Alien skull simulacrum

Paul Jackson found this enigmatic object in his garden a few days ago while clearing some gravel. What could it be? Is it just an oddly-shaped pebble, or is it a prehistoric stone-age carving in the realistic likeness of an ancient alien? It’s an oddly-shaped pebble, of course.

The iconic image of the “gray alien”—big eyes, big forehead, small mouth, small nose, no ears, no hair—has become a deeply ingrained part of modern culture. But it’s a relatively recent phenomenon, and it’s interesting to spot them turning up in anachronistic settings, such as the Alien simulacrum in the coat of arms of Florence, and this Alien-looking demon from a 1941 pulp magazine.

A few days ago I was looking at issue #1 of Dell’s Flying Saucer Comics, published in April 1967. This was well before the image of the gray alien was imprinted on the public consciousness in the 1980s and 90s. But many of the aliens featured in the comic have gray-like characteristics -- much more so than most popular-culture aliens of the period. In particular, there’s a six-page story called “Far-Out Physical” which features aliens that not only look a bit like grays, but indulge in gray-like activities such as abducting earthlings and subjecting them to medical examinations... as can be seen in the sequence below. I don’t think the alien dialog has been censored (although “bloody” was still quite risqué in the sixties)... I think the empty speech bubbles are meant to signify that their language is unintelligible to humans!

Bacchus and Ariadne

Here is a picture for anyone who thinks classical mythology and/or renaissance art is dull. It’s the work of the 16th century Italian artist Agostino Carracci, and it depicts the legendary tale of Bacchus and Ariadne. In Greek mythology, Ariadne was a Cretan princess who fell in love with the hero Theseus. He dumped her on the island of Naxos, where shortly afterwards the god Bacchus arrived to help her get over him. While the legendary account has them indulging in a robust sex session, it’s not often depicted as explicitly as it is here! A more traditional version was produced by Agostino’s brother Annibale Carracci.

It was not unknown for artists to produce generic porn images and slap classical-sounding titles on them to “get them past the censor”. But that’s not the case here, since the scene really does depict the legend of Bacchus and Ariadne. The male figure is wearing a wreath of vine-leaves, which was a universally recognized symbol of the god Bacchus. And in the background you can see Theseus making a getaway in his ship... again a widely recognized symbol often seen in depictions of this story.

Bacchus is often euphemistically described as the “god of wine”, but actually he was the god of drunkenness, debauchery and all-night sex orgies. Not surprisingly he had a large cult following, particularly in the decadent times of the later Roman Empire. We even used to worship him here in Somerset, as can be seen from this (sadly rather damaged) statue in the Roman ruins at Bath.

Futuristic gadgets of the 1930s

Nowadays voicemail services are taken for granted, and most people will remember the clunky tape-based answering machines of the 1980s and 90s. But back in the 1930s, answerphones were a marvel of science fiction, as the following quote from the May 1935 issue of Doc Savage magazine illustrates:

‘At exactly noon, the telephone buzzer whirred in Doc Savage's New York skyscraper headquarters. The buzzer whirred three times... Then an automatic answering device, an ingenious arrangement of dictaphone voice recorder and phonographic speaker – a creation of Doc Savage's scientific skill – was cut in automatically... "This is a mechanical robot speaking from Doc Savage's headquarters and advising you that Doc Savage is not present, but that any message you care to speak will be recorded on a dictaphone and will come to Doc Savage's attention later," spoke the mechanical contrivance. "You may proceed with whatever you wish to say, if anything".’

The caller leaves a message, after which ‘The mechanical device in Doc Savage's New York office ran on for some moments, and a stamp clock automatically recorded the exact time of the message on a paper roll; then the apparatus stopped and set itself for another call, should one come.’

Doc Savage’s answering machine isn’t the only high-tech wonder described in this story (called The Secret in the Sky, and written by Lester Dent under the pseudonym of Kenneth Robeson)... it also features a touch-sensitive intruder alarm that works by detecting changes in electrical capacitance, and a superfast air vehicle that is characterized by the sonic boom it creates (actually described in the story as a “crack” rather than a “boom”, by analogy with the crack of a bullet... real-world supersonic aircraft were still more than a decade in the future).

Ambiguous Symbolism

Here is another photograph from my recent visit to London. This was taken in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and shows a wooden model of Jesus riding on a donkey. It was made in Southern Germany around 1480, and according to the caption “On Palm Sunday it was drawn through the streets to commemorate his triumphal entry into Jerusalem”. If I’d seen it a month ago, it might have been topical!

There is something jarringly contradictory about the juxtaposition of a donkey and the phrase “triumphal entry”. To human eyes, a donkey is a comically awkward-looking creature. Compared with a horse, camel or elephant, the sight of a grown man riding on one is anything but dignified. This isn’t just a modern perception -- even the Old Testament prophet Zechariah talks about the future Messiah “humble and riding on a donkey”.

But humble is a relative term. What if there are strict rules against riding on any kind of animal? In that case, riding on a donkey is transformed from a symbol of humility to a symbol of power (made even more powerful in light of Zechariah’s prophecy). According to Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in The Masks of Christ, “At Passover, it was the custom to enter Jerusalem on foot as a sign of humility. The people should have been offended that he was riding into the holy city on the back of an animal. If they were happy with the arrangement, they must have recognized him as a special person to whom the usual customs no longer applied.”

Enigmatic Art

A few months ago I wrote an item about the awesome apocalyptic paintings of John Martin (1789 -1854) that were on show at the time at the Tate Britain museum in London. I went there again last week, and I have to say the museum’s permanent collection is pretty dull in comparison with the Martin exhibit. At first glance the picture above looks like it might be one of Martin’s works, and it does depict the Biblical tale of The Destruction of Sodom which is exactly the sort of subject Martin specialized in. On closer inspection, however, it simply isn’t vivid enough -- the architecture and human figures are too vaguely drawn and hazy. Actually the picture is by Martin’s much more famous contemporary J.M.W. Turner (1775 -1851). If you think the picture looks too good to be a Turner, that’s because I “improved” it by enhancing the colours and contrast. The original, shown below, looks exactly like any other painting by Turner!

Another unusual picture I saw in the Tate is shown below. This dates from the late Elizabethan period -- to put it in context, that’s around the time Shakespeare’s plays were written. It depicts an “average man” praying to heaven as he is beset by woes from all sides. The picture is highly symbolic, with most of the figures dressed in a classically timeless style... except the woman on the left, who is wearing what must have been the high fashion of the time. For some reason this struck me as a distinctly kinky touch, especially as one of her three arrows is labelled “lechery”!

Since my own photograph didn’t come out very well, what is shown here is a detail from the Tate’s own image. You can see the full version here, together with a transcription of the various labels.

What's going on here?

This week's post was originally called "The Politics of Relativity"... which was a  bad idea from the start, since I've never understood politics and I've forgotten most of what I used to know about relativity. I've had so many errors pointed out to me that it's too much hassle to correct them all -- I've just removed the post altogether. Here instead (more on my current intellectual level) is a photograph from Paul and Melanie Jackson depicting an enigmatic statue on the War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle, which is printed in the latest issue of Fortean Times (FT288).

(Ahem) The same issue also contains an article by myself entitled "The Locked Room Mysteries". And my review of Galileo's Selected Writings. In case you're interested.

The Principle of the Excluded Middle

Aristotle (right, as imagined by Rembrandt) is often blamed for the prevalence of black-and-white thinking in Western culture. But the problem stems not from what Aristotle said, but what people think he said. The Principle of the Excluded Middle, as originally formulated by Aristotle himself, makes perfect sense. It argues that, if a statement X is demonstrated to be false, then the negation of statement X must necessarily be true. The operative word is ‘negation’... not ‘opposite’.

I mentioned the Bible’s Excluded Middle on a previous occasion. If you start with statement X = ‘Everything in the Bible is true’, and find something in the Bible that is demonstrably false, then you have proved that statement X is false. All this means, in strictly Aristotelian terms, is that the negation of X must be true: ‘Not everything in the Bible is true’. But far too many people imagine they have proved the opposite of X to be true: ‘Everything in the Bible is false’. It’s not just the Bible-hating atheists who take this view -- many Biblical literalists do as well. That’s why they get so upset if anyone suggests that pi is anything other than three.

For a more Fortean example, there is an analogous situation in the case of UFOs. In this case, statement X might be ‘All UFO reports can be attributed to sightings of extraterrestrial spacecraft’. If this statement is proved to be false, then all the Excluded Middle says is that its negation must be true: ‘Not all UFO reports can be attributed to sightings of extraterrestrial spacecraft’. But again there is a tendency to apply the erroneous logic that the opposite statement must be true: ‘No UFO reports can be attributed to sightings of extraterrestrial spacecraft’. And again, it’s not just the skeptics who think along these lines, but the UFO enthusiasts as well... hence their outrage when any specific report is ‘explained away’ as a weather balloon, the planet Venus or a flock of pelicans.

When Aristotle formulated his Principle of the Excluded Middle, he was talking about a statement and its negation, not a statement and its opposite. But the ancient Greek philosophers did have something to say on the latter subject. It’s called the Dialectic Principle, and in this case the statement is called the ‘thesis’ and its opposite is called the ‘antithesis’. According to the Dialectic Principle, the two sides should engage in a sober and rational dialogue, and come to some mutually agreed compromise called a ‘synthesis’ (don’t laugh -- the ancient Greeks really thought this might happen).

In the case of ufology, the thesis would be ‘All UFO reports can be attributed to sightings of extraterrestrial spacecraft’ and the antithesis would be ‘All UFO reports have mundane explanations’. If ufologists and skeptics were as enlightened as the ancient Greek philosophers, they would engage in a meaningful dialogue—without spelling mistakes, bad grammar and whole sentences in capital letters—and come to a synthesis from which the state of human knowledge could move forward. But the real world doesn’t work like that.

Forteans, of course, are an exception to the general rule -- we are at our most comfortable in the ‘excluded middle’ between thesis and antithesis. Charles Fort himself referred to the dialectic principle in Lo!, and even attributed it to Aristotle: “I am thinking of an abstraction that was noted by Aristotle, and that was taken by Hegel for the basis of his philosophy: That wherever there is a conflict of extremes, there is an outcome that is not absolute victory on either side, but is a compromise, or what Hegel called the union of complementaries.”

The First Radio Hoax?

To most people, the phrase “radio hoax” conjures up the notorious Orson Welles Martian invasion broadcast of 1938. But it’s sometimes alleged that a similar hoax was perpetrated a dozen years earlier, in January 1926. At that time the BBC, which was little more than three years old, had a state monopoly on radio broadcasting in the UK. British listeners had just one channel to choose from, so a Saturday evening prime-time broadcast had a captive audience of perhaps ten million people. And so it happened—according to the story—that on Saturday 16 January 1926 ten million people were taken in by the world’s very first radio hoax.

