UFOs Over The Wanaque Reservoir: The Roswell of the Ramapos

January 11, 1966 started like any other mid-winter day in the small suburban town of Wanaque, NJ. The air was clear and cold, kids were enjoying the holiday vacation from school, and residents of the Passaic County borough went about their usual daily routines. Little did they know that before the day was over something would happen, something fantastic and unexplainable, that would change the lives of many of the townsfolk forever.

It all started in the early evening of that Tuesday night. It was about 6:30pm, and the winter sun was already long gone over the western horizon, past the great Wanaque reservoir, and behind the darkened Ramapo mountain range. Wanaque Patrolman Joseph Cisco was in his cruiser when a call from the Pompton Lakes dispatcher came over his police radio. It was a report of a “glowing light, possibly a fire.” Then as if right out of a sci-fi movie Cisco heard the words: “People in Oakland, Ringwood, Paterson, Totowa, and Butler claim there’s a flying saucer over the Wanaque.”

“I pulled into the sandpit, an open area to get my bearings,” Cisco recalls. “There was a light that looked bigger than any of the stars, about the size of a softball or volleyball. It was a pulsating, white, stationary light changing to red. It stayed in the air; there was no noise. I was trying to figure out what it was.”

Wanaque Mayor Harry T. Wolfe, Councilmen Warren Hagstrom and Arthur Barton, and the Mayor’s 14-year-old son Billy were on their way to oversee the burning of the borough’s Christmas trees, when they heard the reports that something “very white, very bright, and much bigger than a star” was hovering over the Wanaque Reservoir. They decided to pull into a sandpit near the Raymond Dam at the headworks to meet Officer Cisco and get a better look at the ‘thing.’ The Mayor’s son Billy spotted the object at once, flying low and gliding “oddly” over the vast frozen lake “like a huge star.” “But it didn’t flicker,” Billy told reporters the next day. “It was just a continuous light that changed from white to red to green and back to white.”

“The phenomenon was terribly strange.” Mayor Wolfe would later recall. He described the shape of the unidentified object as oval, and estimated it to be between two and nine feet in diameter.

The next thing that officer Cisco remembers is his patrol car’s radio “going bananas,” as calls from all over a 20-mile radius flooded into the police headquarters. Cisco radioed Officer George Dykman, who was on patrol nearby. Just as Dykman received Cisco’s message, two teenagers came running up to his patrol car frantically pointing at the sky and shouting “Look, look!”

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At that moment Wanaque Civil Defense Director Bentley Spencer drove up with CD member Richard Vrooman. “The Police radios are all jammed up!” Spencer said excitedly. Dykman and Spencer gaped at the sky along with Michael Sloat, 16, and Peter Melegrae, 15. “What the heck is it?” Dykman wondered out loud. “Never seen anything like it in my life.”

Back at the sandpit Joseph Cisco’s radio crackled as another unbelievable message came across the airwaves: “Something’s burning a hole in the ice! Something with a bright light on it, going up and down!” Then another transmission fought its way through the din: “Oh boy! Something just landed in front of the dam!”

Spencer and reservoir employee Fred Steines raced to the top of the 1,500-foot long Raymond Dam where they described seeing “a bolt of light shoot down, as if attracted to the water…like a beam emitted from a porthole.”

Patrolman Cisco, Mayor Wolfe and Town Councilmen Hagstrom and Barton climbed to the top of the dam to get a better look.

“There was something up there that was awful bright.” Hagstrom recalls. “We don’t know what it was. We thought it was a helicopter, but we didn’t hear a motor. It looked like a helicopter with big landing lights on. We got goose bumps all over when we saw where the hole was.”

According to John Shuttle, another Councilman who witnessed the UFO, there was no doubt about it: “It was there.” He said. “I saw it, a brilliant white object, two to three feet across, and its color – no, not color, shade – it kept changing.”

Curious residents who had been listening to their police scanners began to congregate around the entrance to the reservoir hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious flying object. Traffic slowed to a crawl and then stopped altogether as motorists watched agape from their vehicles’ windows. Reservoir Police Lt. George Destito was forced to close the main gate of the reservoir to keep out swarms of onlookers who converged from the north and south on Ringwood Avenue. “People were coming out of the woodwork.” Cisco recalls. He and the other town officials stood on top of the dam in the freezing January night air for a half an hour watching the strange light. Then, without warning, it sped off to the southeast. It hovered briefly over Lakeland Regional High School in the Midvale section of town, then reappeared over the Houdaille sandpit in Haskell, where volunteer firemen were burning Christmas trees. From there the UFO continued southeast in the direction of Pines Lakes in Wayne.

Before the sun came up the next day Joseph Cisco would see the bright light once more. At about 4am on the morning of January 12, he saw the object moving from north to south along the horizon over the town of Wyckoff.   He and Wanaque Police Sgt. David Sisco would take turns looking at it through a pair of binoculars. The next day Cisco’s wife told him that she too had witnessed what see described as a “silver, cigar-shaped object moving south from their home, about 1,000 feet from the reservoir.”

January 12, 1966

One day after the initial sightings of the UFO, Patrolman Jack Wardlaw reported seeing a “bright white disk” floating in the vicinity of his home in the Stonetown section of Wanaque, just west of the reservoir. “It seemed like only a block away, above Lilly Mountain, maybe 1,000 feet up,” Wardlaw said. “Don’t ask me what it was. But I do know it wasn’t any helicopter, plane, or comet. It shot laterally right and left. It stopped. It moved up straight. And then it moved down and disappeared in the direction of Ringwood to the north.” Wardlaw described the object as “definitely disc-shaped and at certain angles, egg-shaped.”

Sgt. David Sisco said that he was on patrol at about 6:30 that evening when the UFO noiselessly hovered into view. “It glided, then streaked faster than a jet, “ he told reporters, “and when it rose, it went straight up.” Reservoir guard and former Wanaque policeman Charles Theodora and Sisco went to the top of the dam to take a look at the bright light. “We looked across the water and saw a cylinder shaped object,” Theodora remembers. “It was moving back and forth like a rocking chair motion. We were astonished.” A few minutes later the object shot straight up into the night sky, until it was indistinguishable from the other stars. Theodora said that he didn’t hear a sound while the light show was going on. “I didn’t believe in UFO’s, I thought they were a lot of bull. And then I saw it. It was a breathtaking sight; something I’ll never forget.” After the January 1966 sightings, radar was installed atop the reservoir dam.

October 10, 1966

Whatever it was that visited the skies over the Wanaque reservoir in January, reappeared for its most fantastic showing to date in October of that same year. The first reported sighting of it came shortly after 9pm on the evening of Monday the tenth, when Robert J. Gordon, of Pompton Lakes, and his wife Betty saw what they described as a single saucer-shaped object about the size of an automobile glowing with a white brilliance. “At first I thought it was a star,” Betty Gordon recalled, “but it seemed to be moving. It had a definite pattern. It would move to the left of the tower, and then move back directly over the tower. I’m quite sure it was not a star or planet.” Bob Gordon, an officer on the Pompton Lakes police force, called police headquarters and requested that a patrolman be dispatched to their home. Officer Lynn Wetback responded, but was told that the “saucer” was already gone. The Gordons, and their neighbor Lorraine Varga, who had also witnessed the UFO, told Wetback that the object was headed in the direction of Wanaque Reservoir. The officer radioed Wanaque police and notified Sgt. Ben Thompson, a six year veteran of night duty with the Wanaque Reservoir police department, who was driving his patrol car south along the reservoir at the time.

Thompson looked out of his car and to his astonishment saw the UFO heading right toward him. He pulled his cruiser over at Cooper’s Swamp, near the ‘Dead Man’s Curve’ stretch of Westbrook Road.   “I saw the object coming at me.” He said. “There was an extremely bright light. It was a bright white light, bright like when a light bulb is about to blow. It was very low. It appeared to be about 75 feet over the mountain. That would be Windbeam Mountain. It was traveling very quickly and in a definite pattern; first right, then up and down, then repeating the pattern. Distances are deceiving, but it might have covered an area of a half a mile. It went straight over my head, stopped in mid-air and backed right up. It then started zig-zagging from left to right. It was doing tricks. Making acute angular turns instead of gradual curved ones. It looked as big as a parachute. I got out of my car and continued to watch it for almost five minutes. It was about 200 to 250 yards away. It was the shape of a basketball with the center scooped out and a football thrust through it. Sometimes the football appeared to be perpendicular to the basketball and sometimes standing up on end. There were two different gadgets. It didn’t make much noise, but as it was moving, it raised the water beneath it. I watched it maneuver, stirring up brush and water in the reservoir, it was about 150 feet up…I had difficulty seeing because the light was so bright it blinded me.”

