Skepticblog

In June of 2009, philosopher of biology Michael Ruse took a group of grad students to the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Kentucky (and also some mainstream institutions) as part of a course on how museums present science. In a critical description of his visit, Ruse reflected upon “the extent to which the Creationist museum uses modern science to its own ends, melding it in seamlessly with its own Creationist message.” Continental drift, the Big Bang, and even natural selection are all presented as evidence in support of Young Earth cosmology and flood geology.

While immersing himself in the museum’s pitch, Ruse wrote,

Just for one moment about half way through the exhibit…I got that Kuhnian flash that it could all be true — it was only a flash (rather like thinking that Freudianism is true or that the Republicans are right on anything whatsoever) but it was interesting nevertheless to get a sense of how much sense this whole display and paradigm can make to people.

This comment was severely criticized, but it’s profoundly relevant to skepticism. Continuing from the theme of my previous post (on “The Reasonableness of Weird Things”) I’d like to argue that the experience Ruse describes — the fleeting sense of “Could it be true?” vertigo — is one of the most important experiences skeptics can have.

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So I guess I can now reveal that no, I am not jackass enough to imagine that the “John E Walker” Bigfoot video is so compelling as to command the attention of SkepticBlog or the Skeptologists.

The video was made and sent to me back in January by John Rael of SkepticallyPwnd.com, and he asked me to write up something that looked like a critical review of it. He said it would be easy, since it’s such a lame video, and I suppose it was. It would have been easier if it had been more compelling. When a video is so dumb, it’s kind of hard to say anything intelligent about it.

I’m not exactly sure what role I played in his gag, but what the heck, it was a fun little lark. His reveal video is here.

But Google Alerts made this a little more fun. Turns out some Bigfoot site, the Bigfoot Lunch Club, picked up on my SkepticBlog analysis and found it lacking. The author’s comments are well worth a read: Continue reading…

A frame from the video in question.

I am in receipt of a new alleged Bigfoot video, the YouTube version of which is hereinafter appended. A fellow emailed it to me with the request that I help him “get it into the right hands”, because, you know, routing Bigfoot videos to the appropriate cryptozoologist is what I’m all about.

These are actually kind of fun to get. At a first glance, there’s nothing in there that’s inconsistent with a guy in a suit. If a guy had a suit like this and his homey filmed him in it, this is exactly what you’d expect the video to look like. By Occam’s Razor, this is a guy in a suit; because the other possibility requires the introduction of the assumption that an unknown species of great ape roams about. But I hate to stop there; that’s too easy. Continue reading…

And here’s why.

It pisses me off because it’s the perfect microcosm of what’s wrong with television science reporting. They’re not interested in reporting good science or in educating their viewers; they’re only interested in tabloid stories. And they affix a “science” label to them. Send some horseback kooks into the woods with a megaphone and an infrared camera to look for Bigfoot, show it on the Science Channel, and that’s what passes for science programming in the United States. The obvious result? We have a population who believes that communication with ghosts represents the leading edge of brain research, that multilevel marketing schemes are a way to get rich, and that a mail order gadget (suppressed by the oil companies) will make your car run for free. Continue reading…

I would like to turn the clock back, if I may, to a few years before I had ever heard of such a thing as skepticism, back to June of 2001. One of my responsibilities was as Technical Editor for the database publication FileMaker Advisor magazine, and I wrote a companion editorial column called Browse Mode. In one such column, I wrote about the exploits of one Bill McClintock (last name changed at his request), who used FileMaker Pro software to manage his own database of Bigfoot sightings – quite the colorful topic for a publication that could easily run on the dry side.

Tucked in the back corner of a woodworking shop in Portland, Oregon, Bill managed his database with great care and hunted for patterns in his database of reported sightings. One of his nuances (and I’ve since gathered that this is endemic in the Bigfoot community) was a virulent hatred of competing Bigfoot researchers. Of the best known Bigfoot organization, Bill said:

Organizations like BFRO (Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization) list anything and everything, no matter what joker reports it. So it’s impossible to glean anything statistically useful out of their databases. Continue reading…

In my podcast Skeptoid, I cover a lot of topics. Some of them are fresh to many listeners, some of them, not so much. I’ve talked about tales as hoary as Roswell, The Amityville Horror, Bigfoot, and The Philadelphia Experiment. Things we’ve all heard a thousand times, and about which there’s often not much new to say.

Am I preaching to the choir? Am I wasting my breath? Am I repeating old information to an audience that’s already tired of hearing about it? If I were, that would probably be a waste of time. Maybe skeptical outreach should avoid the old subjects.

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