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

0:00:11
Pascual Romero: Welcome to an all-new episode of Squaring the Strange. I’m your host, Pascual Romero. I just wanted to hop in real quick before we get to the live episode we recorded at the New Mexico Podscape Festival, to thank New Mexico Podscape for having us. Be sure to check them out at Facebook.com/nmpodscape We’d also like to thank the awesome podcasts who attended and broadcasted live Breaking math simple cocktails dating and other paths to suicide City on the edge women wit and wine color circuit presents improv bagel potential problems podcast show and tell sex Albucrazy Podcast, Hi Guys, 10 Drink Minimum, and Amazeballs. And last but not least, we’d like to thank Ty and the Podscape crew for hooking us up with this awesome opportunity, especially Chris, who gets a producing credit this week for getting the episode to me last minute, because that’s just kind of the pressure I like to put on people. Anyway, enjoy the show.

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0:01:36
BR: Yes, well, we are in an alternate Squaring the Strange studios somewhere in upper Namibia. So welcome, welcome everyone. And we’re going to be doing the show live. So we’ll try not to say anything that would get us in trouble?

PR: Yeah, I think we’re okay. I think the slander case from John Edwards is folding as we speak.

BR: He should have seen that coming, I would think.

PR: So Ben, what are you skeptical of this week? Well this week I’m skeptical of casting a skeptical eye on monsters and disasters. I’ve always found it fascinating that when we talk about alleged creatures such as Bigfoot and Chupacabra and Mothman and Loch Ness Monster and whatever else, we tend to think of these creatures as sort of these eternal monsters that are out there. They’re running around the wilderness evading, capturing this and that. if they’re actual animals, they’re subject to the same pressures and crises that the rest of us are. In particular, for example, during natural disasters, hurricanes, everything like that, you’ve got hurricanes, flooding, volcanoes. And so I was especially thinking that with the recent hurricanes in the Caribbean, and also the flooding in Houston and elsewhere. So you’ve got, anyway, so that’s sort of what I was thinking about was the not always obvious connection between sort of cryptozoological monsters and natural disasters and how one informs the other.

0:03:28
PR: Right, right, right. Yeah, that’s really interesting because you always have to think about, you know, how in the aftermath of any kind of natural disaster you end up with, you know, first you have to assess the damage. You’re going through all the areas that are affected and naturally there’s a lot of dealing with the bodies of animals. And after fires, you know, you always find a lot of animals that have to be taken out of the woods and stuff. And as far as I know, you know, I’m not the expert, but we haven’t found a Bigfoot body in a forest fire thus far, have we?

BR: We have not. We have not. And actually it’s interesting the history of the chupacabra, the course of the Hispanic vampire beast which originated in Puerto Rico, has a strong connection historically to the Hurricane Hugo. And I want to just touch with you on that because it’s sort of a lesser-known aspect of the monster. And of course, Hurricane Maria, as we’re speaking now on the air, I think the remnants are still hitting the Caribbean and Puerto Rico physically. But there was actually another devastating storm, Hurricane Hugo, 20 years ago, which helped spawn the Chupacabra story in an unusual way. And that was in 1989. Hugo killed dozens of people in Puerto Rico and, of course, devastated the island, including the crops and many of the animals there. And it left a lasting legacy on the island, including on its alleged monster. And so here’s the connection, because I’m sure you’re wondering, when’s he going to get to it? So here’s the thing. So the main origin story for the chupacabra, there’s actually two of them, the main origin story is that many Puerto Ricans believe that the chupacabra came from and lived and maybe still lives in the El Yunque Rainforest, which is just outside of the capital San Juan. And the story goes that was and is a top secret US government genetics lab somewhere deep in the jungle.

PR: Oh, okay. Naturally.

0:05:44
BR: And I’ve been to El Yunque and I’ve looked for it and every time I ask they’re like, we can’t talk about that.

0:05:49
PR: A lot of shills there.

BR: Exactly. A lot of government shills getting paid over there. But the story goes that the chupacabra first emerged in 1995 because of Hurricane Hugo had come through and there were these again these these top secret evil Frankenstein type experiments and the hurricane smashed this lab as it did.

PR: Like a Jurassic Park kind of scenario.

BR: Exactly. So so in the midst of all this destruction this top secret lab was you know it was was roof was ripped off, whatever, and the chupacabra, which the US government created, according to this theory, jumped out and said, hey, I’m gonna go suck your goats, and proceeded to do so. And so this is, again, this is one of the main theories that many people had about that. And it’s fascinating, again, I traveled to Puerto Rico to interview the original eyewitness for the chupacabra, Madeline Tolentino, I talked about in my book, Tracking the Chupacabra. And again, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in El Yunque, also in the Arecibo radio observatory, amazing place. I’m hoping it wasn’t damaged, just this huge telescope looking into the stars. But anyway, the idea was that the Chupacabra lived for many years in this rainforest, which is, it seems plausible, except for, I mean, it is 28,000 acres, but it’s also the most popular tourist spot on the island. It has over a million visitors each year.

PR: Okay, so yeah, that’s popular.

BR: Yeah, it’s popular, and you would think that, well, hold on here, you’ve got a million people visiting this place, you know, you would think that they’d find a Chupacabra now and then, or a top secret government lab or something that’s creating these monsters. And yet not a single tourist has reported seeing that or anything else. But anyway, that’s how Hurricane Hugo directly contributed to the story of the Chupacabra. And this theory that I’m talking about, it was actually widely reported in Puerto Rican tabloids at the time. In particular, there was a tabloid called El Vocero that reported all sorts of crazy Chupacabra stories including this one. And so, in that way, this natural disaster that of course many Puerto Ricans were dealing with and greatly impacted their lives, sort of trickled down into this weird anti-U.S. government conspiracy theory that spawned the Chupacabra.

PR: Okay, okay, and that I feel like that’s one of those situations that any time conspiracy theories pop up it’s always especially ripe at kind of the tail end of some kind of major crisis, especially in a situation where you have, you know, the need for government aid or something like that and then if you talk about the history of Puerto Rico with the U.S. there’s a lot of a lot of tension there in terms of like how much we contribute to them versus what they contribute to us because they’re a territory. So there’s like a sociopolitical kind of precedent for conspiracy theory at the tail end of any kind of disaster. And so it’s kind of funny that that, you know, it seems almost natural that they would have jumped into that kind of secret government conspiracy conclusion for that story.

BR: It’s fascinating and that’s one of the things that I see over and over in when you’re looking at these sort of folkloric stories and monster stories and even sort of unexplained paranormal stories is that all these topics, they don’t emerge in a vacuum. There’s a specific social and cultural context in which these sorts of monsters and stories emerge whether it’s the Exorcist film, William Friedkin based on William Peter Blatty’s, or the Amityville Horror or the Chupacabra. In all these cases, if you look closely enough, you’ll find really interesting threads, historical and folkloric, that contributed to these weird things.

PR: Totally, totally. Yeah, that’s really interesting. So now, I’d like to maybe kind of go to Bigfoot, because that one’s really interesting to me, because that’s the one where I feel like we should have some way to kind of chase him out of the woods, so to speak, in the wake of a forest fire or something, and what’s up with that?

0:10:21
BR: You would think! In the case of Bigfoot, I mean, one of the main cases that I go to was the eruption of Mount St. Helens. Which was in the Pacific Northwest. And it killed lots of animals, but oddly no Bigfoot. So there are lots of animals that we know for a fact exist, died from ash explosions and that, and yet somehow the Bigfoot knew it was coming, maybe they were psychic or whatever else. When you ask believers, particularly Bigfoot believers, about the lack of evidence, they have a couple ad hoc explanations. Some people say that the Bigfoot bury their dead. I’ve been told there’s a Bigfoot graveyard somewhere and that they assiduously gather up their dead and dig a big hole and put them in there and that’s why we don’t find their bones. I’m skeptical of it. Other people say that bones, the Bigfoot bones dissolve unusually quickly in soil. And people say, well, you don’t find bear bones. In fact, you can find bare bones. But leaving that aside, the point is that they have all these sort of special pleading arguments for why we don’t have you know Bigfoot bones or DNA teeth things like that, but again we can we can look at natural disasters and events that are known to kill animals hurricanes floodings even lightning yeah lightning. Lightning kills wild animals all the time Darren Nash in his in his blog tetrapods zoology has a blog on this reindeer, cow, elk, sheep, giraffe, horses. In fact, there was a case a couple years ago in Norway, like 300 reindeer died from lightning. Oh, wow. They’re just out there because they’re out in the open, lightning strikes and just mass killings. In fact, there was a lightning strikes here and there. So, you know, the fact is that assuming that these are actual corporeal animals that live and breathe and poop and eat, they don’t have the shelters like humans do. Sure, a few of them can find shelters in caves and nooks and crannies, but most of them can’t. And so you have to ask yourself, well, hold on here. If these animals are actually out there, and keep in mind in the case of Bigfoot, we’re not talking one Bigfoot.

PR: Right. Well, yeah, that’s always the thing with cryptozoology is that biologically speaking, any creature needs a population to exist and the larger and more demanding, I mean, presuming Bigfoot’s a human-like creature, the bar gets raised. It’s not like a type of mouse or something where they may exist in a little colony somewhere. This is a large creature that would need a large enough population with enough genetic variation and enough to support generations of these creatures. And, you know, so it’s it’s that that part has always kind of gotten me.

BR: Well, I mean, that’s that’s an important thing to keep in mind. I mean, you know, the question isn’t why haven’t we found a Bigfoot? The question is, why haven’t we found dozens or hundreds or thousands of Bigfoot? I mean, that’s let’s let’s just be very clear about this. We’re not looking for one or two. We’re looking for, by some estimates, you’d need tens of thousands of Bigfoot in North America. So the question isn’t why haven’t we found one. The question is, why aren’t we finding more of them? No, no, no. Why aren’t we finding one of them? And this is especially true, as you said, in the case of natural disasters. Will the body of a skunk ape killed in the recent flooding and hurricanes be discovered any day now in Florida. Presumably. I mean that’s the skunk ape is one version of the Bigfoot story And it’s been photographed and discussed in Florida in Florida of course we recently had hurricanes various hurricanes including Irma and so presumably there’s no reason not to assume that there’s not a bunch of dead skunk apes and dead Bigfoot in Florida and their bodies will be found any minute now.

0:14:26
PR: Right, right.

0:14:27
BR: Yeah, I’m waiting for it. Same thing in in in in Puerto Rico. There’s no reason to think that there’s not the body of of of one or more or dozens of chupacabras will be found washed up on some on some beach outside of outside of San Juan. Because why wouldn’t there be?

0:14:47
PR: Yeah. Well, unless the thing they don’t want to be true, which is no chupacabra.

BR: And the other thing to keep in mind is that, you know, the other thing that natural disasters do is they force animals into new areas to escape the wind and flood. So it’s one thing to argue that Bigfoot, you know, all these hundreds and thousands of them pack their way into caves like a clown car or something. It’s another thing to say, OK, well, let’s just assume you’re right. Let’s just assume that, yes, OK, the chupacabras and Bigfoot and these other animals, they sense the storm coming, they gather away, the flooding, whatever else. All that means is they would be forced into areas with other animals and people. I mean, the same factors, that very fact should greatly increase the chance of one being sighted, since out of harm’s way means the same thing for all terrestrial animals. The same thing that could hurt or kill a human can hurt or kill a Bigfoot or a Chupacabra. And so they’re all being forced through floods and other factors into smaller and smaller areas, which should logically mean there should be an explosion of Bigfoot sightings during these crises. And yet there aren’t.

0:16:04
PR: That’s really interesting, and I think that’s an angle that most people don’t really consider in cryptozoology is just the effects that the environment has on these theoretical creatures. It’s quaint to imagine there’s a couple of Bigfoot running around in the woods and stuff, but at the same time, it’s like when rubber meets the road, you know, it’s like what do they do in a forest fire? What do they do when they’re starving? What do they do in a drought? Because we know what happens to animals when those things happen. We see bears in neighborhoods. We see animals that shouldn’t be in the city moving into the city to escape, and thus far we have not seen that with any of these more legendary creatures.

BR: Right, and you know, as you said, there’s very real environmental pressures on these animals if they’re real. And the fact that there’s this sort of deafening silence among Bigfoot proponents is really telling, I think. You know, it’s like, again, they have all these sort of like, you know, ad hoc, you know, special pleading arguments for why they don’t find any bones or whatever else. Ok, that that aside, where are they? Where are all these dead ones that should be seen? And they’re like, well, oh, look at the time. Oh, squirrel. They’re like, all right, come on, man. Step up and explain why this isn’t happening. So anyway, that’s what I’m thinking on my skeptical hat this week. Nice, nice.

PR: And we’re here at the New Mexico Podscape Festival, for those of you who are just tuning in to the live stream that we posted on the Facebook. And we just wanted to thank you guys for having us here. This has been really great.

0:17:46
MAN: We have an audience question. Can we ask an audience question really quick?

0:17:51
BR: Oh, yeah, sure.

0:17:52
PR: Absolutely.

0:17:53
MAN: What evidence do you have that maybe the skunk ape is not just Florida, man?

BR: Well, it’s typically sighted in Florida, but that’s a fair question. It is a fair question. You know, it could be, well, again, all right, here we go, right? So here’s the thing. So you have animals that are attributed and known to a specific place. For example, Puerto Rico, you know, you have the skunk ape, you have different things like that. Here’s, again, here’s the issue is certainly animals migrate, but we’re talking about large bipedal hairy animals that you know would be seen crossing I don’t know a highway you know among you know all these crowds you know I mean this would be interesting right you’re watching CNN and you see that big long line of evacuees from Florida going up the coast trying to get out and all this herd of Bigfoot these skunk apes just cross in front of all the all the cars you know we’re making the way between the cars, escaping along with the Floridians.

PR: Well, I think that in this case, if Skunk Ape is Florida, man, we would find evidence of the Skunk Ape standing on the roofs of the flooded houses yelling, hold my beer.

BR: Exactly. Come rescue us, man.

PR: Hey, strangers, we love sharing our podcast 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.

0:19:40
PR: So in other news, today was supposed to be the apocalypse.

BR: I heard that. I heard that.

PR: That made the news. Actually, this was here for the apocalypse. Yeah. But yeah, I actually didn’t really hear much about this until I think within the last week. So I started looking, it looked like it had kind of made the rounds in the media. But it was it was really interesting to to hear that on such short notice. You know, I’m used to the the Herald camping kind of like build it up to the apocalypse. You can sell some survival.

0:20:18
BR: I’ve been reading the Bible for the last 84 years. It’s pretty clear to me that September 23rd is going to be… all right.

0:20:25
PR: Yeah. So so let’s get a little framework for this. So today we have an apocalypse and that. What was that based on?

BR: My understanding it was based on a couple of things. It was it was this sort of weird syncretism of or blend of astrology and and of course scripture, scriptural prophecy. Well, it’s sort of two of my favorite pseudoscience is blended into one. Just pick and choose. It’s the way it is these days. And the validity is diluted. When you have two topics whose track record of success are slim to none, and you blend together, it’s just exponential BS. So yeah, again, I only sort of saw a bit of it in passing. But again, the idea was that there was the alignment of the stars. One of the things I heard was that the stars had never aligned exactly this way before. And then, of course, I was reading astronomers saying, no, this is, it is rare, but it has happened before and it will happen again and whatever else. So the idea that just because this particular constellation is going on means something doesn’t, and then there’s like some connection to, you know, these figures and the astrological signs and anyways this whole thing.

