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 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 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.)

Episode Four: The Bermuda Triangle

 Episode summary: Nimoy throws shade at Nova and a Coast Guard cutter encounters fog . . . in the Bermuda Triangle. 

Bike summary: 3.3 miles. This is the last episode I forgot to record calory data for. 

When people think of In Search Of, it's probably episodes like this that come to mind, versus that first one about psychic plants. 

I don't think I've heard anything about it recently -- the universal adoption of GPS for navigating for ships and boats, as well as the fact that Bermuda, the Bahamas and Miami were hubs of a huge tourist trade may have finally killed it in popular culture -- but when I was a kid in the 90s there were still shows about it appearing with some regularity (I seem to recall having my parents videotape one two hour long one that connected the Bermuda Triangle to Atlantis that must have been shown at 9:00 pm. Update: it might be this one, hosted by Richard Crenna, with this the Atlantis one ). I think TV crews like justifying trips to the Bahamas as work trips. Nowadays the only things that disappear mysteriously in that part of the world are the tax liabilities of certain high net worth individuals and businesses. 

Anyways, we open with Nimoy throwing shade on a rival documentary crew that concluded there was no mystery to the Bermuda Triangle by engaging in what can only be described as moving the goal posts. It's very subtle, but he says something like "Not to investigate is undermine the essence of science itself", even though the rivals (which turned out to be Nova) concluded that there's nothing paranormal going on, not that there's nothing to investigate. Of course missing planes and ships need to be investigated, for the sake of the families and insurers if nothing else, but there's a huge difference between saying to a greiving widow "Your husband's ship disappeared. It probably sank with all hands, but we can't find any remains because the ocean is big, deep and dark." and "Your husband's ship disappeared and we don't care." 

I do wonder if multiple TV crews have ever turned up to make dueling documentaries somewhere and they end up trying to sabotage each other and rewrite the scripts to include disses and take thats. 

It's a way of making skeptcs sound callous, dogmatic and incurious and it's still done today. UFO believers have won a huge victory by getting the US military to release a bunch of videos taken by planes, get these videos into mainstream publications like The New York Times and get ex-CIA director John Brennan to say things like "Some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be the result of something we don't yet understand . . ." But press them on the explanations advanced by skeptics and they say they just want to investigate.

To demonstrate that there's still a mystery to solve, we are presented with a few stories we're told can't be explained: a plane crash, a Coast Guard cutter encountering a white wall that left people on board feel cold and clammy and someone with a mid-Atlantic accent calling in to a radio station. 

The Coast Guard cutter seems to have come across some fog and they don't offer many details about the crash. The voice on the radio was genuinely creepy, though. It said that every living thing has an aura, as does the planet itself, and the Bermuda Triangle is like some kind of communications device for the planet's aura to contact the "Millionth Council" that governs it. Ships and planes get transported to "the timeless void" if they're in the triangle when the thing is on. A) This sounds like something from a film (or TV show, eg The Fantastic Journey, B) Why are "precursor" or advanced civilizations always so damn negligent? In fiction they'll mark their abandoned superweapons or the repository of an evil warlord's consciousness with temples or shmuck-baity warnings, but these Millionth Council jokers can't even bother to put up a single pyramid of skulls. I guess in space no one can hear you file a civil suit. They're doing a great job of governing the planet, too. 

Podcast summary:

I like Smith's Razor: "Never attribute to the paranormal what can be attributed to your misunderstanding of statistics."

Of course, as any baseball fan knows, even massive sample sizes don't mean that the nigh-impossible doesn't happen, only that it will evantually happen to a Mets team in a close playoff race -- just ask Jeff Francoeur.

In the show notes they mention that writer Gian Quasar speculates that the "Millionth Council" caller is either Peter Tompkins (who wrote about psychic plants, ancient astronauts and the Bermuda Triangle) or Carlos Allende (he invented the Philadelphia Experiment).

I think Jeb says the whole phone thing is very Mothman-y, which gives me an excuse to post this picture, from the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, ME.

Blake also talks about some of the ships that "mysteriously" disappeared in the Triangle and it turns out that they were old, slow cargo ships operated without much regard for safety in a part of the world known for hurricanes. One of the ships was on fire so much the alarms were turned off! Wikipedia goes him one better and points out that a ship cited as disappearing in the Triangle actually exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of miles away. 

In the end, the real mystery is if I'm ever going to get this Barry Manilow song out of my head.

 

Episode One: Other Voices

 Episode summary: Can plants talk? In Search Of investigates. 

Bike summary: 2.1 miles, 108 calories. 

TV reaction:

As first episodes go, this is an odd choice. I know people in the 70s and 80s had strange pseudoscientific fads like pyramid power, crystals and the intelligence of dolphins and whales, but what was going on that made a show about the supposed psychic and empathic powers of houseplants compelling TV? (Although having seen the ads that accompanied the Star Wars Holiday Special, maybe this was dangerously exciting by 70s standards?) I would have led with the Bigfoot episode, which opens with a tense, dramatic reenactment of a cabin supposedly being beseiged by Bigfoots.

Not much about the episode sticks out to me, other than Nimoy's frankly creepy insinuations. "Children are more accepting of new ideas than adults", "Have plants been speaking to Man for millions of years?" "Your honor, the plants told me to kidnap the children". (I made that last one up.)

It feels a bit unfocused. There's a bit at the beginning where some guy is trying to teach kids to "feel the plant's life force" or something, a woman doing an experiment with playing music to plants, some Kirlian photography showing plant "auras" and a guy with a polygraph machine trying to see if plants can feel others' pain, first by scratching himself with a scalpel and then by scratching a producer with it. Nothing really ties it together. It really needed something like an explicit thesis of vitalism or maybe the Gaia  hypothesis to bring it together. Also, I find it interesting that they didn't talk about Peter and Eileen Caddy's garden in Findhorn, Scotland, which they claim flourished because of their spiritual practices. 

Podcast:

No Nimoy Fashion Report yet. 

The kids in the beginning are doing "plant Reiki" according to Jeb (I think, it might be Blake). The guy teaching them to empathize with mulch is Billy Meier, who made the photo the "I want to believe" poster is based on. It's apparently from The X-Files, but I know it from poster sales at college in the late Aughts and Vice TV ads in the Boston subway. (Meier also claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus and Mohammed, among others, and is in contact with extraterrestrials, like someone who really likes the All Myths are True trope. Per Wikipedia, he's also an anti-Semite.)

Jeb and Blake really focus in on polygraph guy, who they find really squicky for the way he does the "experiment" with plants feeling the pain of others. They keep describing him as "stabbing" with the scalpel, which makes me think of Young Frankenstein, but it's more of a scraping motion. Also, polygraph guy was an interogator for the CIA, which makes me wonder if they let him go because he wanted to recruit plants as spies (maybe Timothy Zhan saw this?).

They mention that the Mythbusters recreated the "play plants music" experiment (NB: I want to look up this experiment because the episode presents it like this woman got a doctorate for a science fair project, while kids these days build fusion reactors for their science fairs), but while the experiment on In Search Of found that classical music was great for plants and acid rock the worst for them, I think the experiment on Mythbusters found that plants preferred heavy metal to other types.

Conclusion

Ultimately, we know what plants would say if they could talk.