A year before October 7, 2023, reshaped the political landscape, we founded a nonprofit organization called Antisemitism Watch. The decision followed decades of reporting on the Holocaust and its aftermath, and years of chronicling daily antisemitic incidents. What became unmistakable over time was not simply persistence, but normalization—antisemitism embedding itself across wide swaths of society with diminishing resistance.

In a Newsweek op-ed in which we announced the launch, we wrote that “few contest that antisemitism—history’s oldest hatred of a religious and ethnic group—has had an unmatched post-Holocaust resurgence.”¹ The data confirmed record numbers of anti-Jewish attacks across the United States, Canada, and Europe, while social media accelerated newer conspiracies blaming Jews for everything from the slave trade to COVID-19.^2, 3

Even then, our concern was not only the scale of antisemitism, but the way it was being confronted. The most prominent institutions tasked with addressing it were doing so selectively, not consistently. The Anti-Defamation League had diluted its core mission by repositioning itself as a more generic anti-hate organization and, in practice, mostly focused on right-wing antisemitism while giving a free pass to anti-Jewish hostility from the political left. 

In the months following the October 7 attack, antisemitism shed its inhibitions. 

What distinguishes this moment is the collapse of stigma. Expressions that would have ended careers a decade ago now generate applause, clicks, and campaign donations. Language that would trigger immediate condemnation if directed at other minorities is routinely excused, contextualized, or ignored when directed at Jews. Hostility that once hid at the margins has migrated inward—into campuses, political platforms, cultural institutions, and digital ecosystems. The result is an old hatred on steroids—newly unmoored from consequence. 

This normalization is not diffuse, but has taken shape through two distinct but mutually reinforcing channels. The progressive left frames Israel as fundamentally illegitimate, a country of inherent injustice. That creates an atmosphere in which hostility toward Israel is cast as an ethical obligation. And for many on the left—and their Muslim activist allies—the distinction between Jews and Israelis frequently collapses. 

On parts of the populist right, antisemitism has reemerged through the architecture of conspiracy theory. Jews are cast not as oppressors, but as puppet masters—orchestrators of migration, finance, media narratives, and foreign entanglements. The vocabulary differs from that on the left, but the structural function is identical: Jews are assigned exceptional and malign agency. 

Political Normalization on the Left: From Policy Critique to Moral Indictment 

Criticism of Israeli government policy is legitimate. What has shifted in recent years—and accelerated sharply after October 7—is not the criticism, but its recasting into a moral indictment of all Jews, whether they have anything to do with the country or government of Israel or not. 

Beginning in the mid-2010s, segments of the progressive movement increasingly described Israel as a uniquely flawed state: a settler-colonial project, an apartheid regime, and a profoundly racist enterprise.^4, 5 Universities helped entrench this view, often through curricula and campus programming that treated those claims not as arguments but as axioms.^6, 7 Qatar, for example, the same country that has been a financial lifeline to Hamas, has given $6.6 billion to American educational institutions.^8, 9

More foreign money boosted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) anti-Israel movement, once largely confined to activist circles, into footholds in student governments, academic associations, and local political campaigns.^{10, 11, 12, 13} Local chapters of major U.S. unions, including units within the United Auto Workers, adopted resolutions describing Israel’s actions as “genocide” and calling for arms embargoes and boycott campaigns.¹⁴

The antisemitism of the left and the right converge within the broader framework of modern populism.

At several American universities, diversity, equity, and inclusion offices came under criticism for omitting antisemitism or Jewish identity from their anti-discrimination frameworks. At Stanford, a DEI official told Jewish students that their identity was tied to “whiteness” and “colonialism,”^15, 16, 17 while at UCLA, campus officials told Jewish students that “Zionism” placed them outside the scope of DEI protections, even when they were targeted as Jews.^18, 19, 20

These developments began to erode an important distinction: in many campus protests after October 7, chants and signage moved quickly from condemning Israeli military actions into rhetoric that not only censured Israeli policies but questioned Israel’s right to exist.^21, 22, 23 As harassment, intimidation and social exclusion of Jewish college students surged, they began hiding visible signs of their identity.^24, 25, 26 Jewish students report pressure not only to criticize Israeli policy, but to disavow Zionism entirely as a condition of social inclusion.^27, 28, 29

Language played a central role. The term “Zionist”—historically denoting support for Jewish national self-determination—increasingly appeared as a pejorative rather than a description. Our colleague David Christopher Kaufman has written about the rapid mainstreaming of the slur “Zio,” a diminutive form of “Zionist” historically popularized by white supremacist David Duke and long embedded in extremist discourse.³⁰ The term has migrated from fringe spaces into activist debates, entertainment culture, and political rhetoric.³¹ Graffiti reading “Kill your local Zio Nazi” has appeared on American campuses, while demonstrators in London chant, “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zio in the ground.”^32, 33, 34

When Zionism is defined as racism or genocide, those who identify as Zionists are implicitly placed beyond the moral community. Zionism is no longer treated as a political ideology open to debate, but rather as a moral stain. Empirical data confirm the broader climate. 

A March 2026 survey of 1,000 students across 170 British universities found that one in five said they would be reluctant to have a Jewish roommate.³⁵ Nearly half reported witnessing slogans justifying the October 7 attacks, while among those frequently exposed to campus protests the figure rose to 77 percent. One in ten said Holocaust denial or minimization was not antisemitic, and more than a quarter believed that calls to remove “Zionists” from campus were not discriminatory. 

In these findings Israel is not described as acting disproportionately, imprudently, or even unlawfully; it is described as inherently genocidal. Holocaust inversion—labeling Israelis as Nazis or Gaza as Auschwitz—has appeared with increasing frequency at demonstrations and across digital platforms.^{36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42} By depicting Jews as the new Nazis, such rhetoric reverses historical roles in ways that are psychologically potent and politically combustible, allowing hostility to be reframed as anti-fascist virtue. 

The same pattern has surfaced in cultural spaces. At the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival and related events, filmmakers and actors issued open letters accusing Israel of “genocide” and denouncing institutions that declined to take a maximalist anti-Israel stance as complicit in “anti-Palestinian racism.”^43, 44 That same year at the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, Sweden, Israel’s representative, Eden Golan, performed under extraordinary security amid sustained protests and explicit death threats.^45, 46 To protect her, Swedish authorities asked her to remain in her hotel room except for rehearsals and performances. 

Political incentives reinforce these dynamics. In several Western democracies, including the United States and the United Kingdom, some elected officials face organized blocs for whom anti-Israel activism is a defining issue. In the United Kingdom’s last general election, for instance, five independent candidates were elected to Parliament on only a pro-Gaza and anti-Israel platform.^47, 48 In the U.S., public condemnation of antisemitic excesses within those political movements risks primary challenges, social media backlash, and accusations of complicity in alleged war crimes. Silence, by contrast, carries fewer immediate costs. That silence, of course, allows the most strident voices to have outsized influence. 

This asymmetry matters. Political leaders routinely condemn antisemitism when it emerges from the opposing party. Far fewer are willing to confront it when it surfaces within their own coalition. The reluctance to draw internal boundaries contributes to the perception that such rhetoric is acceptable, even righteous. 

Political Normalization on the Right: The Return of Conspiratorial Antisemitism 

If the progressive left has contributed to normalization through moral absolutism, the populist right has done so through conspiratorial absolutism. 

Antisemitism on the right rarely presents itself as hatred, but rather as revelation. But its structure is familiar. Jews are not condemned as colonial oppressors but cast instead as hidden orchestrators—disproportionately powerful actors.^49, 50 These tropes are recycled from earlier eras: insinuations of Jewish control over media and finance,⁵¹ suggestions of dual loyalty,⁵² and recycled speculation linking Jews to shadow networks of global power.^53, 54, 55 These themes, once confined to fringe pamphleteers, now circulate widely through podcasts, livestreams, and social media feeds to audiences in the millions.^56, 57

The accusation that Jews are omnipotent has long been one of antisemitism’s most durable adaptations. What distinguishes the present moment is scale—and monetization. Digital media ecosystems allow conspiratorial claims to travel instantly, stripped of context and insulated from institutional gatekeeping. Influencers with audiences in the millions can launder antisemitic tropes through the language of anti-elitism or investigative skepticism. 

Antisemitic conspiracies are algorithm-optimized, fusing centuries-old libels with modern virality. Figures such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have built massive audiences by not merely courting controversy—they have aired claims rooted in longstanding antisemitic conspiracy frameworks. Carlson has suggested, for instance, using genetic testing to determine Jewish legitimacy in Israel, “to find out who Abraham’s descendants are.”⁵⁸ He has questioned whether Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has any connection to the land because his family is “from Poland.”⁵⁹ The premise echoes the discredited Khazar theory, which casts Ashkenazi Jews as impostors.⁶⁰

The danger is the quiet, cumulative expansion of what society is willing to excuse.

Carlson has also provided an uncritical platform to extremist figures, including Nick Fuentes,⁶¹ who has publicly denied aspects of the Holocaust, praised authoritarian regimes, and repeatedly argued that Jews wield disproportionate and harmful influence. Carlson did not substantively interrogate or rebut anything said.⁶² The significance lies less in any single statement than in the format: a two-hour content that allowed historically fringe antisemitic narratives to be presented to a mass audience without correction or context. 

Candace Owens, meanwhile, has made the Khazar claim explicit, writing to Sen. Ted Cruz on February 21, 2026, that “The people currently occupying Israel are Khazarian Turks,”⁶³ while also promoting narratives of “Jewish supremacy,”⁶⁴ depicting Jews as a “cult,”⁶⁵ and claimed on the February 2, 2026, episode of her podcast that modern Jews are not actually Jews but “pagan gypsies wearing the cloak of Judaism.”⁶⁶ In extended broadcasts, she has also revived claims that Jews dominated the slave trade and promoted classical antisemitic texts rooted in blood libel, and alleged that a secret Jewish cult, Sabbatean Frankists, practices pedophilia and conspires to control non-Jews.^67, 68, 69

Monetization data reveal advertising rates of tens of thousands of dollars per episode and annual revenues reaching into the millions.⁷⁰ Antisemitism has become lucrative content. 

Figures such as Owens, Carlson, Dave Smith, and others use social media not just to monetize their posts, but to clip, amplify, and circulate appearances, arguments, and narratives across a much larger ecosystem. Content that may begin in a podcast, livestream, or interview is rapidly fragmented into short, emotionally charged segments optimized for sharing. The result is a feedback loop in which inflammatory claims travel farther than careful rebuttals, and antisemitic insinuation is normalized through familiarity, repetition, and algorithmic lift. In that environment, the distance between coded rhetoric and explicit anti-Jewish abuse has grown perilously short. 

We saw that process directly in the responses to two of our recent posts on 𝕏,^71, 72 one about a Miami Beach incident that led to an assault and hate crime arrest, and another about the persistent claim that Israel was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In both cases, the replies quickly filled with material that was not merely critical of Israel or political in nature, but floridly antisemitic: recycled conspiracy tropes, insinuations about Jewish power, and language that would once have been confined to the extremist fringe. Social media, by design, rewards provocation, virality, and repetition, allowing anti-Jewish hatred to appear in waves and then recede, only to surge again around the next triggering event. 

𝕏 is not alone as a visible accelerant of contemporary antisemitism. Other platforms have played a comparable role, especially since October 7. TikTok in particular helped drive a dramatic expansion of anti-Jewish hostility by turning complex events into emotionally saturated, highly shareable fragments that rewarded outrage over context. Younger audiences encountered not only intense anti-Israel content but also conspiracy narratives, moral inversion, and language that blurred any distinction between Israelis, Zionists, and Jews. 

What is unfolding is not simply another cycle of prejudice but rather the normalization of it. It is a structural shift.

Taken together, these platforms have created an information environment in which antisemitism is not merely tolerated but made to feel ambient. What appears in any single comment thread is therefore not an isolated spasm of hatred, but part of a broader digital culture in which antisemitism has become newly confident, newly networked, and far more public. This mode of thinking repackages antisemitism as inquiry and presents hatred as courage. 

The Convergence: How Opposite Narratives Produce the Same Result 

The antisemitism of the left and the right converge within the broader framework of modern populism. In periods of institutional distrust and geopolitical uncertainty, populist movements seek simplified explanations for complex realities, often attributing responsibility to elites or symbolic adversaries.^73, 74 Jews, historically visible yet diasporic, have long served as convenient stand-ins within such narratives. 

The left assigns Jews excessive guilt while the right assigns them excessive power. Both frameworks transform Jews from individuals into symbols and reduce political disagreement to an artificial moral certainty. Jews cease to be a minority community with internal diversity and become symbolic actors—avatars of oppression or manipulation. That transformation flattens nuance, rewards ideological purity, and erodes the distinctions between critique and condemnation, skepticism and conspiracy. In doing so, it creates fertile ground for reemergence of antisemitism across ideological lines. 

Digital algorithms reward outrage and insinuation. Normalization requires only the erosion of consequences. When one in five university students in a liberal democracy reports reluctance to share housing with a Jew, prejudice has moved beyond rhetoric into social calculus. 

A corrosive development within this broader normalization has been the resurgence of Holocaust minimization and the emergence of October 7 denial narratives. On parts of the left, documented October 7 atrocities are questioned, minimized, or reframed as morally explicable resistance.^75, 76, 77 When the mass murder of Jews becomes negotiable fact—contextualized beyond recognition or rhetorically inverted—antisemitism is normalized not through open hatred but through a gross and dangerous distortion. 

Antisemitism has always adapted to prevailing ideologies. While today’s rhetoric differs on the left and right, it is Jews who are again cast as the hinge upon which broader grievances turn: too powerful to be trusted, too illegitimate to be equal. 

Internal Validation and External Weaponization 

A particularly uncomfortable dimension of this moment is the role sometimes played by Jews themselves—as participants in an environment that helps destigmatize antisemitism. In cultural, academic, and political spaces, some Jewish figures have concluded—implicitly or explicitly—that open identification with Israel, or even with mainstream Jewish communal positions, carries professional and social risk.^78, 79

Initial expressions of solidarity after October 7 were, in many cases, followed by quiet retreat—statements deleted, positions softened, or replaced by language that avoided any association with Israel altogether.^80, 81 In parts of the entertainment industry, publishing, and academia, the boundaries have become clear: certain forms of speech carry consequences, while others confer acceptance. The incentives are not abstract. They shape behavior. 

In political life, the same pressures operate differently but with similar effect. Anti-Israel movements increasingly elevate progressive Jewish voices that validate their claims.^82, 83 The argument is straightforward: if Jews themselves describe Israel as genocidal, or Zionism as inherently racist, then such claims cannot be antisemitic. The phrase “as a Jew” becomes a form of credentialing—used to shield arguments from scrutiny and to confer legitimacy. 

That reasoning is logically flawed yet rhetorically powerful. It is a form of rhetorical laundering in which claims that would otherwise be recognized as antisemitic are reframed as internal critique, even courageous dissent. 

Organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace have played a central role in this dynamic. Their activism—highly visible in post-October 7 protests, including organized demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol and on university campuses—has framed Israel in the language of genocide and colonialism, while advocating for boycotts and the dismantling of existing political frameworks.^84, 85 In some instances, that rhetoric has extended into Holocaust-adjacent spaces, including efforts to insert contemporary political claims into memorial contexts at concentration camps like Buchenwald,^86, 87 in ways that many Jewish institutions and historians have strongly rejected.⁸⁸

This dynamic operates alongside a second, parallel force: organized Muslim activist movements that have fused opposition to Israel with rhetoric and practices that increasingly blur, and at times erase, the distinction between Israelis and Jews more broadly. 

In the months following October 7, protests across Western cities have frequently featured slogans such as “rape is resistance” or “globalize the intifada” that framed violence as justified resistance. Visual symbols, including the widespread adoption of keffiyehs as a form of political uniform, signal not only solidarity with Palestinians, but alignment with the rejection of Israel’s legitimacy. The widely used chant “from the river to the sea” is a call for Israel’s elimination, since a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea would leave no room for a Jewish state. 

Institutional actors have played a role in amplifying this environment. Advocacy organizations such as the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) have issued statements and hosted speakers whose rhetoric has fomented antisemitism and contextualized violence in ways that blur moral boundaries.^89, 90 In parallel, documented incidents in countries including the United Kingdom and Australia have raised concerns about Jewish patients feeling unsafe in medical settings after Muslim healthcare workers expressed hostility over the Israel–Hamas conflict.^91, 92

For example, two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney—Ahmad Rashad Nadir (male nurse) and Sarah Abu Lebdeh (female nurse)—recorded a viral social media video while in hospital scrubs, in which they made explicit antisemitic threats, including statements like “I won’t treat them, I will kill them,” “You have no idea how many Israeli dog[s] came to this hospital, and I sent them to Jahannam” (Jahannam means “hell” in Arabic), and a throat-slitting gesture and other dehumanizing comments.⁹³ Separately, Dr. Omar Azzam, a nephrologist at Royal Perth Hospital, was suspended by AHPRA and referred to a professional standards tribunal for alleged professional misconduct involving harassing medical colleagues with antisemitic abuse (including “ZioNazi” slurs). 

Antisemitism has become ideologically portable, socially permissible, and, in many quarters, professionally and financially rewarding.

These developments do not define entire communities. But they illustrate how, within certain activist ecosystems, the distinction between opposition to Israeli policy and animus toward Jews has become increasingly unstable. 

The interaction between these forces—internal validation and external amplification—is what gives the current moment its intensity. When activist rhetoric expands the scope of acceptable hostility, and selected Jewish voices are used to legitimize it, the result is a feedback loop. Claims that would once have been rejected outright are normalized through repetition, credentialing, and the absence of consistent challenge. 

Institutional Courage and Consistency 

If antisemitism is now being normalized not only through ideology and institutions, but also through validation—external and internal alike—then the responsibility of institutions is no longer ambiguous. It is unavoidable. 

Moments like this inevitably invite historical comparison. The rhetoric and the polarization are familiar. But history does not repeat itself on command. The 1930s were not just an era of words, but of institutional collapse and state-sponsored persecution. The warning today is different, but it is unmistakable: the stigma that once made antisemitism politically radioactive has been stripped away. 

What has taken its place is something more insidious. Antisemitism has become ideologically portable, socially permissible, and, in many quarters, professionally and financially rewarding. When hostility toward Jews can be repackaged to fit almost any political narrative and still command applause, a line has been crossed. The danger is the quiet, cumulative expansion of what society is willing to excuse. 

This is not a problem that can be solved with selective outrage or partisan finger-pointing. It is a failure of institutional will. Organizations that claim to fight antisemitism have too often treated it as a conditional priority—forcefully condemning it in adversaries while rationalizing, minimizing, or ignoring it among allies. The result is not balance but complicity: warnings dismissed, evidence reframed, action delayed until it is no longer necessary. Institutions do not lack information. They lack willingness to incur the cost of acting on it. 

Antisemitism has always adapted to the dominant language of its time. What distinguishes this moment is not its evolution, but the degree to which that evolution is being tolerated—even legitimized—by those responsible for opposing it. 

This is the test. And institutions, political parties, and civic leaders are failing it. 

The consequences for such failure are no longer theoretical. What is unfolding is not simply another cycle of prejudice but rather the normalization of it. It is a structural shift. In the United States, Jews increasingly find themselves required to justify their identity and affiliations in public space,^94, 95 while in Europe, Jews are reconsidering whether they can safely remain.^96, 97

If this moment demands anything, it is not another task force or hashtag, but an unflinching commitment to a single standard of moral clarity. The oldest hatred has learned our newest languages; our institutions must relearn the courage to name it, wherever it speaks.

Here we go again.

President Donald Trump and the Department of War have released the long-awaited UFO Files, and they’re about as revelatory as the JFK assassination files were, namely not at all.

In my preliminary review of the files (it will take days or weeks more to read through them all), and following the UFO/UAP community online with endless believers that we are being visited by alien beings (or “non-human intelligence” or “biologics” in the current jargon) digging through the files in search of their long-promised “disclosure” of contact, absolutely nothing stands out beyond the usual blurry photographs, grainy videos, artist reconstructions, and countless stories about weird things in the sky and in space.

As always, I will acknowledge that extraterrestrial intelligences are probably out there somewhere in the cosmos—with a trillion galaxies, each of which having hundreds of billions of stars, each of which having planets it is as close to 100% that some of them somewhere will evolve life and even intelligent life—but very few members of the public are interested in the search for signatures of bacterial-grade life in the atmospheres of exo-planets (as NASA continues to search for life elsewhere).

What nearly everyone cares about is the second question: have they come here?

The answer remains the same: not that we know of. That is, there remains no definitive evidence of alien visitation on Earth, and the UFO Files release has done nothing to change that, which even most of the UFO/UAP proponents acknowledge, promising “just you wait” and “disclosure is still coming” and “the ‘holy crap’ material will be released soon”. So…we shall see. I remain skeptical unless and until my priors are updated with new evidence, which is not in these files.

What is in the files? Here is a brief overview of what I came across as I worked my way through them:

Figure 1. Artist’s “composite sketch” of this object, which an eyewitness described as having been seen in this field, unhelpfully identified by the Department of War as taken somewhere in the United States.

Here is the full caption:

Actual site photo with FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay depicting corroborating eyewitness reports from September 2023 of an apparent ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky, 130-195 feet in length, and disappearing instantaneously.

How anyone standing in a field could assess the length of an object without some means of measurement by which to compare it is beyond me, or how anyone could possibly know it was made of bronze (obviously meaning “it looked like bronze-colored metal,” or some such).

Figure 2. Document dated October 28-29, 2001, in which the Georgian Foreign Ministry reports a Russian aircraft violated Georgian airspace and bombed areas of the Kodori Gorge. Russia denied it, saying it was a UFO. Georgian response: UFO is a Russian “bold lie”. Recall that this is a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union and shortly after Vladamir Putin came to power and launched a military action in Georgia.

Figure 3. In this document, dated September 12, 2023, the Mexican Congress heard testimony on UAP from experts that includes these long debunked fake alien corpses that even all UAP proponents acknowledge as fake. If this is any indication of the quality of the "UFO files" purported to reveal we’ve been visited by aliens, God help us (and I’m an atheist).

Figure 4. This document, dated October, 2023, is emblematic of so many of the UFO Files documents, so heavily redacted as to be difficult to read, much less given proper context. Here is the disclaimer provided by the Department of War attached to all of these documents: “Redactions have been made to protect the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites not related to UAP.”

