Episode 13: Learning ESP

 Episode summary: Can people learn ESP? Can parapsychologists ever bother to have an idea of what ESP even is? No and no. 

Bike summary: 2.3 miles, 118.4 calories.

Amusingly, this episode starts out with film from one of the Moon landings, while Nimoy discusses astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who conducted four "experiments" sending telepathic messages while he orbited the Earth. It's amusing because Nimoy is talking about all this alleged phenomenae over these images and all I could think of was Coleman Francis' infamously bizarre narration of his science fiction horror film, The Beast of Yucca Flats. 

But we soon get to meat of the episode. Having discussed ESP, Nimoy says "Many scientists believe it can be taught."

Much like the psychic detectives episode, this really puts the cart before the horse. 

This episode focuses a lot on things like Zenner cards and random number generation and there's a lot of footage of people concentrating hard. Even today, parapsychologists rely on these things and, much like homeopaths, make use of meta-analyses (often heavily cherry-picked) to try to argue that ESP exists, but they completely miss the point. It doesn't matter how many Zenner cards you pick that match the ones somebody else picked in another room. The problem is that there's no theory to test. The hypothesis "Humans have ESP" is like something you do for a science fair. It's not a testable theory.

Essentially, the problem is that it lacks a mechanism. In science there's a principle called Occam's Razor, which is basically that the simplest explanations are usually correct. For example, 19th century scientists believed that light needed a medium to propogate in, the way sound waves do. This medium, the luminiferous ether, would fill all space and have certain testable properties. However, over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, three things happened: firstly, James Clerk Maxwell and TK Hertz put the idea of light as an electromagnetic wave on a very good theoretical and experimental basis, astronomers Albert Michaelson and TK Morley did experiments that didn't find the properties that the ether was expected to have and Einstein put the nail in the coffin with Special Relativity, which made different predictions about light that were found to be correct and didn't need the ether. 

Without any way for ESP to work, the evidence from Zenner cards and other experiments are indistinguishable from noise. Because of the way they set up the experiments, they're assuming psychic effects are large and obvious, which is a pretty big assumption to make.

It's a pretty big leap to go from the undemonstrated, shaky, barely a hypothesis nature of ESP to teaching it, but this is In Search Of.

From, Edgar Mitchell in Earth orbit we zoom in to Nimoy in a Los Angeles-area elementary school (queue Naked Gun) sitting at a table with a bunch of children. He shows them Zenner cards and asks them to guess the one he's holding. One of them, JJ, is particularly good, but I think this is because he can see what cards Nimoy is holding. 

From the kids, they cut to a man called Lawrence or Laurence Kennedy who was doing some weird performance in an Elvis-style jumpsuits, doing something that looked like a faith healing, but was a spoon-bending demonstration in what looked like a Catholic church. This would be odd, given the Catholic stance on psychic phenomena, but it was the 1970s. 

Personally, I've never really gotten the attraction of spoon-bending. It's just not very impressive and some silverware is so flimsy you don't need tools to bend it. I've bent metal spoons from the dollar store by digging out ice cream that was too frozen. Fixing spoons would be a much better trick.

There was also a guy called Robert Monroe of the Institute for Psychic Research doing remote viewing experiments. I wonder if they were funded by the CIA. There was also a man called Charles Tartt complaining that conventional science "leaves out the spiritual dimension." Yeah, because it can't be measured or experimented with. Applied theology is ethics, not the Force. 

Podcast summary

Jeb and Blake described this episode as a "love letter to the 1970s". 

"We've got Edgar Mitchell, we've got the Moon. We're ready for some serious science."

Jeb reiterates some points he made in the Bigfoot episode about how in the 20th century ideas from theosophy and occultism about psychic powers and spiritual planes and beings and what not get reinterpreted as a subject for science. Instead of mustachioed gentlemen in tweed practicing meditation in order to commune with fairies or something, you get cryptozoologists measuring footprints and parapsychologists trying to find ghosts on the electromagnetic spectrum. 

They also don't like JJ Abrams' take on Star Trek, joking that JJ in the elementary school was Abrams and saying he figured out ESP  by blinding Nimoy with lens flare. They also note that one kid is doing poorly and bring up the idea of a negative psychic reaction, an idea some so-called psychics come up with when suddenly their powers don't work when James Randi is around. 

Although judging by this picture of him with Penn Jillette, it's clear that Randi was some kind of archmage. Look at that staff! 

They also question the logic of using cards to test psychic abilities when so many psychics are trained as magicians and thus are skilled at manipulating cards. 

Blake wondered if there was a connection to Tarot cards and Jeb mentioned it's difficult to buy Zenner cards that aren't marked. 

They also comment on the Faith Healing-esque spoon bending guy and note he's not the Lawrence Kennedy from the Firesign Theater. They also mentioned that Uri Geller claimed he was asked to demonstrate spoon bending to an intelligence agency. 

"Spoon bending can be a passport to a life of leisure even more than an English degree," Blake said. 

(Blake: "You know there's a saying among people with English degrees." Jeb: "Oh, God." Blake: "Do you want fries with that?")

Finally they discussed some creepy-looking lab set ups involving middle aged male professors going into secluded parapsychology labs with female undergrads, turning down the lights and encouraging them to relax on the waterbed. But they also talked about the law of large numbers and confirmation bias -- there's a lot going on, which results in coincidences and it's easy to think the hits are more signifigant than they actually are while discounting misses (perhaps the biggest thing seperating science from pseudoscience is that in actual science, getting a null result that disproves the hypothesis is just as good as producing some data points that confirm it). 

Although, obviously, when I look at my phone a split-second before I get an email notification it's because I have ESP and not because I look at my phone too much and get too many emails.   

  

Episode 12: A Call from Space

 Episode summary: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is actively looking for signals sent by aliens. Carl Sagan appears, as do some dolphins. Are they examples of intelligence? The plants sure didn't pan out.

Bike summary: 2.5 miles, 129.1 calories. 

Following the alternate reality episode last week where ESP demonstrably exists and can be used to solve crime, we get something more down to earth: SETI and the search for aliens. In fact, we get aliens and dolphins -- it's like Nimoy was already working on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. (People went wild for whales and dolphins in the 80s -- at one point Star Trek: The Next Generation was supposed to have dolphin and whale crew-members.)

This episode is a really interesting time capsule. For mainstream science, the study of solar systems outside of our own was basically non-existant and I suspect that even the general public was more skeptical of the possibility of extraterrestrial life than it would be today -- and yet official interest was at it's height. There was a lot of funding available to build and operate radio telescopes. Now there's loads of interest and a lot of ground-breaking work being done and no one has any money. This episode was before any exoplanets were known to exist and even came before the WOW! signal was intercepted

All we knew was the Copernican principle that the laws of physics should be identical everywhere and therefore there ought to be exoplanets. We don't really know much more than that, although the existence of exoplanets is teaching us a lot about how solar systems evolve and form -- for instance, the "hot Jupiter" phenomenon, of gas giants orbiting their primaries very closely took scientists by surprise -- as well as just how common planets are. Just in the past two decades we've gone from thinking that planets were rare to thinking that rocky planets are are and now we think that planets capable of supporting life as we know it are rare, although if the James Webb Space Telescope is ever launched it might even prove that wrong.  

Anyways, the basic idea of SETI is that if the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe, there ought to be planets around other stars. Some of these planets will be capable of supporting life and some of these life forms will be intelligent and develop a technological civilization capable of sending and receiving messages encoded as electromagnetic waves, which could be intercepted by another civilization, eg, us. There are a lot of assumptions there, only one of which is supported by actual evidence. We assume we know what life is and that we would recognize it, we assume we know what intelligence is and that we would recognize it -- civilization is perhaps the thing that we would most easily recognize, but the nature of the search in a way dictates the results: essentially SETI researchers are looking for themselves in outer space. 

The episode mostly talks about what's called "active SETI" (although they don't name it), which is where researchers deliberately send high-powered radio signals at star systems considered possible locations for planets with life. In practice this means stars most like our own Sun. (With a few exceptions, these tend to be stars known only by a catalog number, since most stars that can be seen from Earth and so get either a traditional name or a Greek letter and constellation are too big and often too young and too short-lived to to have planets or life.) They talk about the Areceibo Message, sent in 1974 and directed at M13, 25,000 light years away and the better known Pioneer Plaque, designed by Carl Sagan and attached to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 probes. I don't think anyone really expected these to produce some kind of response (even in the 70s, I think astronomers knew globular clusters like M13 were not only full of radiation but tend to consist of very young stars, while neither Pioneer probe will come close to another solar system for 90,000 years)

After a brief look at Ohio State's Big Ear radio telescope -- watching this I was surprised they didn't talk about the Wow! Signal, but it wasn't detected until August of 1977 and this episode was broadcast in May of that year -- we get to the dolphins. Nimoy says dolphins are obviously intelligent and have a language, but we have yet to exchange one word with them (except, of course, for "So long and thanks for all the fish").

Podcast summary:

Right off the bat we learn that Jeb doesn't like SETI. He thinks it's too speculative and the assumptions are too unwarranted and he compared it to a "technological search for angels."

Blake says the episode is like a brochure for SETI. "We broadcast a message from on far, perhaps even from a pon farr."

