Conspiracies & Paranormal, features and articles | Educational Science

Sep 27, 2022

Trump Meets Orb: 5 Interesting Facts About Crystal Balls

On his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump and Saudi King Salman were captured in a photo putting their hands on a glowing orb. The comical picture has launched a thousand jokes and memes about crystal balls. It turns out that Trump and King Salman weren't trying to...

Oct 14, 2022

Why Sandy Hook Massacre Spawned Conspiracy Theories

One month after the Sandy Hook school shootings, the list of victims continues to grow. One man, Gene Rosen — who found six children and a bus driver in his driveway, brought them into his home, fed them and called parents to assure them that their children were safe —...

Oct 14, 2022

Why JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories Are So Appealing

Fifty years ago, on Nov. 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy fell to an assassin's bullet in Dallas. To this day, nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that a conspiracy was responsible for the president's death. That widespread suspicion of the official story — that lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK...

Oct 14, 2022

Why Creationists Are More Likely to Buy into Conspiracy Theories

When something occurs that's hard to explain, many people say that everything happens for a reason and that the event was meant to be. The thought provides a purpose for what, in reality, was a random, accidental event. This type of thinking, called teleological thinking, is what gives rise to...

Oct 14, 2022

Contradictions Don't Deter Conspiracy Theorists

Did Princess Diana fake her own death to escape the public eye? Or was she killed by a rogue element of the British secret service? If you agree with one of these theories, there's a good chance you'll subscribe to both even though one suggests Princess Diana is alive, the...

Oct 14, 2022

Nearly 50% in US Believe in Medical Conspiracy Theories

About half of Americans agree with at least one medical conspiracy theory, a new study suggests. The study surveyed more than 1,300 Americans to see whether they agreed with six popular medical conspiracy theories — such as the discredited link between vaccines and autism, or the belief that water fluoridation...

Oct 14, 2022

In Photos: Mysterious Crop Circles

Relatively Recent Phenomenon (Image credit: winjohn | sxc.hu)Crop circles first began cropping up in the 1970s, sparking claims that they were created by extraterrestrials. Although two men came forward in 1991 and said that they had created the patterns as a UFO hoax, they didn’t take responsibility for all of...

Oct 14, 2022

Mermaid Sightings Claimed in Israel

Locals and tourists in the Israeli town of Kiryat Yam have been flocking to the coast in hopes of glimpsing a creature that most people believe only exist in fairy tales. An alleged mermaid, said to resemble a cross between a fish and a young girl, only appears at sunset....

Oct 14, 2022

Surprising Realities Behind 'Spiderwick'

If you’ve visited a bookstore in the last few years, you may have seen those cute books about fairies or gnomes where it looks like the author found and smashed one of the poor creatures between the pages. The whimsical drawings of the squashed little folk are at once both...

Oct 21, 2022

Top 10 most famous ghosts

Ghosts are both everywhere and nowhere, stories would have us believe. Their existence is constantly being investigated, but highly doubted, yet despite that healthy scepticism ghosts feature prominently in our culture. They are in television and film, from Harry Potter to The Sixth Sense. Ghost stories are told around campfires...

Oct 21, 2022

11 of the most haunted places in the US

You don’t need to believe in ghosts to enjoy a ghost story about some of the most haunted places. The tales that have grown over generations around reputedly haunted houses can take on a fantastic life of their own in folklore, and the stories that surround a place can influence...

Oct 21, 2022

10 Ghost Stories That Will Haunt You for Life

Ghost stories (Image credit: Photo by Antonio Verrio, CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported)From a spooky 3,200-year-old tale written on broken pottery pieces to amateur YouTube videos of ghost chases, frightening tales of apparitions, demons and goblins have been documented since ancient times and continue to fascinate people today. Although these paranormal...

Oct 21, 2022

Science of the Paranormal: Can You Trust Your Own Mind?

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more....

Nov 14, 2022

Why does the devil have horns and hooves?

Satan is often shown in popular depictions with horns on its head, furry legs and cloven hooves of a goat. But just why is the devil depicted with horns and hooves? It turns out that historians don’t agree on when this depiction of the devil became popular and where it...

Nov 15, 2022

Crop circles: Myth, theories and history

Crop circles are a very straightforward phenomenon: They are a type of landscape art made by humans. Despite evidence to the contrary, some people remain convinced that crop circles were made by aliens brought by UFOs. But how did unidentified flying objects come to be linked with flattened expanses of...