At this point other motorists along Westbrook Road also began to notice the strange light hovering in the sky and slowed their cars to get a better look at it. Fearing a collision, Thompson went back to his patrol car to turn on the red dome light as a warning. “The instant it started to flash,” he remembers, “the object sped away over the reservoir and, without passing over the horizon, disappeared. After three or four minutes it went out, as if a light bulb had been turned out. It seemed as if it had gone right into the mountain. I was dumfounded. It was more than a little frightening.”

Back at the Wanaque Police station telephones were deluged with calls from nervous residents who called in sightings and asked for answers. “The switchboards were completely jammed.” Recalled an officer at the Wanaque Reservoir station. “So was Pompton Lakes. There must have been 150 calls.” Some witnesses may have their doubts about just what they say that night, but Ben Thompson is convinced he saw a UFO.

Denial and Cover-Up

Of course no report of a UFO sighting would be complete without the element of an official cover-up, either actual or perceived, by the U.S. government, and this case is no different. Shortly after midnight on the first night of sightings over Wanaque, word came from Stewart Air Force Base in Newburg, NY, that an Air Force helicopter with a powerful beacon had been on a mission over the area at about the same time the UFO was spotted. At 6:15am the following morning however, an official spokesman for Stewart AFB, Major Donald Sherman, denied any such aircraft had been on any such mission that night, and that the helicopter ‘explanation’ had been without foundation. The next day the Pentagon said that the mystery object was indeed a helicopter with a powerful beacon.

McGuire Air Force Base in Wrightstown said that the object was a weather balloon, which had been launched from Kennedy International Airport.   Shortly afterward the base called local police to tell them that their balloon explanation was a just lot of hot air.

Officials at Stewart Air Force Base and at McGuire denied any interest in the UFO. However, Wanaque Police reported seeing a pair of jets fly over the reservoir shortly after the UFO was first reported, and Patrolman Joe Cisco said that he distinctly recalled seeing helicopters in the Wanaque skies that night.

Improbable Explanations

Thirteen years after the 1966 UFO sightings at he Wanaque Reservoir, the non-profit organization Vestigia, which was based in Byram, prepared a detailed study of the strange lights that were witnessed. Vestigia, an organization that seeks to provide plausible scientific explanations for unexplained phenomena, came to the conclusion that the glowing lights that were seen over the Wanaque by hundreds of people were the result of seismic pressure from the nearby Ramapo fault. According to Vestigia founder Robert Jones, the fault in the Earth’s crust creates an electrical energy field within the quartz bearing rocks underground. At times of extreme pressure this highly charged field will supposedly escape into the atmosphere. Jones asserts that under just the right climactic conditions air particles that are exposed to this energy field will ionize and the result is a glowing sphere of light. (It’s worth noting here that this is exactly the same rational that was offered by Vestigia to explain the Hookerman Lights, after their extensive research on the Chester/Flanders rail road tracks.)

Vestigia’s theories however, did little to dissuade eyewitnesses from their belief that what they had seen was indeed a UFO. Wanaque officers Jack Wardlaw and Chuck Theorora rejected the Army’s initial explanations of the mysterious lights as merely swamp gas, or a helicopter, and did likewise with Vestigia’s contention that the glowing orbs were caused by a seismic anomaly.

“I’ve ridden these streets at midnight for years,” Wardlaw said, “and I know a strange light when I see one. The Army tried to tell me it was marsh gas – that’s ridiculous! Then they said it was a helicopter. Well, if you can’t discern a helicopter or hear one you have to be pretty bad off.”

One week after Stewart AFB sent down its inexplicable explanation for the Wanaque sightings, the Pentagon offered its own scenario. What hundreds of people had witnessed in the skies over the reservoir that January, and described as a brilliant white light which floated, hovered, shot up, down and side to side, was in actuality, according to the great military minds of Washington, nothing more then the planets Venus and Jupiter in a rare celestial alignment.

Quotations in the preceding article were taken from reports of the Wanaque UFO sightings published in the Newark News, the Herald-News, the NY Times, the Star-Ledger, and the Record. Some quotes have been edited for the sake of continuity.

Vouching For Joe Cisco

I lived in Wanaque, right next to the reservoir, in the 1960s during the UFO sightings period. No one ever did find out what created the lights. I personally knew Joe Cisco the police chief at that time. He lived a block away from me at the time. He was always an honest, truthful, and a straightforward guy who told it like it is. I never got to see the lights, but many of my friends did. There WAS something out there. –DLC

A Skeptic Sees The Light in 1974

I grew up in North Jersey and am very familiar with the Wanaque area. I graduated from a local high school in 1969, spent 4 years in the US Navy, and then returned to live with my parents until my marriage in 1976. We remained in New Jersey until 1980 when a job transfer took us to the Midwest.

I served on an aircraft carrier and heavy cruiser during my time in the navy and consider myself to be familiar with most types of aircraft. I have seen various helicopters and high performance aircraft during day and night hours. I’ve kept up my interest in military and civil aircraft over the years and while I would not pass myself off as an expert, I do feel that I’ve seen more things in the sky than most folks.

I consider myself to be a skeptic on the question of UFO’s. I do not subscribe to any particular theory, but I do believe that many incidents are deserving of further study. In the case of the Wanaque sightings, which apparently have been going on for a long time, there may be some phenomena in the area which is of interest – although I’m not sure that it involves space aliens.

I personally saw one set of lights that you might find interesting. This incident occurred in 1974 during the winter months – I’d guess at January or February. It was about 10pm on a clear night. I was on a weekend pass from the military and was returning to my parent’s house from visiting my sister who lived directly west of the reservoir. My usual route to return to my parents’ house was to follow Westbrook Road east across the reservoir and then turn south on Ringwood Avenue. I was just east of Townsend Road when I observed a set of lights in the sky. The lights were very bright and appeared to be one large light in the center with a smaller light on either side.

The lights did not appear to be a “point source” – they definitely had a circular shape and a “hard” edge. The relationship of the lights to each other remained constant throughout the incident, which might indicate that there was a solid object behind the illumination. The color was an intense blue-white. Probably the best way I can describe it would be similar to looking directly into the tail cone of a high performance jet like an F-4 Phantom with the afterburners lit off.

I observed the “object” (for want of a better term) above the hills, which border the west side of the reservoir through the windshield of my car. The evening was very quiet and I could not hear any engine or helicopter blade noise, which would have been significant at what appeared to be the low altitude of the object. –Dave

The preceding article is an excerpt from Weird NJ magazine, “Your Travel Guide to New Jersey’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets,” which is available on newsstands throughout the state and on the web at www.WeirdNJ.com.  All contents ©Weird NJ and may not be reproduced by any means without permission.

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On Language and Humanity: In Conversation With Noam Chomsky

The father of modern linguistics is still opening up new kinds of questions and topics for inquiry. 

"For the first time I think that the Holy Grail is at least in view in some core areas, 

maybe even within reach." Image: Wikimedia Commons

By: Amy Brand

Ihave been fascinated with how the mind structures information for as long as I can remember. As a kid, my all-time favorite activity in middle school was diagramming sentences with their parts of speech. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that I ended up at MIT earning my doctorate on formal models of language and cognition. It was there, in the mid-1980s, that I had the tremendous good fortune of taking several classes on syntax with Noam Chomsky.

Although I ultimately opted off the professorial career track, I’ve been at MIT for most of my career and have stayed true in many ways to that original focus on how language conveys information. Running an academic publishing house is, after all, also about the path from language to information, text to knowledge. It has also given me the opportunity to serve as Chomsky’s editor and publisher. Chomsky and the core values he embodies of deep inquiry, consciousness, and integrity continue to loom large for me and so many others here at MIT, and are well reflected in the interview that follows.

Amy Brand: You have tended to separate your work on language from your political persona and writings. But is there a tension between arguing for the uniqueness of Homo sapiens when it comes to language, on the one hand, and decrying the human role in climate change and environmental degradation, on the other? That is, might our distance from other species be tied up in how we’ve engaged (or failed to engage) with the natural environment?