Another problem Jeb has with SETI is that they believe aliens must be more advanced and therefore peaceful and enlightened, because in all of human history a people with better technology has never conquered and exploited a people with worse technology. 

Then Blake said that "they found Smokey the Bear in Roswell" and he's actually Bigfoot. This really sent me down a rabbit hole, since Bigfoot is French Canadian. The most recent governor general of Canada, Julie Payette, is a French Canadian former astronaut and Quebec City's NHL team was the Nordiqes -- like the Nordic aliens. This is big. This goes all the way to Rideau Hall. 

Jeb also suggests that sci-fi caused space exploration fatigue and that SETI is overpromising. I really disagree with this. There was a lot of scientific and technological optimism in the 60s and early 70s -- there was something like 30 years of continuous, double digit economic growth in most western and even many Soviet bloc countries. Standards of living were increasing, international cooperation was making strides -- this was back when the Peace Corps was respected and not just a thing for rich white kids to get a few weeks experience of white savior syndrome, while the World Heath Organization was running succesful vaccination programs; Norman Borlaug was doing his work on wheat, the European Coal and Steel Community was getting France and Germany to become friends. Yes, there were low points like the Cuban Missle Crisis and the Berlin Wall and the ever-present threat of nuclear war -- but science and technology, and middle-aged men in dark suits meeting in summits around the world, would keep things in check. We have the benefits of hindsight to know that DDT, polyester, Teflon and Freon weren't wonder chemicals and that middle aged men in dark suits don't always have the best interests of people who aren't middle aged men in dark suits at heart.

But man really did walk on the Moon in 1969, at a time when there were some elderly people who remembered the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, who remembered centuries-old monarchies in Eastern and Central Europe fell, who grew up in homes with outhouses and without refrigerators and died in a "push button age". I cannot describe this better than David Szondy and his Tales of Future Past website. 

The fatigue came because once we got to the Moon, we realized there wasn't a whole lot to do. The fatigue came because the energy crisis, the Nixon Shock and stagflation suddenly made space exploration an expensive luxury when people were losing jobs and having to go to gas stations on alternate days. Still, there was a lot of optimism -- in 1976 Gerard K O'Neill published The High Frontier, charting out a future of the space program. In real life, there were only five space shuttles built (and only four at any one time) and they made 135 flights over 30 years from 1981 to 2011 -- but in his book he used what later turned out to be wildly optimistic projections based on NASA's anticipated 50 flights per year and payload costs (in 1976 dollars) under $200 per pound (even cheaper with amortization).

As it turned out, everything was more expensive than anticipated and NASA's approach to human safety was similar to that of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Predicted advances in spaceflight also didn't occur, while computers attracted talent and interest away from space. 

Anyways, Jeb and Blake note that the episode didn't discuss Frank Drake at all, who is kind of the father of SETI. He developed the equation named after him to estimate the number of civilizations in the Mily Way Galaxy (when he pitched Star Trek to TV execs, Gene Roddenberry knew of the Drake Equation but didn't know the exact thing, but he realized the suits didn't know, either, so he made one up). 

They talk about how the UFO believers tend to dislike SETI -- and if you believe aliens are capable of visiting earth regularly and doing so, then looking for their old radio signals is kind of pointless. They also didn't like the parts with the dolphins, which I can't blame them for. Dolphins and whales are no longer the cultural juggernauts they once were.        

It seems very likely that we will discover a planet that could support life like ours within the next hundred years -- but we would be no nearer to discovering any intelligent life than we were in 1976. 

Episode Eleven: Psychic Detectives

 Episode summary: Can the finest psychics in St Louis help the police solve a murder? No, not really. 

Bike summary: 2.6 miles, 133.2 calories

This episode has a great opening, especially in light of the awareness (and over-glamorization) of forensic and scientific criminal investigation techniques popularized by the CSI franchise. A psychic detective called Peter Hurkos plays with some evidence with his bare hands while Leonard Nimoy asks in voiceover, "Can ESP be used to fight crime and find missing persons?"

We'll see more of this later with episodes about ghosts and some other things, but I think that the most entertaining episodes of this show are when it embraces the extremes of the TV documentary -- the highly fact based ones and the ones like this, where they put the cart before the horse and go with it. At no time do they ask "Does ESP exist?" anymore than they asked if Atlantis existed. It's like a window into a parallel 1970s where the paranormal is as ordinary and its uses as ubiqtuous as the internet is today.

From Hurkos the scene moves to Saint Louis, where some people regularly get together as the Psychic Rescue Squad. Most of the episode follows Bevy Jeagers, founder of the Rescue Squad. After a woman was murdered, police were unable to findf the body and the family asked the police to bring in Jeagers . . . who didn't find the body, either. In the episode they recreate how the police brought her to a range, where they let her get in the victim's car. She claimed she went into a kind of psychic trance and experienced the woman's last moments, a blow across the head and impressions of horses and streams. Then she drove around the suburbs known for horses until they gave up -- but they said that where they gave up driving was a bridge over a stream, while the body was discovered a few days later in a creek downstream of that bridge. 

It really isn't a lot to build an episode on, especially since it's clear that the psychics aren't allowed anywhere near the actual case. "Evidence" obtained by psychic means would be inadmissable in court, possibly causing a mistrial, nor could it be used as probable cause to obtain a warrant. The other problem with it is that they kind of fail to really explore how psychic abilities could be used to fight crime. 

Finding bodies and missing persons is all well and good, but it's kind of a niche application. Many times, we see psychics have to be able to touch things that belong to victims -- but crimes like embezzlement or money laundering don't even need the money to pass through the hands of the criminal. Similarly, they never show how the psychics would use their abilities to establish any facts that would be used to convict someone. 

Say you're trying to prove that X murdered Y on the night of July 10. You need a victim, a cause of death, a time of death, a weapon and an indication that X handled the weapon. Even that doesn't establish that X even killed Y. To prove a murder, you also need to prove that X and Y had a history of some sort, that X, even in a state of passion, was capable of making rational decisions (or at least of understanding the consequences of their actions). You also need to prove that Y wasn't the aggressor, that some freak accident didn't happen. There are a lot of things that go into a murder investigation just to establish a plausible or likely sequence of events -- and that doesn't begin to go into actually convincing a jury (well, some juries mighty be more easily convinced than others).

Podcast Summary

Blake sums up the episode nicely by describing the Psychic Rescue Squad as "If the Babysitters' Club had psychic powers" (I'm sure this a Scholastic YA series, by the way). 

They also describe it as looking like an adult extension course. I didn't live through it myself, but I feel like some community college probably did offer courses in ESP. 

They talk a lot about psychics and others don't charge for their services, but accept donations and how this is because of consumer protection laws -- if a psychic can't prove they have psychic powers despite advertising that they do, they can be sued or arrested for fraud. I did not know that, I know a lot of times they say they can't charge for using their putative powers for various mystical reasons (this isn't neccesarrily obfusication -- the clergy of many religions don't technically charge for performing the rites, which is simony in Christianity). 

They mentioned they found a treasure trove of information about the Sally Lucas case, but no mention of psychics involved in it. As I pointed out in my episode summary, psychic "evidence" is inadmissible in court, so that's not unexpected.  

Blake and Jeb also pointed out that Peter Hurkos was a fraud.        

As we all found it in the 90s, no one could have foreseen the closure of the Psychic Friends' Network. 

Take it away, Miss Cleo!

Episode 10: Atlantis

 Episode Summary: It just wouldn't be a show like this without an Atlantis episode.

Bike summary: 2.4 miles, 121.6 calories.

The inevitable Atlantis episode is like every other Atlantis "documentary" I've ever seen (possibly it was even the prototype) as there are shots of a lot of different things and a voice over about how mysterious and ancient they are -- only this is In Search Of, so the voice over is given by Leonard Nimoy, which gives it a kind of gravitas. 

There's Easter Island (maybe the Easter Islanders made the statues?), the Olmec heads, a bunch petroglyphs or geoglyphs (including the Cerne Abbas Giant, which was recently dated to late Anglo-Saxon or early Norman times -- in other words, about when it's first mentioned in written sources. It also may have originally been Jesus, before being overgrown during the English Reformation and re-cut to mock Oliver Cromwell. It's complicated) and a "city older than the pyramids atop the Andes".

"Never have we been so close to finding Atlantis," Nimoy intones. 

There are some scenes of Akrotiri, which is described as "reminiscent of the Minoans" and the Antikythera Mechanism, which in chronological terms comes from closer to the time of Christ than to the Minoans. Nimoy also says something about how the first "modern" computer was invented in I'm not sure what it says in my notes, could be 1922, or maybe even 1940. Regardless, mechanical and analog computers predate even electromechanical computers (by some definitions, IBM is older than the computer, which is weird). 

The episode goes into the usual points, talking about Plato and his account, though relying on the shorter version in Timaeus. Nimoy talks about the wealthy land "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" and how there was once a great land mass in the Atlantic. 

Then we get our first interview -- Dr Maxine Asher, who says she started excavating an Atlantean shipwreak off the coast of Cadiz before the Spanish authorities revoked her permission to dive and so has no artifacts or photographs, other than an amphora. Asher was a fraudster who ran degree mills and believed the "Jews and Catholics" were trying to suppress her Atlantis discoveries. I guess this is something they get together to do on weekends, after the Jews are done with the week's Freemasonry, Communism and International Banking and the Catholics have subverted liberalism, taken over public schoolds, used convents as brothels for priests and the like. 

