Twilight of the Skeptics, Part I

A ‘Skeptic’ Aims at Kecksburg’s UFO and The New Yorker — and Misses

Skeptical Inquirer ‘debunker’ Robert Sheaffer uses obfuscation and omission to dismiss an exhaustively documented UFO case.

This is the first article in an occasional series Trail of the Saucers will publish this fall looking at Skeptical Inquirer magazine’s latest fusilade against anyone who dares entertain the hypothesis that non-human intelligence might be behind the UFO phenomenon. — The Editors

Skeptical Inquirer, the “magazine for science and reason,” put UFOs on the cover of the September/October issue under the banner of “UFOs (or UAPs) Hit the News.” Inside are nearly half a dozen articles taking on the “credulity” of mainstream media coverage of UFOs, which exploded this year in the run-up to the Pentagon’s report on UAPs, and extolling the virtues of “skepticism.”

Collectively, it’s a steaming brew of flawed thinking, obscurantism, evasion, disingenuousness and pure snark. The phrase “doth protest too much” comes to mind. The reader is almost overwhelmed. There’s so much there — and so much wrong with it — that it is impossible to untangle and unpack in a single article.