SGU Episode 885

This episode is in the middle of being transcribed by Hearmepurr (talk) as of 2022-09-27. To help avoid duplication, please do not transcribe this episode while this message is displayed.

Template:Editing required (w/links) You can use this outline to help structure the transcription. Click "Edit" above to begin.

SGU Episode 885
June 25th 2022
Computer illustration shows NASA's Juno spacecraft over the Great Red Spot.
SGU 884                      SGU 886
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
If we're never wrong then we're never surprised. If we grow too protective of our existing beliefs, then we stagnate and stop learning. If we've reached any degree of competence within our field, it's because we got things wrong along the way. So why stop now? It's interesting, I think, for each of us to consider the following: What am I currently wrong about? It's an impossible question to answer, but a curio, though, to contemplate nonetheless.
Hector Chadwick, UK-based mentalist
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Stomach bugs, Heat waves

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, June 21^st 2022, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everyone!

S: Jay is out because he has a tummy bug.

C: Jay has a tummy ache so he can't be here.

E: I've had I've known some other people right around this time who has also come down with this. I don't know they're calling it a foodborne illness. They think it's something they ate and it knocked them out for 24 hours or so.

C: It usually is. Like a norovirus or a rotavirus or a bacterial illness.

S: Could be an enterovirus. That's a summer virus and can give you a GI infection. So he's probably got one of those.

C: I had noro twice and it was the sickest I think I've ever felt in my entire life. It was horrible.

S: Do you feel worse when you have like a bad stomach bug or when you have a bad upper respiratory infection? What makes you feel worse?

C: Well it's it's interesting because I feel like a stomach virus is really acute. So you feel way worse but it's over faster. Whereas the upper respiratory is like stressful and lengthy and you're just like over it because it takes so long to clear. But when I have─

S: Cruddy.

C: ─yeah it is. It is. But when I had noro. Like I thought I was gonna die. Because you're tethered to the bathroom.

S: Yeah. It's more debilitating.

C: Yeah and I also it's kind of weird. I haven't vomited since I was a child. I have like a weird paranoia around puking. And so yes I've had noro twice and did not puke either time. So I was like I was green and like pressing my face against the tile and like oh it was bad it was really bad. For most people it comes out of both ends. For me it was only one end but I probably would have felt better if I had puked. I just refused. I refused.

E: So you suppress the urge?

C: Oh yeah because I had that thing you get where you start to salivate uncontrollably and you're burping. Oh it's terrible.

B: Wow.

C: I didn't throw up.

E: Yeah it's like it's almost like you have a blockage and you have to clear the blockage by vomiting.

C: Yeah but I just didn't. I was like keep it down just deep breathing. A lot of real kind of like focus.

E: I'd rather get it over with.

C: That's what a lot of people say and I probably should have actually looking back. But I couldn't eat for two days. It was I mean it was a whole thing. It was bad. So I'm hoping that Jay doesn't have that because I would not wish that on anyone.

E: But as Steve mentioned it could be a summer virus and that could be the case. Do you know why? Because today's June 21^st. First day of summer.

B: Yes that's right. Longest day of the year. And that means Cara what?

C: Shortest night?

B: Yes. The other side.

E: Beautiful thing.

C: So so explain me this solstice experts. Why is it the first day of summer and not the middle of summer?

S: Yeah it's arbitrary. Well I've wondered that since I was a child. Why is the summer begin halfway through the warmest section. And part of it I think is because the weather like the seasonal weather is delayed a little bit behind the position of the Earth and the Sun, you know what I mean? It's because it is true. The next couple of months are going to be warmer than the last couple of months. Not like we're in the─

B: Absolutely.

S: ─middle of the hot season. We're not. It is shifted a little bit later. But also you look at like the analemma. You have like the figure eight with the Sun at the top, the bottom and the two sides. So that's where they made the cutoffs for the seasons. But they could have made them in where like the top quarter was the summer and the lower quarter was the winter. Instead of making the topmost point the beginning of summer. But ultimately arbitrary it's fine. But I always thought that was a little weird too.

C: Agree, yeah. It just feels like─

B: It didn't.

C: ─it's been summer. Here in LA at least it feels like it's been summer for two months.

B: Yeah well for you.

E: Yeah that's the difference Cara.

B: Yes I agree but for in New England I mean we had just a couple days ago where I was wearing a jacket outside.

C: Really?

B: It was chillier than it had been a in a while and you would never get that in July and August. Never.

