FBI

The FBI says a 1950 flying-saucer memo rates as the most popular file in its online document repository.

The FBI says it never followed up on the most popular file in its online reading room — a one-page UFO memo that passes along a second- or third-hand report about flying saucers and alien passengers that were supposedly recovered in New Mexico.

The memo, dated March 22, 1950, has been viewed almost a million times over the past two years, the FBI said this week in a blog posting. It was written by Guy Hottel, who was the head of the FBI's field office in Washington at the time, and addressed to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

In the memo, Hottel discusses an account provided to an FBI agent ... that was attributed to an informant ... who purportedly heard from an Air Force investigator ... that "three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico."

"They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter," the memo read. "Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots."

Hottel said he was told that the saucers' control systems might have been disrupted by interference from "a very high-powered radar set-up" that the government had in the area. But he admitted in the memo that "no further evaluation was attempted" by the informant, whose name is blacked out in the online document.

The Hottel memo has been in the public record since the 1970s, but it created a huge splash in 2011 when it was added to the FBI Vault, an online repository of public records. Here's how The Sun, a British tabloid, characterized the memo in a headline from those days: "Aliens Exist, Say Real-Life X-Files."

Monday's posting was written to counter such characterizations. The FBI denied that the memo constituted evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft — and said Hottel's report was never taken all that seriously. Instead, it was considered "an unconfirmed report that the FBI never even followed up on."

The FBI said there was no reason to believe that the memo referred to another famous UFO saga, the purported discovery of a crashed alien spaceship in Roswell, N.M., in 1947. "The Hottel memo is dated nearly three years after the infamous events in Roswell," it said. 

The bureau acknowledged that for a few years after the Roswell incident, Hoover followed up on an Air Force request by ordering his agents to verify any UFO sightings. "That practice ended in July 1950, four months after the Hottel memo, suggesting that our Washington Field Office didn't think enough of that flying saucer story to look into it," the posting said.

There's an alternate explanation for the Hottel memo that makes a lot more sense. Two years ago, when the memo was added to the Vault, paranormal investigator Ben Radford noted that the informant's story matched the description of a UFO hoax that was concocted by a man named Silas Newton. In 1950, Newton was telling tales about flying saucers that had crashed at a radar station near the Arizona-New Mexico border. Newton was later convicted of fraud, and died in 1972.

Ironically, there's a whole different section of the FBI Vault that's devoted to Newton, whom the bureau described as "a wealthy oil producer and con man." To get the story about the connections between Newton's tales and the Hottel memos, check out this thorough debunking on the Above Top Secret forum.

Even though the FBI says the memo "does not prove the existence of UFOs," it's not confirming the Silas Newton story, either. "Some people believe the memo repeats a hoax that was circulating at that time, but the Bureau's files have no information to verify that story," it said.

What do you think FBI Agent Fox Mulder would say? "The truth is out there"? Or "Trust no one"? Feel free to weigh in with your own verdict in the comment section below.  

Update for 6:35 p.m.: Mark Allin, chief operating officer for The Above Network, says the truth is out there, in the form of the Above Top Secret analysis that I mentioned earlier. "The short story is, without a doubt, 'Case Closed,'" Allin said today in an email. "The memo is based on a hoax that was carried out by a convicted con man named Silas Newton, and it was debunked years ago. It's a pretty good and interesting hoax story, to be certain, but there is no value in it beyond that."

More about UFOs:

• US Army missile test sparks UFO reports
• Gallery: UFO cases that still stir up a buzz
• Cosmic Log archive on UFOs

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

A photographic mosaic shows the Curiosity rover's surroundings at a Martian location known as Yellowknife Bay. This view has been assembled from black-and-white images captured by the rover's navigation camera on Sol 132 (Dec. 19). Gaps in imagery of the Martian sky have been filled in, and the whole scene has been colorized. Click here or on the image to see the complete 360-degree panorama.

The cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover have been clicking away over the holidays — gathering enough pictures for a 360-degree panorama of its rocky surroundings at Yellowknife Bay, plus a close-up view showing a "Martian flower" seemingly sprouting from the surface.

The panorama was assembled from pictures snapped by the rover's navigation camera system on the 132nd Martian day of Curiosity's mission on the Red Planet, also known as Sol 132 or Dec. 19.

In this case, the folks doing the assembling are Ken Kremer, a New Jersey-based journalist, research chemist and photographer; and Marco Di Lorenzo, a physicist who's a high-school educator and photographer in Italy. They stitched together the black-and-white images, filled in the gaps in the Martian sky and colorized the scene to reflect what an observer on Mars might see.

We've featured the efforts of Kremer and Di Lorenzo several times before: They're part of an active online community that makes use of the raw images provided by Curiosity and other Mars probes, and then shares them via websites such as UnmannedSpaceflight.com. Even now, the folks at UnmannedSpaceflight are posting plenty of amazing pictures from Yellowknife Bay, including a must-see, zoomable GigaPan version. 

