Grab Bag 2: Odds and Ends About Oddities

Here we are, the end of 2019, and it's been an interesting year full of mysteries and monsters. But let's set aside the current events and turn to science for a bit.

There are end of year ten-best lists popping out: here's the first one I noticed. I hate to admit it, but I haven’t read any of these picks for best science and nature books of the year. Robert MacFarlane’s Underland, I think, is at the top of my list. 

I like new animals, living and prehistoric. Some of Nature’s experiment turn out to be really crazy.    A flying squirrel with a 5-foot (1.5m) wingspan? Yes. We have Petauristatetyukhensis, found near Vladivostok and estimated at 30,000 years old.  It easily dwarfs its largest relatives, which are impressive enough. I’ve written elsewhere about how Pakistan's woolly flying squirrel, the largest squirrel in the world, was discovered in 1888, vanished soon after, and stayed missing until 1995. The animal, which is up to two feet long not counting its two⌐foot tail, was found by two dogged amateurs after eluding repeated searches by professional zoologists.

Everyone likes finding new examples of those other flying vertebrates, the birds. A widespread group called the honeyeaters, the Alormyzomela (fancy scientific name Myzomela prawiradilagae), was announced earlier this month from the Indonesian island of (of course) Alor.  As is too often the case, the scientists describing a new species recommended it immediately be declared endangered thanks to habitat degradation.    A handsome little brown and grey creature with a mostly red head, it has a call described as “tssip” or “vick.” 

Then there’s the new crocodile. Really! While New Guinea has a well-established freshwater crocodile, described 91 years ago, it apears that population is split, and what’s now called Crocodylus halli is a different breed of reptile. There were even specimens in captivity, at Florida’s St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park in Florida.  I’ll stop by sometime and see them in a while…

And if you’re not sure what species something is… there’s anapp for that. 

The source is inaturalist.org, which describes itself “a citizen science project and online social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe.”

My favorite critters include the tardigrades, near-microscopic six-legged beasties that look kinda cute and are some of the toughest multicellular organisms on Earth. Freeze, them, dry them, heat them, starve them – they don’t care.  Some of them lived after exposure to empty space, cosmic rays, and brutal temperature changes in a box mounted on the outside of the International Space Station.  There’s a very cool Twitter account at https://twitter.com/tardigradopedia. Some sceintists has raised the idea of integrate tardigrade DNA with humans.  Ummm… that’s how you get a cross between Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers. There was an article in one of those old men’s magazines, like TRUE, that had a blown-up picture of one claiming NASA had photographed this "unknown alien creature" on Mars or in space. 

Speaking of space. I used to spend a lot of time pondering UFOs.  The term stinks, of course: there’s no way to know whether something in the sky is an “object” or “flying.”  Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) is used by, among other organizations, the U.S. Navy, which had some publicized sightings in the last few years. 

I’m talking about the philosophy of the topic and not individual sightings here.  I mention it not because I think aliens are visiting us - I don’t – but because there’s a residue of UFO reports that stubbornly stick in the “unidentified” category.  A couple of more skeptical commenters, Robert Schaeffer for one, have written that, if 95% of UFO sightings could be explained (and everyone agrees on some number in the 90s), then why not 99%? Why not 100%?  I find this a bit unscientific.  No one doubts ball lightning exists, but everyone agrees many sightings are mistaken.  A police hotline may hear from 1,000 people that they saw the murderer whose picture was on TV: 99% may be mistaken and 1% correct, and police still use such tiplines and do get genuine sightings. Thousands of sightings of the Eastern cougar have led to a few genuine cougars (relict, released, or rambling in from other states is not always clear, but the point is 99 percent can be wrong and the thing can still be there,

Going back to our space motif, there are quite a few reports from space by astronauts, who you’d think would be good observers of phenomena in space if anyone is. However, James Oberg had had no trouble explaining them, especially because low Earth orbit (LEO) is filled with debris of all shapes and sizes. ( There are also hoaxes, like an altered Apollo 11 transcript.)

Continuing to ramble, UFO documentaries tend to be low quality at best. One called Unacknowledged, which ran on Netflix, was built around encounters by military personnel and astronauts. So far, so good, but it turns out the astronauts were quoted out of context, some of the military men held way-out fringe beliefs and space and aliens, and the whole ends up pretty weak.  

Groups like MUFON solider on, and not entirely without reason. Alien spaceships are not here, but aerial phenomena, both explainable and not-explained yet, are here.  The discovery of massive discharges of energy, spires and elfs, is recent: The late Aviation Week editor Phil Klass’ old idea about plasmas, large, longer-lived cousins to ball lightning, still has some validity in it. A friend of my father’s, a pilot on duty in postwar Japan, chased a reddish disk that was translucent – he could make out clouds through it – that his P-51 couldn’t catch.  That sounds more like a natural phenomenon than a spaceship, but what sort of phenomenon?  We don’t know. 

And there you have the starting point for all scientific investigation: “We don’t know.”