Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

Reddit user “mygrapefruit” colorized this iconic image, and the result is just great.

One could prefer the Watchmen alternative version, but can’t we appreciate them all? [via ReflectionOf.me]

Popularity: 7% [?]

Posted in Miscelaneous | 1 comment

Hint: look at the shoe, is that a right or left foot? [via pya.cc]

Popularity: 7% [?]

Posted in Miscelaneous | 11 comments

Experience 3D without the fuss of cumbersome glasses! According to an experiment by Jonathan Post presented by one Francois, all you have to do is stick some small gadgets to the side of your head, activate them with two remote controls and have your eyes electrocuted so that they blink frenetically in synchrony with the images in a display.

This is such a great prank, and it definitely is a prank – even if the system was real, no one would seriously propose such a thing, not even for “CES 2012”.

But is the system real, that is, did they manage to have someone blink that fast?

You may remember one of the pioneers of face electrocution on the web, Japanese artist Daito Manabe. On the video above he tries to reproduce the feat with his equipment, without success.

“With my device, muscle couldn’t move faster over 9Hz”, he writes. “Also it was impossible to open my eyes when blinking was too fast.”

Note that in the video description, Jonathan Post claims his device only works on 120Hz displays! Surely no one can blink 120 times per second. The eyes would just shut. Twitching your eyes and actually having them fully shut and open are different things.

Even assuming he had his eyes blinking at a fraction of that speed (60, 30, 15 Hz…), we would also have to wonder how he managed to electrically stimulate his eyelids with such tiny wireless devices, which besides strobing lights also happen to be synchronized with very polished remote controls. Controls that must be sending infrared signals – he points the RCs to the tiny things – so besides strobing lights and electrocuting your face, those tiny, tiny things are also supposed to have infrared sensors.

One could speculate that perhaps on the right spot and the right voltages, one could stimulate not only the eyelids to shut, as Manabe did, but also to open, and then one would be able to blink faster. But then, when you see the video, he simply puts the tiny things in the side of his head without much care of exactly where he was putting it.

This works too well and is too polished a thing for a “prototype”. But is exactly what you would expect if you wanted to simulate you had some gadgets electrocuting your eyelids. The remote controls are more appropriated for an air conditioner, the 120Hz value is probably a number he got from actual 3D display technologies.

I bet that the video was instead created with CGI. He is not actually blinking that fast.

So far the only thing we know from Jonathan Post is the video itself, and very soon he will reveal what he was actually promoting. More than a couple million views in three days… well deserved, as this is one more of those virals that make you laugh and then think.

Something short of an Ig Nobel.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Posted in Miscelaneous,Skepticism | 5 comments

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” – H.P. Lovecraft

The world is full of unexplained phenomena. Some of them seem unexplainable. And the unknown, the unexplained, the unexplainable, is not only uncomfortable, it’s a reminder of a world full of abysmal dangers which we can’t even imagine. As such, one would expect every conscious being would fear the unknown, the mysterious, as many do fear the dark.

Some of us however, this writer included, love mysteries. There’s a significant market for the unexplained and the occult. Well, there’s a market for horror movies, there’s a market for puzzles. But the fascination with the unknown despite its implicit horror can also be understood in other ways.

One of them is that the fear of the unknown can be fought with the mere illusion of knowledge. One can simply make up and, this is important, believe in an arbitrary explanation for the unexplained to stop being a nuisance, at least to our own minds. Believe those stories, have faith in those explanations,and the fear will be appeased. Is there a strange unexplained light in the sky? Oh, those are Zeta Reticulli spaceships showing off, part of the hybrid program. Or rather just swamp gas, simply ignore them. Either way, those who find and easy and certain answers to everything very probably don’t actually have an answer to everything, they just believe they do. They don’t actually love mysteries, but the explanations they think that answers them.

Mere faith can deal with the fear of the unknown, but it doesn’t actually deal with the issue, it can even aggravate it. It’s not very helpful to lose the fear of the unknown if we keep being as vulnerable and far from understanding the world in which we live. Fighting instead the fear of the unknown with the real light of knowledge is surely the most promising path, and it’s exactly one of the ways of defining that which we call Science. And the trust, one can even say faith in the success of this scientific endeavour is another way by which one can appreciate, and truly love a mystery.

Another great writer, Isaac Asimov, reminded how the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!‘ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny …‘. Every anomaly, every unexplained event, every UFO and Paranormal case may be the first requirement for a new, and better understanding of the Universe, for greater and better knowledge. The day there would be no unexplained thing left will be the day there will be no knowledge to gain. Science will have exhausted its purpose. We can be reasonably sure this day is still very distant, if it may ever come.

More than a body of knowledge, science is a way to acquire verifiable knowledge, one that not only appeases to our own fears, but those of any and everyone who faces the same phenomenon, be they Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, whether they believe in fairies, unicorns or Santa Claus. For the unknown to be dealt not with arbitrary faith, but with knowledge that can be tested and used.

Believing in a higher plan may offer some comfort amid a smallpox outbreak, but understanding it’s a contagious disease and proving it can be prevented by vaccination offers us real knowledge to appease our fears – and actually eradicate this terrible malady.

Not all scientists will embrace anomalies with excitement. Scientists are human beings attempting to practice science, and they do not always succeed. Even the most accomplished men and women of science will not be making scientific statements at every thing they say. It’s not being a scientist that makes what you do science, it’s making science that makes you a scientist.