Noam Chomsky: The technical work itself is in principle quite separate from personal engagements in other areas. There are no logical connections, though there are some more subtle and historical ones that I’ve occasionally discussed (as have others) and that might be of some significance.

Homo sapiens is radically different from other species in numerous ways, too obvious to review. Possession of language is one crucial element, with many consequences. With some justice, it has often in the past been considered to be the core defining feature of modern humans, the source of human creativity, cultural enrichment, and complex social structure.

As for the “tension” you refer to, I don’t quite see it. It is of course conceivable that our distance from other species is related to our criminal race to destroy the environment, but I don’t think that conclusion is sustained by the historical record. For almost all of human history, humans have lived pretty much in harmony with the natural environment, and indigenous groups still do, when they can (they are, in fact, in the forefront of efforts to preserve the environment, worldwide). Human actions have had environmental effects; thus large mammals tended to disappear as human activity extended. But it wasn’t until the agricultural revolution and more dramatically the industrial revolution that the impact became of major significance. And the largest and most destructive effects are in very recent years, and mounting all too fast. The sources of the destruction — which is verging on catastrophe — appear to be institutional, not somehow rooted in our nature.


“The sources of the destruction — which is verging on catastrophe — appear to be institutional, not somehow rooted in our nature.”

A.B.: In a foreword to a book on birdsong and language, you wrote, with computational linguist Robert Berwick, that “the bridge between birdsong research and speech and language dovetails extremely well with recent developments in certain strands of current linguistic thinking.” Could you talk about that? What kind of insight might birdsong offer into our own language?

N.C.: Here we have to be rather cautious, distinguishing between language per se and speech, which is an amalgam, involving both language and a specific sensorimotor system used for externalization of language. The two systems are unrelated in evolutionary history; the sensorimotor systems were in place long before language (and Homo sapiens) appeared, and have scarcely been influenced by language, if at all. Speech is also only one form of externalization, even if the most common. It could be sign, which develops among the deaf very much the way speech does, or even touch.
Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky’s 2015 book “Why Only Us” draws on developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and humans’ remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire it.

Berwick and I have argued (I think plausibly, but not uncontroversially) that language, an internal system of the mind, is independent of externalization and basically provides expressions of linguistically formulated thought. As such, it is a system of pure structure, lacking linear order and other arrangements that are not really part of language as such but are imposed by requirements of the articulatory system (sign, which uses visual space, exploits some other options). Internal language is based on recursive operations that yield what we called the Basic Property of language: generation of an infinite array of hierarchically structured expressions that are interpreted as thoughts. The externalization system for language has no recursive operations — it is, basically, a deterministic mapping that introduces linear order and other arrangements that are required by the output system.

Birdsong is very different: it is an output system that is based crucially on linear order with very little structure. There are some suggestive analogies at the output levels, but my own judgment at least, shared I think by my colleagues who do extensive work on birdsong, is that while the phenomena are of considerable interest in themselves, they tell us little about human language.


“While the phenomena [of birdsong] are of considerable interest in themselves, they tell us little about human language.”

A.B.: You developed the theory of transformational grammar — the idea that there is a deep, rule-based structure underpinning human language — while a graduate student in the 1950s, and published your first book on it, “Syntactic Structures,” in 1957. How does the field of theoretical linguistics today compare with the future you might have imagined 60 years ago?

N.C.: Unrecognizable. At the time, linguistics altogether was a rather small field, and interest in the work you describe was pretty much confined to RLE [the Research Laboratory of Electronics]. Journals were few, and were scarcely open to work of this kind. My first book — “The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory” (LSLT) — was submitted to MIT Press in 1955 at Roman Jakobson’s suggestion. It was rejected by reviewers with the rather sensible comment that it didn’t seem to fit in any known field (a 1956 version, with some parts omitted, was published in 1975, when the field was well-established).

Actually there was a tradition, a rather rich one in fact, which this work in some ways revived and extended. But it was completely unknown at the time (and still mostly is).

In the late ’50s Morris Halle and I requested and quickly received authorization to establish a linguistics department, which we considered a pretty wild idea. Linguistics departments were rare. Why should there be one at MIT, of all places? And for a kind of linguistics almost no one had ever heard of? Why would any student apply to such a department? We decided to try anyway, and amazingly, it worked. The first class turned out to be a remarkable group of students, all of whom went on to distinguished careers with original and exciting work — and so it has continued, to the present. Curiously — or maybe not — the same pattern was followed pretty much in other countries, with the “generative enterprise” taking root outside the major universities.

Our first Ph.D. student in fact preceded the establishment of the department: Robert Lees (a colleague at RLE), who wrote a highly influential study on Turkish nominalization. Since there was as yet no department, our friend Peter Elias, chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT, had the Ph.D. submitted there — rather typical and highly productive MIT informality. It must have surprised proud parents reading the titles of dissertations at graduation.


“New domains of inquiry have opened up that scarcely existed in the ’50s. Students are exploring questions that could not have been formulated a few years ago.”

By now the situation is dramatically different. There are flourishing departments everywhere, with major contributions from Europe, Japan, and many other countries. There are many journals — including MIT Press’s Linguistic Inquiry, which just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Studies of generative grammar have been carried out for a very wide range of typologically varied languages, at a level of depth and scope never previously imaginable. New domains of inquiry have opened up that scarcely existed in the ’50s. Students are exploring questions that could not have been formulated a few years ago. And theoretical work has reached completely new levels of depth and empirical validation, with many promising new avenues being explored.

Morris and I, in later years, often reflected on how little could have been foreseen, even imagined, when we began working together in the early ’50s. What has taken place since seemed almost magical.

A.B.: It was in that 1957 book that you used your well-known sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” — a demonstration of how a sentence can be grammatically correct but semantically not make sense, thereby pointing to structure and syntax as something primordial and independent from meaning. A poet may object to the idea that such a sentence is meaningless (and could perhaps describe it as demonstrating what linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson called the “poetic function” of language), and a number of people have set about “injecting” the sentence, so to speak, with meaning. Why do you think that is?

N.C.: It’s because of a failure to comprehend the point of this and other examples like it. The point was to refute commonly held beliefs about grammatical status: that it was determined by statistical approximation to a corpus of material, by formal frames, by meaningfulness in some structurally-independent sense, etc. The sentence you cite, call it (1), is plainly grammatical but violates all of the standard criteria. That’s why it was invented as an example. (1) differs from the structurally similar sentence (2) “revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently” (which, unlike (1), has an immediate literal meaning) and from (3) “furiously sleep ideas green colorless,” the original read backwards, which can hardly even be pronounced with normal prosody. The special status of (1) of course arises from the fact that although it violates all of the then-standard criteria for grammaticality, it is of the same grammatical form as (2), with an instantly interpreted literal meaning and in no respect deviant. For that reason, it’s not hard to construct non-literal interpretations for (1) (it is possible, but much more difficult for (3), lacking the structural similarity to fully grammatical expressions like (2)).

All of this is discussed in “Syntactic Structures,” and much more fully in LSLT (which included some work of mine jointly with Pete Elias developing an account of categorization with an information-theoretic flavor that worked quite well with small samples and the hand-calculation that was the only option in the early ‘50s, when we were doing this work as grad students at Harvard).

Failing to grasp the point, quite a few people have offered metaphoric (“poetic”) interpretations of (1), exactly along the lines suggested by the discussion in “Syntactic Structures.” Less so for (3), though even that is possible, with effort. It’s typically possible to concoct some kind of interpretation for just about any word sequence. The relevant question, for the study of language, is how the rules yield literal interpretations (as for (2)) — and secondarily, how other cognitive processes, relying in part on language structure (as in the case of (1), (3)), can provide a wealth of other interpretations.

Remarks on Noam: A compendium of tributes to Noam Chomsky for his 90th birthday.

A.B.: In our interview with Steven Pinker in May, we asked for his thoughts about the impact that the recent explosion of interest in AI and machine learning might have on the field of cognitive science. Pinker said he felt there was “theoretical barrenness” in these realms that was going to produce dead ends unless they were more closely integrated with the study of cognition. The field of cognitive science that you helped originate was a clear break from behaviorism — the emphasis on the impact of environmental factors on behavior over innate or inherited factors — and the work of B. F. Skinner. Do you see the growth of machine learning as something akin to a return to behaviorism? Do you feel the direction in which the field of computing is developing is cause for concern, or might it breathe new life into the study of cognition?

