Articles tagged with "stone"

Originally published in Issue 26 of the NZ Skeptic, February 1993

Despite my regular attempts to unsubscribe from some of the more egregious nonsense I receive in my email, spam still gets through - at this point it seems there's a mailing list that I signed up to that is able to subscribe me to new lists quicker than I can unsubscribe from existing ones. And, to be honest, I don't mind that much. My spam filter is able to deal with most of the fluff, and the stuff that does get through is often great fodder for this newsletter. To that end, I recently received an email titled “The BUDDHA STONE Money Magnet Kit!” which intrigued me:

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.

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.

It's often said that scientists long rejected the idea of meteorites, but the evidence for this assertion is far from convincing.

There were more than 20,000 pilgrims packed around ancient Stonehenge for the 2004 summer solstice. Among them were witches, druids, new age healers… and Hamilton journalist Russell Joyce. He reports from the scene.

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

About the time this issue makes it to the letterbox, those Americans not glued to chat-shows or the latest update on alien abductions will be treated to a documentary on recreations of ancient monuments, in which New Zealand's infamous Fridgehenge features.

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?

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?

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:

Interest in the healing power of mineral stone crystals has taken off in the past five years and not only in the United States.

Rhodes, which gave the classical Greek world one of its seven wonders, also gave it Cleobulus, one of the seven wise men. The recent search for the lost 100-foot bronze Colossus, prompted by the visions of an Australian clairvoyante, revealed nothing except, perhaps, that there is little wisdom left on the island.