Figure 5. These are two of many photographic stills taken from videos shot, again unhelpfully, somewhere in the “Southwestern United States.” The UAP is the little dot that could be almost anything (a balloon, a drone, an aircraft), subsequently being tracked by a helicopter. Given the terrain I immediately thought of one of the many military bases throughout this part of the country where planes and drones and, yes, even balloons, may be found.

Also unhelpful are all the blacked out rectangles, which very likely represent all the information we would need to identify the speed, distance, size, etc. of the object based on where, exactly, this was filmed, and when, etc.

This is another reason why I support Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project at Harvard University because they are building multiple observatories in various locations in order to triangulate whatever objects are detected. Without triangulation, it is extremely difficult to assess size and speed of the various objects identified in these files (and elsewhere) of UAPs.

Figure 6. This UAP is almost surely a drone or small plane, probably moving away from the camera. The caption reads: “U.S. Indo-Pacific Command reported UAP that resembles a football-shaped body near Japan” and appears to be taken in 2024.

Figure 6B is an image of an “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle” (UAV) I found online labeled “The Jetank unmanned aerial vehicle successfully completed its first flight in China, Shaanxi province.” I’m not claiming this accounts for the UAP sighting near Japan, but with a range of 7,000 kilometers, and with all the political concerns about Chinese aerial technology, it’s not completely crazy to think it could be something along these lines.

Figure 7. These light anomalies photographed from the surface of the moon by Apollo 17 astronauts are curious indeed. At first I suspected they were lens flares, as I’ve seen many such images in photographs taken at haunted houses, graveyards, and the like purportedly representing ghosts floating around the facilities, but it is not clear that lens flares explains these images.

I await the government’s own additional investigation, as explained in the file:

While this photo has been previously released and discussed by keen observers, there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly. New preliminary US government analysis suggests the image feature is potentially the result of a physical object in the scene. Additionally, as part of this investigation, the government has obtained the original film from the Apollo 17 mission and the results of the full NASA and DOW analysis will be released when completed.

Similar such images were photographed by Apollo 12 astronauts with no explanation provided.

Figure 8. This video short from the files was posted by UAP investigator Steven Greenstreet on 𝕏 (@MiddleOfMayhem) noting “This ‘alien UFO’ appears to be a parachute and a flare, which is leaving behind a smoke trail”:

Figure 9. This screen shot from a UAP video appears to be a balloon trailing its string or tail.

The following is a comment from the pilot and astronaut Scott Kelly, from a NASA press conference at which he spoke, explaining how difficult it is for pilots to determine what it is they think they saw:

In my experience of flying over 15,000 hours in 30 something years in airplanes and in space, the environment that we fly in is very conducive to optical illusions, so I get why these pilots would look at that Go Fast video and think it was going really really fast. I remember one time I was flying off Virginia Beach Military operating area and my RIO [Radar Intercept Officer], who sits in the back of the Tomcat, was convinced we flew by a UFO. I didn’t see it, so we turned around to go look at it. It turns out it was a Bart Simpson balloon.

My brother Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and also now a U.S. Senator, shared a story with me about an experience he had years ago that when he was the commander of STS 124; they were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the Space Shuttle and they see something in the payload bay and they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt—they couldn’t quite figure it out—and they were potentially going to have to go and do a spacewalk to retrieve it. But before they did that my brother grabbed the camera and they took a picture of it, and when they blew up the picture they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay; it was actually the International Space Station that was 80 miles away.

There are cases where pilots have rendezvoused on a buoy because they thought that was their wingman. It’s just a very very challenging environment to work, especially at night.

That’s enough for now. Much more to come as I go through the files, but in general, remember the “residue of anomalies” problem that exists in all science: No hypothesis or theory in any field accounts for 100 percent of the phenomena under investigation.

This residue problem means that no matter how comprehensive a theory is there will always be a residue of anomalies for which it cannot account. The residue problem in UFOlogy was poignantly illustrated in Leslie Kean’s 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, in which the UFOlogist admitted that “roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained” as:

weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole-punch clouds, and the list goes on!

So the entire extraterrestrial hypothesis for explaining UFOs and UAPs is based on a residue of data left over after the above list has been exhausted.

What’s left? Not much.

But, as always, I remain open to examining new evidence if it is forthcoming. Let’s see what’s in the next tranche.

About a month ago, a woman in Egypt was harassed on a public bus (she will go unnamed to protect what privacy and dignity she still has left). She recorded the man who was targeting her, and when she confronted him, he responded not with shame but with escalation: he mocked her appearance, called her trash, and insulted her by saying she looked like a nonbeliever.

When the video went viral, the public response was revealing. Before many people asked what had happened to her, they wanted to know something else: Was she Christian or Muslim?

If she were Christian, the matter was to be treated as an internal issue for the Church. Once it became known that she was Muslim, however, the urgency evaporated. No serious solidarity emerged. No meaningful protection appeared. Instead, what followed was rationalization, skepticism toward the victim, and the suggestion that she herself was somehow the problem. At one point, the alleged harasser was even welcomed onto a television program!

Meanwhile, the woman at the center of the incident was left to absorb the consequences alone. She lost her job. She spent substantial money pursuing the case in court. More profoundly, she lost a basic sense of personal safety. People found her social media accounts and sent threats of harassment and death. In effect, she paid a steep price simply for insisting on two elementary rights: the right to exist in public and the right to travel without being assaulted.

Morality that depends on who you are, rather than what was done to you, is no morality at all.

Yet, this is often the same culture that speaks most loudly about morality. But what does “morality” mean if it does not include the willingness to stand beside a victim? What is moral seriousness worth if a woman’s right to dignity and protection is treated as secondary to sectarian identity? Moral standards are not being applied universally. They are being applied conditionally. And morality that depends on who you are, rather than what was done to you, is no morality at all.

And so, I ask: isn’t it a mockery of us as human beings, with all our complexity, our differences, our layered identities to be reduced to a single question: What is your religion?

It should not matter whether I am Muslim, Christian, or neither. I am exhausted by the inevitability of this question, by the way it is the sole lens through which people are judged.

What I want to consider is what it means to have your identity stripped away, to be left alone in a society that believes your position on religion is enough to judge you as morally deficient—and even to justify your imprisonment if your beliefs are revealed—as in the case of Sherif Gaber, a young Egyptian atheist who has faced years of legal persecution for expressing his beliefs online. Gaber was accused under Egypt’s laws, specifically charges related to “contempt of religion” for content he published on social media platforms. Since 2015, he has been arrested, detained, and subjected to ongoing legal pressure. With multiple cases brought against him the total sentence is at least six years in prison.

Think about that: for writing commentary on religion no different from what you read in the pages of Skeptic and other publications, in Egypt you could end up in prison. This is the consequences of a legal framework in which individuals are prosecuted for expressing beliefs that go against socially accepted religion.

After publicly criticizing religious ideology, a fatwa calling for his death was issued in Egypt, forcing him into hiding under security protection.

The German author Hamed Abdel-Samad represents another form of skeptical consequence. After publicly criticizing religious ideology, a fatwa calling for his death was issued in Egypt, forcing him into hiding under security protection.

Exact statistics on the number of atheists or even such cases are difficult to obtain due to fear and underreporting, but human rights organizations have repeatedly documented the use of laws to silence dissenting religious views. Deviation in belief is not merely debated—it is punished—and public opinion in such cases leads toward support a death sentence for religious skeptics, seeing dissenters as a threat to social and religious order, further reinforcing a climate in which legal punishment is not only tolerated, but sometimes socially demanded.

Why have religious institutions become so deeply entrenched in power? If debate fails, is prison or the threat of death really the answer? Is it not enough to believe that nonbelievers or followers of other religions will be punished in the afterlife? Apparently not.

The Suffering of Being the Exception

I remember asking a friend twice my age whether he had any friends from his generation who shared his non-belief. It took him a full five minutes to answer. For a moment, it was like he was begging his own mind to offer a single name. But, ultimately, his answer was “No.”

After that, I let my thoughts wonder. When he was my age, did he wish to find someone like him? Not even necessarily when it comes to shared views on religious belief, but in thinking that a person should not be judged by their faith or lack thereof? Was he rejected by his family for refusing to conform to their beliefs? Was he threatened, punished, as I have been? Was he forced into religious practices he did not believe in? And does he now perform them merely to avoid the headache?

These questions are not abstract or hypothetical to me.

These questions are not abstract or hypothetical to me. I have seen the answers in my own life. At times, the answer is you will be on the receiving end of open aggression, but sometimes it also takes quieter forms like shaming and an unwillingness to accept even the act of questioning.

People like my friend are rarely visible, not because they do not exist but because visibility comes at a cost. In my experience, disbelief is often met with rejection and violence. Families will expel you, and they’ll attempt to reshape you by forcing some sort of conversion therapy with clerics, guilting, or constant reminders of what you should be.

Silence becomes the safer option. Many learn early on to separate what they think from what they say, to perform belief rather than risk confrontation. Others choose distance: emotional, social, or even geographical. Emigration, when possible, becomes less about seeking new professional opportunities and more about survival.

In 2014, Egypt’s official religious authority, Dar al-Ifta, claimed that there were exactly 866 atheists in the country, roughly 0.001% of the population. This number was widely mocked, not only for its precision, but for its detachment from lived reality. Even at the time, many argued that the figure was far too low, with some suggesting that there were likely more nonbelievers in a single university than the officially reported national number. While statistics remain difficult to obtain, some surveys suggest that around 11% of Egyptians identify as “not religious,” with the percentage rising to nearly 20% among younger generations.

Nonbelievers often conceal their views to avoid social ostracism.

The lack of reliable figures on atheism itself is not incidental. It reflects a climate in which many individuals choose silence over exposure. Reports consistently note that nonbelievers in Egypt often conceal their views to avoid social ostracism, legal consequences, or even threats to their safety. At the same time, most of the population still identifies as religious, creating a social environment in which deviation from dominant beliefs is often stigmatized.

So, while I can’t speak for my friend directly, I recognize the pattern. It is not one story or anecdote but a shared condition.

To be the exception in this country is to be destined for suffering. Rejection, when it comes from loved ones and family, is often justified as fear for your fate in the afterlife. But at a societal level, the consequences can escalate to imprisonment or even death like the case of Farag Foda, an Egyptian intellectual assassinated in 1992 after publicly criticizing religious extremism, who remains one of the most striking examples of how dissenting ideas can provoke violent responses beyond the law.

Between the cases of Foda (silenced by bullets), and Sherif Gaber (pursued through courts), exclusion and the belittling of your mind and your difference are considered as the “gentler” responses.

And at times, even families may resort to threats of violence—this happened to me when my uncle decided that I must get a session about the hijab with a sheikh that was 20 years old and whose education stopped at elementary school. This sheikh was younger than me! Here’s what he said:

You must wear the hijab because our messenger Mohamed said that. You should wear it and you get hit for not wearing it, and others have the right to harass you.

In response, I started to laugh at this nonsense. Then my uncle started to shout at me saying “I’m 30 years older than him yet I respect him” and then he started to hit me.

I got my arm twisted and my bones almost broken, and he hit my head on a wooden chair! Yet, my own mother saw what he did as right and blamed me for the incident. The police didn’t do anything. Why? In upper Egypt, such violence is called discipline.

I do not betray. I do not lie. I do not gossip about others’ right to live as they choose. I do not harass. I do not steal. I do not submit to tyranny or dictators. I am not a misogynist. I do not compromise when it comes to justice. Even the most outwardly devout struggle to uphold many of these virtues. And yet, in this society, because I am labelled as a disbeliever, I am ostracized. My words are attacked, my freedom of belief is confiscated, and I watch others suffer the same fate simply for their intellectual stance on religion.

What harm is there in my choice to not wear the hijab?

What harm is there in my choice to not wear the hijab? What harm is there in choosing whether or not to pray or fast? There is far more violence rooted in these questions than most are willing to see. So, I do not blame those who hide who they are. Because in a society that imposes identity upon you the alternative is to lose everything.

Imposed Identity

We all live complex lives. I have my work as an architect. I have my intellectual and cultural space, my identity, my way of thinking. But then there is my family, who reject my very existence based on my decision not to wear the hijab or not to have children.

In my dealings with people, I have noticed that anyone who rejects the type of “corrective” violence I describe here is met with extreme violence in response. Whoever refuses to be violated is punished by society. Whoever refuses to be beaten faces something worse. Whoever asks for the bare minimum of dignity risks losing everything to obtain it.

We are all expected to bow. And if you refuse, then you must accept a different reality of being rejected, threatened, and hunted. Even if your only “crime” is a word, writing an article, speaking in a café, or simply attempting to express your identity to those closest to you.

I often think of my childhood friend. We were raised together in strict religiosity, grew up side by side for 18 years, and even her father, before he passed, urged her to never let go of our friendship. But with age came socialization—she began to see my thoughts as a threat to her rigid faith. She urged me to stop questioning and stop overthinking. And when I didn’t, she chose to walk away.

Isolation is a personal condition that is reproduced across generations, shaped by accumulated histories, beliefs, and constraints.

Perhaps that was, in a way, a form of liberation. I was no longer confined by her worldview, no longer afraid of being alone. It was painful to lose her, but I was not the one who refused to accept the other.

The phrase “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” borrowed from Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, is not a literary exaggeration, but a logical outcome of living in a society such as this. In the novel, isolation is a personal condition that is reproduced across generations, shaped by accumulated histories, beliefs, and constraints.

In a similar sense, the solitude I describe here is not simply emotional or self-imposed. It emerges from a social environment that penalizes deviation and narrows the space for intellectual and personal autonomy. This isolation is produced through sustained pressure to conform, and the consequences of refusing to do so. We are all, to varying degrees, the product of long accumulations of inherited fears, ideas, and habits we did not choose. We simply find ourselves born into one place or another in the world, and yet it shapes us. But understanding this does not erase the impact of harm, nor does it make its possibility easier to endure.

I meet dozens of people every day, yet I know almost with certainty that only a few will truly understand—or even try to—what it means to choose your own thoughts. I rarely see anyone disturbed in the way I am when women are dehumanized in inherited religious discourse, when oppression is justified in the name of faith, or when entire populations are reduced to arrogant narratives that erase their humanity.

Because of this, the world often feels harsher to me than it does to others. And holding on to the bare minimum of humanity begins to look like an extreme position. I remain in a state of constant alert around others not out of fear, but out of a need to protect myself from disappointment.

I carry repeated disappointments from family, friends, and those closest to me. Not necessarily because they are bad people, but because they are, like everyone else, shaped by the same accumulations that reproduce fear of difference, superficial religiosity, and daily moral tribunals disguised as faith.

What exhausts me most, however, is the persistent sense of isolation and the awareness that I am surrounded by people who do not respect their own freedom. So, how could they respect mine?

And so, solitude is no longer merely a feeling. It has become a way to protect what remains of me.

“By facts, I mean what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan meant: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.” By reality, I mean what the science fiction novelist Philip Dick meant: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” —Charles Murray, Facing Reality

The lifelong agnostic Charles Murray has found God, and he would like to walk us through his journey from agnosticism to belief in his latest book, Taking Religion Seriously. 

Since I take religion seriously I was curious to see if I would read a work of apologetics that has become customary among a contingent of modern theists: multiple C.S. Lewis citations, gestures towards Intelligent Design by way of discussion of the infinitesimally small improbability of our universe to foster multicellular life, and the inability of contemporary science to provide an adequate explanation for the existence of consciousness and morality. And I was right—they’re all there! For this review I’ve selected six clusters of arguments: (1) The Origin of the Universe and Intelligent Design, (2) Consciousness and Terminal Lucidity, (3) Near-Death Experiences, (4) C.S. Lewis and the Moral Sentiments, (5) the Historicity of the Gospels, and (6) the Shroud of Turin.

The Origin of the Universe and Intelligent Design

One of the common strategies of Christian Apologists is to provide readers with a bevy of numbers, both unimaginably large and small, in an attempt to overwhelm us with data on the impossibility of the existence of the universe sans a creator God or Intelligent Designer. It admittedly is quite unbelievable. There are all sorts of natural facts about our universe—the strength of the force of gravity, the amount of energy converted from hydrogen in stars from the process of fusion, the number of particles and anti-particles in the early stages of the universe, etc., such that if they were a fraction of a fraction different it would mean there would be no higher orders of life in it. But life exists, ergo … 

Murray goes on to grant that science has suggested a possible answer to this conundrum of how our universe came to be with such an infinitesimally small likelihood of it being composed precisely how it is: the multiverse. We are one universe among many, and so it isn't surprising that we found ourselves in one of the lucky universes. Given enough rolls of the dice, it was bound to happen eventually. There has been no confirmed, empirical evidence of the multiverse theory, but some physicists are attracted to it because it aligns with certain existing physical theories that do have an empirical basis (and not because they are atheists). This is a dead-end for Murray, not because he thinks the theory is wrong on its own terms, but simply because “he is not competent enough to describe the hypotheses.” 

In a very bewildering turn, Murray raises Samuel Johnson’s bon mot that he used to discard George Berkeley’s philosophical idealism: proclaiming “I refute it thus,” and then Johnson stomps onto a rock. The brilliance in Johnson’s remark was his refuting Berkeley’s idea that objects do not exist in material reality by blatantly revealing what our intuitions presuppose—they do. Murray’s sloppy usage of this remark is that he “refutes the multiverse thus” by staring into the nighttime sky to see it littered with stars. The multiverse theory does not say the night sky does not exist; it is saying that there are more universes than the one we inhabit. Ours, through improbable odds, already exists. Is it that far-fetched an idea to think there may be others out there? A lot of cosmologists think not and, again, they suspect as much not out of an animus for theism. 

Throughout his book, Murray routinely cherry picks evidence and then shoehorns God and Soul into the gap for things for which we do not yet have adequate explanations.

What Murray displays in this section, as he displays throughout the whole book, is a failure of imagination. Scientists did not have a consensus on the existence of other galaxies until a century ago, and our only real limitation to discovering that was a technological limitation of telescopes. Homo sapiens has existed for at least 300,000 years on a planet that is thought to be 4.5 billion years old, in a universe that is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old. We are extraordinarily new at trying to trace universal origins. Murray repeatedly takes this gap for things we can’t yet explain and slots God into it. 

Consciousness and Terminal Lucidity

Murray tells us that one of his reasons for doubting the materialist view of the universe is the inability of materialism to explain the reality of consciousness. Very strangely, he begins this section by telling us that “[a]s an adult, I thought that evidence for some kinds of psychic phenomena, including telepathy and distance seeing, was strong.” This is one of the more bizarre claims I’ve seen in a book purporting to be written by a person using evidence-based reason. The evidence for telekinesis is nonexistent. The evidence for distance seeing (what is usually called remote viewing) is a bit more nuanced, but only by a bit. The CIA conducted studies for years trying to demonstrate the reality of remote viewing for intelligence gathering purposes. An internal retrospective review claimed a small, statistically significant possibility of remote viewing being a real phenomenon, but the results were far from conclusive, no useful intelligence was gathered, and the program was cancelled. Later analysis has shown that the CIA’s work was riddled with errors, which corroborates with later studies showing no evidence for remote viewing.

I think it is rather obvious that these views are crankish, but Murray is right that after all these years science has not found an adequate explanation for human consciousness. He uses a lot of space to elucidate the alleged phenomenon of terminal lucidity—people with significant brain issues of some kind having moments of substantial clarity shortly before their death. It would be rather remarkable for someone with severe Alzheimer’s to suddenly have recall of past events or people that they haven’t recognized or known in years. The science in this area is nascent, yet the anecdotal data from hospice workers seem to point to it being a possibly real occurrence, whatever “real” means in this context (something may be happening but we don’t know what it is yet). 

Murray takes this and uses it to jump to the conclusion that the materialist explanation for consciousness cannot explain the existence of terminal lucidity. Never mind there have been no neuroscientific studies trying to evaluate the phenomenon as it happens, or that there are possibly natural explanations for such events. Why is Murray in such a rush for explanations for terminal lucidity when research in this area is still in its infancy? 

Steven Pinker, in an extended quote from a piece on this website, has coyly called this the “Soul of the Gaps,” a reappropriation of the famous God of the Gaps. Murray is looking for the existence of the soul to explain events that probably have a natural explanation. The brain is the most complex thing in the universe. We still don’t have a consensus explanation of why humans dream, and yet we do. Do we think that a soul is needed to explain the subjective experience of dreaming? Obviously not. Yet, throughout his book, Murray routinely cherry picks evidence and then shoehorns God and Soul into the gap for things for which we do not yet have adequate explanations.

Near-Death Experiences

For Murray, one of the key components of demonstrating truths in Christianity is showing the inadequacy of non-transcendent explanations for the existence of subjective consciousness. Murray thinks that the phenomenon of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)—wherein people experience bright, white lights, passing through a tunnel or passage way, sensing the presence of deceased loved ones, and feelings of euphoria during near-death events—shows that there must be something beyond our mere material experience of reality. For this, Murray writes that there have been case studies where experiencers of NDEs “remembered details of the procedures employed in resuscitating them that they should not have been able to describe.”

The much more plausible explanation than these being real, transcendent experiences is that NDEs are formed from chemical reactions in your brain preparing you for death.

Throughout the book, Murray provides a plethora of reading recommendations, and for this, he suggests the work of Sam Parnia, whose recent book Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Deathexplores the science of NDEs. Parnia has been a researcher in this area for years at the Human Consciousness Project, where he serves as the director. In a review of Lucid Dying for The New York Review of Books, physician Nitin Ahuja tells us about Parnia’s work from a 2014 study that attempted to test scientifically whether people being resuscitated were able to recall details they shouldn’t have been able to. To test this, Parnia and his researchers placed visual and auditory stimuli to see if the patients being resuscitated would be able to recall these details to researchers in the event they survived. As is routine for when paranormal phenomena are examined under the scientific eye, the results were not encouraging. Out of a test sample of over 100, “only one patient had verifiable sensory recollections of the arrest itself, and none remembered any of the visual stimuli planted by the study team.” So much for empirical evidence for NDEs as a gateway to the next realm. 

Ahuja goes on in his review to suggest that these NDEs could have a material origin of psychedelic neurochemicals being released in the brain. This seems plausible, as what people recollect experiencing during NDEs corresponds with the type of things people experience during psychedelic trips—feelings of euphoria and acceptance, the recognition of the connectedness of all things. Murray suggests this possibility as well but then asserts that this explanation can’t explain all cases of NDEs without elaborating further. 

