Candle on the Water

by Brian Dunning
August 5, 2025

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This is episode #1000 of Skeptoid. The show began in October 2006, and is today going stronger than ever, almost 19 years later. It first broke into the iTunes top podcasts in the Social Sciences category in January 2007, and as far as I know it has never dropped out of the top 20; despite there being 5.5 million podcasts today compared to only two thousand when I started. This makes me the luckiest person I know: Having been privileged to do for a living the same thing I would be doing anyway for a hobby. But much more than that, it's put me in a classroom for 19 years, learning and understanding more than I ever dared to hope, studying one thousand different subjects, well enough to share a 15-minute overview of each of them with you. I have grown enormously as a person during that process — and like all of us, I probably have a whole lot more to do. In all that time, not a week has gone by that I haven't thought of a transformative experience I had as a small boy in a movie theater in 1977.

No, I don't mean Star Wars, though I also had that transformational experience that same summer — I spent years perfecting my skills drawing the T-65 X-Wing from all its various angles. No, this experience was found in Pete's Dragon (1977). The movie's peak moment was when Helen Reddy, known at the time as the "Queen of 70s pop", stepped out onto the gallery outside the lantern room of her lighthouse near the fictional fishing town of Passamaquoddy, Maine and sang the movie's anthem, "Candle on the Water." She was singing it simultaneously to two people: to her fiance Paul, lost at sea this past year; and to Pete, the young orphan boy escaping an abusive foster family, and whom she had just taken in.

I should note that the similarity to the phrase "a candle in the dark" — best known as part of the subtitle of Carl Sagan's 1995 book A Demon Haunted World — is not lost on me. But that book came out 18 years after Pete's Dragon made such an impression on me; and by then, the candle on the water was already firmly etched into my DNA as my metaphor for a guiding light. Carl Sagan is probably someone you and I both hold in a great deal of respect as the guru of all science communicators who truly did succeed in reaching people of all belief systems. As he explained, his "candle in the dark" came from the title of a 1656 book by the physician and humanist Thomas Ady. Ady's book attacked the superstitions of the day, specifically the belief in witches and witchcraft, and advocated for skepticism and evidence-based thinking in the face of widespread hysteria. Ady offered "a candle in the dark" as an allegory for reason and critical inquiry, which could bring reassurance and comfort.

For me, I grew up on the coast, often swimming in the ocean or sailing on yachts, and had my share of deep sea scares. The title "Candle on the Water" resonated powerfully with me: a beacon — not to knowledge — but to safety and warmth. And now in later years, when we use humankind's best tools, the tools of the scientific method, to discern what's real from what's not, we are best positioned to keep ourselves safe, be it from disease, from scams, from conspiracy theories, or from false hope — all the threats that Skeptoid seeks to explore. I didn't know anything about science or skepticism or James Randi or Carl Sagan when I watched Pete's Dragon as a boy, but the words of that song struck me at a deep, organic level, and the idea of a lighthouse has always been close to my heart.

The filmmakers were not subtle about having the dragon Elliott playing the role of Pete's imaginary friend. Pete had had a rough life with nobody to love him, and had constructed this common coping mechanism. And it's fascinating to extend this same parallel into the various forms of woo that scientific skepticism is critical of. Every day in my work, I encounter people who believe they can speak with their dead relatives, or who have placed all their faith into a hopeless fake cure for some medical condition, or have turned in financial desperation to multi-level marketing, or have become deeply psychologically invested in the belief that aliens fill our skies. These are all imaginary friends by any other names; they are the dragons I first spoke of all those years ago with my 2008 short film Here Be Dragons. Pete simply needed love from Elliott; and almost all people who seek comfort from some pseudoscience or paranormal belief are just as innocent and well meaning. But while Pete had the advantage of Hollywood movie magic that made Elliott real when the critical moment came, people in our material world won't ever get that magical rescue from their invisible friend. But luckily there are so many of us who will always be willing to throw a lifeline, and to hold up that candle.

And that's why I do what I do, and why Sagan did what he did, and James Randi, and a very very long list of my friends and colleagues in every walk of science communication and skeptical advocacy. Some are authors and speakers, some are other podcasters, some are filmmakers and YouTubers, some are social media mavens. Very few make much money at it, or even get to do it full time. We do it because we believe it's important and worthwhile.

But we also face a lot of opposition — overwhelming opposition, as it happens. For every one science advocate scraping by thanklessly, there are ten charlatans selling every imaginable quack cure and sham scheme, happy to make a quick buck passing off magically easy solutions to people facing real and difficult problems. These are the stormy seas of misinformation our lighthouse tries to rise above, but all too often is drowned out by the concussive waves of profiteering.

Here in this melee, many approaches are tried. Some try humor, some try snark, some try debate and confrontation. I try the big tent, being non-judgemental and simply offering the facts to those who are truly interested in learning. It appeals to some but not to everyone. No approach does. That's why many styles of communication are needed.

When Pete tried going to school, the other children laughed at him for saying he had a dragon. Nora's father Lampie (played by Mickey Rooney) got pushed around in the bar and made fun of for trying to warn everyone about the dragon. And so it is easy for us to make fun of the person with the ridiculous belief — the UFO "disclosure" enthusiast who makes himself more and more ridiculous with claims and conspiracies that cannot hold their own weight, all in pursuit of a desperate need to have superior knowledge, to be anointed as one of the few who dare to have an open mind and are not hobbled by blind adhesion to the status quo.

I have seen mockery succeed as a way to coax people out of rabbit holes. I have seen believers crack under this weight and reluctantly conclude that maybe they are wrong after all. But it's not a method I'm good at. What works best for me is the same things as what happens to naturally appeal most to me — and that's finding the amazing new fact that I never knew before. Every false belief system has a foundation that necessarily has cracks in its accuracy, and some of those cracks open up to really neat science facts that both believer and skeptic can appreciate equally. Sometimes the believer follows those threads backwards, and sometimes they too find that they are more intrigued by the real science, to the point that they abandon their imaginary friend. Because here's something that's both real and interesting. This is what works for me, but as I say, by no means is it the only or even the best method for guiding lost people toward the light.

Allow me to close with a proposal. There are some hundred thousand or so of you listening right now. Let us turn that into a hundred thousand candles. Nora never suffered her lantern to flag; let all of us line every dark coastline and make sure every person out there on the water can reach a shore that is warm and bright.

Many times in the past few months, people have asked me what I was going to do for episode #1000. I said I wasn't sure yet, but internally, the idea I had was that it wouldn't be my episode, it would be your episode. So I turn the question around. What are you going to do with this episode? What is special to you that you can keep in mind as you hold your candle on your shoreline; what can you do that nobody else can, because nobody else is you? Join me; join all of my friends and colleagues who do this same work. Let us build a hundred-thousand-strong army of advocates for science and reason, all standing ready to hold our beacons aloft and guide the lost to safe shores.

Skeptoid #1000 is dedicated to the person who played me the most important private performance of "Candle on the Water" of my life, and it was played to me on solo viola on an autumn day. It came when I needed it most, when I was far away and was more lost than ever before, and had no shorelines in sight — only darkness. What I take away from that moment is that any of us can be the saving, guiding light for any other of us, at any time, sometimes at that exact moment of greatest need, and often defying the remotest hope.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning