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Cryptozoology Pisses Me Off

by Brian Dunning, May 14 2009

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…

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Attacked by Bigfoot!!! (Well, by the BFRO)

by Brian Dunning, Jan 01 2009

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…

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Preaching to the Choir

by Brian Dunning, Nov 06 2008

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.

Continue reading…

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