UFOs (or UAPs) Hit the News

Look to the skies! UFOs are trending again! In recent months, UFO interest has gained sufficient altitude to escape not only the immense gravity wells of Facebook and Twitter but even that dark credibility vacuum known as The History Channel. Serious though incomplete reporting has appeared in mainstream news media, including The New York Times, …

On April 30, the normally serious New Yorker dropped online a very misleading article titled “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously.” (UFO author Leslie Kean said that work on this story “has been underway for months,” which is quite surprising!) The article appeared in the May 10 printed edition of the New Yorker under …

Many scientists and skeptics expressed concern to us about the New Yorker article “The U.F.O. Papers” (in the May 10 printed edition). We know of at least two who submitted letters to the magazine about it. The New Yorker didn’t publish them, but here they are: Dear Editors: As an astronomer, educator, and a Fellow …

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have no doubt noticed that news media have been filled with gushing, uncritical articles proclaiming the glorious new reality of UFOs. On the right, we have Tucker Carlson on Fox News and the New York Post; on the left, we have the Washington Post and The …

The following statement and guide for media coverage of UFOs was issued June 3 and reissued June 25 (the day the Pentagon UFO report came out) by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer. It expresses concern about some of the recent “over-enthusiastic and uncritical coverage of UFO claims,” offers precautionary advice …

Since the 1960s, relativism about natural science has been a major trend in parts of the social sciences. Proponents of social constructivism, the strong program, deconstructionism, and postmodernism describe results from natural science as power-based social constructions rather than the currently best knowledge about the natural world. Critics have accused them of contributing to the …

Organized skepticism has a reputation for attracting physicists and psychologists. To test that notion, I grabbed the March/April 2021 Skeptical Inquirer and looked at the affiliations of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) Fellows and its Scientific and Technical Consultants listed on the inside covers. According to my count, about 20 percent of the total …

Pastor Jeremiah Johnson had three prophetic visions on October 20, 2020 (The Altar Global 2021a). The first was of the Los Angeles Dodgers winning the World Series that began on that day. The second was of Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. The third was of Donald Trump winning reelection. When the …

On June 15, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) released the first draft of its Global Alcohol Action Plan 2022–2030 to Strengthen Implementation of the Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol (WHO 2021). I’m all for reducing harmful alcohol use, but I was taken aback by the advisement that “appropriate attention should …

Every generation, it seems, must have its own UFO “flap.” (“That’s the technical term,” I once heard Carl Sagan wryly observe.) We had flaps in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s (the SI anthology The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Coverups, Prometheus Books, 1997, chronicled our coverage of that one). After a …

A lawsuit recently filed in the Supreme Court of Ghana seeks to ban the teaching in the Ghanaian public schools not only of evolution but also of the idea that Earth is in motion. Filed on November 24, 2020, the lawsuit apparently received no public attention until March 20, 2021, when Emmanuel Ebo Hawkson covered …

In a brisk seventy-five minutes, Neil deGrasse Tyson wasn’t able to cover all the biggest questions about the universe, as he does in his new book Cosmic Queries, or scores of popular topics that intrigue the public, as he does in Letters to an Astrophysicist, but nevertheless he did pretty well. In his Skeptical Inquirer …

Psychology professors Ivan W. Kelly and Don H. Saklofske have written and published online a new major critique of Western astrology. Their fifty-six-page paper, “Contemporary Western Astrology: A Philosophical Critique 2021,” is a thorough critical examination of the concepts and assumptions underlying most astrologers in the contemporary Western world (Europe and North America). Its focus …

Noted astronomer and skeptic Cornelis (Kees) de Jager died on May 27, 2021, at the age of 100. He was cofounder of the Dutch skeptical organization Skepsis and its first chairman from 1987 to 1997. He was a longtime fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. When Paul Kurtz spoke on January 12, 1987, with …

The free, online, open-source, introductory textbook Astronomy, published by the nonprofit OpenStax project at Rice University, has recently reached the milestone of having been read by over half a million students since it was published in 2017. The book was written by astronomers Andrew Fraknoi, David Morrison, and Sidney Wolff, with the help of about …

Look up “natural” ant repellents online, and you are bound to find cucumber listed as an easy home remedy to ant infestation. Is there any truth to this? A National Taiwan University entomologist, Prof. Matan Shelomi, discovered that there was no actual scientific evidence for or against this claim, so he decided to test it …

Among the borderlands of the paranormal, few exploits are stranger than those relating to supposed extraterrestrial phenomena. Take, for example, the fate of flying saucer writer Morris K. Jessup, who became entangled in various UFO conspiracy theories. Jessup led a life that threatened to become frustratingly comic, except that its mix of far-out alien claims …

On August 29, 2020, about 18,000 people gathered in Berlin, Germany, either denying the existence of COVID-19 or contesting decisions taken to contain it. Among the gatherers were conspiracy theorists of all sorts, chemtrail believers, followers of QAnon, anti-vaccination advocates, homeopaths, people like Robert Kennedy Jr., and right-wing extremists who, waving Third Reich flags, attempted …

Medical research studies can be divided into two types: observational and experimental. Observational studies simply observe the effect of a variable in a population. They can assess the strength of a relationship, for instance between dietary factors and disease. Are vegetarians less likely to develop cancer? Are patients treated with a new diabetes drug less …

Imagine you are about to buy a new home, and the real estate agent says, “I have some more information about the maintenance history of the house. Do you want to see it?” The question seems silly; of course you do. It’s a basic principle of economics and rational decision-making that when making a transaction …

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 …

Q: How does a tornado explain the finding of a single species in some falls of frogs? Surely, the aerodynamics of the lift might sort for weight but not for species and genus. —L. Coleman A: For millennia, people have reported a rare and strange phenomenon: a sudden rain of frogs—or fish or worms—from the …

Repairing the American Mind I was delighted to read Guy Harrison’s article espousing the need for critical thinking education (May/June 2021). On one count, however, he is thankfully wrong. At the college level, said education is not limited to “university philosophy courses.” For close to one hundred years, Speech Communication (or Communication Studies) Departments have …

A historian of science at Princeton University specializing in modern physics, Michael D. Gordin is also the author of The Pseudoscience Wars (2012), a book devoted to—in the words of its subtitle—Immanuel Velikovsky and the birth of the modern fringe. (David Morrison reviewed The Pseudoscience Wars in the March/April 2013 SI.) But, as the title …

Michael J. Behe is a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. With the publication twenty-five years ago of Darwin’s Black Box, Behe began to advance an argument against Darwin’s theory that evolutionary traits said to alter a species by natural selection typically consist of multiple component parts, resulting from separate genetic mutations …

I would normally ignore a book by a non-climate scientist promising “the truth about climate science that you aren’t getting elsewhere,” because such language is a red flag. But I’ve known the author of Unsettled, Steven Koonin, since I took his quantum mechanics course as a PhD student at Caltech in the 1970s. He’s smart …