Skeptics of the Paranormal Masquerade as Serious Scholars of the Spooky

Tonight, October 31, is Halloween, a night for masquerades.  Little girls are dressing up as princesses and little boys are dressing up as superheroes. We also see the masquerade of skeptics that always appears around Halloween, when we see a bunch of stories online with titles such as "Why Your Brain Causes You to Believe in Ghosts" and "How Your Brain Causes You to Hallucinate a Ghost."  When they author such stories, denialist skeptics masquerade as serious scholars of the paranormal, and they masquerade as people who understand some neural basis for belief or some neural basis for hallucinations in normal people. 

In general, our skeptics are not apparition scholars, and are not scholars of human observations of the paranormal or human reports of the anomalous. The literature on human reports of the paranormal is a vast body of literature consisting of so many books and publications you would need a large public library to hold all the books and publications.  In general our skeptics show no sign of having read any such books, other than a few books written by fellow skeptics. They do not busy themselves reading the classic observational reports of apparition sightings. They do not study the countless volumes of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research or the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, even though such volumes can be very conveniently obtained online at sites such as www.archive.org or this site.  They show no signs of having read any of the fifty main works on the paranormal that a serious scholar should read before writing about it (such as books listed here). 

But in their articles appearing around Halloween in which they attempt to debunk apparition sightings, our skeptics try to masquerade as scholars of the paranormal.  We can tell they are no such thing by their lack of references to the relevant scholarly and observational literature. We can also tell their lack of scholarship on such topics by their incorrect generalizations about apparition sightings. 

A skeptic describing an apparition sighting will tell us all kinds of imaginative narratives that do not match the observational characteristics of apparition sightings.  He may say that you went to some spooky house and got scared, and that fear caused you to hallucinate seeing a ghost. Or he may say that you were filled with grief, so your brain caused you to see the ghost of some person you wanted to believe has survived.  He will not typically provide narrative examples of such cases, because there are so few of them. 

What our skeptic will not tell you about is a type of apparition sighting far more common, that he cannot explain.  In this type of apparition sighting, a person who is in a completely normal state of mind will suddenly be surprised to see an apparition of someone he did not know was dead or even close to death; and will then soon learn that the same person died about the same time the apparition was seen.  There are hundreds of cases of such apparitions, which you can read about in my posts below.

n Apparition Was Their Death Notice

25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

25 More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

Yet Another 25 Who Were “Ghost-Told” of a Death

Scientific American's Very Lame "Ghost Explanations"

They Also Were "Ghost Told" of a Death

More Accounts of Veridical Apparitions

Even More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Serve as Announcements

Still More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Act as News Bulletins

They Too Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

They Seemed to Ghost-Learn of Someone's Death

It Seemed Her Suicide Was Not Her End

Our skeptic will typically not know about such cases, because he is not actually a scholar of human reports of the paranormal, but merely masquerades as such a thing. Another very common type of apparition sighting is when the same apparition is seen by multiple observers.  Examples can be found in the posts below:

When Multiple Witnesses See the Same Apparition

When Two or More See the Same Apparition

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 Cases

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 More Cases

More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers
Many an Apparition Is Seen by More Than One
Still More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers

When an Apparition Is Seen by Not Just One

Our skeptic will conveniently ignore all such cases. 

Because he has not actually made a scholarly study of apparition reports, our skeptic will continue to advance his lame "fear or grief causes hallucinations" theory, even though such a theory totally fails to explain any of the more interesting reports of apparition sightings,  which occur to people when they are not afraid or grieving, and often involves more than one observer seeing the same apparition, which could never happen from brain hallucinations.  Our skeptic will not cite any scientific experiments supporting his theory, because it is a fantasy without experimental support. 

If there was some tendency for people to hallucinate when they were afraid or grieving, it would be very easy to prove such a thing with experiments. For example, you could test 100 subjects with an experiment in which you told them something terrifying, such as that a tornado or earthquake will soon strike the building they are in.  Then ask such people to describe what they saw, to see how many of them hallucinated. Or you could tell 100 subjects a lie that some beloved figure or one of their relatives had died.  Then ask about their observations, to see how many of them hallucinated from grief. Of course, there are no experiments supporting the fanciful notion that fear or grief causes hallucinations of apparitions. And there are almost no reports of apparitions seen at funerals, the meetings where you have the greatest concentration of grieving people. 