The usual account is something like the following. Switching on their crystal sets to listen to an uplifting moral lecture by a distinguished academic, the audience instead hears breaking news of an unruly demonstration in Trafalgar Square. They listen in alarm as the protesters break into the National Gallery and vandalize it, swarm into St James’s Park and throw broken bottles at the ducks, and then advance towards Parliament Square in a threatening manner. A government minister is spotted trying to flee the scene, and summarily hanged from a lamppost. An academic who is on his way to the BBC to deliver a lecture is roasted alive. The Houses of Parliament are attacked with trench mortars and the ‘Big Ben’ clock tower crashes to the ground. At this point, in an attempt to calm the audience, the programme switches to a live relay of band music from the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel... but this is interrupted by a loud crash, which listeners are informed was the sound of the Savoy being blown up by the rioters.

Actually, of course, nothing untoward happened in London that day. The broadcast was the work of just one man: Father Ronald A. Knox, a rather unorthodox Catholic priest who was probably most famous as a writer of mystery novels. He did all the voices and sound effects himself — for example the noise of the Savoy being destroyed was actually made by Knox demolishing a wooden greengrocer’s crate. So the broadcast was a work of fiction... but was it really a hoax? Well no, it wasn’t -- it was a satirical comedy sketch. It may not have been a precocious forerunner of Orson Welles, but it was certainly a precocious forerunner of classic BBC radio comedy of the kind normally associated with The Goon Show of the 1950s. All this becomes obvious when you look more closely at the details of the programme.

For a start, the show lasted a mere twelve minutes, which is far too short a time for the events that were supposedly unfolding. It’s true that people often choose Trafalgar Square as a venue for protests, but not at 7.40 on a January evening. The day’s radio schedule listed the show as ‘Broadcasting the Barricades’ -- so, far from being spontaneous ‘breaking news’, it was obviously programmed in advance! To make this absolutely clear, the show was announced on air as ‘a work of humour and imagination, enlivened by realistic sound effects’. This is a fact the hoax proponents tend to gloss over, together with the absurdist humour that permeates the script.

The leader of the protest is a Mr Popplebury, described as ‘Secretary of the National Movement for the Abolition of Theatre Queues’. The academic who is attacked on his way to the BBC has the equally ludicrous name of Sir Theophilus Gooch... and after informing his listeners that Gooch is being roasted alive, Knox adds that ‘he will therefore be unable to deliver his lecture to you’.

When the Palace of Westminster is attacked, Knox informs his listeners that ‘The building is made of magnesian limestone from Yorkshire, a material which is unfortunately liable to rapid decay. At present, in any case, it is being demolished with trench mortars.’ After Big Ben is destroyed, he points out that it can no longer be used for the BBC time signal, which in future will come from ‘uncle Leslie’s repeating watch’.

Perhaps the most absurd thing of all is the programme’s ending. After destroying the Houses of Parliament and the Savoy Hotel, the rioters set their sights on the BBC studio itself. They head there ‘with a threatening demeanour’, but as soon as they arrive they sit down quietly in the waiting room and start to read The Radio Times!

Alien Politics

There have been two stories in the news recently about British politicians and UFOs. The two cases couldn’t be more different, and yet they’ve been treated in a very similar way by the mainstream media. To me, that’s the most interesting (and indeed horrifying) thing about these cases -- the fact that the average journalist can’t grasp the distinction between someone who fervently and obsessively believes in an unorthodox theory about UFOs, and someone who simply has an interest in the subject of UFOs among many other interests.

The first case concerns Simon Parkes, who is a member of the Labour party and a recently elected town councillor in Whitby in North Yorkshire. As he reveals in a video on YouTube, he believes he has been visited by reptilian aliens throughout his life, starting with a first encounter when he was just a foetus. He believes the aliens have a special interest in him, and that he is part reptilian himself. In the video, he comes across as much nicer and more intelligent than most politicians, and there can be no doubt he’s sincere in his beliefs. His claims are so bizarre, and so embarrassingly personal, that they’re not the sort of thing a politician (or anyone else) would choose to make up if they were simply seeking publicity. Inevitably, the media have portrayed Councillor Parkes as a batty eccentric, although his constituents and council colleagues don’t seem very bothered by his bizarre disclosures.

The second case, as I’ve already said, is completely different from the first. The person in question is Rupert Matthews, a Conservative politician and a prolific writer, as you can see from Rupert's Amazon page. He has written over 170 books, which is an impressive feat in itself, and they span an eclectic variety of subjects. Most of them are popular history books of the “coffee table” variety, and Rupert refers to himself as The History Man. But he has written one book on UFOs, one book on Roswell, and one book on Alien Encounters... and those three books out of 170 spelled political disaster.

At the elections for the European Parliament in 2009, Rupert got enough votes to secure himself a place at the top of the list for the next available vacancy in the East Midlands constituency. That vacancy looked like it was coming up a few months ago when MEP Roger Helmer announced his forthcoming resignation. But then word that “Rupert Matthews believes in UFOs” reached the ears of the Chairman of the Conservative Party, Baroness Warsi. She stepped in to veto the democratically agreed selection process and put forward another candidate of her own choosing (baronesses, of course, have never been very bothered by technicalities like election results).

