Like many of you, I read with dismay BuzzFeed’s article about allegations that Skeptic magazine founder Michael Shermer raped skeptic Alison Smith in 2008 after plying her with alcohol at a party during The Amaz!ng Meeting (TAM) in Las Vegas. Shermer released a statement denying the allegations but admitting to having had consensual sex with Smith. He points out that there is no evidence for the accusations and that the accuser continued to correspond with him happily years after the event. Other women speaking to BuzzFeed reported unwelcome sexual advances from Shermer, including an incident where he was allegedly “playing with his crotch” while hitting on a young woman at an atheist event. Shermer denies this as well, noting that the allegation of several minutes of indecent display in the midst of a crowded event is hard to credit.

Because I have criticized fringe authors for their involvement with former American Nazi party president and convicted pedophile Frank Collins (in his Frank Joseph publishing persona), it would be hypocritical of me not to take note of these very serious allegations since Michael Shermer has published many of my articles, including my very first, “Charioteer of the Gods.”

I have never met Michael Shermer in person, nor have I exchanged more than a few lines of email with him over the years. All of my Skeptic magazine articles were published before allegations against Shermer became public knowledge, and certainly before I became aware of them today. Apparently PZ Myers wrote a piece about the allegations last year, but this came after my last Skeptic appearance and was not known to me.

If the allegations are true, it is truly disturbing. For the time being, I don’t see myself returning to the pages of Skeptic until this sorts itself out. Also: These skeptic and atheist conferences sound like absolutely awful bacchanals. I am glad I have never been to one.

I’m feeling a bit uninspired today, so I’ll share a grab-bag of small stories I haven’t figured out how to spin into something more substantive.

Editor's note: This post has been corrected after I misidentified the authors of a journal article mentioning me.

Today I have several short topics to share.

Yesterday a public radio producer asked to speak with me about pseudoscience and the Kensington Rune Stone for a planned documentary about the artifact. I’m supposed to talk with her later this week, so that will be interesting, I guess. Of course, you know that any documentary on the subject will inevitably collide with Him Who Must Not Be Named…

Did you see PZ Myers’s recent blog posting about the problems with skepticism? It was an interesting read, and one that seemed to reflect criticism I have myself received on more than one occasion. In sum, Myers disapproves of skepticism because it does not generate new knowledge and instead suggests that the positive knowledge generation of science is the most effective weapons against falsehood. He uses the example of Bigfoot:

First, a brief update: Yesterday I received the first proof copy of the hardcopy edition of Cthulhu in World Mythology. It’s undergoing a final set of corrections, and then it should be available for sale at Atomic Overmind and on sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble shortly. So, if you’ve been waiting for the print edition to order your copy, the wait is almost over!

Linda Moulton-Howe and the Alaska Pyramid
Here’s a bizarre claim I didn’t know about. I have no idea how I missed it. In March the Humans Are Free fringe website reported a claim that Ancient Aliens pundit and fringe author Linda Moulton-Howe made in 2012 that a major pyramid had been discovered in Alaska. The Humans Are Free article appears to be derived, sometimes verbatim, from pieces that ran on Moulton-Howe’s Earth Files in 2012, but which are now locked behind a membership paywall. Similar articles appeared on numerous other sites such as Before It’s News in 2013, all derived from the same source.

If you’re at all interested in paranormal and historical mysteries, you almost certainly know the work of Joe Nickell, the resident investigator at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and one of the most frequent correspondents for Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptical Briefs. On his blog last week, Nickell related his experience with a television producer who had asked him to appear on TV to investigate an unnamed fringe mystery. According to Nickell, the producer complained that another skeptic he had contacted by phone was too negative and dismissive.

I thought about holding this for Sunday, but I think it is important to get a debunking of this nonsense into the public record. Alan Butler, that faithful friend of Scott Wolter who once tried to sue me for reviewing one his books, has taken on a new persona. According to his Facebook page, he is now “Alan Butler, Time Messenger,” and he aims to tell us that time travelers built the moon and invented the conspiracy guarded by the Freemasons.

Butler and Scott Wolter, with whom he is working on the Freemason part of his new ideas, assert that the Washington Monument was deliberately positioned in downtown D.C. by Freemasons to produce two remarkable effects. First, it is designed to have its shadow reach the U.S. Capitol on September 17—Constitution Day—to celebrate the Constitution. It is also designed to repeat the feat on March 25, to celebrate Mithras and Attis, the secret gods of their hidden star-goddess cult.

As we here in the United States celebrate Independence Day, I’m taking the day off. So, in honor of the holiday, I’m honoring American independence with links to articles on my website about the Founding Fathers and other patriotic topics:

• Review of Ancient Aliens S03E11: Aliens and the Founding Fathers 
• Benjamin Franklin, Catastrophist
• Would Medieval Welsh Explorers Really Threaten American Sovereignty?
• Who Really Discovered America?
• Did Native Americans Discover Europe in 60 BCE?
  

And from my Library:

• Thomas Jefferson Excavates an Ancient Burial Mound – Thomas Jefferson
  
• Fictitious Discoveries by Early Explorers of America – Historical Magazine
  
• Did the Phoenicians Discover America? – Thomas Crawford
  

And be sure to pick up a copy of my book Unearthing the Truth, packed with great information on strange beliefs about the early history of the United States!

I just received the new edition of Skeptical Inquirer (July/August 2013), and there are a couple of interesting things in it. First, I want to point out the excellent work Benjamin Radford did in exposing plagiarism in The Element Encyclopedia of Vampires (2009), which was filled with cut-and-paste plagiarism from websites. This was an even more egregious case of plagiarism than the self-copying I have documented in the work of David Childress, Erich von Däniken, and others. I dock Skeptical Inquirer points, though, for claiming the article was reviewing “plagiarism in New Age books” when in fact it is one book. I sort of hoped for a broader investigation given all the obvious plagiarism I’ve uncovered in alternative archaeology texts.

Since we’ve been discussing Einstein and Helena Blavatsky this week thanks to Gary Lachman’s “ironic” discussion of the same, I thought it was worth looking at Theosophy’s claim to have invented Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the famous equation E = mc^2. Boris de Zirkoff made the claim on behalf of his great aunt, Blavatsky, while editing her papers, and he also was the first to suggest that Einstein was a frequent reader of the Theosophical fraud. Over the years this bit of puffery expanded into Leon Maurer’s claim, first presented by (unanswered) letter to the physicist Richard Feynman in 1975, that Einstein derived relativity from The Secret Doctrine.