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Nov. 16, 2010 - Skeptoid
15:20
Skeptoid #232: Listener Feedback Rides Again

A peek inside the Skeptoid inbox, ranging from the sane to the insane. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Ancient Skulls and Alien Hybrids 00:06:13
When we see an unusually shaped skull from an ancient civilization, how should we interpret it?
One way is to consider things like disease and genetic conditions, and cultural practices like skull binding for cosmetic purposes.
And another way is to stop all study and categorically declare that alien hybrids are the only acceptable explanation.
We're going to answer this, and also some other correspondence sent in by listeners.
Listener feedback is up next on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of HyperFixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's HyperFixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Listener feedback rides again.
Once again, we're going to dig through the Skeptoid inbox for interesting feedback.
These include emails sent to me, comments posted to the online transcripts for the episodes, and also posts to Skeptalk.
Anything that looks good.
Just for fun today, I'd like to start with the sane feedback and then move progressively toward the insane.
Fortunately, the sane people generally have something interesting and helpful to add.
My episode on live frogs found encased within ancient stone discussed estivation and hibernation, two ways in which some animals can preserve their resources and minimize their oxygen or water needs.
Dr. Brian Pavo is a marine biology consultant in New Zealand, and he offered the following additional information.
Beyond estivation and hibernation, there's another level of suspended animation collectively known as abiosis or cryptobiosis.
As the name suggests, this is stopping or hiding life, but not permanently.
The poster child for this phenomenon is tardigrada, water bears.
They're very cute, essentially aquatic, animals living in trees and on glaciers, in lichens, in soil and sand and in the ocean, in water films.
They can simply stop for days without oxygen or other necessaries, but they can also collapse into beautiful cyst-like forms that are incredibly resistant to radiation, high temperatures, and even acids.
They remove all liquid from their body and to prevent cellular damage, replace it with a simple sugar called traolose.
Water bears can stay in such a state for decades and perhaps indefinitely.
I did encounter them in my research, but decided to exclude them because we were talking about vertebrates, frogs specifically, and water bears are very, very different.
Most are microscopic.
Some species have only a few hundred cells, and they have open circulatory systems instead of cardiovascular systems.
They're extremophiles and can even live in outer space.
Show me the frog that can do that, and we'll revisit the topic.
Thanks to Dr. Pavo for this very cool extra information.
So let's move on to some listeners to whom we owe a little less thanks.
Dr. Johnston from Inverness, Scotland, seems to be among those who think the misshapen skulls of Peru are not modified deliberately, as has been the practice for more than 9,000 years, but rather that the explanation can only come from alien DNA.
No amount of binding can increase the cranial capacity of skulls, which was estimated to be in the region of 2,500 cubic centimeters in these skulls, i.e. 2.5 liters.
No known human being ever had such a skull capacity, not even the largest Neanderthal skull.
Neanderthals were not humans.
Humans are not even descended from Neanderthals.
Dolphins also have large brains.
Does that also prove that humans must be aliens?
Also, they obviously represent related individuals and look in no way deformed.
Other than being shaped like cucumbers.
There was also another enormous skull, three liters, which was round and very wide.
It did not look in any way pathological.
No, nothing unusual about that at all.
There was obviously something very strange going on around that region, and no amount of so-called academic disparagement can detract from that fact.
Some scientists, confronted by something which does not fit into their comfortable hypotheses, respond by trundling out some contrived and often ridiculous explanations.
Further research by impartial scientists should be carried out.
DNA should be interesting.
Many ancient cultures have done this.
In infancy, while the skull is still pliable, it would be bound with cloth or even pressed between boards to create a great variety of strange shapes.
A lot of museums have large collections of these, such as the Museo Regional de Ica and the, pardon my Spanish, Museo Nacional de Archeología, Antropologia, Historia del Perú, both in Peru, and the American Museum of Natural History and the Peabody Museum at Harvard.
None of these skulls have ever been found to have unusually large endocranial volumes, contrary to Dr. Johnston's misunderstanding.
1300 CC to 1600 CC is typical among the artificially deformed skulls, the same range as normal adults.
They've been so extensively documented that I'm not sure what further work Johnston feels needs to be carried out.
At least one 3-liter skull has been found, however.
It was an ancient Egyptian man who suffered from hydrocephaly.
His head had not been artificially deformed, and its proportions appeared fairly normal, to a layperson at first glance anyway.
The Real Mengele Adventure 00:07:47
However, this poor fellow had a number of other skeletal deformities and was paralyzed on his left side.
But so far, nobody has found it necessary to classify him as an alien hybrid.
