Mothballs and Otters

Joe Nickell, called a "paranormal investigator" (!) on tonight's Monster Quest. Not clear if he calls himself that, or it was Monster Quest's idea, but hell no! Nickell is not a "paranormal investigator." He is a "professional skeptic," a "professional debunker," a pathological skeptibunkie, well, you know. But not a "paranormal investigator" and please, keep your semantic hare splitting comments to yourself thank you very much.

So, tonight's episode of MQ was interesting. Giant flesh eating eels ---- yeeeeeeeewwwwwwww. Scary. Creepy. Cool. No one's talking paranormal here or anything else, just good old fashioned Really Big Creatures That Can Eat You Whole stuff. Joe Nickell of course wants it to be more. Like all skeptoids.

Here's a link to a video clip of Loren Coleman and Nickell on CNN discussing a sea serpent. There's footage. Coleman quite reasonably says it's hard to say what it is, and he makes no so-called 'bleever statement that it's a sea monster. Nickell ignores the rational open minded Coleman, and goes off anyway.


Back to MQ. First of all, MQ was doing a good job of not having skekptoids on, a very welcome and nice thing. I think they're changing their policy; they seem to be having more of these pathological debunkers on. So Nickell does his whole "they're not sea serpents or giant eels they're otters" routine. Or maybe logs. Logs that float up from the deep. To prove this, he demonstrates for us with a mothball in a clear bowl of carbonated water.

He also does his smug little dance with witnesses. He puts a log out there in the water, and has the witnesses estimate how long the log is. They all did pretty well, the log was 18 feet, and estimates were in that range. Nickell actually seemed disappointed they did so well, and begrudgingly admitted they did do well.

And then there was his absolutely over the top comment at the end of the program that perfectly underscores the innate belief of the pathological skeptoid: that everyone is out to lie, fool themselves, and what's more, that everyone is so ignorant and stupid and shallow, we'll do anything to keep mysteries mysteries. To paraphrase, he said that "people want to believe, and would rather keep the mystery than solve it."

This assumes that someone who sees something unusual is mistaken, and since they won't believe the "explanations" someone like Nickell offers them,-- who wasn't there, doesn't live in the area, isn't familiar with the local flora and fauna, -- they're like little kids who believe in Tinkerbell.

Well, at least Nickell didn't suggest the things people have been seeing in the water for hundreds of years were owls.