All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Nov. 30, 2021 - Skeptoid
17:36
Skeptoid #808: Followups and Extras

Some new facts and extra information on six previous episodes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Krakatoa vs Tsar Bomba 00:07:11
Got some follow-ups on past episodes for you today.
If you love the originals, you're going to love hearing the new information even more.
Today we've got some extra stuff on the Tunguska event of 1908, the famous reincarnation story of the boy who thought he lived a past life as a World War II fighter pilot, a big reveal on the famous haunted Debuk box, and much more.
That's coming up right now 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.
Follow-ups and extras.
I was about to open this episode by saying it's time for another of my favorite category of shows, but I had to stop myself because, honestly, I love them all equally.
So it's time for another type of show I really love.
It's a listener feedback episode, and I'm going to feature stuff that any of you have written in about that add some color or new information to past shows.
The reason I love these episodes so much is that it's a shotgun blast of blurbs about famous urban legends, most of which you've heard of, some of which you may not have, but all of which are fascinating by themselves in that each offers a unique view into human nature.
We'll get started with our recent episode number 803 on the Tunguska event, the famous explosion over a Siberian forest in 1908, attributed to a large meteor.
In the introduction, I said the explosion produced the loudest sound in human history, as reported in the sources for the episode.
Quite a few of you replied to this very quickly via email, Twitter, Facebook, pretty much everywhere, asserting that it was either the explosive eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 or the 1961 nuclear test by the Soviet Union called Tsar Bomba that are generally acknowledged as the loudest sounds ever.
Now it is indeed true that most articles on the subject say that.
The reason is that most of these articles were written prior to December 2018 when the primary source for my episode was published, or else they were evidently unaware of this newer information.
It came from the international group that met at NASA Ames to use all the new data gathered from the 2013 Chelyabinsk event to more accurately characterize the Tunguska event.
Although their published report did not talk about the sound, it did substantially upgrade the probable energy level of the explosion.
Previous estimates for Tunguska had ranges up to 300 decibels the revised estimates start at 300 decibels.
Keeping in mind that all of these are probabilities based on many variables, so every published paper gives different estimates.
The top three sounds in human history, meaning they were heard by the ears of modern humans, are Tunguska, Krakatoa, and then Tsar Bamba.
However, I should have said Tunguska was probably the largest sound.
A number of you also pointed out that comparisons like this are invalid, since sound can't actually be louder than 194 decibels.
At that amplitude, the pressure difference between the peaks and valleys in the acoustic wave is one atmosphere.
Thus, it would require negative pressure to get louder, which is impossible.
The explosions we're talking about produced shock waves, which means the wave fronts are moving faster than the speed of sound.
Although shock waves and acoustic waves are not the same thing, both have amplitudes that can be measured in decibels.
Thus, it's not meaningless to talk about the sound produced by explosions like this at levels like 300 decibels, though it is, strictly speaking, not really an acoustic sound.
Next, we've got some tasty tidbits on episode number 612 about a young boy who made headlines in 2009 when his parents, Andrea and Bruce Leininger, published the book Soul Survivor, announcing their son James as a legitimate case of reincarnation.
He had lived a past life as a World War II fighter pilot.
Believers in reincarnation embraced it eagerly.
The boy had what seemed an unnatural interest in fighter planes and even knew the names of specific aircraft carriers and details of certain pilots' careers.
But the story was never persuasive to either objective fact-checkers or to those knowledgeable in psychology.
The parents had, for years, prompted and guided their son in the construction of this narrative, all under the guidance of a professional past-life regression therapist, in whom they placed complete faith.
There are two pieces of new news on this story.
First is that I heard from listener Michael Sutteth, who has just written a magnum opus paper deconstructing this case, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
He interviewed a dozen people and reviewed everything written on the case and detailed countless times that Bruce Leininger misrepresented the timeline and other facts.
The paper is a monumental takedown.
According to Sudoth's research, the Leiningers were clearly consciously deceptive in numerous instances.
But at its core, it's really a case of them having honestly deluded themselves to begin with and then tweaked both the narrative and their impressionable young son in order to bolster the fantasy they so desperately want to believe.
The second piece of news involves our old friend Robert Bigelow, the wallet and mastermind behind so much UFO news from recent decades, including all the recent Pentagon stuff and his old Skinwalker Ranch project.
Bigelow's current project is the Institute for Consciousness Studies, which seeks to prove the reality of the afterlife.
In November of 2021, Bigelow's Institute awarded Bruce Leininger $20,000 for a paper about his son as, quote, definitive proof of reincarnation.
Could the bar possibly be set any lower for, quote, definitive proof?
The Dybbuk Box Revealed 00:03:51
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finish the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating, skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast, and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Moving on to episode number 428 about the Dybbuk box, an antique wine box supposedly haunted by a malevolent spirit from Hebrew mythology called a Dybbuk.
It was originally listed on eBay by Kevin Manus and then passed through a string of owners who reported all kinds of terrible things and bad luck caused by the box.
It has since come out that Manus, a fiction writer, has acknowledged that the entire Dybbuk box story was a piece of fiction like any other.
I first heard about this from my friend Kenny Biddle, who interviewed Manus on his YouTube show in 2021.
I use the words confessed when describing what was inside Charles' article here, where you pretty much said, yes, you made up everything.
So can you elaborate on that?
You can just make it up.
I'm a writer, man.
That's what I do.
I came up with the concept and wrote a story.
Okay.
I do the same thing.
I understand the creative part, but wouldn't you agree that's making it up?
Well, yeah, the same way as H.G. Wells made up the time machine.
If it sounds like he's being a bit too cagey, here's what Manus told Input Magazine just a few days before Kenny's interview.
I am a creative writer.
The Dybbuk box is a story that I created, and the Dybbuk Box story has done exactly what I intended it to do when I posted it 20 years ago, which is to become an interactive horror story in real time.
So hopefully you can all stop emailing me that my episode needs to be retracted because the Dybbuk Box story is so compelling that it absolutely must be true.
Episode number 424 was about the Santa Barbara Samoom of 1859, an apocryphal event in which a blast of superheated wind hit this coastal California town.
Suffice it to say that a lot is wrong with the story.
The California coast does get very hot winds, but nowhere near the temperatures or levels of destruction claimed in the 1859 Tall Tale.
Fracking's Hidden Cost 00:02:43
Published accounts about the event point out that the temperature in Santa Barbara that day reached 133 degrees Fahrenheit, about 56 degrees Celsius, and then usually go on to say that it was the world's hottest temperature until Death Valley hit 134 in 1913.
However, meteorologists generally all discount that Death Valley reading as being unreliable, and it's likely to soon be decertified, as happened with a 136 claimed for Libya in 1922, along with a 131 from Tunisia in 1931.
But the Samoom episode has needed a new update on its transcript.
Death Valley registered an official, accurate 130.0 degrees Fahrenheit, 54.4 degrees Celsius, on July 9th, 2021.
That is the legitimate new highest temperature ever recorded on Earth.
Though it has not yet, as of this writing, been officially certified, it probably will.
Incidentally, I was there just a few days before, but only caught 126.
I was super bitter that I missed it.
An update of my own is next.
Episode number 275 debunked a huge number of false claims about fracking, mostly from the popular 2010 movie Gasland, which depicted all kinds of dramatic and bizarre environmental consequences from fracking, very few of which were true.
As I always say, if you want to address a problem effectively, you need to have an accurate understanding of the problem, not a cartoonish caricature of it.
There is one major consequence from fracking that was not mentioned in the episode, and that's probably the most important reason to stop it.
It's not caused by the fracking process itself, but by the natural gas mines that fracking feeds off.
Opening up these natural gas reservoirs is the number one source of atmospheric methane in the United States, and in some other countries.
As we recently discussed in episode number 797 on atmospheric methane, curtailing the release of methane is a supercritical tipping point in the fight against global warming.
And so, regardless of whether fracking itself causes any strange problems or not, fracking, and all natural gas mining, must be stopped completely, as soon as possible.
The short version being there's one true reason to stop fracking.
We don't need a bunch of false reasons weakening the argument.
Shadow People Explained 00:03:47
Finally, I want to give a quick nod to my listener, Max, who wrote in with a plausible suggestion that probably explains some eyewitness accounts of so-called shadow people.
Episode number 175 was all about these shadow people, black, ghostly figures that people see in their house, but who often dart out of the way when they turn to look.
Max wrote, I have a floater in my right eye that under certain light conditions, i.e. low light at night when I'm working in my office, creates the illusion that someone just on the edge of my field of vision is trying to sneak up on me, or standing still looking at me on my far right-hand side.
When I turn to look, obviously there's nothing there, because of the change in relative position between the floater and where I am looking.
This floater appeared some 20 years ago, and the first time it happened, I genuinely felt that there was someone there, and I recalled having read something about people being watched by shadow people.
It was not long after that I saw an ophthalmologist who explained what it was.
While Max's personal story is anecdotal, floaters are a real ophthalmological thing and do produce dark circles, dots, blobs, or lines in the vision.
They probably do explain some eyewitness accounts of shadow people, but certainly it would be silly to claim it explains all of them.
So, that's all the feedback and follow-ups we have for you this week.
Next week we'll be back in business with a full regular episode.
And until then, keep the show honest.
Keep that feedback coming in.
You know who else is honest?
Skeptoid's premium members like Rob Palmer, the well-known skeptic, Mark Curry from Melbourne, Australia, Shawnee the Argonaut Moon from Wyoming, and Damien Cassidy.
Remember, every Skeptoid episode has a transcript page at skeptoid.com with complete bibliographic references and further reading suggestions.
And they also print out into nicely formatted PDF documents that you can share.
And don't forget to order the Skeptoid books.
They make great bathroom reading and they're awesome gifts for people who don't listen to podcasts.
Get them in our online store at skeptoid.com slash store or wherever books are sold.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as five US dollars per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection