Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, where we apply critical thinking and evidence-based analysis to, well, everything from the simple to the strange, the mysterious to the mundane.

Pascual Romero: And welcome back to Squaring the Strange. I’m Pascual Romero with me as always is…

BR: I’m Benjamin Radford.

PR: Yes, and he became British this week, I guess.

BR: Don’t mock me, sir!

PR: We actually, I’ve been keeping track of our listener stats and there’s quite a few of you from the UK, so welcome. It’s always nice to hear that we’re getting a little bit more global.

0:00:54
BR: All the way across the pond.

BR: I know. I’m excited. I don’t know what time it is for them. Well, it doesn’t matter because it’s a podcast.

BR: High wattage, right? We have extra hamsters running to generate electricity.

PR: We do.

BR: We have the hamsters, we have extra hamsters running to generate electricity to reach all the way to the UK.

0:01:14
Yeah, all the way to the UK. It might even be a UK animal. What do they have there? Weasels? We have a lot of weasels. Foxes? Lemmings? Irish?

BR: Foxes? They do fox hunts.

0:01:26
Right, okay, foxes. We’ll say foxes on wheels.

BR: They have black cats. They have a big tradition of black cats and scary things. Maybe somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, Nessie is a…

PR: Nessie could help. Nessie’s big. That’s a lot of potential energy right there.

BR: That’s right. That’s right.

0:01:48
So whatever our British friends are doing to get our signal across, thank you very much.

PR: So this week, we’re going to be covering something a little different. We had a couple of weeks of ghosts and spooky stuff. This week a different, well it could be spooky I guess depending on who you ask, but we’re going to be talking about UFOs and most specifically we’re actually going to be talking about our own local home grown UFO legend in Roswell, the crash in, what year was it, 1947? And so we’ll be getting to that in just a minute. But first, Ben, what are you skeptical of this week?

0:02:28
BR: Well, this week I’m skeptical of a new game, a new dangerous game that’s being shared around.

PR: So not Sorry?

BR: Not Sorry. Not that dangerous.

PR: Monopoly? Monopoly is a dangerous game, actually. It can ruin a family, trust me.

BR: Bad things happen. Anyway.

BR: Not as dangerous as Playing Gods.

0:02:45
Some of our listeners will get that. But no, this is actually a subject that I had heard a little bit about a few weeks earlier and then I was interviewed by a BBC news reporter in Brazil, who asked me to research and comment on it. And the story is about what’s being called the Blue Whale Suicide Game.

PR: That is confusing to me already.

BR: Yes. Why would blue whales kill themselves?

0:03:20
Seriously, right? And of course there are whale beachings and what not. But no, this is serious. This is serious. Look in my eyes. See the serious? Okay, so. The blue whale suicide game is believed to be a hidden online social media group in which the main goal is to encourage children to kill themselves.

0:03:43
As one does. The structure is that young children are drawn to the game and the idea is that they are given tasks. They are given 50 tasks, one to do each day. And it could be something weird. It could be to wake up at an unusual hour, maybe to eat a certain unusual food, maybe watch a horror film, maybe stub your toe, cut yourself, these sort of weird, sort of dark, edgy type things. And the idea is that this escalates. So each day someone says, okay, today you have to do this.

0:04:26
And I go, okay. And then today, good job, good job. Now Billy, you have to do this. You killed a cricket, now go find a puppy. Yeah, yeah, scary stuff here, right? And the idea is that on the 50th day, they are commanded to kill themselves. And this has been going this these these rumors about this this dangerous Horrifying blue whale game have been circulating for for several weeks in fact I think a month or more in different places I think it really began in Europe and Russia and it sort of been screen anyways is most recently Making big news in Brazil, which is why I was asked to research it.

0:05:11
So you know it’s interesting there were there were there were warnings going around, for example in the UK, it was the classic moral panic thing. It’s like, please parents, beware of this game, share this, tell your kids, talk to your kids about this before they get into this. And so when I saw this, it was immediately red flags jumped up all over the place. It has all the hallmarks of a classic moral panic. But what’s interesting is that there’s a couple of aspects. One is that it has the grooming aspect. You see that in cults, you see that in abuse sometimes where there’s this concern of an evil stranger. You know, stranger danger, a stranger is

0:05:58
is manipulating your children into doing evil things and God knows what. One of the things that has kept the story alive is that there have been some connections to real suicides. For example, there was a young girl that allegedly threw herself under a commuter train. And so you have, and you see this often in urban legends, where parts of the urban legends will be localized. And so they involve real people and often demonstrable, you know, an actual person. So what you find is that rumors and legends like these are widely shared because they appeal to seemingly legitimate statistics and sources.

0:06:52
And it’s interesting because that legitimizes in parents and the public’s mind because they’re like well this is, they’re being quoted by this police, this police commissioner.

PR: Right, yeah it’s kind of like the Cropsey story in New Jersey.

BR: Exactly.

PR: There’s an element of truth to the urban legend.

BR: Exactly. And so, and it’s not just, urban legends are compelling and interesting because they’re specific. And again, as I mentioned, they’re often localized variants. It didn’t happen in some generic mall.

0:07:24
It’s the local mall. It’s the DeVargas mall. It’s someplace where people have a personal connection to. And in this case, for example, the Blue Whale Suicide Game was said to have 130 victims. The 130 is a very specific number. It’s not like a few dozen, it’s 130. How would you even… Who’s tracking… Who has a notch on the wall, right? And so, for example, oftentimes the rumors will refer to comments from legitimate police organizations.

0:08:00
And it’s interesting, I saw this last year during the evil clown panic. As you may recall, shortly before Halloween, there was creepy clown stories all over the place, all across the country, Stockholm. But what was happening was that the officials and the school officials were legitimizing the fears because there were actual school lockdowns yeah schools are being locked down because someone was concerned that the evil clowns are going to come and shoot up the school yeah and and what and is interesting dynamic because uh… you know if you’re a if you’re a school official you have to take it seriously this is a threat to a school exactly now it may be ridiculous yeah it may have nothing behind it

PR: but you can’t you can’t brush it off in the off chance that you are wrong.

0:08:53
I feel for anyone who has to be put in that position because you can’t not follow protocol but at the same time it’s like…

BR: Well it’s a school threat after Columbine and Newtown and all these others and so there’s this dynamic where police and school officials and parents legitimize bogus threats. Not because they want to but because they have to err on the side of caution. And what that does is, picture a parent who hears a story from their 13-year-old that a clown is going to shoot up the school. That’s not going to happen. They don’t pay any attention. But then the next day, they get an email saying, school is shut down because of a clown. They’re like, well, this sounds bogus to me, but someone’s taking it seriously. The same effect is happening here with the blue whale suicide, where police departments in a couple of cases actually are sending out warnings, even though there’s really nothing to it.

0:09:53
So the question is not, as skeptics, the question isn’t, is this thing possible? Because anything is possible.

PR: Yeah, that’s that’s a broad question that yes, that’s always gonna be the answer in some way

BR: No matter what weird thing it is the answer. Is this possible? Yes, as we’ve talked about before, you know in science Anything is possible. The the what we know about the world is is tentative based upon the evidence today,,

PR: The the question we should ask ourselves is, is this probable?

BR: Exactly. Exactly.

