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In essence, it's about the burden of proof, more than it's about the evidence itself. It's not particularly scientific, but mundane proof/a mundane explanation would likely be sufficient for a mundane claim, less so for an extraordinary one. If my kid told me, "I know my friend's Dad can...

I don't want to wade too far into the abortion debate, but would say that I know women for whom their abortion was absolutely the right decision, but still felt a great deal of remorse, guilt, and suffered a significant period of depression after the fact. I say this not to present it as an...

A childhood spent watching Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, reading Fortean Times, and hours poring over "Unexplained Mysteries" books led me to believe that spontaneous human combustion and the Bermuda Triangle would play a far larger role in adult life than they ever really did.

The question becomes whether you investigate as if we're looking at a criminal case, or if we investigate as if we're looking at Fortean events as a scientific hypothesis. Both would have different measures of what would be considered "proof" or "evidence". I'll start by saying I have...

I think this plays a part in it, though could be overstated, and relies on an "evidence first" model that kind of never quite sits right with me. Similarly, the suggestion that Ancient Greeks based the myth of Cyclops on finding Mammoth or elephant skulls that they interpreted as a one-eyed...

There was a band called Porn Orchard who once recorded a comedy Christmas song allegedly by Peter Murphy and Tom Waits, titled "Christmas Sucks", that's good for a giggle.

It's an interesting one - I actually rather like that joke, because it sets you up to think that the Major is being uncharacteristically PC, only for the punchline to be not that he objects to the racial slur, but that he's nit-picking the specificity of it. It's very clear that the Major is the...

I believe there are some old Looney Tunes cartoons that were released on DVD with a disclaimer, and a recorded piece to camera explaining, along the lines of, "this cartoon reflects values which are unacceptable now, and were unacceptable then, however...", in order to frame them in a historical...

Always greeting magpies - that's one that's just ingrained in me, I've never even really thought of it as a superstition, it's just something I've done since before I could remember, and that my Mam always does and just passed down to me. Saying that, I'll usually greet any cat that I see with a...

There was an "International Falun Gong Day" demonstration in Leicester Square a month or two ago, the last time I was there. I knew nothing about them, and it all seemed fairly inoffensive - was quite shocked to discover some of their beliefs when curiosity led me to Google them a while later...

There's a similar belief that I remember from childhood, that if you touch a moth and it loses the "dust" (actually scales) from its wings, it will either die or lose the ability to fly.

The photo of "Soros in SS uniform" is not of George Soros. Ultimately, George Soros is no different to any number of wealthy activists - problem is, most of them are on the side of the right-wing. No one attacks the Koch brothers with the vitriol the right wing aim at Soros. He's a bogeyman...

I'm working in Jersey at the moment, and this story's created a lot of amusement - particularly that it's getting coverage in the nationals! - though I'd say "overrun" is quite the exaggeration. I've not encountered any feral chickens myself, but it's not uncommon for them to be kept roaming...

The Orson Welles War Of The Worlds story is blown out of proportion; if nothing else, barely anyone would have actually been listening to the show in the first place. There was a survey of 5000 households the same night of the play, which found that fewer than 2% of respondents had been...

"Snickelways" might be my favourite word in the entire world. Love it. The Whitby Barghest is bringing back vague memories, though...it's part of the book The Whitby Witches, that I read way back when; all sorts of local folklore wrapped up in a mad mixture of Lovecraft and Wheatley. I lived...

Indeed - on the first page of search results for "transplant research military", I found this; http://cdmrp.army.mil/rtrp/default A US military research program into reconstructive transplant research. I've not seen anything to suggest a UK equivalent (though admittedly not looked very far...

All of the memories of Mandela's death can easily be explained as people misremembering news reports about the political situation in a country they had very little knowledge of. There's an awful lot of Americans claiming that they "remember" Mandela dying in the '80s, I very much doubt you'll...

It's also worth noting that snakes (and likely other reptiles) were seen, by many cultures, across large stretches of time, as either literally immortal or symbolic of death and rebirth, because of their skin-shedding. And while I've not really seen much evidence, I suppose you could also...

... And while I think your "reptilian brain" argument is an interesting and sound one, I also think it's incredibly charitable towards Icke - the far more likely explanation being that he's talking cobblers. ...

On a similar note, I love this clip; A mystery guest on the game show "I've Got A Secret", in the mid-50s - effectively the age-old game where the contestants have to guess what the guest is famous for - who was the last surviving witness of the assassination of Lincoln.

I think this often gets overlooked by those who see technology as something utopian - a cashless society would heavily discriminate against poor and marginalised people. I'd like to think that's something that's been overlooked by people with big ideas and not enough time spent considering the...

Is it "quite blinkered", or is it just more rational? While I don't believe in Sasquatch, if it were to exist, I would say the chances of it being some kind of ape was orders of magnitude more likely than it being something "inter-dimensional" or paranormal. On one hand, it falls to...

Indeed - Houdini, who is Randi's idol incidentally, also had a bee in his bonnet about "psychics" and spiritualists, and sought to debunk them. He was good friends with Arthur Conan Doyle, who never encountered a bit of spiritualist quackery he didn't like, so Houdini demonstrated how many so...

I can see, and largely agree with, your argument, Mike. The modern narrative is very much that Christianity consciously and actively usurped existing rituals and festivals, where there was more likely a bit more "give and take" than that. Like any folklore or myth, the stories will have...

We also have a woefully inefficient digestive system where meat is concerned, and lack the speed and sharp teeth or claws to be effective natural predators. The idea that we're naturally predisposed towards a more meat-based diet doesn't really hold that much weight, and the idea that a...

