1593 Transported Soldier Legend | Hacker News Reader

1593 Transported Soldier Legend

en.wikipedia.org

67 pointsbenbreen8 comments

The most damning part of this story is:

> Obregón traces the story to a 1698 account by Fray Gaspar de San Agustín

The event happened in 1593, but nobody wrote it down until 1698 almost 100 years later? [ Skepticism intensifies ]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-n_5eEf7cA

But seriously, I suspect survivor-ship bias. Most people in Perez's position would in fact continue to be locked up, treated as likely deserters / in league with the devil, and generally lost to history. On a given day, if you just made up a story about the governor being killed, what are the odds you would be right? Probably much closer to win-the-lottery odds than entropy-reverses-itself odds.

Well, this assumes the guard actually existed. The Wikipedia article could just be based on an imaginative kid telling a made-up story to his brother (although the kid would have to be quite knowledgeable to know about the historical events, as well as the details like differing uniforms); the story has spread that it's become, as the article says, folklore.

There are churches in the world that's been built because some people (usually young girls) said they saw the Virgin Mary...

This reminds me a bit of the excellent first chapter of Death’s End by Cixin Liu. If this article sparked your imagination I suggest you check out the book and the whole trilogy.

I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps it was a high dimensional fragment. Or a local who all of a sudden thought he was a guard from the Philippines. Given the Don Quixote story, I'm more inclined to believe that. We should try not to be the Sancho Panza to the Quixotes out there.

"Not saying it was aliens.... but it was aliens!"

I'm not sure why this was posted? Something made it relevant today? The human brain is somehow wired to believe the most irrational things, not sure if there was an evolutionary benefit.

Belief in the extraordinary can just be pattern matching. Something that is very evolutionarily beneficial.

I don't think anything in particular happened today, it's just intriguing folklore with an interesting, albeit limited, history.

I personally love the random wikipedia links on HN. There are some really interesting corners that I never would have even imagined existed!

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