In a Tetherd Cow Ahead exclusive, we present for your scrutiny a shot of a SECOND mysterious missile launch over California in the space of a few days! This CowCam™ shot was captured just this morning and we present it to you here for the very first time! Yes folks, mysterious missile launches are all the rage in the US at the moment after this report on CBS News on Tuesday showed a ‘phantom’ missile being launched off the coast near LA:
Of course, not one of the hundreds of commercial news channels that uncritically ran the story managed to mention that the moving footage ((They mostly ran still images cherry picked for the most ‘missile-looking’ frames.)) shows it to be the slowest ‘missile’ in the known universe – if it was launched 35 miles off the coast that is, and is climbing skywards. Of course, there is the possibility that the ‘climbing plume’ was just an optical illusion and the missile was actually really high up in the atmosphere, at about, oh, 30,000 feet or so, and travelling along the path that a commercial jet might have used… oh, wait…
Idiots.
[I suppose it could be a Reticulan plot to ennhilate us…]
UPDATE: There is a totally brilliant deconstruction of the incident here. If you’re in any doubt after this, there might be a job in the US military for you.
It doesn’t matter what kind of goofiness you can imagine in your wildest flights of fantasy – there is always some woo-monger who can out-goofy you.
Dear oh dear. Where to start? OK, you may know that the current attempts to explain the quirky mathematical conundrums that are thrown up by modern physics lead to all kinds of unusual and counter-intuitive conjectures of how our actual reality manifests itself. One of these hypotheses calls for a situation where every conceivable possible consequence of every possible event is quite literally executed in one of an infinite number of alternate universes. I want to emphasize that this is just a mathematical speculation and there is no actual reason to think it’s anything more than an abstract concept. One thing is for certain – our feeble human brains don’t cope very well with strange ideas like this.
The problem is, Faithful Acowlytes, that even feebler human brains than yours or mine think they can understand this kind of thing. Or, at least, they want to convince other feeble-minded people that they do. Not only that, they also claim that they can somehow communicate with these multiple universes and by doing so fix things up for themselves in our own universe.
This useful trick is achieved using the technique of Quantum Jumping, the discovery of ‘The American Monk’ – one Burt Goldman, an 82 year old man who seems to have no real credentials other than as a purveyor of other different, but equally silly, flavours of flim-flam. Visiting the Quantum Jumping website is a frustrating and mind-numbing experience. It takes you several links to find out that the website itself is never going to give you any real indication of how the technique is supposed to work – but you do (naturally) have numerous opportunities to divest yourself of money. For your edification, as near as I can make out, this is Quantum Jumping in a nutshell:
1: Scientists ‘have proved’ that there are multiple universes.
2: In those multiple universes there are copies of you that are more successful/attractive/wealthy/happy than you are in this universe.
3: Somehow ((There’s no real detail ANYWHERE about how this is achieved. You have to pay for the DVDs/books to get this information. Numerous commenters on Burt Goldman’s websites claim that you don’t even get it when you pay, which doesn’t surprise me.)) you can get in touch with these ‘better’ versions of you, and, for reasons that are exceptionally unclear, they will reveal to you the secrets of their wonderful lives.
Of course, the real sleight-of-hand here comes underneath the term ‘quantum’; quantum stuff is weird, and therefore all bets are off and anything is possible. Never mind that the ‘logic’ of this concept leads to all kinds of unhappy paradoxes (One of these is that if it’s possible to alter this reality for the better, then it’s also equally possible to alter this reality for the worse. For every reality where there is a helpful ‘other self’ there’s one that’s malign and has every intention of doing you harm. How are you EVER going to tell the difference, eh?)
Mr Goldman claims that after employing the technique of Quantum Jumping he was able to accomplish the following feats:
•Started fine art painting (‘My artwork hangs in a museum to prove it’)
•Achieved status as a photographer (I got my photographs shown in multiple galleries throughout the US, Europe and Asia)
•Became a writer (Claims several books including Goodbye April Moon)
•Started a Million Dollar Online Business
Here is an example of Mr Goldman’s painting:
One has to speculate that the museum that it hangs in is, perhaps, in another universe. A universe where talentless artists get their work hung in museums.
Elsewhere you can read an excerpt of Mr Goldman’s book Goodbye April Moon, which is of a similar calibre, except with words. It seems like an awful shame to me that given the infinite number of possible universes and unlimited iterations of doppelgänger Burt Goldmans, the Miracle of Quantum Jumping could only manage to put him in contact with versions of himself that have aspired to achievements of monumental mediocrity. ((Of course it is possible that Burt Goldman is revered as an absolute GENIUS in another universe… this multiple universe thing is so damn convenient!)) His last claim to have ‘started a million dollar online business’ is possibly valid – it’s the business that gets people to fork out money for stupid and completely unfeasible self-improvement schemes like Quantum Jumping.
And, as is too often the case, Burt Goldman has a convenient disclaimer if Quantum Jumping doesn’t deliver the promised results. This, in his own words in a reply on his site:
No proof is necessary! Brilliant! He’s selling you something that may or may not work, and, if it doesn’t, he doesn’t have to explain why it should. It just doesn’t! Man, I wish I had his chutzpah.
One thing that was striking about trawling through Burt Goldman’s various sites is that the experience is eerily familiar. The endless screeds of utter twaddle, interspersed with blocks of exhortations in capital letters and promises that lead to more promises and deliver nothing at all, reminds me vividly of none other than our old friend Prophet Peter Popoff. Burt Goldman is like Peter Popoff without the God factor. An ‘alternate universe’ Peter Popoff, you might say. Unfortunately BOTH of them are in this universe.
I’ll end this post with one of the many stories that Mr Goldman tells on his site, and with a video from him on how you can improve your life simply by ‘tapping’. Yes, that’s right, tapping. Tapping on things. Ping.
I meditated until I was satisfied I was in alpha and then jumped into a parallel and got an impression of my alternate self. He obviously knew what I was there for and handed me a [propeller] beanie hat. I looked at the hat and asked what is it for. “Healing,†my twin self said. “Put it on and spin the propeller when you want to heal someone.â€
The image of Mr Goldman wearing a propeller beanie seems somehow astonishingly apposite. Imagine him wearing it throughout the following clip for best effect.
Happy tapping Cowpokes! I’m off to find the universe where people properly understand the words ‘quantum’ and ‘fractal’, and where Burt Goldman, Peter Popoff and Melissa Rogers are nothing more than characters in a fictional daytime soap opera. It has to be out there somewhere.
That example par excellence of stellar journalistic accomplishment The Melbourne Age, tells us this morning that iPods and iPads are nothing less than the Typhoid Mary of the looming global apocalyptic pandemic. Well, they stop just short of putting it exactly like that, but it is hard to understand why they’re running an article headlined ‘Apple Store Teeming With Germs’, if not to warn good citizens about the looming plague.
Because they surely wouldn’t be doing it just to bash Apple…
The story, if you haven’t guessed, is that demonstration models of the abovementioned devices on display in Apple stores, can transfer germs from one prospective customer to another – a concept that seems to send the journalist responsible for this rubbish (one Asher Moses) ((Well, I guess he’s not entirely responsible. Like pretty much all modern journalism it’s just a story recycled from somewhere else – in this case, The New York Daily News.)) into virtual paroxysms of hand-wringing. The article give us all kinds of ominous facts and figures, with commentary by various and sundry ‘experts’, about how iGadgets in Apple stores (mentioned solely and specifically) are contaminated with various kinds of icky bacteria. It’s all so very ewwwwww. ((It’s hardly surprising that the bacteria mentioned are in evidence – they are among the most common on the planet.))
