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forgottenlivesobverse · 2 years

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‘The First Englishmen’

Daniel Tessier's 'The First Englishmen' is the first of the volume's two adventures for the Christopher Baker Doctor and his children. Dan has this to say...

What made you want to write for Forgotten Lives 2?

Two reasons. Firstly, I've always loved the mystery surrounding the Morbius Doctors, and I never for a moment bought the idea that they were anything other than the Doctor's past faces, so the opportunity to flesh one of them out was irresistible. More importantly, the first volume was so good I was absolutely dying to be involved in the second, and practically begged to be considered.

What's your story about?

The Christopher Baker Doctor and his children enjoy an adventure in a prehistoric England that never was.

What did you most enjoy about writing for this version of the Doctor?

I loved what Andrew Hickey did with this Doctor in the first book by giving him a family. Having the Doctor travelling with his two young children gives the story a different feel to most of Doctor Who. The closest is probably the old comics which had the Doctor travelling with his grandchildren John and Gillian - who in my head are either Cedric or Jilly's children - but it's more invested than that. There's no doubt that this Doctor really loves his children, and this part of his life really stands out.

What were the influences on your story, and what genre were you writing in?

I was going for an educational adventure, just like Doctor Who started out, but one that was deliberately dated and incorrect by modern standards. I reasoned that Baker's Doctor would have been the current version in the late 40s, maybe very early 50s, and that got me thinking about what sort of inaccurate ideas might have been put forward in his stories.

I've long been fascinated by the Piltdown Man, a famous palaeontological hoax which was purported to be the missing link between man and ape. Piltdown is just up the road from where I grew up so it has a particular place in my heart, and I just love the idea that someone faked a fossil hominid and got away with it. I love even more that it went on for decades, because no scientist would back down and accept the evidence it was fake and so admit they'd been fooled. Especially since it 'proved' that England was the cradle of humanity, and quite right too! It wasn't conclusively proven to be a fake until 1953, so would have been presented as fact in a fictitious historical Doctor Who story before that time.

While I was researching the time period the Piltdown Man supposedly lived in, I was relieved that it was an interglacial - a warmer period between the extremes of an ice age. We're technically in one now. Each interglacial has a name, generally taken from the location key fossils were found, and I was thrilled to discover where this period got its name. That became my very favourite line in the story.

Aside from the one you've used, which of the Forgotten Lives Doctors is your favourite?

The Robert Banks Stewart Doctor -- my Doctor's immediate predecessor -- is probably my favourite. He feels the most fully fleshed in, I can so easily imagine him in his stories. They're all fascinating, though. It's amazing how distinct and well-realised each incarnation is.

Can you describe your story's Doctor in three words?

Best Dad Ever.

#morbius doctors #doctor who #Forgotten Lives #christopher baker

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un-pearable · 2 years

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love piltdown man documentaries bc of the hilarious moment when they’re reviewing the various theories about who did the hoax/made the fraudulent fossils and then out of nowhere ITS ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE WITH THE STEEL CHAIR

#academic grudges here desire for fame there. missing link perception bias??? SHERLOCK HOLMES’ CREATOR’S PRANK ON THE #SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY FOR CLAIMING HE DIDNT UNDERSTAND EVIDENCE??????#text✨#anth n arch #there’s no CONCRETE evidence he was responsible but it’s hilariously plausible #at least. as far as i know #we FINALLY got to fossil hominins in bioanth and we’re talking about pseudoscience babyyyyyy hell yeah #anthropology✨

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apokryphonmuseum · 11 months

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The Piltdown Man

In 1912, a discovery was made in Piltdown, England, that would change the course of the scientific study of human evolution. Amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have found a skull and partial jawbone of an early human ancestor, which he dubbed the Piltdown Man. The discovery was hailed as a major breakthrough in the study of human evolution, and the Piltdown Man quickly became an iconic figure in popular culture. However, in 1953, the Piltdown Man was revealed to be a hoax, a composite of a human skull and an orangutan's jawbone.

