18 for 18

by Brian Dunning
October 1, 2024

This week's show marks the 18th anniversary of Skeptoid. The show began in October of 2006, and 956 episodes later, here we are closing the 18th year. Something I like to do once a year or so is a recap of selected episodes from years past, not only to help introduce newer listeners to the breadth of the content we cover here, but also to remind longtime listeners to go back and re-listen to some of their favorites. And today, the 18th anniversary of the show, seems like the perfect time to do it again. Today we've got retrospectives on 18 shows, ones that were either among my favorites, or ended up being unexpectedly popular.

Year 1: The Living Stones of Death Valley

Racetrack Playa, with the mysterious sailing stones that seem to move by themselves and leave long trails in the dry lakebed, has always had a close personal connection with me, so of course I was going to cover it early on in the first year of the show. After having been there so many times, including once when the conditions were just right and I was able to see the stones move and how it happened, I finally decided it was time to collect the data and publish a paper on it. But as you may know, in 2014, just as I had my research permits and was ready to buy the remote data collection station, some other guys beat me to it and published — having done essentially the exact same research I was planning. Don't just be skeptical; be quick about it. Episode #21

Year 2: Ghost Hunting Tools of the Trade

As far as I know, this was one of the earliest times that anyone working in skeptical activism had turned the skeptical eye on the electronic gadgets used by television ghost hunters. They do it because the average viewer thinks electronic gadgets equals science. Well it doesn't science actually requires the scientific method, not creeping around in the dark with building contractors' instruments and pretending to be scared every time a light blinks. Episode #81

Year 3: Chasing the Min Min Light

In this show we got to visit the Channel Country in Australia's Outback, where a famous ghost light has been reported ever since the country of Australia was formed. The light would cruise silently along, pacing travelers on horseback, or following walkers. But then in 2003, a certain university professor decided he would solve it, and so he did. The Min Min Light is now conclusively explained and is reproducible, thanks to the region's unique topography. Episode #133

Year 4: Ball Lightning

Everyone just assumes ball lightning is a thing, because we've all heard about it so many times. Well it turns out there's no electromagnetic theory supporting such a thing, unlike every known form of electrical discharge. The descriptions for things variously called ball lightning are all over the map for size, color, shape, behavior, duration, sound, movement, etc. And the "scientific" theories to explain it are wildly speculative and describe things never observed in nature. Even today, not a single undisputed photo or video of ball lightning exists. Chances are there's probably no such thing as ball lightning. Episode #192

Year 5: Mao's Barefoot Doctors: The Secret History of Chinese Medicine

Typically, people think of Traditional Chinese Medicine as something that's widely used, due to Eastern people being more enlightened — or something. In fact, the history of the Barefoot Doctors initiative — Chairman Mao's plan to get modern medical care to everyone in a country the size of China which largely lacked modern infrastructure — tells a very different story. Beijing was a world leader in modern medical research at the time, and the Barefoot Doctors manual always advocated modern medicine first, only defaulting to herbal remedies when a pharmacy or hospital were unavailable. It was an astounding action taken by American publishers that created the myth of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Episode #259

Year 6: Noah's Ark: Sea Trials

This episode came about when I was looking at stories of Biblical literalists claiming to have found the remains of Noah's Ark, and it got me thinking about huge wooden ships. Where would all the wood have come from? How much was needed to build a barge of the dimensions given? What has happened when actual wooden ships have been built that have approached those dimensions? Could Noah's Ark even be theoretically possible? Well, we don't even have to go too deep into the engineering; the square-cube law and beam theory tell us all we need to get a very, very definitive answer. Episode #279

Year 7: The Cult of Nikola Tesla

Few figures from history have had their good names hijacked and misused as has Nikola Tesla. A segment of the Internet has conferred him with magical Jesus powers and claim that he invented free energy and just about anything else you can dream of, all of which the government suppressed, because reasons. As a science writer who has sometimes pointed out that Tesla is really only known for patenting inventions in America that had been developed in Europe by others, I get no shortage of hostile tweets and emails from Tesla cult members. Episode #345

Year 8: Finding Butch and Sundance

While the movie treatment of Mozart and Salieri was grossly, inexcusably fictionalized in Amadeus, the movie treatment of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was much less so — really only dramatized, at least so far as the final scene goes. The question, which is a valid historical one, is did they actually die in a gunfight with Bolivian soldiers in 1908. It could easily have been two other guys. In this episode we dug up the real evidence to find out — which is still there in a tiny cemetery 4500m up in the Bolivian Andes. Episode #394

Year 9: The Chess-Playing Mechanical Turk

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, an Austrian royal engineer toured the world with an incredible machine: an automaton in the form of a Turk sitting at a chessboard. The Mechanical Turk defeated Europe's finest chess players, and public figures all around the world — including Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Napoleon Bonaparte — all fell to the machine's skill. Many tried to guess its secrets; all failed. Can Skeptoid get to the truth? Episode #476

Year 10: Ninjas Unmasked

In college some guy told me he had ninja training, and since I was an idiot, I believed him and was always trying to get him to teach me how to be invisible or to fly or any of the other things pop culture had taught me that ninjas could do. So I eagerly dove into this subject, and it's probably not surprising to Skeptoid listeners that virtually everything we think we know about the ninjas is complete fiction: everything from wearing black, to having fighting skills, even that they were called ninjas. But they were absolutely very real, and played important roles in the formation of modern Japan during the upheaval of the Sengoku period. For me, the most interesting thing about the ninjas is that they were created to be the exact opposites of the samurai in almost every way. Episode #509

