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From the archive: The New Age and the crisis of belief

Tim Axon
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From the archive: The New Age and the crisis of belief

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 2, from 1991.

It is often said in skeptical circles that belief in the irrational has been increasing dramatically in recent years and has now reached unprecedented levels. Whether or not this is strictly true, there can be little doubt that belief in the paranormal and the occult is widespread and plays a not unimportant part in the lives of at least a significant minority of the population. Nowadays, such enthusiasms are often referred to under the heading of the ‘New Age’ and however one might disapprove of it – the social movement which feeds on and propagates such beliefs must be acknowledged as one of the more significant features of the contemporary cultural landscape in the West.

If the skeptical community is to develop the appropriate strategies that will enable it to challenge irrational or unsustainable beliefs effectively then the origin and nature of these beliefs must be thoroughly understood. This will only be possible by studying such beliefs in their proper historical and cultural context. Yet, so far as I am aware, the history and the sociology of the New Age Movement has received relatively little serious attention from within the ranks of ‘organised skepticism’.

As I am neither an historian nor a sociologist by profession it is not my intention to attempt to anticipate the details of what such an understanding might eventually take. But I do want to explore some of the issues involved, more with the aim of opening up discussion and debate than of arriving at some kind of definitive conclusion. In particular, I want to examine how the New Age Movement might be seen as being at least in part a response to what I shall refer to as the ‘crisis of belief’ that confronts contemporary Western societies. In analysing this crisis of belief I shall to some extent draw freely on ideas deriving from recent debates on modernity and postmodernity on the one hand, and from modern cognitive psychology on the other. My aim IS to show that these ideas can help deepen our understanding of the New Age Movement and of the social and psychological forces which have given rise to it.

The New Age Movement

The New Age Movement is notable for its confused and chaotic diversity, and for its tendencies towards eclecticism. Because of this, concentrating only on the paranormal and occult beliefs associated with New Age thought can easily distort one’s perception of it as a whole. In fact, the movement is broad enough to incorporate a great variety of themes, including not only the occult and the paranormal but also (amongst other things) alternative medicine, spirituality and mysticism, fringe science, alternative archaeology, various forms of psychotherapy, a concern with ‘green’ issues, together with elements deriving from feminism and the peace movement. It ranges from the most implausible beliefs concerning, for example, the healing power of crystals, to ideas (like those connected with a concern for the environment) which presumably deserve to be taken rather more seriously.

In retrospect, it has to be admitted that placing such a wide variety of beliefs under the single heading of ‘New Age thought’ may in fact be begging rather a lot of questions. Nevertheless, all these beliefs share a certain ‘alternative’ character in the sense that they provide an alternative to established knowledge and to conventional ways of behaviour.

Fundamental to the essentially ‘alternative’ character of the New Age Movement is the fact that it rejects many of the secular attitudes prevalent in contemporary Western societies – and yet it does so without turning instead to some kind of conventional religious belief. On the one hand, although the founder of Christianity is generally regarded with respect, the New Age attitude towards the Christian churches is largely one of indifference and is on occasions actively hostile. (Eastern religions generally get a much better press). On the other hand, the anti-secular point of view is displayed most clearly by the uniform hostility shown to what is often referred to in New Age literature as ‘scientific materialism’.

The New Age Movement is not, however, an anti-science movement as such, and its hostility does not extend to those often controversial areas of science – which include parapsychology, Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, and various mystically-inspired interpretations of modem physics, for example – which dwell on the fringes of accepted knowledge but which seem in one way or another to challenge the assumptions of philosophical materialism.

Image of planet earth on a black background, with North and Central America visible below the clouds.
Planet Earth, via publicdomainpictures.net

Nevertheless, the New Age Movement is opposed to what it takes to be the dominant scientific/secular view of the world which sees mankind as living in a random, mechanistic universe devoid of purpose. Instead it promotes a view of the world which is non-materialistic in nature, which allows a place for marvels and for magic, for imagination and creativity, and for a ‘spiritual’ dimension to life. In short, the New Age Movement is essentially quasi-religious in character – a point which has not been lost on those skeptics of an anti-religious persuasion who often see challenging belief in the paranormal and other New Age beliefs as simply part of a larger project directed against what is taken to be ‘religious superstition’.

The Decline of Belief

Although it is difficult to prove such connections, the rise of this quasi-religious movement is surely related to the decline in the status of conventional religious belief in the West over the past couple of hundred years or so: we no longer live in an essentially ‘pre-modern’ era in which Christianity is the dominant ideological force. The effects of this process of ‘secularisation’ should not, of course, be exaggerated: the influence of Christianity remains strong in many parts of the world, not least in the United States. But few would deny that there has been a lessening in the status and authority accorded to religious beliefs and institutions during this period. Christianity no longer commands the unqualified support of the intelligentsia and, more generally, no longer exerts the overwhelming cultural influence which once it did: Christian belief has come to be seen as ‘optional’ in a way which previously was not the case.

The decline of religious belief was accompanied by the rise during the course of the nineteenth century of new, secular ideologies – in particular, secular humanism and (far more influentially) Marxism. Despite their many differences these two secular ideologies shared a common, optimistic faith in rationality, science and progress, a belief which can be traced back to the Enlightenment and which formed one of the great themes of the so-called ‘modem’ period. But on the whole, the often bloody history of the twentieth century and the ever-present possibility of nuclear and/or ecological crisis have in fact tended to undermine such a faith and have made the nineteenth century belief in the moral and social advancement of mankind and in the unqualified benefits of scientific and technological progress seem in retrospect to have been rather naive.

For this and for other reasons the decline in the influence of Christian belief in the West has not been matched by a concomitant rise to a position of dominance of any alternative secular ideology. Of course, followers of the secular ideologies still exist, but generally speaking they are restricted to small groups which exert little real influence: the secular ideologies are marginalised in much the same way as Christianity often finds itself marginalised in the contemporary world.

A religious official with dark-skinned, masculine hands and cream-coloured robe cuffs breaks up wafers for Eucharist
A Catholic priest prepares eucharist wafers. Image by Norbert Staudt from Pixabay

The collapse of faith in both the traditional, religious and the modem, secular forms of belief characterises our era, an era sometimes referred to as the ‘postmodern’ age (to borrow the fashionable phrase of the gurus of culture). This is an age in which the old forms of belief are unable to sustain a consensus, an age characterised by fragmentation when ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Our culture offers no overall message, no larger vision or narrative which might enable people to see their lives in a meaningful way.

Instead there is the world, conceived as a collection of facts revealed by science. But these facts cannot be said to have been fused together into a view of the world and of mankind’s place in it that really satisfies the human need for significance and meaning. Thus, although the mechanistic conception of reality is by no means an inevitable implication of modern science (and is indeed seriously challenged by it in several respects), the overall impression of the scientific world-view presented to the general public is still predominantly a mechanistic-materialist one in which there is little opportunity for deriving any kind of metaphysical comfort.

For many people such a view of the world is extremely bleak, and all the more bleak for the absence of any generally accepted belief system (be it religious or secular) which might serve to ameliorate or modify that view. It is this situation which, I think, the followers of the New Age Movement are reacting against their rejection of ‘scientific materialism’ and why they are nevertheless sympathetic to those forms of fringe science that seem to have rejected some essential elements of the materialist view of reality.

The Search for Belief

Despite the fragmentation of belief which characterises our era, there remains a deep underlying need for belief. For, however incomplete and incoherent it might be, we all require some kind of system of belief with which to generate order out of the chaos of experience and to lend a degree of organisation to our lives. We all need to be able to make sense of the world. We all need to experience life through the meaningful categories of some belief system, whether that system be religious, political or philosophical in character. Indeed, for those who subscribe to it, such a belief system is the meaning of their lives! For all of us, our beliefs play an essential part in the construction of our personal world (ie, the world as we experience it).

Of course, our beliefs may not always immediately show themselves in an explicit commitment to a particular ideology but they nevertheless exist under the surface and undoubtedly play a quite fundamental role in our lives. In particular, what we believe (and whether our beliefs are basically optimistic or pessimistic) can have a profound effect on how we feel. Consequently, the belief system which we happen to accept has an enormous impact on the way in which we, as individuals, come to think, feel and act. Moreover, in the absence of any such relatively consistent and suitable optimistic belief system we are likely to experience considerable confusion and emotional distress.

Far from being a trivial or inconsequential observation, this notion concerning the centrality of belief systems to our mental and emotional life forms one of the key themes of modem cognitive psychology and systems of psychology based on this approach (such as Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory, for example) provide the theoretical underpinning for the view that belief systems are not just pleasant yet dispensable accessories but actually play an essential role in the proper functioning of the human organism.

It is this human need for belief that turns the contemporary situation consisting in the fragmentation of belief into a true crisis of belief. There is an innate human urge to believe to construct meaning. Yet our contemporary situation is not characterised by the ascendancy of any particular system of belief: both Christianity and the secular ideologies are to a large extent marginalised. The result is a large class of confused and alienated people who do not really know what to believe in, but who still feel the need to believe in something.

