Last month I made a trip with friends to the other coast of Florida, and our route over there was the Tamiami trail. Guess what’s on that trail? The Skunk Ape Research Headquarters, of course!

It’s tough to express how disappointing this institution is to visit. It’s basically a ramshackle gift shop fronting a petting zoo and a campground area. There are also three large animal statues outside, one of a Florida Panther, the other two of a gorilla and of a lion that were probably appropriated from a put-put course or the like.

The large words above the entrance beckon the travelers inside. What comprises the exhibit? Another gorilla statue, a few shelves split between Skunk Ape merchandise and a some lean Skunk Ape documentary evidence.

And that’s it. It’s hardly worth the stop. The rest of the gift shop is devoted to more standard Florida tchotchkes, and the whole store is festooned with cobwebs and other unmistakable signs of decay. At the back of the store is the entrance to a petting zoo.

The driving force behind the belief in a Skunk Ape living near the everglades was a Mr. David Shealy, who owns the research headquarters. It’s my understanding, at least from anecdotal accounts, that Mr. Shealy has become bored and disillusioned with the whole Skunk Ape thing because it hasn’t made as much money as he hoped. I’m sure there are still hardcore Bigfoot researchers who will hold on to their belief in a Skunk Ape in south Florida, but the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters is a monument to a weird idea whose time looks past.

It happened while I was on vacation, but a local TV station ran a story about a “mysterious sea creature” being spotted off of  Sand Key Park. The incident happened on August 30th, and the news story is quick to connect the monster to the Normandy Nessie flap from last year.

I’ve embedded the entire story below. There’s not much to say about it. The family that spotted the creature isn’t identified, and the cell phone video of the incident shows absolutely no creature at all. I’m sure the witnesses saw something, but there’s no reason presented to explain why we should assume they saw a sea monster and not some normal sea creature, like a manatee or a shark. And yet again the anaconda explanation is trotted out again, because Florida still isn’t over worrying about giant snakes for no reason.

I’ve decided to highlight some instances of positive portrayals of skepticism in the entertainment media. Considering how much woo is pedaled as entertainment it may seem like us skeptics never get to be the heroes, but occasionally there are good stories we can root for.

My first example is from comic book that came out quite a while back. The Dirty Pair are two scantily-clad law enforcement agents that starred in a series of sci-fi novels in Japan, and later in many animated movies and TV series. In 1988 the American comic book company Eclipse bought the rights to do a book based on the characters. The American Dirty Pair took the form of a series of mini-series, all written and drawn by Adam Warren, with the first three series being co-written by Toren Smith. The third series (1990-1991) was entitled A Plague of Angels, and that’s the series the scene below is from.

Set-up: Kei and Yuri are agents for the 3WA, an organization that enforces the law within the interstellar civilization that humanity has become by the 22nd Century. Though Kei and Yuri’s technical code-name is “Lovely Angels” they’re widely known as “The Dirty Pair” because of their wonton use of violence and the fact that most of their operations have tendency to go  horribly worng, resulting in innocent casualties sometimes on a planetary scale.

In an attempt to rehab the Angels’ image the 3WA has ordered them to spend time with a reporter, Cory, who in turn has be ordered to turn in a positive story about the Angels no matter how hard that may be. Cory takes Kei and Yuri to a club, hoping that perhaps alcohol will bring out their best side.

(Click on each image to see them full size.)

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The British government has been releasing newly declassified government records relating to UFOs in batches for a few months now. The most recent batch dropped yesterday, and even mainstream news sources have been making a lot of a Winston Churchill cover-up claim made in one set of correspondence. For example, the BBC headlined their coverage, “Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show.”

I can already see the UFO believers going insane over this one. That particular slice of the UFO community that believes that the US government has been covering up some sort of ongoing relationship with aliens (c.f. Majestic 12) are going to love that the documents revealed yesterday say that Churchill was consulting with Dwight Eisenhower when he made the cover-up decision.

But what do the documents really say? Are the cover-up claims at all credible?

First of all, the letters released are from 1999, and they concern a third hand story. The letter writer is apparently a scientist of some sort (DEFE 24/2013/1, pg. 284), and he’s looking for information on a “foo fighter” incident his grandfather once told his mother about. The grandfather was supposedly one of Winston Churchill’s bodyguards during WWII, and was present when Churchill discussed a mysterious object that was seen and photographed following a British bomber. The object was metallic, and was far faster than any known aircraft. After discussing the object’s ramifications the whole incident was supposedly classified for 50 years on Churchill’s personal order.

There are many clues throughout the letters that the story the letter writer’s mother told him had been hopelessly contaminated with decades of later pop culture influences. The most obvious is this passage in an addendum the letter writer included with all his mother’s recollections of what her father told her (DEFE 24/2013/1, pg. 276).

Another person at the meeting raised the possibility of an unidentified flying object, at which point Mr. Churchill declared that the matter should be immediately classified for at least 50 years and its status be reviewed by a future Prime Minister.

This is impossible, because the term “unidentified flying object” didn’t exist during WWII. The terms was first used in US Air Force documents in the early 1950s. Even the term “flying saucer” was not coined until 1947. In short, there was no real term for “possible alien spacecraft” in the time period the meeting supposedly took place, so if someone there was trying to hint that they thought something was an alien spacecraft there was no euphemism to hide behind. They would have had to come right out and say it, and I imagine that would be very memorable to everyone in the room.

Churchill’s reason for the cover-up is also a bit ridiculous, considering the context. According to the letter writer (DEFE 24/2013/1, pg. 279),

Mr. Churchill is reported to have made a declaration to the effect of the following:

“This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general public and destroy one’s belief in the Church.”

The letter writer specifies that this meeting took place in the “bunkers,” so I assume that means during the Blitz. Nazi Germany was bombing the hell out of London on a nightly basis, and had ballistic missiles with a range of 200 miles, but Churchill was worried a single object that hadn’t hurt anyone was going to cause a panic? That hardly seems likely. The “mass panic” explanation for the UFO cover-up is a creation of pop culture, and as I argue here it doesn’t make much sense as a government policy.

In summation, this third hand story with absolutely no corroboration. Nothing more is known about the “foo fighter” incident that sent Churchill into such a panic, or if it ever happened. Moreover, the whole incident directly contradicts what British UFO believers have previously claimed to be the “holy grail” proving Churchill’s interest in flying saucers. Going forward it will be interesting to see how deeply ingrained this new, unconvincing “proof” of a British UFO cover-up will get in the UFO myth.

Need something with big teeth to be afraid of? The St. Pete Times has had you covered this last week.

On Sunday they profiled Capt. Bill Goldschmitt, a shark fisherman with a somewhat outdated view of the shark situation in the Gulf of Mexico. In the course of the interview Capt. Goldschmitt claimed to have once almost caught Old Hitler, a giant hammerhead shark that supposedly lives in Tampa Bay.

“I had him once,” Capt. Bill says. But everything went wrong, as they do in the good fishing stories. Old Hitler was just too big — at least 18 feet long. The wind roared and lightning flashed. Capt. Bill howled at the elements. The hook straightened. Old Hitler sank below the waves.

I think we can write that off as a fish story.

In more substantial news, the Times reported today that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has given a trapper permission to kill a 10-foot long alligator that has been seen in the canals around the Roser Park area. This is a very large gator for such an urban area, and it probably would be best for the local pet population if the trapper finds it.

Yesterday Germany lost their World Cup semi-final game to Spain, a result that was perhaps unexpected — unless you happen to be a octopus. A psychic octopus.

I’m not going to argue with Paul the psychic octopus’ results, because it’s not really worth it. The octopus has a 50/50 chance of being right about each game just by random chance, and we have no idea under what circumstances the picks are being made. The whole thing may be a joke, and I can’t read the original German news sources, so it’s a little hard to be sure.

Let’s assume for a moment the whole thing isn’t a complete joke, and the people at the aquarium are even half-serious about the clairvoyant cephalopod. How did it start? Who looked at a octopus in a tank in Oberhausen and thought, “You know what? I think this mollusk has supernatural knowledge of the future outcomes of football matches being played in South Africa!” By any rational measure, that’s a heck of a leap.

The thing is that there are many phenomenon almost as loopy that accepted as evidence in many fields of pseudoscience. Take just a couple of examples from cryptozology, which I know best.

Glowing pterodactyls – The ropen is an obscure cryptid, claimed to live on the islands of Papua New Guinea. I couldn’t find any reference in my library to the animal before 2003. That’s not say there weren’t people claiming that pterodactyls might survive to the present day before that, but most of the stories came from Africa (the kongamato) or America (thunderbirds). The ropen has been heartily embraced by, of all people, Creationists, because they’ve convinced themselves that finding a living animal that was considered long extinct will disprove evolution in some way. The evidence for the ropen is frankly sparse even by cryptozoology standards, mostly coming down to one eyewitness report from a local man who was interviewed in 2003, though his sighting was years earlier. In more recent years cryptozoologists and Creationists have started claiming that any unexplained lights seen in the night skies around Papua New Guinea are also the ropen. The theory seems to be that the ropen is bioluminescent, even though I could find no “ropen light” sighting that had any features that would make it different from any old UFO sighting, or that would suggest the “light” was a flying animal of any kind.

Bigfoot Knocking Wood – This one is not nearly as dirty as it sounds. The idea is that certain Bigfoot researchers go out in the woods and hit two pieces of wood together, on the theory that Bigfoots find this so compelling they answer back by hitting branches together. I’ve always found this one particularly odd because even most Bigfoot researchers admit that they have no good reason to think this would work, yet they do it anyway and “analyze” the tapes that result. Of course if you’re in the woods long enough you’re always going to hear sounds you can’t identify, especially if you’re making a ruckus yourself. Many of the wood knocking tapes I’ve listened to sound suspiciously like echoes.

It isn’t limited to just cryptozoology, though. Why would aliens from outer space draw symbols in wheat fields in England? Ghost hunters on TV are always claiming that whatever “readings” they get on their electronic equipment are evidence of ghosts. Conspiracy minded people may be the worst. They see any cloud in the sky that seems odd to them as evidence that the New World Order is spraying “chemtrails” to facilitate mind control.