As someone whose body was preparing itself for death at one point (I didn’t eat prior to donating blood once, and it sent my body into a kind of shock) and felt those attending feelings of euphoria and acceptance, the materialist explanation doesn’t seem lacking in the way Murray tries to persuade us it is. The much more plausible explanation than these being real, transcendent experiences is that NDEs are formed from chemical reactions in your brain preparing you for death, and that the visions of a blissful paradise, which are not uniform in being blissful among NDE experiencers, are attributable to culturally encoded descriptions of an afterlife.

C.S. Lewis and the Moral Sentiments

C.S. Lewis features prominently in the mind of Christian apologists, and his classic defense of the faith, Mere Christianity, is mellifluous and conversational (it was based on BBC radio talks Lewis had given), melded with an academician’s skill for making lucid arguments. Murray is no exception and says that it was a crucial step in his journey to Christianity. Murray focuses on two arguments from the book: the moral sense and Lewis’s famous Trilemma. 

Lewis describes the moral sense that lives within us, which most of us (with the possible exception of some psychopaths) have felt from time to time, such as the internal twinge of emotion we feel when we see a crying child or a tragedy on TV. There is some evidence that cultures seem to converge on a similar set of values, but Lewis then suggests that this moral sense is only intelligible when viewed as being bestowed upon us by the Christian God, for how could blind evolution alone give us this moral sense? And why would it? 

There are, in fact, credible reasons to ascribe the existence of a moral sense from millions of years of human evolution and sociability. The moral sense itself is incredibly faulty; something you would expect from abstract values being derived from humans doing the messy work of living in a shared world. My moral sense tells me we have a pressing obligation to help the poor, for example, and we should broadly tax relatively wealthier people to help attenuate poverty. Murray’s moral sense does not lead him there. 

Cultures have condoned the most heinous of acts—torture, slavery, genocide—even weaponizing that moral sense to justify them! If God implanted this moral sense within us, why did he make it so … flawed? Sociopaths recognize this and abide by the gushy moral sentiments they see others express out of a rational expediency for living in a lawful civilization. In our own culture, we react with moral certitude to animal abuse yet tolerate the utter horror of factory farms. Unless an atrocity happens right in front of us, we tend to not mind very much (and even then, the moral sense can be very iffy). 

 What I also find odd about this argument from a Christian point of view is that it diminishes the significance of the life of Jesus, one fascinating aspect of which is how he inverted the morality of the Romans. Instead of promoting the virtues of strength, pride, and service to the state, Jesus taught that we must promote values of humility and compassion, and disregard the morals of the state. It was the meek who should hold our concern and not the strong. Based on contemporary Roman accounts, this was antithetical to the dominant morality of the time. 

If Jesus offered an inversion of the dominant morality of his time—one that also justified slavery and wars of conquest—then where was this universal moral sense? That seems to be one of the things that made Jesus’s teachings so urgent. It is also what made his life and death so necessary. What he was saying wasn’t, by the standards of the time, a “natural” sentiment, but it was compelling. And since then, his call for the fundamental universal value of human life became embedded in Western moral thought—at least discursively, if very imperfectly applied in the world. That itself seems to be evidence (and there is plenty of other evidence), this innate moral sense which dwells within us can be influenced as much by culture as it can by biology.

The stakes for Murray’s revisionist dating of the Gospels seem a lot lower than he makes them out to be.

As for the Trilemma, I have always found it facile. Briefly, Lewis tells us we must select among three options on the life of Jesus: he was a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. There’s an evident fourth option here: the Gospels are not a reliable narrative of the life of Jesus. Jesus never called himself Lord (or if he did, then we can just use the original Dilemma: he was a liar or lunatic) or performed the miracles attributed to him. If that is the case, then we have no way to rely on the original trilemma as a guiding principle. This fourth option seems to destroy the false choice of Lewis’s Trilemma.

The Historicity of the Gospels

Murray uses a significant portion of his book to try to show that the Gospels are a lot more reliable narratives than modern mainstream scholars have considered, who put the time the Gospels were written over 30 years after the death of Jesus. Murray mostly uses the work of Jonathan Bernier to redate the Gospels. In Bernier’s telling, the Gospel of Mark, the earliest written Gospel, was written around 42–45 CE, whereas non-revisionist period dating typically puts authorship around 70 CE. Bernier uses some interesting textual deep readings to estimate his dating. But even then, if we assume Bernier is correct, his dating still puts the Gospel of Mark about a decade after the death of Jesus. For an account of someone who was not an eyewitness during a time without readily available means for recording recollections or visual evidence, it really does not seem far-fetched to think that many things were lost, misinterpreted, exaggerated, confabulated, or just fabricated during that time span. We also know from the work of scholars such as Bart Ehrman that these types of theological claims of Jesus as divine link up with Roman Imperial Cults of the time. The stakes for Murray’s revisionist dating of the Gospels seem a lot lower than he makes them out to be.

Murray also tries to defend the Miracles of Jesus by borrowing from his language of social science. It is important to mention that there is no corroborating evidence of Jesus’s miracles outside of the Gospels—there is not one independent, contemporaneous source discussing Jesus’s miracle-making in any way. I found this section so tremendously on-the-nose for Murray giving a defense of Jesus’s miracles that I think it’s worth quoting in full. It reads as what ChatGPT would spit out for a prompt of “give a defense of the existence of Jesus’s miracles in The Gospels in the style of Charles Murray:”

A man who is 6'9" or taller is four standard deviations above the American male mean, which translates into just one out of roughly thirty thousand American adult males. He is extremely tall but far from unique.

Now consider the healings that Jesus is said to have performed routinely throughout his ministry. There is an obvious and plausible explanation for his rapid growth in fame and attention. Then consider that some people are healers in ways that go beyond technical skills—a phenomenon that physicians themselves recognize in rare colleagues and that has been observed in many cultures for centuries. Some of these gifted people are the equivalent of 6'9" as healers of both mental and physical ailments. Suppose Jesus was one of them. The accounts of Jesus’s healings could be largely true even if the miraculous nature of the healings was exaggerated in the retelling.

Continuing along this line, imagine that Jesus was also the equivalent of 6'9" in wisdom, fortitude, empathy, sympathy, and charisma. Combine all these qualities, and you are faced with an extraordinary and compellingly magnetic figure, surely unique in all of human history. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, a human that far above the mean in all those human characteristics would be indistinguishable from the Son of God—or, at the least, could easily be mistaken for the Son of God.

I don’t really see how one can exaggerate healing the blind of blindness or the deaf of deafness in Ancient Rome through natural processes; they either can see or hear, or they can’t. Jesus either raised the dead or he didn’t. Murray can’t delve too far into this since it’s important for his case to have us believe in the reliability of the Gospels. But no matter, we can’t let facts get in the way of a good story. 

The Shroud of Turin

Skeptic readers are familiar with the Shroud of Turin—the alleged burial cloth of Jesus post-crucifixion in the 1st century—as being a medieval forgery. Murray asks us to consider otherwise, and he’s right when he avers that the Shroud is a rather remarkable historical item and that we still don’t have definitive knowledge of how it was created. He makes the case for it as a true artifact of the first century largely through the work of the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), which was a collective of scientists in the 1970s and early 1980s that, through scientific analysis, concluded that the problems of deducing what the Shroud is “remain unsolved.” What they did find were various kinds of data that gesture towards it being of a human representation, not an artistic representation, and of Middle Eastern origin—these findings would later be refuted by subsequent studies. Murray also conveniently leaves out that the leaders of the group were concurrently part of the executive council of the Holy Shroud Guild, a religious organization interested in the Shroud being of divine origin. 

A piece of the Shroud underwent carbon dating testing in 1988 by three different labs that dated its creation to about the 14th century. Approximately the same period as the historical record begins for the Shroud. Seems cut and dry; the Shroud is a medieval forgery. Not so fast, Murray informs us. Raymond Rogers, one of the STURP researchers, argues hat the piece of the Shroud used for testing was not part of the original cloth but came from a repair patch that was placed on the cloth after some kind of damage. Others see this Patch Theory as nonsense and don’t accord with the known material of the Shroud. But fine, Murray gives us some reasons to doubt the carbon dating.

Murray then presents a 2019 study that used a different kind of forensic dating method, which showed the Shroud to be dated to the 1st century. But in a stroke of irony, this method used a thread that was in proximity to where the carbon dating from 1988 was taken on the Shroud. Which is right? Is the Patch Theory true, and we can’t rely on that portion of the Shroud since it was a later add-on, or can we rely on that portion of the Shroud because a new, not widely accepted, method gives the Shroud some legitimacy? It can’t be both. Murray does not address this contradiction.

For the sake of charity, let’s say that scientifically dating the Shroud with the available evidence is a dead-end (even though we do not have strong reasons to discard the carbon dating). Murray also doesn’t tell us that the blood stains are inconsistent and “totally unrealistic” for a supine corpse; that we have no historical record of the Shroud prior to the 14th century; or of the issues of the presentation of body-geometry with how a 3D person would have been pressed on a 2D surface wherein, whomever created the Shroud, did it too well, and did not include distortions you would expect from a cloth being wrapped around a person; among many other pieces of counterevidence. Recently, there was the discovery of a document from the mid-14th century of a contemporaneous scholar also declaring the Shroud to be a forgery. 

For a thorough review of the Shroud of Turin and why it is a Medieval forgery (one of thousands of such holy relics manufactured over the centuries), see Shroud expert Andrea Nicolotti’s “Unraveling the Myths Surrounding the Shroud of Turin”published in Skeptic in 2025. 

Whither Murray

Murray talks at length in his book about how he has attended weekly Quaker Meetings for decades with his wife, Catherine Bly Cox, a believing Christian. He also discusses the importance of the conversations he had with his Christian friends, Nicholas Eberstadt and Peter Wehner. All of this, and more, hints at Murray’s motivated reasoning, more than sheer rational persuasion, to explain his usage of selective and sometimes even fringe evidence. 

It is striking that Murray, who has stressed throughout his career that he always follows reason and evidence wherever they lead, has ignored a significant body of thought and evidence against the Christian worldview.

Apologists such as Murray often think that it’s merely enough to poke holes in philosophical materialism to show the truth in Christianity. The problem with this is that the story and metaphysics of Christianity do not seem to correspond with the universe we find ourselves in, which, of the little we’ve learned about it so far, seems altogether even stranger and more fantastical than the one which exists in the confines of the Christian imagination.

It is striking that Murray, who has stressed throughout his career that he always follows reason and evidence wherever they lead, has ignored a significant body of thought and evidence against the Christian worldview. Murray doesn’t grapple with issues such as why miracles suddenly stopped appearing in the age of mass video surveillance, or the lack of evidence for the external efficacy of prayer. Murray also fails to address the Problem of Evil—how can believers reconcile the existence of evil with an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God? 

Why, for example, did God create a world in which millions of people would die from natural disasters? Why did God create a species in his own image in which for most of their history half of their offspring died in childhood? I often think if Jesus was the true Son of God, why did he knowingly proffer teachings which would later be used for completely contradictory causes—from slavery and conquest to liberation and pacifism—and not instead teach the humans of Ancient Rome about the germ theory of disease? 

By the end of his book, it is clear that Murray has failed to meet his own criteria for “Facts” and “Reality.” He has finally found his myth. 

Over a quarter century ago, “The Texas Miracle” was mentioned by presidential candidate George W. Bush as a model for educational reform. What was this Texas Miracle? It wasn’t a miracle in the same sense as an apparition of the Virgin Mary—last witnessed in 1531 in Mexico. Rather, it was observed that the Houston Independent School District had apparently experienced significant gains in student achievement simply by holding school administrators accountable for their students’ test performance. The Houston superintendent, Rod Paige, was later appointed by President Bush to be Secretary of Education. Sadly, the miracle turned out to be a hoax. Administrators were able to improve test scores by increasing the numbers of students who were categorized into special education so their scores would not be included in the overall average.¹ Such a strategy to increase average scores by omitting the lowest scores is called left truncation of the score distribution.² Note how the same strategy would boost life expectancy by only polling the living.

Ten years later, the El Paso Miracle involved a similar strategy. Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia had 9th grade low scorers transferred, dismissed, retained, or allowed to skip ahead to their junior year to keep them from taking the state-mandated 10th grade achievement test. To raise graduation rates, students received full course credit for taking a two-hour weekend class. Garcia spoke about his desire to become state education commissioner. Then he was arrested.³ We note that in the biblical past, those chosen to bestow miracles were very special people and were often canonized⁴ for their efforts (e.g., Acts 19:11 tells us that God’s miracles came through the hands of Paul). We know of no one who has compared Rod Paige or Lorenzo Garcia to St. Paul. 

We have little hope that using evidence to debunk such claims will eradicate the audience for a good miracle.

The idea of being able to summon a miracle to solve the age-old problem of poor and minority students scoring low on achievement tests has near universal appeal. Such miracles are, in Samuel Johnson’s delicious observation, “the triumph of hope over experience.” The same observation helps to explain the gush of enthusiasm in the public media immediately following reports of educational miracles. Over a century of experience in educational reform has taught us that unbelievable improvements in average student performance either (a) did not happen, or (b) were due to a strategy of limiting who was included in the assessment. Yet, because such smoke-and-mirrors miracles tend to be easier and cheaper than boosting student performance through smaller classes, better instruction, etc., we have little hope that using evidence to debunk such claims will eradicate the audience for a good miracle. The best we can hope for is a visible increase in skepticism and a demand for associated empirical evidence to support the claimed miracle. Experience has taught us that the smaller the reported effect of an intervention on the grand enterprise of education, the more likely it is to be true. 

The Latest Miracle 

The latest educational miracle is the “Mississippi Miracle”—the miraculous turnaround of a state that only recently consistently ranked near the bottom of all states in education. Mississippi now leads the country as the fastest improving school system.⁵ The most recent 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results reported that Mississippi now ranks in a tie for 7th among all states in 4th grade reading, whereas in 2015, only three states scored lower than Mississippi. The rankings, when statistically adjusted, are even more impressive. 

Once an educational laughingstock … after adjusting for demographics such as poverty and race, Mississippi ranks number one …⁶

Indeed, how can a state that has long been plagued by being in either first place in undesirable rankings (poverty, obesity, infant mortality rates, corporal punishment) or last place in desirable ones (education test scores, median household income, teacher salaries) now be lauded as a role model for other states to follow in the education of their children? 

When adjusting for poverty, Mississippi has moved to the top of all states not only in 4th grade reading but also math.⁷ Even kids who are not economically disadvantaged have improved.⁸ But success is not limited to the wealthy or White. The question is who hasn’t improved? Hispanic students in Mississippi now outperform Hispanic students in all other states. Black students in Mississippi rank third among Black students in all states. And, even more surprising, the improvements in NAEP scores have occurred for students at every percentile ranging from the lowest performers to the very highest. This is unusual, as educational interventions typically improve performance for either the low performers but not so much for the high performers, or for the high performers but not the lowest. In fact, Mississippi was the only state to improve 4th grade NAEP reading scores for the bottom 10 percent of students from 2013–2024.⁹ There are no typical aptitude‑by‑treatment interactions here, where one group of learners improves more than others. This is simply amazing considering that the intervention was designed to benefit struggling readers. Again, such large, universal effects raise red flags as smaller ones are the norm in education. 

Is the Mississippi Miracle finally the educational messiah for which many have been waiting that will reverse the curse of past educational miracles? Almost 700 years ago, the Shroud of Turin was proclaimed to be the same burial shroud that covered Jesus of Nazareth. Such a claim was subsequently examined by several experts to determine its authenticity. The Mississippi Miracle deserves a similar close inspection. Some believe that the impressive results are simply a result of strict accountability and weaker teacher unions that, it is often claimed, prioritize job security over student learning.¹⁰

Experience has taught us that the smaller the reported effect of an intervention on the grand enterprise of education, the more likely it is to be true. 

Others have pointed to Mississippi’s 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) as the cause of the observed changes. The LBPA emphasizes training teachers in the “Science of Reading,” identifying and providing help to students with reading deficiencies, and holding students back in the 3rd grade if they don’t meet a minimum score on the 3rd Grade Mississippi Academic Assessment Program (MAAP) student achievement test in English Language Arts (ELA), or MAAP-ELA (i.e., the gate). Two of the architects behind the implementation of LBPA have since leveraged the Mississippi Miracle to secure prominent positions outside of the state. Carey Wright was Superintendent of Education from 2013 to 2022 and now has the same role in Maryland, where yet another miracle has been recently reported.¹¹ Phil Bryant, governor from 2012 to 2020, was recently appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for the NAEP. 

The success attributed to the LBPA, and in particular, the 3rd grade retention policy, is influencing other states who are scrambling to follow suit (e.g., Arkansas,¹² Utah,¹³ Indiana, Ohio,¹⁴ and Nebraska¹⁵). Oklahoma is even considering retaining struggling readers as early as first or second grade.¹⁶ The House Appropriations Committee held a hearing in February 2026 to learn more about state-level policies.¹⁷ Is retention the key component of the miracle? Retention has always been controversial due to the negative social-emotional effects that retained students experience.¹⁸ Some also question whether retention improves later reading performance.¹⁹ If not retention, is it the teacher training in the science of reading and the four years of reading initiatives (K–3) that are responsible for most of the gains? What exactly should other states rush to replicate if they hope for similar results? 

The best way to untangle what is going on would be to design an experiment where Mississippi kindergartners are randomly assigned to the following four conditions through the 3rd grade: (1) new-and-improved reading initiatives with no 3rd grade retention, (2) the old reading instruction with no 3rd grade retention, (3) new-and-improved reading initiatives with 3rd grade retention, and (4) old reading instruction with 3rd grade retention. After four years, this design would allow us to answer three questions concerning the effects of LBPA components on 4th grade NAEP reading performance: (1) do the reading initiatives work? (e.g., 1+3 outperforms 2+4), (2) does retention work? (e.g., 3+4 outperforms 1+2), and (3) is the effect of either reading initiatives or retention mediated by the other? (E.g., the new reading initiatives only show an advantage when kids are retained.) Such large-scale experiments are costly, but important as we witnessed with the Tennessee Class Size Experiment in the 1980s.²⁰ In the absence of experimental evidence that would allow for causal conclusions, we are left considering various plausible reasons for the apparently improved NAEP score that a randomized experiment could easily rule out. Unfortunately, these other possible reasons cannot be confirmed, just like the claim that the Mississippi Miracle was caused by the LBPA’s improved reading initiatives, retention, or both, cannot be confirmed. But the latter causes can be disconfirmed along with other plausible causes. We now present seven such possible reasons for Mississippi’s impressive rise in 4th grade NAEP reading rankings. (See supporting figures and tables.²¹) 

1. Recent improvement reflects continued momentum prior to LBPA. 

So did the miracle begin in 2015 with the implementation of LBPA? Mississippi NAEP scores had been improving long before then. From 2005 to 2015, NAEP reading scores increased ten points (204 to 214). Since then, they have increased only five points. Perhaps the Barksdale Reading Institute, a $100 million investment founded in 2000, deserves most of the credit. Would scores have continued to increase without the LBPA? Without a randomized experiment (including a control group that did not receive the LBPA), we can’t know without making heroic assumptions. But the trend for ten years before LBPA was certainly increasing. 

When this left truncation of the score distribution occurs, the overall average increases … all of the observed gain in performance can be accounted for by the retention policy, with three points left over.

2. Retention prevents low-scoring 3rd graders from taking the 4th Grade NAEP. 

The LBPA passed in 2013 but was not fully implemented until 2015. Beginning in the spring of 2015, all 3rd graders were required to achieve at least a score of 2 (out of 5) on an annual state reading assessment to advance to the 4th grade. This had the effect of preventing a sizable portion (5.6 percent) of the lowest scoring 3rd graders in 2016 from taking the NAEP in 2017. When this left truncation of the score distribution occurs, the overall average increases. Using the formula we derived earlier,²² removing the bottom 5.6 percent would yield an improvement in average score of about four points. Mississippi’s 4th grade NAEP reading score average increased by only one point from 2015 to 2017. So all of the observed gain in performance can be accounted for by the retention policy, with three points left over. One implication of those extra points is that the rest of the LBPA, aside from the retention policy, actually lowered scores a little. The same goes for the four-point increase from 2017 to 2024. With the new retention policy holding back over 9 percent of 3rd graders in 2018–19 and 2021–22 based on low reading ability, the NAEP increases should be higher. 

Of course, Mississippi had been retaining 3rd graders for all sorts of reasons long before 2015. But the criteria changed in 2015 to focus just on the reading score. Similar to what happened in Houston and El Paso, low scorers were held back and prevented from participating in the 2015 NAEP. Gavin Newsom has pointed out that, based on basic statistical theory, the retention policy inflates the NAEP results.²³

3. Increased exemption rates temper LBPA effects. 

But what about the sustained level of performance and five-point increase since 2015? Several defenders of the Mississippi Miracle have claimed that retention alone cannot explain the successes since 2015 because retention rates have actually decreased while scores continue to improve.²⁴ Table 1 displays data for Mississippi 3rd graders taking the gate test since 2014. Retention rates have decreased twice—first after the implementation of LBPA in 2015 and then again after the minimum score on the gate test was increased (from 2 to 3) in 2019. If one only looks at the retention rates, it seems that the retention policy is not the sole cause of the NAEP improvements, because decreased retention rates are associated with higher scores. That would also imply that the K–3 reading initiatives were the cause of improved student performance. But were they? Or is it only smoke and mirrors that lead us to believe that they are? 

Table 1. 3rd grade students in Mississippi taking the MAAP-ELA test for promotion. Although retention rates have decreased, exemptions have increased, meaning that the percent of 3rd graders who are not ready for 4th grade has not changed. From https://mdek12.org/sites/default/files/reports/LBPA/2025/LBPA_2024-25.pdf

According to the LBPA, a 3rd grade student who does not pass the gate test (score 3 or higher since 2019) may still be promoted by the school district for “good cause.”²⁵ These causes include promoting those who have (a) previously been retained twice, (b) passed an alternative assessment, or (c) been identified as having either a disability or (d) limited English proficiency. In contrast to retention rates, the percentage of students who have received a good cause exemption has increased since the minimum score was raised in 2019. Both retention and exemptions are indicators that students are deemed “not ready for 4th grade.” This means that the overall percentage of 3rd graders (retentions plus exemptions) who are not passing the gate test is not decreasing. Thus, the LBPA reading initiatives do not appear to be reducing the percent of 3rd graders who score low on the state reading test. 