Interestingly the real lost city/civilization Tartessos is widely believed to be near Cadiz. 

Then there's a shot of the Piri Reis map, supposedly showing ice free Antarctica. This continues to annoy me, as it keeps being brought up in the Atlantis discourse to this day. In the first case, if it is a super advanced ancient map, it doesn't show Cape Horn and the Straights of Magellan! That's a big thing to miss for ancient astronauts. Moreover, according to translations of the map the information from the time of Alexander the Great pertains to the Near East, while the information about the coast of South America comes from captured Portugeuese ships. The origin, where zero degrees of longitude and zero degrees of latitude meet, is at Alexandria. I don't know what projection is used, but it's probably not the Mercator.    

And then we go to the Carribean for the Bimini Road. I think most of the episode is set here, which involves an archeologist, an Italian count/diver, a psychic and Peter Tompkins of the Bermuda Triangle  and talking plants episodes. The "road" was discovered by people looking for evidence of Edgar Caycee's prediction that Atlantis would start to rise again in the late 60s and I believe the psychic was from the Caycee Foundation. They claim to have found a 3,000 year old shipwreck beneath a 16th century one and suggest that Bimini was Atlantis' western port and Cadiz its eastern. 

One of the weird things is that everyone talks about Atlantis as having awe-inspiring advanced technology, but what we are shown as "Atlantean" are not very advanced -- especially since the producers don't have their dates right. The story in Timeaus is that it came down through Critias' family, his great-grandfather having heard the story from Solon, who died around 560 BC. It was set some 9,000 years before him, so call it 9500 BC. For context, this would make the destruction of Atlantis older than Gobekli Tepe and contemporaneous with the beginning of agriculture in the Ancient Near East. 

If Atlantis did exist at those dates, its pottery and architecture would be thousands of years in advance of everyone else. But the episode gives a date range of 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, or 3,000 BC to 1000 BC, which is roughly the Bronze Age. 

Then they talk about Tiwanaku, the "city atop the Andes older than the pyramids" as being 10,000 years old, but this is only a segue to talk about the Moche people, who apparently made statues of people of all the races, which somehow proves Atlantis. I guess the unspoken assumption is that they're pre-Columbian.

Podcast summary

Jeb and Blake were once again joined by Sharon Hill and they have a lot of fun with this one. I imagine Atlantis is one of those things that gets real archeologists all bent out of shape. As evidence, I give you how annoyed Jeb gets with the brief shots of different things. 

"Here are many things from around the world and now we're going to tell you things that aren't true about them," he says.

He's confused by opening oin Easter Island and notes that nothing Nimoy says in the first two minutes is correct, eventuially asking what any of it has to do with Atlantis. 

Blake calls it a "litany of mystery", which WBAGNFAB and Jeb calls it a myth parade. I like to think of it as a mythquerade -- there's some interesting real stuff hiding behind this crap. Not about Atlantis, but about the things they're trying to link together seemingly at random in and of themselves. For instance, I'm sure we know or suspect we know more about the Olmec than just the heads, but whenever they're brought up it's about the heads and how they "prove" Atlantis or some other Old World contact, as though an entire civilization did nothing else than exist to provide racists and tv producers with B-roll. 

Anyways, they bring up the idea of "flat antiquity" -- there's us, the recent past and everything else, which is genericly "ancient". This is, to an extent, part of the human condition (as one of those people who thinks that the mid-90s was 10 years ago, I know) and I wonder if it might be related to the modern trope of Medieval Stasis, where the author of a sci-fi or fantasy novel will have 10,000 years pass between stories, but next to nothing changes in the setting.  

Another concept is hyperdiffusionism, which tries to trace every cultural or technological advance back to a presumed "mother civilization." It's ancient aliens without the aliens and it relies on things like Elisha Gray inventing the telephone at the same time as Alexander Graham Bell as fantasy. It also falls apart when one considers that trying to find a common origin for Egyptian and Mayan pyramids is stupid since they had different purposes, designs and the Egyptians stopped building them some 3,000 years before the height of Mayan civilization. 

The result of hyperdiffusion, which still doesn't provide any proof of Atlantis, is that, as Blake says "Atlantis is everywhere and nowhere."

Maybe Atlantis is the friends we made along the way?

