Skeptic (Altadena, CA) articles from March 2001

Skeptic (Altadena, CA) archives from March 2001

I was Brilling.
March 22, 2001... May the Schwartz Be With You It won't stop. Dr. Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona is the current darling of the media, who eagerly report his belief in mediums and stick him in front of cameras to allow him to bury himself in wild...

Polls Show Paranormal Beliefs On the Rise, Evolution Belief On the Decline.
March 22, 2001... June 8, 2001. Gallup News Service. For the full report go to http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr010608.asp. The Gallup polling service has released its latest audit of what Americans believe about the paranormal and the results show...

Larry King Live, Media Integrity, and Meeting the Psychic Challenge.
March 22, 2001... THE MARCH 6, 2001 EDITION OF CNN's Larry King Live was dedicated to examining "psychics," a program inspired in part by a Time magazine article written by Leon Jaroff that questioned the claim made by John Edward, host of the Sci-Fi channel's...

Monkey Man Delusion Sweeps India.
March 22, 2001... DURING THE FIRST THREE WEEKS OF MAY 2001, residents in the vicinity of New Delhi, India, were alarmed by waves of reports of sightings and attacks by a mysterious creature dubbed in the Indian media as "the monkey man." Encounters were reported...

Forum Letters.
March 22, 2001... Athena Stopped Time, Not God I respond to Samuel Larson's short rebuttal of NASA's "discovery" of missing time in SKEPTIC 8-4. The story is an obvious hoax perpetrated by fundamentalist Christians. NASA knows perfectly well that the missing...

Seeking a New Fulcrum.
March 22, 2001... Parapsychology and the Need to Believe in a New Transcendence LET ME ADMIT FROM THE START that I have a murky and conflicted relationship with the quaint concept of "psi". On the one hand, trained as a physical scientist, I find little...

THE SHADOW OF CALIBAN.
March 22, 2001... An Introduction to the Tempestuous History of Anthropology IN 1607 A SAILOR NAMED Andrew Battell returned to England from imprisonment in Portuguese Africa, bringing with him tales of new worlds and half-man, half-beast monsters we now...

Spin-Doctoring the Yanomamo.
March 22, 2001... Science as a Candle in the Darkness of the Anthropology Wars THERE IS A MAXIM anthropologists often cite about the geopolitics of diplomacy and warfare among indigenous peoples: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. In reality, of course, the...

REQUIEM FOR A CONTROVERSY.
March 22, 2001... Whatever Happened to Margaret Mead? WHEN A CONTROVERSY is young, everyone is riveted. But what happens as controversy ages and becomes more complicated? Who remains interested? In the recent controversy over Patrick Tiemey's Darkness in El...

WHENCE THE "NOBLE SAVAGE".
March 22, 2001... PRIMITIVE HUMANS living in peace and harmony with one another and in balance with nature is an idea in Western society that dates back to at least the 18th century. At that time the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau described humans in a...

VELIKOYSKY AT FIFTY.
March 22, 2001... CULTURES IN COLLISION ON THE FRINGES OF SCIENCE IN 1950, DR. IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY published Worlds in Collision (WIC), [1] a remarkable book that boldly challenged the fundamental tenets of a wide number of academic fields. Velikovsky, a...

The New Atlantis.
March 22, 2001... And the Dangers ot Pseudohistory WHERE DID CIVILIZATION COME FROM? Since the original publication of Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995 there has been a remarkable revival in speculative or "alternative" answers to this...

THE PINKER INSTINCT.
March 22, 2001... AS I SAT DOWN TO INTERVIEW Steven Pinker, the 46-year old Professor of Psychology in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, I suddenly realized that I had not bringed my notes. Fortunately, he holded my attention such that I did...

DID WE LAND ON THE MOON?
March 22, 2001... WERE THE MOON LANDINGS ACTUALLY A GIGANTIC HOAX? Was the film footage of the astronauts walking on the Moon simply one of the most expensive movies ever made? Fox TV's show "Conspiracy Theory" presented the claims of several authors who...