You might think that, for a party that is constantly being told it’s out of touch with ordinary people, the Conservatives would be delighted to have a populist writer whose books line the shelves at Waterstones and are clearly aimed at the casual reader. And indeed the party doesn’t seem to have anything against his writings on the subject of dinosaurs, ancient Rome, the Titanic, the Art and Civilization of the Renaissance, the Spanish Armada or even Haunted London, Haunted Edinburgh or Haunted Oxford. But a book entitled UFOs, and one entitled Roswell, and one entitled Alien Encounters... the man’s obviously a dangerous crank!

But is he? The typical UFO crank is a single-minded individual desperate to get their message across to the world. They write about nothing else. Their books are turgid and heavyweight, packed with original research and theories, and aimed at their enlightened peers. They don’t waste their time writing glossy coffee-table books for the casual reader, let alone books like Battlefield Walks in Devon, Lost Railways of Berkshire, or Heroes of Bomber Command. UFO believers don’t have time for such trivialities. On the other hand, a professional writer who has to make a living by writing about subjects that are likely to sweep off the shelves of UK bookstores is another matter.

Fortunately this story has a happy, if unexpected, ending. A few weeks ago Roger Helmer decided to withdraw his resignation and stay on as an MEP, but at the same time he defected from the Conservative Party to the UK Independence Party as a protest against Baroness Warsi’s heavy-handedness. So she’s lost on two counts -- she can’t put her chosen puppet into the seat, and she’s lost the seat to a rival party!

Chronological Snobbery

I’ve got another letter in this month’s Fortean Times! This one touches on a favourite hobby horse of mine, “chronological snobbery” – the widespread belief that people of the past were intrinsically inferior to people of the present. An example of this is the smug assertion that “people were much smaller in the old days”, as discussed by Mat Coward in the 150th instalment of his Mythconceptions column (FT284, February 2012). One piece of evidence often put forward to support this is the short length of the four-poster beds you see in English Stately Homes (“Gosh, these people had all that wealth and power, yet they were shorter than I am!”). The fallacy of this, as my letter in FT287 points out, is that people used to sleep propped up on pillows against the headboard rather than lying flat. The picture sort of illustrates my point (I know the people in the bed aren’t sleeping, but it was the best I could find).

There was another sentence in my letter that didn’t make it into print: “People often point out that King Charles the First was a very short person, at just five foot four... but they neglect to mention that his grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, was five foot eleven!”

Galileo wasn’t always right...

Present-day fringe theorists often cite the case of Galileo (1564–1642) as proof that they’re right and the authorities are wrong. It’s true that Galileo was constantly in conflict with the intellectual establishment of his time, and that history has proved him to be on the winning side on all the big issues. The Earth really does move around the Sun, and heavy objects really do fall at the same rate as light ones. But is Galileo really such a good role model? Unlike the armchair scientists and internet cranks of today, Galileo didn’t always get it right.

To start with, it’s worth dispelling a couple of tenacious myths about Galileo. The first myth is that he set out to disprove the Bible. In fact, it’s clear from his Selected Writings that he had no problems at all with the Bible: “Holy Scripture can never lie or be in error... nonetheless some of its interpreters or expositors can.” All of Galileo’s arguments are aimed not at the Bible but at the Greek philosopher Aristotle—who was held by the Church to be second only to the Bible in authority.

Galileo used the Biblical story of Joshua, where God caused the Sun to stand still in order to lengthen the day, as evidence that the Aristotelian earth-centred model is wrong, and the Copernican sun-centred model is correct: “This passage of scripture clearly demonstrates the impossibility of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic world system, and on the contrary fits perfectly well with the system of Copernicus.” Galileo argues (correctly) that making the Sun stand still in the Aristotelian view would actually shorten the day, not lengthen it (since the length of the day is set by the Primum Mobile, and the Sun moves backwards relative to this). What you actually need to do is freeze up the whole Solar System. Galileo had observed the Sun to rotate on its own axis, and believed (wrongly) that this rotation was the source of all the motion in the Solar System—hence he argued it was this rotation that God halted in the story of Joshua.

Another myth-conception is that the Church prohibited Galileo from writing about the Sun-centred theory, and that his ‘crime’ was to defy this prohibition. Actually, the Church encouraged him to write about the theory... as long as he ended up debunking it, or at least showing that the truth couldn’t be proved one way or the other. What he was prohibited from doing was offering any concrete proof that Copernicus was right and Aristotle was wrong. But that’s what he did, and that’s what got him into trouble.

The hilarious thing (and now I’m finally getting to the point of the article) is that Galileo’s proof was rubbish. At the time, no-one knew what caused sea tides—Galileo’s fellow Copernican Kepler believed they were due to the influence of the Moon, but Galileo dismissed this as mystical mumbo-jumbo (“Of all the great men who have speculated on this marvellous effect of nature, the one who most astonishes me is Kepler... he had grasped the motions attributed to the Earth, and yet he still listened and assented to the notion of the Moon’s influence on the water, and occult properties, and similar childish ideas.”) Galileo was convinced the tides were a direct result of the Earth's motion, in the same way water sloshes around in a vase when you move it. But Galileo was wrong about this... and he was wrong about the Moon having nothing to do with the tides!

You might think that, having upset the Irish nation last week by suggesting that St Patrick was British, I’ve now lurched on Boris Johnson style to insult the Italians—by pointing out the single occasion on which Galileo made a mistake. But it’s worse than that... he made another mistake as well! Galileo believed that orbits had to be perfectly circular (again, this was a disagreement with Kepler). This created a problem in the case of comets, which are on manifestly non-circular orbits. Galileo’s solution was to dismiss comets as not really existing at all—merely an illusion caused by the Sun reflecting off the upper layers of the atmosphere!

