Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

“Last fall, on Oct. 8, Gennady Osipovich met with a Gypsy woman to have his future told. He became enraged when the self-proclaimed clairvoyant informed him that he was bound for a "kazyonny dom," or "state-sponsored house," a Russian slang term for prison, regional prosecutors said in a statement Thursday.

Osipovich proceeded to employ dubious logic, according to the prosecutors. In order to prevent this fortune from coming true, Osipovich tried to kill the woman. He pulled out a knife and stabbed her, though she managed to escape.

Tragically, two witnesses were unable to flee in time. Osipovich stabbed each of them repeatedly, and the victims died of the knife wounds, investigators said.

Prosecutors said Osipovich was sentenced to 22 years in a maximum security prison.” [Moscow Times]

As incredible as the story is, and as skeptical as we usually are of such, here’s a link for an official website (in Russian) with confirmation. [via Marginal Revolution]

This picture gives me the shivers, even though it “has been rather universally labeled a hoax”, as cryptozoologist Loren Coleman points out. Darren Naish over at Tetrapod Zoology wrote an excellent piece back in 2008 on these amazing Hook Island sea monster photos.

It was on Naish’s post that I saw two additional photos that, even knowing they must have been hoaxed, managed to creep me out even further.

Perhaps that has something to do one with the fact one of my terrors since childhood have been giant underwater creatures. But I don’t think I’m alone and the story told by photographer Robert Le Serrec in 1965 that his wife saw this gigantic tadpole-like creature, and he along with friend Henk de Jong got off their boat to get better close-ups and even film this huge 75-80 ft thing is quite unbelievable. According to them, they only returned to the boat when the creature opened its mouth and moved towards them.

The story is highly doubtful even if you don’t take into account that Le Serrec was not a very credible man, that six years earlier he was apparently already talking about making money with a sea-serpent and that according to Coleman even the Interpol was after him.

So, this must have been a hoax, but how he did it? Darren Naish quotes Ivan Sanderson’s suggestions of “either a plastic bag used by the US Navy ‘for experiments in towing petrol’, a deflated skyhook balloon which had become covered in weed, or a roll of cloth which had been tied together in places”.

Naish favors however the idea that “it was a custom-shaped expanse of plastic sheeting, weighted down with sand”, an idea also favored by Bernard Heuvelmans already in 1968.

It’s a very good suggestion. Naish notes how the broken outline of the creature-thing, especially as can be seen in the head close-up photos, show  that “in at least four spots it looks like someone has placed handfuls of sand on top of the edge of the creature: exactly what you would do if trying to weight down a monster-shaped sheet of plastic.”

But this broken outline bothers me. They could be as Naish suggests the result of sand thrown over the black plastic sheet at the bottom of the lagoon, but I tried the best I could to better see the bottom and I would assume the several rocks that can be seen would mark the contour of the creature if it was plastic sheeting weighed down. Apparently, they don’t. The borders go over the rocks, perhaps that’s why Sanderson suggested weed and cloth tied together, because the border is very broken.

Most of the broken outline could be simply due to the water waves distorting the image of the borders of the creature at the bottom. This Japanese video parody of the Le Serrec photo is funny, but it also illustrates that water distortion on the borders:

But there’s another possibility: the whole black streak could be simply thick oil floating over water. If you look at the broken outline, is could composed of patches of oil breaking from the main blob. Here are some images from the oil spill by South Korean tanker Hebei Spirit in 2007.

This spill is on a much, much larger scale, and looks somewhat different from Le Serrec’s photos. But it illustrates the idea. It has its problems, starting from the fact that I don’t know if it would be even possible to get oil in that shape for a couple of minutes, or even longer; if one could make “eyes” by poking holes in the oil floating. Also, Le Serrec’s story actually mentions that the alleged creature was at the bottom of the lagoon, which favors the idea that that was true, only that the creature was a black plastic sheet, as suggested by Heuvelmans and Naish (and also supported by Coleman).

I hope further investigation, analyzing better quality versions of the original photos, and perhaps even some attempts at reproduction on site, would definitely settle how he did it. Naish even mentions rumors that Le Serrec may be still alive and living in Asia – as of 2003.

However he hoaxed this, and as skeptical as I am, the pictures really creep me out.

“Angels, demons, fairies, creatures from heaven, hell, or Magonia: they inspire our strangest dreams, shape our destinies, steal our desires.” – Jacques Vallée, “Passport to Magonia”

Recently, acknowledged Fortean researcher Jacques Vallée published a series of posts on our cherished BoingBoing regarding crop circles (part 1, 2, 3, 4). News from last year about a directed microwave weapon by the US army prompted Vallée to argue that, since “these things are typically revealed 30 years after they are tested”, their initial development and testing would fit well with the heyday of the crop circle frenzy.

