The Skeptic

The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020.

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If skepticism can be said to have majors like a university, UFO skepticism is certainly among one of the pillars, along with the supernatural, CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine), and conspiracy (my specialty).

There is, of course, a Venn diagram where these majors overlap. I only deal with UFOlogy when it overlaps into my conspiracy world, where it readily...

Many conspiracy theories talk about the government pulling the wool over our eyes, from Covid-fuelled anti-vaxxers to the gold-standard-obsessed fiat currency conspiracists. Browse such circles long enough and you can find people who believe that government itself is intrinsically “them” and

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 7, Issue 3, from 1993.

In the late 1970s several of my friends suddenly found themselves a guru. In the wake of the Beatles and the counterculture this was hardly novel. Mystics, gurus and oriental cults were then the fashion – as they still are – and the Hare Krishna tribe still chanted and sa...

In 1941’s ‘The Lungfish and the Unicorn: An Excursion into Romantic Zoology’, German-born science writer Willy Ley described a mysterious and terrifying inhabitant of the Timor Sea, a relatively shallow body of water to Australia’s north:

This sea, the nativ...