It was a VERY busy week in weird news, no doubt about that. Here is a rundown of the top stories in pseudoscience, anomalies and just plain oddness from the past week courtesy of Doubtful News.

This was a HUGE week in Bigfoot. The Melba Ketchum paper describing her Sasquatch DNA project was released. But there were SERIOUS questions with the publication format rendering the whole project suspect.

Then, she announces that the data is being reviewed by others. Too bad that didn't happen PRIOR to publication like good science protocol should work.  Some people have to claim their share of the limelight. 2008 Georgia Bigfoot in a Freezer hoaxer Rick Dyer claims he shot another one. This time for real.

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.  

An open letter to Penn and Teller about their appearance on The Dr. Oz Show (David Gorski) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/open-letter-to-penn-teller/ Penn and Teller are well known for their skepticism, but they let their fans down when they appeared on the show of the very non-skeptical Dr. Oz. The segment was pointless, debunking only banal myths like the idea that swallowed bubblegum takes 7 years to digest. They offered the appearance of support to Oz, who promotes all kinds of quackery on his show, some of which is potentially harmful to viewers.  

Death as a Foodborne Illness Curable by Veganism (Harriet Hall) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/death-as-a-foodborne-illness-curable-by-veganism/ A doctor who advocates veganism has produced a video claiming that death is a foodborne illness, and that all the major causes of death can be prevented or treated by avoiding foods of animal origin. The studies he cites are cherry-picked and misinterpreted, and he omits any discussion of other studies that got different results. The evidence for a plant-based diet with limited meat is compelling; the evidence for total avoidance of meat, milk and eggs is not.  

As the editing on my 10th book “A Magician in the Laboratory” passes its half-way mark, I’ve come once again to the name George Vithoulkas, a Greek homeopath – but a bit of history before I continue. The JREF includes the efficacy of homeopathy as a legitimate paranormal claim for the Million Dollar Challenge because if it worked as claimed, it certainly would be paranormal – magical. With not a single atom or molecule present in a diluted solution, yet still effecting a cure, that ranks as "paranormal."

This man Vithoulkas had become aware of my 2003 appearance on BBC television in which homeopathy failed a definitive and comprehensive test, and he decided to apply for the JREF prize. A protocol was devised in agreement with a group of international scientists and the experiment was to take place in a hospital in Athens. It involved homeopaths, under Vithoulkas` supervision, prescribing individualized remedies to a number of patients in a double-blind fashion with half of the patients receiving a homeopathic remedy, and the other half no remedy. In August 2006, I sent my signed agreement to Vithoulkas in which I stated my satisfaction with the suggested protocol. I also waived the preliminary test, as I had with the BBC tests, to speed up the process. However, I was then forced to delay the start of the experiment owing to serious health problems.

Vithoulkas has claimed that I knew of certain impending political changes in the Greek government at that time that might have affected his involvement in such a series of tests. It seems that the new administration would not have been agreeable to paying the costs of these tests. I was of course unaware of this situation, yet Vithoulkas now claims that I was looking for a way of getting out of the challenge, certainly one of the most rigorous and well-organized attempts to win the one million dollars that had ever been attempted.

I’ve been a skeptic for almost as long as I can remember. There’s a story I’ve often told about being at the World’s Fair in New York City when I was eleven years old – I had already been doing magic for several years – and figuring out that the IBM pavilion had scammed me out of two weeks of allowance money with a phony computerized handwriting analysis. Although I didn’t know it at the time, when I look back I can see that as a defining moment of sorts.  A moment when my already consuming interest in magic crossed circuits with my fascination with science, and with my admiration for Harry Houdini’s historic work as a psychic-buster, and crystallized my identity as a skeptic. But of course, not quite yet as an activist, movement-oriented skeptic.  That would take longer. But I think it’s safe to say that by age eleven I was already personally, as an individual, a skeptic.

I can still recall watching The Amazing Randi on television when I was a little boy, on a popular local New York Sunday children’s show called “Wonderama,” hosted by Sonny Fox (who spoke at TAM a few years ago and with whom I was thrilled to get a photo!). But I was in my early twenties when Randi wrote a book called The Magic of Uri Geller that would change my life. (I still prefer that original title to the later reissue as The Truth About Uri Geller. One word tells the whole story: MAGIC. As in TRICKS. So simple and direct and devastatingly blunt. So … Randi.)

Randi’s book didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about Uri Geller in particular or psychics in general. I’d been weaned on Harry Houdini along with the art and craft and psychology of deception. But that book radicalized me about the harm that con men and phony psychics do, whether it is distracting the pursuit of science down rabbit holes of confusion and anti-science, or setting the public up with toxic misinformation that can readily lead to victimization by an army of similar con men and women and their catalog of techniques with which to take people’s time, and money, and sometimes even lives away from them.