Because science, as we emphasize, can be understood as the quest for knowledge that starts with the unknown. If you witnessed an unexplained phenomenon, it can be the first step towards a scientific contribution. Share what you found, in every possible detail, with the largest number od records – photos, videos, samples, witnesses. Some scientist may be interested. This author may be interested. Science and technology nowadays offer us tools to easily share information with a great number of people literally at our fingertips.

Do take into consideration, however, that after more than three centuries fighting the unknown with knowledge, we did find a lot of things out, and it’s very possible that the phenomenon you witnessed may be understood through the things we already know. Things we actually know, tested and apply every day of our highly technological lives. If a scientist sounds arrogant on telling you something can be explained in prosaic terms, think also if you, on rejecting his explanation, will not sound arrogant too, by contradicting not only the opinion of that scientist, but generations of thousands of people honestly trying to understand the unknown, just like you.

Science is more than a body of knowledge, but today it’s also a vast body of tested and verifiable knowledge. Are you really the first to face this phenomenon? Are you the only one to actually understand it? Or do the explanation you believe that answers this mystery seem more attractive than the mystery itself?

You may, after all, be correct. You may on the other hand be wrong, just as a scientist can be wrong, just as whole community of scientists may be wrong. Just as I may be wrong in the many explanations presented here in this not at all authoritative blog, as I actually was wrong in not so few of them.

Above all, what is proper is to fight the fear of the unknown through the search for real explanations that won’t depend on mere faith, that can be demonstrated for us all, believers or not, to better understand another small part of a world full of phenomena to comprehend. For the fear of the unknown to be faced upfront as an opportunity to expand that which is known.

For a mystery to be appreciated by what it is, and not by what we want to believe it is.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

Posted in Fortean,Science | 5 comments

Originally aired as coming from Berwick, the quite fascinating image of “something” has already come to light as actually coming from a property in the Antioch Community, Louisiana.

It was originally posted on Dec 2 by “Hillbilly Willi” over at Archery Talk, with the whole background story:

“Very freaky trail cam picture…. dont know what to think..? Don’t know what to think about this one fellers…. Went and checked my camera today and this is what it had on it…. The ground directly in front of my tree was completely tore up, the trail cam had been torn off the tree, straps were popped and everything. Camera was laying face down about 10 ft. from the tree it was attached too. Bark was knocked off the tree where the camera had been, like something had knocked it off while trying to twist camera off the tree. This was the only picture I got of "it" as I had it set on a 2 minute timer. The first picture is of "it", and the second is a picture from a lil while ago of the same spot, just for reference. Checking this right at dusk with a 3/4 mile walk out ahead of you will scare a feller….. When I saw it, my blood ran cold. Still gives me shivers…. What do you guys think??”

The image is a damn fine job, but the story is just terrible. And Hillbilly Willi made the mistake of posting along with it that second picture “just for reference”:

The mistake is on the date: the reference image is supposed to have been taken over a week before the freaky one, and yet, as forum members noted, the leaves in the small tree at left look exactly the same. This is actually evidence that the time lapse between the two images is very small – hours, perhaps even minutes or seconds – and the dates have been altered afterwards to go along with the story.

This is clear when we see three other reference images the same author shared afterwards, dated November 26 and 27, and those do have the leaves in different positions. Apparently on November 30, they returned to the exact same position they were nine days earlier.

Or these dates are simply bogus.

messing with the date on any camera is not per se evidence of hoaxing, but the third image shared by the author is also revealing because it shows him in the scene:

Which allows us to have some idea of scale, and what was the size of that creature if it was indeed real. And if it was indeed real, it wasn’t very big, as it looks almost half the size of “Hillbilly Willi”, with extremely thin arms.

Here too, there is a simple explanation that can be found on somewhat careless digital tampering. The creature is small not only because the author didn’t care very much in having it at the correct scale, but also because he must have used an image of a real deer to create his monster.

The texture, the size, length and width of the creature’s arms and body match those of a real deer, and it was by altering this real image that he got this level of creepiness. The arms were probably legs, and even the glowing eyes were copied and altered from real glowing deer eyes.

I made the comparison below, in the exact same scale, to highlight how the creature’s arms and overall texture matches those of a deer body and legs. In fact, the creature may have been created from another image of that exact same deer, as the leaves in both images suggest the time lapse between the two images — which are indeed two different images as the background is slightly different – is short.

That is, the terrible swamp monster may be simply an altered image of a deer.

But unless the author steps forward with details of the hoax, all we will have will be a story full of holes and a very dubious digital image.

Meanwhile, speculations are going around claiming this is part of a viral campaign either for the “Super 8” movie or “Resistance 3” videogame. The deer cam company, “Wildgame Innovations”, seems to be the profiting a lot from the case too, but none of these have been confirmed as the source for this.

From my part, I think this is just a prank from a hunter who also happens to be a talented graphic artist. He created his account on Archery Talk over a year ago, and posted his image more than a week before someone sent them to the TV station. He also doesn’t seem to capitalize on it for any movie or videogame.

Some have also been associating the image to this infamous 2007 clip:

Much as the “fallen angel” in this video looks like the Louisiana creature, this video was indeed part of a viral campaign, but for Diesel, having certainly nothing to do with this recent picture, except perhaps as an inspiration.

Night vision pictures are somewhat scary, something the Blair Witch project explored more than a decade ago. Even a common child may look somewhat creepy.

An altered image of a deer, then, will not take much to look like a scary monster. Kudos to Hillbilly Willi nevertheless, the image is actually quite fascinating.

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[via Wired Web, Cryptomundo, ArcheryTalk]

Popularity: 20% [?]

Posted in Criptozoology,Fortean | 13 comments