Crystal Skulls

In the late 19th century, replicas of human skulls carved from quartz crystal were being sold as pre-Columbian artifacts. They varied in size from beads to larger than life size. Some were crude and some were very well executed. Most of the publicity has been about a few excellent life size crystal carving. The collection of a Parisian antiquity dealer named Eugene Boban contained 3 crystal skulls. His collection was sold to Alphonse Pinart who donated the collection to the Trocadero Museum.

Many crystal skulls are at claimed to be of Aztec or Mayan origin prior to the arrival of Columbus. There are paranormal claims associated with these skulls. Some people have claimed that some of these skulls can produce miracles such as causing visions, curing cancer, killing people and causing premonitions of coming events. Recently, a claim has been made that if thirteen special crystal skulls can be reunited, a great disaster associated with the end of a Mayan calendar cycle in 2012 can be prevented. Many tests have been performed on crystal skulls but no evidence of any extraordinary properties have ever been found.

Although there are many carvings of human skulls in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art, none of the crystal skulls are from documented excavations. Several crystal skulls in the British Museum were carefully examined in 1967, 1996 and 2004. The indented lines marking the teeth were carved by 19th Century rotary jewelry tools. The type of crystal used to make the skulls is only found in Madagascar and Brazil. The conclusion of the study was that those particular skulls were probably carved in the German town of Idar-Oberstein which was well know for carving things from Brazilian quartz. While this does not prove that all the crystal skulls are fakes, they probably are.

The Mystery of Duffy's Cut

Ghosts, possible murders, dead Irish men, and cholera, 180 years of mystery

Who doesn't love a good ghost story? And the story of the ghosts of Duffy's Cut is particularly rich with historical facts, as well as over a hundred years of spooky tales about the Irish immigrants who tragically died—or were murdered—there.

The first railroad tracks in the U.S. were laid by hand, reportedly over a three mile stretch in Massachusetts. Horses pulled the first carts to run on that three mile track, in 1827. By 1829, Delaware & Hudson Canal Co. put the Stourbridge Lion to work on their mine tracks, the first steam locomotive in America. The locomotive is retired as a stationary boiler when she turns out to weigh twice as much as she was supposed to, according to her builders, and is too heavy for the tracks. But locomotives and railroads were very clearly going to be a large part of the future of this young and energetic country.

Laying track was brutal work, and didn't pay well. Even slave-owners were reluctant to rent out their slaves to lay track. Like much physical labor, laying railroad track fell to migrant workers and immigrant labor. Mile after mile of the early tracks in America were built almost entirely by Irish immigrant labor. So very difficult and dangerous was the work of laying track that there's a chilling old saying about it: Under every mile of railroad track is a dead Irishman.

57 Irish workers were hired immediately upon their arrival at the docks in Philadelphia in June of 1832 by one Phillip Duffy (himself not too long off the boat from Ireland, and fluent in the language) to cut a line of track through some particularly steep and hilly terrain. Just a few weeks later, they were all dead, dumped ignominiously together into a mass grave and covered with the dirt and rock they themselves had just removed to lay track for the Main Line through a particularly difficult area, dubbed "Duffy's Cut."

For nearly a decade, Dr Frank Watson, his brother William Watson, and a team from Immaculata University have been tirelessly digging for the truth of what actually happened to those 57 young men, almost two hundred years ago. In 2009, they found the first two skulls of the men's remains, and at the same time, began to uncover an early American mystery:

Archaeological researchers excavating Duffy’s Cut, the infamous dig-site where Irish railroad workers were found buried en-mass, have uncovered two more skulls which show evidence of blunt force injuries to the skull.

While the official story in 1832 was apparently that all the workers had fallen victim to Cholera, quarantined, and abandoned to die—physical evidence suggest that several of the men were actually quite coldly and brutally murdered. Dr. Watson intends for the team to positively identify as many of the victims as they can, to contact any remaining descendants or relatives, and perhaps even return the remains to their families for a more proper burial.

Frank and William Watson have co-written a book with two other scholars, revisiting the history of these Irish railroad laborers, about the years of searching for the dead men left in Duffy's Cut, and the truth of what they've discovered buried beneath those miles of railroad track.

The Voynich Manuscript: 600 Years Old, And Still Unsolved

The Voynich Manuscript is one of the world's oldest and most enduring mysteries. This hand-written book has been carbon dated to between the years 1401 and 1438, about 200 years before Shakespeare's day.

We know precious little about the manuscript, which is named after the book dealer who purchased it in 1912. The book currently lives at Yale University, where it continues to be studied by cryptologists and mystery lovers from around the world.

If you didn't know what you were looking at, you might suppose you were paging through any other medieval manuscript. It was written with a quill pen, from left to right, with a flourish-y sort of text that is just this side of calligraphic. The text is frequently broken by illustrations, which no doubt are related to the text in some way. It might seem to be a text book or some other sort of knowledge compendium. As you examine the pages you might assume that, since the words make no sense, it was written in a language other than English.

And on that point, you would be entirely correct. For as far as we can tell, the Voynich manuscript is written in no language at all. It is written in what looks for all the world like words and sentences and paragraphs, but the symbols are not any known letters, and they do not form the words of any known language.

Theories about the Voynich manuscript abound, and people are forever proclaiming that they have solved it. But to date, none have.

(I recently ran across the website of someone who claims that the manuscript is written in Italian anagrams, and who sniffs that it "is therefore not as complicated as it first appears." And who then goes on to "translate" the names of a few illustrated vegetables, while getting the identification quite wrong. For example, the plant whose name she translates as "garlic" is clearly not garlic, and the plant's name she translates as "licorice" is clearly not a licorice plant. She also translates only three of the manuscript's 240+ pages, which made me wonder why her effort trailed off after misidentifying a few pages of plants.)

The only thing we can say for sure about the Voynich manuscript is that someone went to a lot of trouble to create it. It covers topics (or seems to) from medical to botanical, and the words visually flow in a very natural fashion. There are two basic possibilities: that the book has meaning, or that it does not.

If it has meaning, then is it encoded? And if so, how? A code which has remained un-cracked after passing through the hands of hundreds of years of ownership would be a valuable tool indeed.

If it has no meaning, then is it the work of a madman, rambling on in a private language which doesn't really exist? Or is it a hoax, and if so, what could possibly be the use?

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Mysterious Mima Mounds

Mima mounds are not a phenomenon particular to the Northwest, although they occur here in their greatest numbers. Mima mounds remain a mystery, despite the best efforts of hundreds of years of scientists and other theorists.

One of the best examples of Mima Mounds can be found just south of Olympia, a few miles off I5 outside Littlerock at the Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve. Imagine a broad prairie field. Now imagine that instead of being relatively flat, it is humped with a vast cluster of mounds, each about 30 feet around, and up to eight feet high. These mounds go on for hundreds of acres, nestled side by side with a narrow path between them.

We have ample scientific data on what the mounds are. But we know nothing about how they came to be.

Most of the mounds are basically giant piles of gravel and sandy soil. They sit atop a layer of flat, compacted clay soil. This is much the same kind of geology that many of us find in our back yards - but not as evenly dispersed.

The first theory I heard to explain the formation of the Mima Mounds was that the local native tribes had built them, as some kind of religious ritual, fertility rite, or burial rite. This theory was no doubt fueled by the thought of the giant burial mounds in England and Ireland which were built by the Picts as monuments.

This theory is quickly debunked by:

 A) The widespread nature of the Mima Mounds, which can be found through Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and even occur in other places throughout the country, including sites outside San Diego, in East Texas, and in central Wyoming.

B) The lack of any human remains (either skeletal remains or buried objects) inside the mounds.
B) Just asking the native tribes themselves, which have kept a historical record of their culture going back thousands of years, and have no such ritual involvement.

Many other theories have been proposed, some more plausible than others. The real problem is that it's impossible to test these theories, since they all require activity on a geologic scale, or over millions of years, to reproduce.

Take the pocket gopher theory. When the gophers hit the hardpan, so the theory goes, they give up and start building upwards. It would take millions of years - billions of generations of pocket gophers - to create these mounds. And although there are pocket gophers in the area, there aren't that many of them. Nor are the mounds notably hollow with pocket gopher tunnels, as one would expect from such an artifact of pocket gopher culture.

One thing is certain: the prairie landscape of the Mima Mounds is under threat. The native tribes used to keep the prairies clear by setting fires every season to burn the brush. Encroaching development has made this unwise, and the prairies are only barely being defended from Himalayan blackberry and Scotch broom by a tireless group of park rangers and volunteers.

Photo credit: WAStateDNR

Exploding Water

You may, at some time, have received a chain email about the dangers of boiling water in the microwave. But unlike pretty much every single chain email ever sent in the entire history of the internet, this one is actually true. 

We think of "boiling water" as "water that is bubbling a lot." But the bubbling action is just a secondary effect. Water hits the boiling stage at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit).

Typically when this happens, the hottest part (in a pan on the stove, this would be the bottom) starts turning to gas. The gas bubbles up to the surface, cooling the water slightly as it does so. 

If for some reason the bubbles don't form, the water doesn't turn to a gas, but it can still keep on heating up. When a fluid gets heated beyond its boiling point without turning to gas, it is said to be a "superheated fluid."

Let's back up and look at those bubbles again. In the same way that raindrops and snowflakes form around particles of dust, bubbles in boiling water form around particles, too. If the water is extremely clean, and the container is also extremely clean, it is possible that the bubbles will not be able to form.

Bubbles form around what is called "nucleation sites." You may be familiar with this term if you have seen the Mythbusters episode about Diet Coke and Mentos. The Mythbusters crew found that it's the nucleation sites - the microscopic pits - on the surface of the Mentos candy which allows the bubbles to form. 

In the case of dropping a Mentos candy into a Diet Coke, the candy has so many nucleation sites that the bubbles form extremely quickly, and with exceptional volume. To such an extent that to us viewing the action in normal time, it appears to be an explosion. It isn't really - it's just the normal process of soda foaming around an object - but faster and more vigorously than usual.

The same thing can happen if you boil water in the microwave.

Boiling water needs nucleation sites to form bubbles. If the water is very clean, and your cup is very clean (cleaner than mine tend to be!) AND you microwave the water for a very long time, you can accidentally create a superheated fluid.

Then you drop a teabag into it, or even just tap the sides slightly, and the same thing happens as when you drop a Mentos candy into a Diet Coke. Except instead of a fun (if sticky) soda explosion, you have an explosion of boiling water.

As you might expect, this is extremely serious. In fact, many people report this having happened to them. It can cause second and third degree burns to your face and hands, a trip to the emergency room, and even skin grafts in particularly severe cases.

Luckily, the answer to this problem is simple: always put something into your water before you boil it. Whether it's a chopstick, a wooden spoon, a wooden stir stick, or a (staple-free) teabag, the object will provide nucleation sites - and prevent your boiling water from exploding all over your hands. 

Photo credit: Flickr/Sterlic

Welcome to Sunny Chernobyl

Stuck as we are in the tense middle of the ongoing disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, many people's thoughts turn to the Chernobyl disaster. How does it compare, and what were the long-term effects?

In 1986 the nuclear reactor in the Ukranian town of Chernobyl went red. This plant had no containment shell, and when it blew, it poured a plume of radioactive fallout into the air above the nearby town of Pripyat. The plume followed easterly winds and over the next week it settled over the Soviet Union, moving slowly eastward to Europe.

The official Ukranian government death toll stands at about 50, the number of workers who were killed directly by the explosion. But the number of people who died as a result of the long-term effects of contamination may number up to a million.

After the explosion, the government created the Exclusion Zone, also called the Zone of Alienation. The borders of the Exclusion Zone are monitored by military personnel, and even today, it is difficult for visitors to receive the clearances and safety training required for entry.

The Exclusion Zone has a radius of roughly 20 miles from the nuclear reactor, although its specific boundaries follow landscape features and take account of the fallout's drift patterns. It includes the town of Pripyat, which had held a population of about 50,000 people. Pripyat, now abandoned, is the focus of many visitors' interest. Its overgrown streets, dilapidated housing, and eerie silence make for fascinating photography, and are a study in post-apocalyptic progression.

Pripyat is also famously said to be haunted. Perhaps its existing cadre of ghosts failed to evacuate with the living, or perhaps they are the spirits of those who died in the explosion, or from the radioactive fallout. Destination Truth traveled to Pripyat, and shot one of the best episodes of the series there.

The explosion also created the "red forest," named for the color of the dead pine trees found there. The trees died en masse after the radioactive fallout, but life has rebounded to a startling extent inside the Exclusion Zone. Although still radioactive, no mutations have been recorded among the wild animals which thrive there. However, most experts agree that a thorough veterinary survey (impossible for several reasons) would no doubt reveal a high level of cancer and tumors among the wildlife.

Nevertheless, wild animals which once flourished across Eastern Europe, but which were almost eradicated by encroaching civilization, has returned in vast numbers. Wolves, brown bear, European wisent (a forest buffalo), elk, moose, Przewalski's horses, wild boar, roe deer, and beaver populations are all thriving in the absence of humanity.

This has posed two problems. First, the bounty tempts poachers - who, aside from operating illegally, then take their poached and radioactive game to market in populated area. And second, the radioactive animals are gradually pushing out from the boundaries of the Exclusion Zone, creating something of a situation in adjoining countries.

The radiation from Chernobyl was and continues to be a serious problem. However, radiation levels outside the Exclusion Zone are within acceptable parameters. It's worth noting that, although there are many towns within the 19-mile zone from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Tokyo itself is almost 150 miles away.

Photo credit: Flickr/Pedro Moura Pinheiro

The Time Paradox

 

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The Time Paradox

Time is one of the most frequently used words in the English Language. We are obsessed with time. Clocks are everywhere and they rule our lives. What is our relationship to the past and the future? And what should our relationship be? Zimbardo and Boyd have written a book titled The Time Paradox for the self-help market that tries to answer these questions.

The book probes into how people feel about their past, present and future. The reader can take a quiz that contains questions designed to get at our feelings about our history, circumstances and future.

With respect to the past, the book breaks personal feelings into Past Negative and Past Positive. Do you see your past as full of pain and failure or do you look back fondly on your personal history? You perspective on the past has a profound influence on how you approach life.

With respect to the present, the book breaks personal feelings into Present Hedonic and Present Fatalistic. Do you see the present as a big party, doing whatever feels good right now and not worrying about the future or do you believe that what is going to happen is going to happen and you cannot really control your life?

With respect to the future, the book breaks personal feelings into Future Focused and Future Transcendent. Do you consider the consequences of your actions and carefully plan your activities or do you think that there is a life after death waiting for you and it is more important to consider your plans in light of the life to come in a transcendent realm?

These are the six basic perspectives that Zimbardo and Boyd identify. Of course, these are not absolutely separate from each other and everyone falls somewhere between high and low for each of these time perspectives. It is important to understand how you relate to your personal past, present and future. If any one of these perspectives dominate over all the rest, it can cause problems in your life.

Obviously, seeing the past in negative terms will have a negative impact on your life. If you have had serious pain, suffer, loss, etc. in your past, it will be beneficial to find a way to look on the positive side of those event, however you can. The best perspective on the past is to see it in a positive light.

If you are too focused on the pleasures of the present moment, you may cause problems for yourself and others in the future. On the other hand, if you feel that you really can’t control your life, this will also lead to serious problems. The best perspective on the present is to enjoy the present but not to the exclusion of everything else. You should definitely understand that you CAN have control of your life and not be too fatalistic.