That is, Vallée promoted the idea, which he initially suggested in 1991, that crop circles are made by the military using directed energy systems, beamed from “a low-observable dirigible using corn fields as a convenient calibration target.”

But this is the web, 2.0, this was BoingBoing, one of the biggest blogs on the web, and most of the 66 comments were very critical of the idea, several of them considering it even a joke. Most of the comment authors didn’t even know who Vallée was, an indication they had almost no background on the Fortean field.

In his second post, Vallée started saying that the original text was, “among other things, a social science test of the role of belief systems in the manipulation of memes and factual data”. Critical of the response, he then went on to explain why his hypothesis wasn’t a joke.

Curiously, in his own seminal book four decades ago, “Passport to Magonia” (1969), Vallée himself does not take very seriously the idea that Soviets were responsible for crop circles:

“Rumors circulated blaming the Soviets for using the vast open spaces of Australia to develop scientific ideas one or two centuries ahead of those of the Americans. Why the Soviets could not conduct their secret testing in the vast open spaces of Siberia was not disclosed. Neither was it revealed why the pilots of the super-secret communist weapon could not resist the temptation to buzz the tractor of a twenty-seven-year-old banana grower.”

He has changed his mind since at least 1991, but he should be able to understand why people would find it hard to consider seriously the idea that secret weapons would be tested on highly publicized events, besides Stonehenge for instance, instead of “the vast open spaces of Siberia” or anywhere else, and for what reason would the military “not resist the temptation to buzz” some farmers. Or any other witness.

If this was indeed a social science test, it seems nobody did their homework, as apparently no one confronted Vallée on what he had published. But let’s take the idea seriously: does it stand as something reasonable, even probable?

Keep reading for more of our long comment on the subject, with trackbacks to BoingBoing, of course.

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They are an amazing sight: even though the initial size figures were eventually corrected to a more comprehensible 66 feet diameter crater, 100 feet deep, those are still impressive and quite regular holes. The one in the image above engulfed a factory in the end of June at Zona 2, Guatemala, while a similar event happened in 2007 a few miles away, Zona 6. Below, an image of the 2007 hole:

While people were puzzled and many joked about these giant holes in the ground, the event in 2007 resulted in two casualties and the one a month ago in one death. Taking this seriously, we have to explain that these features are not mysterious nor have anything to do with “UFO tunnels”. Both features were ultimately the result of intense storms – and it’s an interesting coincidence that the new hole opened after tropical storm Agatha, since Agartha is the legendary city inside the hollow Earth.

These features do not lead to the center of Earth, however, at their bottom a hundred feet down what one finds is quite simply a sewage water collecting system. The infographic below, from Nuestro Diario (June 30th, p.5), illustrates how exactly below the opened hole a water collector tunnel around 10 feet in diameter goes through.

A few days ago a team of geologists also explored the bottom of the Zona 2 hole, you can find the whole Picasa set of photos here. All the soil in the giant hole didn’t disappear magically, it was simply washed away with the water and on to the sewage system. So much so that the sole victim’s body in the Zona 2 hole, Edwin Roberto Velásquez Salazar, was found days later in Las Vacas river, where the water from the collector system ends up.

Not only at the bottom of these giant holes one finds tunnels of the water collecting system: more importantly, perhaps, is that both of these holes were originally vertical shafts, that is, there were already originally vertical holes there, even though they were obviously not that large. Unfortunately many water draining shafts and tunnels were built in the 1950s and some were not properly recorded, and as the city grew some buildings were built over some shafts. That seems to be the case here.

Local geologists suggest then that the heavy water stream from the storm must have damaged the underground collecting tunnels, a problem aggravated by the fact that there was a difference in the level of tunnels. The graphic below (click to enlarge, from Diario de Centroamérica) illustrates, above, the proposed evolution of the holes in the first (above) and second holes.

Add to that that the soil in the city is particularly fragile, basically pumice fill – ash flows made up of loose, gravel-like particles deposited during ancient volcanic eruptions, and there’s no mystery here.

Days after the recent hole, called by many a giant sinkhole, geologist Sam Bonis, who was part of the team that investigated the 2007 case, correctly pointed out that it wasn’t in fact a sinkhole. As he told Discovery News (and National Geographic), "Sure, it looks a lot like a sinkhole. And a whale looks a lot like a fish, but calling it one would be very misleading."

According to Bonis, the hole was rather a “piping feature”, and the further info, photos and graphics here may help understand the giant holes in Guatemala.

Graphic: Nuestro Diario

[Almost all the info for this post comes from the blog “Ciudad Nueva zona 2 Guatemala”, with updated and detailed information on the events. It was suggested to me by friend José Ildefonso, who also provided me with most of the other information on the case]

I always assumed lasers were one of the things we technological apes were first to create in the Universe, much like a watch. If there’s a watch, there must be a watchmaker, as one chap famously argued. He was quite right, though the analogy doesn’t quite apply to other seemingly complex things which are subject to that evolution thing.