0:10:28
And so that’s what I was trying to, when I was talking to the reporter in Brazil, I was trying to explain, well, you know, when you ask me, is this possible? That’s not the right question. Anything is possible. The question is, is there any evidence for it? And the answer is no. So far there’s zero evidence that there is some hidden online social media group that is trying for some unfathomable reason to get kids to kill themselves. What struck me is that moral panics like the Blue Whale game are part of a very old tradition. I mentioned earlier that it’s basically moral panics. These sorts of scary media stories are very popular because they are fueled by parents’ fears about wanting to know what the kids are up to.

0:11:13
You know, are seemingly innocent role-playing games and entertainment leading to unspeakable evil? Dungeons and Dragons? Have you heard any heavy metals, Pascual, that might be leading children astray?

PR: No, I make it, though.

BR: There you go. It’s half the battle right there. So you know, now it’s online games.

0:11:35
And so it has all the classics of a moral panic, as I said. So for example, you see the theme of modern technology and personal devices as posing hidden dangers to children and teens. We see this all the time, right? It’s something that’s in every home. So it’s not a danger that is like out there. It’s a hidden danger in your own home.

PR: It has invaded your life.

BR: And that’s what scares people, right?

0:12:00
Parents are like, well, I’m watching what they want what they see on TV And I make sure they don’t see any r-rated movies, but I’m not I’m not looking at their cell phones all the time Maybe maybe they’re being enticed into this right? So it’s this classic stranger danger fashion and the idea There’s some influential evil stranger that manipulates the innocent Into doing more and more outrageous things. and there’s also of course an element of conspiracy theory to these stories. There’s a hidden world of anonymous evil people that apparently have nothing better to do than to ask teens to do things for 50 days. Frankly, I can’t even stick to a diet for a week. Now, how exactly? Really one thing a day for 50 days?

0:12:44
That’s like a month and a half. I’m not buying it. So anyway, that’s what jumps out at me.

PR: Yeah, and What jumps out at me especially is as you were as you were telling this story about the panic I came to the realization that there was a movie I had seen in the last few months called Nerve and the plot of this movie this came out in 2016 last summer and the plot is about these high school students who who sign up for an app called Nerve and it’s a social media app that basically dares you to do increasingly more dangerous things.

BR: I love it! Yeah. I’m there!

PR: Not the greatest movie I’ve ever seen but but the plot but it is a clever plot device maybe not clever but you know entertaining plot device.

BR: Compelling.

0:13:33
PR: Compelling great that’s the word and and it it ends up just stacking the deck, stacking the deck, stacking the deck, and it just goes to ever increasingly dangerous and life-threatening dares.

BR: An escalation of dares.

PR: Yeah, and it escalates. I won’t give anything away if any of you are interested in seeing it, but it just escalates to levels that are not unlike what we just talked about here and the interesting thing is an element of it is that it’s a social media thing so live video of the person doing it they have to have their phone while they’re doing it to prove they did it.

0:14:13
And it’s streamed live and that’s sort of the motivation for why the app exists and you know it’s basically to get traffic and but it sounds kind of strikingly familiar to this story because it’s got the social media internet element to it, it has the ever increasing dangers element to it, and it’s high school students. So to me, I can’t say for sure, but I would say that this movie probably inspired a pretty strong element to this story.

BR: I would guess so. I remember seeing something about the film. I never saw it. I saw it advertised and I sort of blipped past it because it’s not really my bag. But no, that’s interesting. I would be shocked if there wasn’t some trace back to that. It’s interesting, when you look at some of the fears behind many of these moral panics, a lot of them involve technology. You can look For example, the concerns about little lady microwaving her poodle, or the microwave baby.

0:15:21
And also concerns about EMFs and cell phone. It’s really interesting. When you go back and you look at the social anxiety that each new technology brings. Cell phones, iPhones, television. At one point, it’s interesting, you go back and you look at some of the dire predictions of what will happen when TVs are in every home. It’s like, let me tell you, the world’s going to hell in a handbasket.

0:15:54
PR: You see it every generation, every new cutting edge technology. We always get a little bit of a panic around it and all these stories start coming out. And I know it goes way back. I’ve read things about the perils of cars, which actually turned out to be somewhat true, but the people freaking out about it were people who kind of had a stake in keeping horses as the main. A lot of it’s just people being fearful of change, especially radical change, like the difference between an abacus and a cell phone. To some people it’s just so scary to them, the idea of even trying to navigate the information superhighway.

0:16:35
BR: I can just picture a PSA a hundred years ago, have you heard of these new automobiles? What will happen when your child sees one? Brought to you by the American Horseman’s Association. Coachman’s Association, local 490. There’s just always this concern about it. But as one thing that jumped out, there’s a book that came out a couple years back called Kids Gone Wild by Joel Best and Kathleen Bogle. And the book is basically just looking at the hype over teen sex and rainbow parties and sexting and things like that. And in the book, I’ll just quote a real short section because it’s directly relevant to the blue whale concerns.

0:17:17
They looked at a wide variety of concerns and moral panics over teen sex hype and they said, in the story introductions we analyzed whether the segment was about rainbow parties or sex bracelets, A: they emphasized the involvement of young kids, especially girls, B: warned parents that they were ignorant of what their own children were doing in secret, and C: declared the phenomenon to be widespread. And that’s exactly right. That’s what the Blue Whale Games is trading on. That’s why it’s not that, oh, here’s this weird thing that happened twice in Russia a year ago. It’s like, no, it happened then, but now it’s in your neighborhood.

0:17:54
Do you know what your children are doing? So again, it’s just the latest moral panic circulating around about what kids are doing online. And so my advice to the journalist and to parents elsewhere is to, number one, give your kids some credit. Don’t assume your kids are stupid. Now, to be fair, maybe your kids are stupid. I’m not saying your kids aren’t stupid, but I’m just saying that if your kid has made it through the teenage years and you’re genuinely concerned that he or she is going to open up an app and get on social media and do a dare for 50 consecutive days that ends in suicide, maybe you’ve got other problems.

0:18:42
PR: I’m a parent and it would be shocking to me that my own kid could achieve the entire 50 days before me noticing something was off. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but that alone…

BR: I saw you severed your thumb the other day. What was that about? Yeah, exactly. Is there something you want to talk to me about?

PR: What’s up with that missing thumb? When did that happen? Something that’s a little more negative about them, outside of just them being hoaxes, is that it tends to diminish the theme that it’s resting on, and this being suicide.

0:19:18
That’s a very, very serious topic. And it’s a very serious thing. A lot of people kill themselves every year, and that’s a major problem.

BR: Yeah, absolutely. Suicide is a very serious real problem, and particularly among young people. So in the wake of suicides, which as we talked about, are sadly not uncommon. People look for answers. People want to know why.

0:19:44
Why did this happen? There was the 13 Reasons Why we discussed in another episode. It’s a subject that’s ripe for evocative, compelling discussions and rumor and this sort of thing. And of course, when someone kills themselves, you want to know why. It’s natural. It’s human. Why did this happen? And sometimes there is no reason. And sometimes there is reason, but we will never know it.

0:20:08
This human desire for things to be simple and binary and yes or no, and this is exactly why. And in the real world, that doesn’t really happen. You know, it just, there’s some, people look for scapegoats, right? People look for, they blame rock music, they blame Ozzy Osbourne. They blame violent video games. Take your pick. And unfortunately, life is not that simple. So my advice is always for journalists and authorities and teachers and others to seek out experts in folklore.

0:20:41
Seek out skeptics. Somebody who can put these claims in context and say, okay, well, yes, there’s some truth to that, but there’s another truth over here, and this is part of a larger saying. Because otherwise it’s just this alarmist scary claim going viral on social media. Instead of you know someone saying okay well this is part of a moral panic, this has happened before, it didn’t result in clusters of suicide. No. And you know and calm down.

0:21:07

PR: Yeah, exactly. And if you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-8255. That’s 273-TALK. Or reach out to a friend, family member, or mental health professional in your area.

BR: So, Pasquale, what’s on your skeptical radar? So this week I have been seeing this all over Facebook. People have been sharing a video which is essentially an advertisement for something called Skin Motion. And what Skin Motion is, and I’ll go ahead and just quote it from their website so I don’t misrepresent them, but it’s a person uploads or records the audio they want into an app or on their website and then they generate a sound wave from it.

0:21:59
Now those who don’t know what that is, a sound wave is also known as a waveform or a spectrogram. It is a visual representation of recorded sound and I’ll get into the details of how that works when I talk about why I’m skeptical of this. So it says they generate the sound wave, a person takes the generated sound wave to a tattoo artist from their artist network. So it says that artists need to be licensed in order to make the tattoo and also to change the size, the placement, and customize it. So they do require that they be licensed and certified through SkinMotion. And it says that it processes the audio from the tattoo and adds it to the app. So when the user opens up the app and points the camera on their mobile device at the tattoo, it recognizes the sound wave and plays back the audio.

0:22:55
So in a nutshell, it’s an app that you point your camera on your phone at your tattoo, it scans the sound wave, and then plays back the audio that the sound wave represents.

BR: And I should just clarify, and I hope you don’t mind me saying this, for those who are listening and not watching, which is all of you. Pasquale is heavily tattooed.

PR: Yeah, I’ve got a few tattoos and so and I think this might be a topic that I have a better understanding of being that music and tattoos are you know pretty heavily I’m very heavily involved in both.

BR: And music production, designing, playing, in all facets, you are well versed in that.

0:23:39
So I think this is a perfect topic for you. Honestly, this is right up your alley.

PR: Yeah. So let’s get to why I’m skeptical, because this thing works as advertised. They’re very careful how they claim it works. In fact, they don’t really say exactly how it works. But we’ll get into a little bit of the science of it first Now I want to disclaim that when I say sound wave in the context of this conversation I’m using their term for what is actually just a waveform so a waveform or sound wave as they call it is a visual representation of sound that displays amplitude and Relative volume in a recording most of you probably have seen one of these before. It looks like squiggly line with a bunch of valleys and peaks. If you need to you can Google Soundwave or Google Skin Motion. They actually have a very good demonstration of how their app works. And what happens is this representation is basically just amplitude. It’s not actually any of the information of what the sound is. What it’s telling you is kind of the relative amplitude at any given point in the sound. So what you can discern from sound waves are exact, it’s you know pretty basic stuff. You can tell if something is too loud relative to something else. So if I’m you know talking too quiet and then I talk very loud, the sound wave will show that the quiet part is very low and that the loud part is very high, and we use that information when we’re editing audio to help normalize or what we call compress the audio, which is to basically narrow the volume difference between two different parts.

0:25:32
BR: So there’s less dynamic range and it’s easier to listen to because it’s not… Yeah, it just it makes the sound fill the space a little more at all levels, so it kind of flattens it out so it all kind of sounds one volume. but that’s about the extent. We can see, you know, you can see the rhythm, you can see where beats are hitting, you can see syllables in spoken words, but there’s no actual way to discern what is being presented there. You know,

BR: there’s the contents. So if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re you’re you can’t really tell the content. You can tell the contours.

PR: Yeah. Yeah.

0:26:12
Sort of a good way. Yes, that’s yeah, that’s a really good way of putting it. So the content is is basically impossible to discern. I mean, there are very small exceptions to that in that you might be able to tell, like, I know what mouth noise looks like or, you know, and that’s because it’s a very specific little spike right before someone talks. And it’s not because I know what that sound is. It’s just that I know how it correlates to the sound that follows it. Basically, there’s no way to look at a waveform and know exactly what it is or what sound is being made.

0:26:47
Now, the app, because that’s kind of where I take issue with what they’re claiming in the app because they’re not necessarily saying that it reads the sound wave and can tell what the sound wave is because they do they are kind of careful to say that you know you upload the sound and then they generate a sound wave from the sound and then the sound itself is the sound wave is tattooed on you and then you scan it with the app.

BR: So they probably had lawyers look at it at some point.

PR: I imagine so yeah it is careful to not claim that it’s reading the sound. So for instance, you can’t just take your app and look at someone else’s sound wave on their arm or leg or whatever. It’s not going to know what that is. It’s not going to scan that and reproduce any sound from that because it’s not like a record needle that can pick up the grooves and create a sound out of it.

0:27:40
So that’s my first problem. It’s not necessarily where my problem is ultimately because it’s gimmicky, it’s fun. But I think the representation is a little weird and it makes it seem like it’s doing something it’s not. Because I could literally program an app that reads, you can program an app to read visual information. And you could easily do a picture of a shoe or something and have it cue a song. I mean, that’s it’s-

BR: There’s nothing unique to that.

PR: Yeah, it’s not the shoe that’s producing the sound.

0:28:14
It’s just that the app is saying, I see that shoe. I’m going to produce this sound. And I’m going to pull it off of a server or off of the phone memory or something. And so it’s a bit of a parlor trick to begin with. But my other problem with it is that it says that the artists, that it’s got the artist network and the artists have to be licensed by this company to do the tattoos. And I started looking into it.

0:28:43
Now, I couldn’t get far enough into it to see how much it costs. But I did dig enough to find out that it does require you to do a registration fee and become licensed. I assume there’s some kind of training and the artist has to renew this fee every year and now you know what what’s you know who’s to say that you can’t just do a tattoo of a waveform and and you know attach it to the app. But see, they’re smart about it because they generate the waveform and tie it to the sound. So they give you, as the artist, the image. So you have to use their image because that’s the only one that’s tied to it.

0:29:30
And so it’s kind of like they’re creating a barcode for you to tattoo. And so it is a uniquely identifiable piece of art, so that’s not the problem.

BR: There’s something a little, I don’t want to say dishonest, but there’s something a little sketchy about this.

PR: And so that’s kind of my problem. Back when I was in college, I never was a professional artist, but I understudied an artist and decided I didn’t want to tattoo for a living. So I have a pretty good understanding of how tattoos work, how you do a tattoo. Tattoo artists are not…

0:30:07
you have to be a pretty famous artist to make a lot of money. It’s like musicians, any art really. So tattoo artists aren’t really a group of people that make a ton of money, but they do always try to stay at the cutting edge of things and they try to be the first to do these new styles of tattoos or they try to stay ahead of the curve in terms of equipment and inks. These are people who just do that as a practice in order to stay in business. When companies like this come out and start promising things that people that aren’t quite as technically knowledgeable on the thing, they just jump into it. They’re like, sure, whatever.

0:30:47
I need to be at the forefront. People are going to be asking for this and I’m sure they will be. I mean this has been all over social media. But you know kind of the you know it runs into the issues of you know they’re charging artists a recurring fee and then the other problem is that you know this this service you know it’s a tattoo in theory. I mean there’s a lot of ways to remove the but is in theory is there for life. And an application on a phone is destined to eventually fade away. Even the most tried and true internet services and social networks have died off, MySpace or some of the older stuff that we pretend that we have Squaring the Strange on.