The "decades" Walkers crisps all seem a bit arbitrary. As well as the lamb ones for the '60s (which are the worst of the bunch, as far as I can tell), there's: 1950s: Coronation Chicken 1960s: Roast Lamb & Mint 1970s: Cheese Fondue 1980s: Chicken Tikka Masala 1990s: BBQ Rib 2000s: Sweet Chilli...

That all rings true - my mother was the youngest of 13, and often said she never had much of a childhood/adolescence as her time was split between helping her parents around the house/farm (and, by her late teens, often looking after her ailing mother), and being forced to play "lookout" for...

I had a similar issue - hearing loss in one ear, due to a ruptured ear drum, made the tinnitus much worse. I assumed it was because not being able to hear so well from external stimuli made the "internal" noise of tinnitus seem louder by comparison. Mine comes and goes - usually a high pitched...

Ah, but we all know something doesn't have to be true for someone to have an opinion on it! You're right that European populations are shrinking (and, indeed, birth rates globally are on the decline almost across the board - the global population is growing chiefly because life expectancy is...

The idea that not having any meat in your diet makes you physically weaker, or more tired, or anything, is nonsense. Maybe if you don't manage your diet well enough, but the same would be true if you ate meat - and if we're talking about athletes, they're going to be paying close attention to...

It's now twice you've said this. There is no known technology capable of "inducing thoughts". So citing "highly advanced technology" isn't evidence - it just means that you now, in addition to proving the existence of an advanced civilisation spanning thousands of years and every continent...

Thanks for doing some of the legwork on that one, @AlchoPwn, I was getting prepared to do some sums at the start of the post, and coming out in cold sweats at the thought of it by the end... Even if any of these "Location A is precisely X miles from Location B" ideas were true (which, as has...

What is the Nordic model if not successful socialism? One can argue that it's not "pure" socialism, but no "pure" capitalist society has ever existed either.

While not nearly as good an example as Kurosawa, who really was a master in wordlessly conveying meaning, I recently read a comparison of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World that really highlighted something I hadn't picked up when watching the latter movie for the first time. Every shot in...

No reason to believe it was anything other than the official report, for reasons everyone else has already stated. The conspiracy will be born of fans too distraught to accept that someone whose music they loved could do such a thing, but even moreso by the kind of conspiracy theorist that...

While it's not universally accepted, there is certainly a trend towards Neanderthal being renamed Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis in the literature, and them being recognised as a much closer relative than we used to think. I attended a handful of lectures on Neanderthals and early humans around...

I mentioned the trend towards paranormal explanations for cryptids in the Cryptozoology sub-forum, but it goes beyond even "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" when the explanation for why there's no physical evidence for a creature like Nessie becomes "because it doesn't obey...

I can second that - I worked in conservation for a few years (though sadly most of my contributions were of the long hours scowling at spreadsheets variety, rather than getting out there in a field), and some of the most inspirational and influential people in my life were people I met in that...

I'm in Plymouth reasonably often for work, and have barely even seen the buggers compared to other coastal towns, come to think of it. There's actually posters up around my work advising people that seagulls will attack you and try and steal your food on the short walk from the main building to...

The main thing to bear in mind about the Mary Celeste is that it was victim to a lot of mythmaking - early news reports overstated the condition of the ship (fires still lit, sails set, logbooks up to date, meals laid out), and from Arthur Conan Doyle's "Marie Celeste" story, from whence we get...

Again, the hypothesis isn't that there was a previous civilisation - the paper is asking the question that if there was an industrial civilisation in the Earth's distant past, what effect would it have geologically, or on the atmosphere, and so on. It's not about looking for ruins and artefacts...

It's worth noting that the main point of the Silurian Hypothesis wasn't about evidence of civilisation in the sense of finding artefacts and ruins, but whether there would be any impact on the Earth itself - on the atmosphere, and so on. The purpose of the paper wasn't to look at whether there...

I can understand applauding the pilot if it's clearly a bugger of a landing - there have been a handful of times I've passed on my thanks because the fog's been so thick that plenty of pilots would have given up and turned back (happened to me on a few occasions on short haul flights), yet the...

Both those points ring true with me. I've been working (less than I should) on my Master's thesis along these lines; looking at the phenomenon of social media "bubbles", "fake news" and the notion of trust and so on. The crux of my argument is basically that we're seeing a lot of "fringe"...

There was an extraordinary paper written a while back on macaque/deer sexual habits, and whether they represented some kind of inter-species social function. Never got my head around it. Up until a couple of years ago, I worked in a zoo, and the alpha male Orangutan - not a monkey, I know - had...

Bloody good job too - I worked in a petrol station about ten years back, just as a local taxi firm started switching to hybrids. It was an old fashioned garage, where I was the only person on shift, and had to go out and serve customers at the pumps, there was no self-service allowed. Lost...

I've often wondered this. The closest I have come to an answer is that there is no agenda - the government aren't covering anything up, they're just ignorant and stick to their theory against all evidence. Which sounds like a rather tongue-in-cheek response supporting the "this is all a joke...

There was still, to some extent (not necessarily in all cases), a political motivation by white Europeans to explore that element of Native American mythology, though - in part because it supported the notion of a "white" race before the Native Americans, and also because the notion of "giants"...

Aside from the fact that late 19th/early 20th century American newspapers were more than a little prone to tall tales - particularly when it came to faux archaeological claims. That the only sources for this story appear to be a couple of newspaper articles tells me a lot. There's also...

There ... was a concerted effort for many years (to some extent still to this day) to fabricate evidence of an earlier civilisation inhabiting North America, and ascribing the origin of Native American mounds and artefacts to this precursor race. ... It seems that people felt that proving that...