Saint Patrick of Glastonbury?

As with all the early saints, there are a lot of legends about Saint Patrick and a scarcity of facts. One of the few certain things is that he wasn’t Irish! He couldn’t have been, since he was a Christian, and the Irish he converted were all pagans!

There are plenty of legends connecting St Patrick with Glastonbury in Somerset. Some people even think he was born there! According to one well-established legend, the Pope sent him to Ireland as a missionary in the year 425. After converting the Irish to Christianity, he returned to Glastonbury Abbey in 433, where he became Abbot and eventually died in 472. He is reputed to have been buried alongside the altar.

[This isn't something I'm claiming to be true... I'm simply recounting a legend that people used to  believe  in the past. I'm not making it up -- see the display from the Museum of Somerset shown above!]

Nowadays, Glastonbury is a magnet for hippies, neo-pagans and New Agers, and it seems paradoxical to associate it with a Christian saint. Glastonbury’s shops are filled with books on religion—Buddhism, Witchcraft, Goddess Worship, Sacred Sexuality—but you won’t find many Bibles! While the ruined Abbey is a big tourist attraction, it's more often described as ‘mystical’, ‘mysterious’ or ‘magical’ than as a place of Christian worship. The Abbey was destroyed by King Henry VIII when he abolished the monasteries in the 1530s, but before that time it was the most magnificent building in the country. If you picture Chartres Cathedral transplanted into the Somerset Levels, you wouldn’t be far wrong.

During the Middle Ages, Glastonbury was the religious heart of Britain -- a place of pilgrimage comparable to Rome or Jerusalem. What was important in those days wasn’t what was true, but what people believed. And people believed a lot when it came to Glastonbury. Not only Saint Patrick, but countless other saints were supposed to have been buried there. According to the 12th century chronicler William of Malmesbury, "...nor is there any space in the building that is free of their ashes. So much so that the stone pavement, and indeed the sides of the altar itself, above and below, is crammed with the multitude of the relics. Rightly, therefore, it is called the heavenly sanctuary on earth, of so large a number of saints it is the repository."

Besides St Patrick, Glastonbury is associated with his successor St Benignus, and the presence of their shrines (or supposed shrines) made the Abbey a popular destination for Irish pilgrims for centuries. Around the year 710, a group of them led by St Indract were massacred by local soldiers, and their remains were added to those already interred in the Abbey.

One of the reasons Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome was that he believed the British church was older and more valid! According to a widely believed legend, the Apostle Philip sent a group of twelve missionaries to Britain in 63 AD. The leader of the twelve was none other than Joseph of Arimathea—the man who, according to the Gospels, had allowed the body of Jesus to be interred in his own tomb. The twelve proto-monks were drawn towards Glastonbury, where a heavenly vision led them to found the Abbey!

The Einstein Misconception

A few months ago I submitted a “Mythconception” to Fortean Times concerning what I described at the time as “a very tenacious myth about Einstein”. After much conferring, they decided it was too abstruse and too open to debate to go into the magazine. They were probably right -- but I still think my original point was valid, so I’m going to inflict it on the world anyway.

As I originally stated it, the Mythconception concerns “the idea that Einstein’s 1905 theory of relativity, with its famous equation E = mc², laid the theoretical groundwork for the atomic bomb -- which, the myth claims, works by converting small quantities of matter (atoms) into large quantities of energy. This view is repeated ad nauseam by the media, but it’s wrong. There is no annihilation of matter in a nuclear weapon, only the release of nuclear binding energy.”

To be even more pedantic, E = mc² doesn’t describe the conversion of one thing into another, but the absolute equivalence of energy and mass... with c² as the constant of proportionality. A cannonball may have a mass of 10 kg when it’s sitting in the cannon, but when it’s flying through the air it has a very slightly greater mass due to its additional kinetic energy. This extra energy/mass came from the chemical binding energy released by the exploding gunpowder. If you could collect all the combustion products together again, their combined mass would be just slightly less than that of the original gunpowder.

So even a mediaeval cannon obeys E = mc² -- you don’t need an atom bomb! You might argue that a nuclear weapon is qualitatively different from a cannon, but it isn’t really. There’s a quantitative difference, in that the “slight” changes in mass in the case of a cannon are so slight as to be immeasurable, whereas they’re appreciably bigger in the nuclear case. But they’re still very small. The difference is that the energy released in this case is nuclear binding energy, not chemical binding energy.

The basic nuclear reaction involves the fission of an unstable heavy nucleus (such as Uranium 235) into lighter nuclei. This is commonly described as “splitting the atom”, which is accurate, and “annihilation of the atom”, which is journalistic bollocks. Nothing is annihilated. The fission products have just as many nucleons (protons and neutrons) as there were to start with. But because they’re stable, they have less binding energy -- hence less total mass. That missing energy/mass went into the X megatons of explosive energy.

The archetypal Cold War weapon was a “thermonuclear” device that produced additional energy from the fusion of heavy hydrogen into helium. Again, the number of nucleons remains the same, and the energy released comes from binding energy. If people want to say that matter is “destroyed” in a fission reaction, then they might as well say it is “created” in a fusion reaction!

