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Dark Matter and Periodic Mass Extinctions? Not So Fast!
The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. —Thomas Henry Huxley In recent weeks, physicist Lisa Randall has been promoting her new book, Dark Matter and the...
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Uncovering Archaeology Fantasies
When I started the podcast MonsterTalk, an official podcast of Skeptic Magazine, one of our earliest episodes was going to be about “giants.” I didn’t know what angle I wanted to take on the topic...
View ArticleIs It Irrational to Play the Lottery?
With the recent Powerball mania I thought it would be a good time to talk about how to tell a sucker bet from a fair bet, and whether playing the lottery is a rational behavior. Whenever the lottery...
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Good Grief, Skip! Murder, Mourning, or Anthropomorphism?
Giving Skippy human like expressions and agency was more fantasy than fact. If you’re over the age of thirty and grew up in Australia, there’s a good chance you know who Skippy is. This famous...
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Taking a Shot at the Boot Hill Ghost
In the online world of allegedly paranormal photos, you will find one referred to as the Boot Hill Ghost. In this modern photo (taken in 1996) a man in the foreground stands in Tombstone Arizona’s...
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Vikings Exhibition at Discovery Times Square: Setting History Straight-ish
Entrance to Vikings Exhibit, Field Museum. Last year, I had the opportunity to visit a Vikings exhibition at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. I had been invited to Chicago to give a...
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The Discovery of Richard III’s Grave and the Fallibility of Memory
Richard III’s tomb at Leicester Cathedral. Photo by Isananni One year ago, Richard III, one of England’s most notorious kings, was reburied at Leicester Cathedral after a series of celebrations and...
View ArticleBigfoot Versus the Quest for World Peace?
For the entire history of scientific skepticism, folks in our weird and wonderful little field have heard two criticisms offered with metronomic regularity from people who are “skeptical of the...
View ArticleFringe Claims: Unified by Neglect, Structural Similarity, and Direct...
A recent Scientific American blog post raised a very tedious and very old complaint about scientific skepticism—in essence, “Paranormal and pseudoscientific claims are trivial. Why don’t you do...
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The Complexity of Alien Abduction and the Multidisciplinary Nature of Fringe...
Image by Daniel Loxton with Jim W.W. Smith and Jason LoxtonIn my last post I explained that the teeming menagerie of seemingly dissimilar fringe claims studied by skeptics are unified by the neglect of...
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Science Affirmers
Order the book from Shop Skeptic In this blog and in my book Reality Check, I’ve frequently complained about science-denying politicians pushing policies which are in direct conflict with scientific...
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A New Ice Age? No, Bad Journalism Run Amok
Order the book from shop.skeptic.com A few weeks ago, the internet was abuzz with claims that scientists were predicting a “new Ice Age” around 2030. Many media outlets ran misleading pictures of...
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New Facts Concerning Goddard Squadron Photo
This post continues Blake’s exploration of the “Goddard’s Squadron Ghost” photo. Read his first post on the topic, “Should Goddard’s Squadron Drop Dead Fred?” (published February 2, 2015). Squadron...
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Pilgrimage to Bigfoot Country
Order the hardcover from Shop Skeptic Order the hardcover from Amazon Order the Kindle Edition Order the Apple iBook Last month I was doing geologic field work in northern California, and I had the...
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One Toke Over The Line, Sweet Shakespeare
So stoned he doesn’t realize his quill is nowhere near the paper. There is brand new evidence that Shakespeare was a pothead! This exciting story has appeared on the websites of TIME, the Los Angeles...
View ArticleResolving Conflicts in Findings: Vaccine Promotion is Tricky
A few months ago I wrote about the psychology of vaccine denial. In the post I discussed two publications, one of which (Nyhan, et al.) found: Corrective information reduced misperceptions about the...
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The Problematic Process of Cryptozoologification
How did the traditional character of the cannibal ogress Dzunuk’wa come to be claimed by cryptozoologists as a depiction of their hypothesized “Bigfoot” cryptid species? (Kwakwaka’wakw heraldic pole....
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A Rope of Sand
If my explorations of skeptical history have revealed an overall theme, it is that things don’t change that much. Always there are scoundrels, scams, and misapprehensions; always there are those who...
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The “Mandela Effect”
Former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa met with US President George W. Bush in the Oval Office in 2005—and yet, according to some people’s memories, Mandela died two decades earlier. (White...
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Tony Ortega’s Scientology Book Tour
(Photo credit: Jim Veihdeffer) Tony Ortega returned to his former stomping grounds in Phoenix on his book tour for The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology Tried to Destroy Paulette...
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I Had a Skeptic "Win"
View the video version of this discussion on YouTube. I had a skeptic “win.” That is, I produced content partially inspired by someone’s misconception; this same someone saw my content, and then...
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The 10 Percent Brain Myth
This is an excerpt from Junior Skeptic 37 (published in 2010 inside Skeptic magazine Vol. 15, No. 4), which is a quick ten-page tour of the “Top Ten Busted Myths.” Junior Skeptic is written for...
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The Plane Truth: Noted Skeptic’s Newly Published (Posthumous) Book About Flat...
Explore Bob Schadewald’s final project, a book on the topic of his most specialized area of skeptical expertise: Flat Earth theories. I’m very pleased to learn that The Plane Truth, the unfinished...
View ArticleSo… Who ARE You Gonna Call?
Outside of Junior Skeptic (my primary ongoing project) a surprising amount of my professional output—most of my blogging, stage appearances, op-eds (PDF), and interviews—is given over to the oddly...
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I Don’t Know What You Mean
Painting by Daniel Loxton, c.1999. Acrylic on canvas. 24″x36″. The journal Judgment and Decision Making has stirred considerable interest with a recent paper titled “On the Reception and Detection of...
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The Century-Long Fight Against American Quackery
A typical advertisement for a fraudulent mail order cancer “cure,” highlighted in the American Medical Association’s Nostrums and Quackery (1912). This summer, I spent a week in Chicago examining the...
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Confessions of a Skeptical Marketer
Every job has its moral dilemmas. There’s the bus driver who must drop passengers in questionable neighborhoods. The theater cashier who isn’t allowed to say, “You really want to see that stinker?”...
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Astonishing Legends, Questionable Facts
Drunken Owl Wine Bottle Holder (Photo © 2014 Joseph Oliphint Photography. Image used by permission of Rodney Brazil at HomeWetBar.com) A small percentage of the population self-identifies as...
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Is the Earth Flat?
Recent news stories,1 celebrity endorsements, and Google search trends2 have highlighted an apparently growing conspiracy theory belief that the Earth is not a globe, but instead a flat disc....
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The Skeptical Virtue of Seriously Just Being Quiet
This post is something of a personal reflection. If you’re looking for some straight up debunking, my latest is here. Recently I attended a dinner party as the guest of a new friend among people who’ve...
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