PR: Okay, yeah that’s really, I don’t, I mean even if something happened for the very first time in all of astronomy, what does, what precedence do we have to even say it means anything? Exactly, well you know one of my favorite failed doomsday guys is a guy named Richard Noone, N-O-O-N-E, and he wrote a book called Five Five Two Thousand. And I have a copy on my shelf, I like to flip through it every now and then when I need a chuckle. And his book said that on Five Five Two Thousand, May 5th, 2000, there would be a particular alignment in the skies that would cause, I think it was the ice caps to flip, and the world would be destroyed in ice.

PR: And mine was destroyed in tequila that night, just for the record.

BR: I’m glad you survived. So I actually contacted Mr. Noone about a month before his prophecy came out, and I said, yeah, I’d like to interview you on May 6th. He’s like, well, the world’s going to end. In case the world doesn’t end, if you don’t mind, let’s just arrange this now. And he begged off. And anyway, you can find his book, 5/5/2000, The Ultimate Disaster, for sale on Amazon.com for one penny. It’s worth every cent. But it’s interesting, if you look at historically, celestial events have been seen as portents of the apocalypse. You look at eclipses, for example. They were interpreted as a darkening of the intentions of one or more deities. Something is in front of the sun, this is creeping me out, this can’t be good. When the sun goes out, not a good thing during the daytime, clearly we’ve pissed off some entity, let’s kill some virgins. That makes sense. Right, why not?

PR: Intuitive.

BR: Intuitive, that’s what you do. But of course, these celestial events come and go, but they come and go without any obvious disaster. how in a sort of pre-literate, pre-enlightened time, this would be plausible, right? You have comets, you have eclipses, you have things that are clearly unusual and sort of ominous.

PR: Yeah, yeah, and like you said, it makes perfect sense in a world where you lack any real understanding understanding of what’s happening and you know especially something like an eclipse where you know at any given place in the earth it happens a minimal number of times especially a total eclipse I mean that you know there are a whole lifetimes that go by without seeing one in a specific spot on Earth so it’s you know it’s pretty interesting to think that you know people I mean that’s just all part of how the human mind works with a lack of information. I mean, you just fill in the gaps. And in a world where it pays to be scared of everything, in the survival sense, why not have it be the gods are mad at us?

0:25:01
BR: And fortunately, we have scientists, astronomers, and I know some really good astronomers, who can explain these things perfectly. We don’t need to go back to superstitious thinking from centuries ago, we’ve actually built up a good working knowledge of how these things work and why they work. And the recent eclipse was a perfect example. I was actually very gratified to see all the science coming up and astronomers saying, hey, guys, this is really cool. This is science. Don’t be scared by these crazy loons. This is actually a science mind. I always enjoy it when we can use a popular pop culture event of great interest to sort of bring in science and educate people about it.

PR: Totally. I think that’s one of the great things about nowadays, especially with the way the internet is with social media and everything. We have so much access to this stuff. And for the first time, I think of my lifetime, I mean, there were definitely famous scientists or famous people pushing science. We had guys like Mr. Wizard and various other guys. Bill Nye kind of picked up the torch after that. But now it’s like we’re kind of in a renaissance for it where some of the top people in their fields are famous for what they do. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a perfect example. And to me, that’s really encouraging, because most of the hysteria around the eclipse this year was like, I need to get to a place where I can see the whole thing. And it was really cool. There was all this tourism that happened around it. And in my lifetime, I can’t think of a time, maybe Halley’s Comet, but that there was more pop culture kind of surrounding a celestial event or just anything you know scientific like that so it was really exciting.

BR: Yeah well and it’s interesting you mentioned Haley’s comet you know there was a scare in 1881 when there was an astronomer that this is when they were first analyzing comet tails through spectral analysis you can look at the light coming from comets and determine the chemical analyses. And they discovered that the comet tails included a deadly gas called cyanogen, which as it sounds like is related to cyanide, which is in fact toxic to us. And someone said, well, hold on here. Cyanogen? The Earth is going to be going through this comet’s tail. We’re all gonna die! You’re doomed! And then so there was this there was a genuine widespread doomsday panic regarding Halley’s comet in 1881 and it was actually the comet was supposed to go through in 1910 but it was first discovered this was gonna happen.

PR: Did we make it?

BR: We made it. I made it. I don’t know about you. My forefathers made it. I wasn’t here for it. My forefathers made it. But again, once again, it was left to scientists and astronomers to calm the public’s fears and say, look, this is not, yes, this is a deadly gas. Our Earth’s atmosphere does a pretty good job of protecting us. That’s why we’re still alive. Don’t worry about it. But anyway, so do we have any listener questions?

MAN: There’s none in the chat right now.

