Tag: the paranormal

1,558 words

Warning: this review may contain spoilers.

Human fascination with extraterrestrial life has never been merely a scientific curiosity. It belongs, rather, to that deeper region where metaphysics, fear, hope, and civilizational fatigue begin to overlap. The alien is not only an imagined inhabitant of distant stars; it is a mirror placed before mankind, forcing us to contemplate the possibility that our history, our religions, our wars, and our self-importance may be provincial episodes within a far vaster order.

Popular culture has absorbed this fascination with unusual intensity because it allows the cosmic question to enter ordinary life. (more…)

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Christmas is traditionally a time for ghost stories, a subject for which I have an immense affection, so much so that I once spent an entire decade or so, on and off, researching and writing a book about poltergeists and their implied social and psychological meaning. Or, at least, that what I thought I was writing. (more…)

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So far in this short series, we have been examining the widespread mass hysteria-like phenomenon of demon-attack panics in contemporary African schools, but gullible children are not only limited to the Third World. Consider events in Houston, Texas, in 1983, when hundreds of schoolchildren (presumably of all races) became convinced they were going to be murdered by the Smurfs. (more…)

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It’s Halloween season and so to honor the holiday, I thought it would be fitting to write about a horror movie. But which one? I’ve recently acquired an interest in the nostalgia catnip that is 1980s slashers. I could choose one of the landmarks or an overlooked curiosity of that genre. Or I could indulge the classic movie fan and go with one of the lesser-known gems from the early 1930s horror boom which turned Dracula and Frankenstein into the instantly recognizable faces they are today. (more…)

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In the previous article in this series, we examined an illustrative selection of 21st century cases of alleged demonic persecution of staff and students alike throughout black African schools, many of which were blamed on witchcraft and sorcery.

But witchcraft and sorcery are mere secondary phenomena. For them to exist in the first place, a witch or a sorcerer already has to be present nearby to cast such spells. (more…)

1,971 words

August 27 sees the annual anniversary of the birth of the modern-day version of the Bigfoot legend back in 1958, when Californian logger Jerry Crew spotted some prints in the ground which looked as if they had originated from a pair of feet which were very…well, big. The whole thing was probably a hoax, but it helped launch the fringe scientific discipline of cryptozoology, or the search for unknown animals, into the public mind. (more…)

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First they came for elves, and I remained silent because I never met an elf. Then they came for Gods, and I remained silent because I never felt their presence. Then they came for ghosts, and I remained silent because I never saw a ghost. Then they came for consciousness, and I did not exist.
– Unknown mortal (more…)

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Joe Nickell

The recent death of Joe Nickell, the leading American skeptic of the paranormal, brought to mind a few questions about just what precise sort of things the committed investigator might have been skeptical about in life. Going around laughing at supposed backwoods rednecks saying “Hahaha, you believe in Bigfoot!” might have been OK, but skeptically questioning uncritical witness testimony about the existence and habits of certain other unlikely North American primates like Martin Luther King was quite another. (more…)

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Cryptids are an endless source of fascination, and explanations for the phenomenon abound. My personal theory is that they are for the most part real, albeit in strange extradimensional, metaphysical ways. Regardless, whether they are real or not, and if so and in what manner, is a question of fact. Right now I want to deal with the question of their meaning. (more…)