It’s all rigged anyway. I’m not going to you know, they’re not going to count my vote. They’re just going to give it to, you know, to the Democrats. And he’s bitching about this in line. And I’m like, well, you can go home, sir.

0:17:15
PR: Makes me think of the show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, when there was an episode where Larry David gets in line to vote and it’s a really long line. And he’s like, can I ask you a personal question to the guy in front of him? He asked who he’s voting for. And he’s like, oh, it’s the other guy. So they they realize they’re both voting for the opposing people. And and he’s like, hey, what if we just left? We leave together. And I just thought that was a nice.

CW: Yeah. Oh, that’s great. Oh, yeah. A friend of mine kind of has a deal with that with her husband because her husband always votes the opposite party that she does. So she’s always very eager, like, oh, I’m anxious to go out and nullify my husband’s vote.

PR: Well, that’s in this day and age, it’s it’s pretty wild to even imagine people on other sides of the spectrum being in Relationships anymore.

CW: Yeah. Well, you know, they’ve been together for years and years and years so they’re getting along. Now moving from the craziness of politics to the craziness of Twitter. Holy crap guys. What the heck’s going on with Twitter?

PR: Chiquita bananas apologized for taking over governments, I think.

CW: And then didn’t the actual like real, I can’t even say official now with a straight face, didn’t the like real life actually in reality Chiquita Banana account say, oh no, we haven’t actually taken over any governments since 1965 or something?

PR: Yeah, something like that. I, which I’m like touche, but also, yikes.

0:18:48
CW: So Elon Musk, upon buying it has has just kind of stirred the pot vigorously for the past two weeks. And one of the things he did was institute an $8 blue checkmark scheme. And if you haven’t heard about it already, to summarize, anybody now can get a blue checkmark, although not anymore, but for a while you could, you get a blue checkmark. And the thing is, you could then change your name to anything you wanted to. So this immediately resulted in a bunch of blue checkmark Elon Musk accounts, which then got those people banned from Twitter, because then they put down rules about who can be a parody account, you have to spell out that you’re a parody account. God, it’s so hard to have a sense of humor these days. Yeah. One of the things that made news pretty quickly was an account for somebody called Adam Schefter Knot. And that’s a parody account, kind of pretending to be Adam Schefter, who’s an ESPN reporter. And it’s really just a college kid just who decided I have $8 to burn, let’s have some fun. And he announced that the Raiders head coach had been fired. That got a lot of play. People thought he just used the same photo that Adam Scheffner has on his real ESPN account and so everybody believed him for a while. Now this is one of those things that only lasted for a little while. Now everybody is pretty hip to the fact that blue checkmarks didn’t mean anything. So we had George W. Bush with a blue checkmark talking about how he misses killing Iraqi people and LeBron James wanted to be traded and Eli Lilly of the pharmaceutical world announced that insulin would be free.

PR: Yep and their stock took a massive dive when that happened by the way.

CW: I’ve heard rumors like did Elon Musk actually just want to completely slash and burn and destroy Twitter because I’m trying to imagine what the world would look like if that was his goal and it would not look very different from what’s happening.

0:21:00
PR: Yeah, I get the sense that he probably didn’t mean for it to backfire so badly because Twitter Blue has actually been in existence for I think a little maybe over a year. The blue checkmark thing is the new thing. So the Twitter blue subscription at $8 a month launched last year, but like nobody got it because why do you need a subscription to Twitter?

0:21:21
CW: Oh, I didn’t. Huh. Okay.

0:21:23
PR: Yeah. So, and I think, and so I think his thinking with announcing this blue checkmark thing was like, hey, here’s a way to get people to sign up. Problem is like he fired everyone that could tell him no, or at least say maybe this isn’t a great idea. And so, yeah, they just rolled it out without testing it, without any, you know, usually you spend a little time doing some market research and stuff. And so they rolled that out. And of course, you know, immediately this all happens and everyone’s mad. And, you know, in all fairness, you know, there is a lot to say. There’s a lot to be said about, you know, impersonating a company or misrepresenting a brand. I mean, that’s the reason trademarks and copyright exist. And so this is actually, you know, I mean, there’s some pretty heavy duty ramifications, I mean, for, especially like watching stock, company stock, you know, of all these various companies just taking dives because people, you know, impersonating them were taken on face and people immediately started selling off stock because they’re like, whoa, they’re gonna give away insulin? I mean, that’s crazy. We can’t own stock in a company that gives it away for free.

