Seeing Mermaids (2015)

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This article was originally published at the defunct Insight blog at Skeptic.com on June 9, 2015. An archived version is available here.

“The Vision of Columbus” after de Bry, as it appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine No. 389, October 1882. (Daniel Loxton’s collection.)

Mermaids—the topic of my Junior Skeptic 48 story (bound inside Skeptic Vol. 18, No. 3)—are usually considered fantastical, purely imaginary creatures. (Or, at least, they were until Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel aired their infamous 2012 and 2013 documentary-style hoaxes Mermaids: The Body Found and Mermaids: The New Evidence. These hoaxes are discussed in detail in the same issue of Junior Skeptic.) Read more

The Plane Truth: Noted Skeptic’s Newly Published (Posthumous) Book About Flat Earth Theories (2015)

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This article was originally published at the defunct Insight blog at Skeptic.com on Nov 19, 2015. An archived version is available here.

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 final work of skeptical scholarship by the late Robert J. Schadewald (1943–2000), has now been prepared for publication and released online for free. You can read the book in its web version here, where you also find the EPUB ebook version available for download.

During his life, Bob Schadewald was the world’s leading skeptical expert on the history of flat-Earth advocacy. The pseudoscientific notion that the Earth is a flat disk may seem as quaint as it is preposterous, but so-called “Zetetic Astronomy” enjoyed a surprisingly strong period of public prominence in the UK and US during the 19th century—attracting attention from debunkers of the period such as Alfred Russel Wallace1 (see Skeptic Vol. 20, No. 3) and Richard Anthony Proctor, and prompting reflections from later thinkers including George Bernard Shaw and George Orwell. During the 20th century the relative sophistication of Zetetic Astronomy collapsed into muddled conspiracy theories, parody, and ultra-fundamentalist Biblical literalism; nevertheless, flat-Earth advocacy continues to this day. Read more

The Problematic Process of Cryptozoologification (2015)

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This article was originally published at the defunct Insight blog at Skeptic.com on Aug 31, 2015. An archived version is available here.

Color photo of a totem in front of Royal British Columbia Museum

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. Carved in 1953 by Mungo Martin, David Martin, and Mildred Hunt. Thunderbird Park at the Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, BC, Canada. Photograph by Daniel Loxton)

Much of my skeptical research traces the historical pathways through which pseudoscientific and paranormal beliefs emerge and evolve over time. In particular, I’ve explored the cultural origins of allegedly genuine monsters such as Bigfoot (“cryptids”) for Junior Skeptic (the children’s section of Skeptic magazine) and Abominable Science!, my 2013 book with Donald Prothero.

My research has often led me to consider how folkloric phenomena are brought under the umbrella of cryptozoology (the largely pseudoscientific “study” of legendary, allegedly “hidden” animals). In this active process, fuzzy abstractions—fluid supernatural conceptions, diverse “saw something weird” events, stories, metaphors, and shifting myths—are distilled down into more-or-less concrete hypothetical “species” of cryptids. For want of a better term, I’ve started to think of this cultural crystallization process as “cryptozoologification.”1 And it’s a bit of a problem. When the mists of folklore are reified as the discrete objects of cryptozoological pursuit, something is not only lost, but actively discarded.

I’m by no means the first to raise that conceptual concern (and it’s the concept I really wish to promote here, not the imperfect neologism). Sharon Hill has recently taken up the topic (here and here), calling this “the illusion of facticity.” Hill riffs on Lake Monster Traditions: a Cross-Cultural Analysis, by Michel Meurger with Claude Gagnon (London: Fortean Times, 1988), which gives a great deal of critical attention to this “scientification of folklore.” (This is surely one of the most important cryptozoology books ever written—a road map for a type of folklorically-aware skeptical approach I’ve sometimes called “post-cryptid cryptozoology.”) Read more

From the Skeptical Literature: Thomas Ady on the Role of Mental Illness in Witchcraft Confessions (2014)

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This (lightly edited) article was originally published at the defunct Insight blog at Skeptic.com on Sept 28, 2014. An archived version is available here.

Thomas Ady was an English doctor and critical exposer of both persecutions for alleged witchcraft and the type of faux-paranormal scams, such as fortunetelling, that sometimes led to witchcraft trials. He was especially critical of the use of torture (including sleep deprivation1) in those trials. But some victims of witch trials confessed without coercion. Ady reflected on those poor souls as follows in his 1655 treatise, A Candle in the Dark:

Some indeed have in a melancholly distraction of minde confessed voluntarily, yea and accused themselves to bee Witches, that could do, and had done such strange things, and wonders by the help of the Devil; but mark well their distemper, and you shall finde that they are deeply gone by infirmity of body affecting the minde, whereby they conceit such things as never were, or can be, as is often proved by experience among Physicians, many of those dying in a very short time, (although they be not put to death) except they be cured by the Physician; and truly if such Doctrins had not been taught to such people formerly, their melancholly distempers had not had any such objects to work upon, but who shall at last answer for their confession, but they that have infected the mindes of common people with such devillish doctrins, whereby some are instigated to accuse their poor Neighbours of impossibilities contrary to the Scriptures, and some drawn to confess lyes, and impossibilities contrary to Christian light?2

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A Rope of Sand (2015)

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This article was originally published at the defunct Insight blog at Skeptic.com on Sept 8, 2015. An archived version is available here.

