The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), is a program within the U.S. non-profit organization Center for Inquiry (CFI), which seeks to "promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims." Paul Kurtz proposed the establishment of CSICOP in 1976 as an independent non-profit organization, to counter what he regarded as an uncritical acceptance of, and support for, paranormal claims by both the media and society in general. Its philosophical position is one of scientific skepticism. CSI's fellows have included notable scientists, Nobel laureates, philosophers, psychologists, educators, and authors. It is headquartered in Amherst, New York.
UFO conspiracy theories are a subset of conspiracy theories which argue that various governments and politicians globally, in particular the United States government, are suppressing evidence that unidentified flying objects are controlled by a non-human intelligence or built using alien technology. Such conspiracy theories usually argue that Earth governments are in communication or cooperation with extraterrestrial visitors despite public disclaimers, and further that some of these theories claim that the governments are explicitly allowing alien abduction.
Harper's Bazaar is an American monthly women's fashion magazine. It was first published in New York City on November 2, 1867, as the weekly Harper's Bazar. Harper's Bazaar is published by Hearst and considers itself to be the style resource for "women who are the first to buy the best, from casual to couture". Since its debut in 1867, as the U.S.'s first fashion magazine, its pages have been home to talent such as the founding editor, author and translator Mary Louise Booth, as well as numerous fashion editors, photographers, illustrators and writers. Harper's Bazaar targets an audience of professional women ranging from their twenties to sixties, who are interested in culture, travel, and luxury experiences.
The Roswell incident is a collection of events and myths surrounding the 1947 crash of a United States Army Air Forces balloon near Roswell, New Mexico. Operated from the nearby Alamogordo Army Air Field and part of the top secret Project Mogul, the balloon was intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests. After metallic and rubber debris was recovered by Roswell Army Air Field personnel, the United States Army announced their possession of a "flying disc". This announcement made international headlines but was retracted within a day. Obscuring the true purpose and source of the crashed balloon, the Army subsequently stated that it was a conventional weather balloon.
Popular Science is a U.S. popular science website, covering science and technology topics geared toward general readers. Popular Science has won over 58 awards, including the American Society of Magazine Editors awards for its journalistic excellence in 2003, 2004, and 2019. Its print magazine, which ran from 1872 to 2020, was translated into over 30 languages and distributed to at least 45 countries. In 2021, Popular Science switched to an all-digital format and abandoned the magazine format in 2023.
David Graham Phillips was an American novelist and journalist of the muckraker tradition.
Philip Julian Klass was a preeminent American aviation/aerospace journalist and UFO researcher, best known for his skepticism regarding UFOs. In the ufological and skeptical communities, Klass inspires polarized appraisals. He has been called the "Sherlock Holmes of UFOlogy". Klass demonstrated "the crusader's zeal for what seems 'right,' regardless of whether it brings popular acclaim," a trait he claimed his father instilled in him. "I've found," said Klass, "that roughly 97, 98 percent of the people who report seeing UFOs are fundamentally intelligent, honest people who have seen something—usually at night, in darkness—that is unfamiliar, that they cannot explain." The rest, he said, were frauds.
Jerome Clark is an American writer, specializing in unidentified flying objects and other paranormal subjects. He has appeared on ABC News Special Report, Unsolved Mysteries, Sightings and the A&E Network discussing UFOs and other oddities. Clark is also a country and folk music songwriter.
Identifying unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is a difficult task due to the normally poor quality of the evidence provided by those who report sighting the unknown object. Observations and subsequent reporting are often made by those untrained in astronomy, atmospheric phenomena, aeronautics, physics, and perception. Nevertheless, most officially investigated UFO sightings, such as from the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, have been identified as being due to honest misidentifications of natural phenomena, aircraft, or other prosaic explanations. In early U.S. Air Force attempts to explain UFO sightings, unexplained sightings routinely numbered over one in five reports. However, in early 1953, right after the CIA's Robertson Panel, percentages of unexplained sightings dropped precipitously, usually being only a few percent in any given year. When Project Blue Book closed down in 1970, only 6% of all cases were classified as being truly unidentified.
Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts is a non-fiction book published by Hearst Communications, Inc. on August 15, 2006. The book is based on the article "9/11: Debunking the Myths" in the March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics and is written by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan, responding to various 9/11 conspiracy theories. The authors interviewed over 300 sources for the book, relying on expert and witness accounts.
McCall Corporation was an American publishing company that produced some popular magazines. These included Redbook for women, Bluebook for men, McCall's, the Saturday Review, and Popular Mechanics. It also published Better Living, a magazine that was distributed solely through grocery stores.
Electrician and Mechanic was an American science and technology magazine published from 1890 to January 1914 when it merged with Modern Electrics to become Modern Electrics & Mechanics. In July 1914, incorporated with Popular Electricity and the World's Advance and the title became Popular Electricity and Modern Mechanics. The new publisher, Modern Publishing, began a series of magazine mergers and title changes so numerous that librarians began to complain. In October 1915 the title became Popular Science Monthly and the magazine is still published under that name today.
The 2009 Morristown UFO hoax was a series of aerial events involving mysterious floating red lights in the sky, that first occurred near Morristown, New Jersey, on Monday, January 5, 2009, between 8:15 pm and 9:00 pm. The red lights were later observed on four other nights: January 26, January 29, February 7, and February 17, 2009. The events were later revealed to be a hoax, perpetrated by Joe Rudy and Chris Russo. Rudy and Russo have described the hoax as a social experiment, with the ambition of exposing "ufology" as a pseudoscience and raising consciousness around unreliability of eyewitness claims.
Japan Air Lines Cargo Flight 1628 was a Japanese Boeing 747-200F cargo aircraft flying from Paris to Narita International Airport that was involved in an unidentified flying object (UFO) sighting on November 17, 1986. During the flight, Captain Kenji Terauchi reported seeing three objects he described as "two small ships and the mother ship". The FAA in Anchorage only saw Flight 1628 on their radar. Two other nearby planes only saw Flight 1628 and no other objects. An FAA investigation of the incident characterized Terauchi as a "UFO repeater". Astronomers and investigators have determined that Terauchi probably mistook the planets Jupiter and Mars as UFOs. Contradictions among the accounts of the crew from the three aircraft as well as contradictions between the transcripts and later interviews with Terauchi have cast doubt that anything unusual happened.
Henry Haven Windsor, American writer, magazine editor, and publisher, was the founder and first editor of Popular Mechanics. He was succeeded as editor by his son, Henry Haven Windsor, Jr (1898–1965). Windsor also published Cartoons Magazine from 1912 to 1922. Windsor was born in a log cabin in Mitchell, Iowa, the son of Rev. William D. D. Windsor and Harriet Butler (Holmes) Windsor. He attended Iowa College, graduating in 1884. On June 25, 1889, he married Lina B. Jackson in Marengo, Illinois.
Skepter is a popular science magazine of the Dutch skeptical foundation Stichting Skepsis. It describes paranormal or controversial theories and methods from a skeptical perspective.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was an unclassified but unpublicized investigatory effort funded by the United States Government to study unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP). The program was first made public on December 16, 2017. The program began in 2007, with funding of $22 million over the five years until the available appropriations were ended in 2012. The program began in the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
The Pentagon UFO videos are selected visual recordings of FLIR targeting from United States Navy fighter jets based aboard aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2004, 2014 and 2015, with additional footage taken by other Navy personnel in 2019. The four grainy, monochromic videos, widely characterized as officially documenting UFOs, have received extensive coverage in the media since 2017. The Pentagon later addressed and officially released the first three videos of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) in 2020, and confirmed the provenance of the leaked 2019 videos in two statements made in 2021. Footage of UAPs was also released in 2023, sourced from MQ9 military drones.
Kenny Biddle is an investigator of paranormal claims. He is chief investigator at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a fellow of the same organization.
"Have We Visitors From Space?" was an article on Flying Saucers by H. B. Darrach Jr. and Robert Ginna that appeared in the April 7, 1952 edition of Life magazine. The piece was strongly sympathetic to the hypothesis that UFOs might be the product of extraterrestrials. Publicity surrounding the piece is believed to have contributed to the 1952 UFO flap, a subsequent wave of reports that summer.
