Category: The Practical Skeptic

On March 21, 2022, China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735, a 737, experienced a sudden and catastrophic event. Cruising normally at 29,000 feet, something happened to cause it to go into a steep dive. After hurtling downward for a minute, records show it briefly leveled off at 8,000 feet, then plunged again, even faster, before crashing …

How should skeptics treat Joe Rogan? Should we ignore him? Should we engage with him? Should we write long articles about him? If invited, should we go on his podcast? I first met Joe Rogan in May 2013. He was filming a TV show called Joe Rogan Questions Everything. It was a kind of fringe-science …

An oft-bemoaned reality of the world of skepticism is eloquently expressed in a popular quote attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” It is fitting that this quote both describes what this column is about—the viral nature of falsehood and the difficulty …

I’m not sure when I first noticed that the universe appeared to be sending me coded messages through Jeopardy!, but I know it never stopped, and it never will. I’m not mad. I will explain. Jeopardy!, for the tiny percentage of you who are unaware, is America’s favorite quiz show. Created in the 1970s and …

Over the past ten years, I’ve looked at over a thousand UFO photos and videos. They all share one fundamental problem: they are ambiguous. They’re not simply ambiguous in the sense of being unidentified; after all, the acronym stands for unidentified flying object. But they are ambiguous in that we cannot rule out mundane explanations. …

Editor’s note: With this issue we are pleased to welcome a new regular columnist, writer and investigator (and CSI Fellow) Mick West, creator of the Metabunk.org website and author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole. You might not think of the topic of UFOs as being a conspiracy theory. After all, who is allegedly conspiring? Are …