Astronomer Richard Anthony Proctor. For general details about Proctor’s life and career, read this brief biographical sketch published in 1874.

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 probe mysteries and push back against paranormal fraud. Throughout history, those skeptics have repeatedly reached for the same tactics, claimed the same (scant few) rewards, and faced the same challenges of burnout and cynicism.

English astronomer and science popularizer Richard Anthony Proctor (1837–1888) makes an interesting case study. He weighed in as a skeptic against (surprisingly popular) Flat Earth advocates (see Junior Skeptic 53), quackery, and a range of pseudoscientific ideas connected to astronomy. His debunking book Myths and Marvels of Astronomy was a 19th century version of Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy. Originally published in 1877 (my copy dates to 1880), Myths and Marvels of Astronomy is available to read for free in several editions online. Read more

Horse-Laughs, the Rapture, and Ticking Bombs (2011)

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This (lightly edited) article was originally published at the defunct Skepticblog.org on May 24, 2011. An archived version is available here.

As most of you will have heard, Christian radio mogul Harold Camping’s predicted “Rapture” came and went on May 21st without so much as a trumpet sounding. This failure of prophecy unfolded to a clamour of Tweets and parties from the nonbelievers’ side of the aisle. There’s something undeniably funny about a confident prediction unfulfilled, and Camping’s prediction couldn’t have been much more confident: “We know without any shadow of a doubt it is going to happen.”

Still, personally, I had a hard time enjoying the circus. It seemed ghoulish to crack wise when so many hopes and dreams — and lives — hung in the balance. Belief, as we skeptics know all too well, cuts across lines. Beliefs unite the clever and the dull, the young and the old, the righteous and the wicked. Camping’s fear-mongering meant good people sold homes, quit jobs, broke up families, or spent the college money on apocalyptic billboards. I worried especially about the kids lying awake that week waiting for the end of the world, just as I worry about the kids suffering artificial, unnecessary terror over 2012. Read more

Russell’s Hedgehogs and Hirst’s Shark (2012)

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This article was originally published at the defunct Skepticblog.org on Feb 7, 2012. An archived version is available here.

Today I’d like to share a piece of good practical advice from philosopher Bertrand Russell—and to share some reflections that touch upon it.

To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.

If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don’t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet.1

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You Have Been Poked By God (2011)

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This article was originally published at the defunct Skepticblog.org on June 7, 2011. An archived version is available here.

Cover of Isaac Asimov's autobiography "I, Asimov"Skeptical pioneer Isaac Asimov (a founder of CSICOP, now called CSI) produced such a staggering library of books (over 500!) that his multiple autobiographies were merely punctuation. I have three Asimov autobiographies in the Junior Skeptic library. Sometimes, just for fun, I pull one down at random, flip it open, and read the first two pages my eye happens to fall upon. Each time I do this, I inevitably

  1. read something funny;

  2. learn something interesting;

  3. and, feel a blog post spring ready-made to mind.

This certainly happened when I read Asimov’s tale of his personal experience of psychic premonition or divine intervention — in the form of a literal poke on the shoulder.1 Read more

Rescuing People from Aliens (2012)

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This article was originally published at the defunct Skepticblog.org on Jan 24, 2012 An archived version is available here.

Cover of Susan Clancy's book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (2005)

Working on refinements to my upcoming cryptozoology book with Skepticblog’s own Don Prothero (due out later in 2012) gave me a chance yesterday to dip back into Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy’s fascinating 2005 book about her studies of alien abductees, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. I thought I might share a couple of passages from the book here, partly because they dovetail so nicely with my own “Reasonableness of Weird Things” arguments.

Clancy’s area of primary interest is not skeptical investigation of paranormal claims, but false memory. To perform an ”honest broker” service as thorough and reliable guides to the evidence on paranormal topics, skeptical investigators are ethically obliged to seriously consider the (unlikely) possibility of paranormal phenomena. In her own work with abductees, Clancy’s obligations were different. She felt justified in taking it pretty much for granted that her subjects had not been kidnapped by space aliens. Abductees were, for Clancy, a proxy group to allow her to examine questions related to a separate population’s “recovered” memories of childhood sexual abuse. Read more

Carl Sagan’s Crazy Train (2012)

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This article was originally published at the defunct Skepticblog.org on Oct 2, 2012. An archived version is available here. (Questo post è disponibile anche in italiano nella versione online di Query, la rivista ufficiale del CICAP (Comitato Italiano per il Controllo delle Affermazioni sul Paranormale). Potete leggerlo qui.)

Steven Novella’s post last week on the complex topic of the ethics of speech was inspired by consideration of the ethics of “colloquial use of the term ‘crazy.’” This is an area of interest to me. I have often argued both for professional restraint in the things skeptics say and the manner in which we say them; and, for the importance of ongoing conversation on the ethics and efficacy of skeptical practice. But Novella’s post also had excellent timing, as I was already planning on touching on some of the thorny ethics at the intersection between skepticism and mental illness. Read more