Category: paranormal

Is That You, Jason?

Yesterday, Sena and I were playing cribbage and we both suddenly started hearing a knocking noise which sounded like it was coming from our roof or the attic. We’ve heard a similar noise in the past, but it stopped and we forgot about it. This time it seriously interrupted our cribbage game.

It sounded like an intermittent knocking, which reminded me of some of the paranormal shows I like to watch so I can laugh at the ghost hunters scream and jump at every bump and reflection.

This knocking actually made us stop and listen intently. It sounded like it came from somewhere in the ceiling. There were several intermittent series of soft but clearly audible knocks.

I did remove my house slippers and turned the radio off so we could hear it more consistently.

Sena got a wooden spoon and tapped the ceiling 4 times in the area on the spots where the knocking noises seemed to be coming from.

Four knocks sounded, seemingly, in response. She did this a few times, but the responses seemed to become more random. This back and forth went on for a short while. The noises seemed to move around. It started in the kitchen, then moved to the pantry, next it was in the mud room. It was nearly always 4-5 distinct knocks with intermittent silence.

We were pretty sure at first that it was coming from either the roof or in the attic. But we couldn’t imagine why anyone (or anything) would be in either location.

I didn’t volunteer to check the attic. The door to it is high in the ceiling in a corner of the garage. I would have had to drag a lot of stuff out of the corner to make room enough to wrestle the adjustable ladder up to it. Let’s see, what was the other reason?

Oh yeah, I didn’t want to have a close encounter of the machete kind with Jason Voorhees.

I finally got the idea to look out our window and noticed construction workers were way down the street installing siding high up near the roof. I started to wonder whether the pounding they were doing were the source of the knocks we were hearing. Was it some kind of echo phenomenon?

I got my camera out and focused on them. They were high up on a scaffolding and were holding the vinyl siding, but I couldn’t be sure they were hammering it on the house. We couldn’t clearly prove that our knocking noises coincided with their hammering.

I tried to find out on the internet whether noises in our roof or ceiling could arise from noises occurring elsewhere. I tried to phrase it different ways, but it was hard to get anything back except the usual stuff about rafters buckling in the winter from ice, critters, water hammer due to high pressure water line valves shutting off abruptly, and other common reasons.

Anyway, the noises stopped and that seemed to be connected with the construction workers installing siding on the lower portion of the house down the street. I still think our noise was related to that.

And the most important part of this story—I won the cribbage game.

Glitch in the Matrix or Something Else?

I saw one of the paranormal shows the other night and there were a few videos supposedly demonstrating possible proof that our reality is actually a computer simulation that sometimes gets glitchy.

One of the images was a bird stopped and motionless in mid-flight. It looked like a still photo which bounced around a little. Sure, the bird was motionless—but so was everything else.

The other two were actual videos and looked more interesting. One showed a large flock of sheep that were not moving much. There was an ear or tail flip here and there so they weren’t really motionless or “frozen.”

The other video showed a pretty interesting episode of what looked like what some would call tonic immobility in a squirrel. A person was hand-feeding the squirrel nuts and it suddenly froze for a short period of time and later just snapped out of it and acted normally. I wonder how a person got a wild squirrel to take food by hand.

Both the sheep flock and squirrel videos are available on the web. Some think the sheep become still because of a change in the weather, possibly rain. There was no explanation for the squirrel freezing.

Glitch in the matrix?

The squirrel might have been displaying tonic immobility, which can occur in certain animals. Probably the best-known example is the opossum. When it senses it’s in danger from a predator, it plays dead. There’s even a saying for this, “He’s just playing ‘possum!”

You can find the immobile squirrel story on the web by searching the term “catatonic squirrel.” In the article, the squirrel is called catatonic.

Catatonia is a complex neuropsychiatric condition in humans often marked by immobility and muteness. In a small percentage of cases, people can show purposeless agitation, or automatic, stereotyped motion.

In many cases, a small dose of benzodiazepine (usually injectable) can quickly reanimate a person who has catatonia, although the improvement is often only temporary. The usual course of treatment is to look for an underlying reversible medical or psychiatric cause and to apply effective treatment quickly, which can be life-saving.

