Concealing major secrets by unleashing a ton of nonsense that people find it hard to wade through is a pretty useful trick.
It’s also what annoys me about alternative medicine. Like, I can’t discount 100% of it, because willow bark (from which we get aspirin) worked on headaches before we investigated WHY it worked, and figured out a better way to process it. And it took ages for people to appreciate how washing your hands can kill the invisible things that are making you sick.
And apparently there is one guy in the world who is actually affected by cell phone signals, enough to make him pass out, and it’s not psychosomatic (since it happens when he has no clue there’s one nearby), so he has to live off in the wilderness where there aren’t any, and trying to investigate the problem is necessarily difficult due to not being able to go to a regular doctor in town, etc.
So things that we don’t understand yet are still real, prior to us understanding the mechanics. BUT the few alternative medicine claims that are real are snowed under a giant layer of B.S. that can’t possibly be doing anything useful.
Except, the correct mindset to deal with B.S. (“that sounds ridiculous and doesn’t mesh with our understanding of basic science”) is how some other discoveries were pushed aside until someone actually investigated them. Sometimes our understanding of science needs to upgrade (e.g. the “light is both a wave and a particle” thing, or quantum mechanics in general), and sometimes our intuition is way off base (like how humans are terrible at intuiting statistical realities). And sometimes humanity makes some crucial errors of logic (like how “radium can be used to treat cancer” got extrapolated to “radium is Magic Awesome, drink this radium juice, oh wait it gave you cancer”).
Incidentally, look up The Poisoner’s Handbook on YouTube. It’s an eye-opening (and sometimes horrific) view of the evolution of toxicology in the 19th century.
Yeah, alt.medicine is made worse by Snake Oil Salespeople. “100% organic snakes that only died of natural causes.” But the charletans out there obscure the truth, in their lust to rip us off.
Gah! Lying about medicine, and dont even mention Purdue Pharma near me.
The utter irony with snake oil, from where the term originated, is it actually does work as a topical muscle relaxant and there are modern products that use the specific compounds.
The term came about by the actual charlatans to demonise actual products so they could sell their faux wares.
The Philadelphia Experiment would be a pretty poor cover story for the Manhattan Project, considering it was completely unknown until Morris Jessup received the Carlos Allende letters on the topic in 1955.
Most likely, it was just degaussing (neutralization of a ship’s magnetic field to reduce vulnerability to magnetic mines), as seen through the lens of third-hand stories and mental illness. That, combined with ships “teleporting” as a lighthearted cover for the semi-secret use of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in quickly moving of military ships between Philadelphia and Norfolk.
I had not heard the degaussing theory. The one I like is that they were attempting to make the ship invisible *to radar* by surrounding it with some sort of E/M plasma. It worked as far as it went, but electronic gear blew out and there were places (nodes?) where you could get sliced to ribbons, leading to panic, leading to a horror show, leading to nothing anyone ever wanted to talk about again.
Sounds like you watched something off the Trey the Explainer channel. He makes a lot of videos debunking cryptids. He also makes some great paleontology videos.
“I think Bigfoot is blurry, that’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that’s extra scary to me. There’s a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.” — Mitch Hedberg
The most rational explanation that I have ever seen.
I think Harry Turtledove has it right: if Sasquatches existed, they would have moved out of the forest centuries ago and one would be a governor of a Pacific Coast state (we like to elect tall people to high office).
Personally, the world is so very large, and there’s proof that there used to be multiple members of the genus Homo out there that I can’t discount that there might be isolated populations of non-human homonids which are smart enough to avoid humanity deliberately. And there’s so many stories from so many places (skunk-ape, sasquatch, bigfoot, Yeti, Man-of-the-Mountain)…
The lack of evidence points the other direction, of course (since it’s unlikely that dedicated searchers wouldn’t stumble across campsites with spoor, hair or other verifiable signs), but again, the world is so very, very large and difficult to traverse in the places where sasquatch roam.
Then again, it could just be particularly hairy hippies, mutants, or isolated members of other great-ape species (like Man-of-the-Mountain is basically Orangutans).
