Could a sonic weapon have focused a wave of energy with pinpoint accuracy on American diplomats in Cuba? Robert E. Bartholomew presents a plausible explanation for the illness cluster reported by State Department officials: mass psychogenic illness.
Dr. David Speed examines why the definitional ambiguity of the word “spirituality” is problematic for researchers who seek to explore the relationship between it and other constructs.
In this week’s eSkeptic, Professor of Geology at the University of South Florida, Dr. Marc J. Defant, provides an analysis of the claims made by Graham Hancock in his book Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization.
Is Antifa an enemy of free speech? Raymond Barglow discusses the recent violent demonstrations in Berkeley, which purported to “fight fascism,” while fueling it instead.
![Hercules Killing the Lernean Hydra, Cornelis Cort [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://old.skeptic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Hercules_Killing_the_Lernean_Hydra-2x.jpg)
Social psychologist (and regular columnist for Skeptic magazine, Carol Tavris, discusses the hydra of prejudice and the psychological predictors that lead to it rearing its ugly heads.
![Image by Comfreak via Pixabay.com (https://pixabay.com/en/ufo-aliens-landscape-evening-1673929/) [PUBLIC DOMAIN]](https://old.skeptic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/ufo-1673929_1920-by-comfreak-2x.jpg)
How useful are eyewitness reports and “investigations” by UFO proponents? In this week’s eSkeptic, psychology professor Dr. Terence Hines reviews How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth, by David Clarke.
Harriet Hall, M.D. (the SkepDoc) examines the latest flavor of integrative medicine called “functional medicine” (FM) — a Trojan horse designed to sneak non-science-based medicine into conventional medical practice.
Michael Shermer reviews Knowing the Score: What sports can teach us about philosophy (and what philosophy can teach us about sports), by King’s College philosopher David Papineau.
Tim Callahan explores the question of whether microbes from any given planet will be brutally harmful to the inhabitants of another planet who have no immunity to the alien pathogens.
George Michael reviews Milo Yiannopoulos’s self-published book Dangerous, which has reached #1 on Amazon’s Bestseller list, and, at the time of this writing, is near the top of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.
Peter Kassan examines the idea that we are all just computer simulations living in a computer simulation.
Medical sociologist Dr. Robert E. Bartholomew, examines a “baffling epidemic of hallucinations” that was reported to have broken out in Oregon in October of 2016. Was it an outbreak of mass suggestion, or simply an surge of shoddy journalism?
James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian offer a point-by-point reply to 10 popular criticisms of their parody-style hoax paper, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” that they published in an academic journal called Cogent Social Sciences.
![Jacques-Louis David [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://old.skeptic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Jacques-Louis_David_The_Death_of_Socrates-2x.jpg)
Based on a sample of hundreds of respondents to a survey distributed through social media, California State University, Fullerton psychologists Brittany Page and Douglas J. Navarick explain the differences they found in how atheists view God.
Alan Sokal reflects on the hoax perpetrated by James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian who published a nonsensical paper “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” in the peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences.
Since the death of William Peter Blatty—the author best known for his novel turned blockbuster film The Exorcist— exorcism is, once again, showing a robust presence in contemporary life, this time among millennials. In this article, Kathy Schultheis warns that this resurgence of interest in exorcism is a sign of how far reason has fallen.
Can paradoxes that seem to undermine belief in the God of Christianity actually support a belief in Him? Skeptic magazine’s religion editor, Tim Callahan, reviews Paradoxology: Why Christianity Was Never Meant To Be Simple, by Krish Kandiah.
“The conceptual penis as a social construct:” a Sokal-style hoax on gender studies by @peterboghossian and @GodDoesnt.
Dr. Nathan H. Lents catches up with Dr. Lee Berger to ask him about the astounding and far-reaching implications of confirmed rumors that a second cave had been found harboring more Homo naledi skeletal remains, and revealed that the fossils are much younger than previously thought.
As promised last week, this week, we present anthropologist Dr. Vincent M. Sarich’s defense of the bell curve. See last week’s eSkeptic for the critique of the bell curve by Diane Halpern.
