Close encounters of the woody kind

"I know this sounds crazy, but ever since yesterday on the road, I've been seeing this shape. Shaving cream, pillows... Dammit! I know this. I know what this is! This means something. This is important." Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss) in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

There's an extravagantly bizarre theory going around which involves that spectacular piece of American geology, Devil's Tower in Wyoming, probably best known as the place where the alien mothership lands at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Given the place's cinematic history, you might think that we're talking some kind of UFO-related oddity, but you'd be wrong. Never mind hypothetical beings from another star system stopping off for a roadside picnic at one of Earth's more striking natural visitor attractions; we're talking about an idea so strange that even David Icke might have trouble believing it before breakfast.

So what is it about Devil's Tower? That shape ... what does it mean? Well, what does it remind you of? A tree stump? A very big tree stump. Fortunately, there's a video on the Internet which explains what you probably thought was just a coincidence:

But lately, there’s been a change; something new and furious is growing in the community. ‘No Forests on Flat Earth’ is an incredible new theory, proposed only last month. Its claim is grand, counterintuitive, and beautiful: we were lied to; our flat earth has no forests...

...We’ve all seen forests, we all know what they are; how could anyone claim that they don’t exist? But our narrator knows better. “They make us think that this is a forest,” he tells us, “when you are actually looking at thirty-meter bushes. After watching this video, you will reverse your concept of forests by 360 degrees.” This isn’t a forest at all: only a diminished imitation. Thousands of years ago, a cataclysmic event destroyed 99% of the Earth’s biosphere, and when it happened, it took away the real forests. Real trees are nothing like their stunted cousins, the miserable perishing scraps of wood that we see today; they were truly vast, hundreds of kilometers tall, magical organisms that sustained a total living ecology of the flat earth. These things were the anchor of a beautiful world that has now vanished forever. And how does he know? Because everywhere around us, we can see their stumps.

The first piece of evidence is Devils Tower in Wyoming, U.S.A., a great geological stub ... rising out of the rolling lowlands on all sides, four hundred meters of towering igneous rock that may have formed as a volcanic plug, rising out of the ground as the sedimentary stone that surrounded it slowly eroded away. Or so they want you to think. See its intricate hexagonal columns, curving up in a way that looks almost organic. See the perfection of its sheared-flat summit. Doesn’t this remind you of something?

For several minutes, our guide to this new reality shows us images of mesas, plateaux, flat-topped mountains, chunks of isolated cliffs, placed next to pictures of astoundingly similar-looking tree-stumps. Every time there’s the same challenge. ‘Name ten differences.’ You can’t. ‘There are only two differences: material and size.’ These things look the same: they are the same thing. 

Sam Kriss

The Giant's Causeway and volcanoes are also cited as evidence for a theory that also manges to cram in a nuclear war which took place in the 19th Century, but somehow escaped the notice of closed-minded conventional historians.

You'd have thought that, in 2017, the human race already has all the alternative facts it can handle but, with most mainstream politics rapidly melting into a fever dream of post-truth weirdness, I guess the tinfoil hat brigade just had to up their game, or be out-weirded by the new normal.

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