I know I’m being pedantic -- it all comes down to what you mean by “matter”. I’m using the term to mean “nucleons”... and what I’m saying is that nucleons are neither created or destroyed in a nuclear reaction. But if by “matter” you mean the rest-mass of a macroscopic chunk of matter, then a measurable part of that comes from the nuclear binding energy, some of which is lost (in both fission and fusion reactions). But—coming back to Einstein—that’s a consequence of quantum theory, not the theory of relativity! E = mc² merely describes one effect of the nuclear reaction, not its ultimate cause.

When you get down below the scale of nucleons, things get even more blurred. Protons and neutrons are made up of three quarks each, but if you could separate the quarks out they’d hardly have any mass at all -- most of the mass you’re aware of in the real world is the binding energy holding the quarks together!

The first Paranormal Investigator?

I mentioned Joseph Glanvill’s book Saducismus Triumphatus in my post about The Daemon of Tedworth a year ago. Since then, I’ve managed to find an online copy of the whole book, and it’s really very interesting. The Fortean world centres around the conflict between “skeptics” and “believers”, with Forteans sitting on the sidelines looking on in amusement. Glanvill’s book may be the first work ever written that specifically addresses this conflict.

In an earlier post I wrote about David Hume: a skeptic in the 18th century, and another one described William Hogarth’s satire on Paranormal investigation, 18th century style. But Glanvill lived in the 17th century -- Saducismus Triumphatus was published in 1681, the year after his death. The title is Latin for “Triumph over the Sadducees” -- “Sadducees” being Glanvill’s word for scientific skeptics and rationalists. Glanvill himself was an avid believer in the supernatural, largely because he considered that there was ample scriptural authority for its existence (in his day job, he was a clergyman).

The most interesting section of the book is called “Proof of Apparitions, Spirits and Witches, from a choice Collection of Modern Relations”. This is effectively a compendium of Case Studies collected by Glanvill over a period of many years. In this sense, Glanvill can be considered the world’s first paranormal investigator. And his mindset was exactly the same as that of a modern paranormal investigator. Just as David Hume, the world’s first militant skeptic, made the standard mistake of all skeptics (“If an event doesn’t fit in with my preconceived notions of what is possible, then it couldn’t have happened”) so Glanvill makes the standard mistake of all believers: “If a reputable witness says an event happened, then it must have happened exactly as they described it.”

One example will give the idea. Glanville’s tenth “Relation” concerns “The Apparition of the Ghost of Major George Sydenham to Captain William Dyke, taken out of a Letter of Mr. James Douch to Mr. Joseph Glanvill”. The witness in this case was an Army Officer, Captain Dyke, and therefore his testimony was automatically accepted as correct in every respect. The Captain had been friends with another officer, Major Sydenham, who was a devoutly religious man. Dyke on the other hand was a worldly cynic, and the two of them had many friendly arguments about the nature of God and the Afterlife. They agreed that whichever of them died first would visit the other on the third night after the funeral, and tell them the truth of the matter. In the event, it was the Major who died first, and the Captain duly kept a lookout at the appointed time -- but the Major’s ghost failed to turn up.

Then one morning about six weeks later, Captain Dyke was woken up by an unexpected visitor in his bedroom. It was the ghost of Major Sydenham! The ghost told his old friend: “I could not come at the time appointed, but I am now come to tell you that there is a God, and a very just and terrible one, as you will find if you do not turn over a new leaf!” Glanvill takes this as clear evidence of the afterlife and the existence of God -- he isn’t bothered by the fact that the Major’s ghost didn’t turn up when the Captain was keeping a vigil for it, but waited until he was sound asleep. If you ask me though, it sounds like a particularly vivid dream!

The End of Books

 The picture above, showing passengers on the Paris metro listening on earphones rather than engrossed in reading books, was drawn almost 120 years ago by a man named Albert Robida. It’s an illustration for Octave Uzanne’s short story “La Fin des Livres” (“The End of Books”), published in 1895 -- when the most advanced audio technology consisted of cumbersome Edison phonographs with wax cylinders, hand-cranks and brass horns.

As 19th century predictions of future technology go, I think this one is pretty impressive. The story is set in London, and concerns a group of Victorian gentlemen who discuss what the future might hold. When one of them is asked about the future of books, he says “If by books you speak of our countless collections of paper, printed, sewn and bound... I tell you frankly that I do not believe—and the progress of electricity and modern mechanics forbids me to believe—that Gutenberg's invention should not soon fall more or less into disuse as a medium for our intellectual products.”

“Gutenberg’s invention” refers to the printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century. Ironically, the text of Uzanne and Robida’s “La Fin des Livres” is now available in electronic form on a website called Project Gutenberg!

The picture of the metro passengers shows them plugged into communal devices built into the train, but Uzanne and Robida also predicted personal media players (as depicted on the left): “there will be recording cylinders as light as celluloid pens... devices for the pocket, around the neck or on a shoulder strap that will be held in a single tube like a case of spectacles.” This strikes me as particularly impressive, because miniaturization is one aspect of modern technology that most early science fiction failed to predict -- even into the 1930s and 40s.

So is the prophecy of “the end of books” coming true? In one sense it is, and in another it isn’t. Uzanne and Robida imagined that the printed word would die out, to be replaced by voice recordings. There is little sign of this happening -- there are such things as “audio books”, but only as a fringe interest. Most people use the written word as much as they ever did... if not more. But the “written word” appears increasingly on LCD screens rather than printed paper -- so in that sense this is one Victorian prediction that was spot on!