N.C.: Sometimes it is explicitly claimed, even triumphantly. In Terrence Sejnowski’s recent “Deep Learning Revolution,” for example, proclaiming that Skinner was right! A rather serious misunderstanding of Skinner, and of the achievements of the “Revolution,” I think.

There are some obvious questions to raise about “machine learning” projects. Take a typical example, the Google Parser. The first question to ask is: what is it for? If the goal is to create a useful device — a narrow form of engineering — there’s nothing more to say.

Suppose the goal is science, that is, to learn something about the world, in this case, about cognition — specifically about how humans process sentences. Then other questions arise. The most uninteresting question, and the only one raised it seems, is how well the program does, say, in parsing the Wall Street Journal corpus.

Let’s say it has 95 percent success, as proclaimed in Google PR, which declares that the parsing problem is basically solved and scientists can move on to something else. What exactly does that mean? Recall that we’re now considering this to be part of science. Each sentence of the corpus can be regarded as the answer to a question posed by experiment: Are you a grammatical sentence of English with such-and-such structure? The answer is: Yes (usually). We then pose the question that would be raised in any area of science. What interest is there in a theory, or method, that gets the answer right in 95 percent of randomly chosen experiments, performed with no purpose? Answer: Virtually no interest at all. What is of interest are the answers to theory-driven critical experiments, designed to answer some significant question.

So if this is “science,” it is of some unknown kind.

The next question is whether the methods used are similar to those used by humans. The answer is: Radically not. Again, some unknown kind of science.

There is also another question, apparently never raised. How well does the Parser work on impossible languages, those that violate universal principles of language? Note that success in parsing such systems counts as failure, if the goals are science. Though it hasn’t been tried to my knowledge, the answer is almost certainly that success would be high, in some cases even higher (many fewer training trials, for example) than for human languages, particularly for systems designed to use elementary properties of computation that are barred in principle for human languages (using linear order, for example). A good deal is by now known about impossible languages, including some psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic evidence about how humans handle such systems — if at all, as puzzles, not languages.


“In just about every relevant respect it is hard to see how [machine learning] makes any kind of contribution to science, specifically to cognitive science.”

In short, in just about every relevant respect it is hard to see how this work makes any kind of contribution to science, specifically to cognitive science, whatever value it may have for constructing useful devices or for exploring the properties of the computational processes being employed.

It might be argued that the last question is misformulated because there are no impossible languages: any arbitrarily chosen collection of word sequences is as much of a language as any other. Even apart from ample evidence to the contrary, the claim should be rejected on elementary logical grounds: if it were true, no language could ever be learned, trivially. Nevertheless, some such belief was widely held in the heyday of behaviorism and structuralism, sometimes quite explicitly, in what was called “the Boasian thesis” that languages can differ from one another in arbitrary ways, and each must be studied without preconceptions (similar claims were expressed by biologists with regard to the variety of organisms). Similar ideas are at least implicit in some of the machine learning literature. It is however clear that the claims cannot be seriously entertained, and are now known to be incorrect (with regard to organisms as well).

A further word may be useful on the notion of critical experiment — that is, theory-driven experiment designed to answer some question of linguistic interest. With regard to these, the highly-touted mechanical parsing systems happen to perform quite badly, as has been shown effectively by computational cognitive scientist Sandiway Fong. And that’s what matters to science at least, not just matching results of arbitrary experiments with no purpose (such as simulation, or parsing some corpus). The most interesting experiments have to do with “exotic” linguistic constructions that are rare in normal speech but that people instantly understand along with all of the curious conditions they satisfy. Quite a few have been discovered over the years. Their properties are particularly illuminating because they bring to light the unlearned principles that make language acquisition possible — and though I won’t pursue the matter here, investigation of infant language acquisition and careful statistical studies of the linguistic material available to the child (particularly by Charles Yang) reveal that the notion “exotic” extends very broadly for the infant’s experience.

A.B.: You remain as active as ever, on more than one front — collaborating with colleagues from other fields such as computer science and neuroscience on a series of papers in recent years, for example. What are you currently working on?

N.C.: It’s worth going back briefly to the beginning. I began experimenting with generative grammars as a private hobby in the late ‘40s. My interest was partly in trying to account for the data in an explicit rule-based generative grammar, but even more so in exploring the topic of simplicity of grammar, “shortest program,” a non-trivial problem, only partially solvable by hand computation because of the intricacy of deeply-ordered rule systems. When I came to Harvard shortly after, I met Morris Halle and Eric Lenneberg. We quickly became close friends, in part because of shared skepticism about prevailing behavioral science doctrines — virtual dogmas at the time. Those shared interests soon led to what came to be called later the “biolinguistics program,” the study of generative grammar as a biological trait of the organism (Eric went on to found the contemporary field of biology of language through his now classic work).

Within the biolinguistic framework, it is at once clear that the “holy grail” would be explanations of fundamental properties of language on the basis of principled generative grammars that meet the twin conditions of learnability and evolvability. That is the criterion for genuine explanation. But that goal was far out of reach.

The immediate task was to try to make sense of the huge amount of new data, and puzzling problems, that rapidly accumulated as soon as the first efforts were made to construct generative grammars. To do so seemed to require quite complex mechanisms. I won’t review the history since, but its basic thrust has been the effort to show that simpler and more principled assumptions can yield the same or better empirical results over a broad range.

By the early ‘90s, it seemed to some of us that it was now becoming possible to bite the bullet: to adopt the simplest computational mechanisms that could at least yield the Basic Property and to try to show that fundamental properties of language can be explained in those terms — in terms of what has been called “the strong minimalist thesis (SMT).” By now there has, I think, been considerable progress in this endeavor, with the first genuine explanations of significant universal properties of language that plausibly satisfy the twin conditions.

The task ahead has several parts. A primary task is to determine to what extent SMT can encompass fundamental principles of language that have come to light in research of the past years, and to deal with the critical experiments, those that are particularly revealing with regard to the principles that enter into the functioning of the language faculty and that account for the acquisition of language.

A second task is to distinguish between principles that are specific to language — specific to the innate structure of the language faculty — and other principles that are more general. Particularly illuminating in this regard are principles of computational efficiency — not surprising for a computational system like language. Of particular interest are computational principles specific to systems with limited short-term resource capacity, a category that has recently been shown to have critical empirical consequences. Yet another task is to sharpen these principles so as to include those that play a role in genuine explanation while excluding others that look superficially similar but can be shown to be illegitimate both empirically and conceptually.

Quite interesting work is proceeding in all of these areas, and the time seems ripe for a comprehensive review of developments which, I think, provide a rather new and exciting stage in an ancient field of inquiry.


“For the first time I think that the Holy Grail is at least in view in some core areas, maybe even within reach.”

In brief, for the first time I think that the Holy Grail is at least in view in some core areas, maybe even within reach. That’s the main topic of work I’ve been engaged in recently and hope to be able to put together soon.

A.B.: You recently celebrated — along with a large body of friends and colleagues here on the MIT campus — your 90th birthday. Such milestones are of course cause for reflection, even as one looks ahead. Looking over your work to date, what would you say has been your most significant theoretical contribution to the field of linguistics?

N.C.: Opening up new kinds of questions and topics for inquiry.

A.B.: A very broad question, but perhaps one that speaks to the times we’re living in right now: What do you regard these days as cause for optimism?

N.C.: Several points. First, the times we’re living in are extremely dangerous, in some ways more so than ever before in human history — which will essentially come to an end in any recognizable form if we do not deal effectively with the increasing threats of nuclear war and of environmental catastrophe. That requires reversing the course of the U.S. in dismantling arms control agreements and proceeding — along with Russia — to develop ever more lethal and destabilizing weapons systems; and in not only refusing to join the world in trying to do something about the severe environmental crisis but even aggressively seeking to escalate the threat, a form of criminality with literally no historical antecedent.

Not easy, but it can be done.

There have been other severe crises in human history, even if not on this scale. I’m old enough to remember the days when it seemed that the spread of fascism was inexorable — and I’m not referring to what is referred to as fascism today but something incomparably more awful. But it was overcome.

There are very impressive forms of activism and engagement taking place, mainly among younger people. That’s very heartening.

In the final analysis, we always have two choices: We can choose to descend into pessimism and apathy, assuming that nothing can be done, and helping to ensure that the worst will happen. Or we can grasp the opportunities that exist — and they do — and pursue them to the extent that we can, thus helping to contribute to a better world.

