Skeptoid 4: Astronauts, Aliens, and Ape-Men

by Brian Dunning

  However, there are two fatal flaws with this hypothesis. First, methane can only burn in an oxygen environment within a specific range of concentrations. It can only spontaneously ignite within an even narrower range, and requires the presence of phosphine combined with phosphorous tetrahydride. The needed proportions of these gases are unlikely to be found in nature. Second, in laboratory experiments designed to replicate the conditions needed for spontaneous ignition, the combination of oxygen, methane, and phosphorus compounds burns bright bluish-green with a sudden pop, producing black smoke. Under no conditions does it burn slowly, or red, or rise up in the air as a fireball. So even if the improbable conditions did exist in the Mekong river, the resulting display would not look like the Naga Fireballs.

  Nong Khai’s main proponent of this natural explanation is a pediatrician, Dr. Manos Kanoksilp, who has made the study of the Naga Fireballs his passion. He believes that the precise conditions require an alignment of the sun, moon, and Earth. He also believes that this particular part of the river is especially high in oxygen (it isn’t) and that it’s sufficient to spontaneously combust the methane because the sun heats the water to a hot enough temperature (it doesn’t).

  Whatever is shooting up into the air, you’ve got to figure that it has some solid mass. When you watch the videos you can see that the red-orange lights go up very fast, consistent with fireworks, small rockets, or even tracer rounds (very much like a 12-gauge shotgun tracer round, which is comparatively slow). How is it possible for any flaming object to move that quickly through the air without blowing out? That’s not a problem for something like a firework or a tracer round, things designed for exactly such a purpose. But it’s a major problem for a burning ball of gas, which has an insufficient mass to drag ratio to move that quickly through the air. Even a pyrotechnic explosion that billows into the sky rises at a slow rate consistent with hot air rising through cold air; it does not and cannot streak like a bullet at hundreds of feet per second. For the Naga Fireballs to move as they do, they must enclose an object significantly more massive than the air they’re moving through. This necessarily means they’re heavier than air. And since they’re rocketing skyward, this means they must have been physically propelled.

  So, from what we can observe, it’s actually more plausible that a river dragon is spitting flaming balls of dragon-mucus skyward, than it is for the Naga Fireballs to be naturally produced burning gas bubbles.

  Would you hear fireworks or gunfire? I doubt it. The river there is 700 meters wide, or about a half a mile. It takes sound 2.5 seconds to travel that far, by which time all 400,000 spectators are screaming. Combined with the loud music and amplified announcers, you’re not hearing anything that someone’s not shouting directly into your ear.

  The famous photo

  And then there’s that photograph of the American soldiers holding the Naga at a secret military base. With a little elbow grease, it’s possible to track down the actual source of the photograph. As it happens, this picture was first published in a 1996 issue of Ocean Realm, by a Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist at UC San Diego who was one of three called by the US Navy to come and examine a 23-foot oarfish found by a group of SEAL instructors on a beach run at the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado, CA. The account was later written up in the April, 1997 issue of All Hands, the magazine of the US Navy. The photograph was taken by Lt. DeeDee Van Wormer. This particular oarfish was pretty beat up, and appeared to the Scripps scientists to have met its fate at the business end of a boat propeller.

  While sightings of the oarfish are relatively rare, their distribution in salt water is worldwide. Fresh water, like the Mekong river in Laos? Not so much. A Google image search will turn up many such photographs of groups of people holding great long specimens. No mystery here, and no giant sea serpent or military conspiracy needed to explain the photograph on sale in Thailand; and also, not evidence of a river serpent.

  The lesson to learn from the Naga Fireballs is that, while the historical folk explanation of such stories is almost certainly fictional, the popular “scientific” explanation reported in mass media is often just as wrong. We saw the same thing when we discussed the popular waterspout explanation for frogs and fish falling from the sky; and we see it again here with swamp gas offered as the cause of the Naga Fireballs. When you hear a report of a supernatural phenomenon, the reporter often offers a scientific explanation. It may be right in many cases, but whether it is or not, you should always be skeptical.