4. Increased accommodations equals increased performance.

One might argue “So what?” The kids who receive the exemptions still have to take the 4th grade NAEP reading test the following year. It appears that the good cause exemption category largely responsible for the increase in exemptions has been diagnosing students who don’t pass the gate as having disabilities. This is similar to what happened in Houston. But rather than prevent them from taking the test, Mississippi has increased the percentage of disability-labeled students who are allowed to take the NAEP with accommodations such as extended time, taking breaks during testing, cueing to stay on task, preferential seating, or testing in a separate session compared to everyone else being tested in a packed large room. Such accommodations typically benefit all students’ test performances regardless of disability status.²⁶ The most common accommodation is extended time. The relation between extra time and the amount of boost to a test score is sometimes complex,²⁷ but the question is never “did the accommodation boost scores?” but rather “how much of a boost?” 

From 2003 to 2024, the percentage of Mississippi 4th graders classified as having disabilities for the NAEP increased from 9 to 20 percent. This increase was second only to West Virginia. The percentage who were tested with accommodations increased from one to 12 percent.²⁸ It is hard to imagine that such testing accommodations would not have some positive effect on scores. 

5. The miracle did not extend to later reading assessments. 

Any salt-worthy miracle would also increase students’ reading ability in parallel with the increases in their reading scores. Thus, greatly improved student reading ability demonstrated in increased 4th grade scores should also show up later when the same students are tested for reading proficiency. Mississippi is one of eight states that require all 11th graders to take the ACT as a state accountability test. Despite the fact that 11th graders in 2025 would have been exposed to three years of LBPA from 2015–18, Mississippi’s rank among the states with regard to scores on the ACT reading subtest has not improved. In both 2018 and 2025 only Nevada did worse among those eight states. 

Mississippi ranks last in teacher pay. Does anyone really believe we should push for lower teacher pay to achieve miraculous results?

Since 2005, Mississippi’s 4th grade NAEP reading scores have increased 15 points, but 8th grade NAEP scores have increased by only two points. Eighth-graders tested in both 2022 and 2024 would have been exposed to the full four years of the K–3 LBPA intervention. Thus, as has been noted,²⁹ the effect of the miracle had apparently run its course by 8th grade. Granted, compared to the U.S. overall, Mississippi has not experienced as much of a decline in 8th grade NAEP reading scores since 2019. But in 2020, the COVID pandemic caused a major disruption to education and not all states responded by closing down schools to the same degree. 

6. Reduced learning loss follows increased in-person instruction. 

We can see how this was manifested in Mississippi by starting with the COVID pandemic that hit in 2020. States differed dramatically in terms of how long schools were shut down to be replaced by remote instruction.³⁰ Whereas Oregon, Maryland, and California students spent about 20 percent of the 2020–21 school year in school, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana students spent around 75 percent of the school year in school. Learning loss was likely greater for those students forced to spend more time learning remotely than in person. This was confirmed by the NAEP trends from 2019 (pre-COVID) to 2024 for the two sets of states. Oregon’s, Maryland’s, and California’s scores decreased, whereas Alabama’s, Mississippi’s, and Louisiana’s scores did not decrease. Reduced learning loss from COVID could explain part of Mississippi’s improved ranking in NAEP scores since 2019 and the “Southern surge” overall. 

7. Statistical score adjustment due to nearly 100 percent poverty. 

Next let us discuss what happens to Mississippi’s NAEP scores when they are adjusted for poverty. First, we note that a policy of retention to prevent low scoring students to take the test is but the other side of the adjustment coin. When scores are adjusted, some proportion of student scores are not counted. This is obvious from the results. If a state’s ranking improves after adjustment, it can only mean that some of its lower scoring students are not being counted. The greater the gain, the more students of low performance are being ignored. If the adjustment is being done on the basis of the size of the student population in poverty, the state benefits by increasing its poverty level as much as possible. As stated earlier, Mississippi now ranks first for both 4th grade reading and math when adjusted for poverty and race. How did this happen? Mississippi’s Free and Reduced Lunch (FRL) rate, an indicator of poverty, amazingly, almost miraculously, was 99.7 percent in 2022, up from 74.9 percent in 2014–15. The next highest state was Nevada with 81 percent. Arkansas, Alabama, and Louisiana’s average increase was about 3 percent over the same time period. What changed? The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), enacted in 2010, allows high-poverty schools to serve breakfast and lunch free to all students without collecting household FRL applications. In CEP schools, districts may report all enrolled students as eligible for free lunch regardless of each student’s household income because everyone receives free meals. 

The Urban Institute, which adjusted performance on the 2024 NAEP, uses FRL and it is highly variable across states.³¹ It appears that Mississippi took full advantage of the CEP, whereas other states did not. Mississippi’s FRL increased almost 25 percent from 2019 to 2022, but it does not have an actual poverty rate that is considerably higher than other states. Using FRL rate to statistically adjust NAEP scores for poverty greatly inflates the adjusted scores for Mississippi. 

Conclusion 

The Mississippi Miracle has received widespread publicity. There are few willing to question the emperor’s new clothes; instead, many are scrambling to adopt Mississippi’s educational policies. Any proclaimed miracle deserves close inspection combined with a good dose of skepticism. The present examination reveals seven possible, non-LBPA, reasons for the impressive improvement in ranking attributed to Mississippi’s 4th grade NAEP reading scores since 2015: (1) an earlier trend of improvement that began in 2003 simply continued, (2) the 3rd grade reading gate prevented low scorers from taking the 4th grade test, which raised the overall average, (3) an increasing number of exemptions given to 3rd graders reveals no improvement in 4th grade readiness, (4) an increasing percentage of 4th graders are being classified as having disabilities and receiving NAEP testing accommodations that likely improve scores, (5) similar miraculous gains have not been observed for 8th grade NAEP or 11th grade ACT reading scores, (6) reduced learning loss during the pandemic due to high in-person instruction rates compared with most other states, and (7) an exceptionally (and inaccurately) high poverty rate used to statistically adjust scores inflated rankings. Thus, the LBPA may not play a large role in improved NAEP scores as other have suggested.³²

Forty years ago, Connecticut’s Education Enhancement Act increased funding for teachers so that five years later, salaries had increased 62 percent to become the highest in the nation. By 1998, Connecticut 4th graders scored the highest (232) on the NAEP reading test, a 10-point increase since 1994. The percent of 8th graders scoring proficient or higher was also first in the nation. Connecticut’s White, Black, and Hispanic students outscored their counterparts in the other states (Wise, 2019).³³ Sound familiar? This was the Connecticut Miracle. 

The miracle was lauded by the top education scholars.^34, 35 But like all education miracles, it did not last. Connecticut reverted its policies back to national norms and soon experienced national results. By 2005, the 4th grade NAEP reading scores had dropped six points. In 2024, Connecticut’s reading score had dropped down to 219—tied for 7th place with … Mississippi! Mississippi ranks last in teacher pay.³⁶ Does anyone really believe we should push for lower teacher pay to achieve miraculous results? 

Suppose someone walks into a cold house and is faced with two options. The more expensive one is turning up the furnace and heating the entire house. The cheaper one is holding a lighted match under the thermostat. Similarly, boosting a state’s NAEP scores can be done in two ways. The more expensive one is improving the entire educational system starting with prenatal care, daycare, full-day kindergarten, teacher aides, etc. The cheaper one is reducing the impact of low-scoring students by retaining them or reclassifying them as special education, or by adjusting the overall score by giving lower weight to the low-achieving groups so their influence is vastly diminished. The latter solution may give the appearance of a miracle, but sooner or later everyone realizes that the house is still cold. 

Given what we have found with our deeper dive into the Mississippi Miracle, we must conclude that enthusiasm surrounding a rush by other states to replicate the Mississippi model be tempered with hard won empirical wisdom. We ought to not blindly yield to the entreaties of the supporters of the Mississippi Miracle (so aptly described in Acts 26:14). 

We wish to acknowledge the assistance of the following University of Texas at Arlington graduate students: Nasja Aude, Cole Davis, Veronica Erives, and Jaclyn Foster.

When used to describe Israel’s conduct in its war against Hamas in the wake of the latter group’s brutal October 7 massacre, which killed approximately 1,200 Israelis, the word genocide no longer functions primarily as a condemnation of military action designed to destroy a civilian population group. Instead, it has become shorthand for outrage at the scale of destruction in Gaza and, often, a broader condemnation of Israel’s entire military campaign, and sometimes of Israel’s very existence. The force of the accusation has grown through repetition, reinforced by the undeniable emotional impact of images emerging from the conflict.

But genocide is not simply another word for devastating war, overwhelming force, or even a high rate of civilian casualties. It is not an emotional intensifier to be invoked when the consequences of war are particularly grim. 

The dictionary definition of genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.¹ Similarly, in international law, genocide is a narrowly defined crime. It requires proof of dolus specialis—the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such. That requirement is not a technical detail, but the central feature that distinguishes genocide from every other form of wartime violence.²

The concept of genocide was forged in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish jurist who coined the term, was influenced not only by the destruction of European Jewry but also by earlier episodes of targeted mass violence, including the Armenian massacres and the killing of Greek and Assyrian communities by the Ottoman Turks. Lemkin understood that war has always produced enormous civilian suffering. Indeed, the Allied campaign in World War II resulted in the death of several million civilians. Some Allied actions, such as the bombing of Dresden, were morally dubious, but neither Lemkin nor his collaborators in creating the modern concept for genocide believed that the U.S. and Great Britain had engaged in genocide in Europe or Asia. 

What set genocide apart, then, was not the scale of death alone, or even insufficient concern regarding civilian suffering, but its purpose. War may kill to secure territory, defeat an enemy, or compel surrender. Genocide kills because of who the victims are, with the aim of eliminating a peoples’ existence as a group. 

When the international Genocide Convention treaty was adopted in 1948, its drafters were acutely aware of the stakes. To label a state genocidal is not merely to allege criminal conduct. It is to render a sweeping moral judgment that the state stands outside the bounds of lawful and civilized order. For that reason, the definition was deliberately demanding. The drafters understood that if the term became elastic—if it could be stretched to cover every brutal conflict or every campaign marked by tragic civilian loss—it would lose the distinctive force that made it meaningful. 

Given that background, and later international judicial rulings, the accusation that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza is unsupportable. Establishing a claim of genocide against Israel would require more than pointing to the scale of suffering in Gaza or to deeply felt moral condemnation. It would require setting aside established precedent, blurring the distinction between intent and consequence, and relying heavily on tendentious, nay dishonest, interpretations of rhetoric by Israeli leaders. In effect, concluding that Israel has engaged in genocide requires not just expanding the definition of genocide beyond its accepted legal contours but well beyond reasonable interpretation of the concept. 

Importantly, the charge that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians did not arise for the first time in the context of the post-October 7 conflict in Gaza. Variants of the accusation began as a product of Soviet propaganda during the Cold War, specifically following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, which left the Soviet Union facing a significant geopolitical setback. Its Arab allies had been decisively defeated by a Western-aligned state. In response, Soviet institutions engaged in what they described as “active measures”—long-term efforts to influence international narratives to undermine Israel and win favor with Arab and Muslim countries.^{3, 4, 5, 6}

One strand of this effort involved reframing Zionism by combining traditional Russian antisemitic tropes with avant-garde anti-colonialist theory. Rather than a national movement for Jewish self-determination, Zionism was increasingly portrayed as a form of colonialism and racist Jewish supremacy.⁷ Soviet-era publications, sometimes grouped under the label “Zionology,” advanced these themes, portraying Israel in starkly negative, and often antisemitic, terms.⁸ Indeed, the USSR chose right-wing extremist Russian nationalists, heirs to the most intense antisemitic tradition in Europe, to run its anti-Zionist propaganda campaign.⁹

The Soviet’s anti-Zionist rhetoric had a clear internal logic. If Zionism could be equated with racism, and racism with fascism, then Israel itself could be depicted as a morally illegitimate state. More pointedly, it enabled a striking moral inversion: a state established in the aftermath of the Holocaust was cast as embodying traits associated with the very regimes that had persecuted Jews. The upshot was a massive Soviet effort to portray Israel as a racist, genocidal power akin to Nazi Germany.¹⁰

This framing found expression in international institutions. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, which declared in 1975 that Zionism, unique among movements for national self-determination, “is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” represented a culmination of these efforts. Thereafter, accusations of genocide against Israel became a familiar feature of anti-Israel rhetoric, even as the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, captured by Israel in 1967, grew at among the highest rates in the world.^11, 12

The fall of the USSR in 1991 and the beginning of the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993 put a damper on this rhetoric for a time. But then Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat rejected Israel peace offers at Camp David and Taba in 2000 and 2001 in favor of a terrorist war against Israeli civilians that came to be known as the Second Intifada. Anti-Israel activists saw both a need and an opportunity to reframe public debate from Arafat’s intransigence and resumption of brutal terrorist activity to what they saw as Israel’s inherent illegitimacy.^{13, 14, 15, 16, 17}

Genocide is not simply another word for devastating war, overwhelming force, or even a high rate of civilian casualties.

The upshot was that the genocide accusation reemerged prominently at the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The official diplomatic proceedings were marked by significant controversy,¹⁸ but it was the parallel NGO forum that proved especially influential in shaping subsequent discourse.¹⁹ There, amidst an orgy of antisemitic rhetoric, and the shameful spectacle of purported human rights NGOs openly hawking the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,²⁰ the official NGO final statement described Israel as an apartheid state guilty of “acts of genocide” and called for its international isolation.²¹

Following Durban, activists routinely accused Israel of genocide.^22, 23, 24 The accusation was raised during multiple rounds of conflict in Gaza—in 2008–2009, 2014, and 2021—as well as at times when large-scale hostilities were not underway.^{25, 26, 27, 28} For example, Israeli efforts (ultimately wildly unsuccessful) to restrict the import of war material to Hamas-controlled Gaza were frequently depicted as genocidal.²⁹

That continuity is important for understanding the speed with which the accusation resurfaced after October 7, 2023. Historically, genocide determinations have followed extended periods of investigation. In Rwanda and Srebrenica (Bosnia), the term was applied only after patterns of organized, identity-based killing had been clearly established. In contrast, accusations of genocide in the current conflict emerged almost immediately after the initial air strikes by Israel—before reliable casualty data existed and before patterns of conduct could be meaningfully assessed.^30, 31

This sequence suggests a reversal of the usual analytical process. Rather than evidence leading to a conclusion, the conclusion preceded the evidence, shaping how subsequent events were interpreted. Once the label was applied, civilian suffering was readily understood as confirmation of a predetermined narrative of genocide. 

For anti-Israel activists the accusation performed a strategic function in public discourse. Characterizing a military campaign as genocidal places it in a category that carries both legal implications and a profound moral condemnation. While the war in Gaza could have ended at any time with Hamas’s surrender and release of the hostages it took, the genocide allegation served to pressure Israel to cease hostilities on Hamas’s terms. 

Meanwhile, Israel’s accusers ignored or evaded the governing legal standard for the crime of genocide. In Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Serbia and Montenegro (2007), and again in Croatia vs. Serbia (2015), the International Court of Justice confronted a central question: How can genocidal intent, necessary for a charge of genocide to stick, be inferred from conduct in the absence of an explicit extermination order? 

The Court’s answer was deliberately strict. For a pattern of conduct to establish genocidal intent, that intent must be the only reasonable inference that can be drawn from the evidence. If the facts can plausibly support another explanation, the inference of genocide fails. 

This “only reasonable inference” requirement is not a minor doctrinal detail. It is the mechanism that preserves genocide as a crime of specific purpose rather than one inferred from tragic outcomes. If there is a plausible alternative explanation—such as the pursuit of military objectives in an armed conflict—the legal threshold is not met. 

The Court applied this reasoning in Croatia vs. Serbia. Even in the face of widespread atrocities and ethnic cleansing, it declined to find genocide because the conduct could reasonably be explained as an effort to displace a population and secure territory rather than to destroy the group itself. In practical terms, the Court drew a sharp distinction: horrific civilian suffering, even if a matter of policy rather than an unintentional by-product of war, is not enough. A state’s conduct must be inexplicable except as an attempt to annihilate a protected group. 

Applying that standard to Gaza highlights the difficulty of sustaining a genocide claim under existing law. Israel has articulated identifiable military objectives: dismantling Hamas’s military infrastructure, destroying tunnel networks embedded beneath civilian areas, preventing rocket attacks, and securing the release of hostages seized on October 7 and held by Hamas in Gaza.^32, 33, 34

A standard that renders even morally justified wars against genocidal regimes themselves genocidal would cease to function as a meaningful legal test.

One may debate the proportionality of particular Israeli strikes, criticize specific tactics, or even argue that earlier Israeli policies were primarily responsible for the underlying conflict that led to the war. But as long as Israel’s state military objectives provide a plausible explanation for its conduct, the inference that the campaign is aimed at destroying Palestinians as a group cannot be the only reasonable interpretation. 

Under the ICJ’s own precedents, that conclusion should carry significant weight—even if the Court’s future application of those precedents, given the polarized political environment in which it operates, is uncertain. Some contemporary legal arguments, including by countries hostile to Israel, implicitly acknowledge the constraint imposed by the existing standard and seek to revise, indeed, undermine it. 

For example, Brazil has asked the ICJ to adopt a “balanced approach to dolus specialis, one that reflects not only the criminal law dimension but also the Convention’s overarching humanitarian object and purpose.”³⁵ Belize, meanwhile, rejects the plain meaning of the Genocide Convention and subsequent precedent, and asserts that “there is no requirement that the State or individual act exclusively with genocidal intent.”³⁶ Chile suggested adoption of “a fluid concept of intent,” based on “a holistic analysis of evidence.”³⁷ All of these standards virtually invited subjective and politicized decision making, effectively transforming genocide from a crime of purpose into a crime of outcome, where civilian suffering, as such, is proof of genocide—at least if the suffering has sparked sufficient international outrage. 

The drafters of the Genocide Convention rejected that approach. The 1948 Secretariat Draft explicitly distinguished heavy civilian losses in war from genocide, noting that such losses “do not as a rule constitute genocide” and fall instead within the domain of the laws of war. International humanitarian law governs how wars are fought—through rules of distinction, proportionality, and precautions. The Genocide Convention addresses something different: the intentional destruction of a group. 

A further source of confusion arises from the ICJ’s January 2024 provisional measures order in South Africa vs. Israel. Many commentators—including international law scholars—have interpreted the Court’s finding that certain rights were “plausible” as a determination that an ongoing genocide was itself plausible.^38, 39, 40

That is not what the Court held. At the provisional stage, the ICJ assesses whether claimed rights under the Convention are plausible and whether interim measures are warranted to protect those rights while the ICJ investigates and watches subsequent developments. As former ICJ President Joan Donoghue later clarified, the Court did not conclude that a plausible case of genocide had been established.^41, 42 The distinction is significant, even if it has often been blurred in public discussion, and explains why the ICJ did not order an immediate halt to Israeli military actions. 

To understand why the genocide accusation encounters these doctrinal obstacles, it is useful to consider how recognized genocides have been identified in practice. The Holocaust remains the clearest example. The Nazi regime did not kill Jews as a by-product of combat. It constructed an integrated system of annihilation: identification, registration, deportation, and industrialized killing. The Nuremberg Tribunal described this as a “record of consistent and systematic inhumanity on the greatest scale.” The key feature was not only the scale of killing, but its organization and purpose. 

Similar patterns appear in later examples of recognized genocide. In Prosecutor vs. Akayesu (ICTR 1998), the killing of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda was described as “meticulously organized,” with roadblocks, identity checks, and targeted massacres of civilians. In Srebrenica, the ICTY found genocide based on the systematic separation and execution of Bosnian Muslim men and boys. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge implemented policies targeting specific groups for destruction, supported by centralized directives. 

Across these cases, common elements recur: coordinated planning, identification of victims based on group membership, separation of civilians from combatants, and extermination as a state objective rather than a by-product. Genocide is organized destruction directed at a group as such, rather than simply large-scale civilian death in wartime. 

The current war in Gaza presents a different pattern. Israel has been engaged in an urban conflict against a non-state armed group that operates within civilian areas, stores weapons in residential buildings, and maintains extensive tunnel networks beneath civilian infrastructure. These facts do not eliminate Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law. But they do provide a framework within which the resulting destruction can be understood as part of a military campaign rather than as evidence of a policy of extermination. 

Public debate often relies heavily on casualty figures, but here too careful distinctions are necessary. Estimates of total deaths in Gaza vary and are often drawn from sources that do not clearly differentiate between combatants and civilians.⁴³ In some activist discourse, aggregate figures—sometimes cited, based on Hamas’s Ministry of Health’s data, as approximately 72,000, sometimes using entirely made-up figures of up to 500,000—are presented as evidence that Israel has killed or murdered that number of innocent Gazans.^44, 45

Once the label was applied, civilian suffering was readily understood as confirmation of a predetermined narrative of genocide.

That formulation obscures several important points. Even taking Hamas’s 72,000 figure at face value, it includes combatants as well as civilians.⁴⁶ The killing of enemy fighters in an armed conflict is not unlawful, much less genocidal. In addition, Hamas’s total likely includes individuals who died of natural causes during the course of the war,⁴⁷ and those killed by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the result of either errant missiles or executions of political opponents.^48, 49 The aggregation of all deaths into a single figure presented as evidence of criminal intent reflects a broader tendency to treat all harm associated with a conflict as a product of unlawful conduct. 

This approach has analytical consequences. If the killing of combatants is treated as equivalent to the killing of civilians, and if all deaths are framed as evidence of wrongdoing, then the underlying objection is not limited to alleged violations of the laws of war. It is, more fundamentally, an objection to the existence of military action itself. In that context, allegations of war crimes or genocide risk becoming rhetorical extensions of a broader opposition to a particular war or even war itself—at least war waged by Western-aligned countries—rather than conclusions grounded in international law. 

The tendency to infer intent directly from outcome without regard to intent is tempting in the face of large-scale suffering resulting from a military campaign by a state like Israel that has many ideologically motivated enemies. But the structure of genocide law is designed to resist that inference. 

Comparative examples reinforce the accepted distinction between deliberate annihilation and other military operations that cause civilian harm. The Battle of Mosul (Iraq) against ISIS in 2016–2017 resulted in extraordinary destruction; large portions of the city were damaged or destroyed, and thousands of civilians were killed. ISIS embedded its forces within civilian areas and used civilians as shields, complicating targeting decisions and magnifying the human cost. The devastation was widely recognized as horrific. Yet no serious legal analysis characterized the campaign as genocide. It was understood, instead, as brutal urban combat against an entrenched armed group. 

The same logic applies in earlier conflicts. The Allied invasion of Normandy resulted in tens of thousands of French civilian deaths. The objective was to defeat Nazi Germany and liberate occupied Europe. If the scale of civilian harm in urban warfare were sufficient to establish genocidal intent, such operations would fall within the definition of genocide. A standard that renders even morally justified wars against genocidal regimes themselves genocidal would cease to function as a meaningful legal test. 