Catatonia can lead to all kinds of complications because afflicted persons can’t eat or move. Some people who recover say that they felt extremely anxious or fearful during the catatonic episode.

Catatonia in humans is not the same thing as tonic immobility, a condition that is thought to be a survival mechanism in some prey animals in response to intense fear. If they “play dead”, a predator might not notice them or might let them go. But I can see why some people speculate there might be an evolutionary link between the two conditions.

These are interesting situations, but they aren’t evidence for a glitch in the matrix.

Factual or Fictional or Felgercarb

I’ve been watching a couple of shows about Alaska that are pretty much Bigfoot tales. One of them is The Alaska Triangle and the other is Alaska Killer Bigfoot.

And when I looked on the web to find out more about the TV shows, I learned a new word, “Felgercarb” (alternate spelling “felgercarb”). It means “crap” and I read that it originated from a 1978 Battlestar Galactica episode. The word was used by a reviewer of The Alaska Triangle. He called the show felgercarb and it obviously means he had a low opinion of it.

Incidentally, I never watched Battlestar Galactica.

I remember an English professor in Texas who made it clear that fact and fiction were not distinguished from each other by simply saying that fiction is anything that is not true. After all, fiction can be about the truth in various contexts, such as science (as in science fiction), and social and economic forces. And facts are mathematical and scientific data including formulas and historically verifiable events.

On the other hand, felgercarb is distinguished from facts and fiction by being notable for being non-satirical, non-parodical writing or performances—and by being unconvincing, amateurish, and—crappy.

Just to clarify, the Bigfoot show Mountain Monsters, which I think is a parody of all the Bigfoot shows, would not be classified as felgercarb, mainly because they obviously are making fun of the Bigfoot sagas.

Anyway, both of the Alaska shows have been labelled as felgercarb (whether they use that name or not) by a significant number of viewers. I acknowledge that a lot of people like them.

One reviewer of The Alaska Triangle who identified himself as living in Alaska all his life said he had never even heard of the Alaska Triangle.

Supposedly, a lot of people have disappeared in the Alaska Triangle, the borders of which connect Anchorage, Juneau, and Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow). Bigfoot is not the only cryptid people claim to see. One bus driver says he saw a dinosaur cross a road, specifically a velociraptor, that scientists say has been extinct for about 75 million years. No tourists on the bus saw it.

This prompts the question, why did the dinosaur cross the road? Because chickens didn’t exist yet.

Actually, the question is why didn’t the bus driver snap a cell phone picture of it? Because he didn’t want to get cited for distracted driving.

Another wild story on The Alaska Triangle is a circle of mutilated animals found far from any body of water. Why the connection to water? Because one of the animals was a whale. I guess the whale was in the middle of evolving and growing lungs. Sorry, actually it was accidentally dropped from a flying saucer driven by a distracted alien scrolling for barbecue blubber recipes on his cell phone.

I guess nobody’s heard of the Iowa corn mutilation phenomenon. Every year there are reports of several ears of corn completely denuded of kernels found near cornfields. Only the cobs are left. Weirdly, explorers and paranormal researchers often don’t find them in circles, but in terrifying little piles, not uncommonly surrounded by savagely ripped beef jerky wrappers and beer bottles completely drained of all liquid.

The Alaska Killer Bigfoot is even more mystifying—or stupefyingly felgercarbish. The explorers are investigating a place abandoned many decades ago because a special breed of Bigfoot monster called Nantinaq slaughtered people and knocked over the clothesline poles, making it impossible to dry overalls and flannel shirts.

The explorers on Alaska Killer Bigfoot occasionally barf for the pleasure of viewers. Maybe it’s the Nantinaq effect or spoiled beef jerky; it’s not clear which is more likely. It’ll have to await further study by various guest experts like spirit mediums and elderly Bigfoot experts.

Buoys somehow get into the tops of trees and holes mysteriously get dug where explorers find ancient coins, which they fail to clearly identify and maybe wonder if they can buy beer with them.

I wonder if Tony Harris, host of the show The Proof is Out There, will travel to Alaska and investigate Nantinaq or the inland whale circles. That show tends to retain some skepticism and usually errs on the side of saying something is unknown rather than saying thing like “Bigfoot has been proven to make infrasound” noises.

You know, so far nobody on the Alaska Killer Bigfoot took advantage of what might be a fact of infrasound, which is that it can nauseate people and possibly make them barf.

Oops, I just made a contribution to felgercarb.

My Plan for the Unidentified Frying Objects!

We have to get the UFO thing under control, and it’s going to take more than mass produced tin foil hats. I watched a couple of paranormal shows the other night and saw The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch and The Proof is Out There hosted by Tony Harris.

I poke fun at The Secret of Skinpicker Ranch and The 200 Proof Moonshine is Out There, but not in malice. It’s because they are funny. Just to let you know, I think they’re both pretty good entertainment, although I favor The Proof is Out There because of the skeptical approach.

As usual, Tony and his experts politely debunked a few alleged paranormal phenomena and used a sense of humor doing it. I’m still not sure why Tony calls the current series the Skinwalker Edition. He never really investigates what the skin picker cast members are up to, which usually involves saying “What the bleep” after seeing the odd orb or two and occasionally having fainting spells.

I think Tony gets green screened into a couple of pictures and videos of the Skinpicker Ranch in northern Utah where it’s located and politely comments about what the cast is up to on the show. I cannot understand why an astrophysicist, Travis Taylor, is on the show, other than to try to give it credibility for the pseudoscientific approach. However, Dragon (played by Bryant Arnold), who is just a security guard, gets more camera time than Taylor.

That said, I think it’s way past time to get a better understanding of these Unidentified Frying Objects (UFOs). We’re talking about an astral chicken here, who is anatomically altered to function as its own wormhole vortex. I think the White House has been aware of the alien poultry cloaca portal vanguard (APCPV) for decades.

There are not enough tin foil hats to go around, people. Besides, they are a waste of good aluminum foil wrapping paper, which should be reserved for the resistance fighters when it comes time to roast the invaders. Don’t blame me when you get caught; you’ve been warned.

What we really need is a large coop to confine these galactic free range cluckmeisters. We need to toss the so-called Unidentified Frying Objects, which are actually alien cloaca black hole benders, into the skillet and add poultry seasoning. You want them to be golden brown.

It’s important to be committed to the goal, even when their hired thug abductors which commonly look like little green men (the small grays are the custodians). The abductors tend to be easily tricked into setting you free if you find a decent BBQ rib joint for them. Jimmy Jack’s Rib Shack in Iowa City is a good choice. They also do chicken.

You’re welcome.

UFO Sighted in Iowa So Break Out Your Tin Foil Hats!

Did you see the breaking news about a UFO sighting in Iowa in the last couple of days? You better get up to date because you don’t want to get caught in the tractor beam along with the cows. Get your tin foil hats.

Sena and I are not sure what to make of the UFO report in the Polk County area. The windshield the guy shot the video through is pretty dirty. The object in the sky spins pretty quickly. We figure the aliens have to be gorging on Dramamine.

The UFOs have plenty of opportunities to beam up the cows and anybody else who gets caught out in the open. Sena and I got abducted and had to think fast to get out of a fix.

The aliens accidentally beamed up a cow, which is no surprise—it’s Iowa, after all. They cooked the cow. Heinous! Horrific! Tasty with baked beans. The aliens were going to barbecue us until Sena showed them her recipe for cherry cobbler.

We ran into Fox Mulder up there. He was trying to talk his way out of a special dental implant.

It’s not like Iowa never gets visitors from outer space. There have been reports in the past, at least one from Council Bluffs.

Instructions for making tin foil hats are all over the web. Better get busy.

Hickory Hill Park with Sena the Bigfoot Hunter

Because we found that tree structure in Hickory Hill Park recently, Sena led us on a Bigfoot hunt yesterday.

At first all we saw were more dragonflies. One was a male Widow Skimmer. We knew it was a male because it had white patches on its wings. So the first one we saw the other day was probably a female. Then we saw a bright blue dragonfly. We found out later it’s called (what else?) a Blue Dragonfly in the skimmer family.

At first, the expedition went like a lot of those Bigfoot expeditions on TV. The birds got nervous. We heard some tree knocking noises.

Then we saw tracks. Finally, Sena caught sight of a Bigfoot. We caught it on video—sort of.

The Little Mundanities of Life

Sena says I need to write about some mundanities, so I will. She says the mundane things in life are important. She told me about an episode of The Waltons she saw years ago, which emphasized the importance of life’s little mundane things. I looked for the episode on the web, but couldn’t find it.

We wash and dry dishes the old-fashioned way. We never use our dishwasher, so it’s like brand new. Sena overheard a conversation two women had at the store about a kind of pre-wash spray you can get that will make it easier to get dishes cleaner when you do them the old-fashioned way. They discussed the pros and cons at length. Neither one of them bought the product.

She got a bottle of that Dawn dishwashing liquid in the upside-down bottle. You get less soap. But you can squeeze out the soap without flipping it.

She can’t seem to get the coffee maker lid down in the morning sometimes. That’s why I took a picture of it. The mundanity of it. I fixed it later in the afternoon.

Without the mundanities, life would probably wear us out. Just think if you had to tolerate a day full of odd events, like the one we heard about on the KOKZ Iowa’s Classic Hits Radio 105.7 morning program yesterday, Mike Waters Wake-Up Call. It was about this crazy rooster who crowed until he fainted. This was a pretty exciting meme in December of 2020.

When we heard it on the radio, we actually heard the THUD when the rooster finally keeled over. Could you stand that level of hilarity all the time every day?  Of course not! I wonder if that fainting consequence could apply to other situations?

Politician: “And if you elect me, I promise—THUD!”

Bigfoot Hunter: “If I hear that little twig snapping noise one more time, I will run over there and confront the hulking—THUD!”

Car Salesman: “This little coupe has only 2,000 miles on it, driven by a little old lady librarian—THUD!”

Psychiatrist: “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, if carefully and consistently implemented, could solve every human conflict if only—THUD!”

UFO Witness: “Look at that thing! What the “bleep” is that thing?” I’ve never bleeping seen a bleepity-bleep thing like that in my bleeping life, can you believe—THUD!”

Celebrate life’s little mundanities every once in a while. They’ll give you a break from all the excitement.

The Proof is Way Out There

I watch the History Channel show, The Proof is Out There, hosted by Tony Harris, an American journalist and filmmaker. The show reviews videos of paranormal events, supposed cryptids, and other weird stuff and generally ends up debunking at least half of them. I’ve seen some of the videos on another TV show, Paranormal Caught on Camera, which airs on the Travel Channel. Interestingly, the hosts of that show tend to uncritically endorse the authenticity of the videos while The Proof is Out There usually debunk them as faked.

I don’t know how the videos get swapped between the two shows. In fact, the last episode I saw of The Proof is Out There was subtitled “The Skinwalker Edition.” The History Channel blurb on it says that Tony Harris “…travels to the Skinwalker Ranch, a place known as the epicenter of strange and mysterious phenomena.”

In fact, Harris does nothing of the kind and many of the videos were previously aired from other episodes. The only connection with Skinwalker Ranch were a few photographs from another History Channel show, The Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch. I wonder if the producers of that show didn’t allow Harris to actually evaluate the alleged paranormal events of their show because they were afraid he would debunk them.

Obviously, the title of the show “The Proof is Out There” got its name from the X-Files subtitle, The Truth is Out There. Some viewers have suggested that there may be another meaning to the subtitle, which is that the truth may be “out there” in the sense of outlandish or crazy instead of from aliens in outer space.

So, what’s going on with The Proof is Out There? Is it designed to do a better job of picking out the faked paranormal videos? Sometimes they miss them, like the one about the glitch in the matrix which turned out to be a cool camera trick.

Most often they hedge their bets and say they don’t know what’s going on in the video. But they don’t shy away from calling something a hoax if the evidence points in that direction.

On the other hand, do the producers of The Proof is Out There somehow collude with those of other paranormal TV shows, sharing videos and creating the impression that they’re more objective just to sustain interest in the show and even deliberately foster controversy for the same reason?

That would be way out there, although I still like the show. And the cryptid chaser parody, Mountain Monsters, obviously pokes fun at other sasquatch-themed shows. Not only do they get away with it, some people love it for just that reason—including me.

When we’re taking ourselves too seriously, I think it’s healthy when somebody comes along and makes us laugh at ourselves.

The Scientific Skinny on Bigfoot

What’s up with this Bigfoot thing? Could it be a few humans with the rarest form of Hypertrichosis (Werewolf Syndrome)? You know, some scientists said that Patty, the hairy creature featured on the Patterson Gimlin film back in the 1960s, was not genuine because she had hairy breasts. Hey, guess what? If a woman has Hypertrichosis she can grow hair anywhere, even on her breasts.

But I guess that would not account for the huge size of Bigfoot. Why would they be seven or eight feet tall? They’re sometimes described as being ferocious carnivores. What would they find to eat in the forests? Deer, maybe. But are they quick enough to catch deer?

Can a 1,000 pound bipedal humanoid chase down a deer? Hey, it’s more likely Bigfoot could be a grazer. Some of the largest animals on the planet eat nothing but grass. Take cows for example. They’re pretty big and they munch on things like grass and frosted mini-wheats—with just a little milk they squeeze from their non-hairy breasts.

That’s a tough skill to master when all you’ve got are hooves. And like some chimpanzees who can learn to crack nuts with big rocks, if cows don’t get the hang of milking themselves by the time they’re a few years old, they just never get it. They’re stuck with trotting to Hy-Vee to get a gallon of two percent.

But sometimes you hear about Bigfoot making these tree structures. That’s what some people call them. They usually don’t look like they amount to much. It’s not like they have a well-defined sun room or even a roof. It’s a stick laying across another stick, unless you’re watching the TV documentary Mountain Monsters. Then they’re split levels or log cabin vacation lodges with a jacuzzi.

And how about the noises that Bigfoot makes? The sounds vary a lot from screams to deep bellows to nasal twangs reminiscent of Willie Nelson singing “You Were Always on My Mind.” Do they have a language of some kind? Or do they just grunt and growl and ask where to get the best beef jerky?

Bigfoot sometimes knocks on trees. I’m not sure why. It could be like knocking on wood for luck, I think. Maybe it’s their music. Knock three times on the big tree if you fear me.

This stuff gets pretty deep after a while. Your thoughts?

Parody or Fake Science?

I was just looking at the IMDb reviews of 3 TV shows, one of which we think is hilarious and a couple of others we watch mainly because there’s nothing else on and we’ve already played cribbage for entertainment. In my opinion, one of the shows is a parody of science (and by extension fake science), and the other two are fake science. And I think the parody is a lot more entertaining the others.

Let’s list the shows with their IMDb reviews links:

The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch

Expedition Bigfoot

Mountain Monsters

We can’t watch Mountain Monsters anymore because it’s available only on the streaming network now and it’s not worth chasing (although it was uproariously funny).

One way to keep this post from getting too long is to let you look at a few reviews of all three on IMDb and compare them.

I don’t know what you think, but I have always thought that Mountain Monsters is a parody of shows like the other two, which try to be scientific but fall far short.

First, we need a definition of parody. Merriam-Webster says:

Parody: “a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule.”

I think it’s probably also good to know the difference between parody and satire.

Now we think The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch and Expedition Bigfoot are failed attempts to come off as science-based so-called reality shows. They take themselves too seriously. You can probably tell that from the IMDb reviews. The casts never find anything noteworthy, jump at their own shadows, and generally are terrible actors.

If you then read the reviews for Mountain Monsters, maybe you can see why we’d classify it as a parody. Most reviewers call it pure entertainment. It’s unpretentious and clearly pokes fun at the other two. I even found one reviewer who pointed out the credits at the end of Mountain Monsters has a disclaimer saying no animals were hunted. We hadn’t noticed that, but it’s probably because we were still laughing so hard at the hillbilly antics.

The cast of Mountain Monsters are probably better actors, but forgivably often can’t stop themselves from laughing at their own jokes.