Doug Selsam of http://www.selsam.com/ wrote:Nice post on the electrostatic balloon spider webs.
I had an experience when I was 5 years old that changed my life. It explains why I know there are simple things that degreed scientists are clueless about: I was 5 years old in upstate NY, slept outside in a tent with a neighbor kid. We woke up before the sun and went out to play. As the sun was rising, we started seeing shimmering blobs slowly falling from the sky, changing colors as they fell. We tried to catch them but they disappeared like a bubble popping the moment our fingers touched them. They also disappeared when they hit the wet grass blades, but we noticed a very thin spider-webby substance left strung between the grass blades. The spider-webby stuff in the grass blades disappeared in your fingers if you tried to collect it. Many years later I contacted the other kid and he remembered it like yesterday.
Of course we told my parents what we had seen and of course as we already knew, they didn't believe it. What adult is going to believe a 5-year-old telling them about shimmering colored blobs falling from the sky that disappear when you touch them?
Nobody could explain what we had seen. That was my entry into realizing that I knew things that nobody else knew, and at 5 years old had already experienced something that no scientist could explain. I realized I could probably figure out things that nobody else could.
As the years went by I arrived at an explanation: Balloon spider silk in the still morning air was collecting condensation and falling from the water drops' weight, As the strands fell they formed mats, spread apart by electrostatic force. By the time we saw the mats of silk near the ground, the sun was making rainbows through the drops, which we interpreted as the blobs changing color as they changed position relative to our eyes.
When we touched the blobs, they disappeared like bubbles popping, because we disturbed their electrostatic equilibrium, draining the charge - the wet strands stopped mutually repelling. The blobs collapsed and seemed to vanish.
And of course when they hit the grass blades, they also vanished as the electrostatic charge was instantly drained, but we were able to see the super-fine threads because they still had micro-water-drops on them. But the webs themselves were so ephemeral that they seemed to disappear as we rubbed the water drops away.
I have since read about this phenomena several times. One account was in the same area, across Lake Ontario in Canada, in the same year, by a ship's captain. Same exact story down to every detail, except no grass blades on the ship.
Other similar stories include single giant purple blobs that fall in yards, made of a substance that disappears when touched. The characteristic they all have in common is they disappear in your hands when you try to collect samples, or evaporate from jars if any substance is collected. The overall name for the phenomenon is "Angel Hair" and in many accounts it is related to UFO sightings. Often, people see a UFO spewing silk strands out the back and they fall as anger hair, which disappears when touched. There seem to be a lot of these UFO/angel-hair accounts in Australia. The night before, we were convinced a UFO was watching us (watching too much TV) and I am puzzled to this day that most accounts of this angel hair phenomenon relate to UFO's and seldom mention the idea of spiders.
Anyway, when I saw the story of exactly what had happened to me in a book of "unexplained phenomenae" I realized that if I knew this one particular "unexplainable" phenomenon was real, maybe a lot of other weird stories off such phenomenae were also real, so I never laugh at any account of something unexplained, no matter how improbable it sounds. I know how it is to have something unexplainable happen and nobody believes you. But in my case, I think the spider explanation works, and some other witnesses and scientists have also applied a spider silk explanation to the angle hair phenomenae, but I had not heard anyone but me apply the electrostatic repulsuion principle to it until now.
So that is why, from 5 years old, I've always known the academics often simply don't know things that even a 5-year old can see. I realized at that young age "Science and "experts" do not always have the answers". In fact it is easy to see this: How many doctors spent their lives explaining how millions of ulcers were "caused by stress", until someone finally noticed they went away when people were put on antibiotiotics, being in fections caused by heliobacter pilori? How about decades of cardiologists recommending partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (margarine) as a cure for heart disease for decades on end? What about "Eggs, not as bad as we thought"? Extrapolate to "global warming" and all the rest: scientists are clueless at least half the time.
Since then my attitude is "I know things nobody else knows and sometimes the academics and experts, in at least one case, and probably others, have no clue". That's why you can hold up anyone from NASA to MIT and I laugh - maybe they know, maybe they don't. Perhaps half the time, they don't. I never heard them explaining angel hair. They all denied even "ball lightning" (also appearing in the same books of unexplained phenomenae as "angel hair") until video of it began to accumulate and they could deny no more. And yet the scientists dare to call others "deniers" while the entire process of science is to deny anything until it is proven.
I went on to predict that planets were everywhere back when "official science" seemed to think it was doubtful other stars even had planets, let alone life. I predicted life was everywhere in the universe, while "science" still maintained life might most probably only exist on Earth.
I understood the reason why we have an appendix, as a repository for beneficial bacteria (a "starter culture") long before academia ever figured that one out. For most of my life the story was "Nobody knows why we have an appendix". I really thought "how long can these supposedly smart people operate on infected appendixes before they figure out the reason they are filled with bacteria is because that is the purpose?"
I know lots of other stuff the academics are clueless about, such as why we have a chin, and of course a hundred easy ways to do AWE.
So if anyone wants to understand my humorously skeptical attitude toward academia, the electrostatic balloon spider silk phenomena is the root of it all. I knew about the electrostatic repulsion of balloon spider silk long before any "experts" ever even contemplated such a thing.
Feel free to pass along this info on the group if you wish.
Doug
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