Casualty data in Gaza, often invoked in public debate, do not alter this analysis when examined carefully. Estimates of civilian-to-combatant ratios in Gaza remain contested and should be treated with caution.⁵⁰ Suffice to say that even the higher figures—at least those that have a reasonable basis in the available data⁵¹—are far from inherently damning. This is especially true when one considers that the international community resolved that—contrary to international law and Egypt’s treaty obligations—the vast majority of civilian Gazans would not be permitted to flee the conflict, unlike civilians caught in other wars. Egypt’s lengthy border with Gaza remained firmly shut to refugees, save for those with the resources to provide Egyptian officials with substantial monetary payments (that is, bribes).⁵²

Further eroding the case for genocide is the military mismatch between the parties. Israel possesses overwhelming military capabilities, including one of the most powerful air forces in the world. If the objective were the destruction of Palestinians as a group, Israel could have easily killed hundreds of thousands of civilians within the first month of the war. Genocidal campaigns historically involve efforts to maximize destruction. By contrast, Israel has employed a range of measures associated with attempts to mitigate civilian harm, including warning civilians of an impending strike, issuing evacuation orders before military advances, and implementing humanitarian pauses and corridors to facilitate aid delivery.^53, 54, 55 Every non-exigent military strike was approved by military lawyers trained in international law who reported only to other lawyers. Israel even facilitated a vaccination campaign that resulted in over half a million Gazan children being vaccinated for polio.^56, 57 The existence and use of such measures do not resolve all legal questions, but they cannot be reconciled with an inference of exterminatory intent. 

Meanwhile, approximately two million Arab citizens of Israel—most of them ethnically Palestinian—live within the state, participate in its political system, and serve in public institutions. In recognized genocides, the targeted group is not simultaneously incorporated into the political and civic life of the state alleged to be pursuing its destruction. 

Claims of Israel’s genocidal intent are sometimes supported by reference to isolated statements by Israeli public officials. Famously, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu analogized Hamas to Amalek,⁵⁸ an ancient genocidal enemy of the Jewish people that according to Jewish tradition reappears in different guises throughout history. This remark was wildly misconstrued to mean that, first, all Gazans were Amalek, and, moreover, their status as Amalek meant that they all should be killed.⁵⁹ The latter accusation was based on a misinterpretation of a biblical verse distinct from the verse Netanyahu quoted;^60, 61 the latter verse, instead, reminds the people of Israel to remember what the Amalekites did to them. 

Similarly, a statement attributed to Israel’s president Isaac Herzog to the effect that Gazan civilians bore collective responsibility for Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities is frequently cited as evidence of genocidal intent.⁶² Putting aside the fact that this statement is taken out of context,⁶³ and Herzog immediately thereafter pledged that Israel would obey the laws of war,⁶⁴ Israel’s presidency is largely ceremonial and does not direct military operations. Stray statements made from outside the relevant military and political chain of command cannot possibly show genocidal intent. 

As noted previously, some legal advocates pressing the genocide claim against Israel argue, explicitly or implicitly, that the definition itself must be adjusted to fit the facts of Gaza.⁶⁵ In other words, verdict of genocide first, and—if necessary—we will manipulate the law to support the preconceived outcome. South Africa, which brought a genocide claim against Israel to the International Court of Justice just three months into the war, argues that intent, rather than being the only reasonable inference from a state’s conduct, may be inferred by extensive civilian death and suffering.⁶⁶

Given South Africa’s prominent role in the proceedings and propaganda war against Israel, this argument is especially notable. Redefining genocide in this way would have implications that would extend well beyond the Gaza conflict. Any state engaged in combat against an armed group embedded within dense civilian environments would face the risk of genocide accusations whenever the level of civilian casualties provoked moral outrage by a vocal segment of world opinion. The term would cease to function as a precise legal category and would instead become a more general instrument of political and moral condemnation, weaponized to prevent certain disfavored militaries from pursuing legitimate military ends. 

For some activists, this is undoubtedly the goal. Israel, beyond its own unpopularity among Islamists, Arab nationalists, and self-styled “anticolonialist” leftists, is the “canary in the coal mine” for a set of legal tactics designed by anti-Western forces to render liberal democracies unable to defend themselves against non-state actors. 

Israel currently operates under some of the most restrictive Rules of Engagement of any modern armed forces.^{67, 68, 69, 70} The Israel Defense Forces use tactics—such as “roof-knocking” (warning civilians of an impending strike), sending millions of text message evacuation alerts, and dropping millions of leaflets—that were virtually unheard of previously to limit civilian harm. 

By accusing the most legally regulated military in the region of genocide, activists seek to create a new, impossible “Floor of Illegality.” If the IDF’s conduct can be successfully branded as genocide, then the same legal precedent can be used against the United States or NATO in any future conflict against groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda. 

A sober analysis requires acknowledging both the scale of suffering in Gaza and the limits of the legal concepts used to describe it. Civilian harm is real and devastating. Allegations of violations of the laws of war deserve careful investigation. 

Raphael Lemkin’s understanding of his genocide neologism was meant to identify a specific and extreme form of human destruction. Preserving its meaning requires resisting its expansion into a catch-all term for wars that produce severe suffering. If the term is applied whenever urban combat yields tragic results, it will lose its capacity to distinguish the phenomenon it was created to describe. 

In that sense, the stakes are not limited to this conflict. The question is whether genocide will remain a narrowly defined crime of intentional group destruction, or evolve into a broader label applied whenever motivated activists disapprove of a war that causes significant civilian harm. The former preserves a critical legal and moral distinction. The latter risks dissolving it.

On April 30, 2026, David Copperfield took his final bow at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, closing a residency that lasted more than 25 years. Longer than many entire entertainment careers, it was an extraordinary run. For audiences, it marked the end of a show. For magicians, it marked the close of a defining era.

As a professional magician, I’ve spent years studying the craft, performing, and thinking about how wonder is created and how human perception operates. Like many in my field—and millions of others—I grew up watching Copperfield’s television specials.

Most people still recognize Copperfield’s name, even if they can’t name a particular illusion. When he rose to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s, stage magic was no longer central to popular entertainment. Copperfield changed that almost single-handedly, placing large-scale illusions alongside blockbuster films, arena concerts, and major sporting events.

Over more than four decades, he sold tens of millions of tickets worldwide—more than 7 million at the MGM Grand alone—and became one of the highest-grossing solo entertainers in history, with career ticket sales reportedly exceeding $4 billion (more than The Rolling Stones!). He earned 21 Emmy Awards for his television specials—as many as The Sopranos—and accumulated multiple Guinness World Records.

But what stands out is not just the numbers. It is the consistency with which he delivered complex, high-precision performances night after night, often multiple times per day. In the final eight weeks (56 days) of his MGM Grand residency alone, he performed an astonishing 120 shows. That level of scale and reliability reshaped what audiences expect from a magic show. The bar was raised, and it stayed there, elevating the entire field.

The television specials were cinematic events that reached tens of millions. Perhaps none captured the public imagination like the 1983 disappearance of the Statue of Liberty. In front of a live audience seated on Liberty Island, with an estimated 50 million viewers watching on television, Copperfield made a national icon appear to vanish. The illusion became an instant cultural phenomenon, prompting people around the world—many for the first time in their lives—to exercise skepticism and critical thinking, asking: “How did he do it?”

What made the illusion groundbreaking was not only the audacity of “vanishing” the Statue of Liberty. It was the way Copperfield blended spectacle, storytelling, and technical precision, elevating magic to the status of a major cultural event. This contrasted powerfully with earlier high-profile magicians such as Harry Houdini, whose 1918 vanishing of an elephant was a theatrical sensation in its day but remained confined to the stage.

Copperfield brought illusions to a television audience of millions while also delivering them live, night after night, with remarkable reliability. The specials invited skepticism—viewers naturally wondered about camera tricks—yet the live performances answered that doubt directly. In theaters and arenas, there were no cuts and no retakes: just a performer and an audience sharing the same space, often with volunteers participating. That made the experience more powerful than that of any performer who relies on camera tricks, and the resulting lessons in skepticism and questioning the limits of perception all the more impactful.

He made it clear that you were being fooled—and that knowledge did not diminish the experience. If anything, it enhanced it.

Copperfield’s cultural influence extends far beyond performance. He founded the International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts, a private museum available to researchers that houses one of the most extensive archives in magic, including rare books, original props, and artifacts from Harry Houdini and many others.

In 2021, he brought parts of that collection to a wider audience with David Copperfield’s History of Magic, co-authored with Richard Wiseman and David Britland. The book (reviewed in Skeptic Vol. 27 No. 2 featuring exclusive, unpublished photographs) profiles 28 groundbreaking magicians across centuries, from 16th-century conjurers to modern innovators. Readers receive a guided tour through artifacts such as Houdini’s straitjackets and Water Torture Cell, along with a 16th-century manual on sleight of hand. The book beautifully connects grounded explanations of the craft’s evolution to what audiences experience in actual performances.

This work helps keep magic connected to its past and rooted in reality. Without that connection, magic can become a series of disconnected tricks and empty stage patter rather than a technically intricate art form with deep roots, ongoing innovation, and a unique ability to test the boundaries of human perception.

That is exactly where Copperfield excelled. He helped define what audiences expect from large-scale illusion: strong production values, clear narrative, emotional engagement, and technical reliability. He never presented himself as supernatural. Compared with many other figures who rose to prominence around the same time, such as Uri Geller, Copperfield made it clear that you were being fooled—and that knowledge did not diminish the experience. If anything, it enhanced it. You knew it was an illusion, yet for a moment you still wondered, “What if?”

The close of the MGM Grand residency marks the end of a long chapter in an illustrious career. Copperfield proved that magic could be romantic, theatrical, and emotionally resonant without relying on supernatural claims or pseudoscientific nonsense. In doing so, he became one of the most emulated illusionists in history and helped elevate the cultural standing of the entire art form.

One of the most dramatic aspects of grand dreams of the human spirit is how quickly they come crashing down to gritty, grimy earth. This is nowhere more true than with the internet. What began as a promise of global connection and unlimited access to knowledge has become a hornet’s nest of hatred, distortion, and lies. Conspiracy theories, which blend all of those elements into novel shapes and patterns, are thriving in ways that would put to shame the architects of the most poisonous false narratives in history.

For the first time, conspiracy is not just a political or geopolitical tool, as it has been for centuries, but a booming industry. Conspiracy theories are now the blood sport of the 21st century; social media platforms that profit off them are the contemporary colosseum where the masses go to watch individuals, nations, religions, and ideas get ripped to shreds. It’s officially sanctioned barbarism. And the crowds love it.

Influencers like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Dave Smith, and Ian Carroll are gladiators of falsehood, deepening their fame and fortune with every next lie. But these are only the most high-profile examples. On streaming platforms, messaging apps, and social media sites, thousands more aspirants work daily—by the minute—to spin and re-spin false narratives. Some, like anti-Jewish blood libels, are as old as time. Others, including the idea that the moon landing was staged, that the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, and that commercial jets emit “chemtrails,” have persisted for decades. Still more, including the idea that vaccines are an instrument of social control, have come to the fore in recent years.

What separates our modern era of conspiracy theorizing from the long tradition behind it is the scale of the rewards and incentives. Recently, the leader of one of the internet’s most prominent and successful new media companies told me that, by his estimate, Candace Owens earns around $50 million annually from YouTube ads alone—not counting speaking engagements, merchandise, and other brand sponsorships. Whether or not this precise number is accurate, it’s clear that the correlation between financial gain and what we might call a largesse with the truth is tight.

In this bewildering flurry, it’s difficult to zoom out. Yet we have to ask: How did we get here? Where is this all going? And can we find a way back—or a way forward? 

Only a few years ago, many people embraced the idea that the internet had ushered in a new dawn for information and communication. The media marveled that Twitter could be used by journalists as a tool to produce real-time reporting from far-flung corners of the world. Wikipedia offered a bottomless trove of free information on everything from big, broad concepts to the marginalia of unsung knowledge. 

Facebook made “friends” out of strangers; Google made urban labyrinths now navigable and dynamic. E-commerce opened up entire new vistas of opportunity. Micro-loans, made possible by digital technology, would lift developing nations of endemic poverty. The vast, inscrutable world of the pre-digital era had magically become legible. We could discern truth from falsehood, fact from distorted fiction. The panacea was just on the horizon, burnishing the sky with hope.

Looking back, it now seems as if that bright glow was a conflagration—the deep tradition of Enlightenment thought in flames. While the fire has burned for years, a clearly defined break,  a rupture in the epistemological chain, came in 2016, when the unthinkable took place in American politics: Donald Trump won the presidential election. There were many reasons for this, tied to the social and cultural dynamics of a country whose demographics and economics had been in flux for over two decades. But for the gatekeepers of American culture, the election represented such an upheaval, a kind of Copernican turn that upended everything they thought they knew about American society and politics.

As in so many instances in history, the response by the ruling elite was not to adapt their worldview to the newly born reality, but to mold reality to their existing worldview. Weeks after the election, Hillary Clinton declared a “fake news epidemic.” The thesis was painfully clear: The U.S. was under attack by its geopolitical adversaries, who were weaponizing social media platforms to sway electoral outcomes. Over the following years, this thesis would be unpacked over and over: The Trump campaign had worked with the Kremlin to stage a mass-scale campaign to distort public views, swinging the election in Trump’s favor. 

How this could have been ascertained little more than days after the election was never explained. Nor was any evidence ever presented that activities on Facebook—the platform that was identified by the media as the primary vector for this attack—had succeeded in moving the needle. One of the few studies on this topic found that election-related false narratives on social media resulted in a shift of only a few hundreths of a percent. 

But none of these very legitimate questions were raised. In fact, the narrative was deepened. The idea, deployed by the Clinton campaign in conjunction with the high-powered political PR firm FusionGPS, was that we had entered an era where information was so compromised that government intervention was urgently needed. In one of his final acts as president, Barack Obama pushed through an administrative determination that designated elections—and, by virtue of this, the information surrounding them—as critical infrastructure. Information now came under the purview of government action and control.

In retrospect, the epistemic bait-and-switch is breathtaking: In order to protect truth, Illing and others argued, journalism had to abandon its most fundamental tenets.

The media seemed to openly disavow the idea of neutrality and objectivity. Vox journalist Sean Illing made one of many such declarations. Illing wrote in 2020, just months before the November election, that,

The American media ecosystem has become saturated with misinformation and noise because the press remains committed to a set of norms that are ill-adapted to the digital age … the obsession with “objectivity” in particular has led to an obsession with “balance” or “fairness” that makes it easy for bad-faith actors to get away with pushing falsehoods.

In retrospect, the epistemic bait-and-switch is breathtaking: In order to protect truth, Illing and others argued, journalism had to abandon its most fundamental tenets. In this politically driven determination, they rejected not only neutrality—an idea debated for decades on the premise that journalists, as human beings, can never fully detach from their own perspective—but also objectivity—the idea that truth exists independently of the observer.

In a vacuum, this idea would have made for good copy, but little more. In reality, it was married to a social justice movement that operationalized it. Just a few weeks before the Vox piece, journalist Wesley Lowery published a wave-making op-ed in The New York Times that married the political rejection of objectivity and neutrality with the then emerging Black social justice movement. In his piece, “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists,” Lowery opined that, “Black journalists are speaking out because one of the nation’s major political parties and the current presidential administration are providing refuge to white supremacist rhetoric and policies, and our industry’s gatekeepers are preoccupied with seeming balanced, even ordering up glossy profiles of complicit actors.”

One of the “glossy profiles of complicity actors” Lowery had in mind was an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton (R) in The New York Times. The piece, which had been solicited by the paper’s opinion editor, called for National Guard troops to be called in to restore order in American cities rocked by Black Lives Matter protests that frequently devolved into riots. 

Had Cotton issued this call on Fox News or the Washington Examiner, no one would have thought twice. But the fact that he was able to make this argument in the flagship news outlet of the center left was an outrage that demanded not just action—the op-ed prompted a mass walkout by NYT newsroom staff—but a public rethinking of the entire enterprise of journalism itself. The theory of new journalism built on a rejection of neutrality and objectivity would not be quietly embraced by journalists at legacy outlets, but trumpeted in the pages of news outlets across the country. It would become a cause célèbre of journalism in itself.

Lowery’s racially motivated rejection of objectivity was not new to The New York Times. The previous year, Nikole Hannah-Jones had published her 1619 Project, which argued in an entire edition of The New York Times Magazinededicated to the theme that Americans had been born not in liberty, but in slavery. That Hannah-Jones and The 1619 Project had been repudiated by virtually the entire field of American history, including historians at elite American universities, mattered little or not at all. The reason was exactly the one promulgated by Lowery and Illing: The subjective truths of the Black Lives Matter movement and the quest for racial equity powering not only outweighed the imperatives of truth-seeking, but negated them entirely.

By now, readers of this piece will have detected the core philosophical framework undergirding this shift. For decades, post-modernism had taught that there is no such thing as objective truth, but only social constructs built by those in power. In this case, the power was “white supremacy.” This served the movement remarkably well. With a wave of the collective hand, it could dismiss hard data about police shootings of Black Americans relative to the general population as racially biased and stigmatize those dared to raise questions around the data as full-blown racists. 

Over subsequent years, the same template would be applied to whatever political cause was championed by the left at any given moment. The most prominent of these waves was the gender movement, which used this machinery to overwrite the science of biology with the social science of gender ideology. Those, like J.K. Rowling, who chose to debate the merits of these ideas were labeled anti-trans bigots, or, in Rowling’s case, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFS. 

With COVID, the argument shifted in the direction of near total enforcement of the science establishment orthodoxy on the issue. If you explored the idea that the virus may have originated from a lab that worked to enhance the virality of coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2, you were branded a conspiracy theorist. If you questioned the efficacy of non-respirator masks, which the head of America’s pandemic response, Anthony Fauci, had only weeks before publicly claimed were not effective in stopping transmission, you were called not only anti-science, but a disease vector. Government, newly empowered by post-2016 election information policing powers, stepped in to censor inconvenient facts on social media.

The legacy media and its political allies had built a powerful trebuchet to beat political enemies into submission.

In the introduction to my book about The New York Times, I warned that although the bien pensant had managed to successfully pull off the great epistemological feat of the 21st century—using narrative machinery to reconstruct public truth—this feat would not go unnoticed. The legacy media and its political allies had built a powerful trebuchet to beat political enemies into submission. As with any war, however, the enemy defeated by a powerful new weapon inevitably learns to build and wield that weapon itself. The warfare that results becomes far more destructive. 

Over the past five years, we have witnessed exactly this effect take hold of the American public consciousness. In the wake of the greatest clampdown on information, there has been a counter-weaponization of it. Accounts banned or “throttled” by Big Tech censors returned to platforms with a literal vengeance. Users that had been punished for questioning the efficacy of COVID vaccines would now build conspiratorial narratives about inoculation as an instrument of evil. People who were labeled racist for asking if BLM’s central claims withstood real scrutiny would turn to open race-baiting as a form of retribution.

It was at this exact moment that the world was plunged into geopolitical chaos. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. A year later, Hamas stormed into Israel, slaughtering 1,200 civilians, raping women, and dragging 200 hostages, including women, children, and even infants, into Gaza. In both cases, the major combatants—Russians under a leader trained by the KGB, the master-agency of propaganda, and the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Islamists for whom psychological manipulation constitutes the essence of their war against the West—reached naturally, almost reflexively, for the dark arts.

On social media platforms, they found legions of willing soldiers. In the pre-digital era, propaganda required either building media infrastructure—creating newspapers, standing up broadcast channels—or infiltrating existing ones by recruiting or bribing journalists as assets. Both endeavors are expensive, time consuming, and carry significant risk. Today, every one of those factors has been inverted. The creation of bot networks is, for a state actor, a relatively trivial affair. Paying off top-tier influencers through shell companies or using advertising deals with inflated pricing is virtually impossible to detect. 

The vast sums at stake make this kind of activity irresistible. In 2024, news reports identified influencer Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan, as two figures mentioned in an unsealed indictment against figures tied to Russian state media outlet Russia Today (RT). The indictment alleged that individuals working for RT paid Tenet Media, the company owned by Chen and Donovan, to distribute content produced by other influencers. Ultimately, neither Chen nor Donovan were charged.

For the first time, however, we were given a glimmer of insight into the amounts at stake. The company belonging to Chen, a mid-level influencer, was paid $10 million. For top-tier influencers, the numbers likely scale disproportionately higher.

Conspiracy theory is the most optimized format … it removes the most expensive, time-consuming constraint aspect of journalism—original reporting of corroborated facts.

All this has created the conditions for a perfect storm of propaganda. The demand is bottomless. All that is required is a ceaseless flow of content to feed the flywheel of social media engagement. In this maelstrom, conspiracy theory is the most optimized format. On the supply side, it removes the most expensive, time-consuming constraint aspect of journalism—original reporting of corroborated facts. Instead, the latest, zaniest, and most dangerous ideas that come to mind are instantly turned into “investigations” with dark portent. The material exists prepackaged: antisemitic tropes, tales of flying saucers and alien abductions, and alternative histories that discard established fact as their starting point. The only barriers are technical, and even then they are strikingly low—two or three cameras, a microphone, and a small production team.

On the other side of the market, the demand is bottomless. In the 1990s, when talk radio was on the rise, the content had to be heard in real time and could only be accessed on stations, and in regions, where it was available. Today, all podcasting—the modern equivalent of talk radio—is accessible at any time to every person on the planet. Hyper-specific niches open into mass audiences whose scale dwarfs that of pre-internet broadcast media. The economics scale at breakneck speed.

But there is another factor at work. In his book, How to Win an Information War, disinformation scholar Peter Pomerantsev makes a powerful point expressed in the title of the book’s first chapter: “Propaganda is the Remedy for Loneliness.” This notion traces back to French sociologist and philosopher Jacques Ellul, who wrote that modern man

feels the most violent need to be reintegrated into a community, to have a setting, to experience ideological and affective communication … That loneliness in which he can share nothing, talk to nobody, and expect nothing from anybody, leads to severe personality disturbances.

