You may remember Sylvia Browne as the self-proclaimed psychic who managed to stay in the spotlight despite repeatedly being ridiculously wrong in damn near all of her predictions and providing entirely wrong information on missing persons to desperate loved ones.  One of her most infamous incidents was claiming that Shawn Hornbeck was dead and that she even knew some details of the location of his body – Hornbeck later turned up alive.   After this was revealed by our friend Robert Lancaster, Browne faced a harsh backlash in the media.

She had been a regular on the Montel Williams Show, but since the show went off the air, she has not been as prominent in the media.  She has, however, tried to maintain as much of a presence as she can and has continued to promote her books and speaking engagements.

It seems she has a new (and unexpectedly pathetic) pitch.  Inexplicably some media outlets continue to take her seriously enough to actually devote some precious air time to the fraudulent bitch.

She does not exactly look or sound good. Not that she ever really did…

In some ways, this route represents a safer scheme for Browne. Her claims are still sensational and touch on something that plenty of stupid people are very interested in: celebrity gossip. However, it’s also not falsifiable and can’t result in the kind of direct damage that claiming to know the location of a missing person can. The persons in question are not alive and can’t refute what Browne claims, and although the remote possibility of their estate suing may exist, that seems to be unlikely since there’s really no way to prove anything one way or another.

I do feel rather bad for the poor woman reporter who had to maintain a straight face and pretend to take this all seriously. I can’t imagine what she was thinking, but it may well have been “a masters in journalism and years of trying to work my way up and this is what I’m left doing.”

It still amazes me that the media will devote precious airtime to this pathetic joke. The public may not exactly be very skeptical when it comes to choosing what they watch, but I have to believe that most people can see through this BS.

Our friend James Randi has been promoting critical thinking and opposing ridiculous nonsensical and unproven beliefs for decades, including homeopathy. It’s therefore not really news that he is actively going after the medical sham that has taken hold across the world.

However, a renewed effort by the James Randi Educational Foundation, the 10:23 campaign and others has recently kicked in to take on quackery. Efforts now have begun to target the mainstream companies that support this scam and are focused on raising awareness of the ineffectiveness of homeopathy, which, as it was recently pointed out, is becoming increasingly integrated into pharmacies, right along side real medicine.

For his part, Mr. Randi has been promoting the fact that his foundation is offering one million dollars to prove homeopathy works.

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There’s a lot of crap on television, and there’s really no denying that. Yet despite this, the medium does occasionally deliver world class programing that actually is good enough to redeem its overall value. There are a huge number of shows that promote illogical thinking and unfounded claims from UFO’s to paranormal beliefs to conspiracy theories and precious few good shows with a skeptical, rational theme that portray reality for what it is.

Since others have asked for examples of such shows, and because of the general lack of programing in this nitche, I’ve started to compile a list of the few TV programs that actually do provide good rational, reality-based debunking and informing on superstition and other unfounded claims.

I will add more as I find them, so please feel free to contribute any ideas. I live in the US so this list may be skewed toward American programing, since that’s what I happen to be personally familiar with. If you know of any good additions please let me know!

Note that there are plenty of good science documentaries, so I’ve tried to keep this toward ones that focus on myths, unfounded beliefs and other areas where skepticism should be applied, as opposed to just general science-related content.

Series and Mini-Series:

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage – PBS, 1980

Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World – ITV, 1980
Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers – ITV, 1985
Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious Universe – ITV, 1994-1995

James Randi: Psychic Investigator – ITV, 1991

Is it Real? – National Geographic TV, 2005-2007

Mythbusters – Discovery Communications, 2003 – Present

Penn and Teller’s Bullshit – Showtime TV, 2003- Present

Naked Science – National Geographic Television, 2004-Present

Best Evidence – Discovery Communications, 2007-Present

Single Event Shows, Documentaries:

The Search for the Loch Ness Monster – BBC Television, 2003

The Kennedy Assassination – Beyond Conspiracy – ABC News, 2004

9/11 Conspiracy Theories – Fact or Fiction? – A&E Television (the History Channel), 2007

Peter Jennings Reporting – UFOs: Seeing is Believing – ABC News, 2007

Conspiracy Moon Landing – National Geographic TV, 2007

The Enemies of Reason – Channel 4 Television Corp, 2007

This video has recently been floating around the internet.   It is reported to show footage transmitted from a secret Apollo mission conducted in the mid 1970’s, sometimes called “Apollo-20.”   According to some sites, it was a joint US-Soviet, like the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program.   Others claim that it was just America.  What they all say is that it went to the moon and found evidence of extra-terrestrial life, including some kind of mummified alien body.

