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Feb. 19, 2019 - Skeptoid
20:33
Skeptoid #663: Pop Quiz: Urban Legends

Test your knowledge of popular urban legends, and the science underlying them. 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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Urban Legends Pop Quiz 00:02:51
You thought you were out of school and didn't have to take any more tests?
Well, you were wrong.
Today I'm going to quiz you on that very thing you listened to Skeptoid for, urban legends.
So put on your thinking cap and get ready to have your knowledge of urban legends put to the test.
Literally, our urban legend pop quiz is coming up next on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
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You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Pop Quiz, Urban Legends.
It's time once again to rip you out of the comfort of wherever you are and stick you on the hot seat and force you to take our occasional quiz.
This week's topic is urban legends.
Consider yourself the expert, do you?
Ha ha!
Familiar with all the Skeptoid episodes, are you?
Well, here are 10 questions to test your expertise not just on the urban legends themselves, but on the general science literacy that underpins your ability to evaluate them critically.
Are you ready?
Number one, the Philadelphia Experiment.
It spawned books and movies.
This most incredible of all naval experiments supposedly tried to take a Navy warship in 1943, the USS Eldridge, and make it physically invisible and even instantly transport itself hundreds of miles.
Unfortunately, with disastrous results, with some sailors rematerialized inside the ship's decks and bulkheads, and others with lifelong disabilities.
But that's the fictional urban legend version.
What did the actual Philadelphia experiment try to accomplish?
The Philadelphia Experiment Myth 00:03:41
A.
The experiment was about trying to make the ship invisible to radar.
B.
The experiment was about demagnetizing the ship's hull to evade torpedoes.
Or C. There was no experiment at all.
The correct answer is C. There was no experiment at all.
The entire story is pure fiction.
The USS Eldridge was a real ship, but was engaged in its normal wartime duties nowhere near Philadelphia.
The story was the brainchild of a mentally ill young man, Carl Allen, who wrote it in the margins of a UFO book and mailed it to the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research, from whence it entered the public consciousness and became a permanent urban legend.
Number two, Polybius.
The famous urban legend of the mysterious arcade game called Polybius tells of teenaged players who were driven to either insanity or to suicide, all with their personal information transmitted to government agents.
Supposedly it happened in Portland, Oregon in 1981.
Which one of the following three statements is not true?
A. Government agents actually did escort players out of arcades.
B. Government agents actually did seize arcade consoles.
Or C. At least two Portland arcade players were rendered unconscious.
The correct answer is A. There is no record of government agents taking gamers into custody in 1981 Portland.
What they did do is seize arcade consoles that had been rigged with counters to convert them into illegal gambling machines.
And what did happen to a couple of players is that they lost consciousness following gameplay due to separate unrelated causes.
But put them all together, and they formed the substrate of a nice urban legend.
Number three, the Amityville Horror.
In 1975, a family spent just under a month in a house in Amityville, Long Island.
Their stay was to become a foundation of American urban legendary.
For upon publication of the book, The Amityville Horror, it turns out their month was among the most terrifying hauntings anyone ever endured.
Which character from the book was fictional?
A. George Lutz, father of the family victimized by the haunting.
B. Father Mancuso, whom the Lutzes called in to exorcise demons from the house.
Or C. Butch DeFeo, who murdered six members of his family in the house a year before the Lutzes moved in.
The correct answer is B. Father Mancuso.
The Lutzes did indeed call a priest to bless the house, Father Pecararo, but he always maintained that nothing unusual happened there.
So author Jay Hansen, who was hired by publisher Prentice Hall to dramatize the story, made up a new fictional priest who had all kinds of horrifying misadventures.
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg of how much fiction is fundamental to this story.
So let's just move on.
Number 4.
The Lost Ship of the Desert.
In 1933, a couple exploring the Anzabarego Desert of Southern California crossed paths with a dying prospector who swore he'd seen the bow of a Viking longship protruding from the side of a canyon, which would have put it in sediment that was at least two and a half million years old.
Lost Ship of the Desert 00:03:23
However, in past centuries, it would indeed have been possible for a ship to sail from the Sea of Cortez up into what is now Southern California.
Onto what ancient lake would it have sailed?
A. Lake Cahuia.
B. Lake Lahontan.
Or C. Lake Manly.
Really testing your knowledge of paleolimnology here, the correct answer is A. Lake Cahuia.
It was actually most recently contiguous with the Sea of Cortez about 1500 and is long since gone, leaving a long stretch of desert between the ocean and today's Salton Sea.
The other lakes I mentioned were red herrings.
Lake Lahontan figured into Skeptoid number 390 about the red-haired giants of Lovelock Cave, and Lake Manly is what filled the entire Death Valley basin before we got to do skeptoid number 21 on the Moving Stones of Death Valley.
Number 5.
The Devil Walked in Devon.
A popular story tells that in 1855 in Devon County, England, a track of footprints 100 miles long appeared in the snow overnight.
The tracks went through walls, through pipes too small for a person to fit, and across bodies of water.
It was quickly and widely reported that the devil himself had walked through Devon County that night.
What did the footprints look like?
A. There was no one consistent description.
B. Exactly like a man's footprints with an X in the heel of the left boot.
Or C. Small cloven tracks just a few inches long like a small animal.
The correct answer is A.
No consistent description.
There were no photographs, but the most common reproduced image is a drawing made for the Illustrated London News that shows a single track of horseshoes with a stride of about one foot.
This contradicts the published accounts, most of which describe cloven hooves only an inch or two long, but footprints of every other variety can be found as well.
This is not surprising, given that the means to travel 100 miles in a single day did not exist in Devon in 1855, so no one person saw any meaningful extent of the tracks, and there's no compelling reason to suspect it was indeed one unbroken track.
In fact, history records little reason to suspect anything other than normal animal activity, fueled by newspaper hype and the bandwagon effect.
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Subliminal Seduction Explained 00:06:51
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Number six, the Curse of Macbeth.
The most famous urban legend from the theater world is that of the Scottish play Macbeth, whose name you're not even supposed to utter.
Supposedly, actors die or get injured, or other tragedies happen whenever the cursed play is performed.
Which of the following is true of the Curse of Macbeth?
A. Data does indeed support more injuries at Macbeth performances than in the rest of the industry at large.
B. Data does not support the claim that Macbeth is more dangerous to perform than any other play.
Or C. Insufficient data exists to either prove or disprove the existence of any curse.
The correct answer is C. Insufficient data exists because it doesn't look like anyone's ever done a study or that anyone is ever likely to.
Consider the variables involved.
There's no such thing as a central record of injuries sustained on stage at any of the countless performances of countless plays at countless theaters worldwide.
No standards exist as to what kind of an injury or its timeframe could be attributable to some hypothetical curse.
Different plays have different risk factors like lights, trapdoors, flying harnesses, tricky scenery, stage weapons.
Natural disasters and crimes happen to occur at times and places that could, optionally, be correlated to play performances.
In short, it would be ridiculously impractical to attempt such a study.
Number seven, subliminal seduction.
We've all heard that messages flashed onto a movie screen so fast you can't perceive them will make you want to go out and buy a Coke, and this is still taught today in college advertising classes.
The 1974 book Subliminal Seduction was based largely on the results of one groundbreaking study performed at a movie theater in New Jersey by market research consultant James Vickery.
Vicker flashed subliminal messages lasting 0.003 seconds onto the movie screen, advising people to go out and buy Coke and popcorn.
What were the results of this study?
A. Sales of both Coke and popcorn increased dramatically.
B. There was no improvement in sales, and so Vickery falsified some positive results.
C.
No such experiment ever actually took place.
The correct answer is C.
This famous experiment upon which the entire subliminal seduction industry is based never even happened.
Vicker did indeed publish such a study, but then a major industry attempt was made to replicate his impressive results, which failed miserably.
At that point, Vicker explained that he'd falsified his data.
But then five years later, he admitted in a magazine interview that he'd made the whole thing up out of thin air, and no such experiment had ever even happened.
The failed attempt at replication seems to be the only time such an experiment has been tried under controlled conditions, and it failed completely.
Number eight, animal earthquake prediction.
Unless you've spent your whole life living under a rock, you've heard that animals have some extra sense that warns them when an earthquake is coming.
According to our latest science, about how long before an earthquake can some animals predict it?
A.
A few seconds.
B. About three hours.
C. About three weeks.
The correct answer is A.
A few seconds, which is the time it takes between the arrival of the destructive shockwave called the S wave and the preceding much weaker P wave.
In many cases, animals such as dogs and cats, who are evolved to have heightened senses such as hearing, to detect predators or prey, can feel these shock waves before humans.
Despite many popular press reports to the contrary, no sound evidence or theory suggests they have any other type of predictive ability.
Number 9.
The Min Min Light.
As long as authors have been writing about the Australian Outback, they've told tales of the Min Min Light, a mysterious ghost light dancing about in the distance, luring travelers to their doom.
This particular light has finally been conclusively solved as a type of mirage, making an actual light that's not within any direct line of sight visible to the observer.
What type of optical phenomenon is it?
A.
A superior mirage.
B.
An inferior mirage.
Or C.
A fata morgana mirage.
The correct answer is A, a superior mirage, which is when you see the object higher than it actually is.
Testing published in 2003 proved that Min Min lights were simply distant lights below the horizon, made visible because of temperature gradients.
Inferior mirages are the opposite, the most familiar being when you see a patch of sky on the road ahead, making it look like you're driving into a lake.
Although such ghost lights are often described as fata morgana mirages, this description is almost always wrong.
A fata morgana refers specifically to a superior mirage that is repeated two or more times, often including inverted versions.
Number 10.
John Wayne Radiation Legend 00:03:42
John Wayne and the Nevada Test Site John Wayne's death from cancer in 1979 is often said to be the result of radiation poisoning suffered on the set of the movie The Conqueror in 1954, filmed on location near St. George, Utah, just downwind of the Nevada test site in the days of atomic testing.
Nearly $2 billion have been paid out to residents of St. George as compensation for various cancers.
Decades later, with our vastly improved data, we now know that it would have been risky to be in that downwind area for how long after an atomic test.
A. There was never any significant risk.
B. Risky for about one day.
C. Risky for about one year.
The correct answer is B. Elevated radiation levels could be measured for about a day after a test, and only when the radiation cloud was directly overhead.
As there hadn't been a test there for more than a year prior to the filming, nobody on the crew received any elevated dose of radiation, and a later study of their lifespans and causes of death confirmed this.
And moreover, we now know that the entire testing era did not result in any detectable rise in cancer risk for St. George residents or any other downwinders, despite the ongoing payments from the legal fund.
John Wayne's cancer was more likely from his cigarette habit of five packs a day.
So, how did you do?
Tweet me your score at Brian Dunning.
If you got all 10 right, then you are indeed an expert on urban legends and the science behind them.
A prideful thing, indeed.
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