Another picture from Sol 132 has stirred up some buzz at the Above Top Secret discussion forum. The picture focuses in on a bright, crumpled object that's sitting on a Martian outcrop, as seen by the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI. The translucent shape is reminiscent of a flower's pistils, which led one of the forum's members to call it a "Martian flower."   

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

An anomalous bit of bright material can be seen left of center in this view captured by Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager on Sol 132 of the mission (Dec. 19).

Update for 8:30 p.m. ET: I initially suspected that the flower was a tiny shred of plastic from the rover itself. Such a shred popped up in October. At that time, experts at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory surmised that the plastic may have been a bit of wrapping that was knocked loose from the Mars Science Laboratory's descent stage during the spacecraft's August landing. The plastic was thought to have fallen on top of the rover, and then dropped to the ground weeks later.

That's what led me to go with the plastic-scrap hypothesis. However, some of the folks commenting on the pictures noted that the object seemed to be embedded in the rock — which would argue against my hypothesis. So I put in an inquiry with Guy Webster, who serves as JPL's main spokesman for NASA's Mars missions.

A couple of hours later, Webster emailed me the verdict: "That appears to be part of the rock, not debris from the spacecraft."

Mystery solved? It's certainly an intriguing bit of mineral that stands out prominently in the MAHLI picture. If I find out anything more, I'll be sure to pass it along. And if it turns out that flowers are really sprouting up on Mars, you'll know it's time to cue up the "X-Files" theme. Either way, the truth is out there.  

More pictures from Kremer and Di Lorenzo:

• Scenes from Mars' 'Promised Land'
• Rover checks out its belly on Mars
• Curiosity adds color to Martian peak
• Mars rover points to its destination
• Still more from KenKremer.com

More about Martian anomalies:

• Opportunity's rover rotini
• Spirit's 'Mermaid on Mars'
• Opportunity's bunny ears
• Phoenix's Martian spring

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.

Launch slideshow

Canadian whiz kids pulled the wool, or the feathers, over the eyes of millions of Internet users with a fake video showing a golden eagle trying to snatch a child in a Montreal park.

For a while, "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" spiked on YouTube's viral-video meter, chalking up 5 million views in just one day. One reason why the video leaped up the charts was because it was widely distributed via sites such as The Guardian and Gawker with a minimum of fact-checking. It didn't take long, however, for Montreal police to note that there were no reports of avian kid-snatching attempts. Besides, birders said, golden eagles don't frequent that part of the world — and the bird in the video didn't look like a real golden eagle anyway.

"With all the ignorance about nature that's out there already," the last thing we need is this kind of stupid garbage," the Black Swamp Bird Observatory in Ohio said in a Facebook posting.

"Shame on you, Guardian!" wrote an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist whose nom de plume is Grrlscientist.

Others took note of the jerky frame rate and soft focus, which are typical red flags for video fakery. Some noted telltale anomalies in how the video showed the bird's shadow and one of its wings.

To their credit, the media outlets that linked to the video quickly linked to the skepticism as well. Grrlscientist, for example, lodged her objections on the Guardian website itself, where she is a regular commentator.

Within hours, the jig was up. Montreal's Centre NAD, a school that specializes in 3-D animation design, acknowledged that the video was made up in a production simulation workshop class by three of its students: Normand Archambault, Loic Mireault and Felix Marquis-Poulin. "Both the eagle and the kid were created in 3-D animation and integrated into the film afterwards," the school said in a statement.

Centre NAD's student projects are often aimed at creating hoaxes good enough to fool outsiders. Last year at this time, students put together a video that seemed to show a penguin escaping from a Montreal zoo.

The "Eagle Snatching Kid" episode is just the latest example of instant foolery facilitated by image processing. Such pranks can be harmless fun — but they can also create serious problems. For example, after last week's horrific school shootings in Connecticut, some hoaxes purported to show that the perpetrator gave advance warning of what he was planning to do. That has the potential to send investigators down a dead end, which is why police issued a warning about that kind of mischief.

The bottom line? Be skeptical about the videos or screenshots you see on the Web, on YouTube or in the Twitterverse. Here are a few pro tips that Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, emailed us while the video was being scrutinized:

"I've seen the video, and analyzed similar ones in the past. It is difficult to come to hard conclusions about it. The problem, of course, is that YouTube is full of hoaxed videos of everything from Bigfoot to UFOs. My first reaction was that it's most likely fake. A few red flags include the fact that the bird in the video is not a golden eagle (as claimed in the video) and is not found in Canada; and that the baby would likely be far too heavy for a bird to pick up. It is true that large birds of prey can and do swoop down and snatch things off the ground — but they are usually small animals like mice, fish, rabbits, squirrels and gophers. Furthermore, there are no known incidents in history where a bird has actually abducted a baby and carried it off. ... It turns out that it was indeed a hoax."

Update for 3:40 p.m. ET: The YouTube view count has shot up beyond 5 million, and I've updated the figure cited here accordingly. (When I first published this item, it was 2.7 million.)

More adventures in image processing:

• Plastic beads on Mars: The short life of a NASA spoof
• There's something fishy about 'woolly mammoth' video
• Siberian snow job: 'Dead alien' video is a hoax
• UFO video shot over South Korea: Fact or fake?

NBC News' Suzanne Choney contributed to this report.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Arthur Anker via Flickr

Zoologist Arthur Anker's picture of a Venezuela poodle moth has captured the curiosity of Internet onlookers.

It's been compared to a fluffy dog, a Pokemon character and a Power Rangers villain — but whatever it is, the Venezuelan poodle moth has captured the Internet like Mothra in a bad Japanese movie. Now it's up to the experts to figure out exactly where this moth belongs on the tree of life.

The first thing to emphasize is that the poodle moth is no phony concoction like the jackalope, dogerpillar or chupacabra. Its cute, furry, scary look is totally in line with what's expected for a neotropical ornamental moth. In fact, cryptozoologist Karl Shuker found a similar picture of a white, fuzzy critter known as Diaphora mendica, or muslin moth, a member of the lepidopteran family Arctiidae.

The Venezuelan poodle moth is even more bizarre-looking than your run-of-the-mill muslin moth. That's largely due to the details that zoologist Arthur Anker of Brazil's Federal University of Ceara captured in the photograph he took in the Gran Sabana region of Venezuela's Canaima National Park several years ago.

The nearly head-on perspective, without any sense of size scale, led my colleague Rosa Golijan to compare the bug to a Power Rangers villain — for example, Finster, the loyal servant of Rita Repulsa. However, if this showy critter is indeed a neotropical relative of the muslin moth, it's much more benign: Such moths feed on herbaceous plants and cause little trouble. They're also relatively small: The muslin moth's wingspan amounts to little more than an inch (28 to 38 millimeters, according to the UKmoths website).

Shuker would love to nail down the flying poodle's precise species name: "Is it indeed a member of Arctiidae, or are its taxonomic affinities elsewhere? Could it even be a species still undescribed by science? Thousands of new insects are discovered every year in the South American rain forests, so it would be by no means unusual if Art's Venezuelan poodle moth proved to be one, too," he wrote on the ShukerNature blog.

The fact that there are so many types of moths in the Arctiidae family — an estimated 11,000 species around the world, including 6,000 known species in the neotropical region — would make it tricky to classify this particular insect, unless there's an actual specimen in hand that can be sampled for genetic analysis. Nevertheless, we've put out our own inquiries with lepidopterists, and if we hear anything back on the bizarre case of the Venezuelan poodle moth, we'll let you know in an update.

More about bizarre bugs:

• Parasite named after reggae star Bob Marley
• World's biggest bug? That depends ...
• Monster bug? It's no joke
• Eight insects with the 'ick' factor

Tip o' the Log to GrindTV.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Updated 3 p.m. ET Aug. 10: When a Red Planet rover has 17 cameras at its disposal, it's sure to pick up some weird sights now and then — and such is the case with the "Puff on Mars" that was spotted just after NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Sunday night.

The puff was a mysterious smudge that popped up on images taken by Curiosity's front-facing hazard avoidance cameras. The smudge could be seen in the first round of pictures, but was missing in a later round that was taken 45 minutes later. Was the puff just dirt on the lens? A dust devil that happened to be passing through the field of view when the image was taken? Or was it debris thrown up by an interplanetary crash? The experts at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory now say that last hypothesis is the best one.

Curiosity was delivered to its landing spot on Sunday by a rocket-powered descent stage that came to a near-standstill in midair, lowered the rover to the ground on a set of cables, clipped the cables and then blasted itself out of the area. The mission plan called for the stage to crash-land at a safe distance from the rover.

When scientists checked orbital imagery showing the landing site and its surroundings, they found the dark streaks left behind by the sky crane's crash about a half-mile northwest of the rover — in a direction that was consistent with the puff recorded by the cameras. Was the puff actually the cloud of debris thrown up into the air by the crash? "I don't think you can rule it out," mission manager Mike Watkins said Tuesday.

It may sound like an incredible coincidence that the rover's cameras happened to be pointing in just the right direction at the right time to record the splash from the crash, just 40 seconds after the rover's touchdown. But the puff almost certainly wasn't just a smudge of dirt on the lens cover, because it was picked up by two different cameras, left and right. And the circumstances surrounding the puff match up so well with the crash site that the dust-devil scenario seems much less likely.

Steve Sell, a member of the JPL team that monitored Curiosity's entry, descent and landing, confirmed that view on Friday. He noted that the puff did indeed occur at just the right place and time to match up with the sky crane's impact at 100 miles an hour (160 kilometers per hour). "We're fairly certain that that is the impact plume. ... We expected it to kick up a lot of dust," he told reporters.

The fact that the descent stage kicked up that dust right in front of the rover's cameras was "an amazing coincidence," Sell acknowledged.

Case closed? The puff may still have a whiff of mystery about it, but the best course is to move on and get Curiosity ready to catch the next weird sight. Once the rover's Mastcam system is up and running, it will be able to record high-definition color movies at 5 frames per second. The science team is hoping the cameras will track dust devils on the ground, clouds passing through the sky, and all sorts of other moving targets on Mars. So if there are any Martian smoke monsters out there, like the one on the "Lost" TV series, be on guard: Curiosity will be watching you.

More about Mars:

• Panorama reveals a colorful Mars
• NBC video: Panorama featured on 'Nightly News'
• Curiosity reveals a Martian Mojave
• Tour the Martian Mojave in 3-D
• Flying saucer spotted over Mars
• First 3-D pictures sent by Curiosity
• Orbital photo spots rover and its trash
• Curiosity sends color snapshot from Mars
• Rover video looks down on Mars during landing
• Mars orbiter spots rover in midair
• NASA's Mohawk Guy marvels at his fame
• Curiosity rover scores touchdown on Mars
• Mars probe provides radiation revelations
• Video: Highlights from rover's first two days on Mars

Heard any good Curiosity conspiracy theories? Keep us posted in a comment below.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

AP

A piece of iron lies next to a skeleton dating back to the Middle Ages at an archaeological dig in the Black Sea town of Sozopol. Bulgarian archaeologists say they have found skeletons that were pinned down through their chests with iron rods - a practice believed to stop the dead from rising as vampires.

Bulgarian archaeologists are showing off two centuries-old skeletons that they say were pinned down through their chests with iron rods to keep them from turning into vampires — a trend that was all the rage in medieval Europe.

The "vampire" skeletons were excavated recently near the Black Sea town of Sozopol, according to reports from The Associated Press and AFP. Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of Bulgaria's National History Museum, was quoted as saying that corpses were regularly treated this way in some parts of the country until the beginning of the 20th century.

About 100 similar burials have been found in Bulgaria over the years. "I do not know why an ordinary discovery like that became so popular," AP quoted Dimitrov as saying on Tuesday. "Perhaps because of the mysteriousness of the word 'vampire.'"

Bulgarian archaeologist Petar Balabanov has found a number of nailed-down skeletons near the eastern town of Debelt, at gravesites dating as far back as the 1st century. According to custom, the bodies had to be pinned down just in case they tried to rise from the grave. AFP quoted Balabanov as saying that the rite was practiced in Bulgaria as well as other Balkan countries.

Of course, the world's most famous vampire legend is associated with the 15th-century Balkan strongman known as Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler. That's mainly due to Irish novelist Bram Stoker, who borrowed the Dracula name for his 1897 novel about a blood-sucking bad guy from Transylvania. The idea that vampires drank blood may be of relatively recent vintage, but the idea that the dead had to be stopped from rising again was widespread in medieval times — in part due to the plague.

Several years ago, Italian archaeologists made a splash when they dug into a mass grave for 16th-century plague victims on the Venetian island of Nuovo Lazzaretto and found the remains of a woman who had a brick stuck between her jaws. To explain the brick, they cited some of the anti-vampire strategies practiced at the time.

For example, in one region of Germany, gravediggers would occasionally return to a plague grave and find that the shroud surrounding the corpse had been eaten away, with blood or other fluids coming out of the mouth. The hair and fingernails also appeared to grow longer, even after burial. Today, researchers say such phenomena are due to the natural stages of decomposition — but in the Middle Ages, people feared that these were the signs of vampirism.

The Italian researchers claimed that the brick was jammed in to keep the "Vampire of Venice" from causing trouble. But other archaeologists have disputed that claim. They suggest instead that the brick merely fell into the mouth of the woman's skull. That has sparked a scientific tiff, as LiveScience reported last month.

Based on Balabanov's excavations, the Bulgarian nailing-down practice goes much farther back than Dracula or the Black Death — maybe like placing coins on the eyes of the deceased, but grislier. What do you think? Is this solid science, or another case of vampire grandstanding? Please feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about ghoulish archaeology:

• 'Vampire' victim spurs gruesome debate
• Black magic revealed in ancient tablets
• The science of bloodsuckers
• Gallery: Seven ghoulish discoveries
• Gallery: Myths and realities about vampires

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Marine biologists say the spooky "Cascade Creature" seen drifting through the deep sea in a viral video isn't a whale placenta, a parachute, a plastic bag or an alien visitor: It's a type of jellyfish known as a Deepstaria enigmatica.

The video, which was apparently captured by a remotely operated vehicle near an underwater drilling site, caused a bit of a stir over the past couple of weeks among weird-science fans. Now it looks as if the truth is out there, thanks to assessments from experts such as Steven Haddock at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Craig McClain at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.

"This bag-like jelly is not that rare, but is large, so rarely seen intact," Haddock and his colleagues write on the JellyWatch Facebook page. "In the video, the swirling from the sub makes the medusa appear to undulate, and it even turns inside-out." They provide a helpful picture of a more typical specimen.

McClain is even more helpful in his posting at Deep Sea News. He provides citations on previous sightings of the beast, including explanations for the jellyfish's weirdly collapsed shape. And he shows through photographs and drawings that the strange appendage and whitish lumps seen in the video are D. enigmatica's gonads. TMI, Craig ... TMI.