On the issue of the future, you should have concern for the consequences of your actions and make plans but not to the point where you cannot enjoy the present. People who are too focused on a transcendent future will tend to ignore important aspects of life in this world.

So, look back positively on the past, enjoy the present and plan for the future. This, in a nutshell, is the advice of the book, The Time Paradox.

 

Dogu Figures

Evidence of Japan's prehistoric alien visitors?

A few days before the big earthquake in Japan, I happened to stumble across an episode of a show on The History Channel called "Ancient Aliens" which discussed Dogu figurines in depth. I made a note to research them later, and now I can't help but wonder what has happened to these historical sites in the disaster. 

Dogu figurines are small fired clay statuettes of humanoid figures, which were made in the late Jomon Period of Japanese history, between 14,000 and 400 BC. The Jomon culture was a Paleolithic culture of hunter gatherers which settled in Japan and began to create the world's first example of pottery vessels.

There is a lot of variation in Dogu figurines, yet all of them share a similar set of qualities. Clearly these were something of a fad among the Jomon people, an artistic line that lasted for several thousand years. Most reputable anthropologists believe they are fertility symbols, or involved in fertility rituals. (But isn't that what they always say? It's the "tastes like chicken" of the anthropology world. When in doubt, write it off as a fertility symbol!)

Dogu figurines seem humanoid, although grossly distorted. Many of them have extremely overdeveloped breasts or butts, or have a tiny waist with hugely swollen arms and legs. And a surprising number of them seem to be wearing goggles.

In fact, one of the most prevalent styles of Dogu figurines are called "Shakokidogu," derived from the term "shakoki" which means "light blocking device." These figurines seem to be wearing slit goggles, similar to those worn by the Inuit to prevent snow blindness.

You can look at Dogu figurines and think, "Gosh, they had some strange artistic fads back in the Iron Age." Or you can look at them and think, "I bet those represent the aliens who came to Earth to give culture to the Japanese."

Such was the contention of many UFO specialists interviewed on "Ancient Aliens." The Dogu figurines do indeed look something like a person in a weird space suit. And their emergence in the artistic record coincides with a rich period in the development of Japanese culture. (Although you would be hard pressed to find a 10,000 year period in history in which that was NOT the case.)

Do the Dogu figurines represent aliens who brought Japan to the Japanese, so to speak? Or could they actually be time travelers who traveled back in time for the same reason? (And doesn't that sound like the plot of a sloppy time travel movie? "Time traveler travels back in time to create what would become his own culture.")

One feature which is common to almost all Dogu is the intricate patterning. Each figure is covered in swirls and stamps which coil around their torsos, encircling their limbs. And each one seems to have nipples, if not breasts. Do these represent elaborately patterned space suits? Or do they simply represent heavily tattooed people, both male and female?

One of the richest archaeological sites for Dogu figurines is in a town called Ishinomaki, which was one of the hardest hit by Friday's earthquake. Here's hoping that the site - and the archaeologists researching it - came through the event unharmed.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Brocken Specter: The Fog Monster

The "Brocken Specter" is a sort of optical illusion that most often happens in the mountains. It is named after the Brocken, a mountain in Germany where the illusion happens frequently, due to its geographic situation.

Imagine that you are standing on the sidewalk  on a sunny day. You turn so that the sun is at your back. You look down and see your shadow cast upon the sidewalk.

Now imagine that you are standing on a mountain side. Your climb started out in the foggy lowlands, but you have climbed above the fog (or low-lying clouds) and now stand in the sun. You turn so that the sun is at your back. You look down and see your shadow cast upon the fog below you.

A few weird things happen. For one thing, because your shadow is being cast on fog instead of a solid surface, it's hard for your brain to compute where the shadow actually is. It can seem both far away and very close, because the shadow on the fog particles throws off your depth perception.

For another thing, because of the angle of the light and the depth of the fog, your shadow is distorted into a triangular shape. It seems very wide at the feet, and very narrow at the head. This can give the illusion that the shadow is very tall, like a giant striding along beside you.