In a further attempt to give the story credence, Mr Moses happily goes on to conflate a completely separate dataset with his speculation. He breathlessly inform us that Britain’s Which? magazine, in consultation with a ‘hygiene’ expert, examined a sample of 30 (unnamed brand) mobile phones and found that:
…the average handset carries 18 times more potentially harmful germs than a flush handle in a men’s toilet.
O.M.G!
Aside from the fact that a study like that (even if it is executed properly) is completely irrelevant to this story, ((Consider this – the flush handle in a men’s toilet is probably cleaned at least once a day, if not more frequently. It is NOT a good benchmark against which to measure anything except other things that get cleaned as frequently. It’s irrelevant in respect to phones (inasmuch as you could choose ANYTHING which doesn’t get cleaned much with which to compare it – tv remotes, say, or car keys) and it’s certainly meaningless in terms of iPads in Apples stores unless you have some kind of tangible link. This is a journalist using data recklessly and indiscriminately to attempt to add weight to an article that is lighter than The Zero.)) please to note the journalistic weasel word ‘potentially’ in that quote. Let me give you a Tetherd Cow Ahead rephrasing of that:
•Experts find that stairs are potentially life threatening!
•Experts find that water is potentially lethal!
•Experts find that newspapers are potentially dangerous to your mental health! (Oh wait. That’s true no matter how you look at it).
This stupid piece of scare-mongering fluff is a shining example of why I will be happy to see newspapers go the way of the town crier, and hopefully, their owners and editors hauled off by tumbrel. Honestly – what is the point of such a story?
Let me ask you, Mr Moses, why isn’t this piece about the thousands of other things that are touched by human hands in the course of a normal day? Like escalator handrails? Or lift buttons? Or money? Or salt shakers in McDonalds? Or ATMs? Or public phones? Or demonstration products belonging to other electronics goods retailers????
Could it be, perhaps, that the mileage you would get out of that might not be so… convenient… to your purpose of trashing a successful company that makes products that promise to be the biggest threat to your livelihood since the advent of television?
The Guardian reports today the shock horror story of the decade – if you’re a dedicated ‘horrorcore’ hip-hop fan, anyway.
It turns out that the Insane Clown Posse – those rapper doyens of the crass, the violent and the sexist – known for such moving lyrics as:
I stab people, 4, 5 people everyday
I tried to see a shrink to stop that shit but it ain’t no FUCKing way
…and:
I grabbed her by her neck
And I bounced her off the walls
She said it was an accident and then apologized
But I still took my elbow and blackened both her eyes
…and:
If I was a king all bitches would blow me
Big bag piles of jewels for my homies
We would go to war and take everybody’s land
No clothes allowed for female citizens
…have, all this time, been Evangelical Christians.
My mind flip-flops between being flabbergasted and entirely unsurprised. Flabbergasted because I find it hard to believe that people who call themselves Christians can write these kinds of things, and then unsurprised because I guess I can. And it’s not that the Juggalo ringleaders have suddenly had a Road to Damascus moment, either – they say that they’ve been Christians all along.
Apparently, their music is all just an act, cunningly crafted to sneak up on all those unsuspecting fans of theirs and deliver the message of God under the cover of necrophilia, dismemberment, rape and murder. Not since the Spanish Inquisition has morality been so deeply confused. ((My observation here is that if this is true, then they are treating the people that buy their music with the utmost disrespect – firstly, they are trading on being something that they are not in order to disseminate some dubious moral agenda, and secondly they think their audience is stupid. Which may be true, but doesn’t that just smack of cynical exploitation?!))
This is how Violent J (Joseph Bruce), one of the two figureheads of ICP, puts it:
To get attention, you have to speak their language. You have to interest them, gain their trust, talk to them and show you’re one of them. You’re a person from the street and speak of your experiences. Then at the end you can tell them God has helped me out like this and it might transfer over instead of just come straight out and just speak straight out of religion.
This was the same Violent J who was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in New Mexico. Apparently you need to physically show ‘them’ that you’re ‘one of them’ as well. That’s a slippery slope for which I wouldn’t want to attempt to mount a moral defense.
