The Bizarre Quniverse of QAnon Conspiracies

Featured Image credit: Julian Leshay / Shutterstock.com   This article was completed well before the events of January 6 at the U.S. Capitol. QAnon followers were among the leading participants in the assault. In the 1999 film The Matrix, the entire plot pivots on a choice that Neo must make. He must choose between a …

What is truth? You can speak of moral truths and aesthetic truths, but I’m not concerned with those here, important as they may be. By truth I shall mean the kind of truth that a commission of inquiry or a jury trial is designed to establish. I hold the view that scientific truth is of …

After a series of stinging defeats in the U.S. courts, one branch of biblical creationism mutated into a neocreationist movement known as intelligent design (ID) in the late 1980s. The selective pressure that led to this evolution was a single line in the 1987 Edwards decision by Supreme Court Justice William Brennan that emphasized differing …

I was at an ethics lecture when the professor stated that philosophy studies what science does not. This was when I became aware of the philosophical version of Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of nonoverlapping magisteria (Gould 1997). This was a little surprising because the lecture was on the ethics of technology, but it was not …

Charles H. Jones does not like the idea that philosophy and science are separate magisteria, analogous to the sharp separation between religion and science once proposed by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Well, I agree with Jones: science and philosophy aren’t separate magisteria, and I actually wrote critically of Gould’s idea in the pages of …

Investigations into the accuracy of psychic detectives in locating missing persons are typically conducted by skeptics after the fact. One benefit to examining psychic detective information is that it’s often falsifiable (when and if the missing person is recovered). A Tarot reader or medium, by contrast, may give a client generic messages about how dead …

When podcaster/journalist Stephanie Kemmerer proposed our cover article on QAnon, I knew little about the phenomenon except for occasional mentions. Once she researched, reported, and submitted it (she interviewed former QAnon followers, and her article by then had expanded to a two-part series), I read the result, “Life, the Quniverse, and Everything,” in disturbed amazement. …

During the pandemic, many of the “normal” library functions of research, teaching, education, reference, etc., have slowed down significantly. As a result, we here at the Center for Inquiry Libraries have had an opportunity to catch up on many of the functions that take a back seat to other time-sensitive duties. One such item was …

It’s often said that journalism is the first draft of history. I hope that’s true because I possess, in seven full-size filing cabinets in my garage, an unvarnished account of twentieth-century science as observed and reported by three generations of science writers—my grandfather Howard H. Blakeslee; my father, Alton L. Blakeslee (both science editors of …

Robert L. Park, American physicist and noted critic of pseudoscience (and fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), died April 29, 2020, at the age of eighty-nine. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Texas, Park got his PhD in physics from Brown University. He spent most of a decade working as a …

In November 2020, state biologists surveying wild bighorn sheep by helicopter in San Juan County, Utah, noticed something odd in a remote sandstone canyon: a triangular metal pillar about ten feet tall. They later visited the curiosity on foot and took photos, soon spawning international headlines and internet buzz. Comparisons to the obelisk in the …

History is the arbiter of controversy. —Lord Acton The prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has released its findings into what sickened dozens of American Embassy diplomats in Cuba starting in late 2016 (dubbed “Havana Syndrome”). The panel reached no definitive conclusion but found that pulsed radiofrequency (RF) radiation, a.k.a. directed microwave energy, was the …

On Christmas morning 2020 in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, a bomb inside a motor home detonated. Minutes earlier, the RV had been emitting a voice warning passersby to get away, because it would soon explode. When it did, Anthony Warner was inside and was killed instantly. Police recovered a vehicle identification number from the debris and …

American writer Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?)—in his collection of mystery and horror tales, Can Such Things Be? (1893)—included a trilogy of stories of incredible disappearances. They are not mere accounts of missing persons such as those that police and private detectives are involved in every day. Instead, in each instance the disappearance has elements of the …

Is hypnosis for real? Do people actually go into a trance, or is it just a matter of imagination and role playing? Some people swear by it. One website proclaims that your mind power is limitless: The highly focused, yet deeply relaxed state of mind achieved via hypnosis yields many great benefits, digging to the …

(Cover Image Credit: Pixabay)   Not long ago, I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw a video of people in Perth, Australia, gathering in small crowds outdoors, no face coverings in sight. From my perspective in the United States, where an average of over 2,000 people a day were dying of COVID-19, it was …

Q: Have you done an investigation into pet acupuncture? What’s the story behind that? —M. Downey A: Pet acupuncture is not a topic that has gotten much specific attention from skeptics. It’s not widely practiced among professional veterinarians, though it does have its adherents. Many fields are inherently sketchy, acupuncture and psychic phenomena among them. …

Downfall of a Charlatan I was disappointed with David Marks’s long and interesting article on the downfall of Hans Eysenck (November/December 2020) for two reasons. First, he criticizes Eysenck for his “credulous defense of parapsychology.” But parapsychology is a legitimate field of science, even if the phenomena it seeks may never be found. It is …

Both in my classrooms and in public forums, I have seen most discussions of the relative merits of evolution and creationism falter due to confusion over use of the terms theory and fact. Creationists try to challenge the validity of evolution by asserting that it is merely a theory, while evolutionists counter by asserting that …

My friend and colleague Scott O. Lilienfeld died on September 30, 2020, far too soon, at the age of fifty-nine (see obituary in January/February 2021 Skeptical Inquirer, 10–11). Scott wrote an amazing twenty-five articles for Skeptical Inquirer and in total more than 350 articles before his untimely death. Readers can come to appreciate his many …

Deej. 2017. 72 min. Directed by Robert Rooy. Executive Producers: Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan.   High school and college classrooms around the United States were offered a free virtual screening of the movie Deej for Disability Awareness Month in October 2020. The film was marketed as a Peabody Award–winning, Emmy-nominated film on autism, adoption, …