Of course, there was no Apollo-20. There would have been, but the program was cut short early on to include only missions up to Apollo-19.   Then, further cuts resulted in Apollo 18 and 19 being axed, although some of their mission objectives were rolled into Apollo 15, 16 and 17.

The launch of a Saturn-V is pretty hard to hide.   The only facilities equipped to handle and launch the rocket were at Cape Canaveral, Florida, which is not far from populated areas that can easily observe the launch.   The flights were fairly easy to track into orbit and even beyond, even with amateur telescopes and radio receivers.   Not only that, but all the hardware from Apollo was accounted for.   All rockets were either used for the Skylab program or left as museum pieces.

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This is not the first time I’ve complained about the quality of the content on the History Channel, or as it now is called, simply “History.” However, recently things have gone from dumb to absolutely moronic, as the channel is now running the show “Ancient Aliens” almost daily. In case, the title does not clue you in, it’s a rather one-sided show presentation of the supposed evidence that generations of humans past were contacted by extra-terrestrial visitors and that this influenced their culture.

Here’s just a small sample of what kind of thing the series contains:

Damn… I feel dumber every time I see a video from it.

However I also feel compelled to answer a number of the contentions made by the series.
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Watching this video, one might think that it’s a spoof of some sort.  The content is so ridiculous it would be fitting of “The Onion” or some other humor outlet.   I mean, can anyone really take this seriously?

No, it’s real.   I didn’t believe it at first, but having checked out the source, this is not a joke.   It’s a video from a newscast on RT-America.   RT or Russia Today is a Russian television news network based in Moscow.  Russia Today broadcasts in a number of languages and has several regional television networks aimed at providing Russian-centered news for the areas served, in the local language.

RT America is one of those networks.  It’s analogous to BBC America or NHK International.  RT America opened relatively recently – January 2010.  It does not broadcast continuously, but does produce daily news telecasts.   It can be found on a few extended lineups on cable systems, but has struggled to gain widespread acceptance.   Aside from internet content, the only way to receive the channel is with a FTA satellite system via Galaxy-19.

Given that the network has the stated purpose RT-America is “coverage of the Americas from an international and Russian perspective,” it’s not hard to see how it would struggle to gain much in the way of viewership – there aren’t all that many Russian expats living in the US, at least not enough for a cable or satellite operator to bother dedicating some of their bandwidth to an English-language Russian-centric news source.

In light of this, RT-America has found a niche in the extreme wacky conspiracy theory community.  In the quest to gain attention and viewership, RT-America has been in a race to the bottom, besting even mainstream American news services for sheer idiocy.   This would appear to be the result.

By the way:  Do I even really need to go into all the reasons this video is stupid?  the fact that the phenomena was a common illusion produced by a contrail, or the fact that a missile would not be shot at Iran by firing it from the Pacific ocean on an eastward trajectory?   Or for that matter, the fact that an EMP weapon would not disable a ship? (the communications electronics, perhaps, but not the heavy duty power systems deep in the metal hull)

The “Web Bot” is a software program which crawls the web looking for patterns in searches and other internet traffic with the goal of predicting events based on collective human subconsciousness.  So far, the program has shown an uncanny ability to predict events of all kinds, so long as the reporting of those predictions is not made until after the event. (post diction)

It recently came to my attention that the Web Bot had made a starting prediction:  World War III is about to happen.  It will be an all out nuclear war that will involved billions of casualties.   Exactly when the “tipping point” will happen is a matter of some debate.   Some claim that the Web Bot has placed the start of the nuclear war on November 8, while others say it will be sometime between November 5 and 8.   The most common date cited as the date that will signal the beginning of the end is November 6.   Which was… yesterday

Still others now say that we’re living in a false sense of security if we believe that getting past November 6 means we’re safe. They claim that a refined estimate puts the beginning of the end on November 14.

So when will it start? Has the nuclear war started?   If you answer yes to any of these questions please report to us here so that we know it has started!

• Have you noticed a blinding flash accompanied by a searing feeling of radiant heat?
• Have you experienced a rapid burst of overpressure totaling 30 psi or more?
• Have you noticed any areas that are devoid of major surface features and covered with a shallow crater of fused glass where there had not been such a crater before?
• Has your body been rapidly converted into a superheated gas?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, please contact me so that I can report that the massive nuclear war world war has started.

In a related story, the BP oil spill, which you may remember was capped a couple of months ago and has mostly since dispersed, is predicted to kill 1.2 billion people. Also, there’s supposed to be an Israeli-lead attack on Iran in July 2010.

If there’s one thing amazing about things like the Web Bot it’s the fact that they can fail so epically so many times and yet when they are even vaguely correct, which they are bound to occasionally be just due to dumb luck, people will see this as an affirmation of their power.