Recently, as part of their overt ‘coming out’ the Clowns released this video of their song Miracles, in which they apparently find everything miraculous, including UFOs, fog, and the Pyramids: ((How magnets, the Pyramids, UFOs and ghosts fall into the category of Miracles Wrought By God is kinda hard to fathom…))
It appears that they use the term miraculous here in a religious sense, rather than as hyperbole. In other words, they are rapping about all these ‘miracles’ as literal Works of God. The clue is the part of the lyric that says:
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
Yep, it’s those evil scientists at it again. As one science blogger has put it, the video
…is not only dumb, but enthusiastically dumb, endorsing a ferocious breed of ignorance that can only be described as militant. The entire song is practically a tribute to not knowing things.
I figured most people would say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know Insane Clown Posse could be deep like that.’ But instead it’s, ‘ICP said a giraffe is a miracle. Ha ha ha! What a bunch of idiots.’
Yeah, see, the problem is, Violent J, that your observations aren’t so much deep as breathtakingly banal…
Plant a little seed and nature grows
Niagara falls and the pyramids
Everything you believed in as kids
Fucking rainbows after it rains
there’s enough miracles here to blow your brains
… and, to be frank, it’s terrible music to boot – the rap in this song is possibly the worst I’ve ever heard. Take away the trademark in-your-face offensiveness and Insane Clown Posse just have nothing at all to offer.
As it stands, for all their ghetto posturing and murderous carnival grotesquerie, I say that the Insane Clown Posse are nothing more than Insipid Clown Pussies. It takes guts to look the universe squarely in the face and endure all the uncomfortable consequences of the realization of the measure of your insignificance. ((Conversely, it takes no guts at all to beat up a woman, and it follows that to write a ‘song’ about doing so is the work of a very tiny soul indeed. Don’t spin me your ‘whatever it takes to get the Lord’s message through’ bullshit, you hypocrites.)) Religion, especially the brains-on-the-floor flavour of religion offered by Evangelical Christianity, is the ultimate avoidance of facing up to reality. It says, in no uncertain terms, that if you trust everything to God, all will be hunky dory. It’s the easiest of cop-outs for a difficult challenge. In this respect, ((…and possibly others, it has to be said – pardon my cynicism.)) then, it is less confronting to discover that the members of the Insane Clown Posse are Christians, than it would have been to have heard they were philosophers, atheists or scientists.
If you answered wooooooooooooo… to the title question, then you were entirely correct! Yes that’s right – today’s post features woo and sound, two of my most favourite subjects.
It was only a matter of time before someone realised that there was a niche for an ‘alternative’ medical treatment based on sound. Today on The Cow, I will examine one such treatment ((Oh yes, there are many more than just one. Perhaps I will cover Tama-Do at some later stage…)) – something named Human Bioacoustics, the amazing cure-all featured on a site called NutraSounds. ((Oh dear. Already with the dumb.)) Human Bioacoustics was created by a personage named Sharry Edwards™, ((Yes, that’s right, she’s trademarked her name.)) who claims that her process ‘has unlimited health and wellness potential.’ Unlimited! Human Bioacoustics can make you weller than well!
BioAcoustics Voice Spectral Analysis can detect hidden or underlying stresses in the body that are expressed as disease. The vocal print can identify toxins, pathogens and nutritional supplements that are too low or too high. In addition, vocal print can be used to match the most compatible treatment remedy to each client. The introduction of the proper ((If you don’t do it ‘properly’, it won’t work…)) low frequency sound to the body, indicated through voice analysis, has been shown ((By whom?)) to control ((‘Control’? What does that mean?)): pain, body temperature, heart rhythm and blood pressure. It has also been shown to regenerate body tissue ((Body tissue regenerates anyway. This means nothing.)) and alleviate ((Alleviate? In what way?)) the symptoms of many diseases (in some cases, even those considered to be incurable). ((Note the equation of the symptoms with the disease itself – a common ploy of pseudoscentific medicine))
Oh yes, there it is! Gobbledigook piled on balderdash layered on crapola. I’ve given you a helping hand with the shifty language and vague promises. I wonder why the disclaimer that is hidden away at the bottom of the NutraSound pages in very small print isn’t placed in slightly closer proximity to the above paragraph?