0:22:32
CW: Yeah, well, and then all the advertisers are just fleeing like rats from a sinking ship.

0:22:37
PR: Yeah, yeah.

0:22:38
CW: Yeah, Rolling Stone had an interesting headline. Elon Musk’s $8 check marks proved to be a Twitter misinformation disaster. And Ben, how do you feel like this whole recent dust up over check marks is going to really affect misinformation? Will it actually result in everybody being a little bit more savvy about misinformation?

0:22:59
BR: I don’t know. I mean, misinformation, it’s a, as we’ve talked about in the show many times, it’s a multifaceted problem. Certainly, social media and Twitter specifically has been a main driver of that, especially when you look at political misinformation, sort of being weaponized and things like that. I can sort of see both sides. On one hand, I don’t think anybody is terribly hurt if there are some obvious parody accounts and some pertain to somebody else. At the same time, my fundamental reaction is that misinformation is inherently bad. I mean, you know, there’s jokes and there’s this and that, but you know, any time someone is being deceptive or there’s misinformation, it just, it just, you know, it muddies the waters and it, it, it has the potential to mislead people as, as Pascual was saying, you know, in the case of businesses and whatnot. So if somebody wants to pretend to be, you know, Steven Spielberg or Elon Musk or Oprah or whoever else. I mean, in a way you can sort of say, well, whatever. But I don’t know, it sort of leaves a bad taste in my mouth when it just…

0:24:09
CW: It struck me that the two of the bigger stories I saw about the misinformation slash parody accounts being taken seriously because they have a blue check mark, they were sports related, like LeBron James and this other baseball player announcing that, hey, everybody, I want to be traded. And then, of course, the head coach of the Raiders here in Vegas being fired. And I’m like, huh, you know, that’s sports. Yes, there’s financial ramifications. Yes, the team is probably not very happy about it. But that’s got to be one of the least harmful types of misinformation. I’d rather have misinformation out there about who’s being traded to a different baseball team than whether or not a vaccine works. So, yeah. Yeah. On that note, I’m glad the parody accounts decided to go for football and baseball and basketball rumors. But as as people will know, on Veterans Day, just this past Thursday, when you hear this, it’ll be last Thursday. We’re actually recording several days earlier. So who knows what will happen in those several days. But the $8 check mark idea that Elon had has been paused. And we don’t really know what’s gonna happen. Maybe he’ll unpause it. Maybe Twitter will completely implode by the time this episode uploads. We’ll find out.

0:25:35
PR: Yep.

0:25:37
CW: But before we use up all the time talking about the interesting current events, we should probably move on to talk about the ancient mystery known as ley lines.

(MUSIC)

CW: So this week we’re talking about ley lines and this is one of those topics, we’ve had them before, where I dive into my research and start doing my online searching and looking for stuff. And one of the first articles that pops up, I start reading it and oh, it’s by Ben Radford. So, it happened again with ley lines on Live Science.

0:26:03
So Ben, why don’t you just, rather than me reading your work and then talking about it like I’m researching Why don’t you just say stuff and I’ll repeat you.

0:26:31
BR: Well, if it makes you feel any better that there’s been more than one occasion when I’ve I’m looking for some information and I’ve done a Google search and I’ve gotten about a third of the way into it before I realized That I actually wrote it That’s happened on several occasions, so don’t worry about it.

CW: Okay. So what are ley lines? How would you define them?

BR: So ley lines, there’s sort of different definitions. Basically, the idea is that they’re straight lines that link prominent natural and man-made places or locations or buildings, in some cases pyramids, things like that, around the world. So there’s local ley lines, there’s national ley lines, and there are global ley lines. And so basically it’s this sort of weird sort of pseudoscience-y version of lines of latitude and longitude.

0:27:29
CW: There also seems to be in the pop culture mentality, there’s this idea that there’s something to them because because the earth has a magnetic field and because animals can sometimes migrate and use, you know, whatever they’re using to kind of interact with the magnetic field around the earth or something else dot dot dot to find their way that these ley lines are something that has some sort of academic, you know, provenance to it.

