It was a bold and brash attack on innocent girls that outraged the world and spawned unprecedented online activism: Boko Haram, an extremist Muslim group in Nigeria, abducted about 276 schoolgirls from a rural secondary school in the town of Chibok on April 14, 2014....
Benjamin Radford
The ‘FBI Bigfoot Investigation’: Where’s The Beef?
Breathless headlines last month referred to the “FBI Investigating Bigfoot,” a clickbaity phrase if ever social media saw one, along with the promise that newly-declassified FBI files shed light on the mystery. As intriguing and sensational as it sounds, it turns out...
Squaring the Strange: Psychics and Holly Bobo
In 2011 I had just written an article for Discovery News about a bogus psychic in Long Island when a young woman named Holly Bobo went missing in Tennessee. Her abduction made national news, and I decided to monitor psychic predictions and information about her...
94 Rock Morning Show Podcast!
I was on the 94 Rock Morning Show and we talked about a wide variety of things, ranging from social media fake news to Bigfoot sex. If for some reason you want to hear it, it's here (don't worry, you can listen anonymously, we won't judge):
The Perils of Recycling News
I've been seeing links to this news story widely shared over the past few months, about the U.S. voting against a U.N. resolution condemning Nazis. It's being shared as evidence of our current government supporting white supremacists-- except that it happened in 2016...
Misleading Memes As Cloaked Propaganda
Soon after a university cheating scandal recently broke, a meme declared that “White privilege is REAL,” and gave three examples presumably illustrating that premise. The first shows a photo of actress Felicity Huffman and states that “Feds will seek 4 months jail...
Guest Appearance on ‘Destination Unknown’
I was recently in Puerto Rico shooting an episode of “Expedition Unknown.” I can’t give many details before the show airs, but here’s a photo of me with host Josh Gates interviewing an eyewitness to something weird....
Squaring the Strange: Grab Bag Time!
New episode of Squaring the Strange is out, thanks to Pascual and Celestia, I just bring the doughnuts. Enjoy this longer-than-usual episode with four thrilling topics! Is 5G more dangerous than Flavor Flav? Should we breed shark-cats to protect us from cancer AND bad...
Popobawa Returns: As a Toy?
For those who didn't see it, Russ Dobler wrote an interesting piece on the popobawa, a skeptic-raping bat/ghost/djinn I investigated in East Africa years ago. I had no idea it had been featured on a kids TV show! You can read it HERE!
Aladdin’s Genie–and its Jinn Origins
My new CFI blog is out! I take a brief look at the folklore behind the genie in 'Aladdin,' and explain how Disney's "genies" came from Arabic "jinn." With the much-hyped release of the new version of Disney’s Aladdin, I thought it would be interesting to take a...