For a third opinion, look no further than Australia's Nine News, which quotes Daniel Bucher, a marine biologist at Southern Cross University, as saying that the gonads were the giveaway.

Now that we've settled that, bring on the next sea monster.

More sea monsters:

• Iceland's monster unmasked
• Monster bug? It's no joke!
• Nessie-like monster filmed in Alaska
• Why giant squid have basketball eyes
• Fishermen pick up dying giant squid

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The Shroud of Turin has been seen as many things over the past 620 years, ranging from true burial cloth of the risen Jesus to clever medieval fake, but Cambridge art historian Thomas de Wesselow puts together a 448-page-long case for one of the lesser-known theories in his new book, "The Sign": that the shroud's negative image of a naked, bloodied man was really produced by Jesus' decomposition, and that the stories of his resurrection were inspired by the display of that cloth to his earliest disciples.

"The message really is that the Shroud of Turin is authentic," de Wesselow told me. "This is the only rational way of understanding this image. It can be understood entirely naturalistically. There's no reason to invoke a miracle to explain the image."

De Wesselow acknowledged this could be a hard sell for believers as well as for skeptics. "There are two big things I am arguing against," he admitted.

He's already taking flak from both sides.

"It's breathtakingly astonishing," said Joe Nickell, a senior research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry who has written extensively about the shroud. "He's clearly not a doubting Thomas. He's come up with some rather silly ideas, and then as people often do, he's fallen in love with them."

Meanwhile, in a column about the shroud, the Catholic Herald's Francis Phillips basically brushed off de Wesselow's views, saying they were "too eccentric to reproduce here."

Legends and lore for Easter
"The Sign" is the latest example of shroud lore that comes out during the Easter season, just around the time when millions of Christians are dwelling on the story of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. (I'm linking to other examples at the end of this item.) The Shroud of Turin has a clear line of provenance going back to around 1390, but when you try to go further back, you can easily get swept up in tales of the Knights Templar and legendary relics like the Veil of Veronica and the Holy Mandylion.

De Wesselow comes at the story from his background in art history. He's been researching the story of the shroud full-time for the past five years, and has woven together an explanation from scientific findings that seem to support the shroud's authenticity, plus perspectives on the animist beliefs of ancient peoples.

"I've studied images, what they mean and how they affect people," de Wesselow said. "In the old days, people saw images as potentially alive. They had potentially a consciousness. ... That type of thinking was absolutely standard before the modern age. It has nothing to do with an optical illusion, and it has nothing to do with people being stupid."

De Wesselow picks up on the idea that the shroud is actually a "vaporograph," colored by a chemical reaction between the gases exuded by a dead body and the carbohydrate deposits on the surface of Jesus' burial cloth. Blood stains were left on the cloth as well. When the shroud was taken from the body, the ghostly image remained behind — and de Wesselow said Jesus' disciples could have interpreted that image as the spiritual manifestation of their leader.

"The appearances of the risen Jesus were simply viewings of the shroud image," he said.

Here's what de Wesselow thinks happened next: After a series of viewings in the Holy Land, the shroud was and taken to the city of Edessa in modern-day Turkey, where it came to be folded up, framed and venerated by the Byzantine Christians as the Mandylion. The cloth was transferred to Constantinople in the 10th century, and disappeared in the year 1204, only to turn up again in France in the 1300s. The shroud was transferred to Turin in 1578, and it's been there ever since.

Holes in the theory?
What about the biblical references to the risen Jesus conversing with the apostles, or eating fish to prove he was really real, or letting St. Thomas touch his wounds? De Wesselow noted that the first accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection were written down decades after they supposedly occurred. "In that time, there's plenty of room for all the legends to be added to the story. ... These are stories written by sophisticated individuals later on to prove the point that there was a physical resurrection," he said.

Is there any evidence that dead bodies could actually produce the sort of vaporograph that de Wesselow is talking about? "We haven't got anything precisely similar," he acknowledged, "but I don't think that's surprising."

He pointed to a phenomenon known as the Jospice Imprint: In 1981, a cancer patient died at an English hospice and left a partial imprint of his body and face on a mattress cover. "It seems to have been formed from urine pooling around his body," de Wesselow said. That's not what he thinks happened in Jesus' case, but he nevertheless cited the imprint as "another example of a strange image."

De Wesselow totally buys into the evidence provided by the Shroud of Turin Research Project, to the effect that the image is not an artistic forgery but the real imprint of a battered man from centuries ago. That's a huge leap of faith right there. If you accept that, there are only so many types of explanations for the shroud you can come up with. De Wesselow said his explanation addresses the shroud mystery as well as the roots of belief in Jesus' resurrection.

"There are explanations involving a miracle, or that Jesus was spiritually resurrected and appeared in visions to his disciples," de Wesselow told me. "Since the 18th century, scientists have tried to explain the resurrection, and they've basically given up. They've basically forgotten about the whole problem. What I think I can do is provide a fairly coherent explanation which is completely naturalistic. It's a better alternative to the traditional Christian view."

