Wednesday Weirdness Roundup

One of the biggest, spookiest boogeymen in the H1N1 vaccine hysteria is the use of squalene in oil-based vaccine adjuvants. What the paranoia-peddlers fail to mention is that oil-based adjuvants aren't used in human vaccines, as I explain in "Much Ado About Squalene" at Leaving Alex Jonestown. You might as well be worrying that your... Continue Reading →

Conspiracy Monday: The Secret Space Program

Hoaxes from Space Part IIAbout ten years ago, a teenage Evangelical Christian boy I knew was talking about the space program when he suddenly burst out, "Why do rich people want to live on the moon, anyway? Don't they know it's going to turn to blood?"Though I didn't know it at the time, he was... Continue Reading →

I Like a Strange Balloon

By now, you've probably all heard the harrowing tale of "Balloon Boy", 6-year-old Falcon Heene of Colorado. Earlier this week, Richard and Mayumi Heene reported that their son had probably accidentally drifted away in the basket of an enormous helium balloon, shaped like a flying saucer, that Richard had constructed. Such contraptions are common in... Continue Reading →

Hoaxes From Space: Time Travel Hoaxes, Part II

Ong's Hat As legend has it, Ong's Hat is an isolated ghost town in the New Jersey pine barrens, almost completely uninhabited since the 1930s. Now it consists of just a road, a few houses, and a cafe. The village was said to be a swinging place at one time, full of saloons and rowdy... Continue Reading →

Hoaxes From Space: Time Travel Hoaxes, Part I

A Photo of Jesus On May 2, 1972, the magazine La Domenica del Corriere (basically the Italian equivalent of Parade) published a picture of Jesus Christ (above, left). This wouldn't be a big deal, except the picture was supposedly a photo. And it had been taken by a living monk, Benedictine scholar Pellegrino Ernetti of... Continue Reading →

Hoaxes From Space Part I: Bob Lazar

Gotta have his hustle tight.The Pimp Daddy of UfologyThis year marks the 30th anniversary of the first public appearance of Bob Lazar.If you're at all interested in UFOs, you've probably seen video clips of Lazar chatting calmly and matter-of-factly about his experiences with extraterrestrial spaceships warehoused in the Nevada desert. In his Dan Dreiberg glasses... Continue Reading →

The Lady Vanishes Part V: Other Notable Cases

1959: Jacqueline Gay Hart Jacqueline Gay Hart, known as Gay to her friends, was the lovely 21-year-old daughter of marketing wizard Ralph Hart, the president of Colgate Palmolive International. Ralph had scraped his way to the top from the humblest of beginnings - trapping muskrats in Alberta to support his widowed mother when he was just... Continue Reading →

The Lady Vanishes Part IV: Dar Heatherington

This is what you get for waking up in Vegas. I don't know if Darlene "Dar" Heatherington is well-known beyond the Canadian border, but around these parts she's a household name. And when people say that name, they either have a very strong opinion on it, or they're utterly confounded by the whole thing and... Continue Reading →

The Lady Vanishes Part III: Aimee Semple McPherson

Before there was Jim Bakker, before there was Jerry Fartwell, before there was Jimmy Swaggart, there was Sister Aimee. Born to an Ontario farming family in 1890, Aimee Kennedy was born again at age 17, and married a Pentacostal preacher named Robert Semple a short time later. After Semple died on a missionary trip to... Continue Reading →

The Lady Vanishes Part II: Agatha Christie

Part I is here.The SolutionThe amnesia explanation was too dodgy to convince everyone, and instead of curtailing rumours, it only caused curiosity about the “missing eleven days” to escalate over the years.One curious person was Jared Cade, a young Christie fan and collector from Australia. He had studied the mystery carefully, and in the end... Continue Reading →

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