Is it therefore at all surprising that many of these people should respond to this crisis of belief by creating their own belief system from the materials that are to hand? Bits of modern science, the remnants of old religions and ideologies, fragments of superstition and half-remembered childhood fairy tales have been sewn together to create the confused patchwork, piecemeal system of belief that is the New Age. Its origins lie in nineteenth century movements like Theosophy and spiritualism, which can themselves be seen as a reaction against the advance of secularisation and as a response to the crisis of belief as manifested in that period. But the contemporary New Age Movement is a response to the more urgent sense of crisis and fragmentation which characterises our own postmodern era.

The ‘packaging’ (as distinct from the content) of New Age belief is also profoundly affected by the nature of contemporary Western societies, dominated as they are by the driving force of technological change and by the dynamic of the market. As we all know, peddling New Age wares (in the form of books, cassettes and courses, for example) can be a lucrative business. But is it surprising that here, in the capitalist West, New Age beliefs are regarded as essentially commodities to be sold and bought in the ideological marketplace? And is it surprising that, with the rapid growth in the technology of communications (radio, TV, video, mass-market publishing and so on), such beliefs should spread so widely and with such speed, with new fashions and crazes continually flaring up as old ones fade away? New Age belief has become a product, a consumer item, even an essential component of ‘style’: it has in fact become a form of ‘designer’ belief.

The Future of New Age Belief

Of course, as we all know, the problem with New Age beliefs is that most of them are extremely implausible when seen in the light of modern knowledge and, when explored further, can often be shown to be false (or at best unsubstantiated). This is where the skeptical movement in its ‘investigative’ capacity has such an important role to play in exposing such failings. But, if I am right and the New Age phenomenon is basically a result of an innate human predisposition to believe combined with the effect of certain long-term cultural changes which have been taking place in Western societies over the past hundred or more years, then I think it is doubtful that skeptics will be able to have much impact on the tide of New Age belief as a whole.

Nevertheless, one can speculate that the skeptical movement – in its ‘mission’ role of attempting to persuade people to adopt a more critical attitude towards such beliefs – may be more effective if it attempts to bend belief away from the more unsustainable and/or damaging manifestations of New Age thought than if it attempts to remove or eliminate such belief entirely.

In the long-term, however, New Age belief is only likely to fade when the cultural forces which produced it have moved on, when the present era gives way to a new era in which new forms of belief finally manage to establish themselves on the ruins of the old. It is far from clear what these new forms of belief might be.

Will one of the old religions or ideologies manage to revitalise and renew itself? Will the contemporary interest in green issues be transformed into a new ‘nature religion’ suitable for the twenty-first century? Will elements of science now located on the fringe eventually come to find greater respectability and more widespread acceptance in the years to come, and for the basis for a new scientifically legitimated system of belief? Or will in fact the present state of confusion and fragmentation endure into the indefinite future?

One can only guess, of course, but if it is the last of these possibilities which proves to be the case then I think it probable that the New Age Movement (or at least something very much like it) will be with us for a very long time to come.

References

  • Basil, Robert (Ed). Not Necessarily the New Age: Critical Essays, (Prometheus Books, 1988).
  • Boyne, Roy & Rattansi, Ali (Eds). Postmodernism and Society, (Macmillan Education, 1990).
  • Ptadwick, Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century, (Cambridge University Press, 1975).
  • Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s, (Paladin Books, 1980).
  • Rowe, Dorothy. The Construction of Life and Death: Discovering Meaning in a World of Uncertainty, (Fontana Paperbacks, 1989).
  • Stott, Martin. Spilling the Beans: A Style Guide to the New Age, (Fontana Paperbacks, 1986).

Who runs the world? According to conspiracy theorists, it’s Beyoncé

Pai Jing Wen
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Who runs the world? According to conspiracy theorists, it’s Beyoncé

If you haven’t heard, the secret to surviving Hollywood is not talent – it is keeping Beyoncé happy.

At least according to the internet, it is.

Welcome to the world of celebrity conspiracies, a place where fame and admiration easily twist into suspicion, and the glitz of stardom becomes a screen for dark, unseen forces. In this world, public figures are more than performers; they are thought to be architects of hidden agendas, puppeteers whose strings extend beyond the stage. 

Beyoncé has been called many things: a queen, an icon, a mogul. For her fans, she is a symbol of power and grace, a woman who has mastered the art of performance and built an empire on talent and resilience. Yet in some corners of the internet, there is a much darker portrait being painted. 

A grainy YouTube video here, a TikTok theory there, another Reddit post over there – all claiming that Beyoncé has been pulling the strings behind the scenes. From obscure symbols to “hidden” messages in lyrics, fans and theorists alike are piecing together “evidence” that Queen Bey is not just a pop icon but the queen of dark secrets, too. 

Destined child of conspiracy

For many, Beyoncé’s journey from Houston’s modest beginnings to global superstardom feels almost too monumental to attribute solely to talent and hard work. To them, her success is not just remarkable; it is suspicious.

Conspiracy theories have only grown alongside Beyoncé’s career. The speculation that she is connected to the Illuminati – once a dominant theory – has since shifted to claims of orchestrated murders linked to her rise and her involvement in shadowy, powerful circles that control the music industry. 

​​Oops! They Diddy it again

The recent arrest of Sean John Combs, AKA Puff Daddy/P. Diddy, has reignited old conspiracy theories involving Beyoncé and the powerful elite in the entertainment industry. Diddy has long been embroiled in rumours of being linked to mysterious celebrity deaths. 

These claims often refer back to the infamous East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry of the 90s, where Diddy’s business dealings were entangled with personal vendettas and escalating violence, which ultimately led to the deaths of Tupac and Biggie. Given his close friendship with Beyoncé, the idea that someone with his influence could manipulate Beyoncé’s rise to fame seems to some disturbingly plausible. 

With his current legal troubles, conspiracy theorists have latched onto the notion that Diddy has done Beyoncé’s “dirty work,” orchestrating the fall or death of other celebrities to ensure her dominance in the entertainment industry (that is what friends are for, right?). 

TikTok has revived these theories with a popular phrase “She Knows” trending widely, which theorists argue has a double meaning. The internet claimed that “She Knows” is a wordplay on “Sean Knowles,” which is a nod to Beyoncé’s last name, “Knowles,” combined with Diddy’s real name, Sean. 

Adding fuel to the fire, J. Cole’s lyrics in his song “She Knows” (which inspired the popular phrase) have become a cornerstone of these theories, with many taking his words out of context to support claims of Beyoncé’s alleged connections to a “celebrity body count.” 

Rest in peace to Aaliyah
Rest in peace to Left Eye (Left Eye)
Michael Jackson, I’ll see ya
Just as soon as I die (I die)

These lyrics are taken as a cryptic admission, with theorists pointing out that Aaliyah, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and Michael Jackson all reached similar levels of fame as Beyoncé, and posed a threat to her dominance in the industry, only to meet untimely deaths. The theories surrounding Aaliyah’s passing are particularly detailed, often painting her as Beyoncé’s most direct competitor during the early 2000s.

Aaliyah, widely regarded as the “Princess of R&B”, was on the verge of breaking into superstardom before her tragic death in a plane crash in 2001. At the time, Beyoncé was transitioning from her role in Destiny’s Child to a solo artist, and theorists argue that Aaliyah’s immense popularity could have overshadowed Beyoncé’s emergence as a solo powerhouse. Aaliyah was not only dominating the R&B charts but was also gaining traction in Hollywood, starring in major films like Romeo Must Die and Queen of the Damned. Her influence extended beyond music into fashion and culture, and she was positioned to redefine the landscape of R&B and pop music. 

Therefore, she must go. 

Fuelling the speculation, theorists argue that J. Cole’s lyrics hint he knows too much. The phrase “Just as soon as I die” is taken as a warning that Diddy and Beyoncé might retaliate against him for exposing their supposed secrets. Fans point to this interpretation as evidence of an elaborate network of power and fear in the industry, with Beyoncé positioned at the centre. 

This specific part of the song has become a popular background track in TikTok videos, often paired with clips of celebrities thanking Beyoncé during their acceptance speeches. According to theorists, these public acknowledgements are not merely gestures of gratitude but acts of self-preservation that celebrities do to avoid “falling out of favour” with Beyoncé, fearing they might share the alleged fates of stars who failed to show her proper respect.

These claims often cite high-profile incidents. For instance, Adele’s 2017 GRAMMYs moment, where she broke her Album of the Year award and dedicated it to Beyoncé, is frequently interpreted as more than just an emotional gesture. It is seen as an act of allegiance to maintain goodwill with Beyoncé. Similarly, Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs – where he declared Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” is one of the best music videos ever – has been reframed as Kanye “protecting” Taylor from potential backlash or worse, aligning her with Beyoncé’s success. According to theorists, Taylor has even allegedly acknowledged this as a heroic act on his part. 

Theories like these flourish, where quick clips and catchy hashtags breathe new life into narratives that might otherwise fade away. 

Guilty until proven innocent?

To understand why some people are genuinely convinced by such theories and why Beyoncé often becomes the target of blame for events seemingly unrelated to her, I interviewed Naythan, a die-hard believer in the darker side of Beyoncé’s fame. 

For Naythan, the evidence is everywhere – if you know where to look. 

One of Naythan’s strongest beliefs centres on Beyoncé’s song “Daughter,” which he interprets as a criminal confession. “She clearly admitted to murdering Jay-Z’s mistress here, lol,” he claimed. He referenced long-standing rumours about Jay-Z’s alleged affair with Cathy White, who was reportedly pregnant with his child in 2011 but tragically passed away shortly after giving birth. 