BR: No one is listening to us. Wow. They’re checking out cat memes and porn, and they’re like, oh, let’s go back to Ben and Pascual. So, okay, so we talked some about sort of natural signs of the apocalypse, and let’s touch on religious apocalypses.

0:28:58
PR: Okay.

0:28:59
BR: Because that’s the other sort of, I was recently researching apocalypses, apoc, apoclo-bye? Yeah, apoclobi. For an encyclopedia that I’m helping to contribute to. And they sort of break into two parts. The first one is, again, the sort of natural doomsday, you know, there’s an eclipse, something bad’s going to happen, or the helliest comet will erupt. But probably the one that’s most familiar to people are the religious ones. And, for example, one of the most famous ones here in America was William Miller, the founder of the Millerites, who like Harold Camping, we talked about earlier, spent many, many years reading the Bible, as many people do. But unlike many people, he decided that the world was going to end sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. Now as you may recall, from reading the Bible, it actually says in the Bible that no man will know the time. So it explicitly says we’re not going to tell you when the world is going to end.

PR: Well that’s an important caveat when you’re selling a religion because you don’t want to give them like the, you know, it’s going to happen really soon so hurry up and join and then you join and it doesn’t happen. It’s like you know you get a lot of like drop in membership. So you’ve got to make sure that you can always move the goalposts. So you’re just like, it’s going to happen any day now. You marked my words there, sister.

BR: So here’s what happened. So finally, everyone’s like, really? You can’t narrow it down? OK, no, let me look at it again. OK, it’s April 23rd, 1843. Everyone’s like, oh, he seems like a nice guy. He’s a farmer. He’s from New England. I like the way he talks. I like the cut of his jib. He clearly knows what he’s talking about. He seems so certain, and this is one of the things you see, is people are like, well, yes, they give us specific dates, they’re like, it’s not like wishy-washy, like, no, God has spoken to me, and this is the period of the day. So we’re like, okay, so he had many of his followers, knows the Millerites, they sold or gave away, or burned their possessions, they’re like, I don’t need this anymore, it’s all good. Yeah, so April 23rd comes and goes, and the naked Millerites were like, huh, maybe I shouldn’t have given away the horse. You know, hey, hey, hey, William, what’s going on here? Anyway, later, eventually, of course, many of his followers got disillusioned, as one would, and actually became the Latter Day Adventists, the Seventh-day Adventists.

PR: Oh, wow, I actually didn’t know that part.

BR: Yes, that’s amazing. A splinter group of millwrights became the Seventh Day Advertist. So then of course you also have Pat Robertson.

0:31:45
PR: Oh yeah.

0:31:46
BR: Who every few months, every few years, is like, Yeah, the world’s gonna end!

0:31:50
PR: I hope that man never dies. He is far and away one of my muses. He’s amazing. I mean, I don’t think anyone takes him seriously. I really, but I just love the guy.

BR: He has his TV show, The 700 Club. And at one point in May 1980, he said, I guarantee you, by the end of 1982, there’s going to be a judgment on the world. Now he may have just meant like he was going to pass judgment, like I think y’all suck. I’m upset about the gays. Maybe that’s what the sort of judgement he was talking about. Anyway, fast forwarding ahead, you had other, probably more recently, the sort of apocalyptic theology that we are most familiar with are, for example, the biblical stuff like Hal Lindsay and Tim LaHaye, the Left Behind series. Hal Lindsay, of course, had a series of very popular books in the 1970s, starting with with the late great planet Earth. He did, I think, a dozen or so, all talking about how he and he, again, he read the Bible, and his version of the Bible said that, he was matching current events with God’s plan, and that if you were just smart enough to follow what he was saying, that you would then recognize, well, clearly he’s right and clearly it’s going to happen. So Hal Lindsey did it, Tim LaHaye did it, Tim LaHaye again being the author of the Left Behind series along with Mr. Jenkins. And what’s interesting is the commercialization of the apocalypse. You know, centuries ago, even many decades ago, if someone said the world was going to end, it would be like, oh, there’s that crazy guy in the corner.

0:33:42
PR: Right.

0:33:44
BR: Old Jeb thinks the world’s going to end again. There you go, right?

0:33:48
PR: Yeah.

0:33:49
BR: But these days, because of the mass media and because a lot of the apocalypse is well-marketed and commercialized, you have books and magazines and videos and seminars and audio tapes and TV shows and television programs and websites, you have all this mass marketing of the doomsday stories. One thing that did was, it expanded the otherwise nominal interest in biblical eschatology beyond the small group, right? So, you know, centuries, you know, decades ago, if someone’s talking about what the Bible says about the end times, the number of people that are interested in that is relatively small. You know, there’s a handful of fundamentalist Christians, but other people are like, yeah, whatever. But so what Lindsay and LeHay and other people did was sort of popularize and say, look, this is something that’s going to affect the entire world. Everyone should pay attention to this. So suddenly the appeal, the sort of perverse appeal of Doomsday was made into a film starring Nicolas Cage.

PR: The finest actor of a generation.