The following video has been making the rounds recently and getting a great deal of attention, even getting coverage on major news outlets. It shows the 1928 premier of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Circus” including scenes from outside the theater where various pedestrians can be seen walking around the promotional sculptures.   The creator of this video (who seems to have recorded the footage from his own television screen) found a particular scene in the footage which has gotten a great deal of attention.    According to him the “simplest” explanation for what is shown is a time traveler with a mobile phone.

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Have you ever seen a UFO?   Chances are you have.   I’ve seen many of them.  An object appears in the sky, but it’s too distant, too small or just too difficult to get a good look at to identify.   If you can’t identify it and it’s flying, it is, by definition, an unidentified flying object, at least to you.

Just the other day I was outside when I noticed a reflective object moving along the horizon catch the sun’s rays.   I think it was a fixed-wing manned aircraft, but since it was only a fleeting glimpse I can’t say this definitively.    It could have been a model aircraft, a Mylar balloon, kite, a piece of foil blowing in the air or a helicopter.  It could have even been an autogyro.  Damned if I know, because I could not identify it.   Therefore, it’s a UFO. (To some extent, this is a matter of perspective.   If someone else knows what it is, then to them, it’s not a UFO but an IFO)

Of course just seeing something in the sky that’s not identifiable does not actually mean it’s anything noteworthy.   On occasion an object sighted in the sky may be something genuinely unusual like a rocket launch, a satellite reentering the atmosphere, an experimental aircraft or an atmospheric phenomena.   However, of the things you’ll see in the sky are caused by rather mundane things.

Throw cameras into the mix and some people tend to get rather excited over things they see in the sky.   All cameras have limits to their resolution and if an object is small enough it will only show up as an nondescript dot.   Cameras also have limits to their light sensitivity, resulting in image degradation in dark conditions.   In addition to this, consumer cameras are really not designed to capture images of distant objects against a dark background and thus their internal gain and auto-focus systems as well as zoom optics can result in some very severe distortions.  Cameras can also introduce things like reflections or lens flare into images, and if the photographer does not hold the camera steady enough, motion blur can turn a point of light into a line or swirl.

Technically, many reported photos of UFO’s don’t actually show a UFO at all, because the thing in the photo is neither flying nor an object.   Rather they show photographic artifacts that are not even visible in real life.

In recent times there have been a rash of reports of UFO’s in China. The Chinese media has reported numerous photographs being taken and a kind of mini UFO-craze now seems to be sweeping parts of the country.   Yet when the photographs are published they tend to be rather unimpressive.   Thus far, nothing really dramatic, just smudges, blurs and dots.

What could possibly be causing this?   Why is China suddenly UFO Central?

Actually, despite claims that this is a sign of alien visitation, the answer is very simple.   Until quite recently, China did not have much of a middle class and gadgets like digital cameras, camcorders and camera phones were not owned by many Chinese.   That, however, has begun to change in the past few years with the growth of consumerism in China, and it continues to grow.  Each day more Chinese citizens buy their first digital camera or multimedia cell phone.   Connectivity and media continues to expand across mainland China.

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This is really a terribly sad story, the life’s work of those who had hoped to protect the endangered American Crocodile and other exotic species and further education and science has literally gone up in smoke after a psychic told villagers that the sanctuary was responsible for the disappearance of two children.

Via Newser:

Mob Burns Croc Sanctuary— on Psychic’s Advice

An American-owned crocodile sanctuary in Belize was turned into a smoking ruin by an angry mob of indigenous Mayans. Truckloads of villagers armed with shotguns and machetes torched all the buildings on the 36-acre sanctuary after a local psychic told them that the Americans had fed two missing children to the crocs, CNN reports.

Cherie and Vince Rose, who moved to Belize and set up the American Crocodile Education Sanctuary in 2004, were away rescuing endangered crocodiles at the time. The couple say they have lost everything—apart from their two dogs, which survived the blaze—but they have no intention of giving up. “We are going to stay in Belize,” Cherie says. “We are going to fight this. I’m not abandoning those crocodiles down there.”

The ACES American Crocodile Education Sanctuary (ACES) was established by husband and wife Vince and Cherie Rose. Vince Rose is a crocodile behaviorist and Cherie Rose is a biologist.  The couple moved from the United States to Belize and, with donor support, created ACES to aid in the survival of endangered Central American species, especially the endangered American Crocodile – not to be confused with the more common American Alligator.

In addition to 36 acres of protected habitat, ACES featured research and educational facilities including accommodations for visiting students and researchers.   As a 100% privately funded non-profit, the sanctuary also offered guest accommodations as means of supporting its unique mission.   ACES was working toward the establishment of a self-sustaining ecological tourist business to provide continuing financial support for the local area and ecology.

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