 If loneliness had been a driving factor in the 1960s when Ellul was writing, today it’s more than even an “epidemic,” as it’s sometimes described. It is the very premise of digital life. The all-encompassing solution to it, the rectangular black holes into which we pour our loneliness, is both remedy and cause of the disease. The atomization of living life with heads bowed, eyes locked on the device of our hands, is total. The common culture defined by books and magazines is gone. And with it, the shared vocabulary of generally agreed upon fact—the moon landing was a triumph, safely administered vaccines keep populations healthy, biological reality exists, and a complex dynamic of politics and markets, not a shady cabal of uber-rich Jews, determines the course of nations—has been dispatched.

 The one great hope lies in the very thing that the confluence of forces on the left and right have sought to dispense with: Objective reality exists.

Audiences, instead, walk through the doorways of conspiracy theory, where they can join a club of initiates given access to something hidden from the broader world. As Ellul put it: 

For it, propaganda, encompassing human relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths.

This is the age of propaganda. The one great hope lies in the very thing that the confluence of forces on the left and right have sought to dispense with: Objective reality exists. It can be studied, measured, and theories about it can be tested. More than anything, in the final analysis, reality always asserts itself. Getting there is about acknowledging this basic fact—and agreeing that no single party or school of thought has a monopoly on the truth. Instead, we collaborate to build models that aim not to advance interests but get close to “the real thing,” whatever it might be.

The dialectic of theorizing, testing, and improving is painstaking. It’s not sexy, and it’s certainly not lucrative. But if there is any path forward, it is this one. It’s time for us to take it.

As I write this the week of April 20, 2026, both mainstream media and social media are chockablock full of coverage of the disappearance or death of eleven (and counting) U.S. scientists who worked on UFOs, nuclear weapons, military defense, propulsion systems, or other related fields (a category that keeps growing as new deaths or disappearances are identified not associated with one of the original categories).

House Oversight Chair James Comer, for example, told Fox News “Congress is very concerned about this. Our committee is making this one of our priorities now because we view this as a national security threat,” adding “there’s a high possibility that something sinister is taking place here.”

Congressman Eric Burlison (R) told Fox News “This has all the hallmarks of a foreign operation,” and suggested to Elizabeth Vargas at NewsNation that it could be China, Russia, or Iran behind the cabal. Famed physicist Michio Kaku opined “If 10 scientists suddenly die or vanish who all have access to sensitive research, this is cause for national concern.” Even President Trump admitted that this is “pretty serious stuff…some of them were very important people,” but added “I hope it’s random.”

It’s random, Mr. President. Connecting a small cohort of individuals from a wide range of fields to deaths or disappearances is an example of what I call patternicity, or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise. It is also a case study in what cognitive psychologists call base rate neglect, or the tendency to focus on specific, vivid, or anecdotal evidence and ignore statistical generalizations that better explain the phenomenon.

One of the eleven scientists, for example, Amy Eskridge, who was president of the Institute for Exotic Science (an organization she co-founded) and worked on anti-gravity propulsion and electrostatic propulsion systems, died by suicide of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. How unusual is that? According to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Violence Solutions, 27,300 people die each year by gun-inflicted suicide in the U.S. That’s the base rate, and Eskridge’s own non-conspiratorial family accepts the fact that Amy was another lamentable casualty of gun violence and suicidality and not the victim of a vicious UFO cabal. “Scientists die also, just like other people,” explained her father Richard.

Most of the other scientists have similar prosaic (albeit heartbreaking) explanations. Monica Reza, who worked on orbital communication systems, for example, disappeared while hiking in the Angeles National Forest near Mount Waterman in California, which is a remote forested area near where I live in which people go missing every year. Although she was accompanied by two other experienced hikers who reported that she just dropped off the side of the trail, I have done a fair amount of hiking and mountain biking in those mountains and well know that there are countless precipitous cliffs off which one could easily fall off and disappear into thick brush below (which is how I broke my collarbone on a mountain bike ride in 1991).

A similar disappearance is that of retired Major General William Neil McCasland, who was Director of Air Force Research Lab who worked on hypersonics, directive energy systems, and advanced propulsion technology, who went missing during a wilderness hike on February 27, 2026 in New Mexico, apparently taking with him his wallet and a .38 caliber revolver and leather holster (leaving behind his phone and prescription glasses). According to his wife, McCasland had been experiencing short-term memory loss, medical issues, anxiety, and a lack of sleep, adding that she suspected he “planned not to be found” and, in any case, “He retired from the [Air Force] almost 13 years ago and has had only very commonly held clearances since. It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him.”

Before we jump to conspiratorial speculations on these particular vanishings, consider the fact that somewhere between 1,200 and 1,600 people disappear in America’s National Parks annually in the U.S., a stunning number that shrinks by comparison to the over 500,000 people who go missing each year according to the FBI. That’s a base rate one should never neglect and likely is the explanation for the disappearance of 48-year-old government contractor Steven Garcia in August of 2025, also in New Mexico, who worked on nuclear and aerospace research, carrying a handgun and also leaving behind his phone, keys, wallet and car. Anecdotally weird? Sure. Statistically out of the ordinary for missing persons? No.

The rest of the outcomes are equally unsurprising and not out of the ordinary: Michael Hicks “undisclosed cause of death” was in reality, according to the LA County Coroner, caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, for which the CDC and the American Heart Association document over 900,000 Americans die each year due to this and related heart diseases. 

Plasma physicist Nuno Loureiro was murdered by a revenge-seeking ex-classmate from the 1990s, who confessed that he’d been planning it for years and that he was envious and resentful of Loureiro’s success. Disturbing, but not mysterious.

Astronomer Carl Grillmair, a 67-year-old Caltech professor who worked on exoplanets, stellar streams, and near-earth objects, was shot to death in February 2026 on the front porch of his rural home in Antelope Valley, CA (about a hundred miles from Caltech out in the desert outside Los Angeles), by 29-year-old Freddy Snyder, a known criminal with a long rap sheet that included carjacking and burglary, including on Grillmair’s property months before, which the astronomer responded to by calling the police on him (as one would rationally do). Again, troubling and tragic, but not inexplicable or grand conspiratorial.

And so on.

The Internet, especially X, is rapidly filling up with additional confusions over these alleged cabals. One Dr. John Brandenburg, a self-identified “plasma physicist” who works on “fusion energy and advanced space propulsion,” with “Phd” in his X username, told his 22.2k followers (see screenshot below) that the death of an “antigravity researcher” named Dr. Ning Li, who was stuck by a vehicle and sustained brain damage that would take her life many years later, was actually the victim of a murderous conspiracy: 

Dear Friends, Like Dr. Ning Li, antigravity researcher, professor John Mack of Harvard, Pulitzer Prize winner, and a Psychiatrist researching UFO abductees, was also run over by a car. This happened in London in 2004. This must end, and whoever is responsible brought to justice.

In fact, Dr. Li died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2021 at the age of 78, following a long health decline after a 2014 automobile accident where she was struck by a vehicle while crossing a street at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and sustained permanent brain damage. As I explained to Dr. Brandenberg in my response to his post on X: 

In the US ~7,500 pedestrians are killed in traffic crashes annually. Globally, WHO reports ~ 1.19 million deaths/year. Before you concoct wild conspiracy theories about UFO people being run over, stop neglecting the base rate.

The tireless UFO disclosure activist and one-time government insider Lue Elizondo went on Chris Cuomo’s popular podcast to explain that UFO disclosure activists and former (and present) government insiders are being murdered, which as I also pointed out on X (see screen shot below) is just what one would do if you didn’t actually believe that you could be murdered yourself.

 And in this mode, I also pointed out on X all the proponents of UFO and UAP disclosure who have not been murdered or disappeared, which again as a counterfactual would seem to negate what is on the table with this so-called mystery, namely that such people are being murdered by some nefarious “they” purportedly operating in the name of some government agency or private corporation.

More generally, this phenomenon is also emblematic of what I call the fallacy of excluded exceptions, an illustration for which can be seen in a 2x2 matrix of four cells (see figure below). Cell 1 represents our mystery, namely UFO and nuclear/military scientists who go missing or are found dead before old age. What about all the UFO and nuclear/military scientists who do not go missing or are not found dead before old age (Cell 2)? Or the non-UFO and non-nuclear/military scientists who go missing or are found dead before old age (Cell 3)? Or the non-UFO and non-nuclear/military scientists who do not go missing or are not found dead before old age (Cell 4)? Suddenly our mystery disappears. There’s nothing unusual to explain in the broader context of everything else that could happen but are ignored in our focus on just the combination we’re interested in exploring.

Keep this matrix of possibilities in mind as we hear about additional Cell 1 examples in the coming days and weeks, such as the one posted by Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R) on April 21, 2026 (see screenshot below), about “the tragic passing of David Wilcock,” citing the biblical passage of John 8:32, which reads “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

What truth is that? David Wilcock was an American paranormal writer and YouTube influencer (over 500,000 followers) deeply involved in the UFO “disclosure movement”, who suggested that he might be the reincarnation of the famed early 20th century psychic Edgar Cayce, that he is in telepathic contact with space aliens, and that reptilian aliens inhabit parts of Antarctica where they are preparing for an invasion to take over the world’s governments and banks. 

Sadly, Wilcock died by suicide the morning of April 20, 2026. Although Luna suggests otherwise, according to the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, “The emergency communications specialist who took the call suspected the caller was experiencing a mental health crisis.” Additional details noted that “officers reportedly reached around 11:02am and tried to make contact with the male who was outside his residence holding a weapon.” 

Again, regretfully but necessarily, we must consider the base rate for this issue: according to the CDC nearly 50,000 Americans every year die by suicide, around half of which are struggling with mental health issues. As such, and woefully but realistically, I think most of us can agree that if you think you are telepathically communicating with alien beings and you think they may be trying to take over the world, you may not be fully sound of mind.

No doubt more deaths and disappearances will be announced in the coming weeks as believers go digging around for more examples of Cell 1, but keep the other cells in mind, along with these other principles of critical thinking, before jumping to unwarranted conspiratorial conclusions.

Zoologist by career, TV celebrity in the 1960s, renowned surrealist painter, and bestselling author of more than 70 books, Desmond Morris left a legacy that enlightened our species, answered taboo questions, and made audiences around the world look at behavior with renewed eyes. This is a tribute to one of the greatest observers of human behavior.

He never shied away from controversy. His first popular book, published in 1967, proclaimed on its cover what at the time was seen as offensive: that we humans are “naked apes.” The logic was compelling: if one were to place close to 400 primate species side by side, a quick visual inspection would reveal that the most notorious difference is the general lack of body hair in humans. Not intelligence, not language, not technology. That was the beginning of his effort to spoon-feed society a lesson in evolutionary humility: there is nothing insulting in seeing humans as animals; every species is extraordinary in its own way.

Going back to that book, in his 1979 autobiography Animal Days, Morris recounts the 30 days he took to write the whole manuscript for The Naked Ape on a typewriter, without editing—an astonishing result by any measure. The book spread fast not only because of its provocativeness, but because the world got to experience what descriptive, entertaining, and compelling writing can do when science merges with audience-centered prose. With over 20 million copies sold, it still stands among the 100 bestselling books in history.

Desmond’s curiosity was unstoppable, and it can be traced back to his unusual rise in academic science through the study of animal behavior. His Ph.D. began with small fish, sticklebacks. While his mentor Niko Tinbergen—the man who showed him there was a path for studying animals without putting them in cages through ethology—was adamant about the importance of specializing in a single species, Desmond rebelled against that idea. That was his character. He then expanded, in his postdoctoral studies, to birds, particularly the small finch. By this time his basement at the university had become overcrowded with multiple species, and there was even an aviary on the department’s roof. No fewer than 84 species passed through his lab during this period at Oxford. He was able to dedicate three full years to the ten-spined stickleback, while exploring variation in other species, fulfilling his tendency to be a “spreader”—to broaden his interests too much.

Out of academia, Morris became curator of the largest collection of mammals at the renowned London Zoo, sharpening his observations across more than 300 species. His insatiable curiosity pushed him to want to know everything there was to know about every mammal. He later focused on our closest relatives, non-human primates, such as Congo—the chimpanzee he taught to paint and whose works ended up in the hands of world-class painters like Picasso and Miró. Again, non-human primates were only a pitstop before the next stage, an obvious one to him: humans.

Once The Naked Ape skyrocketed, Morris moved to Malta, where he enjoyed the pleasure of spending his earnings and living a comfortable life. There he realized something that we may better understand from the flip side: “The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.” Under that premise, he published what could be seen as a follow-up to The Naked Ape, called Human Zoo (1969), where he revisits controversial topics of status, sex, and power. From this work, his commandments of dominance are priceless. He lists the behaviors that, in primate species, are associated with gaining and defending power and status, like “make changes even if no change is needed to demonstrate that you are in control” or “a leader should display his position in their demeanour.” All his work cultivated a unique view of the human animal through the lens of ethology, or through Desmond’s eyes.

Then, motivated by his book editor, Morris began the odyssey that he never finished. It started with a simple premise: a full description of the repertoire of human behavior. After a few months of work, his editor asked about his progress, and he said he was covering the eyebrows. To the editor’s surprise, he had started not from the feet but from the top of the head. That was a sign that his dedication to cataloging gestures was going to take him a lifetime, much like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). 

Not coincidentally, Morris moved to North Oxford, to the house of James Murray, one of the main lexicographic contributors to the OED, as if foreshadowing his own intentions. His book originally titled Manwatching (1977), later adapted to the zeitgeist of our times as Peoplewatching (2003), is still, to this day, the most exhaustive and profound description of human behavior. I believe it offers the highest rate of insight per sentence among all the books I’ve read, and I have called it the bible of human behavior. Ten years later Morris produced another version of that project, this time focused on areas of the body, covering each one through biology, anatomy, culture, and behavior, called Bodywatching (1985). For the serious human observer, these two are indispensable guides.

But Morris knew that the journey was longer than a book. The human repertoire of behaviors cannot be compressed into a trade book. He kept collecting behaviors, labeling them one by one. He had to coin names for many of them, because code-to-elbow or nose-to-forehead behaviors are not commonly described in ordinary language. His approach aimed to solve the natural ambiguity of behavior, so he used descriptive labels to avoid subjective interpretations. His encyclopedia of human actions, titled The Human Ethogram, reached at least two thousand entries by the time he decided to let it go. Now those archives sit at the University of Porto, at the Museu de História Natural e da Ciência, where at some point they may be compiled into one of those posthumous manuscripts worthy of Desmond’s legacy.

Morris’s success transcended writing, probably inspired by the admiration he held for Julian Huxley, a trailblazing biologist who broke scientific etiquette by appearing in mass media. Desmond became a celebrity-like figure with his weekly TV show Zootime. Each week he introduced audiences to different species from the London Zoo, where he worked. The anecdotes are hilarious, and his descriptions of behavior glued audiences to topics they otherwise might have ignored. He developed a charismatic presence that evolved further in his documentaries.

Over his life Morris ended up writing three autobiographies, each time adding new elements, culminating in his more than 600-page 2006 memoir, Watching. This book is as funny as a comedy, and it has the depth and texture of stories that let you enjoy and learn in equal parts. In it, Desmond shares an observational palate so rich that he successfully predicts winners of sumo fights, accidentally receives a papal blessing from Paul VI, and is mistaken for British intelligence in Moscow.

Since 2017, I have had the great good fortune to be in regular contact with Desmond Morris. We exchanged ideas, discussed a few gesture interpretations, like the elbow clapping, and he revealed that his favorite animal was the chequered elephant shrew. He kindly wrote a letter of recommendation for my Ph.D., gave me a few signed books, and invited me to dinner with his family in Ireland. I conducted one of the last interviews with him.

Over these years I asked Morris many questions. Among them was: “If you have to give a single recommendation to those interested in studying nonverbal behavior, what would it be?” Here is Desmond Morris’s insightful response (personal communication, 03/03/2021):

With body language studies, it is my impression that there is often too much abstract theorizing and semantic debate, when we should be getting out in the street conducting field studies. The question I would ask any student of human behavior is “How many hours of field observation have you done?”, not “How many theoretical papers have you written?” How many riots, bar-fights, pop concerts, boxing matches, art auctions, festivals, law courts, beach parties, military parades, religious gatherings and sporting events, have you attended as an objective, body language observer?

Desmond had in mind Tinbergen’s warning about his tendency to spread too thin across multiple problems and numerous species, a signature of his identity. That tension lived in the two sides of his personality: scientific researcher and popularizer. Those identities wrestled within him, and both appear relentlessly in his work and demeanor. For example, in Oxford Morris bought the neighboring house to accommodate his collection of more than 20,000 books. Intrigued by how many of them he had actually read, I asked. His answer was revealing:

I can’t remember the last time I read a book cover to cover.

That line reveals the tradeoff between scope and depth. Morris consumed texts across domains, ages, and styles, allowing him to create unique compilations of facts organized under a single ethological framework, something that could only have been achieved by an unsatisfied curious mind that pursued one question and then moved on to the next. Such an approach may increase the likelihood of stating inaccurate claims, and some people use Desmond’s mistakes as a convenient excuse to discard the rest of his ideas. That is a dishonest and unfair approach. He was a prolific well of novel ideas: where others saw laughter, he saw an evolved mechanism of tension; where Freud saw sexual fixation, Morris described behavioral relics that increase in frequency under discomfort.

Awards and prizes were not his motivation. He was never interested in being knighted as a Sir. Someone of his accomplishments would have been a strong candidate for such recognition. I once asked him about this, to which he replied in his unique humorous manner:

I have made enough rude comments about the authorities and about politicians to ensure that my name is safe from that nonsense. And The Naked Ape won’t have helped.

Morris was well aware of the consequences brought on by the depiction he made of the human animal. Those depictions may have reached their widest audience through his TV documentaries, like The Human Animal, a fantastic visual portrayal of human behavior across more than 40 cultures.

Desmond enjoyed his competing interests—writing and painting—which occupied his mind deeply throughout the day. In his words:

There are two Desmond Morrises, and they are quite different people. I can easily pass from one to the other, but I cannot be both at the same time. When I'm Desmond Morris the painter, I am quite different.... There is rarely any clash between the two aspects. The one helps the other. I obey the two sides of my brain alternately.

Morris’s legacy is gigantic. Beyond more than 12 books on human behavior, he produced books on the behavior of dogs, cats, horses, primates, bison, leopards, and owls. Yet his impact on surrealism was far more than a hobby. Not only were books like The Lives of Surrealists (2018) influential, but, more importantly, in 1950 his paintings were exhibited in galleries alongside Joan Miró. He was an accomplished surrealist painter and filmmaker. If you have read Dawkins’ most famous book, The Selfish Gene, you may have encountered one of his paintings, since Richard himself chose one for the cover.

Until his last days he kept painting and writing. In perspective, he was an outlier who reached the highest level in two incredibly different professions through sheer excellence. And that excellence was cultivated over time, until the end.

For the past five years, he shared in his emails that he woke up with the desire to write and paint—a man in his late 90s who continued relentlessly to enjoy his daily work. Someone who, at the age of 95, published three books in a single year. This year he was also doing two gallery exhibitions of his paintings. That was Desmond: an unstoppable force of passion and curiosity.

Thanks, Desmond. We will continue watching for you.

In 1989, Bob Lazar told Las Vegas reporter George Knapp that he had worked at a secret facility called S4 near Area 51, where his job was to help reverse-engineer the propulsion system of a craft “not made by human hands.”

More than three decades later, despite other whistleblowers alleging the existence of such programs, Lazar remains a rare figure in claiming direct technical work on a purportedly non-human vehicle. And he is now back in the spotlight because a new documentary, S4: The Bob Lazar Story, directed by Luigi Vendittelli, was released on Amazon Prime in early April 2026, and Lazar then did a burst of media coverage, including Joe Rogan, Area52, and Jessie Michels.

He has claimed to have earned two master’s degrees, one in physics from MIT and the other in engineering from Caltech. Skeptics reported finding no record of him at either institution.

Lazar is a contested figure. He has claimed to have earned two master’s degrees, one in physics from MIT and the other in engineering from Caltech. Skeptics, including ufologist Stanton Friedman, reported finding no record of him at either institution and have pointed to the absence of identifiable professors or classmates who could corroborate his attendance. Friedman also cited evidence that Lazar attended Pierce Junior College in Los Angeles, which he argued was difficult to reconcile with the timeline Lazar later described. Lazar has maintained that records connected to his work were altered or removed. He also pleaded guilty in 1990 to a felony pandering charge in Nevada. Taken together, these elements have remained central to skeptical assessments of his credibility.

But beyond these biographical facts lies a deeper disagreement about how his case should be evaluated at all. Part of the friction in the Lazar debate is about what kinds of evidence people are willing—or able—to perceive. When you listen to Lazar at length, you start processing how his claims are generated. Over time, it produces a strong impression that the account is being recalled rather than constructed. Notably, individuals who have spent extended time with Lazar without prior exposure to his story have described a similar shift: from initial skepticism to the sense that they were dealing with a person recounting, rather than constructing, an experience. For some observers, that distinction becomes difficult to ignore.

Many skeptics, however, operate with a different evidentiary filter. When claims are extraordinary, they tend to discount behavioral authenticity signals almost entirely, treating them as unreliable or irrelevant. Testimony, in this view, is flattened: people lie and misremember, and beyond that there is little to be extracted from the manner of delivery. This has the advantage of protecting against being misled by charismatic or deceptive individuals. But it also comes at a cost. It removes from consideration a set of cues that, while imperfect, are often central to how humans actually evaluate one another in real-world contexts.

So we are left with a perceptual mismatch. Where one person sees constraint, specificity, and resistance to fabrication, another sees only an unverified claim. One may register the difference between a narrative that is expanding versus bounded, while another treats both as functionally equivalent. On top of this, many skeptics place heavy weight on abstract priors—chief among them the assumption that non-human technology is so unlikely that no amount of testimonial evidence can meaningfully shift the balance. Once that prior is fixed, the rest of the evaluation becomes largely procedural.

This produces a kind of epistemic stalemate with asymmetrical risks. If behavioral signals are granted no weight, then no amount of constraint, consistency, or non-performative delivery can ever move the needle. Testimony collapses into a binary of verified or dismissed, and cases like Lazar’s are effectively decided in advance by prior assumptions. But if those signals are taken seriously, even provisionally, then the burden shifts: one can no longer dismiss the account wholesale without offering a comparably structured alternative explanation. The alternative explanations largely fall into two categories: 1) Bob Lazar fabricated the story, or 2) Bob Lazar is sincerely recounting a real experience that he fundamentally misinterpreted. 

Before turning to those explanations, it is worth acknowledging that Lazar’s disputed credentials and legal history are real and relevant, and any serious assessment has to take them into account. They establish that he is not an unimpeachable witness and that elements of his biography invite skepticism. Whether they are sufficient, on their own, to resolve the case is far less obvious.

