The Kennedy assassination has been the focus of enduring conspiracy theories alleging that shadowy agents were responsible for the deed. Despite government investigations and untold private ones, no credible piece of evidence has tied anyone besides Lee Harvey Oswald to the deed.

The Kennedy killing is one of the few areas on conspiracy theory thought that has an “official account.” That phrase is normally used by conspiracy theorists to discredit the most mainstream notion and to pat themselves on the back for exposing the sinister ruse. But in this case, the Warren Commission report qualifies. Members concluded that Oswald acted alone, as did a House Selected Committee on Assassinations the following decade.

These days, with a thousand 24-7 social media sites needing to be fed, any even uneventful event – nice oxymoron there – can appeal to the conspiratorial minded. But previously, conspiracy theories centered mostly on major events and it’s hard to image anything more impactful than the first presidential assassination of the modern age.

Largely because of that, it is the one conspiracy theory that a majority of people believe. Contributing to that is that there are so man sub-categories to choose from. Most of them identify Oswald as the trigger man but consider him a stooge or at least as only one of many involved. J.D. Sword wrote for Skeptical Inquirer about a specific theory that puts blame on one of the old conspiracy theorist standbys, the Free Masons. Proponents feel the assassination constituted psychological warfare against U.S. citizens and was perpetrated by means of a Masonic rite. They posit that Kennedy’s assassination was the second part of an alchemical ritual. The first part, the destruction of Primordial Matter, occurred when the atom was split in White Sands, New Mexico.

The second goal of alchemy refers to the killing of the king, which believers assert applies to Kennedy. Proponents use any combination of places, dates, and especially numbers to shoe in a conclusion, no matter how remote or tenuous.

One example cited by Sword: “On the morning of November 22, they flew to Gate 28 at Love Field, Dallas, Texas. The number 28 is one of the correspondences of Solomon in kabbalistic numerology. … On the 28th degree is also Cape Canaveral from which the moon flight was launched—made possible not only by the President’s various feats but by his death as well, for the placing of Freemasons on the moon could occur only after the Killing of the King. The 28th degree of Templarism is the “King of the Sun” degree.”

All of this proves absolutely nothing, other than that proponents having elastic creativity and too much time on their hands, and a desperate to reach a desired conclusion. Their ideas makes little effort to even claim evidence. They just asserts symbolic meaning and assumes the existence of a clandestine, evil entity at work.

There have been two periods of my life in which I engaged I heavy drink. To fix this, I quit. According to Alcoholics Anonymous, this should have been impossible on my own. I had not considered myself diseased, did not call on a higher power, and did not commit to a series of steps to reach the goal. I just dried out, which is something I have in common with many others.

Approaches, be they AA’s 12-step process, something similar, or something quite different, might work for some participants but not for all. And there is little to suggest the AA approach is likely to be successful. AA claims a 40 percent success rate, making it no better than an iffy proposition. But this number applies only to those currently in the program and therefore fails to account for those who have quit (the program, not the drinking). This one size fits all approach is a problem since people over imbibe for various reasons, have varying levels of physical or psychological addiction to alcohol, and have different personalities. Few are the out of control wayward derelicts in need of redemption that AA portrays all heavy drinkers as. When it seems to work, it is more a reflection on the patient than the program.

Forceful interventions are commonly used to spring the program on someone, by relatives or friends. A small army, perhaps including an AA representative, confront the subject who immediately goes on the defensive. While this would a normal reaction, it is treated as a form of denial by those intervening.

If treatment commences, the subject is told alcohol abuse is a disease caused by their being weak-willed. Hence, moderate or even light drinking must be permanently out since the feckless patient is hopeless with any path other than permanent abstinence. Even those who agree with this are kept forever stained by one of the organization’s most well-known mantras, “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.” Because this is not really a disease, it can’t be treated by physicians or medicine. In reality, it is treated as a broken person’s immutable condition. This keeps them forever in need of AA.

It is telling that it has been defined as a disease by the same outfit that claims to have the exclusive cure – though that is something of a misnomer, since the overarching point is that one can never be fully fixed. Being cured would mean an end to treatment and its accompanying payments.

AA has no grounding in science or medicine. It relies wholly on anecdotes, in the form of, “My name is blank and I’m an alcoholic.” Rousing success stories are highlighted but, as James Randi explained, the plural of anecdote is not data.

