Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Quantumsquatch

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that I really enjoyed claims that came from an intersection of two disparate areas of woo-woo.  Specifically, we looked at the idea that it would be convenient for UFOlogists to be able to have access to the subject of their field of study whenever they want, so rather than standing in the cold and dark waiting for UFO to show up, they should simply summon one telepathically.

Then I received an email from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia informing me that hybridizing UFO research and telepathy was hardly the most unlikely pairing one could come up with.  And as proof, he sent me a link he'd run into over at Cryptomundo called...

... "The Quantum Bigfoot Theory."

I wish I were making this up.  Yes, folks, we have a second contender for the weirdest combination of two wacko ideas.  One Ron Morehead, "an accomplished author with much field experience with the Bigfoot phenomenon," has taken cryptozoology and the whole quantum-vibration nonsense and put it in a blender, and poured out something truly breathtaking.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

He starts out by suggesting that the way us regular old biologists study living creatures may not be the way to approach Bigfoot:
Researchers knock on trees, sound-blast screams and yells, or whoop all over the hillside trying to get the attention of a Bigfoot.  Professional trackers experience track-ways left by these creatures that abruptly end, highly trained dogs will not pick up the scent, or if they do they usually don’t come back.  If what you’re doing doesn’t get the results you want, change what you’re doing…it’s that simple.  Folks who claim to be researchers discount those surreal accounts that don’t fall into their preset paradigm.  Is it time to reach beyond Newtonian rules of classical mechanics, and delve into a science that was established almost 100 years ago by Einstein, Born, Heisenberg and Schrödinger?
Well, there's a reason not to, and that's that the subject of study is Bigfoot, and not Submicroscopicfoot.  Quantum theory explains phenomena that generally are relevant in the world of the very (very) small.  Quantum probabilistic effects get "washed out" on ordinary scales of time and size, just as you can discuss the air pressure inside a balloon without worrying very much about the motion of one specific gas molecule.

So right off, he illustrates that he hasn't the vaguest clue what quantum physics actually is.  But he doesn't let that stop him:
(T)  he world of quantum physics has been locked in mathematics.  It’s accepted worldwide by physicists. We don’t see it, but it’s ever present in our lives.  We get that feeling that something is wrong, the phone rings and Aunt Marybell Sue was in a car wreck.  You have a déjà vu …this has happened before.  Without knowing it, could psychics actually be relating to folks from a quantum level?
Quantum physics is a little weird, but that does not mean "if it's weird, it must be because of quantum physics."  And if Aunt Marybell Sue gets in car wrecks often enough that people are experiencing déjà vu about it, maybe it's time to take away her driver's license.

The real coup de grâce, though, comes at the end of the article.  Morehead states:
Is there a race of giants that have inherited the ability to move into the macro-world with quantum physics?...  The remains of giants have been found on earth before.  Most of us know about Greek mythology regarding aliens copulating with human women who then gave birth to a half god-half human, e.g., Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, Hercules, and so on.  They supposedly had great powers and supernatural abilities.  And most of us know of the biblical accounts of the same type of cross-breeding.  If we are to believe there is a core of truth to these stories, could Bigfoot be a diluted remnant of these and have inherited some of their quantum abilities?
It's funny, I've read a great deal of mythology, and I don't recall anything about Zeus being the product of an alien having sex with a human.  You'd think that'd kind of stand out in my memory.  But if we're making shit up, may as well go big or go home, right?

The most inadvertently funny thing about the whole article, though, is when Morehead states that there is no need to defer to posers like Stephen Hawking on matters of physics:
You don’t have to be a physicist to understand enough about quantum physics to realize it could very well be our answer to the understanding of how Bigfoot might operate.
Which, in one sentence, sums up the entire woo-woo worldview.  "Don't expect us even to expend the effort of reading the fucking Wikipedia page on quantum physics.  We'll just throw around some terms that are sort of science-y or something, and call it good."

And we won't even go into Morehead's further speculations that Bigfoot might be the descendant of Lucifer and the Nephilim.

So there you have it.  An even weirder amalgam than summoning UFOs using telepathy.  If there's any crazier woo-woo crossbreeding experiment out there, for example using Tarot card readings to determine which homeopathic remedy to use, I don't want to know about it.  There's only so much facepalming one person can endure.

1 comment:

  1. My first reaction was another slapping facepalm.
    Although i've actually heard (read) something like this before.

    Stan Deyo, of 'The Cosmic Conspiracy' fame, was my step-uncle in-law for a period. I can't remember if it was 'The Cosmic Conspiracy' or his sequel 'The Vindicator Scrolls', but whichever it was, a section dedicated to the possibility of historical cross-breads sounded similar. At first it was the Greek gods reputed to possess amazing physical power, like Heracles, being a cross between humans and aliens. Another bit was his supposition about the origin of Bigfoot and that hairy dude's various cousins across the globe. He described the similarity in relation to the seeming size of the cryptid reported, a huge and strangely powerful creature, and how this was likely the result of historical, or maybe even more recent breeding between humans and Gods ... and /or aliens.
    It made me laugh, it made me cry, but since he was, at the time, my step-uncle in-law, I decided to finish the whole book. (It was really very, very religious, especially the sequel)
    But hey, I had two books that were signed by the author and kept them. They were quite difficult to read a second time so I keep them separated for those nights when I am far too full of good single-malt scotch.

    All the best,
    Woody

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