Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

Volume 24, Number 2, March/April 2000

• Buy this back issue
• Can We Tell When Someone Is Staring at Us?
• The Demon-Haunted Sentence: A Skeptical Analysis of Reverse Speech
• Investigative Files: The Secrets of Oak Island
• Psychic Vibrations: ET, You've Got Mail

Articles

Risky Business
Vividness, Availability, and the Media Paradox
The popular media deliver reports on a carefully chosen set of events in vivid detail. Owing to its concrete, personal, and emotional flavor, this biased sample of information is easily retrievable from memory and therefore exerts a disproportionate influence on our judgments and decisions. This results in the media paradox: The more we rely on the popular media to inform us, the more apt we are to misplace our fears.
John Ruscio

Physics and the Paranormal
A Theoretical Physicist's View
The co-recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics explains how modern physics and biology restrict the possibilities for physical explanations of the paranormal.
Gerard 't Hooft

Efficacy of Prayer
A Critical Examination of Claims
The "landmark study" of Byrd and the recent confirmation attempt by Harris et al., both claiming therapeutic benefits of intercessory prayer, are shown to be invalid. One was improperly designed, the other fallaciously analyzed-and the two contradict each other.
Irwin Tessman and Jack Tessman

Can We Tell When Someone Is Staring at Us?
A common belief is that people can tell when someone is staring at them, and some parapsychologists contend this is a form of distant mental influence. To test this phenomenon, the author tried out two demonstrations, one with forty people in a public area, the other with fifty students in a controlled setting.
Robert A. Baker

Assessing the Quality of Medical Web Sites
Quackery and misinformation on the Internet may become a matter of life and death. As a growing number of patients and health professionals consult medical Web resources, concerns have been raised about their quality and reliability. The free flow of information inevitably brings such difficulties.
Ragnar Levi

The Demon-Haunted Sentence
A Skeptical Analysis of Reverse Speech
Advocates of reverse speech propose that it is a direct path to the unconscious mind. However, there is no evidence of its existence, and accepting this pseudoscience could prove tragic.
Tom Byrne and Matthew Normand

Columns

Editor's Note

News and Comment

• Thought Field Therapy Practitioners and Educators Sanctioned
• New York in Quarantine? Failed Psychic Predictions for 1999
• 'Fastest Man on Earth,' Col. John Stapp, Dies at 89; Had Connections to Roswell Incident, Murphy's Law
• Fortunetelling Ban Lifted in Louisiana
• Geller Rebottled
• Manslaughter Charges for Herbalist, Spiritualists
• 'Psychic Detective' Dorothy Allison Dies
• Top 100 Science Books of the Century

Investigative Files
The Secrets of Oak Island
Joe Nickell

Psychic Vibrations
ET, You've Got Mail
Robert Sheaffer

Science Best Sellers

New Books

Articles of Note

Forum

• Knowing the Place
  Ralph Estling

• CONstructivist Artists
  George Englebretsen

• A Skeptical New Age Music DJ
  Tani Chen

• Further Thoughts on the Star of Bethlehem
  Phillips Stevens, Jr.

Letters to the Editor

Book Reviews

Amazon purchases help fund CSICOP On-line

Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe
By Joel Achenbach
David Morrison
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Little Gray Men: Roswell and the Rise and Fall of a Popular Culture
By Toby Smith
John D. German III
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Statistical Tricks and Traps: An Illustrated Guide to the Misuses of Statistics
By Ennis C. Almer
Mark Durm
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