Space Mining for Fun and Profit

Asteroid Ida and Its Moon Dactyl

This week in Seattle a new startup called Planetary Resources Inc. is unveiling its plans to mine the solar system for natural resources.

The venture is backed by Google luminaries Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, by filmmaker James Cameron and by Ross Perot’s entrepreneur son, among others.

Few specifics are available so far, apart from a bare-bones press release that says the company it would "overlay two critical sectors—space exploration and natural resources—to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP" and "help ensure humanity's prosperity."

Also involved in the project are several former NASA officials who have spoken out on the subject of space mining, particularly extracting minerals from asteroids and other space objects.

The Wall Street Journal notes that NASA has done its own studies on the subject:

Earlier this month, a study by NASA scientists concluded that, for a cost of $2.6 billion, humans could use robotic spacecraft to capture a 500-ton asteroid seven meters in diameter and bring it into orbit around the moon so that it could be explored and mined. The spacecraft, using a 40-kilowatt solar-electric propulsion system, would have a flight time of between six and 10 years, and humans could accomplish this task by around 2025.
 The estimated cost doesn't include the billions of dollars that it might take to extract minerals.
 "[W]ith the right ground-based observation campaign approximately five attractive [asteroids] per year could be discovered," said the NASA study, published by the Keck Institute for Space Studies. It also said that by exploring asteroids people may be able to gain information or find raw materials that would allow humans to travel far beyond the moon.

Cameron’s blockbuster film “Avatar” involved the mining of a precious (fictional) mineral called “unobtanium” on a moon in the Alpha Centauri star system.

There was a flurry of discussion about six years ago on the subject of space mining and its possible benefits in two key areas: the energy sector and the environment.

Wired magazine published an article in 2006 on the environmental and energy implications of mining lunar helium-3 on the Moon:

NASA's planned moon base announced last week could pave the way for deeper space exploration to Mars, but one of the biggest beneficiaries may be the terrestrial energy industry.
 Nestled among the agency's 200-point mission goals is a proposal to mine the moon for fuel used in fusion reactors -- futuristic power plants that have been demonstrated in proof-of-concept but are likely decades away from commercial deployment.
 Helium-3 is considered a safe, environmentally friendly fuel candidate for these generators, and while it is scarce on Earth it is plentiful on the moon.
 As a result, scientists have begun to consider the practicality of mining lunar Helium-3 as a replacement for fossil fuels.
 "After four-and-half-billion years, there should be large amounts of helium-3 on the moon," said Gerald Kulcinski, a professor who leads the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Way back in 1997, former U.S. lunar astronaut Harrison Schmitt, also associated with UW-Madison, wrote a paper for the Journal of Aerospace Engineering on the proposal to mine helium-3 on the Moon and Mars as an alternative to conventional fossil and fission fuels:

The corporate vision of a proposed Interlune-Intermars Initiative encompasses commercial enterprises related to resources from space that support the preservation of the human species and our home planet. Within this vision, the major mission objectives of the Initiative are to provide investors with a competitive rate of return; protect the Earth’s environment and expand the well-being of its inhabitants by using energy from space, particularly lunar ³He, as a major alternative to fossil and fission fuels; develop resources from space that will support future near-Earth and deep-space activities and human settlement; and develop reliable and robust capabilities to launch payloads from Earth to deep space at a cost of $1,000/kg or less (1996 dollars). Attaining a level of sustaining operations for the core fusion power and lunar resource business requires about 15 years and 10–$15 billion of private investment capital as well as the successful marketing and profitable sales of a variety of applied fusion technologies.

Schmitt, a former U.S. senator from New Mexico and now an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, set up a commercial company in 1997 called Interlune-Intermars Initiative Inc., whose mission was to “protect the Earth's environment and increase the well-being of its inhabitants by using energy from space,” particularly helium-3 mined on the Moon.

There is no evidence Schmitt’s proposal made much headway. Wikipedia claims “[t]he idea of generating significant power from helium 3 obtained from the moon is regarded as wildly impractical,” but the only support cited for this contention is an outdated MIT master’s thesis published in 1994.