A skeptic speaks
Nickell, however, prefers to stick with his own skeptical view. "I think the resurrection appearances can be seen as pretty much the same kind of thing we have today with apparitional experiences — ghosts, if you will," Nickell said. "We could see ourselves in such a situation with, say, Elvis sightings. You can understand them as experiences that people had but were illusory."

The way Nickell sees it, the biggest argument against de Wesselow's "cloth-as-Jesus" hypothesis comes from the scriptures themselves: There are only vague references to burial cloths in Matthew, Mark and Luke. The gospel of John, meanwhile, refers to Jesus being covered by separate cloths for the face and the body, which is "fatal to the Shroud of Turin," Nickell said.

"The bottom line for me is, if this author were correct, and Jesus' shroud had survived, surely one of the holy evangelists would have made note of it," Nickell said. "If it had been kept and had a remarkable picture of Jesus on it, we would have known about it. And we don't."

So what do you think? Is the shroud a fake, a miracle, or the real relic of a dead man? Register your opinion by clicking on the poll above, and/or leaving a comment below.

More on the Shroud of Turin:

• Was Holy Shroud created in a flash?
• Documentary looks at the face in the Shroud
• 'Jesus-era' cloth casts doubt on Turin Shroud 
• Could new test settle Shroud of Turin debate?

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Is this truly the video that UFO skeptics have been dreading? Actually, a compilation of 17-month-old video clips from a Chilean military air show is stirring up predictable responses from both sides of the UFO debate, but no dread.

For those who are inclined to believe that some unidentified flying objects exhibit characteristics beyond what our technology seems capable of, the El Bosque case could represent the latest, greatest evidence for flying saucers.

"This is a very, very unusual case, and I'm hoping that this case will help move forward the recognition that there really is something here that's worthy of further study. ... It has the possibility of being a breakthrough case," said investigative journalist Leslie Kean, the author of the book "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record."

But for those who think even the toughest cases can be explained away as video glitches, bugs or other tricks of the eye, the El Bosque case is just more of the same. 

"They're 'unexplained cases' only if you ignore the explanation," self-described debunker Robert Sheaffer told me. "That's what's going to happen in this case."

Genesis of an anomaly
The case goes back to an air show that was staged in November 2010, at Chile's Air Force academy, which is headquartered at the El Bosque Air Force Base in Santiago. Nothing untoward was noticed by anybody during the show itself, but Kean said an engineer at the nearby aircraft factory noticed an anomalous spot as he was sifting through video taken from the show, looking for an image that could be used as a poster photo.

The spot appeared to move quickly from frame to frame, and the engineer thought it looked enough like some sort of craft to notify the Chilean government agency in charge of investigating anomalous aerial phenomena, known by the Spanish acronym CEFAA.

The way Kean tells it, CEFAA investigators looked around for other video clips of the event and pieced together six additional views of the spot-shaped phenomena. Ricardo Bermudez, a retired Chilean Air Force general who is now CEFAA's director, told a UFO conference last month that his agency consulted with other officials, image-processing experts and "non-believer astronomers." CEFAA's conclusion was that the spots were caused by an object traveling through the scene at speeds in excess of 4,000 mph — so fast that it went unnoticed by air-show spectators.

"Humans inside this object could not survive," Kean and a co-author, former New York Times investigative reporter Ralph Blumenthal, wrote in a Huffington Post report appearing on Tuesday. "And, somehow, it made no sonic boom..."

Kean told me that the El Bosque case was notable for several reasons: "I think what's exceptional about this is that the investigation was thoroughly managed by a government agency."  Also, she said, "it's something you can actually see with your own eyes." The fact that the object shows up on seven videos from the same event, recorded from different vantage points, adds to the intrigue, she said.

The El Bosque case fits the pattern that Kean laid out in her book, in which she highlights UFO accounts from experienced pilots, military observers and government officials. Even measured by that standard, the Chilean case stands out, Kean said. "In some ways, I think it's more explosive than many of the cases in the book," she told me.

Skeptics unconvinced
In their article, Kean and Blumenthal wondered whether El Bosque would turn out to be "the case UFO skeptics have been dreading" — but experts on the other side of the UFO debate said their skepticism was unshaken.

"It's a tiny thing in a low-res video," astronomer Phil Plait, the myth-buster behind the Bad Astronomy blog, told me in an email. "If this is the best she can come up with, dread is not exactly what I feel."

Sheaffer, a columnist for The Skeptical Inquirer magazine and author of the book "UFO Sightings," joked about the reference to dread. "I'm shaking," he told me during a telephone interview. "You just can't see it on the phone."

Sheaffer said there wasn't yet enough data available to judge what really happened at El Bosque. "It's going to be like the Phoenix Lights in 1997. We're going to have to go and sit down and look at it," he said. (Coincidentally, Kean and Blumenthal's story came out on the 15th anniversary of the Phoenix Lights incident in Arizona.)

Some of the key missing points in the story have to do with the six other videos that are said to show the flying spot. Kean said that as far as she knew, those videos have not been seen by anyone outside CEFAA's investigative group. Another must-have for outside investigators would be the identity of the shooters behind the seven videos. If they turned out to be seven random people, with no relationship to one another, that would at least argue against the incident being an intentional hoax, Sheaffer said.

The fact that no one reported hearing or seeing anything out of the ordinary during the air show itself would suggest that the anomalous object is a trick of the eye — or, more accurately, a trick of the video.

For some of the denizens of the Above Top Secret online forum, the nature of the spot, or spots, was obvious: It's a bug, or bugs. An insect flying at regular speed through the foreground of the video could have been misinterpreted as an aircraft flying at super-fast speed through the background. One forum member posted several animated GIF images showing a similar effect. Different bugs could conceivably have flown through the viewing fields of different cameras, leading to the impression that the same super-fast craft was shown in each video — particularly if the six videos identified during CEFAA's follow-up were pulled out of a larger set.

"Maybe we'll find out it's a bug, but I seriously doubt it," Kean told me. She said she took Bermudez and his fellow investigators at their word. "All I know is that people who know way more about photo analysis than I have ruled that out," Kean said.

Even though Kean has made a name for herself as a UFO writer, she insisted that she's not wedded to a woo-woo explanation. "I just wanted to get this story out there," she said. "I'm hoping that some American scientists will now take on the analysis of this."

Update for 8:30 p.m. ET: I'm getting additional information from both sides of the debate. Leslie Kean sent me a follow-up email on the bug hypothesis:

"I went back to the CEFAA official re the bugs, and he said that's what they all thought at first when they got the first film (the one I posted). But when they went and got additional footage from very different vantage points which showed the same thing, they knew that was impossible.  I don't think they're that stupid to claim this is a UFO if it was a bug, given that so many experts looked at it."

And there's this from UFO skeptic Tim Printy:

"I am very skeptical of this story the more I read it. There are no high-quality videos available, and the frame grabs/brief clips I have seen appear to be vague and indistinct.  The idea they may be birds, insects or possibly a small Mylar balloon has crossed my mind but I can't tell much from the data at hand. 

"There are some big red flags for me:

"1) This happened over a year ago and people are still working on analyzing this? If the evidence was truly that good, it would take a few months at best to come up with a reasonable analysis to demonstrate it was something not of this earth. 

"2) It is being leaked out to various UFO blogs instead of publishing in a scientific journal. If it were good evidence, that is where it would appear, and not the Huffington Post.

"3) The videos are unavailable to be analyzed from outside sources. Perhaps they learned from the Mexican Air Force video debacle. Once the videos were revealed in sufficient length, many people identified the source of the images as being from oil wells in the gulf.  A lot of people had egg on their face from that one. NARCAP was initially involved with that one, but then later stated they could not properly analyze the video because of the provenance being questionable or some excuse similar to that. 

"4) The videos have no provenance. We don't know what has been done to them since the day of the event.

"Just my thoughts on this one. I can probably come up with a few more red flags, but I would rather wait for the report to appear or the raw videos to surface.  Meanwhile, I will hit my snooze button while the UFOlogists proclaim it the latest 'smoking gun.' So far all of these 'smoking guns' have turned out to be empty water pistols that have never fired a squirt."

More about UFOs:

• Were Soviets behind the Roswell UFO?
• UFO sighted in Russia ... right on time
• Jerusalem videos spark UFO buzz
• James Oberg: UFO book based on questionable foundation
• Leslie Kean: Skeptic misses point behind UFO book
• Share your UFO stories
• UFO cases that generate buzz
• Best places to spot UFOs
• Cosmic Log archive on UFOs

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Russian and South Korean scientists, including the cloning expert who was the focus of a stem-cell scandal six years ago, have signed a deal to try re-creating a woolly mammoth using cells recovered from 10,000-year-old frozen remains.

The papers for the joint research project were signed on Tuesday by Hwang Woo-Suk, chief technology officer for South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation; and Vasily Vasiliev, vice director of Russia's North-Eastern Federal University, during a ceremony at Hwang's office in Seoul.

Hwang is infamous for his role in human embryonic stem-cell research: In 2004 and 2005, he and his colleagues claimed to have extracted stem cells from what they characterized as the world's first cloned human embryos. But in late 2005, his work was found to have been based on fabricated data, and he was barred from continuing research with human cells.

Despite the disgrace, Hwang continued working with animal cloning techniques. Before the scandal broke, his team announced that they produced the world's first cloned dog, nicknamed Snuppy, and that claim has stood up to scrutiny. Last October, Hwang's team at Sooam unveiled eight cloned coyotes that had been produced by injecting nuclei from coyote skin cells into dog eggs. At the time, he said he was interested in cloning an endangered African dog species known as the lycaon ... and was interested in cloning a mammoth, too.

