TALES OF DARK SORCERY
Human sacrifice, football curses, Mexican monsters and Satanic abuse
HUMAN SACRIFICE
When Víctor Hugo Mica Alvarez, 30, passed out after a heavy drinking session at the opening of the Mother Earth Festival in El Alto, Bolivia, on 5 August, he might have expected some consequences the following morning. What he did not expect was to wake up 50 miles (80km) away in Achacachi, inside a coffin. “Last night was the preentry [of the festival], we went dancing. And afterwards I don’t remember. The only thing I remember is that I thought I was in my bed, I wanted to get up to go urinate and I couldn't move,” he said, adding, “When I pushed the coffin, I was able to break a glass that it had and that way I was able to get out.”
The Mother Earth festival celebrates Pachamama, the goddess of Earth and fertility, and during the festival her followers give offerings, known as “Sullu” to the goddess, who is believed to “open her mouth” for such offerings in August. These can be anything from live animals to sheep foetuses, coca leaves and sweets, although there are persistent rumours that humans are still sacrificed to Pachamama in secret. Alvarez believes he was destined to be buried alive as one of these sacrifices, but when he reported his experience to police, they refused to take him seriously as they said he was still drunk. dailymail.co.uk, 11 Aug 2022.
MAGIC MOTHS?
Before the Euro 2016 football tournament final took place at the Stade de France in Paris, a swarm of huge moths descended on the stadium, causing both players and spectators to duck and delaying the start of the match for a few minutes. Now, it is claimed that the invertebrate pitch invasion was the result of a spell cast by a “witch doctor” named Ibrahim in the pay of footballer Paul Pogba, according to his elder brother Mathias. He also alleged that Paul would “scoff at human life” and paid the sorcerer between 75,000 and 100,000 euros bimonthly for his services, which had included cursing another footballer, Kylian Mbappe. Paul Pogba has denied the allegations and linked them to an extortion attempt currently being investigated by police. D.Telegraph, 23 Sept 2022.
MEXICAN SHAPE-SHIFTER
Residents of the town of Cocoyoc in Mexico have taken to painting white crosses on their houses after they began to hear strange noises in the early hours of the morning. Unable to find any human or animal source for the sounds, they concluded they were being made by a nagual, a sorcerer who can shape-shift into an animal, according to local beliefs. “First it was a few residents... and then, as days passed, more people asserted they had heard the same thing,” said Luis Salgado. Concluding that they had to act to ward off the supernatural threat, they decided to paint crosses on their houses. At first, these were mainly in Buenos Aires Street, close to where the noises were heard, but now they have spread to the rest of the town and residents have taken to staying inside after 10pm out of fear of the nagual. In August 2020, the residents of Soledad del Doblado, also in Mexico, armed themselves with rocks, shovels and guns to attempt to kill or drive away a nagual they believed was menacing their community. mexicodailynews. com, 10 Aug 2022.
SATANIC PANIC REDUX
In a case reminiscent of the height of the “Satanic Panic” of the 1990s, seven men and four women from Glasgow have been accused of committing child abuse against two girls and a boy between January 2010 and March 2020 that allegedly involved “witchcraft” and “satanic séances” carried out while wearing cloaks and Devil horns. As well as subjecting the alleged victims to sexual abuse, it is claimed that the accused shut one of the girls in a microwave, a freezer and an oven in an attempt to kill her, that the children were forced to take part in séances “to call on spirits and demons” and made to believe that they had “metamorphosed into animals”. It is also claimed the accused forced the boy to stab a budgie to death and put him in a bath they said was filled with blood. In addition, they are alleged to have killed other animals as well as encouraging the children to attack them. All 11 accused deny the charges and a trial has been set for September 2023. Metro.co.uk, 3 Aug 2022.
2022's Ig Nobel Prize winners revealed
In what is now an annual tradition, the Annals of Improbable Research have announced their 2022 Ig Nobel Prizes, intended to celebrate science that makes people laugh, then think, presented by real Nobel laureates at a ceremony that was once again online due to the continuing Covid restrictions in the US.
Probably the most infamous Ig Nobel went to Kees Moeliker in 2003 for his paper on homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks, and this year the Physics Ig Nobel went jointly to the teams of Frank Fish and Zhi-Ming Yuan for another duck-related paper that explored why ducklings swim in a straight line behind their mother. Fish, appropriately enough a professor of fluid dynamics, had started the work by getting ducklings to swim behind a mechanical mother in a large tank of water, and Yuan had followed this up with detailed computer modelling. Between them they found that a linear formation saves energy for the ducklings, a bit like a car slipstreaming a truck, with the final duck benefitting the most.
The Literature Prize went to Francis Mollica from the University of Edinburgh, who analysed what made legal documents so impenetrable, discovering that it was bad writing, not complicated concepts, that causes the problems. He said: “It’s inevitable that someone could [make contracts incomprehensible] for bad faith reasons, but we didn’t test those kinds of motives.” Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo and Andrea Rapisarda received the Economics Prize for a mathematical explanation of why success goes to the luckiest people, not the most talented, making this the second IgNobel for Pluchino and Rapisarda, who won the 2010 management prize for demonstrating that organisations would be more efficient if they promoted people at random.
Prof Gen Matsuzaki from the
Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan was recognised for “focusing on a problem that no one cares about”, winning him the Engineering Prize for work on “rotary control of columnar knobs”. This examined how many fingers were needed to turn knobs of different diameters, and concluded that “we cannot turn a columnar control of small diameter with all five fingers”. The Peace Prize was for an algorithm to help gossipers to decide when to tell the truth and when to lie, and the Applied Cardiology Prize went to Eliska Prochazkova, who discovered that when future romantic partners feel attraction for the first time, their heart rates synchronise. The Medicine prize was won by research that found chemotherapy patients suffer fewer side-effects when they eat ice-cream after treatment rather than being given ice cubes to suck. Work on constipation in scorpions and how it affects their mating prospects received the Biology Prize, while in a not unrelated area, the Art History Prize was given for work on depictions of “ritual enema scenes” in Mayan pottery. One piece of work that was honoured came into the “why didn’t someone think of that before?” category. Magnus Gens got the Safety Engineering Prize for developing the moose crash test dummy, which he did, he explained, because “Scandinavia had a very large moose population and car-moose collision is a huge problem with many fatal outcomes.”
As he does every year, Annals of Improbable Research editor Mark Abrahams concluded the ceremony by wishing the researchers: “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel tonight – and especially if you did – better luck next year.” improbable.com, 15 Sept; theguardian.com, 15 Sept; New Scientist, 24 Sept 2022.