0:28:00
BR: Yeah, in fact that’s one of several theories about how the ley lines emerged. They were sort of networks of lines that correspond to the cooling earth. So you get into the idea of sort of, you know, natural fault lines. Of course, these would be ones that would cause earthquakes, for example. But somehow the idea is that these, and there’s no, it’s not clear why they would be straight, right? Why would the Earth’s crust break in straight lines where, you know, magnetic magma came up and I just don’t get it.

0:28:35
CW: So we’ve got real things. I mean, obviously there really are fault lines and tectonic plates, you know, places where, you know, there’s a San Andreas fault not far from where I live, you know, and then there’s magnetic directional lines. Those exist, but ley lines are somewhere beyond those lines. They are not connected to anything we can read with any sort of ometer.

0:29:02
BR: Nothing that ends in an ometer. That’s a good way to put it. Yeah, I mean, again, basically the idea is that there’s this grid of earth energies that goes around the globe and there are sites from Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, take your pick, Ayers Rock in Australia and so on. And if you plot these on a map, a curious thing becomes apparent, which is that many of them can be connected by straight lines. Dun, dun, dun, dun!

0:29:33
CW: Is anybody else seeing the glaring thing here that any two points on any map can be connected by a straight line?

0:29:41
PR: Yeah, and just the simple fact that you’re drawing lines on a globe, I mean, it really, it adds a lot of flexibility to the situation.

0:29:51
BR: What?

0:29:52
CW: Okay, so…

0:29:53
BR: Are you suggesting there’s some wiggle room here, Pascual?

0:29:56
PR: Possibly. Let’s dig.

0:29:58
CW: So rather than debunking this at the start and making it a three minute episode, tell us more about why people came to believe ley lines as a thing.

0:30:09
BR: Sure. Well, you know, it’s actually interesting. It sort of goes back to folklore and culture, right? Because people have always found special significance in unusual landmarks and geological features. Mountain peaks, caves, valleys, and things like that, they’ve always been associated with mysticism and the underworld. This is one of the reasons why, for example, when you look at fairy folklore, oftentimes the gateway to a magical world, as happens in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Lookingglass, is, for example, through a portal or a special tree with really ornate roots. And of course we see these sort of wise trees. In fact, we did an episode on that, if I’m not mistaken.

0:30:53
CW: Oh yeah, we should have mentioned Alice in Wonderland in that episode, but we didn’t.

0:30:57
BR: We will circle back to and add that for you listeners. But no, I think that’s, you know, it’s, again, it goes back to folklore, right? There’s this sort of notion that things that are sort of out there, wherever out there is, right? The deep woods, the forest, the caves, places where monsters may lie and people are afraid to go into, they’ve always had this sort of mystical significance. And one of them actually, I’ll just sort of throw in a thing that I encountered. I researched and found an elf church in Iceland, amid a lava field on the Altfeins Peninsula, just outside Reykjavik. And I wrote about it in my book, Big If True, and it was interesting because it was this sort of large truck-size piece of lava that was sort of unusual looking, and it was believed to house elves. And in fact, a highway going through that lava field was temporarily stopped because they didn’t want to disturb the elves. So it’s – and then, of course, for those who have been to Iceland or other places that are similar to it in terms of places that are infused with folklore, there’s lots and lots of stories and legends about energies and mystical things in these sort of dark caves. And the same thing in the British Isles in the 1800s, many people believed that there were mysterious fairy paths that would be connecting certain hilltops on the countryside. And as happens with fairy lore, you don’t mess with the fairies.

0:32:28
CW: Or if you’re in Japan and there’s a really big rock, careful, it might be a prison for a demon.

0:32:32
BR: Yes, we talked about that a while back. And so again, there’s a sort of notion that there are paths that humans either shouldn’t go on or should be wary of going on or at the very least recognize. And the idea of ley lines really only dates back about 100-150 years. So this is not a, you might sort of expect this huge historical provenance, like, well, ley lines were just, you know, discussed in the 1300s. Like, no, it’s much more recent than that. Basically, what happened was there was a landscape photographer in England called And he noticed that there were ancient sites that seemed to be aligned with others nearby. And he’s like, well, this is interesting, right? I mean, there’s this hilltop here, and if you sort of, you know, there’s a certain alignment to another community somewhere else. And, you know, standing stones, and he basically just suggested that that the lines connected, that there were lines connecting these ancient sites were old trackways, again sort of hearkening back to the idea of ferry paths that’s very British. Anyway, in 1921 he coined the term ley lines to describe these sorts of structures, and he wrote about it in a couple books in 1922 and 1925 called The Old Straight Track.

0:34:03
CW: Now, but he wasn’t talking about fairies in particular. He just meant people. Or did he mean something else?

0:34:11
BR: No, he just meant he just sort of said, well, this is interesting. I mean, you can sort of if you plot these out again, he was a he was a landscape photographer, so he was he was used to being out on the land and taking photos and sort of seeing where things are in relation to each other. And so yeah, his idea was not that there was any particular mystical significance to it or it was, you know, a new agey thing. Of course, this is long before the new age. He just said, well, you know, it’s kind of interesting and that it’s possible or likely that people who lived in the different points that were between these lines, basically, as you pointed out, went down those paths to those places. Now, you know, obviously a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. You can’t always go in a straight line. There are, you know, hills and rivers and things you have to navigate around, but for the most part, it makes sense that ancient peoples who lived in different places would take a more or less straight line to get between the different communities.

0:35:16
CW: Now, I understand that ley lines, as Watkins was describing them, are also associated with the Long Man of Wilmington, also known as the Wilmington Giant, a chalk geoglyph, which there are a few of in the world. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

0:35:32
BR: I know only a little bit about that. I’ve seen photographs of it, of course, it’s a famous geoglyph. It’s carved in chalk and I think he’s 230-some feet tall and it’s called the Green Man. And it’s where he holds these two staffs or staves. And Watkins believed the Long Man was depicting someone who was measuring equipment to establish ley lines. The idea was that that image didn’t just happen to be somebody who was holding two things, though the two things he was holding were in the process of creating these ley lines.

0:36:07
CW: Yeah, they look like snakes, like he’s holding up two sticks or something. Yeah. If anybody wants to go see the long man of Wilmington or the Wilmington giant, he’s just outside of Wilmington, East Sussex in England. So I think you’ll have to hike a while, but apparently if you stand on the slope nearby and you look down into the valley, if you’ve ever seen those chalk drawings that are designed to be viewed from a certain perspective, and if you get up close, they’re really, really long and like stretched out, but from the right perspective, they kind of condense into a proper form. He’s one of those. So I was like seeing evidence that ancient peoples were kind of hip to how to create perspective and create illusions like that.

0:36:52
BR: Yeah, and of course there’s a long history of these giant drawings, including the Nazca lines, and one day we’ll do a show on it.

CW: Cool, cool.

PR: But back to ley lines. Wikipedia notes that a similar concept arose independently in Germany in the 1920s called the Heilig Lenien, I think.

0:37:16
CW: Highledge Lenin. Lenin, Lenin. I’ve read lots of his novels. He’s good.

0:37:22
PR: Also translated to English, it’s Holy Lines. And of course, some Nazis adopted the belief because, you know, Nazis do that kind of stuff.

0:37:33
CW: And did it helped them find the Ark of the Covenant, finally?

0:37:36
PR: I don’t know. There’s not a lot of stories about melted Nazis, but maybe there’s not a lot of evidence of them because they melted.

0:37:42
CW: So. So what else have you got, Ben? You can tell us about the the original the OG ley line master here.

0:37:49
BR: Yeah. So it’s it’s interesting to sort of look back on the history of these things and sort of see where, for lack of a better phrase, things went weird. Because the simple observation that communities or notable geological features or whatever else can be connected with lines is kind of obvious and mildly interesting, but not necessarily indicative of anything in particular. And as I mentioned, Watkins didn’t put much credence to it. But along comes the New Agers and the Age of Aquarius and the New Age in the 1960s and 70s. So in 1969, you had people, for example, a paranormal buff and New Ager, Don Mitchell, who conceived of leis as invisible lines of an unknown energy. So he sort of introduced the idea that the ley lines, not only were they just sort of ordinary paths by which prehistoric people could or would have gone to see each other for trade or whatever reason, they were in fact mystical energies that could be divined and located through dowsing and psychics.

0:39:08
CW: Now the New Agers in the 60s, you mentioned John Mitchell there, how much does that cross over with the drug culture that arose in around that same time?

0:39:17
BR: Well, there’s probably some, probably a fair amount of overlap. You know, what you find is that ley lines, they’re sort of an all-purpose side dish to many new age beliefs. It sort of goes with pretty much anything. You can sprinkle ley lines on dowsing and Stonehenge and pyramids and ancient aliens and the Nazca Lines and remote viewing and crop circles and vortices like in Sedona and things like that.