BR: The finest actor. If you’ve seen Ghostrider 2, then you know exactly what you’re talking about Bible stories and apocalyptic stories, you know, they’re both fascinating and terrifying. If it’s true, then that’s concerning because that means we’re all gonna die and the world’s gonna end. And we’ve always been, you know, Americans have always been fascinated by disaster movies. We love seeing the Statue of Liberty get blown up once again, the White House, you know, once again get blown up. So we love seeing things get blown up, including the world. And so there’s this inherent fascination with things exploding in the end times, coupled with many people’s genuine spiritual concern that maybe this is in fact the end times.

PR: Yeah, yeah, and it really, you know, it sells itself. I mean, it’s, you have a lot of people who believe the base framework for it. Whether or not they subscribe to the final chapters of the Bible, they still have the belief system in place that that springs from. A more charismatic or forward kind of person can really push that a little bit and get a lot more people into that idea than the guy on the corner talking about Planet X. Because you’ve got a belief system sort of sitting under the additional apocalyptic belief system. So it’s kind of interesting and I can see why it spreads so easily.

BR: Yeah, and one of the ways that it does that is you can look at the psychological processes behind it. So for example, you have, you know, pareidolia or seeing patterns in otherwise random stimuli, right? So we see faces in clouds, we see patterns in random noise. And when, and so what people like Lindsay and LeHay did was they sort of, they used their interpretation of the Bible and its depiction of end times and the tribulation, and they used modern history as a template. They said, okay, well, hold on here. If you read the Bible, this was predicted. And you read the rise of Israel, the two great powers, all these sorts of things. And it’s exactly the same thing that Nostradamus did. Because Nostradamus, he wrote in this archaic version of French and he would write these sort of vague, general, two powers will rise and one will fall. Like, oh wow, he predicted, no.

PR: He predicted every war ever.

BR: Every war ever, right. And so what many of the Bible literalists and the apocalypse writers do is they use the same technique. They say, okay, well if you read this ambiguous section of the Bible, it talks about X, Y, and Z, and don’t you see how clearly this matches to what happened in the fall of the Berlin Wall? And it’s like, no, that’s your interpretation. That’s one of many, and just because you can retroactively try to connect the dots between what the Bible says about the end times and some real-world event does not necessarily mean that it’s a real thing.

PR: Yeah, that’s kind of funny too because I think that you know we have a we kind of almost have this sick fashion fascination with with you know the world ending and with you know basically just everything going to hell and it’s almost like we want it to happen in a weird sort of way. It’s like watching you know any any disaster movie. It’s like you know do you want a disaster movie where the hurricane, you know, passes by and goes back up and there’s like some high winds, you know, but the beach kind of sucked for an hour. The comb-over goes up and then goes back down, right. And I feel like, you know, apocalypse, you know, is as scary as it sounds in terms of like fear for the future. It’s, you know, it’s like people want it to be really bad and really awful. That’s why the whole rapture thing is so, it’s like hell on earth. I mean, I don’t know, maybe we just get sucked up by a black hole and in half a second everything just blinks out of existence. I don’t know. So it’s kind of funny how that’s, especially these days because you really have to sell it. It just has to be so much more scary. It’s always been really scary couldn’t just feel like asteroids gonna hit us and everything will just be gone I can’t we can’t do anything it’s fine.

BR: Well that’s what’s been the part that’s puzzled me is like for example when when Harold Camping had his his his his notion about and for those who don’t remember he was the the old crazy guy I think it was like 150 or 180 or 200 anyway and he’s like oh I read this and he had this whole thing and they put up billboards.

PR: I remember, I have pictures from, I lived in LA at the time and I had some pictures of that. Yeah, yeah. I think there still are some up actually.

BR: Really? Wow, who’s paying for them? That’s amazing. Back in the day. Well you know I always wondered, it’s like, I actually wrote about the story for Discovery News at the time about failed apocalypses, Apocalypoli. And I always wondered, what are we supposed to do? I mean, oh, the world’s going to end, and I don’t pay my cable bill? What exactly? Why are you telling me this? What in the world am I supposed to do with that information?

PR: Yeah, I guess get right with Jesus.

BR: Well, that ship’s sailed, so what else do you want me to do? Hide the porn? I mean, what exactly are we supposed to do with this? The idea that the world’s going to end. Of all the useless information.

PR: Clear your browser history, folks.

0:41:03
BR: Because God’s going to spend his time checking out where you were on Netscape. Once you get to the gates, they’re just like, all right, let’s just see your Google history. You cannot come in here. No, no, that’s not going to work.

PR: Yeah, no, that’s a fascinating topic. And I always enjoy the doomsday dates coming and going. One day, I think we’ll get it. Fingers crossed. But yeah, I have a feeling today’s going to end pretty uneventfully for us. So yeah.

(MUSIC)

0:41:35
Celestia Ward: Hey Squares and hey strangers, Celestia here with another skeptical fortune cookie. Let’s crack it open and see what we get this week. It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. This thought has been expressed a few different ways, and the general idea is that reason loses its value as a tool if the person you are arguing with doesn’t also employ it. If someone’s rationale for believing in something is purely emotional, or political, or arbitrary, then giving them a rational, fact-based counter-argument likely won’t make a dent in their thinking. This is a frustrating fact many skeptics learn early on. Many quotes similar to this statement have been attributed to a few different thinkers, from Fisher Ames to Ben Goldacre. But the original, according to QuoteInvestigator.com, appears to be from Jonathan Swift, in a little 1721 publication titled, Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Entered into Holy Orders by a person of quality.” That version reads, “‘Reason will never make a man correct an ill opinion which by reasoning he never acquired.’” Generally regarded as the foremost satirist in English, Jonathan Swift was also a dedicated fact-checker and actively fought against the fake news of his day. As his biographer John Stubbs said of his outlook, for it to carry weight, satirical mockery had to be based on solid claims. Yet those swift doggedly researched works like Essay Upon the Art of Political Lying and The Conduct of the Allies, this didn’t make him immune to loving a good tall tale. He wrote a scathing modest proposal in deadpan satirical style, suggesting that excess Irish children could be fed to the rich. And he presented Gulliver’s Travels as a genuine travel memoir, which reportedly fooled a good number of readers. Something tells me that Jonathan Swift and P.T. Barnum would have gotten along pretty well. Now, let’s get you back to Ben and Pascual.

(MUSIC)

0:43:55
BR: So, Pascual, my friend and co-host, my hirsute tattooed boy, what are you skeptical of?

PR: I am skeptical of Gwyneth Paltrow.

BR: Oh, yes, yes. I think I know where we’re going with this, but please lead on.

PR: So she has, as many in the skeptic world know, she has a lot of products.

BR: Now just to be clear, is this the scientist Gwyneth Paltrow or the actress Gwyneth Paltrow?

PR: One and the same. So she has on her website… Which is called goop goop which yeah where she sells vagina rocks and yeah other stuff I don’t know

BR: The jade eggs that are apparently not supposed to stimulate you they’re supposed to cleanse your anyway yeah I don’t know

PR: So yeah right now she’s selling psychic vampire repellent so look that’s again psychic vampire repellent I think it’s made of psychic garlic. I’m not sure.

0:45:16
BR: Homeopathic garlic?

PR: So I’ve got my notes here and it’s just like, it’s kind of vague. There’s an article on it. It’s got a combination of gem healing, gem healing, you know, again, one of the, what is?

0:45:27
BR: What is it, what do you, what is that?

0:45:29
PR: Yeah, so I don’t know what that is. But gem healing in deeply aromatic therapeutic oils. So it smells, I guess, which I guess psychic vampires are offended by scent or maybe they’re just sensitive. I don’t know. And it will get rid of quote bad vibes in order to get rid of said bad vibes. Just spray it generously around your head to safeguard your aura.

BR: I think that I’m already getting all sorts of red flags, but I could have just said like 50 unrelated words and it would have meant the same thing. But Deepak Chopra’s, you know, wisdom generator. It is the happiness of the vibration will result in the cohesion of the quantum.

PR: Right, yeah, there we go, perfect. So we can get these bottles at her website for $22. It’s a bargain if you’re safeguarding your aura, I guess. But yeah, so I don’t really know, the interesting thing is that they don’t really, like that term psychic vampire, like it’s thrown around a lot, and I’ve never, you know, I guess that, you know, in a broad sense, it’s like people that suck your energy from you.

BR: I can talk on that a bit.

PR: Okay, well let’s go ahead and, yeah, what’s a psychic vampire?

BR: Well, I’ve researched vampires in various types, including from my Chupacabra book, because of course the Chupacabra is a vampire, and so I spend a chapter in my book looking at the different incarnations of different vampires. You know, there’s ancient vampires that are more like spirits and evil creatures. The vampires that most people are familiar with are what folklorists call revenants. And of course they’re there.

PR: Love that word. Revenants. We should just call them revenants.

BR: Revenants, yes. Revenants of course being the raised dead. So these vampires, again this is what we think of when we look at Twilight vampires or Dracula, we think of a human that died and then was brought back up and therefore is in human form. But it can sometimes take other forms such as you know wolves, bats, this sort of thing. But of course there are other older types of vampires that were not revenants at all. So they were never humans, we don’t think of them in human form. The Chupacabra is one version of that. And so when you talk to people who believe that they are vampires, and I’ve had some interesting conversations with those people, we’ll save that for another show.

PR: I was deep in the goth scene in the 90s. I know lots of them. They’re familiar with them.

BR: But yeah, so one of the ways in which they sort of steer around when they try to muddy the waters is say, well, whether people can actually drink blood, there’s actually problems with that, including you can get iron toxicity. I mean, it’s actually not healthy to drink blood because of the amount of iron in it, and it’s bad for our digestive systems. It can actually cause problems. Let’s just, and you can drink small amounts, but in terms of drinking blood, humans are not physiologically equipped to do that. So then people say, okay, well, that aside, there are psychic vampires. And then when you pin them down, you get a couple of different, depending on who you talk to. So some people say, no, there are actually vampires who are psychic. But the more common theme is that there are people who, when you’re around them, you just sort of feel blah. You know, it’s like.

PR: I grew up calling those Debbie Downers.

BR: Yeah, exactly. This is the modern version of Debbie. People who, you know, they’re just, you know, like my grandma would call them like a pill. You know, she’s nice, but she’s a pill. And so I would say, pill, Debbie Downer, these are people who, you know, there’s always something bad going on, everything sucks, there’s never anything good, just this constant barrage of complaints and this and that. And so this is a redressed version of some of the psychic vampires. And so my position is, well yeah, if that’s all you mean by psychic vampire, somebody who’s unpleasant to be around, sure, they exist everywhere.

0:49:44
PR: They’re all over the place. Sucking the fun out of the room every day.

BR: If that’s all you mean, and you’re not actually going to any other actual vampiric, the idea of vampires is the draining of bodily substance, draining blood, draining, in the cases of Succupi draining semen. I wrote about a vampire in South America called the Leaky Chiri, which sucks your fat. It actually steals the fat out of your body.

0:50:13
PR: I need to meet one of those.

0:50:14
BR: We’ll do a show on that. So again, inherent to the vampire story is this idea of draining some sort of substance. And they sort of twist the notion of a psychic vampire, if you go from an actual bodily substance to like energy or vibrations or you know, I was in a good mood, they stole, it sucked my good mood. No, no, that’s not a vampire, that’s just, you know, that’s my cousin.

PR: We call them lame people. Yeah, that’s very interesting actually. actually and I really have no idea what this product even claims to do.

BR: Is it FDA approved?

PR: Oh I’m sure it is.

BR: Does it have this thing where it says this product is not guaranteed to do anything?

PR: They did many studies on it by spraying it on people and seeing what happens. Recently though, after kind of pressed about it, Gwyneth Paltrow said that the product is supposed to be tongue in cheek.

BR: Oh, it’s a satire, it’s a joke. Yeah, which is, you know. Just like her whole website.

PR: Her little Hail Mary at the end of the, getting pressed for it, but, so, you know, and I mean, take that with, you know, as you will. I imagine that’s what happens when you press someone to like back up something as weird as psychic vampire repellent. But the product itself appears to be serious. It doesn’t, it seems to have, it comes from what’s called, a company called Paper Crane Apothecary and it’s very…

BR: I assume they sell weed.

PR: Probably. So you know I don’t know. Yeah again it’s, the product seems kind of vague and it just, you know, it doesn’t claim much. It just says it will get rid of the bad vibes. It’s like, I don’t know, man, I know a couple ways to do that. There’s whiskey, there’s weed, whatever. But I mean…

BR: Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, from a scientific and medicinal point of view, of course, we get into what we call falsifiability. Right? It’s like you make a claim and Either you can prove the claim or you cannot prove the claim. And oftentimes, a lot of these products, these alternative medicine products, they get out of having to prove that they work because they go, well, we’re not a drug. We’re a supplement. We don’t need to prove that it works. We just need to prove it’s safe. There’s actually very, very little regulation of the supplement industry. But again, to be crystal clear, they don’t have to prove it works. They just have to prove that they can market it. And there you go.

PR: So anyway. I don’t know that I’d recommend people go to the Goop website. I mean, it’s pretty dumb. But if you want to see some weird and crazy stuff, I mean, it is a good site. I am sure there are plenty others. I just don’t spend my time looking up weird, new-agey, cure-all homeopathic sites.

BR: But you’re checking out Pat Robertson’s failed Doomsday predictions.

PR: Like I said, he’s my favorite. That man is a national treasure. But no, yeah, so it’s pretty interesting that we can even live in a world where that would be considered a product that you could sell, you know, mass market. I mean, it just feels like that old, you know, the old touring carnival salesman with the, you know, with the bottle of nondescript liquid that grows your hair back, makes you taller. And, you know, so, yeah, it’s all kind of the same thing.

BR: And fortunately, you know, we have a lot of good science communicators out there like the Sci-Babe, Dr. Jim Guntner, many other people who are out there fighting the good fight. Science-based medicine is a good website. Whatstheharm.net, there are many really good alternative medicine, there are many good websites that take a good skeptical scientific eye to a lot of this. Definitely, definitely.

0:54:22
Check it out.

0:54:26
We would like to thank our sponsor level patrons, Amy Freshour-Kelley 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. Patronage starts at just a buck and there are a lot of perks and bonus content just for our patrons. If you’d like to lend your moral support, you can head over to iTunes and give us a little more visibility on the iTunes podcast charts and brings a smile to Puzz Buzz.

0:54:56
So, yeah, so that does it for us.

0:55:07
Yeah, we’ve covered quite a bit. of Bigfoot bodies in the wake of forest fires to a psychic vampire repellent from Paltrow. Yeah, and yeah, we just, we want to thank the New Mexico Podscape Festival for having us and definitely check out their website. You should be watching us on their Facebook right now. So hopefully you gave them a like while you popped in and yeah, I guess that about does it for this episode. So we’ll see you guys next week.

0:55:41
Bye-bye.

0:55:42
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

0:55:44
Thank you.

0:55:45
Thank you.

0:55:46
Thank you.

0:55:47
Thank you.

0:55:48
Squaring the Strange is a production of Kronos Creative LLC, copyright 2017. Theme music by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Guitar and Feathered,

0:55:57
and Pascual Romero.

0:55:58
Content producer, Celeste Jawori. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pascual Romero at Kronos Creative Studios. provided by Pascual Romero at Kronos Creative Studios. and I’ll see you next time.

Transcribed with Cockatoo