The new episode of Squaring the Strange is about organ theft urban legends, a favorite subject of mine. Richard Saunders of The Skeptic Zone joins us to discuss organ theft tales! The notion of waking up one day without a few organs, the biological equivalent of being...
Media Literacy
Squaring the Strange: Psychics and the Holly Bobo Murder
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...
Squaring the Strange: MLMs with Special Guest SciBabe!
For those who didn't see it, special guest SciBabe recently joined us to examine Multi Level Marketing (MLM) and pyramid schemes on the new episode of Squaring the Strange. MLM crap annoys us so Celestia spent plenty of time bleeping out choice curse words! Ben and...
Guest on the Skeptic Zone!
I was recently on the Skeptic Zone podcast with the great Richard Saunders! you can hear the show here! You can find more on me and my work with a search for "Benjamin Radford" (not "Ben Radford") on Vimeo, and please check out my podcast Squaring the...
‘Bring Back Our Girls’ At 5: Boko Haram’s Forgotten Captives
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....
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...
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...
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...