Conspiracy comin' at ya!

I would be lying if I said that I am not one to fall for a good conspiracy. As a matter of fact, I am one of the biggest conspiracy theorists I know! (- and with NO shame at that point.) All of this being said, I found the Reuters Fact Check this week, and had a great time reading through some of these debunked claims. Like the photo of two men at Paris Pride, that had been altered to include children, with a claim made by Dr. Anastasia Maria Loupis on Twitter, “This is NOT about human rights! At this point, it’s about saying NO to freaks, perverts, narcissists and pedophiles!” As if altering an image somehow made her point. (Find it here, or here!)

Even more interesting though, was an article about the Devil’s Tower “rock” formation in Wyoming. Now, I say “rock” because this is exactly where our argument begins. According to Reuters, social media users have recently begun suggesting that perhaps, this is no rock formation at all - but instead, the “stump of what's left from [an] ancient tree.” (And I can’t lie, though Reuters did dismiss the claim as false information - I can see where these people are coming from.) Let’s take a look.

Twitter user @Freedm2all, was one of many to share the idea that this could potentially be a tree instead of a rock. Their video (shown here,) shows Devil’s Tower from a closer perspective, and is tagged, “This is a stump of what's left from the ancient tree 🧐 Silicon world”.

After one of my own many trips out west, (to the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert in Arizona,) I find this claim to be quite believable actually. This forest is no regular forest, as there is not a single tree in sight. Instead, the remains of ancient trees from over 200 million years ago. Through natural geological processes, these trees have petrified into solid rainbow crystals, each color a compression of a different mineral inside of the tree.

According to the National Park Service website, during the Triassic period, “The landscape was dominated by a river system larger than anything on Earth today. Giant reptiles, amphibians, early dinosaurs, fish, and many invertebrates lived among the dense vegetation and in the winding waterways.” This is a point that I need to to hold onto for just a minute, everything was “larger than anything on Earth today.”

Let’s swerve back to Devils Rock in yet another Reuter’s article. “The tower is made up of a rare igneous rock called phonolite porphyry. Geologists do not fully know how it formed and there are different theories on details here.” Though this article also debunks the claim by saying it “originated from a satire account,” (found here.) - my question here becomes ; if the formation of this rock is so hard to figure out, why is it such a stretch for it to be an ancient tree? Especially if, as I pointed out above, “everything was larger than anything on Earth today” ; and the knowledge that a “forest” (which is basically just next door in the grand scale of the Earth,) has turned into a crystal covered landscape. Who is to say that, if broke open to the center, Devil’s Rock wouldn’t have these same crystals inside?

(...told you I was a conspiracy theorist.)

I am not as bad as Twitter user @gael82geo though, who commented on the original Twitter post we were discussing from @Freedom2all with the following video tagged “They might not be giant trees, but giant beings. #MudfossilUniversity”

While no, he did not persuade me to believe that this massive structure is an ancient giant being ; there was a series of comments on this video that did lead me to a very interesting take.

Of course, I then had to find this massive ax.

Check out timestamp 4:03, and let me know what you think! Is this a massive ax that cut down an even more massive tree?

As I have already expressed, Reuter’s has debunked the claim of Devil's Tower "tree-hood" - not once, but twice. And yet, the theory still holds strong in the online community. While yes, most of these explanations come from people who may not be so credible, it is impossible to refuse that the National Park Service is a credible source - and that source says they have no idea how Devil’s Tower came to be. I think with this particular issue we need to take a more “Slow News” approach, and wait for the science to be done to know the actual truth. Until geologists can say exactly how it was formed, we can’t really totally deny any explanation?

Can we?