  REFERENCES & FURTHER READING

  Carstens, J. “Seals Find Serpent of the Sea.” All Hands: Magazine of the US Navy. 15 Apr. 1997, Volume 1, Number 960: 20-21.

  Cohen, Eric. “The Postmodernization of a Mythical Event: Naga Fireballs on the Mekong River.” Tourism, Culture & Communication. 1 Jan. 2007, Volume 7: 169-181.

  Dow, J. “Mekong Full Moon Party (Movie Review).” Heroic Cinema. YesAsia.com, 18 Jan. 2003. Web. 7 Dec. 2009.

  Gagliardi, Jason. “Behind the Secret of the Naga’s Fire.” Time.com. Time Inc., 17 Nov. 2002. Web. 7 Dec. 2009.

  Gampell, J. “Personal Journey: Great Balls of Fire - A Supernatural Serpent Thrills Thailand.” Asian Wall Street Journal. 9 Nov. 2002, Volume 6, Number 12: 16.

  Smith, William Leo. “Oarfish: A Glimpse into the World of the Abyss.” Ocean Realm. 13 Nov. 1996, Volume 4, Number 2: 28-29.

  7. THE ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM

  Does this ancient device, 1000 years ahead of its time, prove we were visited by aliens or time travelers?

  Imagine the year 1900. The skies are leaden gray, the dark waters all around you shiver with the approach of a distant storm. You’re in the warm Ionian Sea in the Mediterranean, sheltering along the coast of the barren and barely populated island of Antikythera, waiting out a storm. It’s frustrating because you’re on your way home from Africa where you and your crew have been diving for sponges. Your captain, Dimitrios Kondos, thinks the lost time may as well be put to good use, so he orders you below to see what sponges you may be able to find here. You don your copper diving helmet and heavy suit, and they lower you into the depths. Streaks of dull gray light from above shimmer around you as the rocky bottom approaches.

  But it’s not sponges you find. Minutes later you’re back on board the ship, jabbering excitedly, so incoherent that Kondos thinks you have carbon dioxide poisoning. He goes down himself to have a look. And what Kondos and his crew bring up over the subsequent two years comprises one of archaeology’s great finds, one that truly challenged our understanding of the history of technology.

  Chief among the finds was what has become known as the Antikythera Mechanism, fragile chunks of green corroded bronze, that when picked apart, revealed unexpected mechanical components, mainly gears. The device was surprisingly complex. At first it was thought to be a clock, but when Greek inscriptions were found, it turned out to be a sort of astrolabe for predicting eclipses and moon phases and the positions of the planets, of unprecedented sophistication. So sophisticated, in fact, that everything we knew told us that the Antikythera Mechanism was a full 1,000 years out of place.

  The shipwreck, known as the Antikythera Wreck, has been dated to the first century BCE. The Antikythera Mechanism dates from the century before that. And then, so the popular version of the story goes, nobody on Earth had either the astronomical knowledge, or the mechanical know-how, to construct such a device until a millennium later. Some have said the Antikythera Mechanism is therefore proof of time travel, alien visitation, or Atlantis.

  A portion of the mechanism on display in Greece

  Physically, the device was about the size of a shoebox, with wooden sides and bronze faces. On the front face were two large and three small output dials. On the back were three concentric output dials. To operate the device, you turned a crank on the side, which rotated at least 30 gears inside the machine, some of which w
ere epicyclic. The hands that went round each of the two large dials swept over spiral slots, with a pin on the arm that rode in the slot, similar to a needle following the groove on a record. By setting some preferences, such as what type of calendar you wanted to use, and turning the side crank to select the current date, you could learn all sorts of things: Whether this was an Olympics year, when the next solar and lunar eclipses were (by date and hour), where the twelve constellations were along the ecliptic, the phase of the moon, and the positions of the five planets known at the time.