E: That's right because when you have we experience every flavor of season here in New England. We get the cold cold winters and we get some pretty darn hot summers and everything in between. But Cara in lovely southern California you don't have those kinds of extremes in your weather.

C: No no no. It's really temperate here. But I was on the phone with my mom earlier today and I thought it was brutally hot today so much so that I was trying to arrange going hiking with a friend and we decided we're not going to hike we're going to go on a swim instead. But I was talking to my mom on the phone who's of course in north Texas and I was like oh it's brutal here today it's like 88. What is it like for you? And she was like. Well my car says it's 106. I was oh gosh.

E: The south has been on fire. Some of the hottest temperatures on record in June in the south.

S: Yeah they're having a heat wave really bad heat wave.

E: That a song? (laughter)

S: So Elon Musk has acquired twitter. Did it did that happen?

B: Did that happened?

C: That just happened?

E: When? When? Today?

B: Check it out Steve because I heard that he was one step closer.

E: He passed some hurdle or the government [inaudible].

S: Okay. I just saw that he was like meeting with twitter employees and he's planning on cutting back on this. He's talking as if he's running Twitter. Like wait wait wait when did that happen?

C: Yeah I don't know.

E: Twitter board unanimously recommends Musk's takeover bid. That happened earlier today.

S: There we go.

E: That's gonna be it. Is he gonna pay the money though? He's trying to get a low, he's trying to get it now for less because he thinks that there's more bots than they reported and therefore it's not worth as much.

S: Yeah but of course that's all part of the negotiation, right?

E: Of course. Right. Yeah. But he's clearing hurdles that's for sure. Welp.

S: Welp.

B: Welp.

E: See we'll see where that goes. So yeah interesting happenings in the world of Musk.

S: Right. And crypto is tanking. It's chaos.

E: Oh gosh, are we gonna go there? Oh my gosh. Luna.

Special Segment: Secret of Skinwalker Ranch (6:37)

A friend asked me to watch secret of Skinwalker Ranch on the History Channel. The name of the channel gets it off to a terrible start. I tried sticking to my guns that I don't want to waste my time with multiple sessions of a ghost hunting show where they run around collecting weird data results and only ask questions. But he said it's not like that. However I watched the clip on YouTube and that's exactly what it is. Does the SGU have even five minutes on an upcoming show to comment towards this? Thank you so much. Love all you do. Please keep it up.

S: Evan let's talk about the Skinwalker Ranch.

E. Yeah. We're going to talk about that as a little special segment here because we received an email from a listener. Ben in Michigan. And let me read to you what he wrote to us: "A friend asked me to watch secret of Skinwalker Ranch on the History Channel. The name of the channel gets it off to a terrible start. I tried sticking to my guns that I don't want to waste my time with multiple sessions of a ghost hunting show where they run around collecting weird data results and only ask questions. But he said it's not like that. However I watched the clip on youtube and that's exactly what it is. Does the SGU have even five minutes on an upcoming show to comment towards this? Thank you so much. Love all you do. Please keep it up." Thank you Ben and yes we do have five minutes to cover Skinwalker Ranch. Because this is actually a subject that I have touched on before when talking about Luis Elizondo and he's that former official at the United States department of defense. He has the UAP/UFO fetish. A few years ago 2018 there was a New York Times story that revealed the formerly classified department of defense program that studied UAPs which is unidentified aerial phenomenon. And that was way back in 2007. It was all secret. And the fellow Luis Elizondo was part of that team and some of that money went to Bigelow Aerospace. Enter Robert Bigelow. Real estate billionaire and strong UFO and alien visitation proponent. I'll read you what some of my thoughts about back in 2018 when I first reported on this^{[link needed]}. So Robert Bigelow. Among his claims to extraterrestrial fame is the purchase of a supposedly haunted ranch in Utah which some describe as a hyper-dimensional portal area or stargate. The ranch is said to be infested by an alien or paranormal shape-shifting creature known as a Skinwalker taking its name from Native American legends similar to European legends about werewolves. Bigelow's approved team of paranormal researchers investigated the ranch starting in 1996. They compiled an impressive collection of what might be termed ghost stories but in spite of having access to sophisticated electronic equipment they failed to obtain any actual proof of anything that was unexplainable going on. So in the skeptical community we've known about Skinwalker ranch since the late 1990s. Bob you remember the late 1990s? You just installed Windows 98 on your PC. 512 MB jazz drive, right?

B: Ha-ha. Nice.