Not a very hard choice.

Amy Brand is Director of the MIT Press.

Correction: An earlier version of the article stated that “The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory” was submitted to MIT Press in 1955 and later published in 1985. In fact, it was published, by Springer, in 1975.

CRYPTOZOOLOGY

The Sandy Hook Sea Serpent

The North Shrewsbury (Navesink) River is one of the most scenic estuaries on the Eastern Coast of America. Known for luxury yachts, stately homes, and iceboating, it is hardly the place you would expect to find the legend of a sea serpent. But, in the late nineteenth century it was the location of one of many well-documented and unexplained sightings of mysterious sea creatures that plagued the waters of the North Atlantic.
The creature in question was seen by several people, all who were familiar with local sea life. While returning from a daylong outing, Marcus P. Sherman, Lloyd Eglinton, Stephen Allen and William Tinton, all of Red Bank, encountered the monster. The Red Bank Register reported the witnesses to be sober and respectable local merchants.
At around 10:00 P.M. the yacht Tillie S., owned by Sherman, was making its way back to Red Bank after a picnic at Highlands Beach. The men had enjoyed a pleasant Sunday evening escaping the warm early summer weather. The moon was shining bright, providing for high visibility as the yacht cut through the water. A stiff summer breeze was blowing and they rounded the Highlands and headed toward Red Bank. At the tiller of the Tillie S., Marcus Sherman steered through the familiar waters. At the bow was Lloyd Eglinton, who kept watch for debris in the water ahead.

Artist’s rendition of the mysterious sea creature as it appeared in the December, 1887 edition of Scientific American.

Suddenly Eglinton yelled that there was something in the water dead ahead. Sherman steered “hard to port” to avoid the collision. As they looked to see what the obstacle was, they were shocked. There ahead of them was the Sandy Hook Sea Serpent that had been sighted many times over the preceding two years. So credible were the sightings of the Serpent two years earlier, that Scientific American had run an article issuing an opinion that the monster was in fact a Giant Squid. The article, complete with drawings, appeared in the December 27, 1887, edition of the prestigious scientific periodical.
The earlier sighting at Sandy Hook had been made by several credible witnesses. Most notably the members of the Sandy Hook Life Saving Service. The crewmembers had sighted a large monster in the cold waters just off Sandy Hook in November 1879. The sighting was so credible that scientists were dispatched to take statements. It is from these descriptive statements that it was determined the Sandy Hook Sea Monster was, in fact, a giant squid. For the next several years there were reports of all types of sea serpent sightings up and down the east Atlantic Coast.

Illustration by Ryan Doan.

What the Red Bank men saw was surely no giant squid. It was described as about 50-foot long and serpentine in shape. It swam with snakelike undulations slowly and steadily through the water. As it passed halfway past the bow, its head rose from the water giving forth a mighty roar. The head was described as small and somewhat resembling a bulldog’s in shape. It had two short rounded horns on its head just above its eyes. The eyes we said to be the size of silver dollars. Bristles adorned the upper lip of the monster, much like those that would be found on a cat. The beast’s nostrils were quite large and flattened. The serpent-like body tapered to a sword like pointed tail. The frightened men stared in disbelief as it slowly and leisurely swam toward the shore of Hartshorne’s Cove. As the monster disappeared into the night, the men made their way back to Red Bank with a monster of a story to tell.
The men of the Tillie S. were not the only ones to see the creature. Other boaters on the water saw the serpent and gave near identical descriptions. In all over a dozen boaters had seen the strange creature on his nocturnal swim. Over the next months and years there would be other sightings of the monster in the Navesink. In time it came to be known as the Shrewsbury Sea Serpent. No scientific explanation was ever given for the sightings, as had been done for the so-called Sandy Hook Sea Serpent, however the description is not totally without merit. Other than the size, the description is very similar to that of the Oarfish. In any case the mystery remains as to the true identity and fate of the Sea Serpent.

The preceding article  by Robert Heyer is featured in issue #43 Weird NJ magazine.

CRYPTOZOOLOGY

Loch Ness monster hunter has spent 28 years tracking down mysterious creature

Steve Feltham has been keeping a keen eye on Loch Ness since 1991 in the hope that he will catch a glimpse of the famous Nessie.

A 56-year-old Nessie hunter has now spent most of his life looking for the creature after spending 10,397 days on his quest.

For more than 28 years, Steve Feltham has been watching Loch Ness for a sighting of the monster – setting a world record for the longest Nessie vigil in the process.


And on Saturday, he recorded a monster milestone of 10,397 days – at which point hunting for Nessie technically accounted for more than half his life.

But Steve says he is prepared to spend the next 10,000 days at the loch if that’s what it takes to solve the mystery.

Steve Feltham has now spent more than half of his life trying to track down Nessie

Steve, who will celebrate his 57th birthday on January 30, said: “It was on July 18, 1991, that I arrived full-time at Loch Ness and I have not regretted a day of it.

“The balance of my life has tipped – I have now spent more time looking for Nessie than not.”

Last year, Steve was the star of a film about him by a director from Oscar -winner Ridley Scott’s company. Others who have called on him over the years include Eric Idle, Robin Williams, the Chinese State Circus and Billy Connolly , who asked him to be a guide for some of his A-list chums for a day.

Steve, who is recognised by Guinness World Records for the longest continuous monster-hunting vigil of the loch, first visited the area aged seven on a family holiday.

Steve Feltham at Loch Ness in search of Nessie in 1991 (Image: IAN JOLLY)

He returned many times, with a camera and binoculars, before leaving his job, home and girlfriend in Dorset to move to the banks of the loch in 1991.

Within days, his brother located a former mobile library, which has been Steve’s home at Dores ever since.

After two years of scanning the loch, Steve caught a glimpse of an unexplained disturbance in the water but didn’t have his camera to hand. He has kept a careful watch since but Nessie has not shown herself again.

The adventurer makes money by creating models of the Loch Ness Monster and selling them to tourists.

Steve said he's 'more convinced than ever' that there is something in legend of Nessie

He said: “I never came here to be a cottage industry. I came here to solve a mystery and so far I’ve given up more than 10,400 of my days to do so and I’m prepared to spend the same time again. I don’t regret a day of it. I have lived my life trying to solve one of the world’s greatest mysteries and it’s been the realisation of a dream.

“When I first came I thought I was looking for a plesiosaur, then a Wels catfish – which it might be – and I’m currently reappraising the evidence.

“The vast majority of sightings can be explained but that still leaves those that can’t.”

About 14 years ago, Steve met his partner Hilary, 52, while she was on a trip from her home in Inverness . But he has failed to convince her of Nessie’s existence.


Steve said: “She is sceptical, which is good because she helps me question things. A large part of what I’ve done is to disprove some of the hoaxes.

“But I am more convinced than ever that there is something and I’m very patient.

“I feel confident I will find bits of jigsaw in the Loch Ness Monster puzzle. I’m also deliriously happy to keep going for as long as it takes.”

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CRYPTOZOOLOGY

Taxonomania: An Incomplete Catalog of Invented Species, From the Pop-Eyed Frog to the Loch Ness Monster

Every now and then fantastical species make their way into the scientific literature, taking the scientific community for a ride.

A jumble of old labels from the mammal collection. Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. 

Photo: Michael Ohl By: Michael Ohl

From time to time, sandwiched between the more comprehensive real articles, brief fictional descriptions will find their way into scientific journals. The motivation for doing so varies, but it’s usually with humorous intent. The problem that scientific journals face in publishing such entries is their scientific nature — that is, their responsibility to publish only articles that make verifiable claims about the natural world. Because the journals expect this of their authors, readers expect the same of the journal and rely on the belief that every article will meet general scientific standards. Unless directly obvious, fantastical works not based on scientific methods can quickly and often irreparably damage the reputation of a journal.

This article is excerpted from Michael Ohl’s book “The Art of Naming.”

Austrian entomologist Hans Malicky used this to his advantage. Malicky is known outside Austria as a prominent expert on caddisflies. In the late 1960s, he chaired the Entomological Society of Austria; in this position, he also published the society newsletter, the Entomologische Nachrichtenblatt. The bulletin primarily published anecdotal and not infrequently irrelevant articles on a range of insect-related news items. As its editor, Malicky pushed for raising the scientific standard. The society saw things a bit differently, it has been said, and Malicky was summarily relieved of his post. A short time later, Malicky submitted an article to the society’s other publication, the Zeitschrift der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Österreichischer Entomologen, using the pseudonym Otto Suteminn. The focus of the piece, which appeared in 1969, was two new flea species from Nepal, Ctenophthalmus nepalensis and Amalareus fossorius.

At first glance, nothing jumped out as peculiar about the article: two new species names, complete with morphological descriptions, location of discovery, and author. At first glance, no one could tell that it was all completely fabricated, and because none of the manuscripts submitted to either of the society’s journals went through a process of peer review — something Malicky had wanted to change as editor — the new editor didn’t notice anything was amiss either. The article was published. While insiders close to Malicky saw what was happening, it wasn’t until 1972 that a short article was printed in the Entomologische Nachrichtenblatt by F. G. A. M. Smit, a well-known flea researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. Its title was “Notes on Two Fictitious Fleas from Nepal.” Smit went through the original article line by line, showing that most of the information was invented. Not only the fleas, but also their mammal hosts, Canis fossor (literally, the “canine gravedigger”) and Apodemus roseus (the “pink wood mouse”), are both fictitious, although some of the flea species used for comparison are real. With a little imagination (and linguistic access), a number of the discovery locations provided reveal themselves to be thinly concealed expressions in Austrian dialect. Thanks to an Austrian colleague, Smit was able to provide an explanation for these names: “‘Khanshnid Khaib’ probably stands for ‘Kann’s nit geiba’ (cannot exist)” and “‘leg. Z. Minař’ can sound like a very vulgar (unprintable) expression.” Whether this form of humor is actually funny must be left to the reader to decide. Despite their debunking, Malicky’s two flea descriptions remain in effect to this day, and Ctenophthalmus nepalensis — the fictitious flea hosted by the fictitious “pink wood mouse” — even has its own Wikipedia page. As for Otto Suteminn — supposedly stationed at a regional museum in Košice, Czechoslovakia — he remained a mystery to Smit. The latter had even sent a letter to Suteminn’s address, requesting to borrow the fleas, but he received no reply, nor had the letter been returned. “Suteminn” itself was a pseudonym for Otto von Moltke, a fictitious knight from the region of Mecklenburg in a book by Karl May — a 19th-century adventure writer treasured by Germans and best known for his tales of the American Wild West. At times, the knight secretly retreats to a magical house, where he performs all manner of scientific experiments under the alias “Suteminn.”


Malicky’s two flea descriptions remain in effect to this day, and Ctenophthalmus nepalensis — the fictitious flea hosted by the fictitious “pink wood mouse” — even has its own Wikipedia page.

In 1978, the Journal of the Herpetological Association of Africa, a journal dedicated to the scientific study of reptiles and amphibians, published the description of Rana magnaocularis, the “pop-eyed frog.” The fictitious author is Rank Fross of the Loyal Ontario Museum, a malapropism of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. It’s a short article, little more than a page in length, composed with the structure and style of a legitimate species description. It opens as follows: “Night collecting along roads in Ontario has revealed a new species of frog strikingly characterized by enormous eyes and a flattened body. The species is described below and the adaptive significance of its diagnostic features are discussed.” The diagnosis: “Eyes enormous, protruding tongue usually extended, body and limbs highly flattened dorso ventrally. Dorso lateral fold absent. Otherwise resembles Rana pipiens.” The species could regularly be found in or alongside busy paved roads, especially in the spring. The discussion section is particularly amusing:


Three questions require attention. Of what significance is the peculiar morphology, why is it restricted to a single habitat and how does it move?

Why is the body so flattened and why are the eyes so large? We believe that these are adaptations to the peculiar habitat. Normally frogs are at least partially hidden from potential predators by reeds, grass or bushes. On the road they are completely exposed, however. In evolving a two-dimensional body, the pop-eyed frog is enabled to escape the attention of all predators excepting those immediately overhead. […]

We were at first puzzled as to how it moved from one place to another, observations on live specimens being lacking. Initially we found the tread-like markings found on the upper surface puzzling. Of what use were the treads in locomotion when they were not in contact with the ground? Analogy with the hoop snake offered a hypothesis; the frogs roll themselves into a ring, insert the extruded tongue in the posterior, and roll themselves neatly along, thereby engaging the treads with the road surface.

The description includes a cartoonish sketch of a frog lying in the street with bulging eyes, its tongue fully extended.

It’s clear that this is a description of the many leopard frogs (Rana pipiens) that are squashed in the road each spring. What’s less clear is whether the name can be considered available, according to the nomenclature rules. There certainly aren’t any amphibian taxonomists who would want to include the name in their species lists. If one used the zoological nomenclature rules as the yardstick, surely it would be possible to find an article violated by this species description, thus rendering the name formally unavailable. Many of the basic requirements appear to have been fulfilled: the description is properly published, and it has a scientific name, diagnosis, description, and explicit designation of type material. It’s highly likely that this flat frog hasn’t really been inventoried as a holotype in the collections of the Royal (or Loyal) Ontario Museum. But it isn’t the purpose of the nomenclature rules to assess the credibility of statements made. Even with serious species descriptions, it’s only in exceptional cases that the inventory number and existence of type material are reviewed.


Even with serious species descriptions, it’s only in exceptional cases that the inventory number and existence of type material are reviewed.

All that remains, then, is the disqualifying factor used in Girault’s case, namely, that regarding hypothetical concepts. Nowhere does the publication state that Rana magnaocularis is a hypothetical concept, and what makes the situation even stickier is the fact that the description is based — at least potentially — on a real, physical animal. Reading between the lines, one must therefore conclude that the author’s explicit intent was to publish a name for a hypothetical concept, which would thus preclude him from the responsibility of adhering to the nomenclature rules. It’s safe to assume that the scientists affected by this case (i.e., amphibian taxonomists) would welcome this opportunity to banish Rana magnaocularis to the group of unavailable frog names, and it’s likely the author would agree.

It’s no accident that when considering whether Rana magnaocularis is nomenclaturally relevant, the intent of the author should be emphasized so strongly. If the consensus were that the author was naming a hypothetical concept, it’s unlikely that anyone would argue that the name signified a tangible biological entity and was therefore made available through its publication. The question as to the author’s intent becomes tricky in cases where it’s not immediately clear. But what’s even trickier is when the author’s explicit intent is to name a species he or she believes is real but whose existence other scientists doubt or view as totally hypothetical.

These two criteria — the author’s intent and the physical existence of a biological basis — could actually be enough to separate the wheat from chaff. When it comes down to it, however, it’s anything but easy, and the Loch Ness Monster will show us why.

Since the sixth century, there have been reports of a large animal — or even a group of large animals — in Loch Ness, a deep freshwater lake in the Scottish Highlands. Along with the Yeti and Bigfoot, the monster known as Nessie is one of the best-known zoological mysteries studied by cryptozoologists. The field of cryptozoology examines legends and myths about large animals for their substance, guided by the belief that a significant number of folktales worldwide are based on truly existent but well-hidden animal species. As one of these mysterious mythical creatures, Nessie has grown enormously popular and plays a huge role in the Scottish tourism industry. Alleged sightings are reported to this day, but even systematic searches using sonar and automatic cameras (a necessary strategy, given the unfathomable depth of Loch Ness, which consequently contains by far the most water of all Scottish lakes) have failed to turn up indisputable proof of the existence of an unusually large animal inhabiting the loch.

One of the most widely circulated theories about Nessie is the suggestion that it’s a surviving plesiosaur — part of a group of sea reptiles that otherwise went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period, itself the final chapter of the Mesozoic, or the planet’s Middle Age. Plesiosaurs are characterized by an oblong body, long neck with a small head, and four large, paddle-like swimming extremities. The long neck, in particular, is a regularly recurring motif in popular representations of Nessie. And while there are plenty of scientific reasons that speak against the possible existence of a Plesiosaurus or plesiosaur-type creature in Loch Ness (such as the lake’s geological history or its having too little water and too few nutritional resources, even for a small population), the image of the aquatic dinosaur seems to have become permanently fixed to Nessie.

Many images allegedly show that the Loch Ness Monster exists. The first was taken in 1934 by R. K. Wilson, a respected surgeon, and laid the foundation for the plesiosaur myth. It depicts a large, long-necked creature gliding through the water. The photo was printed in the Daily Mail in 1934 and considered by some to constitute conclusive evidence for the existence of Nessie. However, in 1994, a rigorous study of the image revealed that Wilson had faked the photograph with the help of some accomplices.


Many images allegedly show that the Loch Ness Monster exists. The first was taken in 1934 by R. K. Wilson, a respected surgeon, and laid the foundation for the plesiosaur myth.

The best-known images of Nessie in recent decades were automatic underwater photos taken by patent judge Robert Rines and team. The group produced around 2,000 photos, which were taken in brief, regular intervals during an expedition in 1972 and another in 1975. Six of the photos contained noticeable forms, and of the six, two supposedly showed Nessie. The photos — which are rather grainy, despite their having been extensively retouched using the computer technology of the day — show what the authors were convinced were rhomboidal fins, as well as part of the body of a large animal. Using the camera’s magnification, it was calculated that the back right fin was approximately two meters in length.
The first photo allegedly showing the existence of the Loch Ness monster was taken in 1934 by R. K. Wilson, a respected surgeon, and published in the Daily Mail.

Based on some of these underwater photos, as well as sonar diagrams created around the same time, Rines and Sir Peter Scott — a photographer and conservationist — decided to formally describe and name the monster of Loch Ness. They published the description in Nature, one of the world’s most respected scientific journals, which guaranteed them international attention. The scientific name they selected was Nessiteras rhombopteryx, which is derived as follows: the first part of Nessiteras is obvious, referring to Nessie and thus the name of its home, Loch Ness. The second part ostensibly derives from the Greek teras; the authors write that since Homer, this term has been used to mean “a marvel or wonder, and in a concrete sense for a range of monsters which arouse awe, amazement and often fear.” The specific epithet is a combination of the Greek rhombos, for rhomboidal, and pteryx, for fins or wings. Scott and Rines write that, literally translated, Nessiteras rhombopteryx means “the Ness wonder with a diamond fin.”

The existence of the Loch Ness Monster is anything but obvious, but Scott and Rines substantiate their comprehensive description with information from their photos and other sightings to date. Granted, at first glance there’s not much to see in the photos: a few shadowy and light fields bleed into each other, making any discernible forms hard to interpret. A larger photo shows a white structure that seems almost to suggest a horned head, despite the image’s flaws. Scott and Rines draw what they can from the photos: they describe the approximately two-meter-long fin (the right rear?), areas of the back and belly displaying rough skin texture, and maybe a few ribs. These two small photos, which the authors believe exhibit these structures, represent the actual basis for the Nessiteras rhombopteryx description. All other information provided is guesswork. Based on a fin length of two meters, and with the help of the calibrated photographs, Nessie is said to be 15 to 20 meters in length, with a neck three to four meters long and a small head, which might feature a few horn-like protrusions. The spotty description is completed by two reconstructions that depict a plesiosaurus-type animal, whose body is rather fat and ungainly around the front extremities. The authors pointedly avoid the question as to which animal group Nessie would belong to. The existence of the rhomboidal fins means it would be a vertebrate, no question. According to Scott and Rines, there are no living whale species with even remotely similar fins. D’accord. All that leaves us with is a reptile of some sort, but as the authors concede, any more precise definition would be pure speculation.


Literally translated, Nessiteras rhombopteryx means “the Ness wonder with a diamond fin.”

Scott and Rines could easily foresee that the description of Nessiteras rhombopteryx would be met with criticism. They point out that the nomenclature rules allow species descriptions based on photographs, and that they had to rely on this allowance because unfortunately there wasn’t any type material for Nessie. This isn’t entirely true because technically speaking all that’s missing is the physically available holotype. There was, however, most certainly a type specimen from August 8, 1972, onward because they took a picture of it.

At the end of the description, Scott and Rines state that it “had been calculated” that the biomass available in Loch Ness was sufficient to sustain animals of this size, given the ample populations of salmon, sea trout, and large eels at their disposal. They also believe it possible that 12,000 years ago, at which point Loch Ness was an estuary, it was cut off from the ocean by an encroaching isthmus. A small population of Nessiteras rhombopteryx could thus have been isolated and contained within Loch Ness, where they’ve been living ever since.

It’s worth noting that Scott and Rines open their article with an explanation as to why they want to name the Loch Ness Monster in the first place. Schedule 1 of the Conservation of Wild Creatures and Wild Plants Act, passed by the UK Parliament in 1975, extends full protection to any animal whose survival in nature is threatened. To fall into this category, the organisms must have both a scientific and a colloquial name. Although Scott and Rines grant that Nessie’s existence remains controversial among specialists, they propose to operate under the principle of “better safe than sorry.” Accordingly, if lawmakers are to undertake measures to protect this species of no more than a few individuals (at best) — should its existence ever actually be proven — then it should be acknowledged, they reason, that its inclusion in Schedule 1 has already been cemented through its formal naming.

Anthropologist and Bigfoot researcher Grover Krantz impersonating Bigfoot on TV. Source: UC Berkeley, Cal Alumni Association

It’s not unprecedented for a possibly fictitious organism to fall under official protection. In 1969, Skamania County in Washington State put Bigfoot on the list of protected species. Bigfoot (also known in Canada as Sasquatch) is the legendary ape-man of the Rockies and Appalachians; alleged sightings continue to this day, but its existence has yet to be proven through indisputable evidence. Various theories regarding Bigfoot’s systematic assignment have been discussed. One of the most popular ideas is that Bigfoot is a descendant of Gigantopithecus, an extinct genus of giant ape from Southeast Asia known to us only through fossils. The Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, is also thought to be related to Gigantopithecus and, thus, to Bigfoot. In his book “Big Foot-Prints,” anthropologist and Bigfoot researcher Grover S. Krantz, who died in 2002, discusses the plausibility of the Bigfoot and Sasquatch legends and suggests a few vague possibilities for scientific names. Should Bigfoot be proven to belong to Gigantopithecus, then Gigantopithecus canadensis would suggest itself as an appropriate choice. Should Bigfoot ultimately require its own genus, then it should be called Gigantanthropus, presumably with the same specific epithet, canadensis. Krantz also considers a possible connection between Bigfoot and Australopithecus, an extinct genus of early humans found in Africa, which would lead to the name Australopithecus canadensis. Gordon Strasenburgh, another Bigfoot expert, had already published in 1971 on potential family ties between Bigfoot and another genus of hominids, resulting in an altogether different name: Paranthropus eldurrelli.


It’s not unprecedented for a possibly fictitious organism to fall under official protection. In 1969, Skamania County in Washington State put Bigfoot on the list of protected species.

But let’s return to the question of whether Nessiteras rhombopteryx is nomenclaturally available, which remains unanswered. Is it a valid name, according to the zoological nomenclature rules? Description, diagnosis, name, publication — check, check, check, check. The discussion is therefore focused instead on whether Nessiteras rhombopteryx names a hypothetical concept, in which case it wouldn’t fall under the purview of zoological nomenclature. Many people would surely assert that Nessie is a creature of myth and legend, lacking a biological manifestation in Loch Ness or anyplace else on Earth, which would therefore indicate a hypothetical concept. However, an important tenet of taxonomy is that, first and foremost, what is published is valid. Based on the publication, there’s no doubt that both Scott and Rines are thoroughly convinced that Nessie exists. In other words, the description of Nessiteras rhombopteryx was not published explicitly for a hypothetical concept, and it’s doubtful that the opinion held by many, if not most, scientists—that is, that Nessie is not real—could be reason enough to strike the name from the list of animal species in Great Britain. So there’s a lot to suggest that Nessiteras rhombopteryx can be accepted as a real, earnest, and, yes, valid name.

Interestingly, Scott and Rines compare their new species Nessiteras rhombopteryx with other mythical sea serpents, but specifically those that have also been formally named. The oldest is the Massachusetts Sea Serpent, named Megophias monstrosus in 1817 by naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz. It wasn’t until 1958 that Bernard Heuvelmans — the founder of cryptozoology and one of its most colorful characters — described Megalotaria longicollis, another fabled species with the appearance of a plesiosaur said to live in North American waters. After comparing their photos to the other species’ descriptions, however, Scott and Rines conclude that the older names aren’t applicable to the “owner of the hind flipper in the photographs.”

The Gloucester Sea Serpent of 1817, via Wikimedia Commons.

