-
30 Oct 2009 05:20
October 29. Today, some fringe links. My favorite paranormal author, John Keel, died a few months ago. In his honor, Fortean Times reprinted this 1992 John Keel interview. The Mothman Prophecies is said to be his best book, because it's the one where he's personally involved in the weird happenings, and it's also the easiest to find since they made a movie out of it (which was quite good). But all of his books are fascinating, and the funnest ones to read are the compilations of shorter pieces: Disneyland of the Gods and Our Haunted Planet. I can't remember if Keel ever wrote about this, but it sometimes happens that a miner reports breaking open a rock and seeing a frog crawl out. Now, if you're intellectually conservative, you'll tell a story about how the miner saw it wrong, or how the frog crawled into a hollow rock through a tiny hole a short time before, and a conservative culture will consider the mystery solved. But if you have a curious and exploring personality, you will see the mystery as an opportunity to change your thinking, and you will play this opportunity out as far as you can. As I mentioned last week, these are cultural choices about which the scientific method says nothing. But here's an explanation for frogs in rocks that would require only shallow changes in our thinking: Researchers have found that hydrogen sulfide puts animals into suspended animation. And other researchers have found that several mass extinctions have been caused by hydrogen sulfide gas from anoxic oceans. So maybe those frogs were preserved by hydrogen sulfide in an anoxic extinction, buried in ash or sediment which turned to stone, and revived by oxygen after tens of millions of years. And if that's too weird, we might have to go even weirder. As Sherlock Holmes would have said, if Conan Doyle were smarter: "When you have eliminated the extremely improbable, what remains is to change your idea of what's possible."
And one more link, a clever image about conspiracy theories.
Search the Site