Bob Lazar is a Fabulist

Lazar’s central claim has not been proved, but several elements once dismissed as fantasy have since entered the documentary record. After his account told to George Knapp, Area 51 was eventually acknowledged by the CIA, and federal litigation in the 1990s showed that the government was willing to invoke state-secrets doctrine and repeated presidential exemptions to shield information about the Groom Lake site. That does not prove Lazar worked on non-human craft, but it does mean one major plank of the old dismissive posture—that he had built an outlandish story around an imaginary place—has aged badly.

The CIA’s own history describes daily air shuttles moving personnel and cargo to the facility

The same is true of the surrounding logistics and of Lazar himself. Beyond a secret base in the desert, his story concerned a tightly compartmented installation serviced through unusual access patterns, including shuttle flights out of Las Vegas. The CIA’s own history describes daily air shuttles moving personnel and cargo to the facility, and reporting from Las Vegas has since made the JANET system (or Janet Airlines—a highly classified, top-secret airline operated for the United States Air Force) and its secure terminal common knowledge. Again, this proves far less than believers want. But it also proves more than skeptics used to allow. A fabulist could have been lucky once. He is harder to dismiss as a mere fabulist when elements of the practical architecture around his story keeps turning out to be real.

It is also worth recalling the context in which these claims were first made. In 1989, even within UFO circles, the idea of intact craft in government possession—let alone reverse-engineering programs—sat at the fringe of an already fringe field. The involvement of the U.S. Navy in such matters was not part of the discourse at all. Whatever one ultimately makes of Lazar’s account, it did not emerge as a straightforward amplification of existing narratives.

Then there is Lazar himself. Whatever one makes of his grander claims, it is no longer serious to imply that he was simply invented out of whole cloth as a nobody pretending to have moved in scientific circles. A 1982 Los Alamos Monitor article identified him as a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility, years before the UFO story made him notorious. Even the skeptical archival work that has tried hardest to reduce that credential concedes the key point: Lazar was in the Los Alamos world, and the facility in question was a major user laboratory hosting large numbers of outside researchers and contractors. That does not settle what his precise status was, but it does narrow the space for the old picture of Lazar as a basement fantasist who conjured a scientific persona after the fact.

Taken together, these later confirmations vindicate enough of the external scaffolding of his story to make the pure-fabulist thesis look increasingly strained. Even the once-mocked reference to element 115 no longer belongs to the category of obvious fantasy, though its later recognition by IUPAC does not validate Lazar’s specific claims about a stable isotope or gravity propulsion. But the record increasingly undermines the idea that he spun his tale out of pure nonsense. 

The most common objection to Lazar’s credibility concerns his lack of verifiable academic records, particularly his claim of having attended MIT. This is often treated as dispositive. But it only is if one assumes a normal career trajectory. Lazar has consistently maintained—publicly in broad terms, and in more detail in private conversations—that his presence in that environment was tied to recruitment into classified work. If that is even partially true, the absence of a standard paper trail is a predictable outcome. That explanation may be challenged, but it is not incoherent, and it is not obviously less plausible than the idea that an individual capable of navigating Los Alamos environments simply fabricated an MIT background without anticipating the most obvious line of scrutiny.

That is why the fabulist position now looks less like skepticism than inertia. That model asks us to believe that Lazar wrapped an elaborate falsehood around a secret aerospace world he happened, by chance or intuition, to sketch in several increasingly accurate ways before much of that world entered the public record. That is possible, but it is no longer the modest position. Too much of the story’s external scaffolding has since been independently corroborated to go on speaking as if we are dealing with a man who simply spun a science-fiction yarn out of thin air.

Bob Lazar is Sincere but Mistaken

Lazar may not be lying, this argument goes, but that does not mean he is reporting reality accurately. He may be recounting a real experience, interpreted incorrectly.

At first glance, this sounds like a reasonable position. It avoids the embarrassment of outright credulity while refusing the cheap certainty that he is simply a fraud. It lets one acknowledge the obvious fact that Lazar does not present like a conventional fabricator without having to follow that concession where it may lead.

“He believes what he is saying” has no explanatory power.

The trouble is that this middle position is often treated as though it were self-supporting. It is not. “He believes what he is saying” has no explanatory power. It tells us something about Lazar, but almost nothing about the world. To get from there to a real account of events, one has to specify how a sincere man ended up with this particular story: a decades-long account of a highly unusual engineering environment, populated by sharply bounded details that do not behave like decorative embellishments.

A more concrete version of the “sincere but mistaken” hypothesis is sometimes proposed: that Lazar did have some level of access to classified environments, but in a limited or peripheral role—variously described as a technician, contractor, or even something as mundane as scanning badges—after which he constructed a far more elaborate narrative around fragmentary exposure. In this version, the expansion is not assumed to be deceptive, but the result of inference that gradually hardened into belief. This is, in many ways, the strongest non-fabulist alternative. It preserves sincerity, explains his familiarity with certain logistical details, and avoids the need to posit a decades-long fabrication.

But this refinement simply relocates the core difficulty. It still has to explain how limited, peripheral access could generate a highly specific, mechanically structured account of a system he would not have meaningfully interacted with. It must also explain why that account exhibits the same constraint, stability, and resistance to embellishment as a bounded recollection, rather than the looser, more adaptive structure one would expect from extrapolation. In other words, it replaces one explanatory burden with another, without clearly reducing the overall cost.

He says he did not believe in flying saucers and thought those who did were nuts.

One striking thing is that Lazar describes initially drawing the ordinary conclusion. When he first saw the craft, he says the American flag on it made him think it belongs to the US, a top-secret breakthrough that would explain the UFO reports he had previously dismissed. He says he did not believe in flying saucers and thought those who did were nuts. Only later did he conclude that it was not human-made. In his account, the non-human inference was what he was pulled into by the structure of the work itself.

That is already a problem for the standard middle position. It means the “misinterpretation” in question cannot be a simple matter of a UFO-minded witness projecting his prior beliefs onto an ambiguous event. Lazar’s own account begins with the conservative interpretation and moves away from it only when the setting itself stops making sense under that frame. The skeptic who grants that Lazar is sincere now has to say more than “people can be mistaken.” Of course they can. The question is: mistaken about what, exactly?

That question becomes sharper once one notices the kind of details around which his account is built. The memorable parts are not the ones a hoaxer would obviously choose. Instead of dwelling on awe, he repeatedly says the dominant feeling when coming into contact with the craft was ominous, even creepy. The emotional tone is constraining.

One need not treat that as decisive.

The same is true of the physical details. Lazar describes the inside of the craft not in grandiose terms but in awkward, almost inconvenient ones: no seams, no stylized features, the same sheen and radius of curvature everywhere, light behaving strangely inside, halogen lamps illuminating where they were aimed but failing to brighten the surrounding interior the way one would expect. Luigi Vendittelli, director of the S4 documentary that recreated the facility in a VR environment, says that when they built the set, they ran into exactly this problem: the interior remained unexpectedly dark. He presents this as one of the moments that made him feel Lazar had not simply invented a cool image but was describing a physicality that does not lend itself easily to intuitive fabrication. One need not treat that as decisive. But it is exactly the sort of thing that makes the middle position harder. The details are bounded in ways that feel discovered rather than chosen.

That distinction is central. A constructed story tends to optimize for effect, and answers too many questions. Lazar’s account contains stubborn little irregularities. He says the craft turned into sky when he walked beneath it because the light bent around it, and that the weight was simply gone rather than transferred to the ground. He describes people working around a purportedly non-human craft in a surprisingly nonchalant, dusty hangar rather than in the kind of sterilized environment one might imagine from science fiction. These details raise the cost of the fallback explanation that he is sincere and simply mistaken.

He also describes intimidation tactics after going public.

We are also not in the presence of a private mythology floating free of the world. Lazar told Gene Huff first, then John Lear, and brought them out to see a Wednesday-night test flight because he had the schedule. He also describes intimidation tactics after going public: locked car doors and trunks found open, houses entered, George Knapp himself being followed. One can reject some or all of that. But once again, the middle position cannot simply wave it away with the generic proposition that sincere people can misread events. It has to say what kind of reality generates this pattern.

“He believes it” allows a skeptic to concede the very thing that gives the case its force while refusing to pay the price of that concession. But once sincerity is granted, the path to error is no longer cheap. It has to explain why Lazar’s account exhibits the structure of a constrained recollection of a specific environment, rather than that of an interpretation layered over an ambiguous experience.

In short, Lazar’s central claim—the custody and reverse-engineering of non-human craft—remains unproven, but the standard counterclaims do not carry the weight often assigned to them. Treating Lazar as a fabulist requires a level of sustained fabrication that sits uneasily with the structure of his account and its partial alignment with a once-hidden environment. Treating him as sincere but mistaken requires a chain of error that struggles to generate the specific, constrained features of the story. Neither path collapses under scrutiny, but neither settles the matter.

What remains is a less comfortable position: the case resists easy resolution, and the confidence with which it is often dismissed exceeds the explanatory work that has been done.

A feature length documentary film, released in December 2025, has revived an oft-touted claim of strong evidence of the supernatural. The Case For Miracles¹ is based on the 2018 book of the same title by Christian evangelist Lee Strobel.² Since the film has been criticized for being long on drama and short on evidence, I decided to look for documentation in the book. Unfortunately, when it comes to presenting specific cases of miraculous cures, this is limited to a single chapter, titled “A Tide of Miracles.”³

Among the dramatic cases cited by Strobel is that of a woman identified only as “Barbara” who was suffering from multiple sclerosis to the point that she had been confined to bed for seven years. She heard a voice telling her to rise and walk, which she did. She was sure this was the voice of Jesus. The documentation of this miracle, along with other claims in the chapter, however, is less than impressive, since they all consist entirely of testimonials; nor did the end notes to that chapter provide any medical documentation.⁴

Among the problems with testimonials as accurate histories are the imprecision of human memory, the tendency of narratives involving storytelling to arise among a group of those witnessing the same event, and bias on the part of witnesses. For example, consider the testimony of Tim Ley and members of his family regarding the appearance of the Phoenix Lights (thought by some to be UFOs) in 1997. He, along with his wife Bobbi, his son Hal, and his grandson Damien Turnidge, initially saw them as five lights in an arc shape. They soon realized the lights were moving toward them. As they did so, over the next ten minutes the lights resolved into a V shape similar to a carpenter’s square, or like two sides of an equilateral triangle. They, like other witnesses, reported a huge object, discernible not only by five lights on its leading edge, but as well because it blotted out stars in the night sky as it passed silently over the city. Soon, the object appeared to be coming right down the street where they lived, only about 100 to 150 feet above them, traveling so slowly it appeared to hover. 

It would appear that much of what witnesses saw resulted from the perceptual centers of their brains automatically filling in the spaces between the lights to create a whole object. 

Fortunately, in addition to the testimony of many witnesses, we have videos taken of the 1997 incident,⁵ which show a series of lights appearing in the sky, one by one, then winking out one at a time. In one of the videos, the man filming it exclaims, “Another one just showed up!” In that video the first three lights form a line, then a fourth appears in such a position as to make a shallow angle. In another video, this one without sound, one light appears, then another, then more, up to five, then six lights. These are first in shallow “V” shape, then in a more or less straight line. Then the lights wink out, one by one. None of the videos shows a solid V-shaped object blotting out the stars as it moves overhead. In fact, in most of them the lights simply hover, rather than moving in any discernible direction.⁶ It would appear that much of what witnesses saw resulted from the perceptual centers of their brains automatically filling in the spaces between the lights to create a whole object. 

The images of the lights in these videos support the claim by the Air Force that the “Phoenix Lights” were not alien spaceships but military flares dropped by an Air Force reserve unit on a training mission. These flares are used in combat to illuminate a battlefield at night. As such, they were dropped by parachutes, which allowed them to hover for some time. They were dropped west of the Estrella Mountains, which lie west of Phoenix. They seemed to suddenly wink out as they slowly drifted downward, and their images were blocked by the darkened, hence invisible, mountains. 

More to the point of miracle cures, consider the claim that the Indian mystic and holy man, Sathya Sai Baba, raised a devotee of his, Walter Cowan, from the dead on Christmas 1971. The narrative of this miraculous healing begins with Walter Cowan and his wife Elsie, followers of Sathya Sai Baba, arriving in Madras, India, on December 23, 1971. Walter, an elderly man, suffered a massive heart attack on Christmas Eve and was taken to a hospital, where he died. Then, on Christmas Day, Sai Baba entered the hospital room where Mr. Cowan’s body lay. After a time, he left. Then, friends of Cowan’s arrived and found him alive. This miracle was attested to by a medical doctor, Dr. John Hislop. His wife reported: 

When we reached the hospital with the vibhuti, Mrs. Cowan said, “Walter took a very bad turn just a little while ago. I thought he was dead, and I was terrified. I at once called Baba in a loud voice. Now, Walter seems a little improved. When I called Baba I felt his presence at once.”⁷

The validity of this dramatic testimony is somewhat undone by Elsie’s statement that she thought her husband was dead and that he was then “a little improved.” In any case, both she, along with Dr. Hislop and his wife, were devotees of Sai Baba, rendering the objectivity of their testimonies suspect. 

Since I wasn’t able to find more rigorous evidence than testimonies in Strobel’s book, I decided to look online for medical reports of miraculous healing, specifically healing attributed to the effect of intercessory prayer. In an article in the medical journal Heliyon from 2023 I found an article titled “The remote intercessory prayer, during the clinical evolution of patients with COVID-19, randomized double-blind clinical trial.”⁸ The article states the objective of the study as follows: 

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of intercessory prayer performed by a group of spiritual leaders on the health outcomes of hospitalized patients with Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) infection, specifically focusing on mortality and hospitalization rates. Design: This was a double-blinded, controlled, and randomized trial conducted at a private hospital in São Paulo, Brazil. 

Here are the results of the study: 

A total of 199 participants were randomly assigned to the groups. The primary outcome, in-hospital mortality, occurred in 8 out of 100 (8.0 percent) patients in the intercessory prayer group and 8 out of 99 (8.1 percent) patients in the control group […] The study found no evidence of an effect of intercessory prayer on the primary outcome of mortality or on the secondary outcomes of hospitalization time, ICU time, and mechanical ventilation time. 

In another study, doctors measured the healing effects of intercessory prayer on patients recovering from cardiac bypass surgery: 

Patients at 6 U.S. hospitals were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups: 604 received intercessory prayer after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; 597 did not receive intercessory prayer also after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; and 601 received intercessory prayer after being informed they would receive prayer. Intercessory prayer was provided for 14 days.⁹

The study yielded the following results and conclusions: 

In the 2 groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52 percent (315/6o4) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51 percent (304/597) of those who did not […] Complications occurred in 59 percent (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52 percent (315/6o4) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer […] Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups. 

Conclusions: 

Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery […] but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications. 

Another clinical double-blind study gave more positive results,¹⁰ in which intercessory prayers were made by a group that did not know the patient for whom they were praying, nor did any of the patients know whether or not they were the subjects of intercessory prayers. The researchers concluded that remote, intercessory prayer was associated with lower CCU scores (a metric used to evaluate severity of cardiac illness), suggesting that prayer may be an effective adjunct to standard medical care. While this study suggested that intercessory prayer aided recovery, the benefits gained were far from dramatic: 

Using the unweighted MAHI-CCU score, which simply counted elements in the original scoring system without assigning point values, the prayer group had 10 percent fewer elements […] than the usual care group. There were no statistically significant differences between groups for any individual component of the MAHI-CCU score. 

While a ten percent improvement sounds good, it hardly equals Strobel’s claimed miracle case of the woman with multiple sclerosis, bedridden for seven years, suddenly walking. 

Effects of emotions or psychological states on the brain … can result in the transmission of healing by way of the nervous system acting on the body through the endocrine system. 

Far more dramatic and positive results occurred in a notable Dutch study on the efficacy of intercessory prayer as an instrument of healing: “A Dutch Study of Remarkable Recoveries After Prayer: How to Deal with Uncertainties of Explanation.”¹¹ The study encompasses in-depth interviews of 14 people selected from a group of 27 cases, which were evaluated by a medical assessment team at the Amsterdam University Medical Center. Each of the participants had experienced a remarkable recovery immediately after, or even during, intercessory prayer sessions. So, is this evidence of miraculous, supernatural healing? Not necessarily. 

The article begins with a description of one of these healings, experienced by a woman named Julia who was diagnosed in 1990 with post-traumatic dystrophy, also known as Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). She was wheelchair bound due to intense pain. In 2007, after 17 years of suffering, she and her husband took part in a prayer healing session led by a well-known Dutch evangelist. After the session, Julia stood up and started walking without a trace of pain. She was still free of pain 15 years later, when the study was conducted. 

Julia’s CRPS is initially acute pain caused by an injury, that persisted long after the injury was healed. Among the causes of this syndrome are psychological factors and a neurologically triggered autoimmune response.¹² In autoimmune disorders, the immune system goes from attacking foreign invaders, such as viruses and bacteria, to attacking the person’s own body. Other patients in the study also suffered from autoimmune disorders. Among these were muscular dystrophy, psoriatic arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s Disease. Some of the patients also suffered from purely psychological problems, such as anorexia nervosa and alcoholism. 

All of these diseases can be induced by malfunctioning of the nervous system. This is not to say these disorders are all in the patients’ heads. However, the effects of emotions or psychological states on the brain-such as taking part in a prayer session and states of belief-can result in the transmission of healing by way of the nervous system acting on the body through the endocrine system. 

Three other patients suffered from brain injuries or malfunction. One patient had Parkinson’s Disease, which is caused by the failure of certain brain cells to produce dopamine. Another had suffered from a stroke. Another patient suffered from deafness. While the healing of these problems cannot be so simply assigned to the effect of a psychological state on the nervous system and transmission of these effects to the body by way of the endocrine system, they all do involve central nervous system functioning, which could be affected by an induced emotional state. 

Only four of the patients suffered from complaints seemingly separate from the nervous system. One suffered from iatrogenic aortic dissection—an injury or scarring suffered during a surgical procedure, such as the insertion of a stent. This is usually treated with beta blockers. These medications block adrenaline, thus relaxing the heart and easing stress on the aorta. So, a changed psychological state could, likewise ease this stress. 

Another patient suffered from pelvic instability, which often results from pregnancy and is caused by a weakening of the ligaments at the pelvic floor. This is a basin-shaped structure, consisting of the sacrum, pubis, and hip bones, all held together by ligaments. When these ligaments are overstretched or injured, the bones of the pelvic floor move excessively during physical activities, resulting in pain in the groin, hip, or back. This makes even simple activities difficult and painful. This condition is usually treated by various stretching exercises. 

Another patient suffered from drug induced hepatitis. This is inflammation of the liver caused by various medications, treated by simply stopping the use of these medications. Finally, one patient suffered from rotator cuff rupture. While this is caused by traumatic injury, its protracted pain results from inflammation. Thus, just as in Julia’s case, all four of these disorders involve chronic inflammation. 

There are three problems imputing the dramatic healings to divine intervention. One is that they all seem to stem, one way or another, from either chronic pain or nervous system dysfunction. We do not see in them people being healed of drastic infectious diseases, such as COVID-19. Nor do any of them involve permanent remission of metastasizing cancers. 

It is too far a leap to extrapolate divine intervention from a few healings we can’t explain. 

Another problem is that of patient involvement. In both the study involving patients with COVID-19 and the one dealing with patients recovering from cardiac bypass surgery, the intercessory prayers were remote for the purposes of performing objective double-blind studies. Particularly in the case of Julia’s healing, the patients in the Dutch study were actively involved in the prayer sessions, thus clouding any clear evidence of cause and effect. Finally, it is too far a leap to extrapolate divine intervention from a few healings we can’t explain. 

One last problem with seemingly miraculous cures as evidence of the Judeo-Christian God, is that such a deity would seem to be acting in a rather haphazard manner, healing some people here and there, while not bothering to intervene in horrific atrocities, for example, either the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide. In the latter event, the Armenians were targeted specifically because they were Christians.¹³ Between one and two million of them perished at the hands of the Turks and other of their Muslim neighbors. 

Thus, these now and again, possibly miraculous, healings hardly constitute proof of the God of the Bible.

I am a firm believer in miracles—a confession that will be immediately off-putting to readers of Skeptic. Below I will offer a definition of miracles and attempt to justify belief in them, but for the moment I will focus on a fundamental distinction between two modes of causality. I call these because-of causal mode and so-that causal mode. We can think of these as two ways of explaining an event.

Because-of causal mode example: a man walks into a bank and we ask for an explanation. One explanation tells us about the neurons firing in the motor cortex of the brain that excited a cascade of additional neuron firings, and then muscle flexing. And, of course, there was the mass of the body, the friction of shoes against the sidewalk, the heft and leverage of the doorway, and so on. This mechanical explanation makes the event intelligible; it tells us how the event took place. It took place because of all these enabling factors.

So-that causal mode example: There’s another way of making the event intelligible, and that is to explain the purpose of the man’s actions—he went into the bank so-that he could deposit some money. This is a teleological explanation.

The scientific because of explanation is concerned with immediate past events—facts about what things happened and theories about how they happened. Meanwhile, teleological explanations focus on future outcomes involving values. A teleological explanation tells us that an agent is acting for the sake of bringing about an intended state of affairs—causality guided by purpose. All living systems act with purpose; they seek beneficial outcomes; their behaviors are goal-directed, functional. They are about something.

Here we have two modes of causal explanation—both claiming to render events intelligible, but in different ways. There has been a long tradition of attempts to conciliate these two modes of causality, a tradition that I will now grossly oversimplify. Some people say that the so-that mode of causality is a mere illusion, or at best, a convenient pretense. They believe there is only one kind of causality, and that all genuine explanations can be reduced to the logic of because-of causality.

Others believe that teleological explanations are real, insisting that the universe has some sort of inherent or endowed purpose—it has a point, it is about something, for something. The entire universe behaves in the ways it does so-that an ultimate purpose in creation might be achieved. In one approach because-of causality is ultimately real and so-thatcausality is a fantasy. In the other approach so-that causality is ultimately real and the because-of causality of science is merely an instrument for working out an ultimate cosmic purpose.

The cosmic bus isn’t going anywhere that matters. It has no driver and no destination.