Year 11: Remembering the Mandela Effect

Today, when we think of the Mandela Effect, we think it refers to something that a whole lot of people remember wrong — a shared false memory, as it were — like Jiffy being a brand of peanut butter, or the "Berenstein" Bears books, or the Monopoly Man wearing a monocle. Those aren't true. But what's also not true is that the reason the term Mandela Effect was coined had nothing to do with false memories. The creator was psychic ghost hunter Fiona Broome, and her belief was that these memories were actually correct; the explanation being that those who experience them are sliding between "alternate realities". And that sliding between alternate realities is what the Mandela Effect really is. See? You remembered that wrong too. Episode #560

Year 12: Do Lobsters Feel Pain?

This episode tested the popular belief that crabs and lobsters don't feel pain, so it's OK to cook them by just throwing them alive into boiling water. We looked at a lot of research that's been done, and the fact is that it's far, far from clear that crustaceans don't sense pain. In fact there's plenty of evidence they do. The takeaway from this episode was that there are very easy and fast ways to kill crabs and lobsters before boiling them, which would be a monstrous thing to do if they do indeed feel pain. So next time you order one in a restaurant, ask if it's cooked to order; and if it is, ask them to please "spike" the crab, or "split" the lobster, which a chef can do in less than a second. If we don't know, err on the side of being humane. Episode #607

Year 13: Prehistoric Supersonic Monster Tides

When the Earth and Moon were formed out of the collision of the planetesimals Theia and Gaia, they initially orbited much closer. Since the Moon controls the tides, in Earth's prehistoric days we should have had tidal waves a thousand meters high traveling a thousand kilometers an hour crashing across the Earth's surface several times a day. In this episode, we dived into deep geophysics to see if this is actually what happened — and if not, why not? Episode #683

Year 14: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura

In 2001, a pair of non-experts concluded (without evidence) that the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer's paintings were so well executed that they could have only been done by cheating, through the use of a camera obscura to project an image of the scene before him onto a canvas which he could then trace. The conjecture is today known as the Hockney-Falco Thesis. When Penn & Teller made a film just over a decade later promoting Hockney-Falco, and essentially calling all of established art history and the Dutch master tradition fake, I could not sit still, and presented the truckloads of evidence that debunk this nonsense. Believe it or not, Vermeer was actually a good painter, like his contemporary Rembrandt — with whom nobody seems to have a problem. Episode #707

Year 15: How the Pyramids Were (and Were Not) Built

The more you learn about the great pyramids of Egypt, the more sad you feel for the people who reject all of that and insist on believing fantasies about them. Also, by no means is this an old or boring subject; new discoveries — major new discoveries — continue to be made all the time. In just the past few years, we've learned things like what order the various layers were laid down in; how and when each batch of rock was transported directly to the site; and the name of not only the supreme manager of the project, but also the ancient Egyptians' name for the Great Pyramid itself. Episode #778

Year 16: On Washboarded Roads

As a lifelong desert rat I've spent a lot of time on washboarded dirt roads; and in parts of the world they pose a real problem, making it both difficult and dangerous for emergency services and other important transportation. Curious, I went online to learn what caused them — and found tons of misinformation. Almost everything you'll read about how they're formed is false. But of course the main thing we really want to know about washboarding is how to get rid of it! How to prevent, or at least how to tune your car and its tires and suspension to deal with it. To my great surprise, "On Washboarded Roads" turned out to be the single most downloaded Skeptoid podcast episode up to that date. Episode #822

Year 17: The Treasure of Victorio Peak

Every so often, Discovery Channel or HISTORY Channel come out with a series so chock full of fiction that it has to be addressed here on Skeptoid. The 2023 series Gold, Lies, & Videotape was absolutely true, in that it told of one family's treasure hunt for a fabulous wealth of gold bars, consisting (according to the descriptions) of more gold than had ever been mined in all of human history. This incredible trove was only ever seen by one man, the patriarch of the family, Doc Noss — described in almost every biography as a career con man. Why the family decided that this unspeakable treasure hoard was the one thing he'd ever been honest about is a secret known only to themselves. Episode #880

Year 18: Decoding the Kensington Runestone

In 1898, a stone covered in Viking runes was allegedly found in a field in Minnesota, something that's not possible according to the history we know. The thing I loved best about this story is that the typical skeptical treatment is to explain the several different lines of evidence that tell us the stone is a hoax, and leave it at that — a hoax. But the more I got into the context of why this hoax was done and who did it, it turned out there was a much richer history lesson to be learned — something we find in almost all of the very best Skeptoid topics. Episode #934

I hope this little retrospective has given you some ideas for some cool older shows to go back and hear, either again or for the first time. I actually relisten to a lot of them myself; after 18 years it's impossible to remember all of them, and believe it or not, I can often listen and have no idea where the episode is going to go, or what the conclusion is going to be. But no matter how it turns out, every Skeptoid episode is a great reminder of why it's so important that we should always be skeptical.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning