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.

Pascual Romeros: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange, I’m Pascual Romero.

BR: And I’m Ben Radford, the co-host.

PR: And we are here at episode 16. We’ve been going 16 weeks already. This is kind of flown by.

BR: It has, it has. I’ve been pleasantly surprised and appreciative of all our listeners and supporters.

0:00:45
People are busy and there’s lots of podcasts and lots of entertainment options. Any time that someone can give us some of their time and maybe a buck or two, I appreciate it.

PR: Yeah, definitely. We’ve been really encouraged by the feedback and the following we’ve gotten so far. Our listenership has really grown since day one and we are very thankful for you guys. Today our main topic we’re gonna be talking about a little bit of a of an American legend. It is a monster here in in the South, right?

BR: Yes in in South Carolina.

PR: South Carolina So we’ll be covering that in just a little bit, but first we’re gonna get right into it What are you skeptical about this week, man?

0:01:42
BR: So this week I actually have a return to an ongoing issue that we’ve talked about in previous podcasts, and that is the the blue whale game.

PR: Okay, so this is gonna be like our we’re gonna have to start having like a blue whale update every week.

BR: Well, here’s the thing is it’s interesting, so I’ll recap for the listeners that have forgotten it, even though it was only last week. For those listeners with a really poor memory, we’re talking about a moral panic slash urban legend-y folklore, scare lore thing, conspiracy theory actually, called the Blue Whale Game that is supposedly going around the world, certainly throughout Europe, and if recent news reports are to be believed, have now appeared here in the States.

0:02:34
And again, some of you may recall, it’s basically the idea that there are, that kids today – kids these days, on their smart devices, are being lured into doing a series of 50 tasks of increasing terrifyingness and bizarreness ranging from torturing small animals to watching horror movies at 4:20 in the morning. Anyway, the culmination of this is on the 50th day, it is something even more sinister than the aforementioned activities, and that is suicide.

0:03:08
And in previous podcasts, I talked about the various reasons to be skeptical of this. The long and short of it is that there’s just no good, hard evidence that this is a thing. So many of the news sources that have these sorts of stories, a lot of them are pretty dubious. They’re the Daily Fail sensationalists, tabloid stories, news outlets with little or no credibility, maybe the same ones that might have promoted Pizza Gate. Other dubious things.

PR: And sunscreen causes cancer.

0:03:45
BR: Yes, yes, exactly, exactly. Purely David Avocado Wolf mixed with Alex Jones type stuff. Again, not to make light of it, because certainly teen suicide is a real problem, and that’s very real. That’s not the question. Is there really a conspiracy of people out there on the internet that are trying to lure tens of thousands of teens into killing themselves for no obvious reason?

0:04:11
That’s the question, and as skeptics, that’s what needs to be asked. So again, we talked about this before, and since that time, I was sent two news stories. I mentioned one of them last week, and I’ll recap that one, and there’s another one.

0:04:30
And this often happens as a skeptic, right? You’ll say something, and you’re like, well, I don’t think this is true, and sure enough, like, the next day, there’s a news story, and you’re like, hey, man, you said that wasn’t true. Look at that. I’m like, all right, fine, right? So I looked at it. And so the most recent stories were that there was a case that again we mentioned last week. It was a guy named Isaiah Gonzalez. I think he was a 16-year-old from San Antonio. Apparently the boy had hung himself and his father Jorge had discovered his son unfortunately. And there was a cell phone on and he was either recording it and or live-streaming. It’s not clear from news reports, but that was.

0:05:14
And since that time, I’ve done a bit more research, and unfortunately, live streaming suicides is now kind of a thing. It’s not very common, but it does happen. Just in a few minutes of looking around the internet, I found several dozen stories that are verified. I mean, this is a real case. But again, it’s before, before social media, people would kill themselves in public places, right? You know, there’s, there’s people who’ve shot themselves on television. I mean, there’s sure anyone in that sort of state of mind will have will find some venue to do that. So there’s, there’s nothing pretty unique about it. But anyways, what happened was, in the case of Gonzales, his, his father, understandably searching for answers, he got it in his head that his son Isaiah was involved in this Blue Whale Game.

0:06:09
And again, as I mentioned last week, there’s just not really good evidence to it. I don’t doubt that the father believes that, but with all due respect, it’s a grieving father not an experienced investigator. The other case that came up was even more sort of dubious. This was at least at first blush. What you find is that there was a CNN story about an unidentified 16-year-old girl in Atlanta whose name, well it’s a pseudonym – Nadia. And these two cases, Isaiah Gonzalez and Nadia, whatever her last name is, are allegedly the first two victims of the Blue Whale Suicide game here in the States. That’s what’s making splashes, right? So the CNN story, I’ll just read a couple lines of it.

0:06:57
It says, one family believes an online game led a 16-year-old girl to commit suicide. The game is the Blue Whale and it reportedly incites players to take their own lives. It’s not really clear if the game exists or not. She was young, beautiful, and playful. Her family wants to share the teen story but asks CNN to conceal her identity. And at first, to be honest, at first I thought this was a bogus story. I think we actually kind of briefly mentioned it last week. I’m still not convinced that this is a real case, but the more I look into it, I think it probably is.

0:07:30
So, again, I don’t think it was a hoax. I don’t think anyone was trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. But there’s more to the story than meets the eye, and this is what I was looking into. A week after that first story that I talked about, CNN, apparently realizing just how flimsy the original story was, their editors were like, really, you gotta beef this up, there’s nothing here. So a week later, I think it was on the 17th, they did a longer, more in-depth story, and there was actually an interview with the brother of Nadia.

0:08:04
Still anonymous, still it’s not clear what date she died, but at least it wasn’t just someone behind a silhouette. But again, once again, they were keeping her identity secret. And it was interesting, so there are very strong parallels between the Isaiah Gonzalez case and Nadia’s case. In both cases you had, it doesn’t say how Nadia killed herself. It doesn’t say if it’s a hang or jumping off a bridge or something. It’s not mentioned in the news reports. But exactly as Isaiah Gonzales’ father did, Nadia’s brother Marty, which I’m not sure if that’s his real name or not, but that’s how he’s referred to in the press pieces. He began looking into his dead sister’s social life and artwork and personal effects and drawings and poetry and all the things that teen girls and boys do and have.

0:09:04
And sure enough, he came across evidence which he believes indicate that she was in fact compelled to kill herself by this, the Blue Whale game. So I’m just gonna read quickly from the CNN story. It says, “continuing to research, Marty remembered the picture of the blue whale taped next to her mirror in his sister’s room. He looked through her sketches and found pages of whale drawings and magazine cutouts with the words, I am a blue whale, posted over them, accompanied by drawings indicating self-harm, suicidal statements with words of goodbye, and multiple entries in Russian”.

0:09:39
And again, this is a classic case of confirmation bias. We saw this in the Isaiah and Gonzales case. We saw this in the Amelia Earhart case where someone had it in their mind, this is my conclusion, I’m gonna look for evidence supporting that conclusion. And it’s very, very common and it’s happening in these cases. And I suspect that this is actually misleading them. For example, in the CNN story, because there’s a video along with it, and they show several of her paintings.

0:10:14
They’re these sort of abstracts and sort of blue with some almost like Jackson Pollock-esque scratches on them. To her brother Marty’s mind, this is clear evidence. He’s like, look, this looks like a whale. He says, if you Google whale bones, you know, the similarities between what she drew and whale bones are clear to him. Now, I didn’t, I looked at it and I didn’t see the similarities. So I suspect that that’s sort of, that’s in his, you know, that’s in his mind.

0:10:48
But again, so it’s, you know, this is the contents of the journal. There’s all these things. So, for example, there was a photo that she posted of her legs dangling over the roof of their house. And to him, that suggested that she was thinking about killing herself. And I guess she posted this on Instagram or somewhere. And again, I don’t mean, I’m not casting aspersion on the family, I assume it’s a real family, I’m sorry for their loss, I’m just not convinced that what he’s seeing in his dead sister’s effects and drawings and artwork necessarily indicates that she was compelled to kill herself by this online suicide cult conspiracy thing.

0:11:34
PR: Whether or not she even painted a picture, she could have pictures of blue whales and it still doesn’t mean that she was engaged in a specific website. And on top of that, the only thing that would really give us any proof is social media presence, the online presence. And I don’t really feel all that compelled by these stories in terms of blue whale this or that because the internet is a place where if something exists on it, especially in a way that can be accessed by kids, it’s not going to be some vague thing that you can’t find.

BR: That’s a great point, and that’s exactly right. The question is not, had she heard of the Blue Whale Game, because by this point, almost all teenagers have heard about the Blue Whale Game.

0:12:15
They’ve been warned about it by their parents, by online and elsewhere. So sensational news stories, I mean, it’s all over the place. And so, you know, it would actually be more surprising if in the wake of teen suicide these days, someone had gone through the social media and not found a reference to the blue whale. Just because there’s such an overlap. And I mean, the fact is that if the specifics of the Blue Whale Game are true, determining whether or not Nadia or Isaiah Gonzalez was a victim or not should be easy enough to establish. This, this should not be ambiguous, right? I mean, you know, if you’re a competent, trained investigator, either Nadia’s digital footprint contains instructions from some unknown, sinister person directing her to complete 50 daily challenges, or it doesn’t.

0:13:01
Again, these are tragedies. I mean, teenagers killing themselves is a tragic, sad thing. And my concern is that the families will blame themselves unnecessarily, because like, I should have seen that coming. I should have been up on watching what they’re reading and I should have. And it’s like, no, that’s not the right message. The right message isn’t that you were stupid or you were at fault for not knowing about this mythical Blue Whale Game.

0:13:29
That’s not what you should take from this.

PR: Anyone who’s experienced something like this in their family is susceptible to the emotional drive to find answers and this is a very easy answer to find now because it’s become such a thing and the internet has this way of confirming pretty much any idea you throw into it. That’s kind of the nature of search engines and it’s the nature of social memes. It’s that you know an idea spreads to the point that that its existence establishes itself in the network itself. And so then the Blue Whale becomes sort of this real thing because there’s enough talk about it that you Google it and it comes up. And it sort of reinforces itself.

0:14:14
But, again, grieving families are allowing themselves to kind of fall victim to this thinking, and it doesn’t do them any good because it just kind of creates more questions than answers. And it creates more, like you said, like guilt and blame. And it does nothing to actually answer any questions because it’s not a thing. It’s not there.

BR: It’s not an answer. Even if Nadia and Isaiah were aware of the Blue Whale game, which I assume they were, because again, they’ve been widely talked about in social media for a long, long time.

0:14:46
And even if they thought they were being part of the Blue, as you mentioned, it becomes a self-fulfilling thing. That doesn’t necessarily make the game genuine. It doesn’t validate the claims about it. It’s an important nuance I want to make here, is that even if Nadia had written, I am a blue whale, and even if she had corresponded with her friends about the Blue Whale Game, that doesn’t mean that the blue whale game is real. In the same way, for example, think about in May 2014, we had the two Wisconsin girls. They stabbed their friend something like 19 times, nearly killing her on behalf of Slender Man, a fictional social media generated creature.

0:15:30
Keep in mind, social media generated. My point is that Slender Man didn’t need to exist in order for troubled teens to do violence to themselves or to others as part of a fantasy world. And in the same way, the Blue Whale Game doesn’t need to actually exist in order for it to do damage to real lives.

BR: So, Pascual, word around the campfire is there’s something called a skeptic crate. Do you know anything about that?

PR: I do, as a matter of fact. We are going to be putting out a monthly crate.

0:16:06
BR: A monthly crate?

PR: A monthly crate.

BR: I’m intrigued.

PR: Called the skeptic crate. It will be a crate with a few goodies relating to our show, relating to science, skepticism, show topics, maybe some little bonus items that have to do with us as individuals relating to our own work or things that Celestia has done.

BR: I like it.

0:16:27
I like it. Tell me more.

PR: So any patron above $5 an episode.

BR: Five bucks? Seriously?

PR: Five bucks.

BR: Five measly bucks? That’s like 500 pennies or something.

PR: Yeah, exactly.

BR: Who can’t afford that?

0:16:39
PR: Precisely 500 pennies or something. Who can’t afford that? Precisely 500 pennies. And you will get a Skeptic Crate once every month. We ship them on the 15th of every month. So once you are within a month of good standing at the $5 or more per episode level, you’ll be receiving a Skeptic Crate every month as a regular thank you for your continued support. Go over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange and you can see all the bonuses you can see how to sign up and you can see all the different perks because not only do you get the skeptic rate but five dollars and up have their own bonus VIP level content and episodes that we put out every month.

BR: Love it love it.

PR: So last week we were teasing our lizard man.

0:17:48
BR: Teasing the lizard man. Is that a euphemism, sir?

PR: We’re teasing the lizard man. We brought it up, well you brought it up, and I was kind of baffled because I, you know, I’ve heard of lizard people and, you know, conspiracy and all that, but a cryptozoological lizard man is something that I really hadn’t come across except for maybe some of the old, you know, native legends and things like that, but not a modern day lizard man. So I guess I’ll just hand it over to you. Who is the Lizard Man? What is the Lizard Man?

0:18:29
BR: Well, you’re right. I mean, when I think of Lizard Man, I think either like the David Icke’s conspiracy, you know.

PR: Reptilians.

BR: Reptilians, right. Is Obama a Lizard Man? Did you see this one photo where from this one particular angle his head looks like. Or you go back to like V.

PR: Oh, sure.

0:18:49
Yeah, yeah, V. Sure. Great, great reference.

BR: Oh, yeah, there you go. I mean, there’s a lizard you saw like that, but no, this is a bit different. So, the lizard man, well, let me put it to you this way. In a world where weird things happen, who or what is a lizard man? The red-eyed, seven-foot, nocturnal, automobile-munching, munching lizard monster living in scape or swamp first seen in 1988 terrorizing a helpless teenager as he changed a flat tire on a moonless night. Something like that?

PR: Yeah I need you to say what what swamp scape scape what swamp?

BR: Yeah so it’s the it’s it’s it’s actually scape ore as in someone trying to say escaped but didn’t. It was actually, it’s actually originally titled Escaped Whore Swamp.

PR: Escaped Whore Swamp.

BR: Yes, as in the ladies of the night prostitute type.

PR: Okay, and now we have to, now there’s another legend we need to uncover.

BR: All sorts of legends involved lizard men and little lizards. Yeah, so that was one of the fun, sort of strange parts of the story.

0:20:11
When I began looking into it, sure enough, as one might imagine, as often happens in the South, places, their names change. Sometimes change, sometimes for PC purposes, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Names move around. Well, the language is fluid, and certainly the scape or swamp, which is located near Bishopville, South Carolina. I’m reading from a piece by Robert Cooper, who had a booklet published by the University of South Carolina Department of English in 1965. And he says that, yes, indeed, Scape or Swamp was in fact named Escaped Whore Swamp by a group of revolutionary volunteers.

0:21:02
These soldiers, part of Marion’s Brigade, surprised an encampment of British regulars who were in the process of entertaining ladies of the night. A rather shady background. The British were captured and the volunteers allowed the terrified women to flee into the swamp. So that’s one story. There’s another one. To be clear, it’s pretty clear that it was originally named Escaped Whore Swamp. As to why exactly, which set of escaped whores we’re talking about, that’s a little more dubious.

0:21:36
But there were some. Another one says that sometime prior to 1671, there lived in Salem County a lady of somewhat dubious reputation. Her dalliances aroused the ire of the people of St. Mark’s Parish, and they ran her out of the country. It is implied that they intended to do more than run her out, but she escaped into the swamp. “These blunt and forthright forebearers of ours immediately put a definite tag on the swamp, designating it with the strongest name of a practicing member of the oldest profession.” That story was supposedly handed down through the generations.

0:22:14
PR: Wow, okay. And so that’s, I guess, the perfect place for a lizard man to live.

BR: I can think of worse places.

PR: You know, I mean, it’s any, yeah, a fantastic creature living in a fantastically named swamp is just fitting to me.

BR: It’s just perfect. So here’s the basic story. It’s very dramatic and cinematic, and I will try to do it justice in that vein. Our story begins as many horror films do, with a car breaking down late at night on a dark and lonely stretch of road.

0:22:59
When the victim, or hero, is almost through fixing the problem, he sees something terrifying in the distance, a monster that no one has ever seen before. He rushes to the car, starts the engine, and the creature runs after him, but he guns the engine and peels out. Thinking he’s managed to escape, he starts to relax. But, to his horror, to his nightmare, he realizes it’s not over, and he sees a monster’s hand reaching through the windshield, and he hears a horrifying thump on the roof of the car. Panicked, he drives like a madman, trying to shake loose the monster clinging to the roof, and finally he does so. He rushes home, wondering if it was all some horrible dream or nightmare until the classic and terrifying reveal, the monstrous claw marks on the hood of the car, proof of his brush with the unknown. So something like that.

0:23:51
PR: Chilling. Thank you. Chilling.

BR: Chilling. I have chills. So that’s sort of the, in a nutshell, that’s the general story. As you can tell, this story allegedly happened. It’s interesting because most monsters have one sort of signature world-class sighting. Bigfoot Patterson-Gilman film, right? You have that.

0:24:17
So again, virtually all these cryptids and creatures have some sort of signature story, sign that is emblematic of the best case. If there’s anything that’s real about this, this is it. In this case, it was a teenager named Christopher Davis, and he’s sort of considered the godfather of lizard man lore due to his sighting in the early hours on the summer morning of 1988. And it remains by far the most detailed and interesting and complete story of them all.

0:25:09
Unfortunately, he’s now dead. So all we have are his eyewitness accounts and maybe or maybe not hard evidence. So there’s a couple of things going on. It’s interesting because the sighting that he had in 88, again, is one of the best known and most complete ever. That’s what almost all the Lizard Man story hangs on, is this one sighting. There are a handful of later sightings, none of them are anywhere near as detailed and descriptively much more ambiguous. Oftentimes what you find is that the signature of its presence is mangled cars because it is said to chew on cars and to bite cars.

0:25:59
Now this is weird.

PR: Yeah, you know, it’s funny, it brings to mind the lyrics from Blondie’s Rapture, if anyone remembers her little rap about the monster eating cars.

BR: That’s right, I had not thought of that. Good reference there. But it’s actually very similar to, for example, the Chupacabra, where a lot of the reports, once you start looking at it, people are not reporting seeing a chupacabra. They’re reporting finding dead animals, chickens and goats that they believe are drained of blood and therefore they infer or assume the chupacabra was there. So it’s like, ooh, this looks like a chupacabra sighting.

0:26:39
No, it’s a dead chicken that may or may not be related to chupacabra. And you saw the same pattern happen with lizard man where in later years they would be damaged to a fender or a bumper of a car and people say, oh well, you know, Scape or Swamp is just down the road, it must be the lizard man. Well, not necessarily. So anyway, what began as a local curiosity soon, you know, just it went viral in the days before things went viral.

0:27:07
It was on the Good Morning America, it was on the Oprah show. Time, people, LA Times, all it was big, big news at the time. And by one estimate, like 50,000 people visited Bishopville in the weeks and months following the Davis Society. And crypto tourism.

PR: Yeah, good for them. I always applaud a town that capitalizes on its mysteries.

0:27:33
I never blame them. I was thinking it’s just fun that they always catch in on that stuff.

BR: You know what? And Sharon Hill of Doubtful News, she’s written quite a bit on crypto tourism and I recommend her stuff. But so over the years, what’s interesting is that despite being sort of like the flagship signature sighting of the Lizard Man, Chris Davis’ original and best-known account really has had almost no scrutiny to it. It’s just sort of like, you would assume that for a sighting that is so key to the whole monster, you would think. So I sort of gave you an overview of the sighting in a very dramatic fashion, if I may say so. But we’re actually going to have our good friend and fortune cookie girl, Celestia Ward, give you a brief breakdown into what exactly the story Chris Davis told.

0:28:42
Celestia Ward: Driving home from his job, he had run over something sharp near the swamp, which caused a flat tire. Just as he finished changing the wheel, he suddenly heard a noise and looked across a moonlit butterbean field and saw something that stood more than seven feet tall. According to Davis’s report on the Associated Press Wire Service, the creature, quote, “was about 25 yards away and I saw red eyes glowing. I ran to the car and as I locked it, the thing grabbed the door handle. I could see him from the neck down, three big fingers, long black nails, and green rough skin. It was strong and angry. I looked in my mirror and saw a blur of green running. I could see his eyes and then he jumped on the roof of my car. I thought I heard a grunt and then I could see his fingers through the rear windshield where they curled around the roof. I sped up and swerved to shake the creature off.”

0:29:39
BR: So that was the story basically that he told. Now, it could have been dismissed as a hoax or an act of imagination, but there’s more to the story because his story was actually endorsed by the local sheriff. So, you know, that’s, even down South, no offense, I mean, Boss Hogg territory, even down South, you know, when a local sheriff endorses your story, even it’s about a monster, that lends some credibility. As it should, right?

0:30:20
So, sure enough, the story goes that the local sheriff, Liston Shrewsdale, found Davis’s story to be credible. And he said that his, partly because his story never wavered or varied, and that he was very impressed by that. And to his mind, if Davis had made the whole thing up, then he would have gone on to a bunch of different directions, but because it was consistent to him, that was evidence that the boy must be saying something that’s true.

PR: And, and I heard there was a lie detector involved too, was there not?

BR: Yes, yes, the pseudoscience just piles on.

PR: Which on this show, lie detector means literally nothing.

BR: Well, but to many people it does. Again, we’re going from the skeptics to the layperson. So, yeah, you know, some sources claim that, and again, this is interesting.

0:31:13
This is where there’s a grain of truth to it, but then once you start digging a little deeper, as skeptics you do, you realize that there’s more to the story here. Some sources claim that Davis was administered a polygraph by the police in order to get to the bottom of the mystery. That is, the narrative they’re selling is that the police investigated this and gave him a lie detector and he passed with flying colors. Now, as you mentioned, as skeptics know, the polygraph’s validity has been widely questioned.

PR: Yeah, and I feel like the police don’t make it a habit to whip out the lie detector for a story that’s not a crime.

BR: You would think.

0:32:01
PR: That’s off the top of my head.

BR: And you’re exactly right. So again, there’s a grain of truth to this. So apparently it is true that Chris Davis was given a polygraph test. That much is true.

PR: Would you say that under oath?

BR: I will say that under oath. The rejoinder to that is that it was administered by a police officer, which is not surprising because that’s who would do that. However, as you pointed out, this was not a criminal matter. A lizard man scaring a kid at night is not a criminal matter. There was no police report filed. There’s no crime committed.

0:32:51
Even in Bishopsville, South Carolina in 1988, the police got better things to do. So what actually happened was that Chris Davis’ handlers, or for lack of a better word, people who were trying to help him promote the story, they gave him a lie detector test and according to them, he passed with flying colors. So it was the publicity stuff.

PR: So by handlers, we’re just talking lay people?

BR: Yeah, I think what happened was that some local PR firm was like, hey, this kid saw Lizard Man.

0:33:29
I want a piece of the action here. We can sell Lizard Man t-shirts. Let’s hype this story. So they latched onto him. It was this big thing. And they’re like, hey, how can we make some publicity out of it? Give them a lie detector, not knowing, of course, thinking the rubes. And who knows? Maybe to a lot of people that’s, oh, that’s the lie detector. It must all be true.

0:33:49
PR: Yeah. I do recall back when I was quite a bit younger or maybe back in the 80s when this happened, people took lie detectors a lot more seriously than they do nowadays. It’s worth considering the times were a little different.

BR: That’s a very good point. That’s a very good point. I think probably the skepticism that we brought to modern claims of having passed the lie detector test were not the same as they were 30 years ago. So anyway, there’s actually another account that we’re going to have Celestia read of the story as well.

CW: A shaken Davis reached home, ran in and told his father.

0:34:36
Together they went to inspect the car for damage. The first thing they found was that the side mirror had been terribly twisted. When Chris Davis’ father looked at the roof of the car, he found deep scratches penetrating the paint and even denting the metal.

BR: Thank you for that, Celestia. Very nice. This account actually sort of raises more questions than it answers because here Davis is claiming to have seen dust being kicked up in near darkness at night time from 50 yards away. Now, that’s pretty remarkable. This is where we start getting into eyewitness accounts.

PR: I’m getting flashbacks of the Stonehenge surprise and looking into the field at ground level view.

0:35:33
BR: Right. Well, they didn’t see it. Well, there you go.

PR: They couldn’t. Come on.

BR: Is it possible? Sure. Is it probable? Not remotely. And in this account, there’s no mention of the three fingers he saw, he said he saw clinging to the car.

0:35:48
I mean, the different story is notable for its similarities as much as its differences. And then I started digging into the specifics of the eyewitness account. And this is where it pays to be a pedant, or pedant if you like. Because in skeptical investigations, details matter. So you can’t, if I interview you and you tell me that something, you saw something that’s three foot tall and green, and then I interview you a month later, you say, no, it was five foot tall and yellow, that’s a contradiction.

0:36:25
That’s not, oh, it’s the same. No. It’s not the same. It’s really not.

PR: It’s an important enough detail that you can’t afford to be inconsistent on it.

BR: Right, especially on inherently ambiguous eyewitness sightings like these, like in monster sightings, UFO sightings, ghost sightings. These are all reports that are inherently ambiguous, where there’s only one or two eyewitnesses anyway. And if they’re not giving you reasonably consistent stuff, then you’re valid in saying, what the hell’s going on here?

0:36:58
PR: Yeah, absolutely.

BR: So, I looked at… So, one thing that jumped out at me is Davis’s claim that he saw, quote, a blur of green coming at him as he drove away. And I’d read this detail in many places and online blogs and stuff, because of course, as I always do, I did a bunch of initial sort of pre-production research and got all the resources I could. And it was interesting because no one really paid much attention to that. It was like, oh, he saw a blur of green.

0:37:29
But I started thinking about that and sort of thinking logistics of that. And the fact is that that can’t be true. Like, it literally cannot be true.

PR: I have an idea why.

BR: Well, ask me why.

PR: Why can it literally not be true, Ben?

BR: Thank you. I appreciate that.

0:37:51
You pitch him up ahead of me. The fact is, again, keep in mind the context. He’s in a car, his light’s on, he’s driving away, he sees green out the back from the light of his car. This is what he said. I’m not making it up. This is what the man said. The problem is that car tail lights are red, not white. When you’re backing up, they’re white and also red.

0:38:13
But when you’re driving, when you’re going forward, as he was, because he was escaping from it, they’re red. And therefore, everything behind him would be bathed in red light. And I actually had to do some color research for this, because as you know, being an artist and everything else, there’s light colors, there’s different pigmentations, but when you’re talking about light, both red and green are primary colors, and therefore nothing looks green under a red light.

0:38:42
And I tested this myself. It actually took me like an hour or two. I got some red colors, and I tried it out, and sure enough, a light green object looks yellow and a dark green object looks black. There’s nothing that I tested and I looked online and there’s nothing that looks green in a red light.

PR: Yeah, no, you can’t. It’s impossible.

BR: It does not happen. Yeah. So, this doesn’t mean that he’s lying, it just means that that one fact cannot be true. Either he’s mistaken, or he’s lying, but whichever it is, we can’t take his details at face value. They may be true, they may not be true, but we know at least in this case, that can’t be true. And so, this is the problem, if he imagined or assumed the creature’s color, what other details that people are thinking must be true is he wrong about?

0:39:46
Did it have five fingers, two fingers? Maybe it was four feet, not seven. I don’t know, but we can’t just assume that whatever he saw was there. And, you know, there’s other weird things too. I mean, for example, you know, what Davis drew, and you can find online, we might show a picture of it on the website, you know, it’s not very lizard-like. It’s interesting. I mean, it’s called the Lizard Man, and part of the reason probably is because he said it was green. Well, it couldn’t have been green.

0:40:19
We discussed that. So, see, we had a man-like, man-sized figure of whatever color, but not green, that again, by his own description, isn’t really lizard-like. It didn’t have scales. It didn’t have… I mean, there’s really nothing lizard-like about it. It was just sort of a man-size, man-humanoid thing that surprised the hell out of him. They had glowing eyes. That’s another detail that jumped out at me. Lizards don’t have eyes that emit light. In fact, no eyes emit light. Some animals’ eyes reflect light. Humans, cats, that’s what red eye reduction is.

PR: Light amplification built into mammalian and fish eyes, actually, too.

BR: Yeah, exactly. So again, so his claim that it was green, almost certainly not true. His claim that it had glowing eyes, that it may be reflecting light, but it certainly wasn’t emitting light. And there’s a difference. So again, if you just sort of look at the headline, ooh, scary lizard man, it’s all very dramatic and sensational.

0:41:39
When you start looking at the details, the devil’s in the details. That’s where the story starts to fall apart. So you have that. Again, I mentioned the light. How do you see this thing at 2 o’clock in the morning? The area’s a swamp. Swamps are not known for being well lit.

PR: No, swamps and woods. I’ve been in both at night. Even in good conditions, full moon, everything is so obscured just by the sheer foliage and the air is dense in these places.

0:42:12
It’s really not an ideal place to try to look at anything at night.

BR: No, not at all. Again, I did more research on that. I consulted an almanac to determine what phase the moon was in that night because it matters, right? Is it full moon, half moon? As it turns out it was not a full moon, but it was pretty close. So, you know that part of the story checks out. But again, even in a mostly full moon, it’s not that bright. I mean, you know, there’s been times when I’ve maybe read a little bit under really bright moonlight, but we’re talking about seeing something from half a football field away.

0:42:54
And the details he gave, it just doesn’t make sense. So, you know, we’re back to psychology, right? And so we know that in psychological studies, the human mind is very poor at accurately perceiving and remembering details. We see an image and we get the outlines, we get the gist of it. And then when we later recollect and reconstruct it, we add details. It’s like, oh, well, you know, it seemed to be that size, but if it was that size, it probably had a tail.

0:43:25
I probably saw a tail. I’m like, well, you know, it looked green. Lizards are green. Maybe it had scales. And I’m not saying, this isn’t a matter of lying. It’s just that that’s how the mind works sure our minds fill in details that aren’t really there. Yeah, um To help us make sense of ambiguous things that we see.

PR: Yeah, and your memory The way memory works it needs as complete a picture as it can to stick so right You know that’s that’s it’s a lot of cases where there are stories of people just filling in these large gaps in order to remember the little bits that they actually did witness.

0:44:11
And I think this is a perfect example of that.

BR: Yeah, absolutely. And for those who want to learn more about it, I mean, a good place to start is Beth Loftus. Pleased to say a friend of mine, a longtime memory researcher, and of course, she’s done amazing work on recovered memories and Aronson and Carol Tavris has written about it. There’s lots of great resources for skeptics about memories. Beth Loftus is one of the best places to begin with that. Once you start diagramming it, and this is one of the things I did, I said, let me just make a map here.

0:44:46
I used to play D&D. I’m going back nerdy here. Old school, I remember many times-

PR: Map out the dungeon, man.

BR: Map out the dungeon, man. You got to know where the pits are, where’s the green slime, is the red dragon really going to fit in there, or is that just be it? This is what you do. That’s what investigators do. You reconstruct the crime scene.

0:45:09
You figure out where are these things. I did some drawings to figure out how the hell did this work, right? The fact is that how did Davis escape from the creature? The logistics of his account just don’t add up. He said that he spotted the lizard man like 25 or 50 feet away in near darkness and that it caught up to his car even as it was going up to 40 miles an hour. If you do the math on that, and I’m not great at math, but if you do the math on that, you know the Lizard Man, if it could move that fast-

PR: Should be in the NFL. That’s what you’re saying.

0:45:45
BR: Yeah. I mean, it should have been able to catch up with the car by the time he saw it, registered that it was a threat, figured out what it was, saw it coming at him, closed the trunk, opened the door, got his keys out, closed the door, started the engine. By the time all that’s going on, the Lizardman’s already eaten his pie. It’s just one thing after another. The other thing to keep in mind is that Davis is literally the only person that ever described this sort of encounter. There was a handful of other encounters. Lyle Blackburn wrote a book that includes some of them, but most of them are ambiguous.

0:46:26
They’re not nearly as dramatic, they’re much, much more just ambiguous and sort of nothing encounters. As I mentioned, a lot of them are not reports of the lizard man, they are someone damaged my car and I think it’s a lizard man, which is not the same thing.

PR: And I think your insurance company will not cover that, so you might-

BR: They don’t. Check your policy carefully, folks. So again, I’ll spare you all the details. I actually wrote a feature article in Fortean Times Magazine that you can read all the details about it.

0:47:00
So I’ll just sort of hit on some of the broader points. Another problem with his story is that depending on which version you talk to, he either waited two or three weeks to report it. I understand if you’re traumatized or, you know, someone may not report something right away, but if it’s that’s going on in this guy’s life, I’m going to tell you all about it, man. I’m going to tell you this, I hate you, I’m going to cry in a puddle, I’m calling you, I’m calling BBC News. I’m not keeping this a secret for two or three weeks.

PR: Yeah, no, God no.

0:47:34
I mean, just come on, right? There’s some dubious stuff going on here.

PR: We’ve been hearing a lot of anecdotal evidence and eyewitness stuff, but was there ever any hard evidence?

BR: Well, it depends on who you talk to. But no you’re right, I mean this is this that’s one of the problems here is that as is often the case were we’re down to eyewitnesses. Yeah, and You know as I as I’m forever telling people eyewitnesses are not good evidence. No, I’m sorry. I don’t I’m not raining on your parade, I’m not saying you’re blind.

0:48:28
I’m not casting aspersions on you. I just can’t necessarily believe everything you tell me about what you saw. Yeah. I just, you know, and so-

PR: Even our own legal system doesn’t, doesn’t lean on eyewitness accounts heavily enough. At best it corroborates, you know, that’s about it.

BR: And so, so this should not surprise anybody. And certainly, and again, certainly in the case of this profile, I mean, keep in mind, again, this is, a couple weeks back we talked about the Stonehenge Surprise, the so-called best case for crop circles, which was astonishingly poorly researched, no offense. But you would think that, oh, this is being held up as the big thing, surely this has been vetted. No, no, no, no, no, my friend.

0:49:14
And so that was the case. In here, I’m like, surely somebody has gone through this with a fine tooth comb. And I guess it’s up to me. So I don’t know what he saw. It could have been a hoax. It could have been he saw something weird. I wasn’t there, I don’t know. So then the question is, okay, well, what physical evidence is there?

0:49:32
Now, keep in mind that, again, depends on who you talk to. So by some accounts, there were quote, deep scratches penetrating the paint and even denting the metal on his car. Another account said that the driver’s side mirror was bent and twisted and there were scratches on the car’s roof. Now, this damage to the car would later become central to the Lizard Man story as we’ve seen.

0:49:57
It’s like it went from, you know, jumping out of a swamp at night, running from the escaped horrors to saying boo and scaring kids and then it’s it spends the last half of its life chewing on bumpers and fenders. I don’t know how that works but that’s the story. So again that’s one of the remaining questions but the fact is that there may be no need to speculate on what damaged Davis’s car because it makes a dramatic story but there’s no evidence that it’s true. It goes back to something we talked about before on the show, you know, Hyman’s categorical imperative.

0:50:32
The idea that before you try to something to explain. Before spending a lot of time and effort figuring out how did this happen? Make sure it happened. And that way you’re not running off on wild goose chases, trying to explain something that didn’t actually happen. This is a great skeptical tenet.

0:50:54
I live it, learn it, love it. This comes in handy all the time and certainly comes in handy when investigating the Lizard Man case. It’s fascinating because when you look at some of the original sources, I found a source from 1988 that said that he escaped with no more than a scratch on his fender. That’s a quote there. One early news report offers the following, “when he reached 40 miles per hour, he noticed he had caught up with his car, but he escaped with no more than a scratch on his fender”, Davis said.

0:51:27
Again, this is not a later account, this is an original account at the time from the 88. So, hold on here. So, why is it that he told a newspaper reporter that he only got a scratch on his fender but later accounts as the years progress, oh wow the door is barely hanging on, the mirror is ripped off, there’s deep gouges, whatever else. And so, but here’s the clincher for me because you know accounts can be wrong you know some newspapers hype things, imagine that, some don’t. Here’s what gets my goat –

0:52:07
Where’s the beef? Where’s the photos? Right, keep in mind, you had Chris Davis who’s selling the story, literally selling the story on Oprah to Time Magazine, People Magazine, LA Times, he and his PR machine are working overtime, running from those escape tours, trying to sell this story, trying to sell Lizard Man burgers, and making a good time out of it. And yet, as far as I could tell, and I looked pretty hard, I could not find a single photograph of any damage done to Davis’ car that resembles the later stories.

0:52:47
No twisted metal, no driver’s side mirror ripped off, no deep gouges, nothing. Now, maybe I missed something. I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. So if any listeners are out there, want to take this upon yourself and prove me wrong, knock yourself out. But I looked long and hard and I could not find a single photograph that matched the dramatic car damage that was claimed for Davis’ car. Now, keep in mind, that is exactly the sort of thing that Davis and his PR guys would want. If they had a photograph of the twisted metal, the deep gouges that the 7-foot-tall lizard man had mangled his car, you think they wouldn’t be promoting that?

0:53:33
You think they wouldn’t be sending those to any newspaper? They’d be handing those things out like candy. And so it’s like either these people are grossly incompetent and when trying to prove this guy’s story, just never got around to photographing the damage this monster did to this car, or it didn’t happen.