0:39:46
CW: I should mention that in my little journeys on the internet, I found that some writers on the web were saying that ley lines were termed dragon lines by the ancient Chinese because of course they were. I’ll just read from one of the snippets here which purports to be from a book called Eden, the knowledge of good and evil 666 by Joy or maybe that’s a typo for Joyce, Jeffrey’s pug 2006. This person quoting her says, when the dragon lines cross each other, their energy spirals into a vortex. If several lines cross at a given point, called a node, it produces a massive vortex of energy. One such place is located at Avebury in England, where 12 lines meet and go down into the earth. This is a place where megalithic stone structures were built in ancient times, and is where many crop circles appear today. So yeah, you got crop circles, you got ancient Chinese goes on to say stuff about how Uluru, the Ayers Rock in Australia is actually two serpents kind of twining together called the Rainbow Serpent Dragon Line and such. It seems like an interesting rebranding here.

PR: I thought that Ayers Rock was supposed to be the stump of a giant tree trunk or something. That’s the last thing I heard about it.

0:41:10
CW: Oh no, aren’t you thinking of the one in Wyoming or something that was in…

0:41:16
PR: Oh, maybe it’s that.

0:41:18
CW: Close encounters of the third kind.

0:41:20
PR: Yeah, I don’t know. That one’s been hitting my radar a little bit lately and it seems like a few structures they’re accusing of that. But that is a whole other show we should probably do once a year.

0:41:31
CW: It is. Yeah, the ancient gigantic tree cult is certainly interesting.

0:41:38
BR: And if people are interested, they should check out Sharon Hill’s Spooky Geology. She’s written about that and many other things. But the connection to vortices in Sedona is kind of interesting. It’s a good analogy because as with the vortices said to be in Sedona and many other places, in ley lines, there’s no way to falsify it. Yep. There’s no…

0:42:00
CW: It’s energy, you just can’t measure it with any sort of energy measuring device known to man.

BR: Right, but believe us, it’s there. And you could argue, well, you know, the equator, for example, is imaginary, right? It’s a social construct. But the difference is that, number one, that the equator, as with all the lines of latitude and longitude, are universally recognized. But more importantly, they’re useful. They actually serve a function, a purpose, right? You can tell whether or not you’re on the equator. That is a provable thing.

0:42:37
CW: You just balance an egg, right Ben?

0:42:40
BR: Exactly, exactly. And you’ll know, as we talked about in one of our shows. With ley lines as with you know vortices and whatnot. It’s not not only are they Imaginary and there’s no proof of them. They’re useless. There’s no knowledge gained by knowing where a ley line allegedly is there’s no Because you can’t prove that ley lines exist or that people Act differently or anything changes on ley line compared to a non-ley line, then there’s no…

0:43:18
CW: Well, it seems like a giant use of the sharpshooter’s fallacy where, you know, where you shoot something into the side of a barn and you draw a circle around it. If you happen to notice, oh look, there’s Stonehenge. Well, there’s a ley line. You just circle around Stonehenge, there’s a ley line. Oh, there’s a road and a building and a great pyramid over there. And they’re kind of in, okay, there’s a ley line, you know.

0:43:41
BR: It all makes sense. If you, if you put it that way.

0:43:45
CW: Isn’t it strange how all these gigantic structures are over ley lines? I would, I wouldn’t necessarily say ley lines are useless because they are super useful as a plot device. Uh, and I, I did a little pop culture, skip it and hop in here. And first of all, in the DC canon, you can look up on Arrowverse, talking about various DC properties, that ley lines are strong magic fields that power things, for example, like the Lazarus Pits, owned and used by Ra’s al Ghul, the DC villain you may have remembered from some Batman movies. Users of this Leyline-specific magic include other DC characters like Damian Dark of the Assassins League, Razagul, Esrin Fortuna, and Malcolm Merlin, also known as the Dark Archer. Also, another pop culture tangent here, Leyline is a multilingual all-woman folk band, if anybody’s interested in some female folk. And the website tvtropes.org has a lengthy listing for ley lines. They actually have a couple paragraphs explaining the origin from Alfred Watkins’s 1925 book, The Old Straight Track that you mentioned. And they talk about how occultists sort of ran wild with the whole idea and turned the ley lines into magic. They’ve got an interesting little map there noting that there’s like lines all over it. This looks like the rind of an orange if you look at the earth as depicted with ley lines everywhere and it points out on TV Tropes, note the huge concentration near Florida, which should make anybody raise an eyebrow. The TV Tropes…

0:45:35
BR: Were they created by Florida man?

0:45:38
CW: It might be an explanation for Florida man. You live in Florida, it’s not your fault. You just you know, you’re in the confluence of a bunch of ley lines, you’re gonna do weird stuff. TV tropes goes on to list ley lines as a sister trope to places of power, which is you know, the trope of like, well, there’s these places on the earth that are very special and power resonates and you know, stuff like Ghostbusters uses this trope. And it’s also it’s related to other tropes like geometric magic, functional magic and magic prerequisite tropes. As for the Star Wars universe, which is one of my favorite places to spend my spare time, my ears perked up recently on a YouTube explainer video. Yes, I’m one of those people that watches the explainer videos. I like them. They’re fun. After various Disney Plus channel episodes. So this YouTuber explaining the Obi-Wan trailer was pointing out that a Sith temple established by Darth Vader during his middle years was put on a quote, dark force ley line on I forget the name of the planet. But when I delved into it on the source for all Star Wars Arcania, Wookieepedia, it seemed like the idea of formal ley lines in the Force wasn’t really ever established in canon. It was something that the fans sort of invented and overlaid onto the world. If you read the novels or the comic books or anything that’s canon. They mention nodes or places where the force is stronger. But ley lines, the term ley lines was simply transposed onto that language by people like that YouTube explainer, who take the meaning from the way we use it in our culture and just throw it in there. So who knows, it might end up becoming canon later on. I’ll just have to keep watching all of the Star Wars related episodes on Disney Plus that are released and I’ll let you guys know.

0:47:39
BR: Fair enough.

PR: Awesome. So to pivot from pretend stuff in pretend stuff, let’s pivot back to pretend stuff in real life.

BR: Yeah, let’s circle back for a second. So again, this sort of goes back to, well, is there anything to it? And we sort of touched on this before, but you know, if you pick up books on geography or geology textbooks, they don’t mention ley lines unless it’s like in a sidebar explaining that they’re garbage. They’re bullsh-t. So that is the context under which actual geologists and geographers and others talk about it. And as we touched on before, I mean, part of the problem is that even ley line experts, the so-called experts who have written books, they have seminars and this and that, the self-annointed ley line leaders can’t agree on which sacred sites should be included as the data points. We touched on some of the obvious ones, the Great Pyramids, Ayers Rock, and things like that, but also maybe Machu Picchu in Peru, maybe the Coliseum in Rome, take your pick, right? And on a local level, it would be something like, okay, well, a high hill. Well, how big a hill counts as an important hill, right? I mean, is it a certain elevation? If so, how would the ancients have known, you know, well, this hill is obviously important enough to be considered part of our ley lines. This one over here, eh, kind of scroungy.

CW: So we’re dealing with kind of a scavenger hunt of quote-unquote important sites that would indicate a ley line. And let me get this straight, it can be either man-made or naturally occurring. It can be either really tall or really deep, or just peculiar, or… Wow, okay, that leaves it wide open for interpretation.

0:49:41
PR: Strangely enough, you just described my horoscope today.

0:49:44
BR: It’s all in there if you look close enough, right?

0:49:47
PR: You just got to read between the lines, the ley lines.

0:49:51
BR: Yeah, I mean, anything, standing stones, moats, churches, castles, crossroads, deep wells, groups of trees. There’s literally tens of thousands of potential data points around the world. So of course you can connect the dots. And you know, before I sort of gave the analogy of the equator or Sedona vortices, but another one would be, and Pascual kind of touched on it, would be astrological constellations. You can draw or imagine lines connecting certain stars to form the horns of the Taurus constellation or the Big Dipper or what have you. That doesn’t mean that they’re placed there, that those aren’t intentionally put there, you just, you can make those connections if you want to. And so it sort of goes back to psychology, right, about how, you know, people see patterns and things and people intuit and oftentimes over-interpret.

