Paranormal services are better provided by people who understand their limitations, rather than by those who believe they can do something they can't

Skeptoid is a weekly podcast dedicated to furthering knowledge by blasting away the widespread pseudosciences that infect popular culture.

Each weekly episode focuses on a single phenomenon — paranormal, spiritual, alternative, or just plain stupid — that you've heard of, and that you probably believe in. Skeptoid attempts to expose the folly of belief in such phenomena, and more importantly, explains the factual scientific reality.

From the sublime to the startling, no topic is sacred, politically incorrect though that may be. 63,800 weekly downloads.

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8/19/2008 - In 1961, two Italian brothers, amateur radio enthusiasts, recorded transmissions from Soviet spaceflights that appear to indicate cosmonauts dying in space, and then never making it into the history books. These supposedly dead heroes have become known as the Missing Cosmonauts.

8/12/2008 - Don't worry, the tongue-in-cheek "homeopathic podcast" did not replace any regularly scheduled episodes. This week I answer some student questions on fish oil, charity fraud, rumors, and more. Keep those questions coming, students!

8/8/2008 - Homeopathy is still growing in popularity - but not so much because people believe in it, but because companies are making the word even smaller on the packaging and selling pure water and pure sugar alongside legitimate pharmaceuticals on store shelves. But do homeopathic products really contain any useful content at all?

8/5/2008 - All of the fears of health issues surrounding genetically modified organisms have so far been unfounded (and still lack plausible scientific hypotheses), and so anti-science activists like Greenpeace have turned to "moral and spiritual" objections to justify actions like fomenting terror in poor developing countries. Frightening hungry people away from important new advances in food science is really hard to stomach. I probably wouldn't use the words "ethnic genocide" but you gotta admit, it does have all the trappings.

8/4/2008 - An English language SubRip subtitle file is now available for Here Be Dragons. Apologies to all the hearing impaired viewers who were waiting for this.

7/30/2008 - I'm going to do some episodes where I answer questions from students on the podcast. All are welcome. Come check out this page where I give instructions. This is going to be lots of fun!

7/29/2008 - Many people who passionately advocate for a Free Tibet have an embarrassingly naïve vision of the situation, and probably aren't even aware of what the Dalai Lama himself wants from China. Skeptoid encourages you to apply skepticism to the pop-culture reasons you may have heard for "freeing" Tibet.

7/22/2008 - According to Roman Catholic doctrine, the Fátima "Miracle of the Sun" is not only the greatest miracle, but also one of the most important events in history. But even a cursory skeptical examination shows little compelling reason to think anything remotely unusual happened that day. Come on, Catholics, time to step up the "miracle" criteria.

7/15/2008 - The Large Hadron Collider is CERN's newest toy, the world's most powerful particle collider. Though it's far less energetic than natural particle collisions that happen constantly, some fearmongering alarmists want you to fear that it will create a black hole that will destroy the Earth.

7/14/2008 - If you watched Here Be Dragons and liked it, please sport me 10 seconds of your time by posting your positive review on Amazon.

7/8/2008 - Nine young cross country skiers died at Dyatlov Pass in the Russian Ural Mountains in 1959, in one of the strangest cases on record. Radioactive half-naked bodies. Missing body parts. UFOs. Blindness. And to top it all off, official "top secret" classification from the Soviet authorities.

7/1/2008 - What are numbers stations? Since the cold war, these strange shortwave radio broadcasts have been mystifying amateur radio enthusiasts. Some say they are government intelligence agencies transmitted encrypted instructions to spies. Some say you can actually be arrested just for listening to them...

6/24/2008 - We've all heard the tale of King Tut's curse, and we've heard the popular scientific sounding explanation. Today we take a look at the real science behind what happened (or didn't).

6/17/2008 - Do you believe that people really mean what they say? They do, if you play their voice backwards, say proponents of reverse speech. The claim is that the human brain deliberately chooses words that if played backwards, will say what the speaker's true intentions are.

6/10/2008 - It's time once again for some more winning listener feedback! So much garbage has come in lately that it was time for me to take it out. This time, the bulk of the waste came from supporters of detoxification products.

6/3/2008 - Folk wisdom tells us that vitamin C will prevent a cold, in fact that even larger doses can fight cancer and prevent a whole range of other conditions. Unfortunately it appears that once again, folk wisdom has failed to consult the medical journals.

5/27/2008 - Dr. Philip Zimbardo's infamous Stanford Prison Experiment is popularly believed to have proven that bad environments produce bad behavior in good people. However, a closer and more critical look at the experiment itself and its methodology shows that it may not have been a valid experiment at all, and merely an illustration of one man's beliefs.

5/20/2008 - Although you probably assume that I'm always right about everything, occasionally I do get something wrong, considering my limited resources and all. Here's a look back at a few examples, and the corresponding corrections.

5/13/2008 - Wow, 100 Skeptoid episodes. What a ride! When I first started this I figured I'd do 5 or 6 episodes and get it out of my system. Later I figured 100 was a good round number to call it "a body of work" and move on. But there's no sign of that happening - Skeptoid has spawned one book, and about to spawn a second; a television pilot; and a free 45 minute educational video that will be available shortly.

5/13/2008 - Doomsayers claim that peak oil production will mean a worldwide panic and catastrophe of epic proportions. This is a frightening prospect, but it completely ignores the fundamentals of economics. The nature of markets is to react and adapt. They always have, they always do, and there's no reason to think that that's suddenly going to stop.

5/6/2008 - The National Transportation and Safety isn't always able to find the definitive cause of an aviation accident, as unfortunate as that is. TWA Flight 800 is one such case. For conspiracy theorists, an inconclusive finding like this is a red flag to the bull. They start with the default assumption that the aircraft was shot down by the US government, despite a total lack of any evidence of that, and clear evidence that no such thing happened.

4/29/2008 - Now that Indiana Jones has done his part to promote the myths about crystal skulls, let's take a look at the facts. Legend says the crystal skull was found in a ruined Mayan temple; documents tell a different story. Mythology says that the skulls have mystical properties. Unless someone ever agrees to have this tested, such claims will remain mythology.

4/22/2008 - Conspiracy theorist Richard Hoagland believes that the Cydonia Face on Mars is proof of a Martian civilization that built great cities and pyramids and this giant carved stone face. Modern photographs, the perceptual phenomenon we call pareidolia, and the Law of Large Numbers, however, combine to tell us that it's simply a natural hill that (at a useful resolution) doesn't even look very much like a face after all.

4/15/2008 - Rhonda Byrnes's book and movie The Secret, thanks to Oprah Winfrey, has convinced millions of Americans that medical care, personal motivation, and hard work can all be replaced by simple wishing. And also, that if you get raped, killed, or suffer an illness, it's your own fault. You bastard!

4/8/2008 - Home based businesses (or almost any "business opportunity" that you have to pay for) are almost always ripoffs. Find out how unscrupulous companies first figured out how to invert a conventional sales rep agreement.