“And guess what? Beyoncé announced her pregnancy in 2011 too, but she’s lying,” Naythan added, showing me a video of Beyoncé’s pregnant belly allegedly deflating as she sat down during a talk show, which he claimed was proof she faked her pregnancy. Naythan pointed to specific lyrics from “Daughter” to support his theory:

Your body laid out on these filthy floors
Your bloodstains on my custom coutures
I really tried to stay cool
But your arrogance disturbed my solitude
Now I ripped your dress and you’re all black and blue
Look what you made me do

“She killed Cathy because she was jealous of her,” he concluded. “Blue Ivy is Cathy’s child, not hers.” Naythan further argued that Beyoncé admitted everything herself through the song’s description, which mentions her “struggling with violent thoughts in the face of infidelity.” To Naythan, this aligns perfectly with the timeline of Cathy’s death.

Another striking example Naythan brings up is the recent trend tied to Diddy’s arrest (again). He insists that Beyoncé is fully aware of the alleged “manipulations and sacrifices” required to maintain her position and also complicit in them.

“They’re BFFs. How could she not know?” he argued. 

Imagining secrets where none exist

When I asked Naythan about his sources of evidence, he told me, “The entire internet is talking about it. Facebook, Instagram Shorts, Reddit posts – you just have to look.” 

He was dismissive when I questioned why he did not rely on traditional or credible outlets. “The news can write and report anything. How do you know it’s the truth? It’s all controlled by the government. They only show us what they want us to see,” he said, as though the mainstream media were part of a larger conspiracy to suppress the “real story.”

Conversely, the internet is not controlled by the government, according to him. That is why it is more trustworthy. “It’s people like us sharing what we find.” To Naythan, the chaos of unverified online posts was not a flaw but a feature; the lack of oversight made it more authentic in his eyes.

A bar chart showing the top 8 most-believed conspiracy theories among surveyed Americans in 2019, from a poll conducted by YouGov. 1,220 US adults were asked and 47% believed Lee Harvey Oswald had an accomplice; 29% believe a 'deep state' is working against Trump; 27% believe the government is hiding aliens in Area 51; 23% believe 9/11 was an 'inside job'; 22% believe climate change is a hoax; 21% believe the Illuminati control the world; 19% believe in chemtrails; 11% believe the moon landing was faked.
A 2019 YouGov poll shown in a statista chart reveals a high percentage of adult Americans believing in popular conspiracy theories.

It became evident, however, that his browsing habits likely shaped the conclusions he was defending. By engaging mainly with platforms and communities that fed into his pre-existing beliefs, Naythan seemed caught in a loop of confirmation bias. Rather than seeking diverse perspectives or critically analysing his sources, he gravitated toward content that reinforced his narrative. 

In Naythan’s view, the “truth” was not about facts or logic – it was about rejecting the mainstream story and believing he was part of an exclusive group that knew the “real” story. This made the online sources he relied on feel trustworthy and essential, like a hidden treasure of secret information only a few people could access. Being in the know gave him a sense of power, even if it was not based on anything solid, which played into the age-old human desire to uncover secrets and expose supposed hidden agendas.

However, the sources conspiracy theorists like Naythan cite are often unreliable – frequently snippets of fan-made videos, half-remembered rumours, and selective readings of interviews or song lyrics. The evidence is usually circumstantial, often reliant on vague interpretations or dubious associations that do little more than feed into pre-existing narratives.

Dr McNaughton-Cassill explains that conspiracy theories operate in a self-sustaining loop: when confronted with disconfirming evidence, believers often dismiss it as propaganda or cover-up. This helps explain Naythan’s distrust of traditional media and his reliance on social media platforms for information. His insistence that mainstream outlets are controlled and untrustworthy fits McNaughton-Cassill’s observation that conspiracy theorists favour sources that align with their worldview, even when those sources lack credibility.

While these Beyoncé rumours might seem outlandish to many, it speaks to a broader tendency to dehumanise public figures, viewing their success as evidence of secret, sinister forces rather than the culmination of talent and effort. For some, this version of reality is infinitely more entertaining – and perhaps even more comforting – than the idea that Beyoncé’s success is simply her own.

Houston’s Pride

On the other side of the conspiracy debate are those who view Beyoncé not as a shadowy figure but as a cultural icon who has leveraged her fame to advance social change, empowerment, and philanthropy. To them, Beyoncé’s story is one of transformation – from a Houston girl with dreams to a global powerhouse who uses her influence to amplify marginalised voices and break barriers for women of colour. 

I talked to Lisa, a Beyoncé fan who sees Beyoncé’s legacy in this light and finds the conspiracy theories misguided and dismissive. “If you look at her works, from the Black pride message in ‘Formation’ to her creation of scholarships for young women of colour, she’s committed to uplifting communities and not some evil witch that these people are saying,” Lisa explained as she told me about Beyoncé’s philanthropic work, much of it under the radar.

In 2017, Beyoncé launched the Formation Scholars program to award scholarships to “female incoming, current, or graduate students pursuing studies in creative arts, music, literature, or African-American studies,” signalling her support for the next generation of Black women leaders. She has also been a steadfast donor to charities like UNICEF and Global Citizen, responding to global crises and supporting health and educational initiatives for underprivileged communities. These highlighted a woman who has continually chosen to channel her resources toward meaningful change.

Lisa continued about how Beyoncé’s music has been a tool for empowerment. Songs like “Flawless,” “Run the World (Girls),” and “Brown Skin Girl” have served as anthems for women’s empowerment and pride in Black identity, reaching listeners across the globe with messages of self-love, resilience, and solidarity. Her albums, often references to Black history and Southern culture, connect her listeners to a deeper heritage. 

Beyoncé’s commitment to using her art for advocacy has also come with personal risks. By aligning herself with movements like Black Lives Matter, she places herself at odds with audiences who view such stances as political or controversial. But for her, the risks are outweighed by the possibility of inspiring change. Through her work, she has opened dialogues about identity, race, and power – discussions that often provoke discomfort in those who would rather focus on conspiracies than confront systemic issues. Her high-profile support of movements such as #MeToo and her outspoken support for the LGBTQ+ community add to her role as an advocate for inclusivity and equality, far removed from the secretive figure conspiracy theories paint her to be.

“Honestly, I think some people just have a hard time believing in the success of strong, independent women, especially women of colour,” Lisa said. 

Curious, I asked Lisa how she felt about Naythan’s interpretation of Beyoncé’s song “Daughter.” Her disappointment was evident. She explained that Naythan’s theory completely misrepresents the deeper themes of the song. “It’s about exploring her imperfections, not admitting to some made-up crime.” 

While the official description of “Daughter” did portray a character (Beyoncé) grappling with violent impulses in the face of infidelity, the main focus was how those impulses prompted her to reflect on inherited traits from her father – both protective and destructive. The song explores her dual role as a defender and a potential aggressor, highlighted by her warning that she is “not harmless” and capable of embodying her father’s combative nature. However, this is not a confession of violence; instead, Beyoncé reflects on these traits to delve into broader themes of human flaws and inherited behaviours.

To Lisa, Beyoncé is far from a shadowy puppet master; she embodies a public figure who has succeeded in an industry where few Black women have reached her level, and she uses that success to make a difference.

The Bey-lief System

The contrast between these perspectives is stark. Conspiracy theories try to reduce Beyoncé to a puppet in some hidden plot, ignoring her real power and complexity. On the other hand, those who see her in a more grounded way recognise her as more than just a celebrity – she is an artist, entrepreneur, activist, and mother, with a positive impact that goes beyond entertainment and touches on real cultural and social issues. 

Today, with so much information at our fingertips, it is easy to find “evidence” to back up any opinion, no matter how unlikely. For believers, it feels exciting to spot hidden symbols or patterns—it gives them the thrill of thinking they know something secret and powerful, even if the evidence is shaky at best. On the flip side, skeptics focus on hard facts and actual actions, writing off the wild theories as pure fantasy. 

These polarised perspectives highlight a deeper issue: the human tendency toward selective belief. When seeking information that aligns with our existing feelings, we often construct narratives that feel comfortable and affirming. The real challenge is to identify this bias within ourselves and critically evaluate our interpretations – whether they pertain to celebrities or the broader world.

It is easier to imagine hidden forces or secret dealings than to accept that someone could rise through talent and hard work alone. Beyoncé, in this sense, becomes a mirror, reflecting our tendency to distrust success and explain it through fantastical narratives. For many, these conspiracies fulfil a need for mystery or entertainment, turning her every move into hidden “meaning,” her lyrics into codes, and her public appearances into puzzles.

In the end, these stories tell us less about Beyoncé and more about ourselves – our biases, fears, and the desire to find patterns where none exist. As her legacy continues to grow, we have a choice: embrace her achievements as they are, or distort them into tales that satisfy our preconceptions. Perhaps the next time we encounter a sensational story, we should ask if it is true and why it resonates with us.

Pseudonyms are used to respect the privacy of the interviewees.

The Skeptic Podcast: Episode #003

The Skeptic Podcast
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The Skeptic Podcast: Episode #003

From the pages of The Skeptic magazine, this is The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020. 

