Skeptoid 4: Astronauts, Aliens, and Ape-Men

by Brian Dunning

  In this chapter, we point our skeptical eye at the jungles of the Dark Continent, and other remote hideaways throughout the world, where tales tell that living relics from the past still walk among us: the dinosaurs. From Mokele Mbembe, the alleged sauropod of the Congo; to the Ropen, said to be a pterosaur ruling the skies of Papua New Guinea; to the idea that plesiosaurs are the lake monsters of Loch Ness, Ogopogo, and others; the reports come from all over. You’d think these stories would be on the decline. As humans spread out into the farthest reaches of our planet and explore more, you’d expect the stories to fade as nothing is found. However, they’re actually on the rise, due to promotional efforts by the relatively new Young Earth Creationism movement intent on proving that dinosaurs lived so recently that they coexisted with humans, and may even survive today.

  But all of that aside, this was an chapter I was pretty excited to write, because it’s really fun to examine evidence of something so interesting as living dinosaurs. But sadly, I was immediately disappointed. Dig as much as I could, I found that there is no solid evidence for almost any of these animals. There are tremendous volumes of anecdotal stories, nearly all reported by impassioned cryptozoologists, and nearly all based on interviews of native people: secondhand reports of secondhand reports.

  But surely these people must be seeing something. Legitimate zoologists who have followed up on the cryptozoologists’ claims routinely find that known animals were likely the cause of the stories: birds for the Ropen, and hippos or crocodiles for the Mokele Mbembe. Since the personal anecdote route has failed to produce hard data, cryptozoologists and Young Earthers have turned to ancient artwork in an effort to form a parallel line of evidence. Chief among these accounts is a stone carving buried in the jungles of Cambodia, the Buddhist temple of Ta Prohm.

  The Ta Prohm Stegosaurus

  Ta Prohm is often featured in popular culture. It’s best known for its jungle trees growing among the moss-green stone ruins, most famously for the great roots flowing over it that look like they were poured into place, and its giant stone faces of Buddha. Virtually the entire temple is carved with Buddhist images or decorations. Of particular interest is one column tucked away in a corner, graced with a winding serpent that encircles a number of animals. Some are recognizable as actual animals, others are chimera or mythical creatures such as garudas or nagas. But one stands out in particular, because at first glance, you might think it looks like a Stegosaurus. It’s a stout four legged animal, its big head hanging low, with a tail about like that of a dog. Most significantly, along its back is a row of pointed plates.

  Javan rhinoceros

  The Ta Prohm Stegosaurus has made waves throughout the cryptozoology world, appealing not only to those who believe that relic dinosaurs still exist in parts of the world, but even to Young Earth Creationists desperate for evidence that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. However, upon any reasonable inspection, the Ta Prohm creature fails to serve as good evidence of either of these hypotheses. There are at least three dramatic differences between it and a Stegosaurus. First and most significantly, Stegosaurus had a tiny head, such that from a side view, it’s hard to tell which end is its head and which is its tail. Both were long, graceful, and tapered out to a point. The Ta Prohm creature, conversely, has a massive head, perhaps a quarter the size of its entire body, like that of a hippo, and no neck to speak of. Second, the Ta Prohm creature is completely missing Stegosaurus’ most identifiable feature: the thagomizer, the collection of four spikes at the tip of its tail. Finally, the distinctive plates rising from the spine are all wrong. Stegosaurus had 17 plates of greatly varying size, tiny at the head and tail, rising to very large at the top of the back. Ta Prohm has only six or seven, all of equal size. If the Ta Prohm carving did indeed use a living Stegosaurus as its model, then its quality is grossly out of step with that of all the other animals carved at Ta Prohm, which are quite accurate and beautifully done.

