NZ Skeptics Articles

Articles tagged with "stones"

Darwin Day visit to Stone-Henge Aotearoa

6 March 2023

I visited your admirable monument to early astronomy today as one of a party. You may remember that someone asked if you could source your comment that at some time since Christianity was introduced to England, some of its adherents had tried to destroy Stonehenge, given its pagan origins. As that visitor, I regarded your comment as quite plausible in principle but I had my doubts. If this was true, it would likely have featured prominently in many of the documents, films, videos and TV programs that have covered Stonehenge in recent decades. I had never heard this idea before today and given the coverage just mentioned, I was sceptical. You stated that you believed some contemporary accounts of such destruction exist and we agreed that I should be able to find some documentary evidence with suitable internet searches.

Georgia Guidestones are no more

11 July 2022

If you've been around skeptical circles for a while, you'll have no doubt heard of the Georgia Guidestones - a granite monument that was constructed back in 1980 in a rural area in the US state of Georgia.

The Lost Tribe of Surveyors

1 August 2004

Did the ancestors of the Celts sail to New Zealand and establish a network of megalithic survey points and astronomical sight lines? Some think so

Fire-Walking: Fiji Revisited

1 May 1995

Visitors to Fiji are still being told that village people have the hereditary ability to walk on white-hot stones. This is quite untrue (see Hot Footing it in Fiji,Skeptic 26). A tourist promotion video for airline passengers features the ceremony. It is pretty obvious to the discerning viewer that the stones are not white-hot, but how many tourists give more than a cursory glance?

Hot-footing it in Fiji

1 February 1993

New Zealand Skeptics walk happily on red-hot embers, protected by the laws of physics. Fijian firewalkers, however, are said to stroll across white-hot stones. How do they do it?

Cold Reading for Fun and Profit

1 November 1992

After seeing a demonstration of cold reading at the Skeptics Conference in 1989 I thought this was something I could have fun with, so I boned up on the list of commonplaces provided at the time: