10 June 2024
I would like to start this issue of the newsletter with an apology. In the last newsletter in my brief editorial I mistakenly attributed the proposed Bathroom Bill to David Seymour's political party, ACT, but of course it's been proposed by another coalition partner, Winston Peter's New Zealand First party. Thank you to the readers who were quick to point out my mistake!
29 April 2024
I saw a Facebook post from a friend that caught my interest. A weird thing happened to him on the morning of the 17th of April; he explained it as something from a horror movie. He had a doorbell where he had never put batteries in the ringer unit, but despite the lack of batteries at 6:30 am it started to ring, and continued to ring as he picked it up and shook it to double check it didn't have batteries. Indeed, it didn't.
25 September 2023
There was a recent RNZ interview done as part of their Expert Feature series, which runs on Monday afternoons with host Jesse Mulligan.
26 June 2023
Reading some of the latest research on chronic pain management led me down a rabbit hole of further reading, and the discovery of just how damn weird and counterintuitive pain is.
7 June 2022
There are two theories about the nature of hypnosis – one that it is an altered state of consciousness (ASC) and the other that it isn't. Prof. Charles Spanos of Carlton University (Canada) conducted a large number of hypnotic regressions – the induction of an experience of an apparent previous lifetime – on students at Carlton. He would subtly prime a subject on what to expect in such an experience. For example, he might suggest to subjects that children were generally mistreated in the old days, and that was what a significant number of his subjects found, For another group of subjects he would suggest that children were well-treated and this is what was reported. He'd ask his hypnotised subject simple questions about where and when they found themselves, what the currency looked like, who the country's leader was and whether the country was at war. These answers – as any sceptic might expect – were usually wrong. He also primed one group to expect past-life experiences under hypnosis and another that such experiences were rare. And the two groups largely delivered what they had been primed to expect. On the basis of his work Spanos concluded (agreeing with previous academics) that his subjects were involved in a kind of play-acting and that hypnosis was, indeed, not an altered state of consciousness. From Wikipedia:
18 April 2022
As I write this on the Sunday of Easter weekend, it was announced on Saturday evening that John Cameron, lead pastor at Arise church, had resigned his position on the board, though remains as an employee of the organisation. Additionally, his brother Brent had also resigned from the board. This was announced through a statement on their website.
1 August 2019
I'm Sheree McNatty, Secretary of NZ Skeptics. I've just been asked by a teen about how Skeptics disprove psychics, paranormal activity and the afterlife. When I was a teen I was interested in finding proof of paranormal and the afterlife. I told enquiring Aunts that I wanted to be a Parapsychologist when I left school. I found the thought of people I had known who have died being somewhere else comforting and I wanted to experience it and prove it. Friends and I had seances, I did Tarot and tea leaf reading and tried mind reading. There had to be something after this left and I wanted it to be real. However, it led me to become a Skeptic as no matter what we tried it wasn't convincing. I also found out there was no point being a Parapsychologist as nobody is going to fund repeated experiments that have failed every time.
1 August 2017
The NZ Scientology Headquarters opened to much fanfare in Auckland. Three local skeptics go along for the experience.
1 November 2015
At first I thought this was a windup (my emphasis) – then I realised it was for real! (and happening in Auckland in September):
1 November 2013
A best-selling book claiming to present evidence of life after death may not be all it's cracked up to be.
1 November 2010
One of the main reasons for the success Al Qaeda has had in getting bombs past checkpoints in Iraq is that the main device used to detect explosives is a uselss fake (NZ Herald, 24 July).
1 November 2007
The call for UFO sightings from the Tauranga-based UFOCUS group caught the attention of the Waikato Times (July 28) which ran a two-page feature on alien visitations in this country.
1 August 2004
It began like any other Saturday morning, out of bed even later than on weekdays, a leisurely breakfast, dismembering the 10 sections of the Press, and settling to a good long read. It was then that the pain began, and intensified until something had to be done. No time to send for homoeopathic medicines, no time to summon the healing hands of a Therapeutic Touch practitioner. No! Into an ambulance and delivery into the hands of the conventional medics at Christchurch Hospital.
1 February 2003
A Feng Shui practitioner who died while on a life mastery course in Fiji was ready to leave his body, his widow believes. Stephanie Challis, pictured in the Nelson Mail (11 December 2002) smiling happily with her three children, told how her 41 year old husband Will had undergone a course of body cleansing which involved colonic hydrotherapy and drinking quantities of good quality water.
1 August 2000
What red-blooded skeptic could turn up an invitation to stay in a haunted house and meet the inhabitants -- certainly not your intrepid chair-entity....
1 February 2000
As a born-again skeptic, I find it hard to write about an experience which challenges my entire values system; dead men don't talk, dreams and premonitions tell you nothing except, perhaps, something about your body chemistry, the whole body of scientific knowledge in all the different fields of hard science hangs together, so if crap like creationism and flat-Earth geography are true, then everything else we've discovered in the last 500 years must be wrong... Still, I must be brutally honest.
1 August 1995
Recently I had a UFO experience in the comfort and privacy of my own home. Or rather, I would have had a UFO experience if it had been a UFO. Unfortunately, however, I found a rational explanation for it, which means this story's not nearly as interesting as it could have been.
1 August 1992
It's a mindbending situation, but I guess you'd have to call me a skeptical believer. Like parapsychologist Susan Blackmore, personal experience inclined me towards the idea that supernatural events really happen.
1 November 1990
Is there a scientific explanation for the near-death 'tunnel' experience? This article was first published in the British & Irish Skeptic and is reprinted with the kind permission of Dr Blackmore.
1 November 1990
Experience of synchronicity (co-incidence) has occasioned thoughts on the inter-connectedness of things.
1 November 1988
Doris Stokes, the medium superstar, was a fraud, says a British author, Ian Wilson, in his book, "The After Death Experience."