Besides masquerading as scholars of the paranormal, our skeptical writers of Halloween stories about apparitions will engage in other types of masquerades.  They will masquerade as people who understand some neural basis why normal people would hallucinate seeing human forms. No one understands any neural basis of why a normal person would report seeing a human form in front of him that was not there.  Or, our skeptic may masquerade as someone who understands some neural basis for belief.  No one has any real understanding of how a brain could create an idea or form a belief or store a belief.  Just as no one can give a credible explanation of how a brain or neurons could either store a memory or remember something for decades or instantly retrieve a memory,  no one can give a credible explanation of how a brain or neurons could derive or deduce a belief or preserve a belief or store a belief.  So when skeptics write articles with titles such as "Why Your Brain Causes You to Believe in the Paranormal," they are masquerading as people who know something they do not know.  No one can explain why your neurons or your brain could ever handle any such thing as forming a belief or having a neural representation of a belief or preserving a belief; but we do know a little about why some people may think they understand things that are a hundred miles over their heads.  It has to do with the fact that the mind can take pleasure from such intoxicating but groundless conceits.

When someone imagines that there are memory traces in your brain of the sensations you had years ago, he is at least suggesting an idea based a tiny bit on reality (the reality of you having such sensations long ago); but it is an idea ignoring the neural reality of short protein lifetimes that should prevent any such traces from surviving for more than a few months (the brain replaces its proteins at a rate of about 3% per day).  But the idea of beliefs stored in brains is not based on any neural reality. If I one day think to myself, "If there came to our planet lizard men from outer space, they would be evil," and then that thought becomes a belief in my mind, this is nothing based on any neural reality, since I have never even had a sensation of lizard men. If there were any neuroscience understanding of how a belief could be stored in a brain, we would sometimes read very concerned writers talking about the grave danger of some government or neurologist changing your beliefs or political views or religion by doing something to your brain or giving you some pill.  We read no such stories.  

The complete lack of any understanding of how a brain could store a belief is shown by the fact that there is not even a word for the concept of a place where a brain stores a belief. There is a word ("engram") for the dubious claim of a neural storage place of a memory, but there is not even a word in neuroscience literature for an alleged neural storage place for a belief.  The lack of such a word is Exhibit A that there is no real scientific basis for the claim that brains store beliefs. 

Almost inevitably when we read the Halloween season articles of skeptics, we get the most glaring evidence of people who never did their homework and never made a decent study of the evidence for paranormal phenomena. Misstatements and extremely false opposite-of-the-truth generalizations are extremely common in such articles. Such people keep telling the same lies over and over again.  Any serious scholar of the paranormal will very quickly recognize that the writers of such Halloween-season articles have never seriously studied what they are writing about. But for such writers of these "preaching to the congregation" articles that doesn't matter, because their target audience is other people who won't complain, because their knowledge of such matters is equally poor. 

Tending to present themselves as Kings of Knowledge, the experts quoted in these Halloween articles about the paranormal are typically neither serious and thorough students of human minds and human mental phenomena nor serious and thorough students of the human brain and its physical shortfalls that discredit all claims that it is the source of the human mind. Were they to do a better job of studying human brains, they would not make some of the statements they make. 

We can use the term materialism fundamentalist to refer to the type of professors and skeptics who are interviewed around Halloween on the topic of the paranormal, and the type of professors and skeptics who write articles on the paranormal around Halloween.  The materialism  fundamentalist will keep telling us that there is no evidence for the paranormal, despite the existence of a vast mountain of two hundred years of convincing written evidence for the reality of paranormal phenomena, very much of it written by doctors and scientists. By showing such total denialism, the materialist fundamentalist is very much like a Bible fundamentalist who claims that there is no evidence that our planet is older than about 6000 years. The materialist fundamentalist will often make use of the worst type of gaslighting and character assassination to try to shame, blame and defame credible honest witnesses. Materialism fundamentalists are among the most evidence-oblivious of denialists, and no amount of evidence that could ever appear (nor any testimony of their own senses) would ever shake their dogmatic convictions.  

For some insight into the attitudes and tendencies of such skeptics, you may read my 2022 science fiction story "Planet of the Blind" here. It's an interesting tale about a man on a planet in which almost everyone is blind. The man is asked to investigate controversial reports that a small number of people have what the man thinks is something utterly impossible: an ability to perceive things by some "fifth sense" that is different from smell, taste, hearing or touch. 

When "Spirt Writings" Show an Impressive Prowess (Part 3)

 In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I examined some cases of claimed "spirit writings" which seemed to show great skill beyond any we would expect from those that put the words down on paper. Since writing these parts of the series, I have become aware of another impressive case of this type: the case of Etta de Camp. I first became aware of Etta de Camp when reading the 1909 newspaper story below:

The story can be read in full using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1909-08-22/ed-1/seq-7/

The newspaper tells us that Etta de Camp was a business woman who one day tried her hand at automatic writing. A person trying to achieve automatic writing holds a pen or pencil in the hand, next to a sheet of paper, and tries to relax, to see whether the hand might produce some writing that did not seem to be willed by the person.  Trying such a thing, Etta felt an unusual sensation. After producing pages with meaningless scrawls, she began to get intelligible words, and the writing became more coherent. 

On the page here, Etta tells the story of how her attempt at automatic writing began. She says that she started to get more intelligible words after asking whether a spirit was present:

"The third night when I sat again and the hand began to write in the same way, I said aloud: 'If there is a spirit here who would like to communicate with me he must write more legibly.' After that I began to distinguish such words as 'and,' 'the,' 'farm,' etc., and the writing soon became readable and expressed thought. I received messages from one who claimed to be an Indian called 'Blackfoot.' Then messages came from one signing himself 'Lafayette,' whether the well-known Lafayette or another I do not know. For a time I received many messages from another Indian who signed the name, 'Three Feathers.' "

Etta claims this then occurred:

"During the first part of March, I received several messages from my father who had passed away twelve years before. These messages were all to my mother, and concerned many things of which I knew nothing whatever, being absent from home when the events occurred. Later, they were all corroborated by my mother as being true."

Etta claims this then occurred:

"Then the handwriting changed and this was written: 'I am Frank R. Stockton. I have many stories I wish written out. I am glad I can write them through you. I have one I wish to write called 'What Did I Do with My Wife?' We will go on with it now."

Etta later states this about her automatic writing experience:

"When I lay the pencil down all connection is cut off, the same as when one hangs up the receiver of a telephone, and not one word, line or even the names of the stories come to me in any way until the work is again taken up. A remarkable feature of the stories is that during the writing, although days, weeks and even months have passed between the sittings, the pencil has never failed to continue the story without a break, as if no time had intervened."

In the newspaper story above, we have an example of one of the stories arising from such activity, a story which Etta says came from the deceased Frank R. Stockton. It's a pretty good story about a doctor who discovers a collapsed man outside, and begins going through the man's pockets, trying to find some address that the man might be taken to. In the story the man is arrested as a thief, and suffers legal troubles despite having acted only to assist the collapsed man. Frank R. Stockton is known to have been a story writer, and was the writer of the well-known story, "The Lady or the Tiger?" 

Below is a cover illustration of the stories produced under such activity, one depicting Stockton as guiding the writings of Etta:

The book of stories transcribed by Etta supposedly through the spirit inspiration of Frank R. Stockton includes the interesting story "What Became of the Ghost of Mike O'Flynn?" It tells a tale of observations by the disembodied spirit of Mike O'Flynn after his physical death. Below is an excerpt:

"As the carriages drove up and deposited their occupants beside the grave, Mike's ghost, which still stood holding fast to the gates-ajar, had a fine view of the ceremonies from the floral-laden carriage. The first sight of the open grave made him gasp with terror, but this quickly changed to joy as he realized that he did not have to go into the grave with the body which now reposed upon the ground, in the fine mahogany casket. As the words of the burial service fell from the lips of the priest, Mike's ghost for the first time began to feel solemn, and the tears rolled down his cheeks as the casket was lowered reverently into the grave....His feeling of sorrow for his poor old body made the ghost of Mike deaf to the sound of weeping from his mourning family, so he did not get down from his seat to go and comfort them, but remained where he was, lost in thought. He was lifted down with the gates-ajar and placed at the head of the grave, where he adjusted himself comfortably with his back against a tree, his legs crossed and again quickly lapsed into memories of the past. So deep in the reverie was the ghost of Mike that he failed to notice the departure of the funeral entourage. Finally, arousing himself, he realized, with a shudder, that he was alone with the dead and he shivered as he gazed about at the monuments and graves."

The story includes much speech coming from the ghost of Mike, which is written in a thick Scottish brogue. The representation of how a Scotsman might speak is skillful. It's the kind of writing we would not expect from an American such as Etta.

Another story in the book is a long and very interesting fantasy tale entitled "The Widow He Lost." In the tale a journalist named John Blackstone visits ruins at Rome. Ignoring a sign telling him not to proceed any further, he discovers the ruins of some ancient palace. Exploring about, Blackstone is amazed to find some glorious palace inhabited by a Queen and her royal entourage. We read this passage, in which the lowly John gets himself out of trouble by pretending to be a visiting king :

" 'From what strange planet didst thou drop, sir, and how dared thou seat thyself upon my throne?' exclaimed the Queen, haughtily.

To his great joy, Blackstone realized the Queen was addressing him in his own tongue though with a strange arrangement of speech, and a brilliant idea flashed through his brain. He resolved to use it, together with all the wit he had inherited from an Irish mother, in order to save his head from the spears held so dangerously close that he dared not move for fear of being thrust through the neck.

' If it please Your Gracious Majesty to listen to my tale, I will explain, that, being a king in my own country, the sight of your throne made my heart glad, and, being somewhat weary with my long journey, I seated myself without the formality of announcement, for there seemed to be no one about at the time.' " 

Later in the tale Blackstone eloquently describes his homeland to the Queen who apparently knows nothing of it:

" 'I am about to relate a strange tale, fair Queen, and ask Your Gracious Majesty to pardon me if I consume much time in telling it. Many, many leagues away, too far for the falcon to go and return in one day, is a beautiful island of the sea. To the north the snow flies, to the south the sun shines brightly most of the year. Both parts are good for your health at different seasons, providing you do not have to live in either one of them all the year around. In the centre, or between the north and the south, is a country designed by the gods, called England, and in that country a city is built for the favorites of the gods. The city is named London, and is filled with strong, brave men. and maidens with hair of gold, cheeks like the wild-rose, eyes like bits of blue sky, and skin of milky whiteness...Now, in this town, called London, are buildings of wondrous size and castles whose towers reach far upward to the sky. Among these many castles, built by the people for their lords, is one called the British Museum, and in this castle I live, for I am the King, and it is my home. See, here is a picture of it and my credentials, as well.'  And Blackstone took from his pocket a letter with a large seal, and having a picture of the Museum at the head of the page, the seal and signature at the bottom, so that it looked imposing enough for a king." 

On and on the story goes for many pages, telling a well-crafted narrative. Around page 243 and the following pages we get some real character development and pathos, as the Queen (a widow) starts to tell of her attraction to Blackstone, and her pining for some love that might take her beyond her lonely life fulfilling royal duties. Blackstone asks the Queen whether she wants to go to England to see its glories, and the Queen agrees. The story is then neatly wrapped up as an earthquake strikes, leaving Blackstone surrounded by ruins. He is later recovered by a searching party. 

All in all, the roughly 64 pages of "The Widow He Lost" (basically a novella) makes a fine work of romantic fantasy, one that is a very unified and coherent literary work, something much greater than we would expect to appear as some emanation from the subconscious of Etta de Camp. It is therefore not very hard to believe Etta's claim that the story came from the late great story teller Frank R. Stockton.

Be Suspicious of Speculating Scientists Trying to Explain Away Observations That Seem to Bust Their Theories

 Launched on Christmas of 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (or JWST for short) is a big fancy space telescope that is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope can see farther into distant space than any other telescope. Scientists believe that when a telescope like this looks at the farthest reaches of its limits, it is actually looking far back in time. That's because light travels at a speed of one light-year per year. So if a telescope such as the James Webb Space Telescope observes a very distant galaxy about 13 billion light-years away, that light should be the light the galaxy emitted 13 billion years ago. 

A news  story is entitled "SCIENTISTS PUZZLED BECAUSE JAMES WEBB IS SEEING STUFF THAT SHOULDN'T BE THERE." We read this:

"For a long time, for instance, scientists believed the universe's earliest, oldest galaxies to be small, slightly chaotic, and misshapen systems. But according to the Washington Post, JWST-captured imagery has revealed those galaxies to be shockingly massive, not to mention balanced and well-formed — a finding that challenges, and will likely rewrite, long-held understandings about the origins of our universe. 'The models just don't predict this,' Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told WaPo. 'How do you do this in the universe at such an early time? How do you form so many stars so quickly?' "

In the Washington Post article (which a paywall may prevent you from reading), we read this comment about observations of galaxies at very high redshifts, believed to be observations of galaxies appearing soon after the Big Bang:

"What has surprised astronomer Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute are the number of nicely shaped, disclike galaxies. 'We thought the early universe was this chaotic place where there's all these clumps of star formation, and things are all a jumble,' Coe said." 

A galaxy as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (credit:NASA)

You can find the latest papers on this topic by going to the Cornell physics paper server, and using a search phrase of "JWST+high-redshift" or "JWST+earliest galaxies" or "little red dots." Among the papers are these:

• The paper "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Candidate z ~ 14 Galaxy in Early JWST CEERS Imaging" by dozens of different authors tells us this: "Should followup spectroscopy validate this redshift, our Universe was already aglow with fairly massive galaxies less than 300 Myr [million years] after the Big Bang." This contradicts what scientists have long told us, that such galaxies would take a billion years or longer to form. 
• Another paper tells us, "Neither the high number of such objects found nor the high redshifts they reside at are expected from the previously favored predictions."
• Another paper reports the observation of "remarkably luminous" galaxies that already had a billion stars by the time the universe was only about 300 to 400 million years old. 
• A paper is entitled "On the stunning abundance of super-early, massive galaxies revealed by JWST." We read of the detection of "of two very bright" galaxies at "super-early epochs," with masses of at least a billion solar masses.  We are told "this detection poses a serious challenge to essentially all models," and that what is observed deviates by some ten times from what is predicted.  The authors resort to a "conspiracy theory" to explain these findings, telling us, "The weak evolution from z = 7 to z ≈ 14 of the LF bright end arises from the conspiracy between a decreasing dust attenuation, making galaxies brighter, that almost exactly compensates for the increasing shortage of their host halos." 
• A paper tells us, "The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a surprising abundance of bright galaxy candidates in the very early Universe (<500Myrs after the Big Bang), calling into question current galaxy formation models." 
• Another paper is entitled "Schrodinger's Galaxy Candidate: Puzzlingly Luminous at z≈17, or Dusty/Quenched at z≈5?" The paper mentions a galaxy that seems to have about 5 billion stars, observed at a time when the universe was only about 200 million years old, noting that this "challenges virtually every early galaxy evolution model." The authors also resort to a "conspiracy theory" to try to explain this embarrassing finding, using the word "conspire" in their abstract. 
• Another paper notes that "early observations with JWST have led to the discovery of an unexpected large density...of massive galaxies... at extremely high redshifts z ≈ 10, " and finds in its Section 7 that the most-popular model of cosmology (called lambda cold dark matter or LCDM) is "excluded" (in other words, ruled out) at a moderately strong two-sigma level by the latest observations. 
• Another paper entitled "A very early onset of massive galaxy formation" refers to high redshift galaxies (believed to be the earliest galaxies formed), and notes that "the mass density in the most massive galaxies exceeds the total previously-estimated mass density... by a factor of ∼ 2 at z ∼ 8 and by two orders of magnitude at z ∼ 10." This being wrong by two orders of magnitude refers to predictions being wrong by a factor of about 100 times. 

You can tell how inconsistent these observations are with predictions by going to a NASA page dated January 19, 2021. On that page a scientist says, "Galaxies, we think, begin building up in the first billion years after the big bang, and sort of reach adolescence at 1 to 2 billion years." 

The term "little red dots" is now being used in the cosmology literature for these surprisingly large galaxies found very early in the history of the universe. The term refers to galaxies seen at the observation limits of the James Webb Space Telescope, which appear in photos as mere little red dots, despite their massive size. A search for the term "little red dots" on the Cornell physics paper server now gives 36 matches, such as the August 2024 paper "Sizes and Stellar Masses of the Little Red Dots Imply Immense Stellar Densities."

Gravity working to form galaxies would act very slowly. Galaxies seemed to have formed far more quickly after the Big Bang than scientists can account for, even when scientists are allowed to plug in to their scenarios some imaginary unproven things such as dark energy and dark matter. Sticking to known discovered particles, scientists cannot even explain how spiral galaxies retain their structure over many billions of years, despite galaxy rotations that should cause the spiral arms of galaxies to get broken up within a billion years. The problem becomes ten times worse when you consider "super spiral galaxies" much bigger than our galaxy.

But in late August 2024 we had an example of scientists doing what they so often do:  engaging in desperate, far-fetched speculations to try to patch up some giant hole in their failing theories.  What happened was that scientists made some weird, unverifiable speculation that mysterious black holes were causing the "little red dot" galaxies to look like they have much more stars than they do.  Showing another of endless examples of its tendency to swallow "hook, line and sinker" the most far-fetched speculations, a bunch of science news sites  reported this speculation as if it somehow managed to remove the explanatory problem caused by the "little red dot" galaxies. 

An example of the bad coverage was this headline at www.space.com:

"Early galaxies weren't mystifyingly massive after all, James Webb Space Telescope finds

The bottom line is, there is no crisis in terms of the standard model of cosmology."

It wasn't the James Webb Space Telescope that found such a thing, but some speculating scientists trying to do do an analgesic analysis, one that would reduce the pain of cosmologists caused by how bad they are failing.  The credulity of the writer of this article is striking. He writes "The scientists discovered that black holes made nine of these early galaxies appear much brighter — and thus bigger — than they really are" when he should be writing "scientists are now speculating  that  black holes made nine of these early galaxies appear much brighter — and thus bigger — than they really are." I guess he didn't read the part of the paper that states, "With only photometric colors available, it is extremely difficult to accurately determine the light contributed by the AGN component of these galaxies, making photometric stellar mass estimates for these sources extremely uncertain (Barro et al. 2024; Kocevski et al. 2023)."  An examination of the paper shows that it is filled with all kinds of dubious arbitrary analysis. 

A press release about the paper gives us more reasons for doubting the study. For one thing, we are told that the person in charge of the analysis was not a PhD scientist, but a mere graduate student. We are told that the study was "led by University of Texas at Austin graduate student Katherine Chworowsky." When it comes to the very hard job of properly analyzing the significance of "little red dots" at the faintest limits of telescopic observations,  maybe 13 billion light-years away, would it not be better to have so very hard a task be led by someone who has a science PhD?

The press release tells how Chworowsky got her comforting "our theories still work" results: by speculation and throwing away the troubling observations. We read this (the italicized boldface part is pure speculation, and the underlined part refers to discarding important observations):

"According to this latest study, the galaxies that appeared overly massive likely host black holes rapidly consuming gas. Friction in the fast-moving gas emits heat and light, making these galaxies much brighter than they would be if that light emanated just from stars. This extra light can make it appear that the galaxies contain many more stars, and hence are more massive, than we would otherwise estimate. When scientists remove these galaxies, dubbed 'little red dots' (based on their red color and small size), from the analysis, the remaining early galaxies are not too massive to fit within predictions of the standard model."

Ah, we have yet another example of what scientists do so very often when observations defy their theories: they just throw away the offending observations, perhaps giving some little speculation to try to justify their discarding. So, for example, innumerable mentally normal witnesses have testified that they saw apparitions of the dead, as I am showing in my 60+  posts on this blog with a tag of "apparition."  And the observational evidence for ESP and clairvoyance is overwhelming, consisting of 200 years of written evidence, much of it many times better than the evidence for many theories scientists cherish. But our mainstream scientists just throw away such observations that offend them,  muttering the speculation of "hallucinations" or "coincidence" to try to justify their discarding of abundant important observations. 

In such cases, it does not matter how thin or far-fetched the speculation is; it merely matters that it serves as an excuse (no matter how thin) for throwing away the data the scientist wishes to ignore. So in the study led by graduate student Chworowsky mentioned above, we have only a single sentence using the phrase ""black hole" or "black holes," the mere skimpy claim that " early JWST observations seem to indicate that accreting supermassive black holes are relatively common at z > 5." The press release quoted above has told us that "according to this latest study, the galaxies that appeared overly massive likely host black holes rapidly consuming gas." But that study had only a single sentence  using the phrase "black hole " or "black holes."  

This is typical. When scientists wish to throw away important observations that offend them and conflict with their cherished theories, they think all they need is the tiniest soundbite to justify their ignoring of important observations.  To say that Chworowsky's  paper has given us a half-baked speculation would seem to be too charitable. It might be better to say that she merely gave us the tiniest crumb to try to justify discarding the "tiny red dot" galaxy observations that so many cosmologists are worried about. 

And so it is, again and again in the world of science: scientists throwing in their trash cans so many types of the most important observations, observations that offend them and conflict with their belief dogmas, while giving us only the tiniest crumb of a justification for such ignoring of important evidence.  

The AI art visual above is a "pulled punch" affair. There are so very many cases of scientists ignoring, sweeping under the rug and trying to knee-cap so many different types of important observational evidence that a better visual might depict a large library building of observational evidence conflicting with the cherished beliefs of scientists, with scientists trying to nail up a sign on the front door saying, "Closed."  It would be like the AI art visual below:

Dreams, Visions or Premonitions That Seemed to Correctly Predict a Death

 In the series of posts below, I discussed dreams, visions or mysterious voices that seemed to foretell a death or disaster:

When Dreams or Visions Foretell a Death

More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams, Visions or Voices That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Even More Dreams and Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Some More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death or Disaster

When the Future Whispers to the Present

Let us look at some more cases of this type.

Below is a newspaper account that begins with some graphic pizazz:

Here are the details on the next part of the page:

You can read the article here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1901-10-28/ed-1/seq-7/

Below is a newspaper account of a 35-year-old man who had in quick succession three dreams of his own death, and who very soon thereafter did die unexpectedly. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026965/1897-12-22/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is an account of a man who had a premonition of his death, one that proved true ten minutes later:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83016689/1912-01-13/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is an account of a man who had a dream of his partner's death, one that seemed to soon be proved true:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092066/1909-12-21/ed-1/seq-1/

Next we have one of the strangest accounts to appear in this series of posts. It involves an account of the levitation of a shield, a levitation that is interpreted as an omen of death, an omen that very quickly is  fulfilled. The account might be dismissed by a person not familiar with the many well-authenticated cases of levitation of objects (such as the very abundant cases of table levitations reported in the nineteenth century). 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87065215/1894-05-03/ed-1/seq-3/

Below is a very sad newspaper account of a death foretold in a dream:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1910-10-24/ed-1/seq-3/

The account below is from December 11, 1883, and it summarizes a report that appeared in the Baltimore Sun three days earlier (an account quoted on page 291 of the document here). In the account a young man says that a deceased former teacher of his appeared to him in a vision and told him that he would die of heart trouble on December 5, at 3 o'clock. He did indeed die on December 5, at 3 o'clock, apparently of heart trouble, even though he had no history of heart trouble.  

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015137/1883-12-11/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is another newspaper account of a healthy young person who becomes convinced of imminent death, with the vision or premonition soon realized. We can only wonder what the woman meant by saying she saw "the crape hanging from the door."

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026355/1894-09-29/ed-1/seq-7/

Below is a sad account that appeared on page 58 of the January 26, 1934 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here:

"A woman went into hospital for treatment, leaving at home her husband and four children. One day she was suddenly seized with violent weeping and distress, declaring that her youngest child, aged four, had fallen into the river and been drowned. In order to calm her and convince her that her fears were groundless, the doctors allowed her to pay a visit to her home, where she found all well, ·including the · youngest, whom she kissed and embraced repeatedly, returning to the hospital satisfied. A week later she received the news that this child had been drowned, exactly as she had foreseen."

NASA Just Launched a $5,000,000,000 "Snowball's Chance in Hell" Mission

Hurricane Milton delayed the launch of NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which occurred  on Monday. It's too bad nature can't whip up some time warp that would allow going back in time to cancel the ill-conceived mission, which will almost certainly be a waste of 5 billion dollars that won't produce any very important scientific results.

Europa is a moon of the planet Jupiter. The Europa Clipper mission will be solely focused on getting more information about this distant moon. But the Europa Clipper won't have the job of discovering what Europa looks like. We already know that, from previous space missions.

Europa (Credit: NASA)

The Europa Clipper spacecraft will take photos of Europa more close-up than previous photos. But there won't be any very interesting close-ups, due to the fact that the surface of Europa is almost featureless, consisting of frozen ice. So the Europa Clipper won't find any interesting geological features like the Valles Marineris on Mars. The most interesting features on the surface are merely cracks in the ice. Close-up photos of those won't provide photos that people will be pasting on their walls.

The reason why scientists are interested in Europa is that they think that there could be life in an ocean underneath the icy surface of Europa. Will the Europa Clipper be able to confirm that life exists on Europa? It seems not, for the mission does not include a lander.

But NASA scientists have a loony kind of “bet all your retirement savings on a 9-digit lottery number" idea about how the Europa Clipper spacecraft might detect life. The scientists hope that it might be able to fly through a water geyser erupting on Europa, and sniff signs of life in water vapor. A NASA video told us that Europa “might be erupting plumes of water,” and that “if that's true, then we could fly through those plumes with the spacecraft.” There are two reasons why there is virtually no hope that such a thing would ever succeed in detecting life.

The first reason is the enormous improbability of abiogenesis, life appearing from non-life in an under-the-ice ocean of Europa. To calculate this chance, we must consider all of the insanely improbable things that seemed to be required for life to originate from non-life. It seems that to have even the most primitive life originate, you need to have an “information explosion,” a vast organization windfall comparable to falling trees luckily forming into a big log-cabin hotel. Even the most primitive microorganism known to us seems to need a minimum of more than 200,000 very well-arranged base pairs in its DNA (as discussed here).

Scientists have been knocking their heads on the origin-of-life problem for decades, and have made very little progress. The origin of even the simplest life seems to require fantastically improbable events. Protein molecules have to be just-right to be functional. It has been calculated that something like 10⁷⁰ random trials would be needed for a single type of functional protein molecule to appear, and many different types of protein molecules are needed for life to get started. And so much more is also needed: a complex cell, self-replicating molecules, a genetic code that is an elaborate system of symbolic representations, and also some fantastically improbable luck in regard to homochirality (like the luck of you tossing a big trash can full of pennies on the floor, and having them all turn up heads).  The complete failure of all attempts to search for radio signals from extraterrestrials would seem to provide further evidence against claims that the origin of life is relatively easy. 

There is another reason the “sniff life from a water geyser's vapor” would have virtually no chance of succeeding. The evidence that water plumes even occur on Europa is only borderline, with some research casting doubt on the evidence. If water plumes occur on Europa, they seem to occur only very rarely and for a short time. The paper here suggests plume “ballistic timescales of only 1000” seconds, making the chance of a spacecraft flying through a plume incredibly unlikely (less than the chance of me dying from stray gunfire).  Europa's suspected ocean (the only place where life could exist) is 10 to 25 kilometers below a layer of ice, making it all but impossible that geysers could shoot out microbes through such an ice layer. 

It would not at all be a situation like the following:

Mr. Spock: Captain, I detect a water plume from a geyser on Europa.

Captain Kirk: Quick, hurry over there while it lasts! Go to Warp Factor 8!

If a rare water geyser eruption occurred, the Europa Clipper spacecraft probably would not be anywhere close to Europa's surface. This is because the Europa Clipper mission plan does not have the spacecraft orbiting Europa. Instead, the plan is to just have the spacecraft repeatedly fly by Europa, flying by it about 45 times, so that the spacecraft does not pick up too much deadly radiation near Europa. With only such intermittent appearances close to Europa, the spacecraft would need an incredibly lucky coincidence to occur for the spacecraft to fly through some short-lived water plume ejected by a geyser.

We can compare this scheme to the loony “wing and a prayer” scheme of a traveler who plans to travel without any food to a city in a foreign country, the plan being that the traveler will walk with his mouth open and hope that someone discards food by throwing it into the air, with the food luckily landing in the traveler's mouth.

At a previous NASA video, we get some talk that revealed the main motivation behind Europa exploration. It's all about trying to prove (contrary to all the known facts) that “the origin of life must be pretty easy,” to use the words in the video. For people with certain ideological tendencies, proving that the origin of life was easy is like a crusade. But zealous crusaders often don't make logical plans, as we saw during the Middle Ages when there were foolish missions such as the Children's Crusade, in which an army of children marched off to try to capture the Holy Lands from Muslim armies. The Europa Clipper mission's odds of biological detection success seem like the odds of success faced by the Children's Crusade.

In a news story the director of the JPL laboratory central to these kind of space missions gives us a clue about how the Europa Clipper mission is a kind of materialist pilgrimage, by telling us that "I often talk about these missions as modern cathedrals." But cathedrals last for centuries, unlike Europa Clipper which will crash into one of Jupiter's moons.  In the same article we have a sample of Bill Nye's frequent bad reasoning. He says this:

" 'If there is something alive — imagine a Europanian microbe, let alone Europanian fish people — these things would be shot into space'  Nye said. 'If you sample water in any pond anywhere on Earth, anywhere there’s moisture, you’ll find all these viruses and bacteria and microbes, writ tiny, and so it’s reasonable we’d at least find organic compounds.' ”

Notice the quadruple sophistry in which (1) it is wrongly assumed that probably nonexistent Europa microbes way below a very thick ice layer on Europa "would be shot into space;" (2) it is suggested that so rare an event would luckily match the Europa Clipper's flying path, which would be like you firing a gun randomly into the sky and luckily downing a flying turkey;  (3)  the chance of finding life in earthly ponds (100%) is compared to the chance of sniffing life in a Europa flyby (probably less than .000000001), and (4) we have the witless  suggestion that fish people might be geyser-squirted through a thick ice layer of 10 to 20 miles, ending up high above Europa where they might be detected by a flyby spacecraft.  Bill Nye's reasoning here is as goofy a fairy-tale as his bad reasoning about biological origins on Earth.  

Oops, we got a quixotic quest