On this episode:

Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, or to support the show, take out a small voluntary donation at patreon.com/theskeptic.

The conspiracy-adjacent politicians finding allies in Sovereign Citizens

Michael Marshall
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The conspiracy-adjacent politicians finding allies in Sovereign Citizens

Early into the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Economic Forum leader and unlikely villain of the conspiracist movement, Klaus Schwab, proposed that the world use the crisis as a chance to reassess the form of capitalism pursued by economies across the globe, and consider if better systems were available. While we can debate the merits of his proposal, and even discuss what motivations he had, it’s fair to say that his suggested “Great Reset” bore little resemblance to the version that would be passed around conspiracy circles as evidence of a shadowy New World Order.

In those spaces, which exploded online in the enforced pause of the Covid lockdowns, The Great Reset was something sinister that needed to be opposed by a concerted coalition of free-thinking people – dubbed by some the ‘Great Resist’.

While the reset never actually happened, and the world went back to essentially the same broken capitalist system it had been driving towards before the intervention of the novel coronavirus, the bonds formed at events and protests by followers of the Great Resist persisted, and soon they needed a new bête noir to rise up against. This search for suitable villains would see the rag-tag movement fight back against traffic-calming measures and LGBTQ rights but, while they may have been the most visible (and sadly, in some circles, palatable) causes, the hunt for bogey men also alighted on even less mainstream fears.

This perhaps explains how a community centre in Alfreton, Derbyshire, became the site of an unlikely coalition of figures from the conspiracist fringe in November 2024. Apparently convened at the request of the community centre’s board of directors, the Great Resist conference boasted a theme song from “I’m Too Sexy” duo Right Said Fred, and was organised by former UKIP candidate Liz Phillips, who clearly drew from her political address book for many of the speakers. Top billing almost certainly went to the politically promiscuous Tory/Reclaim/Independent MP Andrew Bridgen, whose speech flitted across edited and editorialised highlights of his backbench career.

Joining Bridgen from the benches of Tory party evictees and refugees were two former MEPs, Ben Habib and Godfrey Bloom, the latter of whom spent the duration of his speech talking up the importance of buying gold, never quite making clear that the gold dealers he cited as being reasonable and reliable pay him an affiliate fee for the privilege. One might ask what it is about opaque precious metals promotion that prominent UKIP figures find so appealing – after all, Nigel Farage spent much of the last ten years pimping bullion while fronting the “Fortune and Freedom” investment business, and recently was forced to reveal that he made £189k last year from similar gold-promotion schemes.

Common Law

However, the presence of so many figures from the corridor next to the corridors of power did little to dissuade the rest of the line-up from veering deep into the weeds of conspiracy claims, perhaps chief among which was Gary Fraughen – pronounced “frown” – who talked about Common Law.

Gary was introduced by organiser Liz Phillips as a prolific writer on common law, whom she has interviewed many times on her YouTube channel. It was genuinely fascinating to see someone who has spent so long engaged with (admittedly reactionary right-wing) politics as Liz has, praising the importance of what are clearly pseudo-legal Sovereign Citizen ideas:

This is something that people are coming back to, and we’ve all got to do this, the legal system and the law system is something we need to know much more about

After the briefest of introductions, Gary was soon into the good stuff, asking the audience: “Anybody here married? Because you’ve been through a horse breeding ceremony”. At first blush, this may have seemed like a judgement of the largely-rural audience, but Gary had brought the receipts, explaining, “What do you need to control a horse? You need a groom.”

Clearly, the suggestion here was that a ‘groom’ as in ‘bride and groom’ is the same as a ‘groom’ who tends to a horse, therefore marriages are an animal husbandry ritual about tending to livestock. Which sounds possible (if not plausible or reasonable), if you spend no time at all investigating the origin and meaning of words. A groom was simply the 12th-century name for a youth or young man; when he was a young man who worked in the stables, he was the horse groom; when he’s a young man about to get married to a bride, he’s the bridegroom.

Gary continued: “And the mare is looked after by the groom and controlled with headgear – it’s called bridalry, where you get bridal wear.” Again, the connections here are purely superficial. ‘Bridle’ for horses is comes from the old English word, bridle, meaning “a restraint”, which was related to the word ‘bregdan’, meaning to move quickly. So, to bredgan your horse, you’d pull the bridle. Whereas when it comes to your nuptials, ‘bridalry’ isn’t the name for a bride’s headgear, it’s a general term for clothing worn by a bride. But the bride will indeed be wearing bridal gear, from the old English word ‘bryd’, which is a betrothed or newly married woman. There is suggestion from some scholars that bridal as an extension term came from the old English ‘brydealo’, meaning ‘marriage feast’ – or, literally, ‘bride ale’. Nothing horse-related at all.

Gary carries on:“If the horse becomes uncontrollable, she’s a nightmare.” This even less relevant than any of the bride chat. A nightmare is just a bad dream at night, and it stemmed from people seeing demons on their chest when they were half awake in the middle of the night. People have back-filled that to suggest that the demons ride in on a dark horse – a night mare. But it’s actually that a ‘mare’ or ‘mara’ is the old English folkloric name for a type of demon, which came from the Proto-Germanic ‘maron’, meaning Goblin.

That ‘mare’ happens to be a homonym for the word for a female horse – a mare – but the latter came via the Old Englise ‘meare’, from the Proto-Germanic ‘marhijo’, which all meant female horse, as do derivations in Old Saxon, Old Norse, Old Frisian, Dutch, Old High German and German.

Two ponies or small horses, both brown with white lower legs and wearing bridles, play together on a dirt surface with a wooden fence behind them
Two equine friends playing in their paddock, with bridles on their heads. By Alexas_Fotos, via Pixabay

Next, Gary makes the link to pregnancy: “If the three trimesters don’t happen and there’s nothing in the carriage, it’s a miscarriage”. Here, he’s clearly reaching, because the word ‘miscarriage’ is just the noun form of the very to ‘miscarry’, and it’s pretty obvious why ‘mis-carry’ would be the term used for when a pregnancy doesn’t carry all the way to term. Equally, it’s just as obvious why a cart pulled by a horse can be called a ‘carriage’, because it carries you.

Further, Fraughen: “At weddings it’s all horseshoes – nothing to do with luck, it’s to do with animal Husbandry”. Despite Gary’s protestations, horseshoes are a sign of luck – they’re made of iron, which was said to ward off evil spirits, and they’re held in place by seven nails, with seven being seen as a lucky number (in English culture at least). But we still need to deal with the elephant in the room: ‘husband’. As in animal husbandry! And a married man is a husband! Is Gary the Sovereign Citizen finally backing a winner here?

Well, no. The word ‘husband’ comes from the Old English ‘husbonda’, meaning ‘the male head of a household, master of a house, householder’. In return, that likely comes from the Old Norse ‘husbondi’, roughly translated as ‘master of the house’, because ‘hus’ means ‘house’ and ‘bondi’ is the past tense of the verb ‘bua’ meaning ‘to dwell’. So, literally ‘house-dweller’, but it would usually be used to mean the person who was in charge of that house… and if they’re in charge of the house, they would also get the say over what to do with the animals, hence animal ‘hus-bond-ry’. How does this link to marriage? Well, the man marrying your young daughter would be in charge of her too, he’d be her ‘hus-bond’. Thank you very much, centuries of patriarchy.

Speaking of patriarchy, Gary went on to explain how gendered titles work:

It’s like the word Mister. Years ago we had master, the young master was the young male in the house. Mister (Mr) comes from the word Mariner, admiralty maritime law, from the first and the last letter of the lowest form of individual working on a vessel. So you had Mister, you had Mrs but it really reads, Mister’s (Mr’s) – he owns her, she’s his property. And with a young female, she’s not owned by an another male yet, so we miss her out.

Unsurprisingly, ‘Mister’, as ‘Mr’, is not derived from the first and last letters of the word ‘mariner’ as the lowest rank of individual working on a vessel. ‘Mister’ is a derivation of the word ‘master’, which started as a word meaning a man who has control or authority over a place, from the Latin ‘magister’, which is where we also get ‘magistrate’, and via French where we get ‘maître d’. Ironically enough, ‘master’ is actually the highest rank on board a shipping vessel, because it’s a synonym for captain… which would have helped Gary out to know, because ‘mariner’ isn’t actually the lowest rank on the ship, it’s not a rank at all, it’s just the name for someone who works on a shipping vessel – mariner, from the Latin ‘marinus’ meaning ‘of the sea’.

As for ‘Mrs’, is that actually a silent possessive apostrophe, and is the word actually short for ‘master’s’ (or, I suppose, ‘mariner’s’)? Well, no. ‘Mrs’ isn’t to be read as ‘Mr’s’, but as an abbreviation for a longer word – just as we abbreviate doctor to ‘dr’, the word ‘mrs’ is an abbreviation of ‘mistress’. And when it comes to ‘Miss’, contrary to what Gary believes the term doesn’t mean ‘we miss her out’ because she’s not yet owned. That would make no sense – in that society the young girl would have been owned by her father prior to her husband, as there wasn’t a time young women were self-owned. The title ‘miss’ is also just a contraction of ‘mistress’ – essentially, like a mistress, but small – while the verb to miss something out comes from the Old English ‘missan’ – meaning to fail to hit what you were aiming at, or to escape someone else’s notice.