Today is Halloween but I enjoy monster movies year-round. Mostly the Universal ones, but I am also a devotee of Val Lewton and am unable to get enough 1950s and 1960s schlock.

I do not extend this affinity to The Exorcist. I just don’t get it. It tops several lists of the most frightening movies ever and I wouldn’t have it in my top 100. The only scene that freaks me out at all is when a floating Regan has her head grotesquely rotated at an unnatural angle. But everyone has their likes, neutralities, and dislikes. The concern here is with an urban legend that a single frame, when frozen, reveals genuine demonic activity as to the Hollywood kind.

Vanity Fair writer Anthony Breznican reports that he and some cronies about 30 years ago, presumably with too much time on their hands, slowed the William Friedkin film down in search of subliminal messaging. Eventually, they hit a voila moment, in a scene where Father Karras dreams about his dead mother. When slowed to a cinematic crawl, the shot reveals what Breznican describes as the “appearance of a horrid white face, sneering with decayed teeth, eyes pooling in red sores.”

This seems not terribly surprising for a movie with The Exorcist’s theme, but the amateur detectives were sure they had hit on something. Enthused, they kept going, and came to a scene where the possessed Regan convulses in her bedroom and easily overpowers the adults trying to help her. During the frame-by-frame investigation, Breznican and his compatriots come across one where Regan’s eyes seem to disappear, leaving only vacant sockets. Again, nothing unexpected from this type of flick. However, Breznican wrote that he didn’t think the technology to pull this off existed in the mid-1970s and that, “It didn’t look like a makeup effect. There was no discernible editing cut either. It just appeared that her face changed.”

What would seem to be a chilling discovery to middle schoolers can be recognized as condition-setting, expectation, and pareidolia by the skeptic. Breznican eventually realized that, but he still wanted answers as to how the scene was managed. He had the chance when he interviewed William Friedkin 20 years after the frightful viewing.

The answer was simple. The director told him, “What’s used there, those quick shots, were the tests that (makeup artist) Dick Smith did on Linda Blair’s double. She had an all-white face and red lips, and I didn’t like it as the makeup for the demon, but viewed that way, as a quick cut, it’s very frightening.”

Not to me. But I do appreciated a good mystery solved.

Drugs have been relegated to a less prominent position on the panic scale, eclipsed by fears that transgender youth might receive medical treatment or by fretting over a classroom featuring Catch-22 (no worries from that crowed about a 22-caliber being present).

But there is still plenty of angst over them there drugs. One example is concern that police officers are suffering catastrophic medical conditions after touching or inhaling powdered fentanyl. But according to an NPR report, medical experts consider this a physical impossibility. The network quoted toxicologist Dr. Ryan Marino as saying, “There has never been an overdose through skin contact or accidentally inhaling fentanyl.”

To be clear, the synthetic opioid is serious stuff. It causes tens of thousands of deaths each year. And owing to its potency and usually being in a concentrated form, overdosing is common.

But hospitalizations and deaths come from it being smoked or injected, not through accidentally getting some on your hands. It is also highly unlikely that one could be exposed to a lethal airborne dose. Brandon Del Pozo, a former police chief who studies addiction, told NPR, “The idea of it hanging in the air and getting breathed in is nearly impossible.”

The news organization failed to uncover one instance of medical personnel confirming that a police officer had been poisoned by or overdosed on fentanyl from incidental exposure. There had been several anecdotes or claims but none of these alleged incidents were confirmed by toxicology reports.

Indeed, the UC Davis website features an interview with its Department of Emergency Medicine’s co-director, who tells us, “It is a common misconception that fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin, but it is not true for casual exposure. You can’t overdose on fentanyl by touching a doorknob or dollar bill. The one case in which fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin is with a special doctor-prescribed fentanyl skin patch, and even then, it takes hours of exposure.”

So there are no dangers here. The panicked crowd can get back to protecting children from everything except flying bullets.

Energy is one of the most abused Alternative Medicine buzzwords. While energy is a legitimate concept, the word is repeated ad nauseum in alt-med circles without specifying what type it is, how it is accessed, or the method behind how it works as a particular medicant.

The field also uses genuine terms incorrectly to try and impress or at least confuse. In a article for Skeptical Inquirer, Dr. Nick Tiller wrote that proprietors of magic jewelry claim the ability to harness quantum energy fields, get in tune with bodily frequencies, emit magnetic pulses, protect the wearer and generally “make Bilbo Baggins envious.” Best of all, there is no arduous adventure that makes one late for dinner; these trinkets, bracelets, and pendants are readily available.

As one example, Tiller cited the PowerBalance bracelet, which the doctor notes uses a physiological trick to make the product seem efficient. In the demonstration, volunteers stand on one leg and hold their arms out for balance. An assistant then pulls down on the volunteer’s forearm and they go a’ tumbling. The volunteer then slaps on the PowerBalance bracelet and the test is seemingly repeated, with the volunteer staying put. However, this is because on the second iteration, the assistant pulled down above the volunteer’s elbow, near to the wearer’s center of gravity.

A similar ploy has volunteers clasp their hands behind the back and when pulled down on, they lose balance. With the magic item is put on, the volunteer stays upright this time, but only because the assistant stands closer, close enough to prevent them from toppling over.

Another product with putative powers is the magnetic bracelet, which proponents claim can access the power of iron-based protein in red cells. Tiller writes that red blood cells contain iron and hemoglobin, and indeed, iron filings align along magnetic fields. However, iron in the blood is weakly paramagnetic and thus would never be responsive to magnetic fields.

In lieu of double blind studies or an explanation of a plausible mechanism, most of these products rely on an array of logical fallacies, such as the appeals to nature, tradition, and popularity.
Genuine medicine uses known properties and mechanisms to treat or cure a specific condition or ailment. Fraudulent knockoffs often claim to be a panacea for a host of unrelated health maladies, to include mental issues. Such wide-ranging claims are almost always a giveaway that the product is bogus.

There are tiers of racism, from the bad old-fashioned kind exhibited by my paternal grandmother, who despised all Blacks so much that she claimed to have never spoken to one. Then there are those who make openly racist jokes and comments but who might be OK with minorities on a selective one-on-one basis. A few notches lower are those who genuinely wonder in the blissful naivete why we don’t have a White Entertainment Channel or history month. But when anyone along this spectrum expresses a sudden isolated concern with racism, my skeptic ears perk up (admittedly, not a difficult feat to manage).

Which brings us to Sid Miller, the Texas agriculture commissioner, whose Facebook profile lauds Donald Trump and Ted Nugent. The ag commish made a minor news splash with his trans-busting requirement that his employees show up in gender-traditional attire, as determined by Miller. No drag queens had ever reported for work, but Miller felt a need to make this pronouncement and regale in the subsequent adulation from the right-wing press. In a Facebook post this past week, he mocked brown-colored Band-Aids, not so subtlety suggesting that white should be the only flesh-toned offering. So when he expressed supposed angst over Aunt Jemima being erased from history, my aforementioned hearing appendages commenced to perking.

Miller posted that Aunt Jemima was the pseudonym of Nancy Green, who was born enslaved but once free, concocted a pancake mix and accompanying syrup, and in so doing, became the country’s first self-made Black female millionaire. She then served as the literal face the pancake mix and syrup for well over a century. But now, her history has been erased by the woke crowd. While I am dubious that Miller had a sudden epiphany about all things racial, let’s put that aside and focus on the accuracy of his claims about the rising flour spokeswoman.

The original recipe came not from Green, but from a white man, Chris Rutt, who with business associate Charles Underwood bought a flour mill and devised a self-rising, premixed flour.

Rutt then came upon a performance of “Old Aunt Jemima,” a minstrel song written by Black musician Billy Kersands. The ditty centered on a racially stereotypical Black woman who entertained and tended to a white family. Inspired, Rutt concocted a cartoonish mammy representation and slapped it on his pancake box. But sales were poor and he and Underwood sold the recipe to the R.T. Davis Milling Co.

A half-century veteran of the flour industry, Davis was a savvy enough marketer that he knew a live spokesperson could attract new customers. With that, he put out a casting call for an outgoing, captivating Black woman to cook the mix at product demonstrations. Enter Nancy Green. She was born enslaved and had the personality and kitchen abilities that made her an ideal candidate for the position.

While cooking, she sang and fascinated audience members with her stories and captivating personality. While this Aunt Jemima personification proved a boon for the business, the notion that Green shared this revenue in any appreciable way is a fabrication. So, Commissioner Miller, it’s not true. But we welcome this newfound concern over the fate of minorities, and you can continue by rescinding your dress code.

For the first time since a player’s strike 40 years prior, the NFL cancelled a game this past season, owing to the on-field collapse of Buffalo’s Damar Hamlin. The Bills safety drilled Cincinnati receiver Tee Higgins in such a way and place that it caused Hamlin to succumb to commotio cordis. A heroic response from the Buffalo medical staff restarted his heart and a long recovery process commenced.

While Hamlin was recouping, his teammates began their next game with a rousing 96-yard touchdown return. This prompted the first of many overexcited proclamations that the Bills were destined to win their long-awaited first Super Bowl championship. Other supposed clues were that Josh Allen threw three touchdown passes and Bills defenders snagged three interceptions, both matching Hamlin’s jersey number. There were also inaccurate reports that it had been three years, three months since the Bills’ last kick return TD.

There are some starry-eyed types who insist there are no coincidences. But for the stodgy skeptic, a more measured approach is taken. Skeptical Inquirer’s Timothy Redmond quoted Michael Shermer as saying that those in the former category “look for and find patterns in our world and in our lives, then weave narratives around those patterns to bring them to life and give them meaning.”

So while the first game after the near-death experience may have had significant emotional impact, there was no need to ascribe a higher meaning to anything that happened that day.
If 500 million Powerball tickets are purchased, the chance of the one in your front jacket pocket being the winner is extremely minute. But the chance of a ticket somewhere having the winning numbers is quite large. Similarly, Redmond wrote, while the odds of a specific stat from a game would match an injured teammate’s number may be low, the odds that some statistic would match the number is high. A quarterback of Allen’s caliber throwing three TDs is relatively common, and while three picks in one game is higher than the norm, it is a reasonable occurrence.

As Redmond put it, fans were “looking for ‘3,’ and they found it. It is the endless number of improbable coincidences that renders such a coincidence so probable.” There were far more non-coincidences failing to incorporate the numeral, such as Buffalo winning by 12, the victory giving the Bills a 7-game winning streak, and Buffalo recording 1 sack. And the supposed inevitability of a Bills Super Bowl championship wilted in their lackluster three-score loss to Cincinnati in the divisional round.

While some have ascribed heartfelt and positive meaning to the occurrences, there are those who produce a malevolent spin. Anti-vax conspiracy theorists made the highly improbable claim that Hamlin’s collapse was unrelated to the violent impact in the precise place on his body that would cause commotio cordis, and that the culprit was an unspecified COVID vaccine injury, which impacted only Hamlin and none of the NFL’s 5,000 other vaccinated coaches, players, and support staff.

This required ignoring previous commotio cordis cases and the medical understanding behind a heartbeat stopping after a blunt blow to the chest at a certain time in the heartbeat cycle.

An even more extreme position holds that Hamlin died or is comatose and has been replaced by an imposter, an assertion void of all facts and reason. This idea would be comical were it not for the trend of anti-vax conspiracy theorist violence and confrontation, such as accosting California legislator Richard Pan and vaccine scientist Peter Hotez, and death threats phoned into Australian doctor Wilson Chin. This brings up chilling thoughts as to what they may have in mind for Hamlin, who endured a life-threatening condition, is still fighting to recover, and may have to deal with being stalked by deranged persons intent on harm.

Baron Doctor (Or possibly Doctor Baron) Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Reichenbach thought he had discovered an basic force in nature, which he dubbed the “od.” But the best evidence shows that rather than this being a groundbreaking advancement, this was instead an instance of a revered scientist wasting his years by becoming fixated on an idea that only he can validate.

Reichenbach had made numerous contributions prior to becoming fixated on his subjects, which he called “sensitives,” and their claims that they perceived things that others were unable to. He spent his last three decades researching and defended his discovery of this unknown physical force, detectable only by him. When his subjects failed in their tests to, say, detect positive currents from negative ones, von Reichenbach retorted with an ad hoc claim that a known current was impacting the “odic” one and confusing the sensitives. There was no way to test this claim.