  Of course, we can’t know what was in the mind of the artist. But we can get an idea from looking at all the carvings in context. In all of the backgrounds, foliage is depicted. The Stegosaurus would be the only animal shown without accompanying foliage, unless we make a different interpretation of the image. If we interpret the “back plates” as background foliage, to bring the image in line with all the others, we’re left with a common, fairly generic quadruped. I think it looks a lot like a single-horned Javan Rhinoceros that lived in the region at the time of Ta Prohm. Other identifications have been a wild boar, or even a chameleon. None of these are perfect matches, but all are much closer than Stegosaurus, and all are real animals that would have been well known to the Ta Prohm artists. And, of course, since Ta Prohm depicts many mythical beasts, there isn’t even a need to identify the creature as a real animal. That Stegosaurus must have lived in Cambodia only 800 years ago drops to among the least likely of many possible explanations for the carving.

  But even given its weaknesses, the Ta Prohm creature is head and shoulders above the rest of the evidence that’s in the form of ancient art. At the bottom end of this spectrum is a formation from Bernifal Cave, one of the many caves in France filled with Cro Magnon pictographs. The paintings in Bernifal all show real animals, but some Young Earthers point to part of the rock surface that they believe has been carved to show a generic dinosaur butting heads with a mammoth. This is one of those cases of pareidolia, like the Face on Mars. It’s fair to say that the contours on the rock do vaguely look like the head and jaw of a dragon-like creature, but what they call a mammoth is just a blob. There are no legitimate petroglyphs in Bernifal. (A pictograph is painted on the surface of rock; a petroglyph is made by chipping into the surface.) This alleged battle to the death has the same surface texture as the rest of the cave, the same general contouring, and has never been included in any legitimate archaeological survey of the cave’s artwork.

  But there is real artwork, that human artists actually did make, that’s better. Virtually every culture throughout history has produced art, much of it very high quality, that depicts dragons or other beasts that look something like some prehistoric species. I could speak for hours simply listing the excellent examples from China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome, Mesoamerica, even North America, where you could point directly to a known dinosaur species and make a match. But you have to understand how illogical it is to consider any of this art to be evidence that the depicted creature was actually known to the artist to be a living or real animal. Art, by definition, is a representation of the artist’s imagination or impression. There is an even larger number of artworks from all of these cultures that even Young Earthers and cryptozoologists would readily admit were not intended to be photorealistic representations of actual living beings. Some fantastic creatures in art happened to resemble real species; many more did not. Ancient artists did not employ a flagging system to unambiguously tell us which of their art represented mythical beings and which were intended as historical records of living animals.

  I’ll give two specific examples that I think would be among the most convincing: A pair of long-necked dinosaurs engraved in brass on the 1496 tomb of the Bishop of Carlisle in the UK, and another stegosaurus (of much more accurate proportions than the one at Ta Prohm) on a shard of ancient Greek pottery found in modern day Turkey. Now, it’s possible to debate the details of these works all day long. Neither of them quite match what we now believe these animals looked like, including some very significant anatomical differences. But this line of reasoning is never going to get you anywhere; you can argue yourself into circles all day long and never change the mind of someone who believes that if an ancient piece of artwork superficially matches a known dinosaur, it’s therefore evidence.

  This all comes down to the value of anecdotal evidence. A personal account, whether it’s a verbal story, a sketch, a written report, or a stone carving, cannot be tested. No matter how authoritative or reliable we consider a witness to be, his account, by itself, cannot be validated scientifically. The l
ine of reasoning that Someone told a story, therefore it must be true is precarious indeed. The reverse is just as invalid: Someone told a story, therefore it must be false. There are so many other possibilities: Fiction, legend, metaphor. And significantly, mistaken interpretation is just as possible on the listener’s end as it is on the teller’s end.

  If we do find a Ropen or a Mokele Mbembe one day, it seems likely that their numbers will be pretty small. Maybe relic dinosaurs were around in larger numbers when some of these ancient artists were active, but all the testable evidence we have for dinosaurs places them tens of millions of years before the first protohuman stood up. We have only anecdotes that suggest otherwise, anecdotes that fail to be backed up by the testable evidence that we would expect to exist were these creatures real.

  Do dinosaurs survive in some remote corner of the world? I certainly hope so, and I think most people would love for it to be true; but I’m not putting my money on it. I think a dinosaur would be pretty hard to miss. Don’t let your emotions govern your science. No matter how much you want something to be true, always consider the quality of the evidence. If it’s anecdotal and unsupported by corroborating testable evidence, you have very good reason to be skeptical.

  REFERENCES & FURTHER READING

  Bahn, P. Cave Art: A Guide to the Decorated Ice Age Caves of Europe. London: Frances Lincoln Ltd., 2007. 66-67.

  Carpenter, K. The Armored Dinosaurs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 76-141.

  Hall, A. Monsters and Mythic Beasts. London: Aldus Books, 1975. 84-99.

  Isaacs, D. Dragons or Dinosaurs. Alachua: Bridge-Logos, 2010. 90-96.

  Novella, S. “Ancient Cambodian Stegosaurus?” Neurologica Blog. New England Skeptical Society, 19 Feb. 2008. Web. 20 May. 2010.

  Woetzel, D. “Ancient Dinosaur Depictions.” Genesis Park. Dave Woetzel, 9 Mar. 2002. Web. 20 May. 2010.

  25. THE WESTALL ‘66 UFO

  200 students watched a strange craft fly near their school in Australia in 1966. What did they see?

  Melbourne, Australia, 1966. A sunny, breezy day in autumn, April 6 to be exact. Field sports were underway for a morning class at Westall High School. A few students saw it first, and then a few more. They described it as a disk, gray or silver, about the size of two family cars, and about four football fields away. It hovered silently, and then descended out of view behind a row of pine trees to the south of the school. A few minutes later it emerged, only now it was being pursued by a squadron of five light aircraft, and now its movement was faster. The object, now described as a small, bright streak of light, darted about with the aircraft playing a game of cat and mouse. After 20 minutes the strange object and the airplanes pursuing it went out of view. As soon as they had the chance, some students scrambled toward the trees and found the grass flattened where the object had undoubtedly landed while it was out of view. Back at the school, students and staff were instructed not to talk about what they’d seen. Intimidated by the sight of military personnel, the students have allegedly remained silent ever since.

  But as we almost always see with urban legends, the more time passes, the larger the story grows. 44 years after the event, retellings have expanded significantly compared to what was documented at the time, and this should always give us cause to approach modern revisionings with skepticism. New evidence coming to light is one thing, but with the Westall event, all we see are new anecdotes. A few adults who were students at the time, and UFO proponents who have interviewed former students, are now reporting greatly expanded versions of what happened. Does that make them wrong? Of course not. But if we want to determine the most likely account of what really happened, we go to the original sources. We go to the original documentation of what the witnesses reported 44 years ago, and we take the contradictory revisionings with a large grain of salt.

  Let’s start by having a look at the area. Westall High School, now called Westall Secondary College, is in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia called Clayton South. The land all about Westall is quite low and flat, and the coast is just about 10 kilometers southwest. Just to the south of the school was a natural open space called the Grange Reserve, mostly trees and scrub. Most of the Grange is still open space and remains today, including the row of trees visible from the school behind which the object was seen to descend. Beyond the Grange, about 4.5 kilometers, is Moorabbin Airport, which was then and still is a small but very busy general aviation airport. By number of takeoffs, it is in fact the third busiest airport in the southern hemisphere.

  Its proximity to the school has contributed to both UFO researchers and skeptics suggesting the sighting may have been of an experimental military craft. However, I don’t find this explanation very convincing at all. Australia didn’t really have much of an aircraft industry in 1966. They’d been quite busy during World War II, but by the 1960’s it was scaled way back, and most of Australia’s aircraft industry was providing service and support to existing planes. There were a few exceptions. The Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation was active at the time, but they did no design work, they merely constructed models in use by the Australians that had been designed overseas. At the time of Westall, they were busy producing the Dassault Mirage III fighter and were just ramping up for production on the Maachi MB-326 trainer. De Havilland Australia had developed two prototype jet trainers, the P17 and the F2, but both of these projects were cancelled in 1965 when the company shifted its focus to production of parts for Commonwealth’s MB-326. The only other aircraft manufacturers in Australia were tiny and built only small civilian or agricultural planes. In 1966, none of these companies had anything like the skunkworks of American aircraft companies that we usually think of when we talk about strange experimental craft.

