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.