It’s one of the tenants of science that correlation is not always causation, and therefore proving causation should always be a priority. Scientists also call this providing the mechanism. Pseudoscience is wont to skip the steps of real science, and it’s much easier to bundle together a bunch of possibly unrelated phenomenon and call them evidence for whatever pet belief you have than to do the much harder work of figuring out what’s really happening.

The other week I was at Tyrone Square Mall when I came upon a kiosk selling “AIR Sports Watches.” The material at the kiosk made vague claims about “improving your game,” and claimed that the watches were “infused with Tourmaline and Germanium.” I wasn’t quite sure if this was an actual health claim, or just a ludicrously overblown description of the watch itself, because germanium is one substance that can be “doped” to make the semiconductors used in so many electronics today.

It turns out the AIR Sports Watches people are claiming all kinds of health benefits from wearing the watches. The company is located in Largo, and they do have a website. In particular, check out the “Features” page, which includes claims that the watches use tourmaline and germanium to “emit Negative Ions & Far Infrared (FIR), improve circulation & mental alertness, strengthen immune system while reducing stress, speed up post-recovery time.” I guess that it’s the “Negative Ions” and “Far Infrared” that supposed to be causing all those miraculous effects, and there’s even a barely sourced PDF explaining the alleged science behind them. What is completely missing is any explanation of how a silly little silicone band is supposed to be producing negative ions or infrared radiation! Even if all the claims about the health benefits of negative ions and infrared radiation were true (and a quick look at the aforementioned PDF should raise numerous red flags*), there is no credible explanation for how the watch creates either in significant quantities. Neither tourmaline (basically, a pretty rock) or germanium  (primarily used in electronics) have a history of being used for the creation of negative ions or infrared radiation.

I have no objection to these watches as sports watches, though at $20 each I’d say they are overpriced by about $19. They’re pretty simple watches, and the silicone bands looked low quality to my admittedly untrained eye. The makers of these watches should be ashamed of the quackery they’ve been using to sell these things.

*For example, the only American source given is a study that was published in 1996 on the “Certified Medinex Website.” Medinex was a website that was pushing its own “medical ethical code” for Internet sites. It is defunct now and it was never a scientific journal, so the citation is meaningless.

FlashNews, a service that provides “daily exclusive offbeat pop culture news items for use by radio/TV producers, on-air talent and print/website editors” ran an item today about Skunk Ape mating season. It’s now! The source seems to be Dave Shealy, he of the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters. Other factoids include Shealy’s determination that there are seven to nine Skunk Apes living in the Everglades right now, and that women who are menstruating can attract the alleged primate.

If you hear something about Skunk Ape sex on the radio or on TV in the next couple days, the FlashNews piece will be a the reason. I’m going to contact Shealy and see if he’ll be willing to talk about where he got his population estimate from.

In recent months we’ve been hearing a lot about snakes here in Florida, specifically the Burmese python population that’s threatening to burst out of the Everglades and consume all small children south of Gainesville. I’ve written about it a couple times, if indirectly.

At the beginning of February the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conversation Commission called for a special six week hunt for the pythons supposed to be infesting the Everglades. So how many pythons did the hunters find?

Zero.

I don’t want to minimize the environmental danger of invasive species like Burmese pythons, they certainly can be a problem. But so much of what we’ve been hearing about these pythons in the local media, and even on national shows like MonsterQuest, has been irrational and not really based on the facts. There’s really no reasonable scenario where these snakes become dangerous to humans.

It reminds me of when I was a kid, I was so worried about killer bees. I saw shows and read in magazines that killer bees were coming, that they were going to be everywhere in the U.S. by 1990, that they’d be killing hundreds of people a year. It never happened. The threat of killer bees loomed large in my psyche for a long time, until I finally read something that explained why africanized honey bees aren’t that much of a problem, and that’s where we are today.

This morning I was looking through the news feeds, minding my own business, and — What’s this? “‘Oriental yeti’ discovered in China”? That’s the headline in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. I’m not sure how an “Oriental yeti” is supposed to be different from the regular kind of yeti, but surely this is a momentous occasion! One of the most famous cryptzoological subjects, captured for all to see! And there’s even a picture of the creature!

…

They’re kidding, right? I’m not exactly sure what that is, but by no stretch of the imagination is it a yeti, oriental or otherwise. I’d guess it’s a civet or something similar that lost its hair for some reason. This is worse than those mangy coyotes that were being passed off as chupacabras a few years ago.

I guess the big question here is how did the concept of the yeti get attached to this poor thing. Surely “yeti” isn’t such a general term that it apples to any unknown animal in Asia. As far as I can tell the story originated in the Telegraph, though they don’t really explain where they got and why they think it’s newsworthy. The creature may have been captured near the Himalayas, but that’s still an enormous stretch to call it a yeti. The Daily Mail also ran a story on the creature, though they are probably just repeating what they read in the Telegraph the day before. The Mail does have a useful “Femail” sidebar providing links to all recent stories on their website with slutty pictures of women, so that’s helpful.

If I can find any more about where this story came from and how it got the sensationalist “yeti” label attached to it, I’ll update this post.