Skepticblog

We may have not had success getting our own prime-time network show with The Skeptologists, but skeptical outreach professionals are appearing more and more often on existing shows as featured experts.

Today I added another such contribution in a small way. Twice now I’ve appeared as a talking head on William Shatner’s Weird or What?, once before with Mark Edward, and now on the subject of the Bell Island Boom. I was gratified when their researcher told me their episode was largely based on my Skeptoid episode, so this will, hopefully, be a decent win for those who want to get the general public excited about what’s cool in reality.

Of course we don’t know how the episode is going to be edited yet, and it’s a necessary evil that for a show to be popular it has to be sensational. I find sensationalism in scientific understanding all the time, but editors and producers always have the “easy out” of promoting mysteries as unsolved or unsolvable, or even just promoting the paranormal explanation as the probable one. We’ll see if that happens here, but I don’t think so. I’ve had a good experience working with this director and the show so far. The episode that Mark and I did will come out in the fall, and today’s will come out later in the season, perhaps winter 2012.

The Bell Island Boom, for those not familiar with the tale, was one of some 600 “mystery booms” heard off the coast of the eastern US, mostly in 1978. Most were found to be sonic booms from the Concorde or military planes, but about a third turned out to be correlated to lightning superbolts in the upper atmosphere that were spotted by the Vela satellites and matched up to airline pilot reports of high-altitude flashes. However one of these lightning superbolts actually hit the ground (a very rare event), did substantial damage to the house it struck on Bell Island, Newfoundland, and scared the pants off everyone on the island with the loudest bang they’d ever heard.

Weird or What? gave me the opportunity to discuss not only the probable explanation, but also the crazy hypothesized explanations put forward by others. These were mostly things like secret weapons tests, of either particle beam weapons or some kind of Tesla superweapon. In no way was I guided to make them sound likely; in fact, I was encouraged to explain why they’re such poor explanations.

So we’ll see how it goes. Let’s hope for the best, and I encourage all our readers to take any such opportunities to spread the value of critical thinking to the largest audience you can.