Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

Have you ever heard the sound of heat? In a way that’s what you can hear with the curious Rijke Tube, an effect discovered by Dutch physicist P.L. Rijke in 1859.

Consisting of nothing more than a long tube open at both ends in which a red hot wire gauze is introduced, the sound is very loud: in the demonstration above by Yoshiaki Watanabe of Doshisha University, Japan, they got 160dB, “equivalent to the sound coming from 100 aircraft engines”, he says. From a simple red hot wire gauze.

The sound comes from a self-amplifying standing wave formed by the interaction of the air heated by the gauze and the fundamental frequency of the tube. It was first explained by Lord Rayleigh in 1879, and the understanding means the Rijke tube can produce a continuous deafening sound by heating the gauze with an electrical resistance.

You can also change its frequency by adjusting the tube’s length, and I wonder if a Rijke tube organ was ever made – a Google search sadly didn’t turn anything like it. The principle also has more practical applications in combustors that can burn more efficiently – and yes, they hum too.

But did I just write that the Rijke tube was discovered by Rijke in 1859? Because actually the effect is being reproduced for quite a long time in the Japanese Narukama Shiji ritual. In this old tradition, the priests heat a bamboo rice pot and when they remove the top, something quite extraordinary happens.

Well, not that extraordinary if you already know the Rijke tube without all the ritual. Fact is, the rice pot “sings”, and a strong and long sound is interpreted as a good sign (more details, in Japanese, here). Certainly a rice pot shouting “Ooooo…” must be good.

The priests, unsurprisingly, didn’t speak of self-amplifying standing sound waves, but rather attributed the sound to the spirits and gods. If you look at how the rice pot is made, however, you will see all the elements of the Rijke tube. Lord Rayleigh didn’t know that he wasn’t only explaining the effect described by his Dutch fellow twenty years before, he was also shedding light into an age-old ritual practiced thousands of miles away and which people interpreted as divine voices. How else would they explain it?

But this is not only the story of science clarifying mysteries and bringing knowledge to the world. One must credit these priests who managed to notice the effect long ago and even turned it into a ritual, without understanding exactly how or why it worked.

We already blogged about the Mpemba effect, described by Aristotle (!), then Francis Bacon (!) and even René Descartes (!), but ignored by science until it was rediscovered in 1963 by Tanzanian high-schooler (!!!) Erasto Mpemba. But we don’t even have to go to these varied phenomena, we can stay with sound, because the Ancient Greeks did a magnificent work in the Epidaurus theater. And is there a better way to show how amazing it is that 14,000 spectators could hear the play in this +2,300 years old theater than Rickrolling?

See how distant the Rickrollers are. The acoustics is amazing, and all sorts of explanations were given throughout history, from the shape of the theater to the winds or maybe even… spirits. It was only recently, very recently, though, that it was understood by a team of the Georgia Institute of Technology that the secret is in the seats. The limestone seats act as an acoustics filter that eliminates the low-frequency background noises while also reflecting the high-frequency noises of the actors towards the spectators.

Alas, the Ancient Greeks didn’t get what was happening and were unable to reproduce the Epidaurus acoustics elsewhere. The fact they did it by accident is amazing by itself. Thousands of years without science didn’t stop people from accidentally stumbling upon complex effects that science itself would take a long time to catch up with. Forteans already know this, and well, it is very true.

It’s highly improbable that an integrated circuit, or even a transistor, would emerge by accident without science. There’s only so much you can go blindfolded, even if you can go somewhere. And even if science takes a long time to catch up, when it does it usually goes way beyond the mere puzzled contemplation of the effect or the association with unpredictable (and inexistent) gods and spirits. The effect is reproduced, understood and applied.

As scientists should perhaps look more seriously to anecdotal stories and old superstitions for the possibility they still hide unusual and perhaps complex effects so far ignored, Fort should not have been so dismissive of established science. Fortunately, most of the contemporary Forteans embrace the scientific method with more enthusiasm.

Cumulative knowledge may advance more slowly, but it’s cumulative, and after a few centuries we have actually reached far beyond the wildest powers of ancient gods. You can reproduce the Rijke tube with rice or metal pellets and three tin cans. A strong and long sound will be the sign you reproduced an interesting physical effect, and understanding it, a prediction that you are on your way to better appreciating the world around you for all the beautiful and unexpected complexities it has.

Whitley Strieber called attention to two videos of “identical and extremely bizarre living forms have emerged from two different countries. Both show odd ‘stick figures’ that look nothing like any ‘alien video’ ever made. One was taken in Fresno, California [above] and the other in Santa Rosa de Quives near Lima, Peru [below].”

To Strieber, “the extremely bizarre nature of the figures and the way they move are so strange, and so completely unlike anything that has ever been offered before as “alien video,” the suggestion is strong that these are real images of unknown bipedal creatures, whose body morphology is so radically different from what has evolved on earth that the conclusion is almost inescapable that they are aliens”.

He does suggest, however, that they could be digital hoaxes. Greg Bishop at UFOMystic also suggests so. Keep reading for our ordinary investigations, with more stick figure aliens and some evidence to solve at least some of them.

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“I’ve actually had that exact experience of a light on a hill looking like a UFO, when driving along the Oregon coast near Tillamook. There was an enormous glowing object in the sky–not just a light, but a massive floating disk–and my mother and I drove toward asking each other "What on earth IS that?" for a good half hour. UFOs started to seem a lot more plausible, even to a skeptic like myself. Eventually I realized that it was the gigantic letter "G," which sits on a hillside over the town of Garibaldi, and which is apparently lit up brilliantly at night. But if I hadn’t known the G was there, and if I never went back? I’d probably still be thinking that I’d narrowly escaped the alien mothership on the Oregon Coast…” [Comment by Ursula Vernon]

Ursula made that comment on Jim Macdonald’s article proposing a very interesting explanation for what Betty and Barney Hill saw.

Whether Macdonald’s suggestion was what the Hills actually saw we may not be so sure, but surely the Giant flying G is a nice story. Fellow Manuel Borraz, who called attention to this nice piece, says it’s probably the first known case of an almost Unidentified G. It reminds me of Smoo.

To the believers, please do not be offended by any of this. I don’t mean to claim or even suggest all UFOs and aliens sightings have explanations such as these. These are in fact rare funny cases, and we must be allowed to laugh at them as such.

[Both images of the Garibaldi G from Colin’s Picasa. More on the history of that G here.]

Now, isn’t that so obviously a Stegosaur? But it’s a carving from the Ta Prohm temple, located in the Cambodian jungle and built c. 1186. The first Stegosaurus fossil was only found in Colorado, USA, in 1876. Stegosaurs were extinct some 140 million years ago. And the one in that carving is all fleshy. It was a living creature.

Creationists are all excited about the carving, “amazing evidence that dinosaurs and humans coexisted” (with many photos). Dinosaurs were actually all extinct millions of years before the first humans, and they only lived together in the Flintstones – unless, of course, you consider that some dinosaurs evolved into birds.

So, many skeptics doubt the carving is authentic, assuming it’s a modern restoration, perhaps like the Salamanca Astronaut. It’s the easy answer.

But apparently, it’s really there, and it’s not a modern addition. Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman was intrigued. And wondered if “perhaps it is nothing more than a rhinoceros?”.

“Fish Head Salad”, makes a very convincing case that it is indeed just a rhino, with a decorative background: Modern Day Stegosaurus?

I side with the rhino interpretation.

Rock carvings of Dinosaurs among men are more famous in the Ica stones version. Creationists are also excited about them, including what seems like a great illustrated book cover.

Did I say that the book cover is amazing? Because it is.

Too bad they are not even honest mistakes like the Cambodian Rhino-Stegosaur. The Ica stones are just plain hoaxes. More info, in Portuguese, including photos of one of the makers of the Ica stones in O Legado dos Flintstones.

And let’s not mention the Acámbaro figures. [via Anomalist]

The photo is very real: this giant stingray may be the largest freshwater fish ever recorded. With an estimated weight between 550 to 990 pounds (250 to 450 kilograms), the image was captured as part of a National Geographic Society expedition in Thailand.

The stingray measuring around two meters in diameter was released later. Its tail was missing, and Zeb Hogan, Biologist from the University of Nevada, estimated its size with it could have reached 5 meters.

As part of the Megafishes Project, Hogan had already recorded last year a stingray four-meters long in Chachoengsao. And NatGeo has the video (the giant stingray appears near the end):

These giant stingrays were first described scientifically as recently as 1989, and the expedition and project are part of an effort to better understand, protect and preserve them.

Upon seeing these colossal stingrays, I couldn’t help but remember the infamous Garadiavolos, made from stingrays exploiting the fact their underside nostrils look like eyes, which along with its mouth give them a sort of pseudoface.

And I wonder how eerie the sighting of a giant stingray may be at night. Something like a Ningen. Fortunately – at least for the faint-hearted – as far as is known, they only survive in freshwater. And even if they survive in the sea, as can be seen in the videos they are not particularly dangerous, apart from their sting, of course. Notoriously, a stingray killed “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin in 2006.

Contrary to the illustration above, you can check real images of giant stingrays, via Google clicking below:

[Above from ketessestars]