Despite his interest in helium-3 as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil and conventional nuclear fuels, Schmitt was attacked by environmentalists at the time as a “climate science denier” and “crackpot.”

We shall see if Planetary Resources Inc. has any better luck.

The Barbary Apes of Gibraltar

For many years zoologists and others have commented on the mystery of Gibraltar’s Barbary Apes – the fact that members of the ape colony on the Rock appear and disappear unexpectedly, sometimes showing up in the company of new apes never seen before – despite the fact that there are no known hiding places on this landmark site.
The speculation is that an age-old subterranean tunnel exists, beneath the Straits, connecting Gibraltar with the North African coast, and that the apes have been using this tunnel for transit since time immemorial.
Author-iconoclast Charles Hoy Fort, a well-known collector of reports on strange phenomena, wrote about this theory in his book Lo! (1931):

...In the London Daily Mail, July 1, 1920, a correspondent expresses an idea... as to mysterious appearances and disappearances of the Barbary apes of Gibraltar, conceiving of a submarine tunnel from Gibraltar to Africa. “All these creatures were well-known to the staff of the signal station on the Rock, many of the apes being named. The numbers sometimes change in the most unaccountable way. Well-known monkeys are absent for months, and then reappear with new, strange, adult monkeys of a similar breed. Those who know Gibraltar will agree that there is not a square yard on the Rock where they could have hidden.”

A few pages later in the same book, Fort cites another press report on the same topic:

In the New York Sun, Feb. 6, 1929, Dr. Raymond L. Ditmars tells of an “old legend” of a tunnel, by which apes travel back and forth, between Africa and Spain. No special instances, or alleged instances, are told of. In Gilbard's History of Gibraltar, published in 1881, is mention of the “wild and impossible theory of communication, under sea, between Gibraltar and the Barbary coast.” Here it is said that the apes were kept track of, so that additions to families were announced in the Signal Station newspaper. The notion of apes in any way passing across the Mediterranean is ridiculous to Gilbard, but he notes that there are so many apes upon the mountain on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar that it is known as the hill of Apes.

Although commonly referred to as “Barbary Apes,” these primates are actually Barbary Macaques, part of a species of true monkeys (Macaca sylvanus), not apes. Apart from man, they are the only primates that live freely in Europe.

The Gibraltar macaques are in fact descended from North African – Moroccan and Algerian – populations of Barbary macaques that today can be found mostly in the Middle Atlas mountains. The macaques have been known on Gibraltar since the British first captured the Rock in 1704. DNA studies have shown that in addition to their Moroccan and Algerian origins, the Barbary apes of Gibraltar have a third DNA source, probably from an extinct Iberian population.
According to conventional wisdom, the Gibraltar apes were imported by the Arabs and Berbers who conquered Spain and ruled substantial parts of the Iberian Peninsula from 711 to 1492. The macaques were said to have been kept as pets by the wealthy.
The belief in a subterranean passage under the Straits of Gibraltar survives to this day. A Gibraltar tourism website discusses St. Michael’s Cave, a geological structure linked to the legend of the tunnel:

St Michaels Cave has interested visitors to Gibraltar ever since the days of the Romans. The cave was long believed to be bottomless. This probably gave birth to the story that the Rock of Gibraltar was linked to the Continent of Africa by a subterranean passage over 24 km long under the straits of Gibraltar.
Pomponious Mela, one of the earliest writers on geography who lived about the beginning of the Christian era named the cave after a similar cave in his home city in Italy.
It was at one time believed that when the Spaniards first tried to retake Gibraltar from Britain in 1704, a party of 500 of their troops spent a night in the cave after climbing the East face of the Rock. Next morning, however the alarm was given and troops of the garrison surprised and overpowered the raiding party. Many other small caves are linked to the main chamber.

In 2001, a Canadian traveler, James Smith, posted some interesting observations on the Gibraltar Barbary Apes on the Epinions website:

One of the most well known attractions of Gibraltar, second only to the famous rock itself, are the bands of semi wild apes that live there. The Barbary Apes of Gibraltar are the only wild primates in all of Europe. There are approximately 200 apes in several extended families or packs scattered among the higher reaches of the "rock" mainly near the Upper Siege tunnels and at the "Apes Den" near the cable car station. The later is a regular stop on all the tours.

Candy stealing aside, the apes are used to humans and tolerate the daily procession of tourists who come and watch them play. They will allow you to get close and feed them and even pose for pictures. Some of the older ones will even ham it up for the cameras as long as you treat them. Although they are wild animals, there are only two things to be careful of, as the tour guides point out.
First never try to get too close to the baby apes. Like most animals, the mothers are very protective. Secondly, as in the case of the candy lady, be careful of anything in your hands especially food and/or shiny objects. As far as the apes are concerned anything they can grab they will, and they'll keep it. Somewhere in the crevices on the side of the rock it is rumoured there is a cache of sunglasses, jewelry, cameras, and other items that used to belong to tourists who didn't heed their guides warnings.
No one is quite sure of how the apes came to Gibraltar in the first place. One theory is that they arrived with the British soldiers and sailors as pets. There is however no records to support this idea.
Another theory is that they may have migrated from Africa perhaps through a subterranean tunnel under the Mediterranean Sea. This theory may not be as far fetched as it seems. It is only fifteen miles across the straight to Morocco and the only other known colonies of Barbary Apes are found in the Middle Atlas Mountains of that country and neighboring Algeria.
Not only does no one seem to know where the apes come from, but no one is quite sure where they go when they die. No one has ever found the remains of any of the colony's deceased apes. It appears that they seem to know when it is their time and disappear into the wilds of the mountain to some undiscovered ape graveyard.

Needless to say, the existence of a subterranean tunnel beneath the Straits of Gibraltar has never been confirmed. The mystery of the Barbary apes of Gibraltar remains unsolved.

Arabian Stonehenge?

Palgrave's Itinerary

An unusual account by a 19^th-century explorer of the Arabian Peninsula describes a massive megalithic stone circle with horizontal lintel stones – much like England's Stonehenge but located in Central Arabia, on the edge of the Tuwaiq (or Toweyk) Escarpment.

Legend says this megalithic circle was built by a giant magician named Darim.

The discoverer in question was William Gifford Palgrave. The account of his travels in the southern part of Qasim appears in his Personal Narrative of a Year’s Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia (1862-63), published in London in 1865.

Palgrave also mentions two other similar stone circles, one nearby and the other on the edge of the Hejaz. While there are many low stone circles in Arabia, this is the first known reference to grand, European-style megalithic structures with lintels.

William G. Palgrave

Palgrave was an Arabic scholar and Jesuit priest, who explored the “terra incognita” of the Arabian heartland with the support of the Jesuit order and French Emperor Napoleon III. 

He posed as a Muslim during his travels, to avoid hostile reactions from locals in more isolated destinations. (In 1865, after his book was published, he renounced the Catholic Church, joined the British Foreign Office and eventually married.)

Here is Palgrave’s account of his discovery of the Arabian Stonehenge:

We halted for a moment on the verge of the [Toweyk] uplands to enjoy the magnificent prospect before us. Below lay the wide plain; at a few miles’ distance we saw the thick palm groves of ‘Eyoon, and what little of its towns and citadel the dense foliage permitted to the eye. Far off to our right, that is, to the west, a large dark patch marked the village and plantations which girdle the town of Rass; other villages and hamlets too were thickly scattered over the landscape. All along the ridge where we stood, and visible at various distances down the level, rose the tall, circular watchtowers of Kaseem. But immediately below us stood a more remarkable monument, one that fixed the attention and wonder even of our Arab companions themselves.
 For hardly had we descended the narrow path where it winds from ledge to ledge down to the bottom, when we saw before us several huge stones, like enormous boulders, placed endways perpendicularly on the soil, while some of them yet upheld similar masses laid transversely over their summit. They were arranged in a curve, once forming part, it would appear, of a large circle, and many other like fragments lay rolled on the ground at a moderate distance; the number of those still upright was, to speak by memory, eight or nine. Two, at about ten or twelve feet apart one from the other, and resembling huge gate-posts, yet bore their horizontal lintel, a long block laid across them; a few were deprived of their upper traverse, the rest supported each its head-piece in defiance of time and of the more destructive efforts of man. So nicely balanced did one of these cross-bars appear, that in hope it might prove a rocking-stone, I guided my camel right under it, and then stretching up my riding-stick at arm’s-length could just manage to touch and push it, but it did not stir. Meanwhile the respective heights of camel, rider, and stick taken together would place the stone in question a full fifteen feet from the ground. These blocks seem, by their quality, to have been hewn from the neighbouring limestone cliff, and roughly shaped, but present no further trace of art, no groove or cavity of sacrificial import, much less anything intended for figure or ornament. The people of the country attribute their erection to Dārim, and by his own hands, too, seeing that he was a giant; perhaps also, for some magical ceremony, since he was a magician. Pointing towards Rass, our companions affirmed that a second and similar stone circle, also of gigantic dimensions, existed there; and, lastly, they mentioned a third towards the southwest, that is, on the confines of Hejaz.
 That the object of these strange constructions was in some measure religious, seems to me hardly doubtful; and if the learned conjectures that would discover a planetary symbolism in Stonehenge and Carnac have any real foundation, this Arabian monument, erected in a land where the heavenly bodies are known to have been once venerated by the inhabitants, may make a like claim; in fact, there is little difference between the stone-wonder of Kaseem and that of Wiltshire, except that the one is in Arabia, the other, the more perfect, in England.

No subsequent explorer ever reported seeing the Arabian Stonehenge, leading other explorers to question Palgrave’s veracity.

F.V. Winnett and W.L. Reed, in their Ancient Records from North Arabia (1970), have this comment:

Palgrave (Narrative, p. 251) reported the presence of a sort of Stonehenge at al-‘Uyun in the province of Qasim but Philby (The Heart of Arabia, vol. 2 [London , 1922], pp. 140-1) claims this to be a figment of Palgrave’s imagination. According to Dr. Vidal, the people of the area have no recollection of any such monument, In any case, the monument described by Palgrave was different in character from that seen by us [near Qarah].

The “Dr. Vidal” referred to in that passage was archaeologist/anthropologist F.S. “Rick” Vidal of Aramco’s Arabian Research Division in the 1950s.

There may indeed be a stone structure similar to Palgrave's description near the town of Nabhaniyah, west of Ar-Ras, in Qasim. According to Najdi sources familiar with that area, there is a megalithic stone site close to Nabhaniyah that is used by locals as a family picnic ground. This claim has not yet been confirmed.

The notion that Palgrave may indeed have seen a dramatic megalithic structure in Central Arabia was supported by a 1998 article in Science magazine. In that piece, archaeologists excavating a megalithic site in Yemen proposed the existence of a widespread Bronze Age megalithic culture throughout the Red Sea region:

For decades, classical archaeologists focused much of their attention on the Mediterranean Sea, where Egyptian stelae, Minoan friezes, and Turkish shipwrecks reveal the rise and fall of empires and the skein of sea trade among them. Now, new excavations are offering the first, tantalizing glimpse of an ancient civilization that flourished 4000 years ago near another major Old World waterway: the Red Sea. Work by researchers from several different countries on the Red Sea's arid southeastern coast points to a complex culture whose people enacted costly rituals, possessed metal tools, and raised daunting megaliths at about the same time as Stonehenge appeared in Great Britain.
 In research currently in press in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, Edward Keall, head of the Department of Near Eastern and Asian Civilization at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, presents preliminary evidence for a previously unstudied Bronze Age culture in coastal Yemen. His team members found the ruins of a circular prehistoric religious site, or henge, built of granite pillars weighing 20 tons. Buried at the foot of a fallen megalith, they discovered a cache of copper-alloy tools dated to between 2400 and 1900 B.C. And nearby, they unearthed fragments of children's skeletons from what appeared to be ceremonial burials. All this suggests a well-organized people living in an arid coastal plain once thought to have been almost empty at this time. "People had assumed that there was nothing there during the Bronze Age," says Keall.
 Other experts say the finding should draw attention to the dozen or so similar stone pillar sites scattered across western Arabia. "These sites have been sort of looked at, but not very thoroughly," says Christopher Edens, a research associate in the Near Eastern section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. "Now, someone has actually investigated these things and found this cache of bronzes, which is phenomenal for this area. I was floored." Moreover, the new excavation, which has yielded the first date for these mysterious megaliths, raises the possibility that an ancient and unsuspected trade network operated along this stretch of Red Sea coast....
 Title: Yemen's stonehenge suggests Bronze Age Red Sea culture.
Author(s): Pringle, Heather
Source: Science; 03/06/98, Vol. 279 Issue 5356, p1452, 2p, 1 map, 2c

Meanwhile, the search for Palgrave’s "Arabian Stonehenge" continues….

Where Was Ogygia, Isle of Calypso?

In Homer’s Odyssey, the wandering hero Odysseus spends seven years on the island of Ogygia, as the captive consort of Calypso the nymph. Nymphs, in Greek mythology, were female nature spirits often associated with specific locales. Calypso was said to be the daughter of the Titan Atlas, and so she was also known as “Atlantis.”

The Maltese have long claimed that Ogygia is actually Gozo, the second largest island in the Maltese archipelago. Some say Ogygia was in the Ionian Sea.

The Greek geographer Strabo of Alexandria (64 BC – AD 24), writing some seven centuries after Homer, argued in a critique of Greek historian Polybius that Homer clearly placed Ogygia not in the Mediterranean, where many assumed all of Odysseus’s exploits to have taken place, but in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

To quote Strabo:

At another instance he Polybius suppresses statements. For Homer says also, 'Now after the ship had left the river-stream of Oceanus', and, 'In the island of Ogygia, where is the navel of the sea', where the daughter of Atlas lives; and again, regarding the Phaiakians, 'Far apart we live in the wash of the waves, the farthermost of men, and no other mortals are conversant with us.' All these clearly suggest that he composed them to take place in the Atlantic Ocean."

Another prominent classical writer, the Romanized Greek historian Plutarch (46-120 AD), also places Ogygia in the Atlantic. In a fascinating natural history chapter of his Moralia entitled “The Face on the Moon,” Plutarch writes:

Well, I am but the actor of the piece, but first I shall say that its author began for our sake — if there be no objection — with a quotation from Homer:

An isle, Ogygia, lies far out at sea,

a run of five days off from Britain as you sail westward; and three other islands equally distant from it and from one another lie out from it in the general direction of the summer sunset. In one of these, according to the tale told by the natives, Cronus is confined by Zeus, and the antique (Briareus), holding watch and ward over those islands and the sea that they call the Cronian main, has been settled close beside him. The great mainland, by which the great ocean is encircled, while not so far from the other islands, is about five thousand stades from Ogygia, the voyage being made by oar, for the main is slow to traverse and muddy as a result of the multitude of streams. The streams are discharged by the great land-mass and produce alluvial deposits, thus giving density and earthiness to the sea, which has been thought actually to be congealed. On the coast of the mainland Greeks dwell about a gulf which is not smaller than the Maeotis and the mouth of the Caspian sea.

[MYTHOLOGY NOTE: Briareus was one of the three Hekatonkheires, ancient giants of Greek myth who helped Zeus and the other Olympian gods overthrow the Titans. Cronus and other Titans were imprisoned in Tartarus, beneath the underworld, and the Hekatonkheires were set as guards to prevent their escape. Hekatonkheires means “hundred-handed”; these giants were said to have fifty heads and a hundred hands.]

As Wikipedia notes, this passage in the Moralia has created considerable controversy. Some have used it as classical support for Plato’s account of Atlantis in the Timaeus. German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), writing in his Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia proposed that “the great continent” mentioned by Plutarch was America and he fixed locations for Ogygia and the nearby islands. German classics scholar Wilhelm von Christ (1831-1906) agreed that the continent was America and was convinced that first-century Norse sailors traveling through Iceland, Greenland and the Baffin Region reached the coast of North America.

Others believed that Ogygia, placed west of Britain by Plutarch, could be the Emerald Isle. Seventeenth–century Irish historian Ruaidhrí Ó Flaithbheartaigh (Roderic O’Flaherty) used Ogygia as a metaphor for Ireland in his work Ogygia: seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia & etc (1685) translated into English as "Ogygia, or a Chronological Account of Irish Events Collected from Very Ancient Documents, etc.

There is still no consensus on the geographical specifics of Plutarch’s descriptions of Ogygia, the neighboring islands and the great continent beyond. But the fact that two thousand years ago a prominent historian was speaking about destinations west of Britain in the mysterious Atlantic Ocean certainly deserves closer scrutiny.

Alien Abductions = Jinn Abductions?

A few “alien abduction” investigators have given some thought to the notion that the “Grays” and other described alien types may actually be jinn manifestations. Here, for example, is a rumination from a now-defunct website called www.abductions-alien.com:

Islam has considerable material that helps identify these “energy-people” and give an idea just what they are. They provide a term that we can use: Jinns; call them Jinns. Most Jinns are good and live mostly in the wilderness. In fact, they appear to “run” nature. Jinns have free will. They can be good or bad. Jinns can shape change and use this ability to trick humans.

Those few Jinns that turn bad enough to take up harassing have found out the new “in” way to harass humans is: Alien abductions! Apparently designing their harassment after the “new” human obsession, aliens, and especially those few original accounts of truly physical abductions, the bad Jinns decided to drop the old fairy appearance and begin shape changing to grey aliens. With their minds, the bad Jinns can rustle up “mother-ships” and their interiors, examination rooms, weapons, instruments, anything. (You can create things too when out of body! But they are good at it for they have lived “there” (higher vibration level) for untold centuries.)

Unwittingly, your own thoughts help these harassers form the surroundings. You expect a ship, an examination room and its instruments, so your thoughts, energized by fear, construct the surroundings. The Jinns themselves mostly only have to “look like”greys then your mind does the rest!

Here is part of another, more recent web posting on alien abductions that toys with the idea of aliens actually being jinn:

Basically, according to research carried out in USA (where else?), 1.5% of the population has been abducted at some time in their life. Doesn't sound much, does it? Well this equates to 4 million Americans and, if consistent around the world, 100 million people. That's a fair amount, not to be sniffed at really.

Abductors come in many forms. Chiefly they're what are called 'Greys'. These are the clichéd alien type. Grey in colour, very large coal black eyes, eyes just like an ant, a slit for a mouth, no visible ears. You know the kind. We've all seen them, just mostly on TV. These extraterrestrials are fairly nice guys, they don't carry laser guns, and seem to want to make peace with Earthlings: they tell the abductees to remain calm, they won't be harmed, and appear to have strict rules about their interaction with us.

The other main, and definitely more interesting, abductor type is 'the Jinn'. They're badder, meaner aliens. They are also the oldest form of aliens known to man: mentioned in the Bible and Koran no less (so they say). They don't have an actual physical presence and are more like what people describe as angels. Islamic texts state that the Jinn are able to materialize or disappear at will: this is because, it is suggested, "they are a form of conscious intelligence just like humans but they live on a higher vibratory level without physical bodies". Yeah, right.

They are said to be the reason that fairy stories exist in most civilisations. These mischievous, sometimes downright evil, pixies have always 'played' with humans just because they can. However, in recent times, they have found a new way to harass humans: alien abductions.

Purportedly, with their mind power, the Jinns can rustle up space ships and their interiors, complete with examination rooms. In your dreams... well, just maybe.

Most cultures acknowledge the abduction of humans by otherworldly beings of some kind. Patrick Harpur, author of Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld, says these abductors look different to each society, but they have some constant characteristics: “they are elusive shape-shifters, always ambiguous, notably part-material, part-immaterial, as well as being sometimes benign and, at other times, dangerous and malevolent. Following the ancient Greeks, I call them daimons.”

Modern daimons include the little gray aliens who snatch people from their cars or beds. Sometimes, Harpur notes, it seems as if the abductees are taken out of their bodies, as if in a waking dream. These are the same kind of ambiguities found by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in his studies of the Trobriand Islanders, whose practicing witches seemed to be able to leave their bodies in similar fashion.

“All cultures recognise daimons who abduct us – from the kwei-shins in China and the djinn in Arabia, to the Yunw Tsunsdi of the Cherokees,” Harpur contends. In Newfoundland, the daimonic abductors were called the “Good People” – fairies who seem to have come over with the Irish immigrants and who were known for abducting young people while they were out picking berries. The abductees would eventually be found in a state of disarray, bruised and suffering from loss of memory, like many victims of alien abduction. Like the UFO abductees, the berry-pickers would later begin to recall bits and pieces of what happened to them: often they had been lured by exotic music, and were swept up in a bizarre dance. Other berry-pickers returned after a much longer period of time, looking quite different or much older, wracked by fear or rendered simple-minded.

In Ireland, those abducted by the Sidhe – nature spirits or fairies – were occasionally allowed to return to their homes after seven years, or after multiples of seven. But they were only sent back to the human world when their years on earth had run out – “old spent men and women,” as Lady Augusta Gregory describes them in Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), “thought to have been dead a long time, given back to die and be buried on the face of the earth.” The reality of these abductions cannot be doubted, Harpur observes, given the many descriptions of “tradition-bearers weeping, sometimes after the passage of many years, as they narrated memorates [i.e., remembered events] dealing with the abduction of their children or other relatives.”

Sometimes the Sidhe may leave the physical person and take only his or her soul. From that moment, the victim begins to waste away in this world. The person is said to be “away” or a “changeling.” What remains, says Lady Gregory, is "a body in their likeness, or the likeness of a body." It may be a “log” is left in the victim’s bed, or a broomstick, or a heap of shavings.

In the case of zombies of Haiti, instead of their souls being taken while their bodies are left behind, their souls remain behind (imprisoned in a sorcerer’s jar) while their bodies are abducted into the Otherworld of the “slave camps.” When they return they are recognized by strangers who take them for dead relatives; whether they are truly lost relatives seems irrelevant.

This reverses the European folkloric tradition in which it is the abductees who become strangers, mere “likenesses” which are barely recognized by their relatives. “Such reversals,” says Harpur, “show how the archetypal motif of abduction by daimons, or daimonic humans, occurs in different permutations: sometimes the soul alone is taken into the Otherworld; sometimes only the body (zombies); sometimes both. We should not, in other words, regard the physical, literally, as an absolute barrier. All cultures other than ours regard the body as quasi-spiritual, just as the soul is quasi-material.”

The Plight of Ain Hit

I don't think much has been done over the past year to correct a problem that caver John Pint reported in one of Saudi Arabia's most important underground sites: Dahl Heet or Ain Hit.

An environmental disaster appears to be in the making at the historic Ain Hit cave/sinkhole south of Riyadh. This is where geologist Max Steineke first observed the impermeable anhydrite cap-rock layer that convinced him crude oil had been captured beneath the Eastern Province. Pint reported in February 2011 that the formerly crystal-clear waters of Ain Hit are being polluted by sewage. (The photo above, from the SaudiCaves.com website, was taken in better days, back in 2008.)

Since newly hired Saudi Aramco geologists regularly make a “pilgrimage” to this site to learn the story of Steineke’s achievement and observe the anhydrite layer for themselves, I think Saudi Aramco should take an interest in protecting the site for future generations.

