Skeptophilia

When I was a kid, I was big fan of books with names like Strange True Tales of the Supernatural and World of the Weird .  These books often...

Is it just me, or has the Religious Right completely lost the plot? And surprisingly, I am not referring to their continuing support of Dona...

I know there are a lot of reasons why people believe weird shit.  It's tempting to settle on the self-congratulatory solution of "B...

I think my problem is that I really don't understand religion. I understand, or at least think I do, religious people .  I have a lot ...

A wag once said, "Artificial intelligence is twenty years in the future, and always will be."  It's a trenchant remark; predic...

Spurred by my post a couple of weeks ago debunking claims that microwave ovens are unsafe, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an email ...

We like to think of urban legends as a modern phenomenon.  As author Jan Harold Brunvand discusses in his wonderful book The Choking Doberma...

It's an increasingly technological world out there, and it's to be expected that computers and all of their associated trappings are...

Ouija boards have been around for a long time -- since 1890, in fact -- but they've only really hit an upswing in popularity (and a com...

A few days ago, I posted about a fellow named Bob Larson who claims to be able to exorcise demons from the possessed via Skype .  My general...

There are times when I wonder if some people aren't really crazy, but are engaging in a sort of elaborate game of self-parody. I do, a...

C. S. Lewis' famous book The Screwtape Letters chronicles the tempting of a young British man (known only as "The Patient") b...