Even fifty years ago, I decided it was pretty unlikely that bigfoot was real, but yet no one had ever found a body, a grave site, or even a thigh bone or jaw. (Many extinct species were discovered from a single fossil bone. A jaw with teeth is especially useful in species identification, but a hominid thigh bone could be definitive, if it was too big to be human and found in an area without large apes.) There’s also the factor that people just like a wild tale better than the boring truth – for example, crazy tales about yetis get repeated far more often than the one about the scientist that examined a yeti hide and identified it as the Himalayan bear.
These days, all you need is a tuft of hair caught on a thorn or a feces sample, and a DNA analysis will prove whether it’s a known species and show which species it is most closely related to. There are probably hundreds of unidentified rodent species, and hundreds of thousands of unidentified arthropods, but there’s very little space left for something as big as Sasquatch to hide.
Well he’s not saying what’s in the airplane hangar or what the turbine was attached to. He’s probably rehearsed, doesn’t have clearance to the full story, and telling the truth as much as he’s been told.
That could also be tact on Agent Brown’s part. After all, while it wasn’t a scientific dissection, Benny’s father *was* killed (apparently in front of him? I know it was a family picnic). Benny has reason to know humans will cut up what they don’t understand.
My favorite is how the Roswell crash actually was a weather balloon… designed to do classified things.
It’s been declassified now, but at the time it would have been a problem to admit that we had weather balloons that were able to spy on Russia (and anyone else) by taking high altitude samples and figuring out the exact geographic position of any nuclear test that anyone did (or something like that). There was a treaty against it at the time, which is why it couldn’t be admitted publicly, and the idea of aliens is so much more exciting than weather balloons.
I used to think it was some sort of top secret military aircraft that crashed… although I suppose in the end that’s sort of what it actually was.
Sure, Area 51’s an empty airplane hangar -now-. They emptied it of all the interesting stuff decades ago, whatever it happened to be, and now it’s all somewhere else. Area 51’s just a distraction these days.
Area 51 is an airfield with multiple runways including a 3 mile long one graded into a dry lake bed. Since the USSR discovered it back in the early ’60s most of the aircraft were moved to bomb-resistant hangars back in the mountains that require taxiing for miles to get to the runways. This is visible by Google Earth.
It’s not entirely empty. They have been expanding it in recent years. Probably doing late-stage aircraft testing for designs they’re ready to announce to the public, so any intel leaks from spying on the site wouldn’t be worth much.
I imagine that, nipped in the bud at simply glowing eyes, it might be a passable half-truth to just dismiss it as a form of bioluminescence or infection that some Sarnothi exhibit. Like it’s the Sarnothi equivalent of pink-eye or something and that if they strain, it increases blood flow to the eyes and the bacteria fluoresce.
So, the key people they need cooperating with this are:
– Mina, who needs to be told the truth. Right now she is alarmed, and warily asking Todd what’s going on. If she understands what’s at stake she will cooperate, because she cares about Selkie, and because she is a good person. But don’t lie to her, and don’t ask her to lie for you.
– Tehk, who is a child, and therefore, like Selkie, needs to be given child-level reasons to cooperate. Perhaps Benny can get through to him, too!
well of course they´re not disecting sarnothis – the harsh exodus gave them plenty of corpses to autopsy
also, brows ‘we´ve got absolutely nothing to cover up here nor did we ever’ is kinda negated by the ‘protect our trout’-bs and the fact that selkie´s bow was confiscicated for studying in some super-secret government lab
The way I figure it; the Philadelphia Experiment was a distraction story for the Manhattan Project.
Someone starts talking about working on the A-bomb and you throw out a red herring about making a battleship invisible.
Concealing major secrets by unleashing a ton of nonsense that people find it hard to wade through is a pretty useful trick.
It’s also what annoys me about alternative medicine. Like, I can’t discount 100% of it, because willow bark (from which we get aspirin) worked on headaches before we investigated WHY it worked, and figured out a better way to process it. And it took ages for people to appreciate how washing your hands can kill the invisible things that are making you sick.