Just to make things a little more unsettling, diffraction often causes a halo or circular rainbow to appear to encircle the head of the figure, like the holy glow on a Renaissance painting of baby Jesus.

This phenomenon is well known to people who spend a lot of time in the mountains. (Its name comes from the German word Brockengespenst, coined by the people who live near the mountain Brocken.) But it can be startling to visitors, to whom it seems almost an apparition appearing below or beside them in the mist.

It is even more disconcerting when, due to some very specific circumstances, the specter appears to be walking alongside you just like another person! For this to happen you need very flat land, a low angle of sun, and foggy weather. These conditions occur in the Arctic and in Antarctica, and the Brocken Specter is no doubt what is referred to as the "extra person" who is said to have haunted many expeditions. I recall having read about this shadowy extra man in an account of Shackleton's Antarctic expedition.

This "ghost who walks alongside you" can also occur in the mountains if you are very high, as when crossing certain mountain passes. A Brocken Specter haunts Byron and Shelley as they cross the Alps in Tim Powers' novel The Stress of Her Regard.

Brocken Specters may also be responsible for many strange sightings that occur in foggy or mountainous areas. It doesn't take too much imagination to see a Brocken Specter as the potential source of many Sasquatch and Yeti sightings, as well as more abstract monsters like the Jersey Devil or the Mothman.

Photo credit: Flickr/Mouser NerdBot

UFO Sighted Over Vancouver, WA

On Sunday, February 20, 2011 a number of residents in Vancouver, WA sighted what they described as a "flying saucer." Several people phoned 911 and were directed to the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, but so far no official reports have been filed.

The object was described as being extremely bright - bright enough to draw neighbors out of their houses to see what was causing it. It was also described as hovering soundlessly in the air, between 7 and 8PM.

What was hovering over SW 192nd Street in the Clear Meadows neighborhood last Sunday night? It did not appear on airport radar, according to the FAA. It hovered roughly in one spot, although it made "occasional side-to-side movements."

Frankly, having seen the video, I suspected that it was an RC helicopter with a string of attached LED lights on the "Party" setting. One eyewitness even said of the saucer-shaped object that "it was almost like someone was controlling it from the ground." The lights flashing on the object are dead ringers for the strips of lightweight LED lights which can be programmed to flash in pattern.

Combing through the comments on the article in The Columbian, I noticed an interesting comment from someone who claimed to know the object's identity. "A relative saw it from Fishers Landing, drove around and found the source, it was someone flying a kite with LEDs on it in a park in Fishers Landing."

Another commenter said that "it was a kite in Clearmeadows park… We watched it from our window during dinner."

Of course, comments on online newspaper articles are the third-lowest form of discourse available on the internet today. (In case you were wondering, YouTube comments are the second-lowest, and 4chan is the #1 lowest.) And these unverified assertions are coming from an essentially anonymous account, so who knows what the provenance is, there.

Nevertheless, they do have the ring of truth. And certainly a kite decorated with a string of LEDs makes more sense than other theories which have been floated, including a mis-sighting of the planet Jupiter (not from the video it isn't), and military helicopters. (Why a military helicopter would hover over a Vancouver neighborhood for the better part of an hour is an exercise left to the reader.)

The kite explanation also addresses the most unusual aspect of this sighting, which is its silence, combined with its low height. It seems clear to me from the video that this is a smallish object hovering somewhere around treetop level.

A Google search for "LED Kite" shows that these are a real thing, which you can buy online. You can either buy a fully-equipped kite, or you can buy the LED lights to attach to your own kite. Anyone interested in UFO phenomena should definitely acquaint themselves with these, because we're sure to be seeing a lot more kite/UFO reports in the years to come!

(And potential pranksters, be aware that people have been arrested for flying LED kites and scaring the crap out of the townsfolk.)

Photo: still image from "Led Kite Lights" uploaded by kiteworldevents

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