Sharon Hill gets to talk about the Minoan eruption and how it ejected 61 cubic kilometers of debris, forming the modern island of Santorini and may have caused typhoons in various places around the Med. Jeb notes people (read: Simcha Fisher and James Cameron)  have tried playing with the date to associate it with the Exodus. They note that no one ever goes looking for Plato's Cave and Jeb says "Ten thousand years ago, beyond the Pillars of Hercules? In other words it was a long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away."

Jeb sighs audibly when talking about the Antikythera mechanism. "It's first century BC, it's not Atlantis!"

Blake says it's "evidence" of lost knowledge. "They lived in stone buildings, how could they have had gears?"

"I live in a wooden house and I have microchips," Jeb counters. 

They talk about how fewer people today talk about the Bimini Road and discus Peter Tompkins as the voice on the radio in the Bermuda Triangle episode. I don't know if it is or not, it does kind of sound like him, but he has a Mid-Atlantic Accent, so he sounds like William F Buckley, Jr. Given the number of WASPs who moved the Miami area over the years, it's possible there were quite a few people with that accent in those days.

They talk about a lot more and Atlantis is one of my favorite subjects, so I will bring this to a close. One day I hope to launch a podcast of my home, talking about the transformation of Atlantis from allegory to a supposed place still being looked for. 

  

Episode Nine: Martians

 Episode summary: Is there life on Mars? Do we take a look at the law man beating up the wrong guy? Is this film a saddening bore? Were there any sailors fighting in the dance hall?

Bike summary: 2.3 miles 118.8 calories

And God said, let there be Nimoy. 

This episode opens with a 1970s understanding of the evolution of the solar system and rocky planets. It's a lot of lava for some reason. I guess film of the Sun was in its infancy. It's like Nimoy's Genesis, especially when he says things like "The planets were the cinders left by the cosmic holocaust". The writing of this show frequently veers into attempts to be poetic and ends up as purple prose, but it's never dull or banal. It's hard to imagine any show today being writen with such aspiration, especially in this genre. Maybe that's why it's survived to be rebroadcast on the History Channel and sold on DVD -- you can't even get all of America's Castles on DVD. 

Then we get a bit of a taste of the history of cinema, as we're shown a lot of Georges Melies' Le Voyage dans la Lune because the idea of extraterrestials would have been completely unfamiliar to viewers in 1977. Then we get Percival Lowell and the canals he saw (he may have been seeing the blood vessels in his eyes). He believed that Mars once had oceans and that Earth might lose its. 

But then we go to the Viking missions, that landed probes on Mars and analyzed some soil (I think it's technically regolith like on the Moon) and rocks, as well as taking photographs. (It's astonishing -- this was just a few years after the last Moon landing and I'm sure a lot of people thought Viking was preliminary to a manned mission to Mars, instead of 44 years after this episode aired and we're doing cool things like flying helicopters there, but have yet to set foot on it.)

Nimoy says that the analyses done by Viking show that Mars was once like Earth, before an ice age and dessication. As we know, we were not on the cusp of a new ice age. There was (and is) desertification, but much of it is due to human activity, not some pre-ordained water loss. 

The thing that really amazed me about this episode was that they didn't talk about the Face! 

Podcast summary

Jeb and Blake pointed out that this episode doesn't mention War of the Worlds, Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars books, or theosophy, which all influenced each other and were influenced by Lowell's observations of Mars. They also point out that the episode doesn't talk about Giovanni Schiaparelli, the Italian astronomer who first observed what he called canali or channels on Mars. 

But the idea of Mars as a dying planet was fueled by a marriage of Lowell's canals to 19th century ideas on evolution and Darwinism. Everything "evolved" -- "races", nations, civilizations and even planets. But it wasn't really scientific evolution, it was more like Star Trek evolution (and, unsurprisingly, bad sci fi traces its tropes back here) with "evolutionary levels", inevitable transformations and predictable endpoints (for a good example, see the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Distant Origin"; relatedly, I once read an anthology of so-called Golden Age science fiction that opened with such a story from very early in the genre's history and a note by editor Isacc Asimov that in the late 30s or early 40s he submitted such a story to John Campbell, who rejected it for being cliched and unscientific).

It led into the same kind of thinking that we got in the Mummy's Curse -- there are all these ancient civilizations on earth that declined into decadence and were taken over by Europeans, eventually European civilization will also decline. And therefore Mars would be advanced in planetary and social evolution, so it would be inhabited by "minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic".

From there they talked about "spacebro culture" and the idea of terraforming Mars, which they rejected, since there's no air or water (there's also no magnetic field and not much atmosphere, but I don't think they make sunscreen with high enough spf). They also pointed out that a lot of the questions asked by the makers of Viking still haven't been resolved, although the consensus today is that Mars did once have liquid water on the surface. 

