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CSICon 2018: Meet the First-Timers
At the opening reception for this year's CSICon conference, the audience was polled to ask who was attending their first CSICon. A very large number of hands went up, initiating sounds of surprise,...
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Vampire Facials
Source: Instagram There is a new celebrity fad: vampire facials. Have you seen the pictures of Kim Kardashian West after her vampire facial, showing her face spattered with blood and covered with tiny...
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How We Believe
Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Convictions Are So Compelling. By James E. Alcock. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. 2018. ISBN: 9781633884038. 638 pp. In James E. Alcock’s classic 1995...
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Diving into the VAERS Dumpster
Vaccines are unquestionably one of the greatest triumphs of modern medicine. Smallpox was the deadliest scourge in human history, responsible for 300 million to 500 million deaths in the twentieth...
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The Ecomodernists
Courtesy of NASA Scientists expect this year globally to be the fourth-hottest on record, with the only warmer years being the three previous ones. Since 2001, we have lived on a planet that has...
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Arkansas’s White River Monster: Very Real, but What Was It?
Arkansas’s White River holds claim to a “monster” that has been said to have appeared intermittently for a century or more. Its reality is defended by cryptozoologists and skeptics alike (I am both),...
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The Salton Sea Flat Earth Test: When Skeptics Meet Deniers
Wikipedia — The Flammarion engraving (1888) depicts a traveler who arrives at the edge of a flat Earth and sticks his head through the firmament. Back in the 1970s when organized science-based...
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Essential Oils: One Weird Workshop
Source: Max Pixel Continuing education is part of most professional jobs. Having been a social worker for twenty years and an elementary education teacher for the past sixteen years, I have...
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Arthur J. Cramp: The Quackbuster Who Professionalized American Medicine
Source: Find a Grave In the first decade of the twentieth century, an enterprising man in Grand Rapids, Michigan, named A.W. Van Bysterveld claimed that he could “locate the cause of your aches and...
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Like a Bad Penny: More Superstitions We Can’t Shake
Source: Pixabay The holiday season is upon us, and you know what that means: eating foods you don’t really like because you’ve always done it, seeing relatives you’ve successfully avoided for eleven...
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UFOs: Why Humanoid Aliens? Why So Varied?
Here’s what we know: People report seeing things in the sky they cannot explain. Reported objects come in all shapes and sizes: saucers and triangles and cigar shapes and everything in between....
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The Not-So-Haunted Museum of Zak Bagans
On the eve of CSIcon 2018, my wife, Donna, and I arrived in Las Vegas excited to begin a week of learning, networking, and the pure enjoyment of hanging out with friends—both old and new. After...
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UFO Identification Process
The important things to remember about UFOs are, first, that they are just alleged sightings that are unidentified—that is, they are not proof of anything—and, second, that eyewitnesses make...
View ArticleThe Top 10 Woo of 2018 [Part I]
2018. The year brought viral moments and memes like the “In my Feelings” challenge, BBQ Becky, and “is this a pigeon.” It also brought us breathtaking, groundbreaking, and at times disturbing science...
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The Top 10 Woo of 2018 [Part II]
This post picks up where I left off last week with the first five in the top ten woo news stories of 2018. Check out the last five here. Do you think I left out the wooiest 2018 woo? Feel free to hit...
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Drinking the Blood of Bats Is a Bad (and Batty) Idea
In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the widespread medical use of animal products such as bear bile, rhino horn, tiger bone, and pangolin scales has resulted in cruelty to animals and has...
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D. Gary Young (1949–2018), Diploma Mill Naturopath and Promoter of Essential...
Donald Gary Young (aka Don Gary Young, D. Gary Young, and Gary Young), the founder (in 1994), chairman of the board, and former CEO of the Lehi, Utah–based multilevel marketing company Young Living...
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A Closer Look at the Bela Lugosi “Haunted” Mirror
In this column, we will be investigating the first of the “big four” cursed objects in Zak Bagans’s Haunted Museum (see the previous column): the Bela Lugosi cursed mirror. The atmosphere was set as...
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Squaring the Skeptic with Celestia Ward (Part 1)
The cohosts of the Squaring the Strange podcast. In May 2018, Susan Gerbic published an article about her trip to New Mexico to speak about the Guerrilla Skeptics project for New Mexicans for Science...
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The Dibbuk Box
In this installment of my column, we’re going to focus on an item that I’ve wanted to write about for some time: the Dibbuk Box. As luck would have it, this is another one of the “Big Four” haunted...
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