Hyped Hollywood Horrors

The 1970s were a heyday for blockbuster horror films and franchises, including Alien, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Phantasm, Carrie, and many more. Although it did not reach the success of movies such as The Omen, The Exorcist, Halloween, and The Amityville Horror, a paranormal horror film titled The Entity was a modest hit. The “true …

I received a call one night from my colleague Ben Radford asking if I’d be interested in working on a project with him. He was working on a piece concerning the Doris Bither haunting, better known as The Entity case (see the preceding article). While focusing on the facts behind the story, he asked if …

If recent films such as The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It are any indication, there’s no shortage of fascination with movies about demons and demonic possession. Perhaps looking to follow up on the success of their Insidious film franchise, last year Blumhouse Studio announced it would be teaming up with Morgan Creek Entertainment …

Just north of Columbia, South Carolina, lies the little-known town of Winnsboro. Often called the “Charleston of the Upcountry,” this quaint small town is rich in historical tradition. Victorian buildings are scattered throughout the city, and much of the business district is listed in the National Historic Register. One can view the town clock, visit …

Vaccination confers almost total protection to all adults fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. Because over 650,000 persons have died in the United States alone from this pandemic, it becomes vital to fully understand the phenomenon of vaccine refusal. Recent news sources reported that COVID-19 cases are rising in almost every state, resulting in increasing …

You may bend over backward to defend your pet “alternative” remedy—herbal medicines, acupuncture, Chinese traditional medicine, tribal witchdoctor cures—whatever it is. If the evidence supports it, your pet remedy deserves to be embraced by orthodox medicine. But homeopathy is in a class of its own. Not only does it not work, but—with a reservation to …

With an admittedly grossly underestimated death toll of more than half a million, Brazil is one of the countries hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. It is also one in which the catastrophic effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus can be attributed, with little space for controversy, to the adoption of public policies based on pseudoscience …

Skeptical sniffing at the seeming silliness of lowbrow topics such as Bigfoot, UFOs, or conspiracy theories is neither wise nor productive. When the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) was first formed in 1976, its mission was partly to combat popular culture myths such as astrology, psychics, and UFOs. Whether …

The level of public acceptance of evolution in the United States is now solidly above the halfway mark, according to a new study based on a series of national public opinion surveys conducted over the past thirty-five years. “From 1985 to 2010, there was a statistical dead heat between acceptance and rejection of evolution,” commented …

Climate Change 2021, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), provides a more clear, precise, and dire view of the Earth’s warming climate than the IPCC’s most recent previous assessment in 2013. During that time, multiple lines of evidence have led to improved understanding of human influences on the climate, including …

Given this year’s UFO flap (see the “UFOs Hit the News” special section in our September/October 2021 issue), it is hardly surprising that the latest Gallup Poll shows belief that UFOs involve alien spacecraft from other planets is up markedly from 2019. Nevertheless, half of Americans remain skeptical. News media throughout the spring and early …

Steven Weinberg, an American theoretical physicist, Nobel laureate (1979), and member of the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) died on July 23, 2021, at the age of eighty-eight. Weinberg was a highly regarded scientist with principal contributions to astrophysics and high energy physics throughout his career. He was honored through …

The world has lost a towering figure of American freethought, a man who was both on the cutting edge of secular humanist thought as well as the foremost caretaker of its rich history. The entire Center for Inquiry (CFI) family is anguished by the sudden and unexpected death of our colleague, teacher, and friend Tom …

This is the first of a new regular column.—Eds. Rudy Giuliani is full of bull. Whether he is promoting bogus cures for COVID-19 or spreading the Big Lie about election fraud, the disgraced former mayor seems to delight in “throwing a fake”—his preferred phrase for dishonesty in the political arena. Giuliani seems to think that …

It has been given various descriptors—including “a perfect crime” and “a classic locked-room mystery”—but when I heard of the case and learned that mystery writer Raymond Chandler had designated it an “impossible murder” (Hunt and Thompson 2019, 37), it seemed to have my name written on it. After all, fellow investigative writer Massimo Polidoro once …

Thanks to the COVID-19 vaccines, I recently had the opportunity to visit Paris, France, for the first time. In addition to the usual art museums and tourist spots, I approached the city with the goal of visiting some of its scientific and pseudoscientific points of interest. France has a proud history of achievement in science …

In 1912, the lawyer and amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson sent a letter to his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, head of geology at the prestigious British Museum. He told Woodward about a skull fragment he had found in a gravel pit near Piltdown Common, England. The fragment resembled the “Heidelberg Man”—a Neanderthal unearthed by workmen in …

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. …

Q: What do you know about the Bridgewater Triangle? I saw that the FX Network optioned a piece about it and planned a scripted series, which I’m not sure was developed. There are some stories here and there, but is anything active still happening? Is it worth doing a deep dig and trying to connect …

THE LEGENDS OF THE PYRAMIDS: Myths and Misconceptions about Ancient Egypt. Jason Colavito. Colavito researches the connections between science, pseudoscience, and speculative fiction. Ancient Egypt is perhaps the oldest and best example. He looks at “the way people imagined (and outright fabricated) Egyptian history from Alexander’s conquest in 322 BCE down to the present.” He …

Environmentalism and the Fringe Re: “Environmentalism and the Fringe” by David Mountain (July/August 2021). One crucial and pragmatic solution to human-induced environmental degradation is to slow population growth through voluntary family planning. The UN projects world population will reach 9.4–10.1 billion in 2050—achieving the lower end of that range would help us preserve the natural …

Once when asked about her name, Madonna replied, “I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name.” Although the life of a pop star and an investigative journalist are worlds apart, there are few who fit this quote as well as Mike Rothschild. In the conspiracy community, no surname is as detested …

True crime shows are not for everyone, but if you are a fan of the genre and a student of critical thinking, this docuseries is for you. It is dark, gritty, loaded with unexpected turns and twists, and is a fascinating historical window into British society in the 1970s. In focusing on one of the …