Angels in Machines

Most of the planets and moons in the Solar System are named after characters from Greek mythology. The moons of Uranus are an exception, with most of the names swiped from Shakespeare’s plays. But two of the moons, Umbriel and Belinda, aren’t Shakespearean characters. They sound like they might be, but actually they come from a narrative poem by Alexander Pope. It’s called The Rape of the Lock, and it’s the daftest poem in the English language.

The phrase “The Rape of the Lock” may bring a bizarre image to mind, but you’d be wrong. It’s not a lock in the sense of a keyhole, but a lock of hair. Pope was writing in the genteel and sophisticated 18th century, when young women were obsessed with following all the latest fashions in clothes and hairstyles (times have changed since then, obviously). In those days, to go up behind a woman and snip off a lock of her hair was a crime of the utmost seriousness -- and if the victim was at all important (or thought she was), then it would very likely start a war. Well no, it wouldn’t... but Pope was a satirist, so he was allowed to exaggerate. The Rape of the Lock is a heroic tragedy modelled on Greek epics like the story of the Trojan War.

Belinda is the heroine of the story. When she discovers that a lock of her hair has been cut off, she goes into what can best be described as a hissy fit. Or that’s how it might be described today -- in Pope’s time, it was called a “fit of spleen”. Unknown to the people around her, Belinda has a whole host of invisible sprites who look after her every need. Umbriel is one of them. When she has her hissy fit, he heads off on an undercover mission to the Cave of Spleen (in the internal logic of the poem, this all makes perfect sense). The cave turns out to be a pretty cool place: “Now glaring Fiends, and Snakes on rolling Spires, Pale Spectres, gaping Tombs, and Purple Fires: Now Lakes of liquid Gold, Elysian Scenes, And Crystal Domes, and Angels in Machines.”

I’ve no idea what “Angels in Machines” means, but it sounds distinctly surreal. The surreal aspect of the poem was picked up by Aubrey Beardsley in his illustration The Cave of Spleen from 1896 (detail below):

So what happened to the lock of hair? It rose up into the sky and became a new star which could be seen through telescopes (“Galileo’s eyes”). Maybe that’s where they got the idea for the moons of Uranus!

A Virtual Spaceship

Last month, the BBC ran a show called Stargazing Live over three consecutive nights. The middle instalment was the most interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it featured a surprisingly (for television) level-headed segment about UFOs, featuring cameos by David Clarke and Mark Pilkington. Secondly, a young astrophysicist from Oxford University called Andrew Pontzen showed a computer simulation of galaxy formation (the screenshot above is taken from a clip he posted on his YouTube channel).

The simulation interested me because that’s the sort of thing I did for my PhD thirty years ago... except that in those days we had to wrestle with mediaeval technology, so the results didn’t look as impressive (example on the left, complete with hand-written labels). But the principle was exactly the same. In one of Andrew’s videos (called “This is a Galaxy”), he uses graphics technology to fly through a simulated galaxy. The result is enormously impressive, but he wasn’t the first to have this idea. I looked back through my thesis, and found the following:

“I devised an interactive program based on GAL64, which produces axonometric projections [of the simulated galaxy] on the screen of the Vector General unit at the University of Manchester Computer Graphics Unit. Unlike the GAL64 views the magnification and viewpoint of these pictures are not fixed, but can be set arbitrarily by means of the Vector General hand control units. Because the operation of the program thus bears a marked similarity to piloting an intergalactic spaceship, it was given the appropriately spaceship-like name of VALKYR.”

Why did I call the program “VALKYR”? I don’t think it stood for anything, unless I made up some extremely contrived acronym. It’s just that in those days, program names were limited to six characters (I told you the technology was mediaeval). I was a big fan of Wagner at the time, and that was the closest I could get to “Valkyrie”!

In those days, my science fiction reading inclined towards the arty end of the spectrum, with authors like Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard. However, I discovered long afterwards that a much more downmarket writer named Alfred Coppel did write a couple of stories featuring a spaceship named Valkyr -- “The Rebel of Valkyr” in 1950, and a sequel “Forbidden Weapon” the following year. As you can see from the scan below (taken from the British Edition of Marvel Science Stories), Valkyr was an appropriately mediaeval spaceship!

Devilish superstitions

Paul Jackson sent this photograph of a Bronze Age round barrow at Wilsford Cum Lake near Amesbury in Wiltshire. The barrow—a prehistoric burial mound—is the grassy hump in the background (it can be seen more clearly in the inset, which comes from Google Street View). Barrows of this kind are fairly common in Wiltshire, as well as other parts of Britain, but this is a particularly well-preserved example. It’s 4.4 metres (14½ feet) high and 36 metres (118 feet) in diameter; it dates from circa 1000 BC.

Round barrows are artificial mounds, built during the Bronze Age for the burial of high-status individuals. Over time, however, their original purpose—and man-made origin—was forgotten. They were widely considered “the work of the devil”, and in some parts of the country round barrows are known as “Devil’s humps”.

Over the centuries, ignorant superstition has attributed a wide range of phenomena to the “work of the Devil”, from eclipses and fossils to warts, migraines and masturbation. As mentioned in The Devil of Rennes-le-Chateau, masturbation continued to be demonized well into the nineteenth century. Production of excessive amounts of semen (to get back to the subject of the photograph) was thought to lead to loss of energy and vitality. Ejaculation twice a week into the marital uterus was good; ejaculation six times a day over your jeans was bad.