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Mike from Asheville, North Carolina had this thoughtful comment on my episode about Aspertame.
Okay, everyone, this Brian Dunning guy is obviously a troll for big industry slash government.
Every single article of his may as well come out of the mouth of any right-wing Washington politician.
He only backs up his stories with sources who have a vested interest in the outcomes they report, and therefore is only towing the company line in every one of his articles.
And most of his commenters are stoogie yes men who either have a vested interest in the pseudoscience this ah regurgitates, or who are just brainwashed like so many other people in the world.
This f ⁇ ing ass does not remotely deserve the title skeptic, and that is a personal attack, you f ⁇ ing piece of sh ⁇ .
I want to remind you that we're not quite to the crazy emails yet.
Mike's on his way there, but he's got a little further to go still.
But since Mike has uncovered all of my secrets, I'm going to quickly change the subject in an effort to distract your attention from his discoveries.
Let's move on to Chris from Romania, who commented on my episode about Josef Mengele's twin experiments in South America.
Everybody is ready to point the finger at Mengele and the Nazis, but it's more to them, definitely, than the official crappy history written by victors lets you know.
First of all, between the persons called Josef Mengele from the concentration camp and Josef Mengele from the Nuremberg trial, well, it was just a hoax, just like the Warren Commission, but that's another story, there were visible differences.
In short, we talk about two different persons.
And I truly believe the real Mengele was demonized.
Keep researching before blaming him or Nazis for atrocities.
Keep researching before accusing the Nazis of atrocities.
So I'm revealing my intellectual laziness by not being a Holocaust denier.
Is that it, Chris?
Chris does, however, bring up an interesting point about the comparison of photos taken of Josef Mengele at Auschwitz with those taken of him at the Nuremberg trials.
There are notable differences.
In Mengele's Nuremberg photographs, he is hazy and ill-defined, almost invisible.
This is because he was not there.
Mengele was never captured and died in Brazil in 1979.
This could be just more intellectual laziness on my part, so I'd better keep researching.
So now we come to today's final email, and it comes from Conrado in Spain.
There's a link to his website on the online transcript for this episode at skeptoid.com.
He had to change the URL because Al-Qaeda hijacked his previous one, according to his homepage.
Conrado was concerned about my episode on the Lucifer Project, a conspiracy claim that the United States intends to crash the Cassini probe into Saturn, causing it to turn into a small sun.
Here's what he had to say.
You seem to clearly work for the dark side, and you are an excellent professional and work very steadfastly at the art of discrediting, obscuring, and poisoning people against the truth.
But nevertheless, I feel compelled to contact you now, respectfully, because I presume that, unlike those bloodline individuals at the top of the Illuminati, you still have a soul.
Someone who has been watching my still incomplete YouTube video lectures on 2010 and the Lucifer Project has warned me that the Lucifer Project is real and indeed on, and moreover scheduled for some time before the end of 2010.
In fact, this person says that the Illuminati plan to detonate Saturn using Cassini's plutonium while it is still in relative conjunction with the Sun, so the Sun absorbs some of the deadly ejected material, meaning now, in early October.
If such an explosion is indeed possible and happens, the radiation shower on Earth would be devastating.
But this person says that those who have faith in Jesus Christ of Nazareth as the only Savior will be miraculously spared.
In fact, if I've read this person well, God will see to it that the Earth is not harmed, so the elite would be mistaken in rushing to their bunkers.
Frankly, there have been so many similar cry wolf into the world false alarms that I don't know what to make of all this anymore.
But nevertheless, I feel I need to pass it on to you.
May the highest almighty God bless you and guide you appropriately as to what to do.
I've read this many times and I'm still unclear on what he's trying to tell me.
On the one hand, he's advising me that this cataclysm is at hand and I should accept Jesus to be miraculously spared.
And on the other hand, he's reassuring me that God will see to it the Earth is not harmed, and the elite, presumably including me, need not rush to our bunkers in any event.
I guess the latter is what happened because the October 2010 doomsday has come and gone, and we still have but one sun in the sky.
In the episode, I went into detail why Cassini's RTGs, radioisotope thermal generators, could not cause an atomic blast, and also into only a few of the many reasons why neither Saturn nor any of our other gas giants would be able to achieve sustained nuclear fusion.
To counter these obstacles, the Lucifer Project conspiracy theorists have invented their own versions of various natural sciences under which these things could happen.
In effect, written their own fictional novel that takes place in a fictional universe.
It's too bad that Arthur C. Clarke beat them to it with 2001 A Space Odyssey, or they could have made some money.
Join Skeptoid Premium Today 00:01:16
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