Has the Internet age created a bunch of cynics, or are there other reasons that UFOs and ghost are vanishing from pop culture?

Walton continues on to explore why sightings of UFOs have declined, citing the pop-culture phenomena Close Encounters of the Third Kind that most likely lead to the increase in reports. Not only have UFOs sightings shrunk, but reports of poltergeists, ghosts, and goblins are also on the wane, Walton notes. Maybe this is because of growing skepticism in popular culture, Walton speculates, but maybe it is something else.  

Wheeling through social theory and the evolution of mass media, Walton makes the case that the “spectacularisation” of pop-culture has diminished our ability to recognize true paranormal or extraterrestrial events (if any do exist). He claims, not that better technology should be able to sort out these questions, but that technology (especially video recording technology) has “hastened the decline” in the belief in the supernatural simply because we are too skeptical. The implication is that our bar is too high: we cannot expect video evidence of a ghost that is of Transformers quality.  

In a world where nearly everyone can be fooled by a YouTube hoax, Walton may have a point, but he goes too far.  

On the first weekend in April, I flew to Minneapolis to participate in Skep Tech, a brand new skeptic conference organized by several student groups at three universities in that area.  This first year event, which was free to all attendees, was a great success from my perspective.  The talks were well attended, interesting topics were discussed and many new skeptical connections were made.  

If you've been paying attention to the conference scene, you may have noticed a huge increase in the number of skepticism oriented conferences in the last few years. This increase is very real, and may well be evidence of skepticism's continued growth. It's getting to the point that some weekends there is more than one choice of event to attend - Skep Tech itself was held the same weekend as NECSS in New York City.

Here is a rundown of the mysterious, the pseudoscientific and the "what-the-heck?" news from the past week courtesy of Doubtful News.  

Let's start with some good news since this last week was pretty darn awful.

People did not feel that a real Noah's Ark was worth funding. 

Forbes magazine gives Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski a whipping by contrasting with another medical center.

Here is a recap of the stories that appeared last week at Science-Based Medicine, a multi-author skeptical blog that separates the science from the woo-woo in medicine.

Eric Merola’s conspiracy-mongering and more of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s cancer “success” stories (David Gorski) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/dr-stanislaw-burzynskis-cancer-success-stories-part-2/ Details reveal the fundamental intellectual dishonesty behind the conspiracy mongering of Eric Merola, the director of the two Burzynski movies. He even accused Dr. Gorski of eating puppies! And two more cases being used to “prove” that Burzynski can cure cancer actually prove nothing of the sort.  

Doves, Diplomats, and Diabetes (Harriet Hall) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/doves-diplomats-and-diabetes/ A new book applies evolutionary principles to the study of diabetes, marshals a mountain of evidence, and proposes a new paradigm that appears to resolve existing paradoxes and better explain the disease. Whether his conclusions are correct or not, the author’s methods epitomize the attitudes of a true scientist. He acknowledges that he could have fallen into a thinking trap and asks readers to critique his arguments.