  Although we now know what the device did, we’re not sure what its use was. By its construction in bronze, which readily corrodes, we know it was not designed for navigation at sea. Astronomers and astrologers probably could not have afforded it. It could have been used as an education tool. Most likely it was built for wealthy Romans who had some interest in its features, probably not too different from early adopters who wanted to have the first iPhone with all the cool apps. The wreck was laden with other objects of great value, most notably a vast hoard of coins and a Peloponnesian bronze sculpture, a larger-than-life young man called the Ephebe.

  So what about these claims that the mechanism is 1,000 years out of place, and no humans had the knowledge to make something like it? Does this prove that aliens, Atlanteans, or time travelers must have been involved? It is a fact that the Antikythera Mechanism is substantially more complicated than any other mechanical devices known from its time. Specifically, it’s one of the earliest known uses of meshing gears. But contrary to the popular telling, it’s not the oldest. Gears were used to drive doors and lift water in India as early as 2600 BCE, two and a half millennia before the Antikythera Mechanism. Aristotle described the function of gears in the 4th century BCE. 100 years later, Dionysius of Alexandria used gears in his automatic arrow firing machine gun. The Greek National Museum contains examples of epicyclic gears from the period. Archimedes was making all sorts of mathematical and mechanical inventions at the time. For hundreds of years, Greek astronomers had been studying the movements of heavenly bodies, and by Archimedes’ lifetime, all the motions replicated on the Antikythera Mechanism were known to science.

  We know a lot about where and when the device was made from the inscriptions in the bronze. The back face is covered with instructions for its use, as is its inside if you open the device. These include descriptions of the controls, various calendars, and mentions of the celestial bodies tracked by the device. By the language and terminology used, as well as by the context of its find among the other artifacts recovered from the Antikythera Wreck, we now have a pretty good idea of where and when it was built: The middle of the 2nd century BCE, probably in Syracuse or Corinth.

  What we don’t know is who built it, but there are some good candidates. It is assumed that Archimedes, who died several decades before the device was built, left behind a tradition of scientists who continued his work and built upon his inventions, and the device could have come from this school. Another leading contender is Hipparchos, perhaps the greatest of early astronomers, who was in his heyday when the Antikythera Mechanism was constructed. Most notably, Hipparchos was the first to devise a mathematical model to predict the anomalies of the moon’s movement, and the Antikythera Mechanism contains a gear set to reproduce exactly these computations.

  Most archaeologists agree that this particular device was neither unique nor the first of its kind. Two factors contribute to this: First, its design is quite refined, which is not consistent with a prototype. Second, an object as expensive and complex as this would typically be made in a series in order to recover the costs of design. Why, then, are its siblings not found? Probably because they were made of bronze, and bronze was highly recyclable and valuable. Few commonplace bronze objects from the ancient world survive for this reason, except for those that were lost at sea and thus escaped recycling. If there were other computational devices made in the period, it is not surprising to archaeologists that they were lost to history and are unknown.

  The surviving fragments of the device at the Greek National Archaeological Museum are too fragile to travel, and so in 2005, two teams brought their equipment to Athens to perform the most advanced imaging studies to date. Hewlett Packard’s team performed polynomial texture mapping to high resolution images of the inscriptions, made with lighting from all different angles to reveal every possible bit of detail. A company called X-Tek Systems brought their 8-ton x-ray machine called the BladeRunner to the museum, all the way from the UK, and made CT scans. CT, or computed tomography, is the process of creating a 3-D image from slices; in this case, slices from x-ray images. We now have extremely detailed maps of the internal mechanism and transcripts of all the surviving inscriptions.

  And, as a result, we now know that the ancient Greeks were building far more advanced computational devices than we used to give them credit for. We knew they had the knowledge, we just didn’t know they were translating it into bronze so exquisitely.

  Antiscience people love to point to cases like the Antikythera Mechanism as examples of science being wrong. They gloat over their belief that historians have been embarrassed, careers shattered, books proven to be in error. They imagine that researchers at universities everywhere are being fired or stripped of their credentials. They believe this case adds to an ever-growing mountain of proof that science is, itself, destined to inevitable failure, and that enlightened scientists should abandon their practice and turn to faith in the supernatural.