0:53:57
And there was no real damage to the car. And even if there was a scratch, they’re not going to photograph it because they’re like, really? Did you hit a dog? No one’s gonna be impressed by this minor scratch and you know anything could have done that. So basically that that falls apart as well, although as it turns out, you know, as I mentioned the damage of the car thing would reoccur later on.

PR: That’s what William Shatner’s TV show episode you were on was about, right?

BR: Yeah, yeah. In a nutshell, yeah.

0:54:30
I was on William Shatner’s Weird or What? A series that ran for a couple seasons. I don’t know, maybe still on. I don’t think it is. I was asked to be part of that episode, and so they interviewed me in my office, and I talked about the lizard man sighting that we’ve talked about, and they also they actually ended up wanting me to go to an auto salvage yard near where Breaking Bad was filmed, actually, and try to beat up a car and damage it in a way that would match Lizard Man.

0:55:00
I’ll tell you more about it in the bonus content, but yeah, that’s the story.

PR: Hey, strangers. We love sharing our podcasts with you, but it takes substantial time and money to produce and release each episode. If you think our podcast is worth a buck or two, please head over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange and consider becoming a patron. Not only will you be helping us, but you’ll also receive some cool perks. Again, that’s patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. Enjoy the show.

PR: So what would you say were some possible explanations for this?

BR: Right, so you know there’s a couple of things.

0:55:48
So you know the most obvious one, and you know you don’t always go with the most obvious ones, the most obvious one is that the whole thing is a hoax. I mean the easiest, most skeptical armchair debunking thing. It’s all BS. The kid made it up. We’re done here. Everybody go home. That’s possible. I mean, sure. Anything is possible. But at the same time, in my investigations, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. And in my experience, far more people have had real, sincere, genuine experiences that they just can’t explain than have tried to fool me or con me. Particularly true in cryptozoology. I remember looking into, I mentioned it briefly earlier, the Champ Lake Monster photo that Sandra Mansey took in 1977, published in 1981.

0:56:49
It’s the most famous, one of the more famous sightings of a lake monster, and it was taken at Lake Champlain. It’s considered by many the best evidence for champ and any lake monster. I had some really in-depth discussions with skeptics who were like, why are you wasting time on this? It’s clearly a hoax. I had interviewed Sandra Mansey, and I had read her accounts, and I don’t think it’s a hoax. I think she genuinely didn’t recognize what she photographed. And I had the same thing happen in the Chupacabra case.

0:57:24
I interviewed their witness, Madeline Tolentino in Puerto Rico. And it’s easy to just assume that, oh, she’s lying for attention, it’s a hoax, it’s a scam. No, I don’t believe so. I think she’s sincere. I think she really, genuinely misunderstood something she saw, and then later became the Chupacabra. So I think that’s the case here. Without really compelling evidence, I’m hesitant to label anybody a hoaxer or a liar because I prefer… There’s enough wiggle room. People are wrong enough in their everyday lives, misperceiving, misremembering that we don’t need to go there.

0:58:04
PR: Yeah, and to make that claim requires other evidence. It’s almost like you’re just making your life harder trying to pin that on a story when the reality is that it’s probably nowhere near as nefarious as you’re trying to assume it is.

BR: I actually hadn’t thought about that, but you’re right because you know if you if you make a positive claim of a hoax Then in a way the burdens on you. Yeah, I mean you shifted the burden of proof to yourself Yeah, if you’re if you’re gonna say that that’s the case You’re making a positive claim then it’s up to you to prove. It’s a hoax. Yeah, that’s that’s a tough hill to climb man. Yeah, I am it’s it’s much easier to prove that someone was wrong and mistaken than to prove intentional deception Yeah, and you you see the same thing when you’re talking about psychics.

0:58:53
Is James Van Praagh a hoaxer? Is Tyler Henry, John Edwards, all these people, are they lying? Are they self-deluded? I mean, who’s to say? It’s hard to prove that one way or the other. So anyway, to my mind, hoax is less likely. I mean, it’s certainly in terms of likelihood, it’s above Lizardman, but it’s less likely than other things. And to be fair, there were a couple other sketchy things about Davis’ story.

0:59:25
For example, I looked into it and June 29th, 88 was a Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, and Davis worked at McDonald’s. And according to his story, he was driving home at 2 in the morning. Now it’s possible that he was driving home from McDonald’s at 2 in the morning. I don’t think that’s the case, especially in the small town. If you’re in Manhattan, there’s a 24-hour McDonald’s, right? If it’s 1988 in the small town of Bishopsville, South Carolina, I don’t think they close at 1.

1:00:01
PR: No, I worked at a McDonald’s in 1994 maybe, and we closed at 10 p.m. and that was in Albuquerque, a city with, at the time, a metro population of probably 6,000 to 800,000 people. Yeah, so I mean, and 10 was kind of the, I want to say that was the corporate hours. So 10, maybe 11 at some, you know.

BR: Even if, even if he stayed late, maybe he got out at midnight. What’s he doing for two hours between the time he gets out of work and he arrives home? So there, again, there’s some sketchy things there, but who knows? I mean, maybe, maybe he, uh, he was in a minor accident.

1:00:43
Maybe, maybe he got off work. Maybe he got a drink, maybe he’s smoking. So I don’t know. I mean, because I went to the food service, man. Crazy shit happens at the food service. You know this. So again, even though a hoax is a possibility, I think it’s improbable. I think there’s much better explanations. And one of the best ones that I came across, and the one that I think is probably true, was an explanation offered by a woman named Alicia Lutz. She’s an investigator from the College of Charleston. She interviewed people fairly recently in 2011. She was told by several locals they had a pretty good idea of what it was that Davis saw that night, and it was not a lizard man. It was actually a local man Lucius Elmore, a butterbean farmer who had a shed not far from where Davis had a flat tire.

1:01:44
I’ve double-checked this. Whether or not Elmore was mistaken for a lizard man is conjecture. The fact that he was there that night and in a butterbean field and probably saw Davis is not conjecture. That’s pretty well established. So, the story goes, I’ll just read you the quote, it’s pretty short here. It says, “Lucius’ brother, Elmore, was a lucrative butter bean farmer with 40-something acres of butter beans. In order to keep his harvest moving, he dumped the beans onto drying tables in his shed on Brownton Road, which he equipped with air conditioning window units to further speed the drying process”. And this is a quote, so I’ll do it my old coot voice.

1:02:32
“In those days, not everyone had air conditioning, and I guess it got so hot sometimes that it went to people’s heads because people kept stealing the units right out of under brother Elmore’s shed”, said Al Holland, owner of the local feed and seed. “Well, I reckon he just picked up three new units from the store and people knew this, but he was determined to make sure that no one stole them.” End old coot voice. So annoyed by the nighttime thefts, Al Moore stayed up overnight near his shed guarding it to make sure that no one stole his air conditioners as they had done before. And that happened to be the same night and not far from where Christopher Davis’s tire blew out. When he heard the car stop just about 100 yards down the road from his butter bean shed, Lucius Elmore, brother Elmore, thought he found his culprit. He’s like, well, there’s a car stopping over there.

1:03:27
People have been ripping off my air conditioning units. I’m going to go check it out. I caught the bastard this time, because who else would be here in the swamp at 2 in the morning? There’s some truth to that. I can see that. So he walks out on the road and he’s standing looking down and and the conjecture is that the kid, meaning Chris Davis, turned around and screamed and took off and Davis’s headlight tail lights reflected in Elmore’s glasses causing the illusion of glowing red eyes. Now, this actually makes sense.

1:03:58
Because because there’s no mention of a green thing. Elmore’s glasses, I mean I wear glasses, I have anti-reflective coating, I doubt he did in 88. But that is plausible. So it’s not definitive proof, but it does seem much more plausible than many of the other stories there. And there would be little incentive to make up a story about encountering Chris Davis that night.

PR: Yeah.

BR: I mean, there’s no… Why would you make that up? And it’s pretty well established that that encounter happened. Now, again, whether that was mistaken for the Lizard Man, it probably was. No one can prove it at this point. And, you know, keep in mind that that, you know, even though Davis would have been aware of any passing cars by the headlights as he changes the time.

1:04:51
He’s pulling off a road, it’s dark, you’re in a swamp, and it’s two in the morning, this is a rural area, there’s not a lot of cars going by anyway. Even if there is cars, you’re going to be paying attention to the road. Anybody here, anyone else, would not be expecting to see someone walking towards him in the mood like darkness from the swamp. No one expects this, like the Spanish Inquisition. Last thing you expect is this. Any one of us could have been startled and spooked by such a sudden appearance. In his panic, Davis’ imagination may have filled in the details. I think that’s probably the most likely explanation. And as I mentioned at the beginning, you know, Davis’s account is very dramatic, very cinematic. There’s lots of folkloric horror movie tropes packed into his story, right? The claw and the running towards you and the narrow escape and the terrifying image. That doesn’t mean it’s made up, it just means that it’s not unlikely that he drew upon that when we’re counting it.

1:06:09
I think it’s entirely plausible that that’s what happened. That the kid broke down at two in the morning, this guy Lucius Elmore, who in fact, as far as we know, was there that night. I mean, it would be a pretty remarkable coincidence if he just happened to be there and reported an encounter, and by the way, with a lizard man as well, and Brother Elmore didn’t see it. So, you know, Occam’s razor suggests this is probably the explanation. And so, you know, so in the years since then, as I mentioned, ordinary and unremarkable damage to cars in the bishops of the area Which would otherwise have been attributed to vandals or ordinary road damage is suddenly The Lizard Man is back. And I saw this over and over again when I was researching it So there’d be there’d be news reports from from you know 10 15 years later. It’s like you know, someone from down the road, it says their fender’s beat up. Is the Lizard Man back? No, don’t go there. Let’s assume for a minute that there is a Lizard Man, and or there was a Lizard Man, he hasn’t really been, he hasn’t been seen since, right, or very ambiguously. Whatever happened to it? Why is it this one case from 88, yeah, is remains the best? It’s like it’s like the the Patterson-Gimlin film. Why is it the best evidence of Bigfoot is this footage from 1967? From the Johnson administration. Really? This is still the best you got?. You would think that the evidence for Bigfoot would increase exponentially in the decades since.

PR: Especially if people actually actively looking for it.

BR: You would think, right?

1:08:02
And in the same way, if the Lizard Man is real, or if it was real, you would think that in the subsequent years, unless it died shortly after this, maybe while being entertained by the escaped whores, or who knows, in shock of seeing Davis run away, who knows, unless he just had a heart attack and dropped dead, you would think that there would be other later sightings that are even more dramatic and more sensational and good photographs. And yet there’s nothing like that. So in the end, I think that Chris Davis’ report, the most celebrated and detailed encounter on record of the Lizard Man is quite literally incredible. I mean, it’s incredible. Literally not credible.

1:08:44
That’s what that means. It’s riddled with both implausibilities and impossibilities. It may be sincere, it may be a hoax, but in any event, no hard evidence has ever emerged since that time. So it remains, again, the best evidence on record and touted by many, many sources as the heart of the lizard man phenomena. And it is if you don’t look too close. If you start picking up our details, if you start diagramming things, you start fact-checking, things get a little less mysterious.

PR: We would like to thank our sponsor level patrons Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’d like to find out what that is and how to become one head over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange.

1:09:44
Patronage starts at just a buck and there are a lot of perks and bonus content just for our patrons.

BR: If you’d like to lend your moral support you can head over to iTunes and give us a review. Every five star review gets us a little more visibility on the iTunes podcast charts and brings a smile to Pascual’s face.

PR: So that does it for us this week. Make sure to stick around next week. We will have already teased this on the Facebook page by the time you’re hearing this, but we are going to be having Andrew Torres on next week from the Opening Arguments podcast.

BR: Cool, I heard it just recently.

PR: Yeah, it’s a great podcast.

1:10:29
It is no lie one of my favorite podcasts. And Andrew actually has been very tangentially involved with this podcast in that he’s given us some little bit of legal insight about running our podcast and all that. So I am just really excited to have him on. We’re going to be covering legal skepticism, when you need to be skeptical of legal cases, of laws, of how people interpret the laws, especially common interpretations of the law, which I think a lot of people seem to take an armchair view of and get it very wrong.

1:11:06
BR: Yeah, no, I think it’s great. I’m really looking forward to it. You know, there’s there’s so many areas that that skepticism and science intersects with law. And that’s fascinating to me. I mean, I’ve always been fascinated by, you know, when psychics and fortune telling is outlawed. And I wanna talk about that, right? What’s the rationale behind it? And you know, is that ethical? I mean, you have people who are offering a service, but a service which they can’t actually prove they can provide.

1:11:37
So is that legal? Let’s ask them to find out.

PR: All right. So until then, we will see you next time.

BR: Bye-bye.