The Piltdown Man hoax was one of the most elaborate scientific frauds of the 20th century, and it has fascinated historians, scientists, and the public alike ever since its exposure. So, what exactly happened, and why did it take so long for the hoax to be uncovered? The story of the Piltdown Man hoax begins with Charles Dawson, a solicitor and amateur archaeologist who was known for his interest in local history and antiquities. Dawson claimed to have found the Piltdown Man skull and jawbone while excavating a gravel pit in Piltdown, a village in Sussex, England. The skull and jawbone were examined by prominent scientists of the day, including Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum, who confirmed that they were a genuine fossil of an early human ancestor.However, there were skeptics from the very beginning. Some scientists were suspicious of the unusually large brain size of the Piltdown Man, which was much larger than that of any known human ancestor. Others noted that the skull and jawbone did not seem to be of the same age or origin, as the jawbone appeared to be much older than the skull.

Despite these concerns, the Piltdown Man remained a popular and influential figure in the scientific community for several decades. It was only in the 1950s that new scientific techniques, such as carbon dating and fluorine testing, revealed that the skull and jawbone were not of the same age or origin and that they were likely a composite of a human skull and an orangutan's jawbone. The revelation that the Piltdown Man was a hoax was a major blow to the scientific community, which had invested so much time and energy in studying and interpreting the fossil. The discovery also raised questions about the motives of Charles Dawson, who had a reputation for being a bit of a trickster and who had been involved in other suspicious archaeological finds in the past.

In the years since the Piltdown Man hoax was exposed, there have been many theories about who was behind the fraud and why it was perpetrated. Some have suggested that Dawson acted alone, while others believe that he had collaborators or even that he was a pawn in a larger conspiracy. Some have speculated that the hoax was intended to promote nationalism and British superiority by showing that the earliest human ancestor had evolved in England. The exposure of the Piltdown Man as a hoax also highlights the dangers of confirmation bias in scientific research. Confirmation bias occurs when scientists interpret evidence in a way that confirms their preconceived notions or beliefs. In the case of the Piltdown Man, scientists were eager to find evidence of a missing link between apes and humans, and the skull and jawbone seemed to fit the bill. As a result, scientists overlooked or dismissed evidence that contradicted their hypothesis, such as the anomalous brain size and the mismatched age and origin of the skull and jawbone.

The Piltdown Man hoax also had broader cultural and social implications. The idea of a missing link between apes and humans had become a popular topic in the early 20th century, and the discovery of the Piltdown Man helped to solidify this idea in the public consciousness. The revelation that the Piltdown Man was a fraud shook people's confidence in the scientific community and raised questions about the reliability of scientific research more broadly.

Despite its notoriety, the Piltdown Man hoax did have some positive consequences. It led to the development of new scientific techniques, such as fluorine testing, that could be used to determine the age and origin of fossils more accurately. It also helped to promote a greater degree of skepticism and critical thinking in the scientific community, which is essential for advancing scientific knowledge and avoiding future hoaxes and frauds.

Today, the Piltdown Man remains an iconic symbol of scientific fraud and deception. The hoax serves as a cautionary tale about the importance of maintaining scientific integrity and rigor and the need to subject scientific findings to critical scrutiny. While we may never know the full story behind the Piltdown Man hoax, one thing is clear: it was a major scientific fraud that had a significant impact on the study of human evolution. The hoax reminds us of the importance of skepticism and critical thinking in science and the need to subject scientific findings to rigorous testing and scrutiny. The Piltdown Man hoax is a fascinating and cautionary tale that continues to capture the imagination of scientists and the public alike. The hoax was an elaborate and sophisticated fraud that fooled some of the brightest minds in the scientific community for several decades. The exposure of the hoax was a significant blow to the study of human evolution and had broader cultural and social implications.

In the online museum of frauds, fakes and forgeries the story of the Piltdown Man serves as a reminder of the complexity and potential for deception in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. By learning from the lessons of the Piltdown Man hoax, we can continue to advance our understanding of the natural world while avoiding the pitfalls of confirmation bias and fraud in scientific research.

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mst3kproject · 3 years

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The Neanderthal Man

Since I'm taking a break from fishmen, I might as well let Bigfoot catch up a bit. The Neanderthal Man isn't exactly a Bigfoot movie, but it’s along the same lines and its entire starring cast has MST3K pedigrees. Robert Shayne was in Indestructible Man and Teenage Caveman. Richard Crane was Rocky Jones, Space Ranger! Beverly Garland was in Swamp Diamonds and Gunslinger. Even the composer, Albert Glasser, wrote music for Invasion USA, Last of the Wild Horses, and almost all of MST3K’s Bert I. Gordon movies.

Some little mountain town in the middle of the Sierras (which the Portentous 50's Narrator takes some trouble to tell us is a primeval place where 'the defacing hand of civilization has fallen but lightly') is having a rash of saber-toothed tiger sightings! At first these are laughed off, but when the game warden himself sees one cross the road in the middle of the night, it's time to do something about it. The warden shows a cast pawprint to Dr. Ross Harkness in Los Angeles, who is interested enough to come up and see for himself. Local Mad Scientist Dr. Groves pooh-poohs the whole thing, which is enough to tell me that we're not dealing with a local cryptid here. Somebody is making prehistoric monsters.

So... I may not have actually run out of movies, but I seem to be running out of plots, because this is a remarkably similar movie to Monster on the Campus. The major difference between the two films is that Dr. Blake turned himself into a caveman by accident, while Dr. Groves here is doing it on purpose.

Another difference is that Monster on the Campus' story, while silly, was linear – events escalated in a way that felt logical, and there were reasons why things happened when and where they did. By contrast, The Neanderthal Man feels like a first draft. At the beginning of the film, we're dealing with the saber-toothed tigers that Groves has been creating by injecting cats with his de-evolution serum. We hear about these slaughtering game and livestock, and it seems like only a matter of time before they move on to human beings. The beginning of the film is quite upfront about the fact that Groves is responsible, too, as it is only mildly mysterious in its depiction of one of the creatures escaping his lab.

Sometimes the saber-tooths are represented by an actual tiger, usually filmed from behind or at a great distance so nobody has to put the prosthetic teeth on it. They do have prosthetic teeth, but they're only visible in a couple of shots. Imagine being at a bar and some guy tells you his job is sticking fake fangs on real tigers for a caveman movie! For close-ups, there's a hilarious puppet head that looks like the sort of thing you'd see mounted on a frat house wall as a joke. The director had the sense not to linger on this in motion shots, but later we see still photographs Groves has supposedly taken of his experimental subjects and they're even stupider-looking than we imagined.

Anyway, this goes on for a while with rising action, as the game warden goes to get Harkness and they manage to shoot one of the animals, only to have it vanish from the kill site when they try to show it to Groves (the movie never bothers to explain how that happened, incidentally. The ending suggests that the creatures change back when they die, but there's definitely no dead kitty cat at the scene, either). The whole movie could easily have just had the cats and their creator as the antagonists, perhaps even ending the same way as Dr. Groves proves his work to the other characters by injecting himself. That's not what happens, though. Instead, the story mostly forgets about the cats one we find out Groves has also been carrying on human experiments.

(Before himself, Groves' first experimental subject was his disabled Latina housekeeper. Another series of photos show her half-transformed into a cavewoman who for some reason is wearing drag queen false eyelashes. And as long as I'm talking about the movie being gross and bigoted, there's a bit where a woman is violently raped. This happens off camera, but the audience is not allowed to entertain any illusions about it.)

The problem is that before we see him give himself an injection in the arm, we have had absolutely no indication that Groves has been giving his serum to anything besides the cats! Cats are stealthy, cryptic creatures and if one of those has been seen wandering around killing things, then surely a full-on caveman beating people to death would not be able to stay out of sight! If what we were seeing were the first time Groves had tried the formula on himself then that would be an explanation, but his notes reveal that he's been doing it for so long that he's on the verge of losing control of the transformation and permanently reverting to a pre-human status, as indeed he does for the climax. Much like the stupid dinosaur in The Beast of Hollow Mountain, the movie's main monster is given no build-up whatsoever!

There's worse yet, though. The main characters, Dr. Harkness and Groves' daughter Jan, are barely involved in the 'caveman' part of the plot. They get phone calls about the various murders that Groves is committing in caveman form, and they snoop around the lab to figure out things the audience already knows. The same story could have been told without them, perhaps with the game warden and the hunter as protagonists, and it would probably have been more interesting. The script also repeatedly has Dr. Groves wander in and bluster about how the tiger sightings are hallucinations and tall tales, which seems a little unnecessary when we already know he's responsible. The film-makers can't seem to decide whether they want us to know that or not.

Dr. Groves wears glasses. Maybe the reason his primitive alter-ego is angry and breaking shit (although it does politely open and close the window it climbs out of, which made me laugh) is because it can't see. This is also my theory about why the Hulk smashes, and what do you know? In Avengers Endgame he's got Hulk-sized spectacles and only smashes when he's told!

The direction of The Neanderthal Man can probably best be described as 'serviceable'. It shows us what's going on, but doesn't particularly add anything to the proceedings. The 'Neanderthal' mask is immobile and uninteresting, not much better than somebody's Party City Sasquatch costume. Even the eyes are just painted on, meaning the poor guy in the costume can’t do much because he can’t see where he’s going.

The dialogue is often very strange, with characters talking like they're in a Jules Verne novel. If only one person did this, it might seem like a character quirk – it works for Dr. Groves, for example – but it's everybody. Seeing the cat carcass is gone, Harkness declares, “I refuse to believe in the supernatural! There must be some logical cause and effect to this unholy adventure!” Groves' fiancee Ruth berates him for ignoring her, saying, “I want you, the man I once knew! The good companion, the cheerful friend. I want the happiness we once found in each other.” It's bizarre to listen to, and often audibly awkward for the actors.

Monster on the Campus was kind of trying to be about how humanity must choose to evolve away from our inner savage, although the finale didn't bear that out. There's a scene in The Neanderthal Man in which this movie seems to be trying to go in the opposite direction, saying that we were never savage to begin with. Dr. Groves is speaking to a panel of scientists about the size of the brain in various 'primitive' species of human. He points out that by the time we reached Homo erectus we were already working with four times the cerebral jelly of a chimpanzee, and argues that our ancestors would have been recognizably human in their behaviour and problem-solving capacity.

(Amusingly, his chart of human evolution includes Piltdown Man, which was proven to be a hoax literally a few months after this movie's release. What makes this even more tragic for the writers is that their list of primitive humans seems to be the only place where they actually did any research.)

The problem with Dr. Groves' theory is that he already knows it's wrong. We soon learn that he's been experimenting on himself with his serum for a while already, and his notes show that he knows very well he regresses into a near-mindless animal. The movie does not even try to reconcile these ideas. If Groves were continuing his experiments in the hope that perfecting his serum would give him a more accurate reconstruction of ancient man, that would be one thing, but the script never goes there.

So now that we've had two 'man turns into caveman by injecting science juice' movies, of course I have to ask which one is better. Monster on the Campus wasn't a good movie but it was definitely an improvement on The Neanderthal Man in several respects, and although I don't have any way to find out for certain, I suspect it was an intentional remake. It's definitely more entertaining and gets bonus points for including the Meganeura dragonfly, but nothing in it is nearly as funny as The Neanderthal Man's fake tiger head. I guess if you're gonna watch one or the other, stick to Monster on the Campus, but if you're gonna watch both, start with The Neanderthal Man and do them in chronological order, the better to spot the inspirations and references.

Before I go, a fun paleontology fact: current thinking is that the saber-toothed cat's eponymous fangs actually didn't show when it had its mouth closed! There are zero cave paintings or ancient sculptures of a saber-tooth cat with teeth visible, and when scientists looked at the structure of the enamel in the canines, it suggested that in life the teeth were hidden by big, fleshy, St Bernard jowls. Google 'smilodon lips' and behold how this looks fully three hundred percent more ridiculous than you're imagining. I love nature.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the neanderthal man #tw: rape #50s #curiously caucasian cavepeople

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wisdomrays · 2 years

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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS: What is the Reason for the Persistence of Darwinism in the General Culture of the Masses, Though Many of Darwin's Hypotheses Have Been Challenged and Even Disproved?: Part 2

What of the evolution of humankind? It is especially badly argued and ill founded. Some scientist discovered some bones, or even just the tooth of an ape, and posited (that is, guessed) the rest—the body posture, flesh, skin, hair, features, etc., of the evolved "human."

Piltdown Man is a good example to famous scientific hoaxes related with evolution. The supposed discovery near Piltdown, England, of an ape like fossil ancestral to modern humans, was reported in 1912. The discovery included fragments of what were later proved to be a modern human cranium and the jawbone of an ape. For many years the Pildown man fossil was a subject of anthropological controversy. In 1953, scientific analyses proved the fossil a forgery.

Evolutionists used to mention the coelacanth, a fish abundant 400 million years ago, as a link between the fish and the land animals because of its limb like fins. It was theorized that the coelacanth lurched onto the land in search of food, staying there longer and longer until—about 70 million years ago—it disappeared from the fossil record. To their surprise, local fishermen caught several dozen coelacanths off the coast of Madagascar in 1938. The caught fish were exactly like their ancestors, perfectly adapted to their deep sea environment and showing no signs of evolution. The coelacanth has been quietly dropped by many text books from the list of evidences of evolution, because it became the symbol of the non evolution of organisms, rather than of their evolution.

Evolutionists also claim that the organisms evolve through random mutations. While new cells are being formed, if the genetic code, normally identical in all the cells of an organism, is copied differently or mistakenly, mutations occur. Such a change, which is claimed to bear evolutionary fruit gradually over a long period, may be caused by a number of external agents, such as geography and climate, even planetary influences such as changes in the sun's or earth's rotation, or by radiation, chemical pollution, etc. The argument is that non lethal mutations which reproduce successfully (that is, adaptively to changes in immediate environment) function like sudden jumps in the progress of evolution and give rise to species variation.

However, recent work in genetics and biochemistry has shown conclusively that mutations are all but always harmful, even lethal, the cause of many physiological disorders. In any case, they could not give rise to a magnitude of change of an order to generate a new species, to make a dog a horse, or an ape a human. For such an order of change to occur randomly and then to become successfully established would require a period of time many times in excess of the highest estimate for the age of the universe.

For years, much research has been done on pigeons, dogs and flies. Though some physiological changes do occur within the same race of animals (there are different breeds of dog and pigeon, for example), such adaptive evolution within species is no evidence for evolution of species. All the extensive research done for years on Drosophila yielded nothing but Drosophila, and the research proved that Drosophila remains as it is.

Hybrid varieties are obtained by artificially crossing two species, such as horse and donkey, but the resultant hybrid (mule) is typically sterile. After long research, scientists have recognized that it is not possible to progress from one species to another. There are some insurmountable, impassable, barriers between species. That conforms to ordinary sense, as well as to the known facts and to scientific reasoning. How could such a creature as human, who has an extraordinarily sophisticated brain and is capable of (in any and every stage of civilization) of linguistic and cultural expression, of religious belief and aspiration—how could such a creature have evolved from an ape? It is quite extraordinary that even to speculate that it might be so can be given serious consideration, let alone believed and accepted as conforming to reason!

However, that acceptance of evolution is a major pillar of modern materialism, and of historical materialism in particular, as Marx and Engels insistently pointed out. It is a sort of blind faith, a prejudice, a superstition that the materialists cling to Darwinism of the crudest kind. They insist that absolutely everything be explained by material causes. As for what, by those limited means, they cannot explain, they dare not admit that they cannot explain it so. They can never allow that there must be a supra natural, metaphysical agency that intervenes to make the biological world as it is, so wonderfully abundant, prolific, diverse and, within stable forms, so marvelously adaptive and versatile in response to local environmental possibilities.

The alternative to evolution is design which necessarily leads to the concept of a transcendent and unitary power, the Designer Creator, God. Therein lies the reason for the continuing tyranny of the Darwinist theory: the fear that to acknowledge the Creator will bring down the edifice of an autonomous science, an autonomous human reason. An individual scientist in his or her private capacity may be a believer, a theist, but science itself must be unbelieving, atheistic. It is ironic indeed that to preserve the illusion of independent human reason, the Darwinists (and materialists generally) will defy or ignore the facts, deny and belittle logic and reason. It is to the credit of the scientific community that, in ever greater numbers, individual scientists have found the courage to question and challenge the tyranny of Darwinism in the teaching of the life sciences.