In December, Japanese news media said that scientists recovered a seemingly viable sample of bone marrow from a frozen mammoth thigh bone in Russia's Sakha Republic, and that a mammoth could be cloned back from extinction within five years. This week, Agence France-Presse reported that North-Eastern Federal University is working with the Japanese scientists and with the Koreans. The Beijing Genomics Institute is said to be taking part in the Korean-Russian project as well.

Reports from Seoul suggest that the mammoth-cloning effort could be launched this year if the Russians can ship the remains to Sooam's laboratory. "The first and hardest mission is to restore mammoth cells," a colleague of Hwang's at Sooam, Hwang In-Sung, told AFP.

Jung Yeon-Je / AFP - Getty Images

South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, (far left) and Vasily Vasiliev, vice director of North-Eastern Federal University of Russia's Sakha Republic (far right), exchange agreements during a signing ceremony on joint research at Hwang's office in Seoul on Tuesday.

Sooam Biotech Research / AFP - Getty Images

This diagram released by the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation shows the process of replacing the nuclei of elephant egg cells with those taken from the mammoth's somatic cells to bring a mammoth back to life.

The plan calls for extracting nuclei from the thawed-out mammoth cells, putting them into elephant egg cells and stimulating the cells to start dividing. Embryos would be implanted into elephant wombs for gestation — and if the effort is successful, a mother elephant would give birth to a baby mammoth around 22 months later.

That's a big "if," as I wrote in December when I discussed the Japanese-Russian project. In addition to the usual problems surrounding interspecies cloning, it's highly doubtful that genetic material recovered from tissue that's been frozen for millennia would be sufficiently intact for extraction and implantation. What do you think of Hwang's chances? Feel free to register your vote at right, and voice your opinion in the comment section below.

More about mammoths:

• Clone a mammoth? Not so fast
• Mammoths mated with a different elephant species
• Mammoth resurrection on the way?
• Woolly mammoth's DNA mapped

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

CERN

The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso experiment sends muon neutrinos through a tunnel at the French-Swiss border in the direction of a detector in Italy, more than 450 miles away.

Months after researchers reported that they measured neutrinos traveling faster than light, they're finding that the incredible result may have been due to a bad connection rather than a violation of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.

The potential instrumental glitches, first reported by ScienceInsider's Edwin Cartlidge, is addressed in a statement from the OPERA Collaboration, the group behind the controversial neutrino-beam experiments.

Last year, the OPERA team made ultra-precise measurements of how long it took for neutrinos to make the 450-mile (732-kilometer) trip between the CERN particle physics lab on the French-Swiss border and Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory. When they took the speed of light and a wide variety of other experimental factors into consideration, they determined that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds before they should have.

If the results were to stand up, they'd mark the first failed test for Einstein's century-old theory. That's one reason why researchers found them so hard to believe, even though a repetition of the experiment yielded the same results. The OPERA team has been reviewing the entire experiment, and several other research groups have been trying to replicate it. A key concern has been the Global Positioning Satellite system used to clock the neutrinos' transit time. The measurements are required to be so precise that the relativistic effects of Earth's gravitational field on the GPS system had to be taken into account.

Now sources familiar with the OPERA review say scientists have identified two potential problems with the experimental apparatus. One has to do with a fiber-optic connector that sends a GPS time stamp to the experiment's master clock. That connector may not have been functioning correctly when the neutrino-timing measurements were made, and as a result, the recorded flight time would be shorter than the actual time. That alone could explain the seemingly faster-than-light results.

Another potential problem has to do with the oscillator that was used to generate the time stamps for GPS synchronization. This problem could have made the flight time look longer than it really was.

The sources I contacted via email declined to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak in advance of the statement issued Thursday. One of the scientists said the glitches should not be characterized as "errors," but instead as "nasty instrumental effects."

CERN spokesman James Gillies confirmed that the GPS connector problem was being investigated, but he emphasized that the effects still had to be confirmed. "More beam will be needed before we know for sure," he told me in an email. Tests with short pulsed beams have been scheduled for May.

Update for 9 a.m. ET Feb. 23: CERN has issued the expected statement about the potential glitches:

"The OPERA collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the OPERA collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May."

Update for 1:53 p.m. ET Feb. 23: Here's a similar statement from Italy's nuclear research institute, INFN:

"The OPERA Collaboration, by continuing its campaign of verifications on the neutrino velocity measurement, has identified two issues that could significantly affect the reported result. The first one is linked to the oscillator used to produce the event's time-stamps in between the GPS synchronizations. The second point is related to the connection of the optical fiber bringing the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock.

 "These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions. While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the Collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012. An extensive report on the above mentioned verifications and results will be shortly made available to the scientific committees and agencies."

More about those pesky neutrinos:

• Faster-than-light neutrinos pass test
• Neutrinos spark wild scientific leaps
• Faster-than-light neutrinos? Not so fast, some say
• Challenging Einstein is usually a losing venture
• Interactive: Putting Einstein to the test
• 'Virtually Speaking Science': Podcast on weird physics

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.