The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker: At The Fringes of Knowledge

What lurks out at the fringes of science? Aliens? UFOs? Poltergeists? Remote Viewing?

Sure, that's all just outside the borders of mainstream science. But what's just on the inside of that boundary?

As the great modern philosopher Donald Henry Rumsfeld once stated so poetically, "There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know."

And thus it is with science.

We have areas where we know what we know. Largely these areas will fall outside the purview of this site.

We have areas where we don't know what we don't know. These are the areas where we often see the most interesting inquiries into fringe science. Weird Reality will certainly be spending a great deal of time on these subjects as well.

But we also have areas where we know what we don't know. These are where you'll often see scientists hard at work expanding the boundaries of knowledge ever-so-slightly. And these areas can often become areas of debate, with some scientists being quite skeptical that we don't know whatever it is we think we don't know.

Take, for example, the existence of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.

Widely considered extinct, this King Of Birds was reported to have been sighted a few years ago in a remote section of Arkansas swampland. Lacking any recorded proof of the sighting, however, many scientists doubt it survives. Without "confirmed" sightings from "credible experts", the bird is in a state of Schroedinger Cat like duality. It exists and does not exist at the same time. We don't know. We don't know if we know. We don't know if we don't know. It might. It might not. The universe, as Dr. Finkelstein said, contains a maybe.

The search for the elusive bird continues. Perhaps someday soon this mystery will be resolved.

But other known unknowns will persist, pestering scientists the world over to keep pushing for more data. The need to fill in these patterns is the devil that drives us all.

We'll be looking at more of these mysteries soon!

Dr. Reich and Orgone Energy

Pareidolia, Paranoia, or Prehistoric? Wood Sighted On Mars

More anomalous images from Mars, this time showing what for all the world appears to be a piece of wood.

The images, from the 2008 Phoenix mission, have aroused much heated discussion around the web. The Daily Mail believes the interpretation of the image as lumber is a result of pareidolia, a phenomenon in which the brain interprets vague sensory input as meaningful. Pareidolia is often trotted out as an "explanation" for everything from backwards speech to the well-known Face On Mars. Of course in this case it doesn't address the basic question- What is the object shown?

The Crit believes it is indeed wood, and indicates that vast forests are/have been present on Mars. It's a long way from one image with a vague object to vast forests, but is this leap in interpretation all that different from what mainstream science does all the time?

French philosopher Jacques Ellul believed the secret to successful Propaganda was to never lie about the facts, for you will certainly be caught out, but to control the interpretation. That's the technique by which you can control what people think. Politicians call it "setting the narrative". It's all the same- define what's an acceptable and marginalize whatever isn't.

Wood on Mars? Shadow? Rock (although this raises some questions about what formed the rock in that way)?

We don't know, what we have are some pixels of different shades. Interpretation of those pixels is up to the individual.

Sugar in space- Glycolaldehyde spotting makes Alien Life more likely

Scientists working with the IRAM radio telescope have found a basic sugar (glycolaldehyde) in a star-forming region of space, making it more likely that life could form in more areas of space than previously thought.

The compound Glycolaldehyde is a component of ribose, which is a component of Ribonucleic Acid, or RNA. RNA is a cousin of the better-known DNA, responsible for implementing the information stored in DNA. It is therefore fair to assert that Glycolaldehyde is essential to life as we know it. The fact that it has now been found in a star-forming region implies that it will be present on planets when they are eventually formed.

One interesting aspect of this story is the degree to which our knowledge acquisition has become abstracted. We are able to learn about molecules in distant regions of space through several layers of inference. Checking the paper to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, we learn the details of the discovery. The text is dense, as it is in most hard science papers, but a layman with a solid foundation in science can get the gist of most of it.

There's an introduction section, which lays out the basic assertions, followed by several sections supporting those assertions. One section details the interferometric data, how it was obtained, and the process of interpreting it and comparing it to several databases of known interpretation. There is, as always in scientific data, a small margin of observational error, and possible explanations are accounted for. The next section works to show the theoretical possibility of the compound forming based on known chemical reactions. Finally, the information is recapped and the finding restated.

So setting aside assumptions about how life works and what is required to make it so, let's examine what's necessary for a civilization to have made this discovery. First, of course, it must have radio astronomy, with all that entails. Understanding of Electricity, Antennae, Advanced Mathematics. Then it must have a theory of Stellar Formation, which implies Nuclear Physics and Molecular Chemistry. Then it must have a theory of life, which implies Molecular Biology. Then, for this particular discovery to be practical, it implies computer systems advanced enough to store massive amounts of data, and computer science advanced enough to make retrieval of that data efficient. It also implies, given our particular civilization structure, scientific cooperation between nations. Cooperation of tribes and peoples on a large scale, for the benefit of all.

If any one of these is missing, this discovery cannot occur. It literally could not have happened prior to now in human history. This is the cutting edge of science, and what the expansion of human knowledge is meant to be. There is much to learn, many things still left unknown.

And there are many things we think we know that are wrong. Look over the list above, examine all the places assumptions or beliefs about how the universe works could in error. It's absolutely certain that some of the conceptual structure behind this discovery is wrong. That may or may not make a difference in the outcome of this observation, but when studying the far frontiers of scientific information, it's worth remembering how much foundation there is underneath it, and where that foundation might change as we gather more and more information.

This dichotomy, the tension between the thrill of the edge of knowledge and the structure of our assumptions, will be a recurring theme on Weird Reality, examining what we know, what we think we know, and what we might one day know. Stay tuned!

Weird Reality's Favorite Sites : Pravda.ru

We here at Weird Reality scan a wide variety of websites seeking the unusual and the paradigm-shifting stories that can break us out of our daily reality-tunnels. Over time we've grown to appreciate sites that provide such material with dependable frequency, and we'll be sharing those sites with you, Dear Reader!

One such site is Pravda.ru , an icon of the Soviet era that has adapted to the changing times in the Motherland. As all products of the Cold War age know, "Pravda" is Russian for "Truth", and Truth is what Pravda.ru provides in great doses. Certainly, not all stories can be taken at face value, but they open one's eyes to other possible views of reality.

Take, for instance, this story on Killer UFOs hiding in lakes. In the space of seven short paragraphs we learn that not only do UFOs hide in lakes around the world, but they may induce humans around the lakes to behave in a self-destructive manner. Somewhere in the unknowable underwater depths of lakes such as Lake John D Long , a crashed UFO caused unspeakable tragedy not once, but twice in the space of a few years.

The powers of the lake could be the result of a curse, an alien technology, or psychological impulses perhaps many would prefer to leave unexplored. But Pravda pokes and prods us to consider what really happened, going beyond the headlines and mainstream interpretations. Coming at things from an extemely oblique angle, Pravda may indeed bring a Seeker to Truth.

Welcome to Weird Reality!

Our intent for this little journal is to highlight stories of anomalous events and fascinating places. We hope to do our part to add to the investigation of the seen and unseen worlds. Join us, we promise it will be an enjoyable experience!