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‘I Was Wrong’: Religious Prophecy and the 2020 Election
Pastor Jeremiah Johnson had three prophetic visions on October 20, 2020 (The Altar Global 2021a). The first was of the Los Angeles Dodgers winning the World Series that began on that day. The second was of Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. The third was of Donald Trump winning reelection. When the …
WHO’s Suggestion That Women of Childbearing Age Not Drink
On June 15, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) released the first draft of its Global Alcohol Action Plan 2022–2030 to Strengthen Implementation of the Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol (WHO 2021). I’m all for reducing harmful alcohol use, but I was taken aback by the advisement that “appropriate attention should …
This article is available for free to all.Our Generation’s UFO ‘Flap’
Every generation, it seems, must have its own UFO “flap.” (“That’s the technical term,” I once heard Carl Sagan wryly observe.) We had flaps in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s (the SI anthology The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Coverups, Prometheus Books, 1997, chronicled our coverage of that one). After a …
Geocentric in Ghana: An Antiscience Lawsuit
A lawsuit recently filed in the Supreme Court of Ghana seeks to ban the teaching in the Ghanaian public schools not only of evolution but also of the idea that Earth is in motion. Filed on November 24, 2020, the lawsuit apparently received no public attention until March 20, 2021, when Emmanuel Ebo Hawkson covered …
Neil deGrasse Tyson on Space, Reality, Pop Culture, Skeptics, and Atheists
In a brisk seventy-five minutes, Neil deGrasse Tyson wasn’t able to cover all the biggest questions about the universe, as he does in his new book Cosmic Queries, or scores of popular topics that intrigue the public, as he does in Letters to an Astrophysicist, but nevertheless he did pretty well. In his Skeptical Inquirer …
This article is available for free to all.Psychologists Publish Major Critique of Western Contemporary Astrology
Psychology professors Ivan W. Kelly and Don H. Saklofske have written and published online a new major critique of Western astrology. Their fifty-six-page paper, “Contemporary Western Astrology: A Philosophical Critique 2021,” is a thorough critical examination of the concepts and assumptions underlying most astrologers in the contemporary Western world (Europe and North America). Its focus …
Astrophysicist and Skeptic Cornelis de Jager (1921–2021)
Noted astronomer and skeptic Cornelis (Kees) de Jager died on May 27, 2021, at the age of 100. He was cofounder of the Dutch skeptical organization Skepsis and its first chairman from 1987 to 1997. He was a longtime fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. When Paul Kurtz spoke on January 12, 1987, with …
Free Online Astronomy Textbook Reaches Half a Million Students
The free, online, open-source, introductory textbook Astronomy, published by the nonprofit OpenStax project at Rice University, has recently reached the milestone of having been read by over half a million students since it was published in 2017. The book was written by astronomers Andrew Fraknoi, David Morrison, and Sidney Wolff, with the help of about …
Myth Busted: Cucumber Does Not Repel Ants
Look up “natural” ant repellents online, and you are bound to find cucumber listed as an easy home remedy to ant infestation. Is there any truth to this? A National Taiwan University entomologist, Prof. Matan Shelomi, discovered that there was no actual scientific evidence for or against this claim, so he decided to test it …
Solving a UFOlogical ‘Murder’: The Case of Morris K. Jessup
Among the borderlands of the paranormal, few exploits are stranger than those relating to supposed extraterrestrial phenomena. Take, for example, the fate of flying saucer writer Morris K. Jessup, who became entangled in various UFO conspiracy theories. Jessup led a life that threatened to become frustratingly comic, except that its mix of far-out alien claims …
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