A couple follow-up items today.
This item at PolitiFact (the fact-checking website founded by the author of this book that I reviewed) delves into the missing scientists story, which most commentators have already dismissed. But let’s see what PF has to say.
(The photo is of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M.)
PolitiFact, Loreben Tuquero, 28 Apr 2026: Fact-checking claims about missing, dead scientists: Were they researching UFOs, nuclear weapons?
I’ll skip the summary of coverage so far. I’ll summarize the major points of the article.
- The people did not all work together. Some social media posts claim they did. Not true. A list is provided.
- Claims that people were targeted for their access to secret programs are unsupported. Again, details of all their projects are given.
- Causes of deaths and disappearances are mixed. Suspects have been arrested for some of the deaths. Most of the disappearances are unexplained, but in one case a body was found, two others involved suicide or overdose, and in three cases no evidence is available at all.
That’s it. PF lets you draw your own conclusion: that there’s no apparent links between these people.
What would be better to know is the rate of disappearances of all people. Anecdotes don’t prove anything; statistical trends might suggest something funny, if something funny was going on.
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Re: my lead item six days ago, about purported evidence that God exists after all. I added a para there about how, even if those claims about the “fine-tuning” of the universe were valid, they in no way imply the existence of a Jesus who answers prayers. As some faithful think. There are many, many, religions in the world. Maybe the fine-tuner was a Hindu god.
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Similarly today.
I’ve noted before a Facebook group called Atheists Against Pseudoscientific Nonsense run by one “AMV”. I still don’t know his name or identity, and his website, thescientificatheist.com, has disappeared. (Yet he lists his phone number on Fb!)
Still, his arguments are valid and compelling. I could explain these things too, but he does it much better than I could. Here’s one today that addresses that “fine-tuning” argument.
Atheists Against Pseudoscientific Nonsense, AMV, yesterday: It is a truly remarkable spectacle to see a man …
If the universe were ‘fine-tuned’ for life, why is 99.999% of it a lethal vacuum of radiation and freezing darkness? One would think a PhD would recognize that a universe ‘designed’ for humans that kills them in seconds without a specialized suit is, at best, a very poor bit of engineering. But, in particular, that this level of argumentation wouldn’t be valid in the school where he got his degree.
To think that the entire universe was made with us in mind and its final achievement is an argument from ego. It is more likely that we are the result of multiple and complex processes, while at the same time just being a stepping stone for whatever will come next; than being the pet-project of a deity that is basically non-existent.
Exactly. Never mind the universe, even most of Earth (such as the oceans) is not amenable for human survival. If the God of the Old Testament exists, why isn’t the universe an endless Garden of Eden suitable for human life and reproduction and domination and worship? As it is, humans survive only in a relatively tiny, thin layer around the surface of the globe we call Earth. Our regions of comfort are very narrow. Not to mention the vast universe evidently out there. Is the entire universe really about us? That seems to be what theists think.
As I’ve suggested, this invokes an entire line of arguments to the effect that “If God really existed…” Why wouldn’t this or that be true? This is easy for non-theists to complete.
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And along these same lines. Facebook is a fount of examples of idiocy and nonsense and simple ignorance. Most people, it seems, don’t actually understand how the world or the universe works. I’ve noted in my reading how children have a kind of ‘intuitive physics’ about how the world works, including the base example of how most people think heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones (see Bering). Many adults never get over these childish intuitions. Thus the flat-earthers and NASA-deniers. Here’s one more item along those lines.
This is about people who think the NASA Artemis II mission was faked. This has an AMV frame about the 10 Commandments and lying, in this case with a fake video. But what struck me was this comment:
In a vacuum of space that suit would be so tightly squeezed around your body that your fingers would not be able to movie, somebody should re-create that scenario
The point here is why this person thinks the space suit would be tightly squeezed around your body. I’m not going to explain why this is so wrong. But there are examples like this every day. Are these the result of a failure of education, or indicative of the limits of human reason?
