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Comment by srge | Hacker News Reader

Why are you downvoted? This is not at all a simple theory. It’s interesting but it defies the Occam’s razor principle. It would involve a very specific combination of natural events. So-called skeptics will spend their lives trying to explain very strange things with everyday normal causes such as « swamp gas » or « reflection on the windshield » when obviously a larger curiosity and openness of mind would be required.

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Take a closer look at roadkill the next few times you see it. You'll often notice the eyes, tongue, etc are missing. Sometimes the corpse will look like a skeleton with skin but no organs.

These are circumstances commonly attributed to aliens or cuppracabra attacking cattle. However it's very common in roadkill when you start to look for it. It's pretty mundane, though I understand some people will find it startling the first time they see or hear of it.

When George Mallory was found on Everest, scavengers had eaten his internal organs from one hole in his (frozen) skin. He was like a human-shaped shell.

What scavengers would that be? No small animal capable of doing that is known to be able to survive at that height. small number of birds can fly that high, that's about it.

The lammergeyer, a sort of high-altitude vulture. They're known to eat the dead on Everest.

> They even have been observed living at altitudes of 7,500 m (24,600 ft) on Mount Everest

> The bearded vulture is the only known vertebrate whose diet consists almost exclusively (70 to 90 percent) of bone.

> The bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus), also known as the lammergeier and ossifrage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearded_vulture

> ossifrage

the bone-breaker

Appropriate.

"ossifrage" is interesting to see in a sentence because the word appeared in a famous 1977 RSA cryptographic challenge with the solution "The magic words are squeamish ossifrage". The challenge appeared in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column and took 17 years to break.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Words_are_Squeamis...

The „conspiracy theorists“ often seem to dismiss multi-factor explanations. When in fact they may be rare when you calculate for a single event, but if you consider how many events are happening across the globe it’s just not that improbable that a medial sensation was in fact the result of an - individually unlikely - chain of events

Or maybe chupacabra attacks are more common than you think and you just think it's roadkill ;)

Occam's razor does not actually mean the simplest explanation is correct. If that was the case you could explain anything with "a wizard did it." Occam's razor says that if you have 2 possible explanations, but one adds unnecessary clauses, the one with only the necessary clauses is more likely right.

For example, two explanations: 1. There was an avalanche and birds ate the soft tissue 2. There was an avalanche, birds ate the soft tissue, and Mars was in retrograde

Occam's razor tells you the first explanation is more likely to be correct. It does not tell you 4 or 5 natural events occurring can't be the best explanation if there isn't a more parsimonious alternative explanation.

Occam's razor prefers the hypothesis with less asumptions that still agrees with all the observations.

H0 assumes that:

- there's intelligent life out there

- that life is close enough to visit Earth

- it's interested in us enough to secretly do weird things to us

- but for some reason hides from our governments/scientists

- and manages to avoid them

- but for some reason regular people can sometimes catch it

- but never on a cellphone

- it came to that particular place and did these particular things

H1 only assumes a lot of things we already know exist and can happen (like hypothermia and scavengers) - happened at once.

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