But lasers can be as delicate and complex as a watch. If there is a laser, there should be a “lasermaker”, I thought, so much so that they were first built only 50 years ago, decades after the idea was first proposed by none other than Albert Einstein and many years after their predecessors, the Masers, were demonstrated. And there can’t be self-reproducing lasers, right?

Well, as far as we know, that’s also right, and there are also no animals capable of emitting lasers, the baby above being a work of fiction which I suspect involves Photoshop (I can tell by the pixels).

But today I discovered at long last that there are natural lasers. This is quite a thing, as even if you already knew about that, I’ll say it also involves Martians! HG Wells! And Alien Abductions!

First things first, as the acronym properly tells, the LASER, or Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, works by stimulated emission, which can be used as an amplification effect by exciting a medium to obtain a population inversion. In the first Ruby laser, seen above, that worked by exciting a ruby crystal with small impurities through a coiled flash tube at just the right energy. It does resemble a watch, doesn’t it? It’s quite a gadget. That’s how I pictured the classical laser.

Shortly thereafter, gas lasers, where an electric discharge stimulates a gas, instead of a flashing light a crystal, were created. These are the ones of interest if you are talking about natural lasers, because it would be quite impractical to think of giant crystals with flashing lights pumps occurring in nature. A column of excited gas on the other hand could perhaps happen somewhere, sometime.

For instance, one tantalizing idea involves creating laser beams by dropping a large asteroid into a star. It would vaporize, producing a streak of slightly cooler material interacting with the hot, excited plasma of the star. An excited column of gas amid a star. According to theory, “amplified spontaneous emission, or laser action occurs”, with a beam emitted “as a narrow precisely aligned with the meteor streak”. And this is just one proposed way for a natural Laser Star.

If that sounds interesting, it’s still somewhat debated. What is not speculation, and has actually been astronomical fact for more than 30 years, is that there are laser planets. Or better yet, that Mars and Venus atmospheres are emitting laser beams. Towards Earth!

In 1976 they were first observed coming from Mars by students of Charles Townes, himself a Nobel laureate for his works with Masers and lasers. They were not powerful like anything coming from a Death Star, but they were an emission 100 million times brighter than expected.

That would be eventually explained because the emission had been amplificated. It was a laser, a natural laser, where the population inversion in excited gas occurred in carbon dioxide at the upper levels of the atmosphere of Mars. The pump exciting that is the solar radiation itself, and the effect is thus strongest near the solar point. The red circle centered on Chryse Planitia represents the region over which the laser emissions were detected.

Chryse Planitia, by the way, is where the Viking 1 probe landed in that very same year of 1976. Were the Martians defending themselves? This may be a silly joke, but here comes HG Wells.

As many have remarked, “death rays” were a staple of science fiction long before the advent of lasers, even before Albert Einstein proposed the basic concept. In “The War of the Worlds” (1898), Wells gave the Martians a terrible heat ray.

“in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, … Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.”

How appropriate it is, then, than natural lasers were detected coming from Mars, and here’s the amazing detail: as they come from carbon dioxide gas lasers, they are lasers in the near infrared. They are invisible, and are the closest things to a heat ray. Wells was right.

Venus’ atmosphere also emits natural laser, also by the same mechanism, also in the infrared, and in fact there are proposals to help detect extrasolar planets exactly by looking for natural lasers.

So, there you have it, I was completely flabbergasted by nature, all the while assuming the laser was a human marvel when Mars and Venus atmospheres had been beaming not-so-terrible laser heat rays towards me my entire lifetime. HG Wells didn’t know about that, but his science fiction was so good it got that part somewhat right.

I promised this also involved alien abductions, and it does, even though it’s a tenuous connection. One of the episodes of the classic sci-fi series Outer Limits is “The Bellero Shield”, aired in 1964 shortly after the invention of laser.

The story involves a scientist who sends a powerful beam to space. An alien comes down the beam, using it as means of travelling, and among the many things he says, telepathically, he tells how “In all the universes, in all the unities beyond the universes, all who have eyes have eyes that speak."

This quote would be important because in an hypnosis session a few days later, Barney Hill, of the famous Hill alien abduction case, would say that the aliens who abducted him had “eyes that spoke”. Add that to the fact that the drawings he made of the alien are quite similar to the TV show alien, as you can see above (the sketches (L), the sci-fi alien (R)), and you get one amazing bit of psychosocial hypothesis applied to ufology by Martin Kottmeyer in “The Eyes that Spoke”.

One last thing, and this was just the last surprise I had. By reading the Laser Stars website, I recognized one name. Dr Donald H. Menzel was one of the pioneers to suggest laser action in atmospheres. If you know your ufology, Menzel was the also the pioneer UFO skeptibunker.

Mind. Blown. [with many thanks to Igor Zolnerkevic]