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George Orwell Versus the Flat Earth
Cover of Junior Skeptic 53, bound inside Skeptic Vol. 19, No. 4. Subscribe to Skeptic In recent months I’ve been hard at work on a three-part series of Junior Skeptic articles exploring fringe theories...
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Willie Soon Be Gone?
In the past few weeks, there has been a tremendous furor over the disclosure of the ethics of a noted climate denier, Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon. He has been one of the “stars” of the climate denial...
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Newly Released Challenge to Sykes’ Yeti DNA Findings
Illustration by Daniel Loxton. Originally published in Junior Skeptic 16, bound inside Skeptic Vol. 10, No. 2 (2003). When Oxford geneticist Dr. Bryan Sykes decided to tackle the topic of Bigfoot, the...
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The Masked Debunkery of Captain Disillusion!
“Captain Disillusion,” who is sometimes known by his alter ego Alan Melikdjanian. (Image by Susan Gerbic, via Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported...
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A Token Thought for the Ancient Seeds of Science
Coins entered the world of ancient Greece by the 6th century BCE, shortly followed by the first material philosophers. (Image by Classical Numismatic Group, Inc., via Wikimedia Commons, used under...
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Annus Mirabilis
Alfred Wegener’s 1915 reconstruction of the drifting of the continents from a supercontinent of Pangea to today. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons). Every year of the 20th century included many scientific...
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Stranger Than Fiction: A Review of the HBO documentary, Going Clear:...
Promotional poster for Going Clear (2015), from HBO Documentary Films “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, start a religion.” —attributed to L. Ron Hubbard On March 29,...
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Loch Ness Silliness
Order the hardcover from Shop Skeptic Order the hardcover from Amazon Order the Kindle Edition Order the Apple iBook The legend of the Loch Ness monster is one of the most popular and enduring of all...
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The Eruption that Created Frankenstein
Order the hardcover from Shop SkepticOrder the hardcover from AmazonOrder the Amazon Kindle EditionOrder the audiobook from AmazonOrder the audiobook from iTunes The year 1815 was an important one in...
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I Get Mail: Cryptids, Smoke, and Fire
In my role as the Editor of Junior Skeptic (and now INSIGHT) I quite often receive email from media, researchers, and general readers about topics I’ve covered. My schedule does not always allow me to...
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Quantum Leaps
Deepak Chopra in 2006. (Image by Mitchell Aidelbaum, via Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Cropped.) In the Middle Ages scholars drew...
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Reflections on Earth Day
Earth, the “pale blue dot”, the tiny green planet in a vast cosmos. It is our only home, and if we foul it, we will never get another chance. (Image created by Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit...
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Double-Exposure in the Back Seat
You can find it reproduced on hundreds of paranormal themed websites and in many ghost books. The photo is usually accompanied by a short bit of text that describes the scenario. Mrs. Mabel Chinnery...
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Is “Brontosaurus” Back? Not So Fast!
Skulls of different sauropods, showing the distinction between the long-snouted diplodocines,and the short-faced brachiosaurs and camarasaurs. (From Tschopp et al., 2015, Fig. 1) The past few weeks...
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Celebrating an Unbelievable Decade of Skepticality
Today marks the 10-year anniversary of the first full episode of the very first skeptical podcast, Skepticality—The Official Podcast of Skeptic Magazine (by a nose! The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe...
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Carl Sagan and the Dangers of Skepticism
This is an excerpt from Junior Skeptic 50 (published in 2014 inside Skeptic magazine Vol. 19, No. 1), which is a ten-page biography of Sagan emphasizing his work in scientific skepticism. A different...
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Botanist Makes “Literary Discovery of the Century”
Shakespeare, is that you? Detail from the title page of John Gerard’s Herball During the past couple of days, media outlets have been running stories claiming that the only authentic portrait of...
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History and Hyman’s Maxim (Part One)
Ray Hyman demonstrates “psychic” spoon bending in 2012. (Image by Susan Gerbic. [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.)In a post last year called “The Forgetfulness of Skepticism,” I discussed one of...
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Monkey Business
The spider monkey, a typical platyrrhine. (Image by Lea Maimone, via Wikimedia Commons. “Geoffroy’s Spider Monkey [Ateles geoffroyi].” Used under CC BY-SA 2.5 license.).Monkeys are such fixtures of the...
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Alternative Medicine Critic Wallace Sampson Has Passed Away at Age 85
Dr. Wallace Sampson speaking about acupuncture in a television interview. Watch video below. I’m sad to note the recent passing of a longtime leading critic of alternative medicine, Dr. Wallace Ira...
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