JoLLy 2

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Almost every town has a lake monster. In the southern town that I grew up in the local sea monster was a catfish the size of a school bus. As it turned out there was some truth to that legend.

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While exaggerated, the lakes that I swam in as a kid were home to some pretty big catfish. In fact, most lakes are home to big fish species like these. More famous and fantastical stories exist though of plesiosaur-like beasts roaming lakes from North America to Scotland, but science is all but certain that it is impossible for plesiosaurs to exist in these lakes. For one, there simply is not enough food in these lakes to support a megafauna like plesiosaur. Second, most large lakes were carved out during the last ice age 10,000 years ago; plesiosaurs were long extinct by that time period.

It is also important to note plesiosaurs did not have gills, nor would any of the reptilian like sea creatures that are famous for roaming lakes. They would have to come up for air and have to come up often. In other words you would have to see these creatures come up for oxygen in these lakes about as often as you would see crocodiles or whales coming up for air, which is pretty often.

In 2003, the final nail may have been put in the coffin for this cryptid. The BBC conducted a large-scale search for Nessie, the most prolific of these giant, reptilian lake dwellers. They used 600 separate sonar beams and satellite tracking and came up with nothing.

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Hoaxes are definitely the biggest thorn in paranormal believer’s side. So much great potential evidence has turned out to be a hoax and with Photoshop and the Internet hoaxes have never been easier. You can purchase a UFO balloon like the one above from multiple different inflatable balloon advertising companies. It has also never been easier to Photoshop ghosts into photographs. How does one even differentiate what could be real and what could be a hoax anymore?

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Right now there is a combined total of $2.4 millions dollars being offered by various organizations if someone can prove that they have supernatural or paranormal abilities under the specific organization’s test conditions. James Randi Educational Foundation alone offers one million dollars to anyone who can prove that they have psychic abilities.

So if clairvoyants or psychics actually exist, then these organizations are just giving money away to these people, right? Wrong. As of this writing all of these cash prizes have gone unclaimed, and not a single famous psychic has yet to go through with any of these tests. Are all psychics so well off that they don’t need a million bucks? I mean with the current economy there has to be a psychic somewhere hard up for money who would be willing to go read some minds for a bit and get a quick million dollar pay check and yet the money goes unclaimed.

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Countless of reputable scientists including Steven Hawking, Carl Sagan, and Michio Kaku say that statistically speaking, we cannot be the only intelligent life to have evolved in the universe. Even those who say that the Drake Equation is nonsensical mental masturbation, have to admit that out of all the galaxies in the universe the likelihood of our solar system being the only to have evolved life seems very unlikely.

The Fermi Paradox is something that the proponents of intelligent life existing on other planets have to find a way around. The Fermi Paradox states if there is so much intelligent life in the universe then where is it? Why do we not see space probes from other worlds or receive radio signals from them? Where are all the aliens?

Some have suggested that intelligent extraterrestrial life does not exist or is so rare that humans will never see it. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains that becoming a self-aware, intelligent species was such a large evolutionary mountain to climb that other species doing the same is improbable. Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has toyed with a similar idea. He says that believing intelligent life has had to evolved on other planets rises from a common misconception of evolution, the fallacy of the “ladder of evolution”. He says, “…Evolution does not strive for a goal but just happens…”

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The God Helmet is a machine placed on top of a test subject’s head. The helmet focuses a magnetic field on the temporal lobe of the brain. It has been discovered that when this is done it causes the subject to have a spiritual or paranormal experience. The research got started when Michael Persinger began noticing that people who have temporal lobe epilepsy would often have vivid hallucinations that were strikingly similar to intense spiritual visions or claims of ghosts.

While using the God Helmet subjects have reported seeing figures standing around them in an empty room, feeling like there was fire all around them, and others who were of a religious persuasion claim that they felt more connected to God, among other experiences. Persinger theorizes that the body may stimulate this area of the brain naturally and this is why people sometimes see ghosts or have intense spiritual experiences. He also argues that evolutionary wise it makes sense. He says that we evolved this mechanism in our brain in order to cope with the stress of facing our own mortality. In other words, Persinger believes that he has discovered the afterlife and it is all in our heads.

Bertrand Russell once famously wrote that there was a teapot that orbited the moon. It was too small to be seen by the naked eye and could not be seen or measured by any of Earth’s instruments. How do you prove or disprove that? The answer is that you cannot, but it isn’t going to stop people from trying.