0:50:44
CW: Well, in defense of constellations and astrology, and I can’t believe I’m saying anything in defense of astrology here, stars are stars. There’s no questioning whether or not a star is a star or is an important part of a constellation. It’s not like you’re going, okay, there’s the constellation I’m going to map out. And oh, there’s a fleck of dust up there. I’m going to count that. Or there’s a man-made structure that I’m kind of, because I’m looking from down to up and I’m looking through a bridge, I’m going to count part of the bridge as my constellation. So at least as far as our clear data, points of light, I mean, Ley Lines, it seems like it’s even more potential for interpretation?

0:51:39
BR: Well, sure. I mean, you know, again, with like, for example, the Big Dipper, you can connect the dots to make it look like, you know, a dipper or a spoon. But if you connected them different ways, you know, if you, for example, connected different dots, it would look different, wouldn’t it?

0:51:54
CW: Fair enough, yeah.

0:51:56
BR: Again, it just sort of strikes me as sort of an example of what’s called teleological promiscuity. We’ve talked about in the show before, maybe not with that such a nerdy phrase, but it’s basically, you know, people sort of over-interpreting the things around them, right? So, you know, people see meaning and intent behind otherwise random phenomena.

0:52:17
CW: So we shouldn’t really end this without talking about the lay hunting community. And that sounds like a group of guys on the prowl trying to get lucky.

0:52:28
PR: No, that’s the getting laid hunting team. They’re a lot more fun than these guys, I promise.

0:52:36
CW: Alfred Watkins himself published something called the Lay Hunters Manual in 1927 and that was in response to the growing number of enthusiasts who were out looking for their own lay lines. Now back then, you know, in the 1920s, these ley line hunters weren’t connected to UFOs or, you know, spirituality or psychic stuff. Maybe some of them were, I don’t know. But these were people looking for just clearings or indications that it was an ancient pathway. Watkins’ death and disbanded formally in 1948, not too long after World War II. Then come the ufologists and they established the Lay Hunters Club in 1952 and then in 65 Philip Hesselton established the Lay Hunter Magazine. So it really struck me as kind of similar to the way that Bigfoot hunter sort of self-organized. Are you seeing parallels there, Ben?

0:53:38
BR: Yeah, it’s sort of this conglomeration, right? It begins with the kernel of an idea that’s attractive and interesting, right? This idea that all around us unseen are and hidden unless you know what to look for, right? It’s almost part of the appeal of the conspiracy. The idea that there’s the world as it appears and then there’s this underlying hidden world that can be revealed if you only know how to look, if you only have the knowledge. So in the case of conspiracies, if you’ll only listen to Alex Jones or other conspiracy people putting out their stuff, and in the case of ley lines, it’s like, well, that just may look like two hills in the distance, but if you know what to look for, if you’re in on, you know, if you’re knowledgeable about ley lines, you recognize, oh my god, there’s a ley line between them.

0:54:32
CW: Well, even beyond that, there’s another parallel I’m thinking here of, you know, this is before Pokemon Go. These clubs, these ley line hunters clubs and the Bigfoot hunting clubs, they offered a chance to get outside, go on a nice hike, observe the landscape or wilderness around you. And furthermore, they also had this vague, tenuous connection to something legitimate. Like the Bigfoot researchers and hunters were like, well, I have the strong interest in zoology. It’s just crypto zoology. And I’m not recognized by academia, but as soon as I find that Bigfoot corpse, I’m going to be in. Whereas the ley line hunters, you know, they were interested in archaeology and history, but they weren’t archaeologists or historians or academics. They just felt like, well, I’m going to go study this on my own. I’ll make my own ology, ley line ology with hookers and bourbon.

0:55:35
BR: Yeah, well, you know, again, it’s the co-opting of an interesting idea and sort of the reading more into it than is there, right? So this is why, as we’ve talked about, Watkins didn’t originally attribute anything particularly significant or mystical to it. And then others come along and say, well, let me sort of bring that into the worldview. And if you look at this and that and that through a new age prism, suddenly it has different significance. And we saw this with the vortices that we discussed. Another example would be a new age crystals, right? Crystals, there’s nothing magical about them. They’re interesting. They’re fun to look at. They’re pretty. Geologists know all about them. It wasn’t really until the new agers sort of attributed some mystical significance to it that these gems and minerals were treated as something special and therefore something that somebody should pay 30 bucks for at a shop in Sedona.

0:56:36
CW: Healing properties of crystals. Who knew that there were so many parallels when you look at weird stuff? They’re so connected to the real study of some subjects. They’re just like one removed, just like we’re going to make this crap up about it.