We are just three minutes into Gary’s talk by this point. I won’t carry on in that level of detail, but as an exercise it is worth doing, because it illustrates the magical thinking behind Common Law and Sovereign Citizen claims, and how they immediately fall apart with even a moment of scrutiny. These kind of ideas require a failure to look into what words actually mean, instead relying on the acceptance of superficial similarities as being indicative of deeper connections. But words don’t work that way – there is no real link between the ‘mare’ that means horse and the ‘mare’ that means demon, but there’s no such thing as a homonym to the common law believer, and any similarity must be indicative of a greater hidden meaning that can and must be decoded.

Gary’s search for meaning wasn’t restricted to marriage rituals – he turned his same brand of pattern-spotting to the aqueous nature of the banking system:

with Capital ships, all vessels were things that delivered the product. Yesterday it wasn’t there, today it has appeared, so it has manifested… so a ship’s manifest has delivered a product. That’s why women go to the  dock, where a ship is kept. And the baby is birthed – not born – because it’s a ship thing. All banking is based on shipping words – a legal tender is a small boat that feeds another vessel. The bank really means the River Bank, because the currency – current – delivers and withdraws flotsam and jetsam to the river bank. And then the income stream diversifies into other areas of water. Everything’s about water with banking.

Again, it would be easy to run through each of these terms and point out that it’s just a coincidence that ‘birth’ a baby and ‘berth’ of a ship are homophones, and that a bank is not related to a river bank, and also that sometimes words are derived from something in a metaphorical rather than literal way.

Legal hot water

It may all feel like silly semantics around definitions, and ultimately therefore harmlessness, but the pernicious aspect of the Sovereign Citizen mode of thinking is that it opens up the door to unreason, and can lead people into real trouble. One woman during his Q&A asked him:

Can you explain all caps name meaning you’re a corporation… so for instance when I got a speeding ticket, it’s like capital letters so, I’ve incorporated myself with a company’s house as a limited company, so when they write to me I send them that information, and I send an invoice as well because they are harassing me.

For his part, Gary seemed happy enough to go along with this, pointing out that it really does work, and that this lady’s weird attempt to dodge a speeding fine is proof of that. He’s wrong. What that audience member claimed to be doing is illegal, and could land her with a criminal charge of driving without valid insurance or a license. All she might be illustrating is that there’s a backlog in enforcement, but that’s not the same thing as one weird trick, and eventually she might find herself in serious hot water.

This is how common law beliefs and sovereign citizen ideas harm – not directly, but indirectly. They lead people into legal trouble, and when they’re in that legal trouble, they offer them magic bullet solutions that unfailingly turn out to be blanks. At the same time, they reinforce people’s journey off the path of reason and into the weeds, undermining their grasp on reality.

Most shocking of all is watching an audience get coached in this kind of idea just several feet from people who were actively involved in how parliament and lawmaking actually works, who absolutely ought to know this is complete nonsense, but were apparently either too fond of the adoration of the crowd, or too ignorant of the careers they spent their lives in, to point out that this isn’t how any of it works.

DNA analysis almost certainly hasn’t just solved the mystery of Jack the Ripper

Mike Hall
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DNA analysis almost certainly hasn’t just solved the mystery of Jack the Ripper

Serial killers hold a peculiar place in popular culture. Figures like Jack the Ripper were sensationalised even in their own time, with newspapers fuelling panic and speculation about Jolly Jack and when he will strike next.

Despite more than a century passing since the brutal Whitechapel Murders, public and popular fascination with the crimes persists. Many serial murderers have books, documentaries, and podcasts dedicated to them, but Jack the Ripper has had an unprecedented influence on British and American culture.

Alan Moore’s From Hell presents the Whitechapel Murders as part of a conspiracy, with the killings forming an occult ritual. Hammer’s Room to Let depicts Jack as Dr Fell, a softly spoken medical doctor in hiding long after the events in Whitechapel. Star Trek says Jack the Ripper was Redjac, an alien creature who possesses Scotty, in a script written by the author of Psycho, Robert Bloch. Another Hammer production, Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, portrays Hyde as responsible for the Whitechapel Murders, while Jekyll struggles with the horrifying actions of his alter-ego.

However, this enduring focus on serial killers comes at a cost. The victims of such crimes are frequently overshadowed, their names forgotten, while the killers become cultural icons. Despite his historical significance, Jack the Ripper was ultimately a brutal murderer. Yet the way we remember him today reflects a wider cultural obsession with serial killers that is both compelling and problematic.

There is also a significant amount of pseudoscience surrounding the Whitechapel Murders. There are hoaxed diaries, fake letters, and conspiracy theories involving the Freemasons or the British Royal family. Some deny Jack the Ripper existed at all, and argue that the murders attributed to him were totally unrelated. Many of these conspiracies and hoaxes persist because, after 140 years, we still have no idea who Jack the Ripper was.

But could that be about to change? In recent weeks, multiple news outlets have reported on a DNA analysis claiming to identify the killer as Aaron Kosminski, a Polish barber who lived in Whitechapel at the time.

As the story goes, a blood-soaked shawl was found alongside the body of the fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes, and was taken home by Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson. Simpson had taken the shawl as a gift for his wife, a seamstress, who quite understandably had no interest in making use of a bloody shawl taken from a murder victim. Rather than disposing of it, she placed it in storage and it was passed down through the family before finally being sold at auction by David Melville-Hayes, a descendant of Simpson, in 2007.

The buyer, a businessman named Russell Edwards, became interested in ‘Ripperology’ in 2001 after watching the movie adaptation of From Hell. Edwards employed Dr Jari Louhelainen, a molecular biologist based at Liverpool John Moores University, who in 2011 used modern forensic techniques to demonstrate that DNA from both Eddowes and Kosminski was present on the shawl, and therefore Kosminski must have been the killer.

Edwards first announced these findings over a decade ago, in a 2014 article for the Mail on Sunday, just days before the publication of his book on the topic. Louhelainen’s examination of the shawl was published five years later, in the Journal of Forensic Sciences – so this story is very much old news. The resurgence in press interest appears to have been driven by the publication of a new edition of Edwards’ book, which hit the shelves last October.

Regardless of the reasons for the renewed interest, there remain several problems with the shawl and its analysis.

First, no contemporary documentation indicates there was a shawl discovered with Eddowes. The list of items discovered with her is exhaustive, and includes a black straw bonnet, black cloth jacket with imitation fur, dark green skirt with a brown button on the waistband, a white man’s vest, a brown bodice, grey petticoat, a pair of men’s boots, large pocket handkerchief, brown knee stockings, two clay pipes, one tin box of tea, one tin box of sugar, one empty matchbox, six pieces soap, one comb, one table knife, one metal teaspoon, several buttons, one red mitten, and a thimble. Despite cataloging such inconsequential items as an empty matchbook and a thimble, the eight foot shawl is not mentioned.

A low-light/monochrome photo of a kitchen knife on a surface, with suspect drips near its point
A kitchen knife and some suspect droplets. By Ryk Neethling, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0

So if no shawl is recorded as being found with Eddowes, how did Simpson have one? One theory suggests that Simpson took the shawl from the crime scene before Eddowes’ belongings were catalogued – an act that would constitute a serious dereliction of duty, even then. While it was common practice at the time to burn a murder victim’s clothing after examination, tampering with evidence before it was recorded would have been highly improper, especially in such a high-profile case.

This leads to a second problem: the silken shawl was very large and would have been extremely valuable. However, Eddowes lived in extreme poverty and had recently pawned a pair of shoes just to get enough money to eat. It seems unlikely that she would have owned such a garment.

Edwards speculates that the shawl in fact belonged to the killer, who deliberately left it at the crime scene to be found. He further argues that the pattern of Michaelmas Daisies on the shawl was a deliberate clue for police.

Michaelmas, or the Feast of St Michael, is a largely forgotten Christian tradition today, but was still celebrated in the Victorian era. Two dates exist for the feast. In the Western tradition it is held on 29 September; Eastern Orthodox has it on 8 November. Edwards argues that this is no coincidence, since 29 September was the date on which both Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride were killed, and 8 November was the date of the final murder, that of Mary Jane Kelly.

Edwards further speculates that Kosminski procured the shawl specifically to leave at the scene, as a hint toward the date of his next murder. While it’s not beyond the realms of possibility for a serial killer to do that, there is no contemporary evidence to suggest that Jack the Ripper operated with this level of symbolic planning, and the argument smacks of a Texas sharpshooter fallacy. The apparent specificity is only apparent in retrospect, and is more likely to have been fitted to match the story than the other way around. And that’s leaving aside the fact that Stride and Eddowes were in fact attacked in the early hours of 30 September (not the 29th), and Kelly lost her life on 9 November (not the 8th).

On top of that, Aaron Kosminski was Jewish and Michaelmas is a Christian tradition. Is it reasonable to suppose that he would have known not only the Western date for the feast, but also the date of its Eastern Orthodox variant?

The next problem with the provenance of the shawl is that Amos Simpson did not attend the crime scene. Simpson is recorded as joining the Metropolitan Police Y Division in 1868, transferring to N Division in 1886, where he remained until his resignation in 1893.