  Of course, other countries did, not only the Americans, the Canadians, and the British, but also France, the Soviet Union, and others. Certainly any of them might have chosen to test advanced designs in Australia. The problem with this hypothesis is that all such designs have long been declassified and are now well known, and none of them would be a serviceable match for the Westall reports. Nobody had anything that hovered silently, darted about playing cat and mouse, or flattened grass when it landed. The closest thing I can find would be the flying saucer shaped Avrocar, which was desperately unsuccessful and had been cancelled five years before Westall. If we introduced the suggestion that maybe an improved version lived on in secret and was tested in the middle of Melbourne in broad daylight, we’d be on very thin ice. There’s no evidence for that, and it would remain unknown to every aviation historian and author.

  There was one strange craft launched that day, however: A weather balloon, reported the next day in the newspaper The Age as a possible explanation for the event. It was launched from Laverton two and a half hours before the sighting, 32 kilometers west-northwest of Westall. The Age reported that the wind was blowing from the west, and if it continued southeast near Clayton South, the balloon could likely have disappeared from view behind the row of trees, very close to 11:00am when the sighting happened. Despite being dismissed by UFO promoters, I find this balloon event to be a very plausible candidate for the first half of the sighting, when a silently hovering disc descended behind the trees.

  The second half of the event had a much different character. Andrew Greenwood was a science teacher at Westall High School, and is the only staff member known to have reported seeing the object at the time. He gave a detailed account to the newspapers. Greenwood first saw the object when it rose into view from beyond the pine trees at the Grange. He described it as a silvery streak “like a thin beam of light, about half the length of a light aircraft.” At first it appeared with only a single aircraft, but was eventually joined by five. He described a “cat and mouse” game that the aircraft played with the object, a game which lasted a full 20 minutes. The object moved side to side and its size appeared to fluctuate slightly. By
the end of morning recess, Greenwood said he turned away, and when he looked again the object and the five airplanes had gone.

  One man, who identified himself only as a former RAAF navigator, wrote a letter to the editor in the April 28 Dandenong Journal, in which he said that Greenwood’s report was a “reasonably accurate” description of a nylon target drogue, like a wind sock, towed by one plane for the others to chase, and known to be in use by the local RAAF at the time. A “cat and mouse” game would be a fairly apt description of what happens when pilots undergoing training try to follow the drogue. For an explanation of why no pilots reported anything strange, he offered “Why should they? They were probably carrying out a normal...exercise and wouldn’t dream that anyone could take a drogue for a ‘flying saucer.’”

  Although this sounds to me like a spot-on explanation for the second half of the sighting as reported in 1966, there’s no evidence that anyone was conducting any drogue exercises there at the time. There’s no evidence that they didn’t, but we can’t do any better than list this as one possibility.

  Talk of military records leads us to the alleged secrecy that was imposed following the event. Did military personnel show up and silence everyone to cover up the event? It does not seem likely, since newspapers widely reported the story, and everyone who’s ever been interviewed about it has spoken quite freely; there is nothing about this story consistent with any kind of coverup having taken place. On April 14, the Dandenong Journal reported that the school would not permit any further interviews with students, and that students and staff at the school had been asked not to talk to reporters. Was this evidence of a government conspiracy? The principal, Frank Samblebe, gave a simpler explanation to the Dandenong Journal, published on May 5, 1966. He said “the flood of callers and phone calls from the Air Force down to the Flying Saucer Association interrupted the children’s studies.” Given this real-world concern of the school, it does seem reasonable that he would have asked the press to leave the students alone, and done what he could to enforce it at the front desk. From every single 1966 account I’ve read, this is the full extent of what’s now being described as a “coverup” or a “conspiracy”.