That the baron doctor thought his odic force explained dozens of unrelated items, while never backing any of this with a controlled study, speaks to egomaniacal thinking. He insisted the odic force ran through everything, yet no machine detected it. Only sensitive people, that is to say those so labeled by von Reichenbach, could do so. In a precursor to Feng Shui nonsense, he suggested buildings face a certain direction to gain odic benefit. Similarly, Southern hemisphere sleepers were advised to lie on their left side, while northerners do the opposite.

While conducting what passed for an experiment, the Baron adhered to a diet and rest regimen and ensured that he never touched metal. At the end of the day, he touched the subject’s hand, while he or she noted when they detected odic force movement. This was not a scientific study and certainly not of the double blind variety. There were no controls, no stated guidelines, and no way of confirming this.

Still, believers insisted the force emanated as aura, yet only they could see it. Scientists of the time almost uniformly rejected the concept, owing to the lack of data and use of established protocols.

One of the great aviation mysteries centers on Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 which disappeared on March 18, 2014, after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing. With little debris recovered, and never a body, we can safely assume the 239 on board are deceased. Their fate has been variously tied to homicidal pilots, black holes, and alien abduction.

Meanwhile, the Netflix series MH370: The Plane That Disappeared centers on two conspiracy theories, one championed by aviation journalist Jeff Wise and the other proposed by French newspaper reporter Florence de Changy. Both doubt the consensus conclusion that the plane plunged into the Southern Indian Ocean. Wise believes Russians hijacked the plane, while de Changy maintains that the U.S. government shot it down.

The few pieces of common ground include that the plane departed at 1:19 a.m. on the fateful morning. And the final contact between the pilot at air traffic control came just moments later when the tower told him to contact air traffic control in Vietnam. The pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, responded, “Good night. Malaysian Three Seven Zero.” Two minutes later, the plane disappeared from radar and voice contact but took up permanent residence in aviation lore.

Suspicion for what happened has ranged from the mundane to the malevolent to the farcical. In an article for Skeptical Inquirer, J.D. Sword wrote that the BBC quoted Malaysian Air Force Chief Rodzali Daud as saying radar signals showed the airplane may have turned around. Supporting this is the Thai military claiming to have intercepted a radar signal from an unknown aircraft turning west toward the Strait of Malacca. Additionally, First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid’s cellphone pinged off a cell tower on Penang Island. Piecing this together, investigators concluded the flight lasted until around 8:19 before the aircraft exhausted its fuel supply and crashed into the southern Indian Ocean.

As the involvement of nefarious Russian or American agents, Wise and de Changy provide little in the way of evidence. They merely dismiss the radar data and insist the satellite information has been falsified. Physical debris is likewise dismissed, with the duo claiming it was planted. This is needless conjecture and supported by noting in the way of tangible proof.

Wise blames the Russians, pointing out that four months later, they shot down a second Malaysian flight over Ukraine. However, this conclusion is based on the appeal to incredulity and post hoc reasoning. He says, “It seemed like an incredible coincidence” and that “When MH370 happened it had the desirable effect of stopping anybody from talking about Russia’s invasion of Crimea.” Besides the aforementioned logical fallacies, this ignores the Law of Truly Large Numbers and represents a common conspiracy theory trait of tying together two disparate events by claiming one is a distraction for the other.

Wise makes an additional claim that Russians hijacked the plane remotely. However, Sword quoted Fuad Sharuji, former crisis director for Malaysia Airlines, as explaining, “Anyone who gets into the hatch can disable the transponder and disable the communications systems, but it is impossible to fly the aircraft from the avionics compartment.”

Meanwhile, de Changy believes the U.S. Air Force shot down MH370 to prevent delivery of electronics to Beijing since American feared China would purloin the technology. Again, this ties together two events without offering evidence. No, the U.S. would not want China to get American technology, and yes, a flight en route to Beijing went down. The French journalist offers little in the way of showing that these facts are connected.

As to recovered debris, she cites a secret source, who allegedly told her the plane’s identification plate was missing and that those are only removed on decommissioned planes. Therefore, the source deduces, the recovered parts were planted. However, Sword notes that eight items were identified from MH370 that were consistent with a Boeing 777-200ER. Moreover, an investigative team analyzed debris consisting of an engine cowling piece and an interior panel piece from an aircraft cabin, again the type found on this kind of aircraft.

In sum, Wise and de Changy’s wild speculations have gotten us no closer to determining what caused the crash or why communications disappeared.