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.