They also discussed the meteorite found in Antarctica that was believed to show evidence of microfossils, ALH84001, and talked about the panspermia hypothesis, which they said wasn't impossible but just puts off the big question, so it seems pointless. To that I say it's turtles all the way down.   

Episode Eight: The Mummy's Curse

 Episode summary: Say Akhenaten one more time, I dare you 

Bike summary: 2.2 miles, 112 calories 

We're back with the weirdness.

This episode opens with two women chanting "Akhenaten" in unison (and boy did I get tired of hearing it quickly) and saying things like "We call out the name, Akhenaten" before Nimoy tells us in voice over about the women were in a play and before opening night they had identical dreams, except that one was struck across the face and other across the chest. The next morning the first went partially blind and the second was suffering from life-threatening internal bleeding . . . so the legend says (I wonder if this was told to the actresses in the recreation?)

Having established the idea that Akhenaten was cursed by the priests of Amun-Re for his heresy, they then cut to a shot of the mask of Tutankhamun, a pharoh who is famous for not being Akhenaten. This isn't the last time that the pharoh who is cursed or cursing changes, either. 

Then, in a jump cut that can cause whiplash, we get b-roll of Downtown Abbey: Highclere Castle, where Henry Herbert, the Sixth Earl of Carnarvon, looks and sounds very much the part of the British lord: he's in tweed, he smokes a pipe and he speaks with that clipped Received Pronounciation accent you never hear any more. He talks about his father, the Fifth Earl, who financed the excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb and died shortly thereafter. Lord Carnarvon could tell a good story and he talks about how when his father died, all the electricity in Cairo went out and when he returned to Highclere, he was told how the exact moment the fifth Earl died his dog started howling and died. 

(I have Lone Star-ish relationship to the Earls of Carnarvon, by coincidence. One of my earliest ancestors in what's now the United States was Major Simon Willard, a soldier, explorer, politician, trader and land speculator who was born in Kent and immigrated to Massachusetts in 1634 and died in 1676. He had three wives and 18 children, of whom quite a few lived to adulthood and sired children themselves. One of his descendents was Joseph Clapp Willard, co-founder of what's now the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, DC. His son was Joseph E. Willard, a Democratic politician in Virginia who served as United States Ambassador to Spain. He had two daughters, Belle Wyatt Willard, who married Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Mary Elizabeth Willard, who married Mervyn Herbert, half brother of the fifth Earl. Mervyn's full brother, Aubrey Herbert, who was the mother of Laura Herbert, wife of Evelyn Waugh. Geneaology: it's like a boring game of Five Degrees of Kevin Bacon sometimes.)

According to Nimoy, a tablet was found in Tutankhamun's tomb, which has now disappeared, that said "Death will slay with his wings all who enter here." I think this has been traced to a 19th century novel called The Mummy. It's odd to worry about curses when excavating tombs, since virtually all Egyptian pharaonic tombs were robbed in Antiquity. In a gothic-sounding recitation, Nimoy quickly lists off the names of the people who died soon after opening Tutankhamun's tomb -- Carnarvon, Jay Gould (whom I thought was the "robber baron" involved in the Erie War and Black Friday, but it was his son) and a few others. 

Then, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, we get back to the story of the play from the opening narration, by a man Nimoy introduces as an historian: Henry Lincoln. I was completely blindsided by this appearance (and another great RP accent). Lincoln was a script-writer, who if not for one other thing, would be best known for the three Doctor Who scripts he wrote in the 60s that featured Yetis, the Great Intelligence and introduced long-running, beloved character Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart (played by the late Nicholas Courtney from 1968 until 2008). The other thing, unfortunately, was Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which is Chariots of the Gods for people who think the Templars built the Pyramids. 

After yet more "Akhenaten Akhenaten" (Let's face it, you can't akhenaten anything), there's a mostly accurate description of the Aten heresy and how the priest of Amun-Re recovered their power after Akhenaten's death, explaining why they might want to curse him. Except we haven't been talking about the curse of Akhenaten, but of Tutankhamun, and the curse has been about vengeance for disturbing the king's tomb and the things inside he needs for the afterlife, not the revenge of reempowered clerics. 

Immediately, after that Nimoy starts talking about how the mummy of Ramesses II was flown to Paris to be examined (he was given an Egyptian passport with "Former King" written on the "Occupation" form, which considering that Fuad II was in exile and the other mummies on international tours, must have meant that Egypt was a net exporter of kings), even though not only was Ramesses not part of the same dynasty as Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, but his tomb was looted in antiquity and his mummy transferred out of the Valley of the Kings to Deir el-Bahri before being discovered in 1881 and put on display -- 1976 is a little late for that curse to manifest. 