That said, it remains unfortunately true that, some young, pliable minds are vulnerable to the myth of Darwinism simply because it is the official dogma, the staple of all textbooks on the subject everywhere. How true and apt is the Turkish proverb—that a half wit can throw a pearl into a well with ease, and forty wise men struggle in vain to get it out again. Nonetheless, there is solace in the knowledge that a lie, however mightily supported, can have but a short life. The truth of the matter is that the origin of the species, and of the major divisions of species, is not yet understood. Is it too heavy a burden on humility to say: "We marvel, but we do not know"? And we marvel most at, and understand least of all, the origin of intelligent speech, ideation, abstraction, symbolization, culture, love of beauty and variety, consciousness, altruism, morality religion, and spiritual aspiration.

To be sure, Darwin was a great and gifted scientist who must be credited with a mighty contribution to the ordering and classifying of species, and for his work on adaptation; but it should be noted that what he did well and incontrovertibly is to observe accurately and understood intelligently what was there in nature.

Whatever his own intentions, in spite of them, his work, like every reliable advance in observation and explanation, confirms the Divine Architect, the All Mighty Power, Sustainer, Administrator, Who willed the marvelous organization, reliable, systematic, subtly integrated harmony of the operations of nature, and who combined that order with beauty. Whereas what Darwin found increases our faith in God, it led him astray.

How great, sublime, is the Creator. Order, understanding, wisdom are by His gift. Likewise, guidance to faith is absolutely in His grasp.

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intimate-mirror · 3 years

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Things I learned due to being a creationist and still believe despite now believing in human evolution (some of these are more controversial than others, see if you can guess which before you google them):

Haeckel’s drawings of embryos make up data to fit the desired conclusion (that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”)

It’s embarrassing that an at-the-time-respected scientist (Grafton Elliot Smith) made up a hominid species based on a tooth which was from a pig

Piltdown man demonstrates that just like in social psych, there’s a lot of profit to be made from fake ape-human-intermediate species, and just like in social psych, these hoaxes can take a long time to get discovered (>40 years in this case)

this following thing about Lucy (link) is suspicious

Superficially, her hip resembled a chimpanzee's, which meant that Lucy couldn't possibly have walked like a modern human. [...] The perfect fit was an illusion that made Lucy's hip bones seems to flair out like a chimps. But all was not lost. Lovejoy decided he could restore the pelvis to its natural shape. He didn't want to tamper with the original, so he made a copy in plaster. He cut the damaged pieces out and put them back together the way they were before Lucy died. It was a tricky job, but after taking the kink out of the pelvis, it all fit together perfectly, like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. As a result, the angle of the hip looks nothing like a chimps, but a lot like ours. Anatomically at least, Lucy could stand like a human.

While googling some stuff, I found this very wholesome education story.

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redshift-13 · 4 years

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Spooky fall listening: tales that might be true

A paranormal podcast aficionado, I’ve heard hundreds of testimonies about alleged extraordinary encounters. Part of the fun of listening to paranormal stories is trying to come up with mundane counter-explanations for what is being reported. Some no doubt admit of prosaic explanation, others are possible hoaxes, and yet others - well, I wasn’t there.

I used to toe a more doctrinaire capital ’s’ skeptic line on extraordinary claims, but nowadays I prefer to not commit myself to an ontology neither I nor anyone else could confidently maintain as true. Maybe the world is a little, or a lot, weirder than we might suppose.

The following are two of the strangest accounts of the extraordinary that I’ve ever heard. In neither case is there evidence of hoaxing (that I’m aware of anyway) on the part of the eyewitnesses, which is not to say that absence of evidence of hoaxing indicates no hoaxing. If eyewitnesses in both of the below are more or less accurately reporting on something they encountered, then I simply have no idea how to understand what is being reported. The possibility that they themselves are being hoaxed is a logical possibility, of course. But in both these cases it seems as if it would take an incredible creative and technical imagination to pull off hoaxes of this type. Or, maybe in both cases they’re blatantly lying - I suspect not, but ultimately I don’t know.

First, the slightly less weird (if at all) account.

1) Orbs and Other things

https://www.strangefamiliars.com/home/orbs-and-other-things

The only additional detail I can add here, which isn’t necessarily helpful, is that I’ve heard very similar accounts maybe 6 times before in other paranormal podcasts. Especially puzzling are the accounts from eyewitnesses who have the self-critical awareness to articulate a process of elimination, ruling out anomalous lights like car headlights coming around curves and shining through a forest, or people dressed in dark clothes carrying flashlights. This doesn’t rule out self-delusion or errors of perception, but it helps.

Glowing balls of light capable of hovering and rapid movement, with no visible means of propulsion, and that are reactive and interactive with eyewitnesses—what the heck are these things? Do such things really exist? Incredibly puzzling if true.

2) Adam Davies & John Carlson encounter the portal and more

http://www.binnallofamerica.com/2015/10/05/adam-davies-john-carlson-boaaudio/

My understanding is that neither Davies or Carlson wanted to speak publicly about this. I can well understand why. Their reported experience was so over-the-top bizarre that to claim in public that it actually happened would run the risk of permanent damage to their reputations.

Adding credibility to this case is Davies himself, a sharp, meticulous and scientific-minded former lawyer who now follows his true passion, cryptid investigations. I reached out to Davies a while back, asking him if he had any further reflections on what he thinks he and Carlson experienced. He had no further comment.

Part of me still thinks this has to be bullshit. Someone must be hoaxing. But, I can’t make this explanation add up. Nor can I fully accept that this happened, despite the apparent sincerity of Davies and Carlson.

If the account of Davies and Carlson is accurate, then I have no fucking clue what happened to them.

Some people do go to great trouble to pull off hoaxes, as in the case of the Piltdown Man or crop circles. Indeed, there’s a lot of hoaxing and also misperception in the land of the paranormal, which complicates matters for the researcher.

If you have suspected or firm evidence of hoaxing in either case above please let me know.

We’re apt to reject and dismiss phenomena that fall too far outside of what’s familiar to us. If all we’ve ever seen is 1000 white swans, we might assume that black ones don’t exist or can’t exist. But is precedent a good indication of what might happen in the future? (Obviously the answer to this varies greatly by context.)

The ‘paranormal event’ throws us back on our epistemological feet, grasping for explanations and arguments that we hope will enable us to resolve the contradiction between the highly unlikely and ‘impossible’, and the possible fact of its existence.

#october #tales of the fantastic #paranormal #podcasts #the unusual #unexplained #challenges for skeptics

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nanaokamotoworld-blog · 6 years

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The Piltdown Man

By Nana

Are you interested in a hoax? there are many kinds hoax in the world so I'm going to tell the most famous one.

One of the famous creature which is called "The Piltdown Man". This creature has clever and has long legs so it was fascinated. Then many people had looked for the man and it had made some books about "The Piltdown Man". That's why it was thought evolutionary creature. However scientists had problem because nobody meet the Piltdown man but finally scientists discovered evidence in 1953. The Piltdown man was forgery because they examined the Piltdown man's part of the body from fossils. As a result our ancestors was combining with human, chimpanzee and orangutan then it had became fossils.

This hoax was known by everyone for a long time but it was created story. It has already known but do you want to believe this story forever?

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orderjackalope · 2 years

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It is the embodiment of all evil, capable of killing with a thought? Is it the brain box of the cosmos, capable of unlocking the secrets of the universe? Either way, this week we look at the Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skull of Doom!

Transcript, sources, links and more at: https://order-of-the-jackalope.com/lost-legacy/

Key sources for this episode include, well, Jane MacLaren Walsh and Brett Toppings's The Man Who Invented Aztec Crystal Skulls; Skeptical Inquirer articles by Joe Nickell and Benjamin Radford; the memoirs of Frederick Albert Mitchell Hedges, Lady Richmond Brown, and Jane Harvey Houlson; and Richard Garvin's The Crystal Skull.

Discord: https://discord.gg/Mbap3UQyCB Instagram: https://instagram.com/orderjackalope Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/orderjackalope Tumblr: https://orderjackalope.tumblr.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/orderjackalope

Email: [email protected]

CONNECTION! Mitchell-Hedges used to play poker with "Bet-A-Million" Gates. A true Gilded Age character, Gates is little-known today but you probably know his famous friend "Diamond Jim" Brady, who we discussed in Series 6.

CONNECTION! Had Mitchell-Hedges stayed with Pancho Villa until 1916, he would have gone up agains the U.S. Army... and a then-unknown private named Rondo Hatton who would go on to be a movie star. We talked about Hatton's career in Series 1.

CONNECTION! Many artifacts Mitchell-Hedges looted from Belize went to the British Museum. One of the experts who authenticated them was Sir Arthur Keith, who you may remember from when he was involved with the Piltdown Man hoax.

CONNECTION! One notable who purchased artifacts from Eugene Boban was Russian diplomat Count Sergei Stroganov, better known for the beef-and-noodle dish that bears his family name. We had a whole episode about gastronyms in Series 7.

If this episode doesn't have enough crystal skull content for you, you should check out "The Crystal Skull of San Luis Valley" from the Tales from Aztlantis podcast! It's one of my favorite episodes.

#Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges #crystal skull #Skull of Doom #Atlantis #New Age

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expfcultragreen · 4 years

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Let me explain the eurocultural attitudes circa "piltdown man" and what that hoax says about cognitive bias as it relates to white supremacy:

White 'scientistific' racists before African origin of homo sapiens confirmed: "obviously the first man was british and everything else is some permutation, an adulteration of the purest and best form of humanity. This only stands to reason, let's look for fossils here, in the uk. No doubt a deluge of affirmation of the primacy of the white race is about to emerge from the earth"

White 'scientistific' racists after finding nothing, being faked out yeti skull style, and fanning out globally: "ah well, it stands to reason that the african origin theory is borne out by the evidence, because [yknow the spin]"

And im like...no, go back, lets just edit what you were saying there to update for locale and whatnot

(Not to be uh, racially supremacist. Im more interested in indigeneity, which, people can argue forever about what that means in the warring contexts of neoliberal global capitalism vs xyz)

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kidl · 5 years

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I’ve been watching a series on Netflix called Histories Greatest Hoaxes. It covers hoaxes like Loch Ness Monster, Piltdown Man, and Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds hysteria. I’m picking up a few new nuggets of trivia, but also some things to think about. One of the recurring themes from the “experts” on hoaxes is that they think we are now too smart and that such hoaxes would be impossible today. Maybe we wouldn’t fall for some of this shows particular hoaxes, but I’m not that confident we are that smart.

Would you believe that the War of The World hysteria was not really as big as we were led to believe? That it was greatly exaggerated by the newspapers of the day? It seems that the radio and newspaper media options were at war and newspapers were doing their best to discredit the radio. The listening audience was minuscule that night. No spike in suicides, but many suicides attributed to the radio broadcast by the newspapers. Radio can’t be trusted, stick with your newspapers. People WANTED to believe it was real.

The Piltdown Man hoax was related to finding the missing link between man and apes...turns out it was in Great Britain. At least the jaw of an orangutan, skull of a man and teeth of a chimp all put together was in Great Britain. Experts could have discounted it pretty quickly by noticing easy giveaways and the fact that a file was used to modify the teeth. But, people WANTED to believe it was real.

All this leads me to one statement a wise man said on the Piltdown episode, “We don’t scrutinize those things we want to believe.”. Think of the things you copy, share, repeat, promote....was there any scrutiny on your part? I know, no one today can be fooled and they wouldn’t share if it wasn’t true. It seems in this current climate we are more blind than ever, or, that’s what I want to believe. I don’t care who is your favorite politician, favorite side, favorite team.... What effort was made on your part for any discernible thought? This silly hoax show is really putting me to task.

I wish I could see in the future to see what hoaxes we fell for today. I’m betting one of those hoaxes will be related to the Keto diet....at least that’s what I WANT to believe.

#netflix #hoax

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