Bernard Heuvelmans did more than just provide an American sea serpent with a name. Following the Second World War, Heuvelmans — who was born in Normandy in 1916 and was torn for many years between his two great passions, jazz and biology — began to systematically study enigmatic, mythical animal species. His two-volume “Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées”(On the Track of Unknown Animals) from 1955 was a bestseller and made him famous overnight. The book provided the cornerstone of modern cryptozoology.


Bernard Heuvelmans’ two-volume “Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées”(On the Track of Unknown Animals) was a bestseller and made him famous overnight. The book provided the cornerstone of modern cryptozoology.

In this work and others, Heuvelmans published scientific names for a host of mythical creatures whose existence is disputed. In 1969, for instance, he described Homo pongoides based on the so-called Minnesota Iceman, a humanoid body frozen in a block of ice that was exhibited in malls and state fairs throughout the United States and Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. Heuvelmans believed that Homo pongoides represented a human species closely related to the Neanderthals that had presumably gone undetected until somehow being shot in the Vietnam War. There’s a lot to suggest that the Minnesota Iceman was a hoax.

Like the Minnesota Iceman, the Yeti also has Heuvelmans to thank for its scientific name: Dinanthropoides nivalis. Heuvelmans translated the name as the “terrible anthropoid of the snows.” If the Yeti, like Bigfoot, potentially represented a survivor of the extinct giant ape genus Gigantopithecus, then Dinanthropoides would be its younger synonym because the former name was published in 1935 by Gustav von Koenigswald. If this were the case, Heuvelmans concludes, then the Yeti’s scientific name would be adjusted accordingly to Gigantopithecus nivalis.

In this fashion, Heuvelmans works his way through the world of cryptids — the world of marvelous animals that so determinedly elude human detection. Not all are as popular as the Yeti, but Heuvelmans wants to use proper scientific names as the key to acknowledging their existence: the long-necked sea cow, 18 meters in length and quite possibly a sea lion (Megalotaria longicollis); the merhorse, an 18-meter-long, whiskered sea monster (Halshippus olaimagni); and the “Super Otter” (Hyperhydra egedei), a sea serpent 20 to 30 meters in length resembling an otter.

Whether Heuvelmans’s names would pass the test of the zoological nomenclature rules is questionable. But there is as little possibility here to oppose the status of a hypothetical concept as there was for Nessie. Even if Heuvelmans were the only person worldwide to believe the cryptids he named actually exist — which he isn’t, by the way — one would have to accept that the names were published for biological entities believed to truly exist. Whether parts of the Code beyond this stipulation were violated would have to be tested for each individual case.

Let us return to a central theme of this book: The Code is a convention developed over many years and by many minds, meant to standardize and thus simplify the management of droves of taxonomic data. How taxonomy — the science of recognition, description, and naming — relates to nomenclature — the rules for creating and managing names — is a regular topic of debate. In most cases of species description, the entities addressed by taxonomy and nomenclature coincide so elegantly that it can be difficult to tell the difference between them in everyday scientific work. The taxonomic process of species recognition and description is so closely intertwined with the naming process that it doesn’t seem necessary to differentiate between the two. Both taxonomy and naming are trained on the same object: a species or other biological entity waiting to be both described and named. As for “naming nothing,” however, the difference is especially striking. In these cases of cryptozoology, the object range for taxonomy is empty because most systematic scientists would agree that the species being described do not exist. The process of naming, however, continues as it always has and as it always should. It’s a linguistic process not an empirical one — it needn’t be bound to reality. Empirically oriented taxonomy and linguistic naming finally overlap when it comes to the range of validity determined by the zoological nomenclature rules. The Code applies only to those names intended for tangible biological entities. By excluding names for hypothetical concepts, the verdict has been issued for most of the names mentioned in this chapter. They don’t fall under the purview of the nomenclature rules and therefore don’t belong in the catalog of life. Were a bureaucratic taxonomist to adopt the view that some or even all of these names were formally relevant to the nomenclature, the question would remain as to what could be gained from this stripe of formalism. Whether the list of all organism names includes a few dozen cryptids — which could turn out to be either fairytale creatures or actual species — is mostly irrelevant to the big questions surrounding the inventory of global species diversity. Considered within this context, names like these are merely the stuff of academic jest, humor notwithstanding.

The publication of Nessiteras rhombopteryx in Nature, one of the best-known and most highly regarded scientific journals in the world, would ultimately prove to be its Disaster of the Year in 1975. The publication, which came out in early December, was followed by a global media response: The whole world was talking about Nessie and its new name. It was precisely the type of media presence a scientific journal like Nature had always dreamed of — and all because of a single scientific article. Before the year was out, however, Scottish parliamentarian Nicholas Fairbairn made a surprising discovery. He had played around with the letters of Nessiteras rhombopteryx and found it was an anagram of “monster hoax by Sir Peter S.” He informed the New York Times by letter, and by December 18, the Times had printed a brief note on the matter, citing the anagram as proof that Nessiteras rhombopteryx was a canard. For Nature, although Rines had countered that the letters could also be rearranged to spell “Yes, both pix are monsters. R.,” it was reason enough to realize it had been given the runaround. We’ll never know whether Robert Rines and Peter Scott had intentionally planted this anagram or it was merely a happy accident. Certainly, that a name formed with such serious scientific intent should contain within itself an admission of deceit constitutes a particularly beautiful example of the art of naming.

Michael Ohl is a biologist at the Natural History Museum of Berlin and an Associate Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin. He is the author of “The Art of Naming,” from which this article is excerpted.

Trump renews attack on lightbulbs and goes after dishwashers, fridges, toilets and showers

President vows to make appliances great again

Andy Gregory

Donald Trump has revisited his vendetta against energy-saving lightbulbs, ascribing them the blame for his orange hue while extending the focus of his ire to include showers, dishwashers and toilets in a wide-ranging rally speech in Milwaukee.

Despite claiming an aide had warned against mentioning lightbulbs ahead of his address, Mr Trump complained “the new lightbulb costs you five times as much and it makes you look orange”.

The president appeared to win his battle with energy-efficient lightbulbs in September, to environmentalists’ dismay, when he rolled back Obama-era legislation decreeing a transition towards their use.

But his fight against ill-performing household appliances continued.

“I’m also approving new dishwashers that give you more water, so you can actually wash and rinse your dishes without having to do it 10 times – four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10,” he said, likely attacking Department of Energy regulations.

Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves
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“Sinks, toilets and showers, you don’t get any water. They put restrictors on and now they made them permanent.

“You go into the shower – and I have this beautiful head of hair, I need a lot of water – and you turn on the water [and] drip, drip, drip. I call the guy, ‘something wrong with this?’ ‘No, sir, it’s just the restrictor’. So you’re in there five times longer than you’re supposed to be, you use probably more water and it’s a very unpleasant experience. We’re getting rid of the restrictors, you’re going to have full shower flow, full sink.”

While also joking about running for president again in 10 years, he conceded the talk of appliances probably wouldn’t make it into a state of the union speech.

“I’ll leave it out because I want to get praise,” he said. “You cannot make a brilliant speech, where they say ‘that was such an incredible, elegant speech’, where I’m talking about dishwashers, sinks, toilets, lightbulbs.”

Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa went toe-to-toe on foreign policy, with Elizabeth Warren proclaiming the need to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, as she herself appeared to end a cease-fire with Bernie Sanders amid a fight for to become the leading progressive candidate.

Pete Buttigieg also criticised Mr Trump for claiming to want to end “endless wars”, yet sending “more troops” into the region.

The president too had some trite words about the Middle East. In one memorable moment, the president doubled down on his boast about keeping Syria’s oil, which experts say would be a war crime, and lamented that the US hadn’t done so in Iraq.
Donald Trump says that he is approving new dishwashers that will stop people from washing their dishes 10 times

In another breath, he predicted a future investigation into his “imminent threat” justification for assassinating Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, who he labelled a “son of a b****”.

While Mr Trump claimed Soleimani’s actions against America meant such justification “doesn’t really matter”, US defence secretary Mark Esper appeared to further undermine its existence when he admitted he hadn’t seen evidence that Iran had been planning attacks on four US embassies, as Mr Trump had previously hinted.

To cheers from the crowd, he boasted of “delivering American justice” in ordering the killing of “the world’s number one terrorist”, Soleimani.

Mr Trump himself noted the contrast between the debates, endorsing analysis that portrayed Democrats as “meek, dull creatures”, and him as “a monstrous, domineering behemoth”.

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