The Whitechapel Murders were investigated by H Division, and there is no record of Simpson ever serving there. Moreover, Eddowes’ murder was in the jurisdiction of the City of London Police, so why would a Met officer have attended the crime scene? According to the oral family tradition accompanying the shawl, Simpson was supposedly on ‘special duties’ that night and was in fact the first officer to discover Eddowes’ body. However, the official record lists Constable Edward Watkins as the officer who found Eddowes, and a list of those present at the scene does not include Simpson. It is also Watkins who appeared at the inquest; Simpson does not attend.

The area where Eddowes was found, Mitre Square, is over a mile from N Division’s area. We might speculate that Simpson strayed from his beat that night and happened upon Eddowes, taking the shawl and leaving before Watkins arrived.

Monochrome photo of Mitre Square in London's EC3, Whitechapel. A cobbled road curves left with dark brick buildings in the background and a small park to the right. The road ahead is blocked by bollards. A road sign for Mitre Square hangs on a short wall next to a bench on the right.
Mitre Square, Whitechapel, London. By Stop Time on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Again, the historical record challenges this theory. At 1:30am, PC Watkins had patrolled Mitre Square and saw nothing unusual. At 1:35am, witnesses saw Eddowes talking to a man near Church Passage. At 1:40am, PC James Harvey walked through Church Passage to the edge of Mitre Square but noticed nothing out of the ordinary. At 1:45am, Watkins returned to the square and discovered Eddowes’ body.

So Eddowes was seen alive at 1:35am, and found dead at 1:45am. And in between times, PC Harvey had walked through the area she was later found and saw nothing. Even leaving some slack for some variation in these timings (it’s not like everyone had iPhones synchronised with internet time), this means there would have been around five to ten minutes for Kosminski to murder and mutilate Eddowes and flee the scene, and for Simpson – having somehow strayed miles from his beat – to stumble upon the body, decide his wife might appreciate a bloody shawl from a murder victim, take it as a keepsake, and vanish before Watkins arrives.

The story stretches the limits of credulity, but let us assume for a moment that all this happened. Let’s assume that the killer wanted to leave an oblique clue to taunt the police, and acquired an expensive shawl featuring Michaelmas Daisies to leave beside a victim’s body. Let’s also assume that it was found by Amos Simpson, who instead of throwing it away, burning it, giving it away, or even giving it a wash – puts it in a cupboard. And let’s assume that all of this managed to avoid police records, but was passed down in the oral tradition of Amos Simpson’s family.

How does that lead us to Aaron Kosminski?

In his 2019 paper, Jari Louhelainen described how he extracted mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from the blood stains on the shawl, and matched those to the mtDNA of a descendent of Eddowes – confirmation, it appears, that the shawl was at the crime scene.

However, even this is an overstatement. Mitochondrial DNA is not typically able to identify individuals with such specificity. The mtDNA may have matched Eddowes, but will also have matched thousands of other people from London at the time. The match doesn’t rule out that this was Eddowes’ blood, but does not confirm it either.

Louhelainen also used mtDNA to link a semen stain found on the shawl to relatives of Kosminski, but this link suffers from the same problem. The mtDNA may match Kosminski, but would also have matched thousands of Londoners of the time.

Moreover, while there does seem to have been some sexual element to the Whitechapel Murders – given the victims were exclusively women and often had organs, including sex organs, removed – there is no clear evidence that Jack the Ripper assaulted his victims in a manner that would have left semen at the crime scene. This is simply not a known feature of the Whitechapel Murders.

Black splatter patterns on a white background, resembling ink or blood
Cleaned up blood is hard to detect without a UV light, and/or luminol. Image via Wallpaper Flare.

In response to this criticism, Louhelainen argues that Victorian forensic techniques were rudimentary, and investigators lacked modern tools like UV lights to detect semen. While this is a valid criticism of historical forensic methods, it also creates a circular argument. If the goal is to prove that Kosminski’s semen on the shawl links him to the Whitechapel Murders, this assumption relies on the very evidence we are attempting to validate. Without evidence that the semen is linked to the crime, the claim that it implicates Kosminski or confirms his identity as the Ripper is speculative at best.

This brings us to another issue: Aaron Kosminski was the only Ripper suspect that Edwards and Louhelainen chose to test, as Edwards already believed him to be the killer. Given the wide range of suspects that have been considered over the years, testing other plausible candidates alongside Kosminski might have strengthened Edwards’ claim… or undermined it. If more than one suspect matches the mtDNA on the shawl, what then?

In fact, even the notion of Aaron Kosminski being a genuine suspect is somewhat questionable. Much of the emphasis on him comes from an 1894 memorandum written by Melville Macnaghten, then the Assistant Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police. In this memo, written years after the final murder, Macnaghten names three possible suspects: Montague Druitt, Michael Ostrog, and a man he refers to as ‘Kosminski’ (no first name given). Macnaghten describes ‘Kosminski’ as a Polish Jew living in Whitechapel, who was committed to an asylum in 1889

Many years later, Sir Robert Anderson, in his memoirs, also refers to a Polish suspect but did not name him as Kosminski. It was Chief Inspector Donald Swanson who, in handwritten notes in his personal copy of Anderson’s book, wrote ‘Kosminski was the suspect’ next to this passage, further noting that ‘Kosminski’ had been sent to the Colney Hatch Asylum and died shortly afterward.

It wasn’t until 1987 that the pseudonymous ‘Kosminski’ was linked to the barber Aaron Kosminski, on the basis of Aaron being the only recorded individual named Kosminski at Colney Hatch. However, there are differences between the suspect ‘Kosminski’ and Aaron Kosminski. The suspect is described as being sent to Colney Hatch in March 1889 and dying shortly afterward. In contrast, Aaron Kosminski was not sent to Colney Hatch until February 1891 and died over two decades later, at Leavesden Hospital, in 1919. Indeed, when Swanson wrote that ‘Kosminski’ had died shortly after going to Colney Hatch, Aaron Kosminski was still alive.

Records from his hospitalisation also show that Aaron Kosminski did not appear to speak English and communicated only in Yiddish during his time there. If he truly couldn’t speak English or had only rudimentary knowledge of it, this would contradict the description of Jack the Ripper, who was reportedly seen conversing with both Stride and Eddowes.

Turning back to the shawl itself – between 1991 and 2001, it was on loan to the Metropolitan Police ‘Black Museum,’ though it appears not to have been put on display, perhaps due to its dubious provenance. After reclaiming the shawl in 2001, Melville-Hayes exhibited it at Jack the Ripper conventions and had it DNA tested as part of a Channel 5 documentary in 2006 (Channel 5’s findings were inconclusive.) The shawl does not appear to have been kept in anything approaching reasonable forensic conditions, and has had ample opportunity to be contaminated, including by those connected to the case.

Following the publication of Louhelainen’s 2019 paper, the Journal of Forensic Sciences received critical letters from two commentators, both of whom questioned the validity of his conclusions. Louhelainen responded with rebuttals, but the debate was significant enough for the journal’s editor to request the raw data supporting the study. Unfortunately, Louhelainen was unable to provide it, citing ‘instrument failure.’ As a result, the Journal of Forensic Sciences has issued an ‘Expression of Concern,’ a formal notice warning readers that the article’s findings might be unreliable. This notice remains attached to the paper at the time of writing.

Russell Edwards has declared the findings to be the final word on the Whitechapel Murders. He has even gone as far as to call for the courts to officially recognise Kosminski as the killer and formally close the case. He has also stated that anyone unmoved by his arguments are simply ‘unbelievers’ motivated to ‘perpetuate the mystery.’

I have no particular enthusiasm for the Jack the Ripper case. I wouldn’t describe myself as a ‘Ripperologist,’ nor do I claim deep knowledge of the subject. In fact, I find the public fascination with serial killers somewhat vulgar. ‘Perpetuating mystery’ is not my motivation, nor is it for any skeptic. My interest lies in understanding what is true, based on the available evidence, and in following where that evidence leads – while remaining cautious not to fall prey to motivated reasoning or wishful thinking about what we would like to be true.

It is entirely possible that Aaron Kosminski is the true identity of Jack the Ripper. However, the evidence and arguments presented in support of this contain too many gaps and flaws to be convincing.

From the archive: Roswell Revisited in 1991 – the final crash of the UFOs?

Christopher Allan
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From the archive: Roswell Revisited in 1991 – the final crash of the UFOs?

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 2, from 1991.

Ufology in Europe has diverged considerably from that in the USA in recent years. Whereas in Europe ufologists have concentrated much more on psycho-social and links-with-folklore explanations and the comparatively new tectonic strain or ‘earthlights’ theories, in the US the current views are much more oriented towards the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) and, in particular, two main ETH offshoots: abductions and crashed saucers. Abductions have been written about ad nauseam in the literature, so I shall deal only with the crashed saucer fad as it now stands.

Back in 1950 an American author named Frank Scully wrote a best-seller called Behind the Flying Saucers, which dealt with the crash of three flying saucers in the south-west US and spoke of little men from Venus being found among the wreckage. It was, of course, all being hushed up by the US government, who had the alien corpses pickled away in secret laboratories. Scully’s book caused quite a sensation and some consternation in official circles for a while. Unfortunately Scully’s informants turned out to be less than reliable (one was later convicted of fraud over another matter) . The book itself was full of scientific howlers and daft imaginings and was eventually exposed as a fake by True magazine in 1952.

Despite the constant stream of sightings and investigations by both official and private UFO groups, crashed saucers faded out of the news almost completely until the late 1970s when a ufologist named Leonard Stringfield presented some 20 or so new cases to a UFO conference in 1978. He later published his findings in his UFO Crash/Retrieval series of papers. The problem was that all of Stringfield’s informants were anonymous military personnel and the dates and places of the alleged events were usually missing. To this day he maintains a strict silence on the identity of his sources. Few ufologists now take Stringfield’s stories seriously and it is doubtful if they ever did.

However, in 1980 a new book appeared which rekindled interest in crashed UFOs and which has kept interest alive throughout the 1980s, leading to a big new investigative project and with it the hopes of a final breakthrough in the acceptance of UFOs as extraterrestrial vehicles. The 1980 book was The Roswell Incident, by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, who had collaborated on an earlier book called The Philadelphia Experiment, a weird story involving the teleportation of a navy ship during World War ll.

Actually Berlitz did none of the research on the Roswell book and has long since dropped out of the affair, having gone back to more esoteric subjects like the Bermuda Triangle and Atlantis, with which he was originally associated. Perhaps he found crashed UFOs not to his liking. The two men really behind the Roswell crashed UFO story are William Moore and his colleague Stanton T Friedman; through the 1980s they produced several updated research papers giving the latest dope on the case, producing new ‘witnesses’, gathering new evidence and generally giving the impression that an enormous ‘cosmic Watergate’ was being conducted by the US government.

What exactly is the Roswell story? Unlike other crashed UFO stories, in this one something did actually take place. On day in mid-June 1947, some ten days before Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting that launched the modern UFO era, a rancher discovered some strange debris on his ranch near Roswell, New Mexico the night after a severe thunderstorm. He thought nothing of it at first, but some three weeks later had another look and decided to report it to the local sheriff. He had, in the meantime, heard of the first ‘flying disc’ stories going the rounds, and curiosity prompted him to look again at his discovery and report it, in case it was one of those ‘things’.

The local USAF base was alerted on July 7 and sent two men back to the ranch with the rancher. They spent one night out in the boondocks, collected most of the stuff, loaded it into a truck and carted it back to the air base some 75 miles away. A short press release was then issued saying a ‘flying disc ‘ had come into the possession of the USAF. No description was given of the said object. The local militia (the few who had seen it) were baffled but, upon orders from on high, immediately dispatched the wreckage by plane to higher HQ at Fort Worth, Texas, en route for Wright Patterson Field in Ohio where technical experts would examine and, hopefully, identify the strange material.

All the above was reported in the local and national newspapers during early July 1947. Brief notices even appeared in the UK, in The Times and Daily Telegraph.

The FBI was alerted; then a press conference took place at Fort Worth where several photographs were taken of the wreckage. A weather officer at the base was called in, examined the stuff, and at once pronounced it as a wrecked radar target, shaped like a large 3-dimensional six-pointed star covered in tinfoil and attached to a balloon; this was a Rawin target, then used for meteorological purposes and a device unfamiliar to most military personnel, and certainly to people on remote ranches. The planned flight to Wright Field was cancelled and the press sent home. The story was dead and buried, and stood that way for over 30 years.

Then suddenly it resurfaced in 1978 as a result of a chance remark by someone to Stanton Friedman after a lecture on UFOs he gave in Louisiana. One of the USAF officers who had recovered the wreckage finally broke his long silence and told Friedman he had once handled pieces from a flying disc. Friedman told his pal Bill Moore and together they began locating some 90 ‘witnesses’ and building up quite a story of a spaceship that crashed after an explosion on board, with four to six alien bodies being found, strange writing appearing on the object, secret photos being taken, military aerial reconnaissance being done, super-secret high level meetings, phone calls and so on. The FBI were said to be deeply concerned at the time, witnesses were told to keep their mouths shut; also, the rancher was held incommunicado at the local air base whilst the ranch was combed thoroughly by the military under conditions of the highest security.

It was this story that formed the main part of the Berlitz/Moore book and Moore’s numerous follow-up papers in the 1980s. Moore and Friedman had a monopoly on the Roswell story until 1988, adding more and more pieces of evidence to their ‘cosmic Watergate’ as they progressed. To fit in with another, unconnected, sighting they had changed the date of the initial discovery, insisting it was on July 3, not mid-June. They had also linked it to an uncorroborated and second-hand report of another ‘crash’ story, told to Friedman, which allegedly happened at Socorro, New Mexico; a story which Moore later had doubts about.

Unfortunately, none of the people interviewed could remember the dates, only a handful had seen pieces of the debris and the original rancher had died long before. In fact every person without exception was interviewed no less than 32 years after the event. Nobody has ever been found who saw the UFO crash; even the word ‘crash’ is a later invention, since the original press reports speak merely of a ‘landing’ or a ‘recovery’ of a light instrument.

In late 1988 the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) decided to launch a new Roswell investigation. In September 1989 a team went out to the remote ranch site and camped there for five days, hoping to find, after a lapse of 42 years, some fragment of the doomed spaceship. Not surprisingly, they drew a blank. To help fund the expedition, CUFOS issued special Roswell expedition T-shirts. The case soon feablred on an ‘Unexplained Mysteries’ TV program; this produced new witnesses and led to yet further interviews.

Two new investigators, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt, have since taken up the role of crashed UFO specialists in the US and, under the auspices of CUFOS, have now interviewed nearly 250 people altogether. If this seems an impressive figure, let readers be assured that only about ten (to be generous) are of any real use, the rest being merely friends, relatives and odd hangers-on, who saw nothing first-hand.

Randle and Schmitt have unearthed startling new evidence, all told by these witnesses (42 years afterwards) of even more incredible things: the wreckage was transported to not one but three secret locations, involving at least seven B-29 or C-54 cargo plane journeys and resulting in a total weight of the craft of some 50 tonnes (as opposed to the piffling 5 pounds of debris originally reported in the press), bodies were indeed found and whisked off for examination, a huge 500-foot long trench appeared in the desert where the spaceship had crashed to earth, armed guards were put up around the site to prevent onlookers getting too nosey, and other strange things occurred which, says Randle and Schmitt, can only be explained by the recovered object being indeed an alien spaceship that met its fate that night in 1947.

They also say the details are still held in top secret files at the Pentagon; despite persistent USAF denials that it has any secret crashed saucer reports of any kind, classified or unclassified. (All USAF UFO files were declassified and released in the mid-1970s; Roswell does not appear in them).

In general Randle and Schmitt’s findings match those of Moore and Friedman. However, Moore was not entirely happy with the two usurpers of his crashed saucer story and, as time went on, became more and more disturbed by their methods, claiming that they had pirated his original research and claimed it as their own. He had presumably realised that with their proposed new book in the offing he would stand to lose financially.

Accordingly he fired an angry 9-page missive at Randle and Schmitt in August 1990, charging them with pirating his (and Friedman’s) source material without due credit and permission. He threatened a lawsuit if Randle and Schmitt went ahead with their book. Meanwhile Friedman, who had already joined forces with Randle and Schmitt, became very angry at Moore’s outburst and split with him, probably for good. Friedman accused his former colleague of ‘a load of false charges… most based on ignorance of the facts and seemingly delusions of grandeur’.

Since then Friedman has come out with a statement that, while he goes along almost entirely with Randle and Schmitt’s ideas, there are still minor points of disagreement, thus he had decided to branch off and write his own Roswell book in conjunction with another ufologist, Don Berliner. Moore, meanwhile, has teamed up with his colleague of MJ-12 fame, Jaime Shandera, to provide yet a third Roswell investigation team (!) running concurrently with the other two groups.

Roswell ‘papers’ have proliferated in the UFO literature in the US for the best part of two years now, so much so that even abductions seem to have, temporarily at least, taken a back seat. Meanwhile, further developments are in hand. A special ‘Crashed Saucer Project’ has been set up by the Fund for UFO Research and in July 1990 a conference was called in Washington to gather as much of the ‘first hand’ testimony as possible and record it on videotape with a view to eventually presenting it to Congress. Indeed, it has been the view of several prominent ufologists that the vast amount of testimony gathered is now so overpowering that both the US scientific community and Congress will soon be compelled to take notice and finally force the military to release their super-secret files and admit that ETH is now a proven fact. With the witnesses now ageing, Friedman says: ‘we must work quickly, because we are racing the undertaker’.

However, skeptics need have no fears. Disputes have now arisen about what is depicted in the six photographs that were taken at Fort Worth in July 1947. The photos show something very much like a damaged balloon and radar target, complete with aluminium foil and wooden beams, but Moore and Shandera still stubbornly claim that the wreckage shown is part of an alien spaceship. Randle and Schmitt, while admitting the stuff shown is merely a wrecked balloon, insist that a deliberate switch was done before the photos were taken (the real wreckage having been secretly spirited away by the military). Also, to further muddy the waters, both the photographer and two of the principal ex-military people involved are now revising their statements. A recent witness has even been found who claims to have ‘remembered’ the crash even though he was only five years old at the time. Friedman is apparently very impressed with his evidence. Randle and Schmitt are not, and claim he is a fake.

If all goes well and there are no lawsuits, there should be two new Roswell crashed saucer books out during 1991 with the prospect of further articles and monographs to come, and with debates continuing for a long time yet. In view of the above, it does indeed look as if the UFOs will finally crash to earth sometime in 1991.

Joe Nickell, legendary skeptical investigator, dies at the age of 80

Blake Smith
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Joe Nickell, legendary skeptical investigator, dies at the age of 80

Joe Nickell is dead. He passed away Tuesday March 4th, 2025, aged 80. During his life, Joe had more adventures and investigated more mysteries than most avid readers will encounter in a stack of their favourite books. How do you summarise a life like Joe’s? Well, in one sense, we don’t have to rely on obituary as biography because his frequent articles and books have done that work, and in his own hand. If you’ve never heard of Joe nor his contributions to the literature of scientific investigation of the paranormal and supernatural, then you find here but a signpost to further reading.

But solving mysteries was just one chapter in the anthology of Joe’s life. No, that’s not an ill-chosen word. Most people see their lives as a biography in progress, a single narrative with the hero version of ourselves as the main character. Joe, on the other hand, took on the challenge of reinventing himself so many times that he came to refer to these episodes as his “personas.”

A side-on photo of Joe Nickell. He has white combed-over hair, thin-rimmed glasses, and a full, white beard. He wears a tweet jacket and black t shirt. He is 73 years old in the photo.
Joe Nickell CSICon 2018 (Sgerbic, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

There is Joe, the 1960s civil rights activist who marched with Dr King and canvassed the hostile segregationist South to help register black voters. Then there’s Joe, the young entrepreneur son of a Kentucky postmaster who learned the trade of sign-painting and used those skills his whole life to find work and create art between various jobs and yet more personas. There was Joe, the private investigator who went undercover to break up crime rings and solve cases that would make great true-crime fodder. Don’t forget about Joe, the noted poet who once participated in a slam with notable members of the Beat Generation. Joe Nickell was present when the hippies tried to levitate the Pentagon. And we mustn’t forget Joe, the documents expert who used his forgery detection skills to find a Nazi hiding from justice. And can you hear that boardwalk patter? That’s Joe, the street magician and conjuror plying his trade to lure you into a museum of magic using the verbal tricks of the trade he learned from his friends in the travelling carnival circuit. Oh – and over there in tweed? Why that’s Dr Joe Nickell, should you find him in the guise of English professor. And of course Joe Nickell could tell you about more of his exploits over an expertly made mint julep, since he was also a Kentucky Colonel who literally wrote the book on that cocktail. 

All of that is before we get to his work on miracles, ghosts, monsters, and flying saucers. Joe probably did more than anyone to let us in on the “secret” that the Shroud of Turin is a 13th century fraud and could never have been the burial cloth of Jesus. With nothing more powerful than a pen, Joe defeated countless beasts and creatures and found time after time that sincere witnesses may have very well seen real things – but the right circumstances can turn the mundane and the natural into the liminal and mysterious. 

Joe slept in haunted houses. He camped in monster territory. He faced cursed objects and holy relics with the most powerful spell known to secular inquiry, the two word invocation that all purveyors of the implausible dread: “Prove it.“

Joe didn’t believe in any gods or afterlife, but didn’t call himself an “atheist.” He preferred to say he was a secular humanist which, if the inquirer didn’t understand, he would define as “an atheist with a heart.” And that’s how I knew him to be.

Joe Nickell talking about being a paranormal investigator, at QED Con 2012. He is dressed in black and is holding up his hand to make a point. He has grey moustache, aviator-style spectacles, and combed-over hair.
Joe Nickell speaking at QEDcon at the Mercure Manchester Piccadilly Hotel on the 11th of March 2012 (Your Funny Uncle, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

I believe I met Joe for the first time in 2009 when he was at DragonCon. He was used to meeting lots of people, being in crowds, talking to large audiences, getting on TV shows, consulting with movie people – but when we met and I told him I was also interested in solving mysteries he only ever treated me as an equal and welcomed me to the calling. 

Joe’s stance was akin to what Dr. Karen Stollznow and I have taken to calling “a presumption of sincerity.” When someone is willing to share their weird or mysterious encounter, we take them seriously and try to understand and listen – and until we run into something that suggests insincerity or lies, we continue to focus on the claims, not the character of the claimant. I think Joe also took this tack when he met potential fellow investigators. He would treat you as a serious colleague until you demonstrated otherwise. 

I don’t know how many investigators Joe took under his wing or collaborated with as trusted colleagues, but it was a lot. I know he worked with Hayley Stevens, Robert Bartholemew, Steven Novella, Jim McGaha, Robert Sheaffer, Massimo Polidoro, and I’m sure many, many others. I know he spoke about collaborating with James Randi and other founding members of CSICOP. He venerated his own mentor and fellow Kentuckian Robert A. Baker, and the magician and author Melbourne Christopher – yet he still took time to help younger investigators just getting started with their own inquiries into paranormal mysteries. 

Joe was as complicated as his many personas suggest. While he could be a tremendous friend, he also could be a bit prickly and his opinion of your merit might fade quickly if you disagreed with him without a strong and cogent argument. And as he got older, he worried too much about people scooping his latest cases. That was unfortunate, because the reality is that there might not be a bustling stable of future scientific researchers into such mysteries. I would be more optimistic about the future if there were a bigger skilled and competent coterie of investigators trying to out-sleuth each other in their relentless drive to track down real explanations for mysteries, but this is a peculiar and rare avocation (Joe’s word).

Why didn’t Joe ever use the Internet? He wasn’t unfamiliar with computers and would use them in his research – yet he wrote his cases up in longhand and had a typist prepare them. He would correspond via letters, and he would use a phone – but he wouldn’t own a mobile or smart-phone and he saw such devices as more distraction than useful extension of his capabilities. I recall one time a notable colleague shared a story about pestering Joe to use a computer to speed up their collaborative process, and Joe pushed back by saying he’d written more than 25 published books without a computer, “and how many have YOU written?” That person has gone on to have their own books published, but it was the kind of retort Joe would use; one that both shuts down the argument while also making a strong suggestion of its own. 

Joe Nickell in his office in Amherst, NY, in 2013. He sits at a desk, dressed in a black shirt and tan jacket. His desk is a mass of papers, books and notes. Behind him is a row of seven black filing cabinets and an old TV.
Joe Nickell in office, Amherst, NY 2013 (Sgerbic, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Even in the last few weeks of his life Joe was in a race to try and finish as much as he could of his remaining projects. He was an utter realist about the brevity of life and wanted to squeeze out everything he could from it. 

Joe went undercover to spot trickery at Spiritualist camps. He snuck “tears” and “blood” from holy relics to have them analysed. He was adept at subterfuge and prestidigitation. Yet what he really wanted was for people to be able to enjoy mysteries but not be duped by the dubious. He kept Occam’s Razor at the ready for any epistemological street fight. He was inspired by Sherlock Holmes, but saw the life of Arthur Conan Doyle as an object lesson that being clever could still end with your being duped by the biggest trickster of all – the true Moriarty of mystery – one’s own fallible mind and faulty perception. 

I was lucky to have known Joe. He went from being a TV face to a notable colleague to a trusted friend. In the decade and a half that we knew each other he was never anything but supportive and helpful, and he was generous and wise with the advice he dispensed. Typically when Joe called it would take an hour to have our conversation. Rare was the call that lasted less than 30 minutes. But last week Joe sounded very tired and told me he needed to rest. Over the weekend I worried, and was relieved when I reached him on Monday. 

“Get some rest, Joe. Get well. You’ve still got a lot of work to do,” I told him.

He sounded winded and said he was going to watch MSNBC and try to get his energy back. A neighbour came to the door while we were talking and I could overhear them tell Joe they were thinking about him and worried that he might fall in the ice trying to get his newspaper. When Joe came back to the phone he told me how much he appreciated good neighbours. I told him that I wished I lived closer so I could check in on him myself. Could I send something his way? Did he need any groceries or anything?

The very suggestion that Joe might be getting frail kicked him back into one of his very best personas: the old investigator with one more case to solve… When he stopped speaking of his immediate health and turned back to his latest investigation – a mystery he dared not share with me because it hadn’t been published yet – there was my old friend again. The man who re-created the Nazca lines, who made the Shroud of Bing Crosby on TV, the man who didn’t believe in miracles, but believed in his fellow man… there was my Joe again. 

“Joe, I just want you to know that I appreciate you as a friend, as a mentor, and as an incredible mind. The world needs voices like yours and I’m honoured to have helped in some small way to share your work,” I said. I had no premonition that he was dying – just a lot of worry given his age and health. 

He thanked me. I thanked him. We said our goodbyes. Now he’s taken on his final persona in our relationship – Joe Nickell, the friendly skeptical ghost who will haunt me with his wisdom and his adventures for the rest of my own life.

The Skeptic Podcast: Episode #002

The Skeptic Podcast
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The Skeptic Podcast: Episode #002

From the pages of The Skeptic magazine, this is The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020. 

On this episode:

Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, or to support the show, take out a small voluntary donation at patreon.com/theskeptic.

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Expert skeptical analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal.

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