E: So let the horror of that historical context sink in. And like most fantastic stories of paranormal activity. And that's all they are. 100% of them. They are stories in one form of another. This UFO story refuses to quit. So fast forward from 1998 to 2020. Courtesy of the History Channel of course. You get the secret of Skinwalker Ranch the television series. Now, in a literal sense if Skinwalker Ranch is a secret it's one of the worst kept secrets on TV. We've known about it for more than 20 years. Obviously it's been reported on for even longer than that. So I don't know what's the secret behind this. I don't know. Interdimensional leprechauns that pop in and out or something. That must be the secret that the history channel--but in any case here's how they describe the show on their website. "The investigation of the world’s most mysterious hot spot for UFO and “High Strangeness” phenomena continues as astrophysicist Dr. Travis Taylor returns to" and this was written about the second season "join real estate tycoon Brandon Fugal, along with his team of scientists and researchers on Utah’s notorious Skinwalker Ranch. In this groundbreaking second season, the team goes deeper and higher than ever before, applying cutting edge technology to investigate the 512-acre property to uncover the possibly “otherworldly” perpetrators behind it all." Yeah. "With everything from mysterious animal deaths to hidden underground workings and possible gateways that open to other dimensions, witness the close encounters that go beyond conventional explanation, as the team risks everything to finally reveal the ultimate secret of Skinwalker Ranch." That's the write-up from History Channel. That's what you get.

B: Wow.

E: You're right. So this okay property in Utah 512 acres. Look in the 1960s and 70s there was a flurry of UFO sightings in this particular region as there was in lots of places. Especially out west in the 60s and the 70s among other places. It was just part of the culture. Part of the phenomenon. But then you get to the mid 90s and you get these stories about the strange going ons and the interdimensional creatures. And all these other stories kind of start to emerge including UFOs and cattle mutilations. Right Steve? We used to talk about cattle mutilations and early skeptic conferences that and get-togethers in meetings. It was one of our topics. And you kind of wonder okay we're the and you got Robert Bigelow. He's this billionaire. It might be and he's got this penchant and the sort of disposition towards the UFOs and things paranormal. Perhaps maybe you're talking more about these stories in order to sort of up the price on the ranch perhaps? Or get them to be more interested in actually purchasing it? But regardless Bigelow after he's done with his research 2016 he sold it to this real estate guy Brandon Fugle. And Brandon said in a recent interview that Skinwalker Ranch is the most scientifically studied paranormal hot spot on the planet. With the highest frequency of documented UFO sightings, bizarre cattle mutilations, electromagnetic anomalies and unexplained phenomenon. Wow. That's a lot. Well the hot spot on the planet. I not only watched the promotional clip. I actually watched the first episode of season one. And I did so that way Ben you don't have to watch it no one else out there has to watch it. I took the hit for everyone. So let me give you a very quick description of the opening sequence and I think we can kind of maybe draw this to a conclusion. You have a person running across a field heavily breathing towards a group of other people standing around something lying in the field. The looks on their faces is of horror and disbelief. That running person, his name's Travis, he reaches the group and we can see they're all standing around a dead cow. They roll the dead animal over on its side. One of the people checks it with a Geiger counter to see if it's radioactive. One of the other people mentions that they saw the cow earlier in the day was alive. But there's no trauma. No animal tracks. No animal marks. No sign of struggle. Travis suddenly whips out his meter, that's all he calls it: his meter, and he says look at the meter. It's making a static noise and the meter it gets louder in volume and he says it's going crazy. It's jumping all over the place. What happens next is that the whole team whips out all of their meters. And then they start holding their devices over the dead cow like McCoy taking a medical reading on a tricorder basically over a person. Handheld spectral analyzer is what these machines say. "What does that mean?" says one investigator. What's this spike? What is this? What are these readings? Travis says: "We do not know the answer. But something out of the ordinary could be happening right now. We've got to get out of here." That's your opening sequence and then it rolls the opening credits and so forth. That's the sequence. Right away the producer of the show in 60 seconds successfully trotted out over a half dozen paranormal tropes that we've been familiar with since we all became skeptical activists back in the 1990s. It is the same old tired product that the world of gullible paranormal investigators they live on it. They breathe it. It is their stock in trade. All this is something with a little bit of a different skin to it. That's all it is. And yes I did. I won't bother you with any more description of what the whole show was about but Ben you were correct it absolutely is 100% that. Total paranormal show just like any others in which they sit around they ask questions of each other. There's no true evidence to see. There's no science going on here.

S: But Evan they have more meters.

E: I know they had meters. Electromagnetic meters.

S: Well were they electromagnetic? They don't say it because they're not even bothering to pretend.

E: Oh they did later in the show.

S: I thought they were spectral analyzers.

E: Yeah well they did a spectral analysis as well. They have lots of meters and there's lots of sciencey things appear to be going on. They have cameras for surveillance. They have noise detection devices planted all over the over the ranch. They look for disturbance they have meters and things that can detect sort of disturbances. Ground vibrations that are going on. They've got aerial--they've taken aerial photography. They've got aerial monitoring cameras pointing every single direction. So yes it has all the trappings of what appears to be science. They even call it the control room that they have. It looks like a I don't know an air traffic control center almost. In a way. With all 50 screens up in front of you if you look that direction. And all the analyzers over to your right. They spent a lot of money, you can tell, on all of this stuff. But what's their evidence? What did they actually come up with? Not a darn thing.

S: Yeah because they're doing pure pseudoscience. Literally. That's the very definition of pseudoscience. Just they have the trappings. They have meters. Tou know they have no idea how to use them. They're not doing any actual hypothesis testing. It's just mystery mongering. That's it.

E: Yep. And then when there are some suggestions and the fellow Travis who is an astrophysicist and apparently has some and degrees in engineering and some other bonafides that are legitimate. He's brought in to help them figure out what's going on here. And unfortunately they're using him as a veil of being authentic.

S: Yeah but the scientist guy whatever should be ashamed of himself. I mean there's no excuse for what he's doing. He should know better. And like if he's telling, I mean I'm sure he's just enjoying the fame but you can't even tell yourself oh but I'm at least I'm going to introduce some actual science into this. No you're not. Because you quickly learn when you do these sort of things. Because back early in our career we would get asked to be on documentaries or whatever. And we did a bunch of stuff. And you very quickly figure out that whoever's doing it, like the director, they have a story to tell. They're going to tell their story no matter what you do or say. You are irrelevant. They're just quote-mining you. You're a prop.

E: Yep. You're prop, yes.

S: I would always like when there's a preliminary interview about before you do the actual on camera interview. I'm always interviewing them. Like what is your take on this. What story are you telling basically. And if it's a gullible pseudoscience promotion story don't do it. It's not worth it. You're just gonna lend credibility to nonsense.

E: Yep. That's all it is. And you're right I think─

S: So they're complicit─

E: ─yep yep.

S: 100%.

E: Yep. Absolutely. It's part of the problem.

S: All right let's move on.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

Jupiter Ate Baby Planets (17:53)

• Scientists find remains of cannibalized baby planets in Jupiter's cloud-covered belly

The Risk of Sitting (27:10)

• An Enormous International Study Just Confirmed The Ugly Truth About Sitting Too Much

NASA Joins Study of UAPs (42:26)

• NASA Joins Study of UAPs

Galapagos Giant Tortoise Not Extinct (59:52)

• The Galapagos giant tortoise Chelonoidis phantasticus is not extinct

What's the Word? (1:08:16)

• Nostrum

_consider_using_block_quotes_for_emails_read_aloud_in_this_segment_

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:12:48)

Followup #1: Testing AIs

_consider_using_block_quotes_for_emails_read_aloud_in_this_segment_
with_reduced_spacing_for_long_chunks –

Science or Fiction (1:23:43)

Theme: Geology Item #1: Geologists estimate that the next major earthquake along the San Andreas Fault would cause vastly more damage from the resulting tsunami than the quake itself. Item #2: The Pacific ocean is so large that it contains its own antipode. Item #3: Sapphires and rubies are actually the same mineral, corundum.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Tsunami more damaging
Science	...has its own antipode
Science	...are the same mineral

Host	Result
Steve	swept

Rogue	Guess
Cara	Tsunami more damaging
Bob	Tsunami more damaging
Evan	Tsunami more damaging

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:35:39)

If we're never wrong then we're never surprised. If we grow too protective of our existing beliefs, then we stagnate and stop learning. If we've reached any degree of competence within our field, it's because we got things wrong along the way. So why stop now? It's interesting, I think, for each of us to consider the following: What am I currently wrong about? It's an impossible question to answer, but a curio, though, to contemplate nonetheless.
– Hector Chadwick, UK-based mentalist

Signoff/Announcements

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

[top]                        

Today I Learned

• Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference
• Fact/Description
• Fact/Description

References

Vocabulary