0:31:29
BR: By the way, please be sure to comment on this on our MySpace page.

PR: So but these things, they go away. And what happens, there’s these servers that get mothballed and thrown in a storage unit somewhere or get sold to another company. And this data is gone. And so now this recording doesn’t exist. And the app doesn’t exist anymore. It stops being supported. And then you just have a waveform tattooed on you, which there could be worse things.

0:31:56
At least it represents something that matters to you. But at the same time, like, people are going into this, I think, expecting more from it than it does. And honestly, it’s just the sheer fact that they are presenting it as kind of a thing that’s like, oh, it reads waveforms. It doesn’t read waveforms. You can’t. You can analyze a waveform, but you can’t just tell what something is by scanning a waveform.

BR: Nothing reads a waveform.

PR: Yeah, it’s exactly, it’s a little sketchy and again I think that it’s a, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s predatory and it’s going after artists, but it is a little frustrating to me that they’re, you know, going straight at the artist like that. And I, you know, and my guess is that it’s going to probably force artists to have to specially price those tattoos because for all intents and purposes, these are tiny little tattoos and they would take a competent artist less than an hour to do, which means that they’re not going to be making a lot of money off of each tattoo. They’d have to be doing a lot more volume or charging a specific rate for that type of tattoo.

0:33:16
BR: Because of course they themselves are being charged for the whatever training it is. Precisely, and I’ll dig a little more. I don’t know if, you know, you probably have to get completely signed up before you see how much it costs. But, you know, I don’t suspect it’s going to be cheap. You know, it just sounds like one of those things that you get into, you know, hundreds if not thousands of dollars to buy into. And who knows, maybe it’s 50 bucks. I don’t know. I just, but it’s a little shady for me. I think that maybe had they tried to do it in a more traditional application way where it’s funded by people buying the app or something, that might be a little more, I’d be a little more inclined to not be so critical of them, but I think, you know, A: they’re making a claim that’s they’re insinuating something that is not true by the technology itself, and B: they are going right after the artists themselves for funding it.

0:34:15
BR: Well, on a related note, I’d like to welcome our new sponsor, Skin Motion. We appreciate the big shill box.

PR: Skin motion, absolutely not what I just said it was.

BR: Okay, let’s do that. I hope that was clear to the lawyers.

BR: So, as you know, there are many, even though the Roswell is by far the most famous, the most popular UFO crash and alien thing here in New Mexico, here in the land of enchantment. There are of course several such lesser known ones.

PR: Yeah, we’ve got the Dulce out in northern New Mexico on the Hikari Apache Reservation.

0:35:09
What else?

BR: There’s the Aztec UFO crash, which is the subject of I think chapter two or three in my book Mysterious New Mexico.

PR: And there was a sighting in Socorro, New Mexico as well.

BR: Yeah, that was by a police officer, Lonnie Zamora, if I’m not mistaken. That remains a Depends on when you talk to quasi unexplained incidents, but yes It’s I mean it’s rare to have a state with you know three or four quasi prominent UFO craters.

BR: Yeah, not to mention the Socorro one is geographically close to the Very Large Array, which is where the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is conducted and also very you know scientific highly important research

BR: So let’s move on to the Roswell crash all right whenever whenever people find out that I’m a Professional skeptic whatever that means and I live in New Mexico of course. It’s always like Oh Roswell like Yeah Like that’s all yeah, that’s where they go right to it like zoom in. Yeah You know what’s interesting there’s lots of fascinating things about Roswell from from the the the evolving mythology to the conspiracy theories It’s it’s a it’s an interesting beast to unpack And one of the most important things to realize that listeners should realize is that there’s not THE Roswell story. There are the Roswell stories.

0:36:58
There are several different Roswell stories, many of which are mutually exclusive. So it’s like, well hold on, when you say do you believe in the Roswell story, which of the varied ones do you believe? And of course, they’re like, oh, there’s more than one. Yes, Virginia, there’s more than one. And there’s about equal evidence for all of them. So keep that in mind. And really, it just depends on who you talk to. Some authors give no credibility to certain claims and eyewitnesses. Other authors stake their entire book or theory on one anonymous source that happened to say something to somebody, someone’s cousin, bartender’s girlfriend’s mechanic.

0:37:47
PR: The usual path of information.

BR: Exactly, as one does. So the fact is that if you have enough dots or data points, you can pick and choose whichever ones you want to include or exclude, and you can pretty much cherry pick the evidence to make whatever you want out of it and tell whatever story you want. So, you know, some people say there was one UFO, some say there were two, some people say the UFO collided with a weather balloon, some say that it was struck by lightning, some say the crash happened on July 2nd, other people say it was July 5th. I mean, take your pick.

0:38:21
It’s really, it’s just all over the map. I have to say that one of the things that always amused me of some of the stories was I’m thinking, okay, so we have alien spacecraft that somehow managed to cross the universe and they were taken out by lightning? Because lightning hits commercial aircraft all the time. It’s not a big deal. This is not unusual.

PR: There are properties of physics that prevent that from downing a plane.

BR: There are, and yet somehow the aliens have not figured this out.

0:38:58
They managed to go across the galaxy.

PR: Through solar storms and asteroids.

BR: And they hit a weather balloon and everything goes to hell, right? A little bit of lightning hits a saucer and they can’t deal with that. I’ve always just like, really?

PR: This is, this is, that’s what did him in.

BR: That makes sense to you, huh? Okay. Okay.

PR: So the basic rundown of the story goes, something came down during a violent thunderstorm in June or July, 1947, found on a ranch by Mack Brazel or Brayzel, as some people say it.

0:39:35
It was small debris scattered over about three quarters of a mile. He described it as quote, wreckage made up of rubber strips, tin foil, a rather tough paper, and sticks that altogether would have weighed no more than five pounds. In fact, he said that he quote, didn’t pay much attention to it, end quote, after finding it and continued making his rounds. On July 5th, Brazel, who lived in a remote area 70 miles from the nearest town, visited the town of Corona, where he heard about Kenneth Arnold’s flying discs that made national news. He wondered if what he found might be related to it. Two days later, on July 7th, he stopped in Roswell and mentioned to the sheriff what he’d found. The sheriff called Major Jesse Marcell at the Roswell Army Field.

0:40:22
They went out to the ranch, and since neither could identify it, they collected it and took it to Roswell Army Airfield. On July 8th, the base’s PR office, under the orders from Jesse Marcel, issued a press release saying a flying disc was recovered. The debris arrived at the office of Air Force Commander Brigadier General Roger Ramey, who identified it as the remains of radar-borne radar reflectors. Ramey then informed the media that they had been mistaken, that it was a weather balloon and photographers were allowed to see and photograph the wreckage. The headlines soon changed to, quote, flying disk explained, end quote, and the whole thing was forgotten about.

BR: So as you said, the Roswell crash of 1947 was pretty much forgotten about, which is odd given how widely known it is today, how oddly cited, you would think that it would be a big deal.

0:41:17
But instead, pretty much nobody really talked about it, thought about it for about 30 years. There wasn’t like, oh, cover up. It was like, oh yeah, remember that crashed radar weather? Yeah. Well, what changed was that in 1978, Jesse Martell changed his story and told UFO authors Stanton Friedman and Leonard Stringfield that something extraterrestrial had been recovered. So yeah, so Marcell changed his story. That was not what he originally said and we know what he originally said because we have…

0:41:53
PR: Sticks and tinfoil.