0:56:53
BR: We’re just going to go sideways to it.

0:56:56
CW: So I guess ley lines is that sort of that sort of thing for people with a bent towards cartography.

BR: Yeah. And as I said, I mean, there’s so many angles to it. So for, you know, people who are dowsers may not be particularly interested in ley lines into their belief system.

0:57:18
CW: How do dowsers figure ley lines into their worldview? I’ve read all sorts of explanations for ley lines, that they’re magnetic, that they’re – there was one I found that said they were ancient world grid mapping things put on our planet by UFOs so that the UFOs would know where to fly on the planet? I didn’t make it up.

BR: They can make it across the universe but they can’t figure out how to get get from point A to point B?

CW: I didn’t make it up, I’m just reporting what I’ve read online which you can read a lot of stuff online. But dowsers, I mean are they are the dowsers saying that ley lines are underground rivers or something and they can find water by using them or?

0:58:05
BR: Well, sometimes. I mean, you know, there’s lots of different approaches to dowsing, right? So there’s water dowsing, there’s oil dowsing, there’s dowsing for missing objects, you know, there’s gold, there’s oil, all sorts of different things. And, you know, sometimes people use pendulums, sometimes they dowse, of course, with the forked sticks and the two bent L-shaped rods and things like that. And so, for example, some dowsers believe that what they’re detecting is actually ley lines underneath the earth. And so, it just so happens to sort of lead them towards whatever they’re looking for. And of course, this is the big hole. One of the big holes in this is that, again, people doubts for different things. How does the universe or the twig in your hand know whether you’re wanting to find oil or water or gold? These are very different substances, right?

0:59:05
CW: Yeah.

0:59:06
BR: So, again, it’s all sort of within the belief system. That’s one of the beliefs is that through knowing where lay lines are, that’ll help you either because you will know to avoid lay lines because that might throw off your dowsing equipment.

0:59:22
CW: Oh, well, so it could also be an excuse. Like if you hire a dowser and you pay them 500 bucks to find a good spot to dig a well and they say, right here and you dig and you dig and you dig and you dig and there’s no water and they say, oh, I’m sorry. It was a lay line interfering with my dowsing ability.

0:59:38
BR: That is exactly – no refunds.

0:59:40
CW: See, and you said you said lay lines weren’t useful.

0:59:42
BR: Well, fair point. Fair point.

PR: Speaking of useful, I did in searching just random stuff about lay lines for this episode. I did find a tweet that I think this is somewhat useful. It said that it was a tweet that said, based on the ancient science of ley lines, following the line between the Salisbury’s ZZ pizza spot and Woking Pizza Express, they should expect the next newsworthy pizza event to occur at Dartford Pizza Hut. Just so you know, people are doing some good things with that, just predicting pizza events and such. And even on the Leyline Wikipedia, someone did find an eight-point Leyline alignment of pizza restaurants in London. So there are eight pizza restaurants on one Leyline. And when you think about the way you cut a pizza, there are a bunch of Leylines on the pizza. So I really think this rabbit hole gets real deep, man. I think I found something.

BR: Mind blown.

1:00:52
CW: Pizza Ley Lines. I think we better end there guys. I don’t think we can top that.

1:00:58
PR: Can’t top it.

1:01:00
CW: You can get toppings on it. Now I’m hungry. I’m going to go have dinner.

1:01:06
PR: You can’t out pizza the Ley Lines.

(MUSIC)

1:01:08
CW: Well, that was a fun discussion about ley lines. And I think it’s kind of ironic that we began this episode talking about the brew ha ha over at Twitter, and we ended up talking about pizza related lay lines on a, as discussed on Twitter.

PR: So again, expect the next newsworthy pizza event to occur at Dartford Pizza Hut.

CW: Okay. Mark it down, everybody. Be there or be square. Ben, what are we talking about next episode?

1:01:51
BR: For the next episode, we’ll be talking about lesser known ones that may or may not exist, but they’re just as interesting as the as the marquee monsters.

CW: Hmm. I’m sure they have a few things in common with their more famous cousins.

1:02:15
BR: They do, indeed.

1:02:17
CW: They live in lakes. Okay, everybody, until then, take care.

1:02:21
BR: Bye bye.

PR: See ya.

1:02:27
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