Disclaimer: Human BioAcoustics, as originated by Sharry Edwards, M.Ed., does not diagnose or prescribe for medical or psychological conditions nor does it claim to prevent, treat, mitigate or cure such conditions. HBA researchers do not provide diagnosis, care, treatment or rehabilitation of individuals, nor apply medical, mental health or human development principles.
Hmm. On the one hand Human Bioacoustics cures everything and then, somehow, when it comes down to a real-world, write-your-name-here-in-blood guarantee, it doesn’t. Is Ms Edwards a little nervous about getting her ass sued off, one wonders? She certainly isn’t shy of making unsubstantiated claims though. In big bold print on her bio page:
Edwards was named scientist of the year in 2001 for her work in BioAcoustic Biology.
Really? Scientist of the Year! Very impressive! That’s not something you could just make up! Let’s see what teh internets have to say about that! Oh, right, here it is. The award was presented to her by a body called the International Association of New Science. Funny… all those links are either dead or seem to point back to organizations with which Sharry Edwards™ has affiliations. She was given the award by her pals! ((Searching on International Association of New Science turns up some frightening crosslinks. The IANS appears to have been concocted by Dr Brian O’Leary a UFO ‘expert’ and Cleve Backster, who is quite famous for writing books about communicating with plants. The frightening part is that the IANS name also appears in conjunction with legitimate research into climate change. These people are being given government money for their idiotic beliefs… If you follow the links even further, it’s worse – there are ties to the whole anti-vaccination hoodoo and a whole other world of medical stupidity.)) Elsewhere she claims that all her work is peer reviewed. I think she is (obviously purposely) conflating the concept of scientific peer review (which is a strenuous intellectual process designed to weed out errors and bad science) with the idea that you get a few of your ‘peers’ to peruse what you’re doing and give you the thumbs up. ((This is what really gets my goat with these kinds of people – they shamelessly trade on the credentials that genuine science affords, while simultaneously bashing all its accomplishments as worthless. If you adopt science, you adopt science. Play properly by its rules, not by some airy fairy ones that you make up yourself! Otherwise, stay off its turf and name yourselves as the magic peddlers that you really are.))
(By this logic, you, my Faithful Cowpokes, could all agree that I was Scientist of the Year and I could boast that on Tetherd Cow! In fact, what a good idea – I need a few endorsements so that I too can plaster it across my banner! Feel free to wax lyrical!)
The phenomenal power of Human Bioacoustics is completely free to all and sundry in the form of the nanoVoice™ ((Yep, Ms Edwards has her whole racket trademarked up the wazoo.)) program, software which is, sadly, only available for PC. ((Well, technically it could be installed under Virtual PC on my Mac, apparently, but I ain’t running VPC just for this piece of crap.)) Of course, you can only freely download the ‘micro’ version – you have to pay (surprise) for the real deal. ((Curious, when the organization that produces it boasts that it is ‘non profit’…)) nanoVoice ‘uses frequency-based biomarkers within the frequencies of your voice to allow you an enlightening peek into your Secret Self.’
I bet you didn’t even know you had ‘frequencey-based biomarkers’ hidden inside your voice. I certainly didn’t and I’ve been working as a professional sound person for thirty years.
This is how it works, as near as I can make out from reading about it: you load a recording of your voice into the program and it analyzes the ‘frequencies’ ((There are those goddamned frequencies again. Teh woo just loves the vibrations and the frequencies!)) and spits out a bar graph in a rainbow of colours. Here’s what the colours supposedly mean (click to get the full chart):
Gee, now what do all those vague waffly non-specific phrases remind me of… oh, that’s it – the local paper’s astrology section! There are some classic howlers:
Yellow (E): ‘uses words first to convey messages and meaning’
Oh yeah, like that’s not going to apply to everyone except mute people.
Green/Blue (G): ‘likes to mix and manage the physical aspects of life’
What? That could mean just about ANYTHING.
Blue (G#): ‘wants to make a difference’
Oh please.
The colours are also arbitrarily tied to various kinds of organs and body parts. When I say ‘arbitrarily’ I mean that there is absolutely no scientific substantiation to say that, for example, the colour green has anything to do with your kidneys, or that the colour blue ‘retrieves nutrients from your bowel’. This is just utter, unmitigated hogwash. And Sharry Edwards™ knows it, or else she wouldn’t have put the comprehensive disclaimer on her site. ((I’m sure she justifies the disclaimer by saying that she ‘was forced to do it’ by the ‘system’ which ‘persecutes her for her beliefs’. A song that we’ve heard many times before.))
For an example of nanoVoice’s extraordinary powers of deduction, you can amuse yourself by visiting an analysis of Mr Mel Gibson’s phone ‘conversation’ with his estranged wife Oksana Grigoreiva, in which he uses bad language, racist terms and is generally an obnoxious prat. I want to say two thing here: first of all, the pages of unbelievable rubbish that you will find here could be attributed to just about anyone, viz:
You have an unusual sense of time. Not having all the information needed to make a decision stresses you. Your reputation is very important to you. You will go to great lengths to protect it. It is important to you that spirituality be a part of everyday life. You think that feeding the mind is just as important as feeding the body. You are aware of how painful thoughtless words can be. You push yourself and others to finish the job. You love new ideas that mean you can have a project to work on. A sense of belonging is important to you.
… and secondly, these ‘frequency’ analyses were made from a telephone recording. To someone like me who knows anything about sound, this constitutes the epitome of ridiculousness. Telephones severely restrict the frequencies of voices, in order to squeeze intelligibility down the lines. Ms Edwards is asking us to believe that her software uses inherent voice ‘frequencies’ to make its divinations, but is simultaneously independent of frequency restrictions. It is the utmost peak of buffoonery. Not only that, it demonstrates without any equivocation, that Sharry Edwards is completely ignorant about how sound works. ((Oh, I’m sure she’d come up with some piece of silliness to ‘explain’ how she can get readings from a telephone conversation – I’d be disappointed if she couldn’t!))
Like many similar pseudoscientific concepts, Human Bioacoustics uses as its basic modus operandi the general ignorance of most people in a specific field of expertise. Few people understand how sound works, but to someone like me who does, Human Bioacoustics, nanoVoice, ‘vocal profiling’ and the ‘Institute of Bioacoustic Biology’ look about as convincing as a pig in a tuxedo.
When I’m at home in my normal life, I don’t watch much tv, but living in LA without my family commitments I do end up with the odd spare half hour at the end of my day that needs to be filled with a little mindless distraction. And if mindless distraction is what you’re after, American television excels. For some reason ((I think it’s some vestige of a long-dashed hope that someday, somewhere, someone might actually make a decent science fiction movie – you know, one that is actually intelligent… Maybe that’s just too much to hope for.)) my brain is drawn to what used to be known as the Sci Fi Channel, but has recently been idiotically re-branded as SyFy. Judging by what SyFy dishes up, I can only assume this naff baby-speak appellation has been applied as an opening gambit in a profit-inspired move to drift the channel away from science fiction programming into a domain that consists of, well, anything that can be loosely assembled under the heading of ‘Crap’.
