The Supernatural Stories That Mirror Our Realities

The desire to conform to often-misguided cultural norms—or even outright misinformation—was highlighted beautifully in the popular Broadway-show-turned-movie Wicked as it explored the parallels in how this journey to fit in can change us. Both the film and the stage show do an excellent job of showcasing how going against the grain can be immensely challenging …

Since its premiere in 2016, Stranger Things has become a pop culture phenomenon. Set in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, during the 1980s, the show chronicles the adventures of a group of teenage friends as they uncover the dark secrets hidden below the surface of their quiet town. What begins as a desperate search …

The second episode of the Netflix docuseries Encounters (“Believers”) features the mass UFO sighting and close encounter of the third kind alleged to have occurred at Ariel School in Zimbabwe on September 16, 1994. We hear the familiar description from some of the now-adult witnesses of seeing a glinting light beyond their playground, which some …

Arguably both a legend and an embarrassment in the martial arts world, “Count Rafael Dante,” the self-proclaimed “world’s deadliest man,” is best known today for flashy comic book ads hawking a mail order booklet that promises readers will “fear no man” and learn “Dim Mak, the kung fu death touch.” Born in 1939 as John …

The study of human evolution has a checkered past. The field was politicized almost immediately after the first discovery of Neanderthal fossils, with European nationalism pushing each country to produce fossils establishing their importance in human evolutionary history. But there were thoughtful scientific controversies as well. The earliest generation of paleoanthropologists were blustery physicians and …

Despite their commitment to critical thinking and evidence-based approaches to solving problems, some otherwise very clear-thinking skeptics occasionally promote some very odd views about the day-to-day practice of science that would come as a surprise to most scientists and philosophers of science. Claim #1: Distinguishing between Science and Pseudoscience Is Easy Some skeptics are quick …

When I sat down to rewatch the first two Now You See Me films ahead of the third installment, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, I decided this time that I wasn’t going to watch them like a casual viewer. I approached the films through the eyes of a professional magician with a criminal …

An adage in education states that just because we teach something does not mean students learn it. As teachers, we must determine why they do not learn the material. In post-Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan, where I taught for four years, the answer to that question was complicated. Educational lending (a.k.a. transfer) is the process by …

One hundred years ago, a substitute teacher named John T. Scopes agreed to help put the tiny town of Dayton, Tennessee, on the map by standing trial for violating a new state law that banned the teaching of evolution. It worked. The trial became the first American courtroom drama to play out in front of …

When I learned that the second and final installment of Wicked would be released this November, I knew it had to be our cover story. And when I learned that the fifth and final season of Stranger Things would also be released this November, I knew it also had to be our cover story. So, …

Penn & Teller Celebrate 50 Years Penn & Teller, magic’s most iconic duo, are celebrating fifty years together. Having first performed together in 1975 at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, they started off as a trio (with Weir Chrisemer) called “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society.” After Chrisemer left the act, the first show created by Penn …

If there is a near-term future of superintelligent computers running the world and they don’t like having been laughed at in their pupal stage of development, I’m toast. Of course, according to Daniel Kokotajlo, the AI software engineer who left OpenAI to become a human fire alarm of the calamity to come, we are all …

In 336 BCE, Alexander the Great—then a young Macedonian king with ambitions to conquer the known world—visited the Oracle of Delphi. In Life of Alexander, Plutarch tells us that Alexander wanted a prophecy to reassure him of his success. Unfortunately for him, he arrived on an inauspicious day when no prophecies could be given. The …

“Aaron Judge is due for a hit.” “The roulette wheel is due to come up red.” “There have been six heads in a row; the next flip has got to be tails.” The gambler’s fallacy can be seen in any number of places in everyday life. It consists of a failure to recognize that independent …

I had a fever of 103 degrees while fighting off a bacterial infection. As I lay in bed, I started to see some weird things. Across the room, in the semi-darkness, shapes began to take on the appearance of human faces. When I moved, the faces vanished. But if I just stared at the broad …

From tampons to tap water, from cereal boxes to vaccines, nearly every modern health scare rests on the same myth: chemicals are killing us. This fear—chemophobia—has become one of the most powerful engines of misinformation worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) lists vaccine hesitancy as a top global health threat (World Health Organization 2019), but …

Q: How can alien abduction experiences align even when individuals recounting them are completely unrelated? When people recall alien probings, their descriptions are similar and reminiscent of what patients see during surgery. Could alien encounters be memories of misremembered (but real) medical procedures? —Emma F. A: As a skeptical researcher, I’ve often been asked this …

What springs to mind when you hear about chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear emergencies? Perhaps recent memories of the COVID-19 pandemic are your first thoughts. For many, it’s the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, when a nuclear power reactor exploded and released large quantities of radiation. Maybe you ran through a list of popular books and …

The article in this issue about disinformation raises a crucial issue: the spread of disinformation and the associated impact on public safety, especially around chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats (see “Toxic Lies: Why Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear [CBRN] Disinformation Matters” by Katy Carroll, Mariana Diaz-Garcia, and Francesco Marelli). It rightly points out that …

Editors Michael H. Bernstein, Charlotte Blease, Cosima Locher, and Walter A. Brown have put together a concise but wide-ranging overview of the nocebo effect. I recommend their book for both scholarly and general audiences. In the introduction, they explain that it is difficult to define the nocebo effect. They offer this “summary”: “The occurrence of …

Joe Nickell Tribute I would like to contribute to the remembrance of Joe Nickell by recalling a moment from 1994, when I gave a lecture at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid titled “From the Shroud of Turin to Uri Geller: A Tribute to The Skeptical Inquirer.” The program note read: “A tribute …