BR: Yeah, so all of a sudden you’re like, hold on here. You said before it was, you know, couldn’t weigh more than five pounds, sticks, tin foil, lightweight, things like that. And all of a sudden, like, whoa, what I meant was, there were the alien bodies, there were claims, for example, that the material had extraordinary properties. It was, it wouldn’t burn, for example. It was indestructible. Okay. And things like that.

0:42:20
PR: Except by lightning.

BR: Well, duh. Except by lightning. And so at this point in 1978 with Friedman’s book, this is where the sort of avalanche begins, where you get this sort of snowball effect and all these claims glom onto it as it sort of rumbles down. Rumbles down the hill and different things fly off and different crazy stories get added to it along the way. But if you go back to the original, like what people originally said, this is what I always explain the importance of doing investigations, find original sources.

0:42:58
It’s fine to go see what other people said later on, but if you want to know what happened at the time, find out what people said at the time. That’s usually very important.

PR: Well that’s pretty much rule number one with any kind of historical, you know Investigation you have to find the earliest most direct source and

BR: And When you’re of course, the question is why exactly did Marcel wait 30 years to change his story? Why is it that for for 30 years? It was not a big deal was this this debris that you know could have been found in some high school science project and suddenly there’s aliens. Well, part of the answer is that in 1978 UFOs were in pop culture. Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out the previous year.

0:43:49
Spielberg, right? Aliens, desert areas. I mean it was in the public’s consciousness. And he’s like, well hey, maybe I did see something now that… Bring the cameras over here. Sounds an awful lot like our what are you skeptical of this week? Very dubious and so so it’s important to understand the context in which Some of the more dramatic and sensational stories about Roswell emerged, right? And it was it was absolutely within the cultural context of this this national in fact global interest in UFOs and aliens and spacecraft. That’s where that came from. And so you have the book in 78 by Friedman, and then that was followed up in 1980 by a book called The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz, who by the way believed in Atlantis.

0:44:45
Just FYI. I’m just throwing that out there.

PR: It’s relevant.

BR: I just thought I’d throw it out there. So Berlitz, who’s a well-known, I don’t want to say crank, but he was a crank. And his family made their fortune in the language schools, the Berlitz language. You can learn French.

PR: I absolutely know that name.

BR: And so he’s tied with that.

0:45:10
And so the story then changed that it was alien craft flying over the New Mexico desert observing U.S. nuclear weapons but crashed upon being hit by lightning. This is where the lightning comes into it. So apparently again, Berlitz in addition to maybe the Atlanteans watching over us, apparently thinks that a little bit of lightning is going to take out extra craft. And then of course there were aliens on board and this is where you get the stories of the bodies and a government cover-up, of course. And this is where the conspiracy element sort of seeps into the Roswell story. And so that really launched a cottage industry of Roswell books. You had the one in 78, you had Roswell Incident, then you had another book in 1991 called UFO Crash at Roswell by Kevin Randall and Schmidt.

0:46:00
And then in 1994 there was the great… There was the great story of the British film collector Ray Santilli that bought old footage of aliens being dissected

PR: I yeah, I remember that one remember that story Yeah, sure

BR: And it was it was bought if I’m not mistaken by Bob Guccione of Penthouse magazine who paid I don’t know a couple million dollars for this Amazingly authentic footage of an alien being dissected. Yeah, he probably should have stuck to the naked girls because of course that turned out to be a hoax. By the 1990s, the Roswell story was just spinning. And people would come out of the woodwork like, Oh, I remember people who had the most tenuous connection to Roswell were suddenly putting themselves in the middle of stories like, Oh well, now that it’s been so long, I’m not so concerned the government’s gonna kill me right let me tell you my story. Really, dude, okay?

0:46:53
PR: Right, now if I recall correctly I was it that video that They eventually aired on TV as a special right

BR: That would be Fox News.

PR: Yeah, okay? I do I remember the video I didn’t get to see it until it was on the internet which would have been probably several years later, but I was several years later, but I was very underwhelmed by it.

BR: Well, Fox News was on the cutting edge of exposing this global conspiracy. Give them credit.

PR: I mean, still doing it to this day, I think.

BR: Funny how that works.

0:47:29
But no, it’s just bizarre to sort of see how what began as a very fairly simple story, it’s complex in that there’s nuances to it. There actually was a cover up. It wasn’t a UFO crash, but there’s nuances to it. But then over the years, it’s become this juggernaut. And again, it depends on which anonymous source you want to believe, whether you have a book to peddle or not, and there you go.

PR: The government does a lot of things that they don’t want the public to know about, and they’re very real things, especially back in the Cold War when we had experimental things all over the place, experimental satellites, low altitude surveillance stuff, and what’s the worst possible thing that can happen is it’s identified, you know, and so what is the best way to keep it from being identified?

0:48:23
Just allowing people to promote it as unidentified flying objects and then making the leap to to aliens because that makes their job a hundred times easier.

BR: Well that’s what happens at Area 51 I mean you know the base there, it’s an actual base, it’s not imaginary.

PR: No, no, it’s real. Driven by the gates on the way to the clown motel.

BR: Yes, that’s right. So it’s a real thing. The question is not, is it a real military base? Because of course it is. The question is, are they hiding alien spacecraft and bodies there?

0:48:58
And the answer is, there’s no evidence of that. It goes back to, it’s not what’s possible, it’s what is there evidence for. And the government and the Pentagon is well aware that X-Files and all these other authors TV shows, movies, you know, are perpetuating the story of Area 51 as being an alien, you know, spacecraft analysis basee or whatever else. And it’s like, so what? What do they care, right? Knock yourself out. If you think we’ve got alien bodies here, sure.

0:49:32
PR: We can neither confirm nor deny it.

BR: Exactly.

PR: You know, not saying I know everyone’s motives, but it’s entirely convenient that people will come up with the most outlandish explanations for things because they don’t need people finding out what things actually are.

BR: Well, that leads me to one of my favorite parts of the Roswell story, which is that it is true that in the Roswell Daily Record there was a quote. So the Roswell Daily Record of July 8, 1947 wrote, and I quote, the intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment Group at Roswell Army Airfield announced at noon today that the field had come into possession of a flying saucer, end quote.

0:50:14
Now that really happened. You can find copies. It’s of course the most requested. The most requested edition of the Roswell Daily Record in existence.

PR: Probably the only request.

BR: The librarian died and that didn’t make the news. No offense to Roswell, but there’s not a lot going on there.

PR: It’s a quiet town.

0:50:39
BR: But the point is that it is true. I’m the first to admit that it is true that according to this story, the Roswell Army Airfield did in fact admit, they came clean, depending on who you talk to, that they had a flying saucer. Now this causes glee in many UFO proponents and slight heartburn in skeptics because they’re like, how do you explain that Mr. Skeptic?

PR: Could have worded it better.

BR: Could have worded it better. So here’s my take on it, right? So there’s three ways to interpret that. The first one is that it was an error or mistake by a local PR office.

0:51:20
Somebody screwed up, that wasn’t really what they meant, whatever. The second thing is that it was a true accounting of what they really found. And frankly, an astonishing lack of security. Really nobody vetted in this whole global conspiracy to cover up aliens that we’re told has been going on for generations all around the world somehow this press release saying that we found a flying saucer that got through? Really? Okay, so that’s the second explanation. The third one of course is a disinformation cover-up. But then the question is, well, what are you hiding if you’re admitting to it?

0:52:05
It was Nessie who was piloting it? Was Bigfoot and Elvis in the back? How does this sort of get any weirder than disinformation? The fact is, look, let’s use Occam’s Razor here, right? The notion that among the different competing explanations, the one with the fewest demands is most likely to be the right one. Requirements. So the fact is that of course government employees get things wrong all the time.

PR: I’ve been to the DMV.

0:52:34
It is a demonstrable proven fact that low level government employees, they don’t get everything right all the time. I’m not knocking, I’m just saying that US government employees are not known for being on the ball all the time. I’ll just leave it at that. And then of course the base issued a correction saying that it was in fact debris from the balloon field. And so, but that’s not mysterious because that’s how that works. When journalists have new information, they correct the story.

0:53:14
That’s how that’s supposed to work. And journalists had new information because they said, yeah, well, somebody’s probably wrong about that. It actually is a weather balloon. And so they updated it. And so that’s sort of how that parses out.

PR: I miss that press, by the way. I really miss that version of the press. Go on.

BR: Well, no, I mean, but the irony here, again, it’s like it’s this sort of weird twist on it.

0:53:40
If you really believe the government is trying with all their might, and the men in black and people, witnesses are being threatened and killed to hide the fact that the government is in possession of aliens and spacecraft, how did this go out? How exactly did the Roswell Daily Record record get this? A simple mistake is by far the most likely answer. But of course, the story gets a little bit of a twist because there actually was a cover-up. As you know, what crashed at Roswell was not, in fact, a weather balloon. It was something called Project Mogul, which is basically designed to listen in for Soviet nuclear testing. And so they were launching balloons.

0:54:31
They were similar to weather balloons, and they could easily be mistaken for one, but it wasn’t in fact a weather balloon. It was, they were trying to basically high altitude microphones to detect, you know, are the Russians, you know, are they, are they, you know, setting off nuclear explosions without or not? Because keep in mind, this is the 40s. Right? No satellites, no internet, people looking for any possible way to collect information. So yeah, so was there a cover up for Roswell?

0:55:00
Yes there was, but it wasn’t of alien spacecraft, it was of a top secret spy project.

PR: At that time, you especially kind of have to think back to the low tech and high tech high-tech worlds colliding and you had low-tech press but you had high-tech military stuff and when something happens the press has to it doesn’t just get out immediately and then if it gets out wrong it has to be corrected later and right now so it’s it’s very interesting to think back that far back you know you know when I think of the words flying saucer and and how it was used in print. It wouldn’t be any different nowadays if someone said flying saucer in a tweet and then deleted it and corrected it. People would still jump on them for saying flying saucer.

0:55:46
However, at the time, it’s interesting to think that they said that and then there was a period of time where that was the answer and it had time to proliferate a little and then it had to be corrected. Still people didn’t really think much of it.

BR: Yeah, you know, keep in mind that that despite the Roswell Daily Record so-called admitting they found a flying saucer – for 30 years, no one believed it, right? It was like, oh, yeah, that was that silly thing. And they corrected it the next day. Not a big deal, right? We you know, when you go back and you look at the stuff, you know, he says what he saw, you know, sticks and tinfoil and stuff that weighed five pounds, right?

0:56:26
What he described originally could not have come across the galaxy. There was no steering wheel, there was no propulsion system, there was no seats, there was nothing that you would think would be in a spacecraft.

PR: And no bodies.

BR: And no bodies, no nothing else, right? And you know, and keep in mind that you know there are still several living Project Mogul scientists who are still alive and they’ve given interviews saying, yes, this is exactly … There’s no reason to cover up Project Mogul anymore. The project was … Its utility died out decades ago. There’s no reason to not talk about it. At the time, there was, and that’s one of the reasons why they didn’t come out and say … Even I mean, even had the local Roswell press known about it, they wouldn’t have been able to corroborate it because it was then a top-secret project.

0:57:24
So again, this is how conspiracy theories get fueled around. And so, I always just remind people, look, the news media is and always has been full of hoaxes, inaccurate and sensationalized news and stories. There’s nothing new here, right? It happens today, happened yesterday, happened in 1947. Yeah. You know, newspapers get things wrong, they sensationalize, they exaggerate. Welcome to the media, right? You know, a hardly a week goes by, there’s not some dramatic sensational claim making national news that’s the leader force to be corrected. You know, misinformation, exaggeration, it

0:58:03
someone lying for attention, it happens all the time. And again, there’s nothing conspiratorial about it. That’s how that works. That’s how the news media work. They like clicks. This is, you know, and if the Roswell Daily Record or any other newspaper has a chance to print a headline saying crashes were found, who’s going to turn that down. Yeah, not You know and it’s the same principle, you know, you know Half a century later. So yeah, yeah Again, you know, it’s important to look at the social and cultural context, you know as we were talking about before These these these stories emerge in a very specific cultural context Yeah, and that was not to not to throw go off on tangent But that was that was important when I was researching the Chupacabra, the vampire beast and all that.

0:58:55
Why did it emerge in 1995 in Puerto Rico? There was a very specific reason. I know that the Chupacabra and Roswell crash sound different, but in fact they’re very similar because there’s reasons why these events emerge. They don’t occur in a vacuum. If you look closely, there’s very specific triggers that sort of lead up to those. For example, there was a Gallup poll taken in 1947 that asked people what they thought was behind the saucer sightings. Now, this was not referring to the Roswell crash, because there was no Roswell crash until later, but this is actually referring to earlier when there was a sighting by Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947.

0:59:43
Kenneth Arnold was actually the origin of the word flying saucer. He saw a series of UFOs in the Pacific Northwest, if I’m not mistaken, and I think it’s Mount Rainier. He was misquoted by a journalist who misquoted him as saying that what it was, it was a flying saucer. Arnold was saying that it moved like a flying saucer would, like a saucer would if it was like skipping over water, like a teacup saucer. So in saying saucer, he wasn’t referring to the shape of what he saw, he was referring to its movement. And the journalists screwed it up and this launched, this is why people recognize the phrase flying saucer.

PR: That’s funny, we might have called them like flying frisbees a couple decades later.

1:00:28
BR: Exactly. And so when a Gallup poll asked in 1947 what people thought was behind the saucer sightings, one third, 33%, didn’t know or gave no answer. 29% said they were products of the imagination or optical illusions. 15% said secret government weapons. 10% said hoaxes. And 3% said weather devices. And 1% said Russian weapons. So the interesting part here is that aliens didn’t even register. When you ask people in 1947, what do you think is behind those saucer sightings, zero thought it was little green men in spacecraft.

1:01:06
It wasn’t even on the radar, literally or figuratively. And it was really only decades later through the emergence of the Roswell story and also the things, too, again, Close Encounters and these other pop culture things that are immersed in the public’s consciousness.

PR: You know, it’s really permeated the culture in places like Roswell, especially Roswell. You know, you have countless UFO-themed things down there. There’s a brewing company down there that does an alien beer. There’s a couple of museums, several museums actually now. And it’s really interesting to see the Roswell of today and the way they’ve kind of capitalized on it.

BR: Yeah, I was there for the, I think it was the 65th anniversary of the Roswell crash.