It’s a category which is headlined by one of SyFy’s own creations, Fact or Faked. Paranormal Files. ((It REALLY annoys me that there is no question mark after the ‘Faked’. If it’s not a question and is just a statement, why do we need a tv show, you morons?)) The premise of the show is this: a bunch of ‘experts’ review a selection of videos sent in each week by viewers, and then pick their favourites to ‘investigate’. The opening credit sequence, weighty with overblown seriousness, introduces us to the members of the intrepid Fact or Faked team:
Ben: Former FBI Agent
Bill: Lead Scientist
Jael: Journalist
Larry: Special Effects Expert
Chi Lan: Photography Expert
Austin: Stunt Expert
Call me shallow, but the very first time I watched the program I took an instant dislike to both Chi Lan and Jael – the former because she’s an opinionated airhead and the latter because I hate her name. Larry is basically an overly-serious nerd, Austin is a gullible prat and Ben looks like he was roped into the whole debacle against his wishes ((No doubt so the producers could flaunt his FBI credentials…)) and is constantly planning his escape from the show.
But you will have sensed that I have saved my vitriol for Bill, the ‘scientist’. Simply put, Bill is an idiot. He is certainly not a scientist in any meaningful sense of the word.
In an effort of forbearance I will refrain from further description of the dumbness of the show itself, and instead just concentrate on a story that was on last night and one that I think demonstrates the full credentials of this team, who must surely all be card-carrying alumni of Scooby Doo University.
The story in question concerns a phenomenon called the Paulding Light Mystery. A video from YouTube shows a tree-lined hill with a bright light waxing and waning in a dusk sky. A ten second long grab (which Fact or Faked repeats over and over) features a mysteriously appealing visual effect as the light is refracted by atmospheric conditions or possibly some kind of lens aberration.
The Facts: If you go to a certain spot just outside the town of Paulding, Michigan, and look toward the south after dusk, you may see, depending on the weather conditions, a bright light just on the top of the tree line. The light may vary in brightness and duration and even sometimes in colour. It is an unusual phenomenon in the annals of the paranormal, in that the light appears quite reliably, with a frequency that has allowed a bit of a tourist industry to have risen around it. In other words, if you visit Paulding, there’s a pretty good chance that you too can see the light.
The Myth: The Paulding Light is said to be the spirit of a dead railway signalman who was crushed to death while trying to warn an oncoming train about another train stalled on the tracks ahead.
So there you have the setup. Let me try and give you some idea of how the Fact or Faked crew typically proceed when investigating something like the Paulding Light.
Dusk approaches. Jael, Austin and Bill have been assigned to this story. They arrive in their Scooby Doo Mystery Machine with a fully decked-out Paranormal Investigation Kit: gas sensors, Geiger counter, FLIR camera system, walkie talkies and a two-person mini all-terrain vehicle. People are already milling about in anticipation of being on television an appearance of the mysterious light.
To fill in some time the team does a couple of vox pops. First of all they badger some poor old lady into saying that she thinks that, yes, the Light is the spirit of the dead signalman. Her demeanour is less ‘genuine conviction’ than ‘How much are you going to pay me?’ Next, a rotund geeky chap steps up to the camera and says that, in his opinion, the Paulding Light might simply be car headlights. Uh-oh. A sensible person! Quick! Cut away to Austin leaping into the ATV – the Light has appeared!
This is as close as Fact or Faked ever comes to presenting anything like a balanced point of view.
The members of the Fact or Faked team then set about deploying their peculiar notion of what constitutes ‘science’ in an attempt to find an explanation for the phenomenon. In this show, Jael and Austin head off to the place where they assume the Light ‘must be’ and traipse around in the dark with the Geiger counter and the gas detector arriving at the conclusion that the Light isn’t produced by radioactivity or swamp gas. Around now I start throwing things at the television. Of course it isn’t, you pillocks – even the most obtuse of dunderheads could make a quick assessment of that theory and throw it out the window. It is obvious that you’d need a mighty outpouring of gas or nuclear energy to generate something as bright as the video shows – that’s not the kind of thing that goes undetected for 40 years. ((These people plainly haven’t got a clue about how nuclear fission works. The amount of radioactivity generated by something that could create a light as bright as the Paulding Light would have contaminated everything within several hundred miles. The lame Ghostbusters-style traipsing-around-in-the-dark-with-a-Geiger counter is nonsense of the highest order.))
Nitwits.
Austin then heads off to a local airport and, with an ultra bright electric torch, ((Now THIS is impressive – 25 million candlepower, according to Austin. Mind you, since ForF plays loose and fast with the facts everywhere else, I’m not sure we can take his word for it. This of course is one of the problems with a show like this – if there are actually any facts present, they get swamped under the tide of make-believe, rendering everything questionable…)) attempts to duplicate the phenomenon by getting a pilot in a light plane to fly low over the area in question. Well, it does make a bright light in the sky, but it’s plainly not the ground-level geographically fixed light that everyone is seeing. How is it that I don’t need to fly around in a plane to figure out that this is also not a plausible contender?
Then the team (grudgingly it seems to me) get down to the most frequently offered explanation for the Paulding Light – that it’s caused by car headlights from either US Highway 45, or the old Highway 45. They choose a segment of the highway that they have deemed the likely place for car headlights to be the culprit and Austin and Jael use their television credentials to get the cops to block off the road. They then drive back and forwards while communicating with Bill back at Sighting Central. Not a sausage. Bill can’t see them.
Instead of even contemplating that the spot they’ve chosen might actually be the wrong stretch of the road, the team hastily dismisses the car headlight explanation. Then, conveniently, before anyone can raise a finger in objection, the Paulding Light has reappeared. Now, with no explanation that satisfies the Fact or Faked ‘professionals’, it falls to Bill to suggest the next course of action.
I want to pause here for a moment and remind you that Bill is featured as the ‘lead scientist’ of this show. Are you containing that concept in your minds? Right then, lets forge on.
So, what is the best scientific strategy that Bill, lead scientist of Fact or Faked, can come up with at this juncture? I hope you don’t snort whisky out your nose like I did, when you learn that Bill’s suggestion is that they try EVP. ((You may remember that I discussed EVP at length on The Cow some time ago, including my personal experiences with it.)) Yes, that’s right, having ‘thoroughly exhausted all possibilities’, Bill, the scientist, determines that they should attempt to contact the Spirit World to find out more about the restless wraith of the phantom signalman. The next few minutes of the show, with Austin, Jael and Bill wandering around the Ottawa State Forest attempting to coax the spirit of a dead railway worker to leave a message on their audio recorders must rank as one of the most risible things I’ve ever witnessed on television. The Scooby Doo-ers seemed genuinely deflated when their recordings turned up nothing.
Jesus H Christ. What kind of dimwitted, brainless lunacy are these people peddling?
And that was where the show ended. With every single scientific explanation exhausted and without any spirit communications from the Ghostly Signalman to set the record straight, as far as Fact or Faked. Paranormal Files is concerned, the Paulding Light remains a total and unfathomable mystery…
The End.
So utterly unconvinced was I by the team’s findings that I immediately leapt from the couch and did what any sensible modern person would do – I searched for the full YouTube clip of the Paulding Light from which Fact or Faked clipped the brief segment that they used on the show.
I’ve embedded it below for your viewing pleasure. Just listen to the credulous amazement of the onlookers as they gaze upon the perplexing riddle of the Paulding Light! Ponder on why Fact or Faked chose to present to their audience the very small snippet at the head of the clip, rather than a bit at, oh, around about the 1 minute mark. Indeed – listen to someone on the audio track at around 3:15, tell you EXACTLY WHAT THE PAULDING LIGHT IS (as if you need to be told by that point because to any normal rational person it’s as obvious as a pig at a christening).
But heck – view the clip and make up your own mind about what the ‘mysterious’ Paulding Light might be: the spectre of a dismembered signalman? A nuclear explosion? Too much gas? I’m pretty sure you’re not going to come to the same conclusion as the insightful investigators from Fact or Faked.