Finally Nimoy casts doubt on the whole thing by pointing out that Howard Carter lived a long and happy life. He doesn't say it, but Lady Evelyn Beauchamp, the fifth earl's daughter and one of the first people in the tomb, was still alive when the episode broadcast. Stephen Fry said on QI that one of the excavators died in the 1970s in his 90s and the New York Times headline was "Mummy's curse strikes again".

All I know is that the word Akhenaten has lost all meaning for me.

Podcast summary:

Jeb said very early on what he thought of the whole thing: "A lot of this is crazy white people."

He explained that many French and British people involved in colonialism were seeking to validate the imperial project. They also had anxiety about their own civilization succombing to decadence and superstition like the ones they were busy subjugating. I get his point, but I guess I don't understand how civilizational anxiety leads to believing in curses. Jokes about how the United States' current political dysfunction is due to being built on an Indian burial ground aside, although it might not be too dissimilar, come to think of it -- Jay Anson claimed the house in The Amityville Horror was built on a field where the local Native American abandoned their elderly and mentally ill to die (spoiler: he was making it up). I guess believing in ghosts and curses (or ethnic or religious minorities) is easier than actually reading about political science. Or confronting political issues. 

A lot of the curse mythos, they note, seems to come from newspapers, most of which were locked out of the tomb opening and spread stories of a curse to make up for the fact that they didn't have an actual story. "I'm not saying the Titanic was cursed," Blake notes. "But everyone involved with her is now dead."

They talk a bit about the play, comparing it to the films of Kenneth Anger. It was written by Arthur Weigall, a journalist and archeologist who had a professional rivalry of sorts with Howard Carter. He helped introduce Akhenaten to a popular audience. They say Weigall "made Akehenaten famous", although I think Sigismund Freud is more deserving of that "honor". 

 

Episode Seven: Earthquakes

 Episode summary: Back in the 70s, only the Earth itself was trying to kill California. Now it's all the elements. 

Bike summary: 2.6 miles, 131.6 calories 

Another largely fact-based episode that really takes advantage being based in California. There's lots of footage of the San Francisco earthquake from 1906, the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, images of then-contemporary San Francisco and the Good Friday earthquake in Alaska in 1964. (Supposedly, many of the fires from the San Fransisco earthquake, which really devastated the city, were set deliberately because people had fire insurance but not earthquake insurance.) 

Nimoy says that 28,000 buildings were destroyed in San Francisco. If it happened today, the NIMBYs there would not let it be rebuilt. (Another thing that's never talked about, but which I suddenly wonder: how local were the effects? The Bay Area was, of course, not nearly as developed back then, but no one ever talks about the effects on Oakland or Marin County.)

Earthquakes seem to have been in the zeritgeist somehow. Two major movies, 1978's Superman and the last James Bond film with Roger Moore, A View to a Kill in 1985, featured villains who wanted to destroy California by setting off the San Andreas Fault. 

A lot of the episode is, however, taken up by speculation -- or Nimoy was pitching a screenplay. He says two British scientists predicted that the combined gravitational field of all the planets lining up on one side of the Sun in 1982 would play havoc with the Sun's magnetic field, causing lots of solar flares and this would somehow result in devastating earthquakes breaking out across the world.

In SF this would cause the Golden Gate Bridge to fail, the Embarcadero to collapse full of cars, huge firestorms would result from downed powerlines sparking ruptured gas mains, etc, until everyone was dead (except for one, gravelly voiced geologist-hero, played by Nimoy, who would lead survivors out of the burning city and find love at the same time). It's incredibly over the top. 

There's also a bit about studying animals' activity to see if they predict earthquakes, especially cockroaches. I know that dogs and horses have been reported acting strangely before earthquakes, but I can't imagine most insects care that much about them. They're pretty hardy. 

Podcast summary.

Jeb and Blake were joined by geologist Sharon Hill, who was amused there was an add for Rice-a-roni in the 1906 footage. 

She said that the 1964 Alaska eartthquake was signifigant because geologists from the United States Geological Survey were able to get on the scene very quickly and it was also the first earthquake understood in terms of plate tectonics, which was a very new theory then.

As far as the animals predicting earthquakes, she said that she wants it to be true and despite there being a large number of anecdotes, there's no good data. Similarly, she said that one technique geologists are looking at to predict earthquakes are emissions of electrons from the earth, but they only happen sometimes. 

Blake mentioned a Japanese legend that earthquakes are caused by a giant catfish trapped in the earth and its attempts to break free. He said earthquakes will continue "Unless we find that catfish and kill it."

I think we're gonna need a bigger pot of gumbo. (And now I'm sad that the Border Cafe in Harvard Square, that served great Tex-Mex and Cajun food, shut down.)