1:01:54
And as you said, I mean, that’s again, no, I don’t want to get any angry emails from the Roswell Tourist Board. But I mean, that’s why it’s on the map. That’s the main reason people go there. It’s the main reason people go to Inverness, Scotland. It’s a beautiful place. I loved it. I spent a week or so there. Wonderful and delightful, but I would never have been there if it weren’t for the Nessie in the lake.

1:02:21
So there’s a whole realm of sort of cryptozoology tourism and paranormal tourism and that’d be a great topic for a show at some point. But yeah, when you go there and when I was there for the 65th, you know, there were a handful of speakers there. I saw a guy named Roger Lear who was sort of the self-proclaimed the world’s top expert on alien implants. He’s actually a podiatrist. He made it sound like he was a world-renowned surgeon. And no offense to podiatrists, but he was sort of, I got the impression, he was sort of exaggerating his expertise in the medical field. But whatever. I met him briefly and interviewed him a little bit and heard his presentation. He was showing these slides of these things that had been taken out of people’s feet and backs and things like this.

1:03:26
And I think there were three or four stories that he sort of, oh, you know, this person contacted me and couldn’t identify what it was and it was so weird. And then we excised the thing and he would show these slides of something like a BB or a splinter or something. And he would tell these stories about, well, you know, this was analyzed and all these reports and I couldn’t recognize most of the places he said they were analyzed. It was like an unnamed, you know, I can’t tell you but it’s a world-renowned lab. But what was odd was that, I’ll tell you the odd part now, so the odd part was he’s sitting there telling us the story and he was a nice enough guy and he actually died a few years ago.

1:04:20
But at one point I raised my hand during the Q&A and I said, well, where are these? And he’s like, oh, well, let me tell you. And he goes into the story about how inexplicably, I think he said he had one or two, but several of them were mysteriously lost. Lost in the mails. There was a courier sent that never picked it up. There’s always some, all of a sudden, some sort of… Something going on. I’m thinking, hold on here.

1:04:48
Let me back up here. You have what you believe, or at least you claim you believe, may be hard concrete evidence of an alien implant, and you sent it to the post office? Really?

PR: You didn’t just drive it yourself?

BR: Was it media mail? You sent it with books?

PR: This could be world-changing data. But it was just, I’m just like, wow. I’m shaking my head.

1:05:19
And honestly, of course, I’m sort of the token skeptic. Everyone else there, virtually everyone else there, at least appeared to be buying into it and asking me, very polite. And I wasn’t being rude. I was just like, I’m calling shenanigans here. So, Lear was there, a guy named Lloyd Pye, who was famous for having a misshapen skull called the Starchild Skull.

PR: Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of that one.

BR: Yeah, and maybe we’ll do a show on that at some point. But I interviewed him, and I saw his skull and talked to him, and he was convinced that this misshapen skull was obvious evidence of a hybrid, alien hybrid.

1:06:01
Yeah, just all these things. And so, it was fascinating to go there There was stuff on crop circles and and one of the fascinating things about about the paranormal is everything gets lumped together So in as a researcher and as a skeptic I always have to like parse out I was like no, no, that’s not the same thing. Yeah, focus focus on this Yeah, because they always want to leave it’s you know, you have someone talking about alien implants You have someone talking about Bigfoot and suddenly they’ve sort of you know shoehorned in Psychics and they’ve shorned in ley lines horned in Crop circle this you and it’s like it’s like no You’re

PR: It is kind of interesting because yeah It seemed it seems like the lumping just happens And I think pop culture has a lot to do with it because they always sweep it all in the one bucket And I hey I don’t get me wrong. I mean you know I’m a skeptic.

1:06:53
I think part of the reason I’m a skeptic is because of how much I love those stories and how much I love all of it and how interested I am in Bigfoot and Nessie and UFOs and ghosts and psychics. Yeah, I lump it all together in how fascinated I am with it, but when you ask me to answer questions about it or ask questions about it for that matter, let’s pick a topic.

BR: Yeah, that’s just very frustrating because, again, you see all this crossover and lumping and people, they want to tie everything together. And it’s like, I get that you want to do that, but these are different things. They really are. I mean, I know something about this.

1:07:28
I think about the same thing. And it just gets frustrating. But no, so again, I’ve been through Roswell a couple times. It’s interesting and you know what? More power to them. They’re making money off of it. They’ve got their flying saucer burgers. Aztec, New Mexico also has a UFO story we’ll talk about at some point. Not on this episode. But also a cool one.

1:07:56
But they tried for a while to have their own UFO festival. But I’ll just tell you a quick – this is a tangent, but hey, there you go. At one point, I was scheduled to be on a DragonCon panel with Leonard Nimoy. Yeah, and I’m so, it’s one of my big regrets. So I co-founded the Skeptics track at DragonCon, which is, of course, the huge nerd fest, and I say that in the most loving way.

PR: Hey, we are nerds.

BR: We are, that’s us. It held in Atlanta over Labor Day weekend, and I’ve spoken at it many times.

1:08:36
Anyway, I’m one of the co-founders of the Skeptics Track, along with Derek Colanduno. And Derek was for a while, for I think a couple years, trying to get Nimoy to go and talk about In Search Of. Because what Derek said, and he talked to Nimoy several times, was that Nimoy, he was always being asked about Star Trek. It’s always Spock. It’s always Star Trek. And so at one point, Derek talked to Nimoy in an elevator and asked him if he would like to do it. And he was like, “yeah! Absolutely! Something not Star Trek!”

1:09:10
And he said, yeah, Nimoy might be on board with it. And then unfortunately nothing ever came of it and then of course Nimoy died. One of my regrets was not being on a panel with Nimoy going over some of the weird paranormal things in the search of.

PR: Yeah, I kind of wish I could have met him because I was never a big Star Trek fan.

BR: Oh, you just lost our listener. What Pascual meant was, he wasn’t as big a fan as some of you may have liked him to have been. Let me just clarify that.

PR: No, and that’s not to say I dislike Star Trek, but let me backtrack here a little bit.

1:09:59
Leonard Nimoy is one of my favorite people, and it’s because In Search of was probably, hands down, my favorite show when I was a kid. And I just caught it every chance I could. And even to this day, there’s episodes, I’m sure there’s episodes I haven’t seen. And I come across them on YouTube every once in a while, and I watch them on YouTube. And I mean, I just love that show. So I kind of regret that I couldn’t have ever met the guy, because I feel like maybe he would have liked me just on the simple fact that I’m like, yeah, Spock, whatever, but in search of.

1:10:48
BR: So we have another piece of listener mail. It says, hey guys, I’m enjoying your new podcast. Thank you very much.

PR: Thank you.

BR: I couldn’t help to email though regarding a kind of irony in your second episode.

PR: That was our first episode of what are we skeptical about.

BR: Yes, that sounds about right. It says, coming off the segment in your target story, which you both made a lot of great points, I wondered if you were perhaps a bit too uncritical of your quote fan mail which followed, such as the infamous “head up your ass” letter. I remember that one.

1:11:19
PR: Yep, yep, that was a personal favorite.

BR: The subject line is your ass, and the first line is why is your head in it? Yeah, that was a great one. I remember that, that’s on my wall. David asks, is it possible these were wind up emails? For those who don’t know, wind up is sort of a British Australian slang for riling, teasing, poking, I think.