  In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. A find like this, that substantially revises our understanding of history, can be the crowning achievement for a scientist’s career. Contrary to what antiscience would have you believe, scientists do not fear new discoveries, they long for them. Every action dictated by the scientific method seeks to learn something new, to revise and improve our understanding of nature or history. Major finds represent major improvements to our theories. Thanks to the Antikythera Mechanism, we now have a better understanding of technology in the ancient world, and new directions for researchers to turn. The idea that a discovery like this is embarrassing, or exposes weakness in the scientific method, is absurdly upside-down and backwards.

  Many times I’ve heard the argument made that scientists fear new discoveries because it would threaten their grant money, so it’s in scientists’ best interests to cover up anything new. All you have to do is look at what’s being funded these days to see how wrong this particular conspiracy theory is. A glance at the National Science Foundation’s list of recent funding awards teaches one lesson: If you want grant money, be a maverick, have something new and exciting. What’s a financial incentive for scientists to look for discoveries that challenge our worldview? New discoveries attract grant money, and grant money leads to more new discoveries. There is no money in continuing to grind over what we already know. So please, can we put this particular conspiracy theory to bed?

  It’s not every year that we find something so historically significant, and that we learn so much from. The rewards we gain from increasing our knowledge by studying them are inestimable. Those who dismiss such finds as alien, or otherwise not part of history, miss out on that knowledge. The lesson to learn is that when you’re confronted by a discovery, stopping at the popular supernatural explanation is guaranteed to lead you nowhere. Instead, you should do what science suggests, and be skeptical.

  REFERENCES & FURTHER READING

  Edmunds, M. “Project Overview.” The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University, 1 Jan. 2007. Web. 26 Jan. 2010.

  Fine, J. Lost on the Ocean Floor: Diving the World’s Ghost Ships. Anapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2005. 83-85.

  Freeth, T. “Decoding an Ancient Computer.” Scientific American. 1 Dec. 2009, Volume 301, Number 6: 70-83.

  Hardersen, P. “Mickey Mouse Discovers the ‘Real’ Atlantis.” Skeptical Inquirer. 1 Jan. 2002, Volume 26, Number 1: 42-43.


  Kanas, N. Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography. Chichester: Praxis Publishing Ltd., 2007. 240-241.

  Price, D. “An Ancient Greek Computer.” Scientific American. 1 Jun. 1979, Volume 200, Number 6: 60-67.

  8. IS BAREFOOT BETTER?

  Some advocate that going barefoot is better for the health and strength of your feet.

  In this chapter, we’re going to let our dreadlocks down and take a rational, science-based perspective on a trend that seems, at face value, like just another nonsense hippie claim from the “anything natural is good, anything modern is immoral” crowd: The idea that we’d all be better off being barefoot. Whether you run marathons or give boardroom presentations, barefoot advocates claim that barefoot, the way we evolved to walk and run, relieves and prevents orthopedic injuries.

  I’ll freely confess that the first time I heard this claim I scoffed, it bears so many of the red flags of pseudoscience. These red flags include the implication of a medical/industrial conspiracy to keep us injured by selling us expensive shoes and orthopedic treatments, and of course the ever-present all-natural fallacy. But what grabbed my attention was that I also noted that products like expensive running shoes also sport a major red flag that I’m keenly aware of. Until extremely recently in the history of our species, nobody had expensive running shoes, or even any shoes at all, and we did just fine. I’m reminded of how I always smirk when I see new parents paying double for special baby apple juice in the supermarket: Even today, most babies in the world are lucky to get a twig and a dirt clod to eat each day, yet they grow up fine. Do I, the product of millions of years of evolution creating a bipedal animal optimized for walking and running barefoot on the savannah, really need a $100 pair of super-duper running shoes to make my feet work properly? My default answer for such questions, based on evolution, is “probably not”. So I believe this barefoot question does deserve a really close look.