One of the most vocal proponents of the anti-masturbation movement was William Acton, who wrote in 1857: “Apathy, loss of memory, abeyance of concentrative power, indisposition for action and incoherence of language are the most characteristic mental phenomena resulting from masturbation in young men. The large expenditure of semen has exhausted the vital force.”

The “too much ejaculation is bad for you” superstition is surprisingly widespread. As well as Victorian England, similar beliefs can be found in the Tantric Yoga and Kamasutra-style “sacred sex” practices of India, and in Taoism and Qi Gong in China. In the context of the latter system, the loss of ejaculatory fluid is associated with a corresponding loss of “qi”, the vital life force -- resulting in premature aging, general fatigue and susceptibility to disease.

The word “cum”, by the way, is Latin for “with”. Wilsford Cum Lake is a parish made up of two small villages, one called Wilsford and the other called Lake. I’m sure that’s what you thought as soon as you saw Paul’s photograph.

The History of Biblical Literalism

Here is another photograph I took on my recent visit to the British Museum. It’s one of the most famous items in the Museum -- the 11th tablet of the Gilgamesh epic. It recounts an ancient, and supposedly fictional, story that was popular in ancient Babylon and Assyria (this particular example comes from Nineveh in Assyria, and dates from the 7th century BC). The 11th tablet has become famous, or notorious, for its description of a great flood sent by the gods to destroy the world. A character named Utnapishtim is forewarned of the event, and he constructs a large boat in order to save as many living things as possible.

Undoubtedly the Hebrew scribes who were exiled in Babylon a hundred years later would have encountered writings such as this... and that, of course, brings us on to the thorny subject of Biblical Literalism. It dawned on me a few weeks ago that the notion that Christianity begins and ends with the Bible is a relatively recent invention. Christianity is 2000 years old, but Biblical Literalism (as a widespread concept) can be no more than 500 years old. Printing, in the context of European culture, was only invented in the 15th century, before which Bibles were rare and expensive hand-written manuscripts. They were written in Latin, too, so most people wouldn’t have been able to read them even if they’d got their hands on a copy.

In its early days, Christianity was typical of the religions of its time. Religions in those days were centred, not on writings, but on symbolism and ritual... a wide variety of rituals, but all of them in one way or another aimed at personal transformation. This was true, in broad terms, of the Mystery religions of Graeco-Roman Europe as well as the “Eastern” religions of Persia and India. While there are great differences of detail, the basic concept was much the same. Writings, if they existed, were for the priesthood, not the people... and usually they were meant for guidance only, not as a central focus of belief.

Early in the 5th century AD, St Augustine wrote a treatise called “The Literal Meaning of Genesis”... but he was arguing for a symbolic, spiritual interpretation of that work, not a literal interpretation in the modern sense. Augustine’s mother was a Christian, but in his early years he turned to another Mystery religion of the time, Manichaeism, before converting back to Christianity. So he was able to look at Christianity from an outsider’s perspective, and see that people who insisted on the word-for-word truth of the Bible were merely making themselves look stupid: “Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world... If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?”

The notion that Christianity should be centred on the Bible, and not on its rituals, originated in 16th century Europe, as more and more people gained access to affordable copies of the Bible in a language they could understand. This was a brand new type of religion... one that belongs to a period in which books are common and everyone can read. That simply wasn’t the case when Christianity started out.

The English Puritans of the 16th and 17th century were amongst the earliest Biblical Literalists. They were persecuted by the established churches (both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England), and to escape this persecution many of them emigrated to America, where they were among the first European settlers. In some sense, therefore, America is founded on Biblical Literalism. That’s probably why most people in the English-speaking world today (atheists just as much as Christians) see Biblical Literalism as the “purest” form of Christianity. That may be true... but the fact remains it’s only a quarter the age of Christianity as a whole!

Annual Report

The Forteana blog has survived its first year! When I started it in January 2011, it was only meant as a quick test to work out how to use Blogger... hence the rather unimaginative title. But since then I’ve done 130 posts, on a wide range of topics including (clockwise from top left): unusual museums, weirdness in renaissance art, out-of-place aliens, folklore, cryptozoology, retro-futuristic science, ancient civilizations and witchcraft.

Much to my surprise, I see that I’ve had 47,000 page views -- an average of 360 views per post. So a big “Thank You” to everyone who reads the site and links to it... especially Patrick Huyghe and Rick Stokes at The Anomalist, who are by far my most consistent referrers! I’m also grateful to the various people who’ve supplied me with material when I was in danger of running out of ideas... particularly Paul Jackson, who has travelled the world in search of photographs for the blog (or more accurately, he’s travelled the world taking photographs, which he’s then kindly let me post on the blog).

An obvious mistake to make when starting a blog is to post all your good material early on, before anyone has started reading it. That’s what I did, and it’s meant that some posts that were really interesting (in my biased opinion) have languished with virtually no page views. In this context, I could mention: Dinosaur Orbit, Precogging Philip K. Dick, Nick Pope at the MOD, Seth Shostak on SETI and Cosmic Geometry in the West Country.

Several of the earliest posts were based on letters that I’d sent to Fortean Times over the years, but were never printed. These included The Da Vinci Code and Mediaeval Symbolism, The Great Moon Hoax and Alien Simulacrum (left). As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, my success rate at FT has shot up over the last few months -- I’ve even got a full-page “Forum” article in the current issue. I’m getting very bigheaded about this -- I’ve just set up a new web page to keep track of my appearances in Fortean Times!