PR: Yeah, kind of getting a wind up or…

BR: Taking the piss out of somebody. Yeah, exactly. Which is just…

1:11:48
PR: We’ll just go down the British vernacular rabbit hole. Yeah, there you go. Okay, that doesn’t help, but anyway, I’m sure you can figure it out.

BR: He says, referencing some of your thinking, it sounded a bit too good to be true and followed a little too closely the tropes of email sent to skeptics. Exclamation parts, caps lock, poor spelling and grammar, accusations of being a shill, etc. He says, if I were to compose a hysterical email to a skeptic, I probably couldn’t have done much better than the first two you read out loud and discussed.

PR: That’s true.

1:12:16
BR: This is true. Anyway, he says, I’m not saying they’re definitely wind-ups. I don’t have the evidence either way. They could be genuine, but red flags waving in my head. Looking forward to more episodes. Cheers, David.

PR: Thank you, David. And he says he’s from Melbourne, Australia, which is why we reference the Australian and British vernacular. So I’ll jump in.

1:12:38
Just the first thing that comes to mind, for me, from my perspective, you’re absolutely right. I mean, it’s entirely possible. Now, these are, you know, so far we’ve read stuff that’s directed at Ben, so he’ll have his own take on it. From my perspective, we’re kind of just taking it tongue in cheek because the two problems are that, one, with emails, we don’t have enough information to vet them and figure out is this person being honest, is this person being silly or sending us a wind-up email. So we kind of have to take everything at face value and we kind of respond with a little bit of a nudge and a wink when we’re responding to something like that, especially because there’s no real reason to give those kinds of emails a serious response to begin with because the person is obviously not interested in a critical discussion about the topic.

1:13:33
BR: Subject, your head. Why is it up your ass? Well, you know, where do I go from there?

PR: It’s a little hard to, to be very critical of that other than, wow, that’s funny. But there’s any number of things that could be, you’re absolutely right. There’s the, you know, we could be getting these emails as a joke or a hoax, but, but I’ll let, you know, Ben kind of tackle this one because they were, they were his emails.

BR: Yeah, yeah. And that’s, that’s a fair question, David. One thing is if you check out my Facebook page, I post these about once a month or so.

1:14:11
I censor out the names because I don’t want to embarrass anybody. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I get a lot of really weird emails. I get hate mail. I get occasional death threats. People who are pissed off, they think that I’m an agent of disinformation or conspiracy theorists among them. Just by nature of what I do, I tend to attract people who are irritated at me and don’t like what I have to say. I try to develop a thick skin about it.

1:14:51
You know, nobody deserves to be abused just for being a writer or a podcast or anything else. But at the same time, again, it’s sort of the nature of the business. I think that part of the reason that I think that these are not wind-ups is partly because they tend to be pretty elaborate. This isn’t just, you know, hey, I hate you, you’re a mean skeptic. They have a whole mythos going on. Stories about their experiences and this and that. I can usually tell when someone is just being nasty and hateful when they actually are trying to send me a message.

1:15:36
And the other thing to keep in mind is that oftentimes I will only share part of the correspondence. So I mean sometimes I’ll go back and forth with somebody. I mean in some cases we’ll go back and forth for days or weeks. And I mean I’m pretty sure they have better things to do than to disingenuously engage me if they’re not. And I try to be diplomatic, very respectful. You know, sometimes people contact me who are mentally ill, and I do my best to steer them towards counseling and help. And I’m sure I’ll be talking about some of those cases in future episodes. But no, it’s a fair question.

1:16:18
I will keep an eye out for it. I actually suspect that now that people know, I’m reading some, quote, fan mail. I’m expecting a handful of wind-up ones. But you know, if it’s really clever I’ll just turn a blind eye to it and we’ll just read it.

PR: Yeah, and I think we did encourage it a little bit too in the second episode when we kind of encouraged people to just write in and give us a hard time. But yeah, yeah.

BR: That masochistic streak that you have.

PR: Yeah, what can I say? It’s, you know, I’m a glutton for punishment.

1:16:53
BR: I’ll forward you my hate mail and see how you like it.

PR: I could just be the handler of the hate mail for now. But yeah, thank you for the question. I think that is a very valid question. I think Ben definitely makes a good point with how there is enough there to at least have a pretty tentative conclusion that they are being fairly sincere. And again, like where I was coming from, which is, you know, we don’t really have any way to know one way or the other, so we just kind of have to take it at face value regardless because I get an anonymous message from someone saying something or claiming something. I have to assume they’re being serious about it in my response to it, which means, you know, any of you sending us fake emails are going to probably be taken seriously as well.

1:17:35
BR: Right. And frankly, I get enough genuine crank ones, so if anyone wants to share any really fake, obnoxious ones, send it to Pascual first. If you hate this show, maybe you should just send us an email saying you like it. That would be a great prank. In fact, prank us by giving us five stars on iTunes.

BR: And donating.

PR: Yeah, and donating to Patreon, because that is a really good way to stick it to us.

BR: That’s going to hurt me. It’s going to hurt me right here.

1:17:58
Here, I’m going to do the chest thump. That’s going to hurt me right here. Give us $10 an episode, man, that’s going to stick it to me.

PR: It will cause some lasting harm to us. So yeah, please do that. But thanks again, David, for the message. And if you’d like to send an email to us or a little wind-up email to us, you can email it to squaringthestrange at gmail.com. And you can also reach us through our various social media that we will be mentioning at the end of the episode.

1:18:39
Thanks once again for joining us for this episode of Squaring the Strange. Be sure to check us out online. Of course, there’s facebook.com forward slash squaring the strange. We’ve got squaring the strange.com. Be sure to check out our Patreon page. That’s how we are able to do this is through people donating and the patron page is patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. Also check us out on Twitter at squaring strange, Instagram squaring the strange.

BR: Various other social media platforms yet to be developed. Yeah, we’re trying to be future-proof here.

PR: And if I miss something, I’m sure I’ll edit it back in later by myself and it’ll sound really weird and of course, we want to thank Amy Freshour-Kelly our sponsor level patron for donating and Any of you who are wondering what that is?

1:19:31
Go ahead and go to our patreon page and check it out The different tiers will kind of determine how we thank you and what you get and there’s all kinds of little Bonuses everything from a buck to as much as you can throw at us So, you know We have a lot of a lot of expenses that you know most people that are in the podcasting world are familiar with but hosting these and putting them out and having them set up for iTunes and all that cost a little bit of money and every donation helps and now we have to use software for transcribing our episodes so that I can find all the foul language when I edit because we are on the radio at 99.1 WIDE LP in Madison.

1:20:11
And so those of you who are listening over there, welcome. And it’s been, well, this will have been the fifth episode for you at this point.

BR:We’re on the air now? Yeah. Well, f**k me!

PR: Oh, s**t. So, those of you out there listening on the radio, thank you for tuning in.

BR: So next week we’re going to be talking about corroboration. Corroboration in that when we try to decide what to believe about the world, we often, of course, look for corroboration, right? One person tells us that, but what do other experts say?

1:20:56
What do multiple studies say? And there’s times when corroboration is valuable and useful, and there’s times when there is only the illusion of corroboration. So I’ll be talking about that. It’s sort of interesting. Interesting, yeah. Looking forward to that.

PR: Very cool. So anyway, thank you guys for tuning in.

1:21:14
Stay tuned next week for corroboration. And that’s about it for us. So I guess that’s a goodbye for this week.

BR: All right, thanks for listening.