And apparently there is one guy in the world who is actually affected by cell phone signals, enough to make him pass out, and it’s not psychosomatic (since it happens when he has no clue there’s one nearby), so he has to live off in the wilderness where there aren’t any, and trying to investigate the problem is necessarily difficult due to not being able to go to a regular doctor in town, etc.
So things that we don’t understand yet are still real, prior to us understanding the mechanics. BUT the few alternative medicine claims that are real are snowed under a giant layer of B.S. that can’t possibly be doing anything useful.
Except, the correct mindset to deal with B.S. (“that sounds ridiculous and doesn’t mesh with our understanding of basic science”) is how some other discoveries were pushed aside until someone actually investigated them. Sometimes our understanding of science needs to upgrade (e.g. the “light is both a wave and a particle” thing, or quantum mechanics in general), and sometimes our intuition is way off base (like how humans are terrible at intuiting statistical realities). And sometimes humanity makes some crucial errors of logic (like how “radium can be used to treat cancer” got extrapolated to “radium is Magic Awesome, drink this radium juice, oh wait it gave you cancer”).
Incidentally, look up The Poisoner’s Handbook on YouTube. It’s an eye-opening (and sometimes horrific) view of the evolution of toxicology in the 19th century.
Yeah, alt.medicine is made worse by Snake Oil Salespeople. “100% organic snakes that only died of natural causes.” But the charletans out there obscure the truth, in their lust to rip us off.
Gah! Lying about medicine, and dont even mention Purdue Pharma near me.
The utter irony with snake oil, from where the term originated, is it actually does work as a topical muscle relaxant and there are modern products that use the specific compounds.
The term came about by the actual charlatans to demonise actual products so they could sell their faux wares.
The Philadelphia Experiment would be a pretty poor cover story for the Manhattan Project, considering it was completely unknown until Morris Jessup received the Carlos Allende letters on the topic in 1955.
Most likely, it was just degaussing (neutralization of a ship’s magnetic field to reduce vulnerability to magnetic mines), as seen through the lens of third-hand stories and mental illness. That, combined with ships “teleporting” as a lighthearted cover for the semi-secret use of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in quickly moving of military ships between Philadelphia and Norfolk.
I had not heard the degaussing theory. The one I like is that they were attempting to make the ship invisible *to radar* by surrounding it with some sort of E/M plasma. It worked as far as it went, but electronic gear blew out and there were places (nodes?) where you could get sliced to ribbons, leading to panic, leading to a horror show, leading to nothing anyone ever wanted to talk about again.
Reminds me how I watched a good video about how the flatwoods monster was probably just an angry owl
Sounds like you watched something off the Trey the Explainer channel. He makes a lot of videos debunking cryptids. He also makes some great paleontology videos.
“I think Bigfoot is blurry, that’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that’s extra scary to me. There’s a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.” — Mitch Hedberg
The most rational explanation that I have ever seen.
I think Harry Turtledove has it right: if Sasquatches existed, they would have moved out of the forest centuries ago and one would be a governor of a Pacific Coast state (we like to elect tall people to high office).
Personally, the world is so very large, and there’s proof that there used to be multiple members of the genus Homo out there that I can’t discount that there might be isolated populations of non-human homonids which are smart enough to avoid humanity deliberately. And there’s so many stories from so many places (skunk-ape, sasquatch, bigfoot, Yeti, Man-of-the-Mountain)…
The lack of evidence points the other direction, of course (since it’s unlikely that dedicated searchers wouldn’t stumble across campsites with spoor, hair or other verifiable signs), but again, the world is so very, very large and difficult to traverse in the places where sasquatch roam.
Then again, it could just be particularly hairy hippies, mutants, or isolated members of other great-ape species (like Man-of-the-Mountain is basically Orangutans).
Who knows?
Or, of course, it could be members of that one great-ape species with a proven propensity for pulling off elaborate hoaxes for fun and profit.
Even fifty years ago, I decided it was pretty unlikely that bigfoot was real, but yet no one had ever found a body, a grave site, or even a thigh bone or jaw. (Many extinct species were discovered from a single fossil bone. A jaw with teeth is especially useful in species identification, but a hominid thigh bone could be definitive, if it was too big to be human and found in an area without large apes.) There’s also the factor that people just like a wild tale better than the boring truth – for example, crazy tales about yetis get repeated far more often than the one about the scientist that examined a yeti hide and identified it as the Himalayan bear.
These days, all you need is a tuft of hair caught on a thorn or a feces sample, and a DNA analysis will prove whether it’s a known species and show which species it is most closely related to. There are probably hundreds of unidentified rodent species, and hundreds of thousands of unidentified arthropods, but there’s very little space left for something as big as Sasquatch to hide.
Have you *looked* at Arnold Schwartzenegger, former governor of California? Half an hour with a weedwacker every morning.
Obviously, Agent Brown is either so incredibly rehearsed at this, or he just doesn’t have the clearance to know the truth.
Or both. Probably both.
Well he’s not saying what’s in the airplane hangar or what the turbine was attached to. He’s probably rehearsed, doesn’t have clearance to the full story, and telling the truth as much as he’s been told.
Also note that he said not to take Benny at “complete” face value. So he’s not completely wrong about how this could go down.
That could also be tact on Agent Brown’s part. After all, while it wasn’t a scientific dissection, Benny’s father *was* killed (apparently in front of him? I know it was a family picnic). Benny has reason to know humans will cut up what they don’t understand.
My favorite is how the Roswell crash actually was a weather balloon… designed to do classified things.
It’s been declassified now, but at the time it would have been a problem to admit that we had weather balloons that were able to spy on Russia (and anyone else) by taking high altitude samples and figuring out the exact geographic position of any nuclear test that anyone did (or something like that). There was a treaty against it at the time, which is why it couldn’t be admitted publicly, and the idea of aliens is so much more exciting than weather balloons.
I used to think it was some sort of top secret military aircraft that crashed… although I suppose in the end that’s sort of what it actually was.
Again I think this echoe thing was and still is going to come out, Selike or no Selkie.
Oh dear. You think time jumps and dimensional travel things don’t happen? Bless your sweet little mundane heart.
J/K 😉
Sure, Area 51’s an empty airplane hangar -now-. They emptied it of all the interesting stuff decades ago, whatever it happened to be, and now it’s all somewhere else. Area 51’s just a distraction these days.
Area 51 is an airfield with multiple runways including a 3 mile long one graded into a dry lake bed. Since the USSR discovered it back in the early ’60s most of the aircraft were moved to bomb-resistant hangars back in the mountains that require taxiing for miles to get to the runways. This is visible by Google Earth.
It’s not entirely empty. They have been expanding it in recent years. Probably doing late-stage aircraft testing for designs they’re ready to announce to the public, so any intel leaks from spying on the site wouldn’t be worth much.
Avery, don’t you know rule #1 of secrecy?
Don’t deny anything you haven’t yet been accused of.
I imagine that, nipped in the bud at simply glowing eyes, it might be a passable half-truth to just dismiss it as a form of bioluminescence or infection that some Sarnothi exhibit. Like it’s the Sarnothi equivalent of pink-eye or something and that if they strain, it increases blood flow to the eyes and the bacteria fluoresce.
Expect then once the truth does come out, you are on record as having lied about it.
So, the key people they need cooperating with this are:
– Mina, who needs to be told the truth. Right now she is alarmed, and warily asking Todd what’s going on. If she understands what’s at stake she will cooperate, because she cares about Selkie, and because she is a good person. But don’t lie to her, and don’t ask her to lie for you.
– Tehk, who is a child, and therefore, like Selkie, needs to be given child-level reasons to cooperate. Perhaps Benny can get through to him, too!
well of course they´re not disecting sarnothis – the harsh exodus gave them plenty of corpses to autopsy
also, brows ‘we´ve got absolutely nothing to cover up here nor did we ever’ is kinda negated by the ‘protect our trout’-bs and the fact that selkie´s bow was confiscicated for studying in some super-secret government lab
“…no dissection if sarnothi…” Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t this whole mess start because some humans chopped up a sarnothi?
Sarnothi are aquatic. Maybe they can excuse the glow as ‘bioluminescence’. Lots of aquatic species have that.