John Pint’s website quotes a visitor to Ain Hit as saying:

Comparing our data with that of the survey of Gregg Gregory and co-workers from 2002, we encountered the water table ca. 27 m higher than in 2008 at our first visit. Two days later we heard from the Ministry of Water and Energy (MOWE) that 7 km to the north, sewage from Riyadh is forming a lake along the escarpment (see Google Earth). Thus Ain Heeth is involuntarily providing us with a karst tracer experiment. At this time it looks like the water table is going to keep on rising and that trillions of bacteria are making a comfortable living down there. Considering the filthy condition of the water and the recent rock falls, the cave has lost its recreational value, having turned into a very obnoxious and quite dangerous place. I doubt that I will make that trip again....

Pint followed up this posting with an email to friends:

From: JohnandSusy Pint

Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2011 12:26 AM

To: ranchopint hotmail

Subject: Pristine Cave Contaminated by Sewage

Hello friends of the Desert Caves,

Only a few years ago, cave divers in Saudi Arabia were delighted to plunge into the crystal-clear waters of Ain Hit (Ain Heet, Ain Heeth) Cave, but just a few days ago, Dr. Stephan Kempe made a shocking discovery in this cave. The story and pictures are at:

http://www.saudicaves.com/sewage/index.html

I have heard of no progress to date in correcting the problem. I certainly hope plans are in motion at some level to save Dahl Heet. Perhaps the Arabian Natural History Association (ANHA) in Dhahran could follow up on this issue.

Brain-Eating Amoebas

A news story by a Denver CBS television station reminds us that the fictional world of literature and the movies has nothing on Mother Nature.

Last week I was reading up on pop-culture zombies for an article I was writing. Modern-day zombies, of course, are often described as brain-eaters. I also noted that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently issued a document on how to prepare for a “zombie apocalypse” – not that they are expecting one anytime soon, but the CDC saw the current zombie craze as an opportunity to put out some information on how to deal with a real emergency.

Imagine my surprise this morning to read an article by CBS4 in Denver warning that people who do nasal washes with tap water run the risk of inviting brain-eating amoebas into their skulls. Says CBS4:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Jewish Health in Colorado both have issued a warning about nasal washes after two people have died from using tap water to do their sinus rinse. Health experts say it’s safe to use nasal washes. It’s not about the rinse, it’s about the water. They warn that a mixture from a faucet could be fatal....

Marie Fornof, Certified Infection Preventionist ... says not to use tap water. It’s because of a brain-eating amoeba called Naegleria fowleri. It’s common in warm rivers and lakes, but if it travels up the nose to the brain it’s usually deadly...

The brain infections caused by the amoeba are rare, but the two most recent deaths in Louisiana were tied to the use of tap water in “neti pot”s to flush sinuses.

The CDC warning about zombie-like amoebas? Was this on the level?

Apparently it was. Our old, semi-reliable friend Wikipedia says:

Naegleria fowleri (also known as "the brain-eating amoeba") is a free-living excavate form of protist typically found in warm bodies of fresh water, such as ponds, lakes, rivers, and hot springs. It is also found in soil, near warm-water discharges of industrial plants, and unchlorinated swimming pools in an amoeboid or temporary flagellate stage. There is no evidence of this organism living in ocean water.... It is an amoeba, described as such by the the CDC, NCBI, articles on pubmed, and WHO.
N. fowleri can invade and attack the human nervous system. Although this occurs rarely, such an infection nearly always results in the death of the victim. The case fatality rate is estimated at 98%.

The CDC, presumably more authoritative than Wikipedia, has an FAQ on the amoeba:

Naegleria fowleri infects people by entering the body through the nose. This typically occurs when people go swimming or diving in warm freshwater places, like lakes and rivers. The Naegleria fowleri ameba travels up the nose to the brain where it destroys the brain tissue.

You cannot be infected with Naegleria fowleri by drinking contaminated water. In very rare instances, Naegleria infections may also occur when contaminated water from other sources (such as inadequately chlorinated swimming pool water or heated tap water <47°C) enters the nose, for example when people submerge their heads or cleanse during religious practices (1), and, possibly, when people irrigate their sinuses (nose).

Let's hope the CDC isn't funnin' us on this one....