Here’s the big question prompted by our encounter with contemporary science: is the grand epic of cosmic evolution in some way driven or guided so-that some destiny might be achieved, or is the cosmos, despite its awesome splendors, ultimately void of genuine meaning or purpose? As Steven Weinberg famously said, “the more we know about the universe the more it appears to be pointless.” There are difficulties with each of these views. If you claim there is genuine meaning somehow inherent in the cosmos, then you must tell us what it is and why we should accept it. But if the claim is that teleological dynamics are not genuinely real, then you are left with the problem of convincing us that meanings (e.g., values, expectations, the force of will) fail to have genuinely real consequences.

I wish to offer a third option, one that avoids both problems. This view says that all the elements of so-that causality (goal-directed behavior) are genuinely real phenomena, but they are recent and unintended emergents of because-of dynamics.

We might frame this emergence view in terms of two different perspectives on the nature of matter: the grunge theory and the glitz theory of matter. The grunge theory says that matter isn’t much—it’s just some sort of vague or chaotic and uninteresting stuff that becomes interesting only when the laws of nature or the will of God whip it into shape. So the grunge theory appears to assign matter to one domain, while relegating both natural law and divine purpose to another. 

I want to reject the dualism of this view in favor of what I’m calling the glitz theory of matter, which holds that there are no independently real laws of nature. What we have are simply the properties of matter. A law of nature is just something we formulate as we observe regularities in the properties of matter. If we take this view then we can see that matter is not boring grunge, but wonderfully interesting and creative stuff. What makes it interesting: when certain properties of matter interact with other properties of matter, we find increasing probabilities that novel and unanticipated properties of matter will emerge spontaneously.

Here’s a simple illustration: Oxygen and hydrogen atoms have distinctive properties, and when they interact they can produce water molecules, which present new properties not found in either oxygen or hydrogen. And then the interaction of water properties with other properties of matter will increase the probability of even more novel properties. And, as proposed above, the emergence of new properties of matter may result in the formulation of completely new laws of nature. All of this follows the straight-forward logic of because-of causality. As interactions continue the probability of getting large molecules will increase, and when you have interactions between large molecules, then the probability of emergent living systems will increase dramatically. And as living creatures arrive on the scene, so too does the visionary logic of so-that causality. In a fundamental sense, the story of creation is a story about shifting probabilities and how these result in the various entities, events, properties and relations that make up the natural world.

I want to suggest that the goal-directed causal dynamics of teleology amounts to an emergent property of living systems. Before the appearance of living systems causality was limited to because-of dynamics, but with life comes purpose and value. Now agency enters the picture and things begin to matter. Living systems behave in certain ways so-that they will survive and reproduce. Molecules don’t do this. Molecules are created and constrained entirely by the care-less dynamics of because-of causality. But when molecules get really complex and interactive then it becomes more and more probable that they will gang up and behave according to a completely new mode of causality. This does not mean that because-ofcausality becomes overruled or deactivated. It means only that the because-of dynamics have called into play additional sets of anticipatory, goal-directed algorithms. 

A meaningless universe has inadvertently, accidentally and aimlessly created the conditions for meaningfulness.

Purposeful behavior and meaningfulness are real phenomena, not illusory; but they are also recent (~4 billion years ago) and localized (on Earth, at least). This suggests that the cosmos itself is essentially absurd—it has no meaning; it is not guided or coaxed by any agent or purpose. It is not about anything. However, without question, there are pockets of genuine meaning and purpose within the cosmos, as we are here to attest. The cosmic bus isn’t going anywhere that matters. It has no driver and no destination. But there are living beings on the bus, and they hustle here and there with all kinds of determination. My life, your life, all our lives, can be rich and full of meaning without having to claim they have cosmic significance. Life can be worth living even if we are not the point of some cosmic drama. The thing that impresses me most about the cosmic drama is that a meaningless universe has inadvertently, accidentally and aimlessly created the conditions for meaningfulness. This mysterious and wonderfully ironic accident—dare I say, “miracle”?—takes my breath away. 

By “miracle” I do not mean an impossible event occurring at the behest of an all-powerful supernatural agent. I mean only this: any event, the occurrence of which is considered to be so radically improbable as to be virtually impossible. (I am excluding logically impossible events from discussion because they have a probability of zero—even gods cannot square circles). A miracle is an event having a probability value so close to zero that you cannot imagine any conditions under which it might occur. Given these terms, it might be said with good reason that many miracles have occurred in our universe—it’s just that they never occur before their time.

A thought experiment might help to clarify this. Suppose we place ourselves backward in time to some point immediately after the primordial Big Bang, when the universe was nothing but a raging inferno (no quarks, no atoms, just pure radiation) and consider the prospect of a supernova. Nothing that might have been known of the natural world at the time could possibly predict or explain the formation of stars, not to mention their fusion and expulsion of atoms. The very idea of such events would be considered so improbable as to be preposterous, impossible, and contrary to nature.

 Life can be worth living even if we are not the point of some cosmic drama.

Or, let us go back a mere four billion years. Again, at that point we would be completely incredulous if faced with the notion that billions of tiny objects would soon be exploring about on our young planet and behaving in complex patterns that defy all that could possibly be known at the time about the natural order of things. And yet, lo and behold, living beings emerged, not because of some magic wand, and not because of necessity, but rather because a countless series of unpredictable probability-enhancing events brought forth the enabling conditions. 

We have the meaning-bearing lives we do because they were made incrementally less improbable by the epic events of cosmic evolution, whereby matter was distilled out of radiant energy, segregated into galaxies, collapsed into stars, fused into atoms, swirled into planets, spliced into molecules, captured into cells, mutated into species, compromised into ecosystems, provoked into thought, and cajoled into cultures. Surely, there is nothing intellectually shameful about embracing the staggering beauty and the humbling fortuity of these events as … miraculous.

Telegony is a long-discredited concept of sexual heredity that has been making a surprising comeback in recent years—particularly within digital filter bubbles, right-wing esoteric milieus, and so-called energy coaching scenes. But what does this tongue-twisting term actually mean?

Classical philologists will recognize Telegony as the title of a lost Greek epic recounting the story of Telegonus, the son of Odysseus and the sorceress Circe.¹ This rare literary reference, however, has little to do with the way the term is used today. 

In scientific-historical terms, telegony refers to the former belief that a woman’s previous sexual partner—often assumed to be the first—could permanently influence her body and thereby affect the traits of children conceived later with different partners. One dictionary definition calls it “a former belief that a sire can influence the characteristics of the progeny of the female parent by subsequent mates.”²

Derived from the Greek tēle (distant) and goneia (procreation), telegony literally means “remote reproduction.” According to this notion, an earlier partner leaves a lasting biological imprint that shapes a woman’s health and the genetic makeup of future offspring—even when those children are fathered by someone else. 

This assumption has been decisively refuted for more than a century. Since the formulation of Mendel’s laws of inheritance, modern genetics has established beyond doubt that only the biological parents contribute to a child’s genetic constitution.³ Telegony has therefore long been classified as a pseudoscientific myth. 

Curiously, contemporary dictionaries still cite prominent media outlets—Time, Newsweek, and The Guardian—as sources that allegedly support or discuss telegony. A closer examination, however, reveals persistent misinterpretations. 

Both Time and Newsweek claim that Aristotle defended telegony.⁴ Not so. While Aristotle wrote extensively on biology and reproduction, his treatise, De generatione animalium, does not propose that former sexual partners influence future offspring. Instead, he advanced a speculative model in which male semen supplies form while the female body provides matter.⁵ This reflects a metaphysical conception of gender—associating masculinity with form and intellect, femininity with substance and passivity— rather than an empirical theory of heredity. 

Telegony’s modern revival is not a scientific rediscovery but a cultural repetition—a myth repackaged to meet contemporary anxieties about sexuality, identity, and control.

The remaining references stem from The Guardian and are often cited in sensational headlines.⁶ These articles report on field studies by Australian researchers suggesting that previous mates might influence offspring size.⁷ Crucially, however, the observed effect concerned houseflies only. What headlines obscure—but the articles themselves clarify—is that these findings have no relevance for mammals, let alone humans. 

From Discredited Biology to Political Myth 

Although Mendel’s laws relegated telegony to scientific error by the early twentieth century, ideas of genetic “imprinting” did not disappear entirely. They resurfaced in ideological form within National Socialist racial doctrine—though not under the explicit label of telegony. 

The Nuremberg Laws did not claim that a woman’s first sexual partner permanently affected her later offspring. Yet the underlying logic of “Aryan bloodlines” and the notion of racial defilement through sexual contact relied on structurally similar assumptions: that sexual encounters could transmit lasting biological or moral contamination.⁸ Political theorists have long noted that myths become politicized when they resonate with prevailing cultural anxieties— whether about heredity, purity, or social order. 

This recursive history did not end with the twentieth century. The contemporary revival of telegony occurs in milieus that generally reject any association with historical racism. Nevertheless, similar narrative patterns reappear—now reframed in spiritual, esoteric, or pseudotherapeutic language. 

In October 2025, these developments reached a broader public audience. At a Skeptic Awards ceremony in Vienna, a European provider of so-called “telegony erasure” services placed third in a public vote for the most unscientific claim of the year.⁹ The Berlin-based proponent advertised the ability to remove alleged energetic imprints of former sexual partners from a person’s DNA through nonmedical “energetic healing,” and claimed to have trained a network of practitioners across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. 

Publicly available material reveals striking similarities across these offerings. Multiple providers use nearly identical language, concepts, and website structures when promoting telegony deletion services, suggesting not isolated belief but a loosely organized commercial ecosystem. 

The idea that a woman is permanently “imprinted” by her first sexual partner functions as a mechanism of control, naturalizing female subordination.

The ideological references invoked by these providers are revealing. Alongside esoteric concepts, they cite the so-called Rita Laws and Slavic-Aryan Vedas as foundational sources.¹⁰ These texts are largely dismissed within Slavic studies as modern fabrications, likely originating in the twentieth century. Today, they are frequently employed within strands of Slavic neopaganism (Rodnoverie) to mythologize ethnonationalist ideas such as hereditary purity and ancestral obligation—claims devoid of medical or historical foundation.¹¹

In this context, the Anastasia movement also appears. Based on novels by Russian author Vladimir Megre, the movement centers on a fictional Siberian healer and promotes a social utopia grounded in “natural” living, ancestral land, and hereditary harmony.¹² Telegony-like ideas—particularly notions of female purity, bodily contamination, and transgenerational burden—play a central role.¹³ Sect-monitoring bodies in several European countries have classified parts of the movement as sectarian and, in some cases, as promoting antisemitic and ethnonationalist motifs. 

These environments often overlap with right-wing esotericism, purity cultures, and manosphere-related discourses. Blogs and forums within these spheres repeatedly—and incorrectly— reject Mendelian genetics, misattribute claims to Aristotle, and revive essentialist gender models in which women are framed as permanently passive and subordinate to male agency. What emerges is not a revival of science, but a repackaging of myth—adapted to digital platforms and marketed as personal transformation. 

The Demand Behind the Myth 

When a long-disproved concept resurfaces despite overwhelming refutation, a psychological belief question arises: Why do people adopt the myth rather than the evidence? The revival of telegony is driven by several overlapping dynamics. 

Within Anastasia-related narratives, telegony is embedded in a closed worldview that promotes rigid gender hierarchies.¹⁴ Men are portrayed as active lineage bearers, women as passive vessels and spiritual caretakers. Within this framework, the idea that a woman is permanently “imprinted” by her first sexual partner functions as a mechanism of control, naturalizing female subordination. 

Comparable patterns appear in manosphererelated online environments, where telegony is framed polemically as pseudobiological justification for moral judgments about women’s sexuality. In these filter bubbles, reductive gender stereotypes dominate.¹⁵

The wish to “remove” traces of former sexual partners may reflect dissatisfaction with experiences of medicine and intimacy.

By contrast, telegony’s resonance in alternative medicine and energy-healing scenes follows a different logic. Here, the appeal lies less in authoritarian gender ideology than in the promise of liberation from perceived constraints of conventional medicine. Audiences range from curious experimentalists to resolute opponents of scientific institutions.¹⁶

Across these contexts, however, a more general motive may be discerned. The wish to “remove” traces of former sexual partners may reflect dissatisfaction with experiences of medicine and intimacy. Many people long for healthcare that feels meaningful rather than bureaucratic, and for sexuality that carries symbolic weight beyond the purely physical.¹⁷

Against this backdrop, telegony can appear to offer something else: the promise that sexual encounters matter, that they leave traces, that intimacy has depth and consequence. This emotional appeal helps explain why myths such as telegony persist despite scientific refutation. 

Telegony’s modern revival is not a scientific rediscovery but a cultural repetition—a myth repackaged to meet contemporary anxieties about sexuality, identity, and control. Recognizing this pattern is essential to distinguishing legitimate meaning-making from the misuse of discredited science.

Ostensibly, the reasons Donald Trump and his administration (particularly Secretary of War Pete Hegseth) went to war with Iran were as a response to the Iranian leadership’s brutal suppression of Iranian protesters, putting a stop to the activities of Iran’s network of proxy groups throughout the Middle East and to destroy Iran’s ability to create a nuclear arsenal.¹ President Trump specifically stated (emphasis in the original):

(…) if we didn’t do what we’re doing right now, you would have had a nuclear war, and they would have taken out many countries.²

He continued: 

The regime already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America.³

Since then, the Trump administration has added “enriched uranium” as another reason to invade. 

Iran’s religiously based autocratic regime has indeed brutally suppressed peaceful protest and does support a considerable number of violent proxies in the Middle East. However, there appears to be little or no support for the president’s assertions that Iran has a viable nuclear weapons program. He has previously stated that U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 had “obliterated” that nation’s nuclear weapons program.⁴

So, if Iran’s military capabilities aren’t the rationale for the Trump administration’s war on Iran, did the administration’ prosecute this war to help pro-democracy groups in Iran bring down that country’s dictatorial regime? Apparently not. War Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a March 2 Pentagon press briefing, “This is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change, and the world is better off for it.”⁵

That’s not quite correct. Iran’s new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s previous religious and political leader, recently killed in a U.S. air strike, isn’t likely to turn Iran into a secular democracy. U.S. air strikes have, if anything, hardened the anti-western, anti-democracy stance of the Iranian leadership. 

This view—that we are involved in a holy war against Islam—is not Hegseth’s alone.

So, if the United States isn’t intent on democratizing Iran, and Iran’s military capabilities aren’t an issue, what is our government’s motivation for attacking Iran, even bringing it to its knees in what President Trump characterized as “unconditional surrender”? While Trump’s motives may be a bit murky and unfocused, those of Secretary Hegseth are not.

Sporting on his chest, among his many other tattoos, is a Jerusalem cross—a favored emblem of the medieval crusaders. Hegseth, author of the 2020 book, American Crusade, told CBS reporter, Major Garrett: “I mean, obviously, we’re fighting religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon.”⁶ Troops, he later added, “need a connection with their almighty God in these moments.” A couple of days later, not long after returning from a dignified transfer of soldiers killed in action, Hegseth quoted Psalm 144 at a Pentagon press conference, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.” 

This view—that we are involved in a holy war against Islam—is not Hegseth’s alone. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has received over 110 complaints from enlisted personnel that their officers, referencing the Book of Revelation, have been essentially preaching to them, telling them this war was part of a divine plan. In one such complaint, a noncommissioned officer (NCO) explained that his commander even said President Trump was divinely anointed to carry out this plan: “This morning our commander opened up the combat readiness status briefing by urging us to not be ‘afraid’ as to what is happening with our combat operations in Iran right now,” the NCO wrote. “He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,’” the NCO continued. “He had a big grin on his face when he said all of this which made his message seem even more crazy.”⁷

This message reflects Hegseth’s own rhetoric, as expressed at a recent Pentagon Prayer Service (emphasis added): 

Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.⁸

One major source of evangelical Christian bias among officers in the military is the Air Force Academy. Evangelical Christian proselytizing and pressure to adhere to fundamentalist end-times rhetoric has long been a problem at the Academy. Consider this 2007 news item: 

Three faculty members from United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado Springs, Colorado–one of whom is also a former cadet–have gone public today with their criticisms of evangelical Christian proselytizing at the USAFA. They are joined by another former cadet now serving in Iraq. One faculty member has been reassigned to the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.⁹

This is one of several news items I found reporting on this problem during the 2000s. Since I was unable to find any recent news stories on the present state affairs at the Academy, I called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and was privileged to speak with Michael Weinstein, founder and president of MRFF. I asked him if, since there had been some congressional scrutiny of the Air Force Academy’s religious policies, if the Academy had reformed with respect to its religious bias. He told me that, unfortunately, the problem of evangelical Christian religious proselytizing was now worse than ever.¹⁰

The coupling of war-making with religious dogma also dredges up the specter of religious wars in the past, culminating in the Thirty Years War.

Among the many instances of religious coercion posted on MRFF’s Air Force Academy’s “Wall of Shame” is the 2022 incident in which a training day was scheduled on Yom Kippur, perhaps the most solemn of Jewish religious holidays (emphasis in the original): 

In its latest slap in the face to Jewish cadets, the ever-religious-diversity-challenged Air Force Academy this year scheduled its “Commandant’s Challenge” on October 5, perfectly timed to fall right smack on Yom Kippur, the most solemn of all Jewish holy days, forcing Jewish cadets to choose between their religion and joining their much-preferred Christian counterparts in the semester’s most important training day.¹¹

Two days after the event, MRFF received an email from the parent of one Jewish cadet who was not only forced to make the agonizing decision to miss Yom Kippur services, but was told by a senior cadet in her chain of command that the issue was her “being Jewish,” suggesting that she at least “make an effort to try Christianity,” inviting her to a Bible study, and telling her that she wouldn’t be “converting away from Judaism” but rather that “Christianity is just enlightened Judaism.” In the words of her parents, this cadet was “humiliated beyond description” and was “was more despondent than we’d ever heard her before.” 

This would seem to be an obvious violation of the separation of church and state. However, when the Air Force Academy invited the highly religious former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson to speak, he answered a cadet’s question about the separation of church and state as follows: 

[God] is the reason that our nation excelled the way that it does. And those people that like to criticize America—criticize people in America—and always talking about separation of church and state, which is not in the Constitution, by the way—do they realize that our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, talks about certain unalienable rights given to us by our creator, a.k.a. God—do they realize that the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag says we are one nation under God—in many courtrooms, on the wall, it says ‘In God we Trust’—every coin in our pocket, every bill in our wallet says ‘In God we Trust.’ So, if it’s in our founding documents, it’s in our Pledge, it’s on our courts, it’s on our money, but we’re not supposed to talk about it. What in the world is that? In medicine we call it schizophrenia.¹²

While “In God We Trust” is engraved on our coins, and while “under God:” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s, this hardly constitutes the imposition of a state religion. In any case, Carson was wrong in saying separation of church and state is not in the Constitution. The First Amendment, possibly the most important portion of the Bill of Rights opens with a prohibition against government involvement in religion: 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. 

Further erosion of the separation of church and state may be found at the Air Force Academy, as evidenced by the recent appointment of Erika Kirk, conservative activist and widow of Charlie Kirk, to the academy’s Board of Visitors. A recent news report on this appointment reported how this is in keeping with Secretary Hegseth’s framing of the current war in terms of a Christian end-times struggle between good and evil: 

Records from the United States Air Force Academy’s oversight board show leaders dismantling diversity programs and reviewing curriculum as the board embraces what critics call a concerning ideological turn toward Christian nationalism and prepares to seat conservative activist Erika Kirk.¹³

The communications, revealed in December 2025 meeting minutes reviewed by The Intercept, come as the administration has employed religious rhetoric in its military policies. Amid the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, some service members and political supporters have framed the war in religious terms, including describing it as part of “God’s divine plan.” 

Critics warn the changes could reshape how the military’s premier officer training institution educates future leaders as it aligns with the administration’s “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” initiative, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s marquee plan to reverse the military’s diversity efforts and emphasize “lethality.” 

The rhetoric voiced above by a military commander to his troops is ominous since it brings to mind the specter of nuclear war. The coupling of war-making with religious dogma also dredges up the specter of religious wars in the past, culminating in the Thirty Years War, and the creation of religious states such as Savonarola’s Florence, Calvin’s Geneva, and Oliver Cromwell’s England. Our more secular society grew out of the Enlightenment of the 18th century, itself engendered in reaction to the excesses of these religious wars and religious states. 

Hegseth, in contrast, sees our nation not as one founded on the principles of the Enlightenment, but rather as a specifically Christian nation: 

“America was founded as a Christian nation,” he said at a recent National Prayer Breakfast. “It remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it,” he added, splicing some religion onto a famous Benjamin Franklin quip about whether the US was a republic or a monarchy.¹⁴

“Not only are we warriors armed with the arsenal of freedom, we ultimately are armed with the arsenal of faith,” he said, adapting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s idea that the US should be the arsenal of democracy to his own religious worldview 

So, was America founded as a Christian nation? Not according to the second president John Adams who was one of the authors of the Constitution. Adams, then vice president under George Washington, while negotiating the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796 to secure commercial shipping rights and to protect American ships in the Mediterranean from the Barbary pirates, said: 

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.¹⁵

Hegseth is heavily influenced by Douglas Wilson, a conservative theologian and Christian Nationalist—one who advocates for Christian dominance over government and society. The sort of Christianity Wilson advocates is something few American Christians today would recognize as what they believe¹⁶ Hegseth’s views would also seem to derive from the (now discredited) end-times scenario proposed by the late Hal Lindsey, which involved the building of the Third Temple, elucidated in a 2015 report from one of his websites: 

Unbelieving religious Jews will rebuild the false temple and offer false animal sacrifices during the first part of the Tribulation. (Daniel 11:31). Then the “man of lawlessness”, the Antichrist, will desecrate that false temple of God by taking his seat in the Holy of Holies, displaying himself as being God. (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 NASB) That event will start the last half of the Tribulation. That will start 3½ years of the greatest horrors yet known to mankind. It will end with the visible Coming of THE ALMIGHTY, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will rule for 1000 years of peace. Then is the last Judgment of all unbelievers of all Ages. He will then establish forever the New Heaven and Earth.¹⁷

In a 2018 speech, Hegseth rhapsodized about the possibility of building the Third Temple on the Temple Mount.¹⁸ Lindsey’s prophecies, first expressed in his first book The Late, Great Planet Earth(the best-selling book of the 1970s), originally called for the Tribulation, the seven-year period leading up to the Battle of Armageddon, to begin within the generation (in his reckoning a period of 40 years) of the creation of the state of Israel. Since Israel became a state in 1948, that would have meant the Tribulation would have begun in 1988. However, as that year approached without it being likely it would be the beginning of the end, Lindsey recalculated the time two different ways. First, he said that the beginning of Israel as a state perhaps should not be calculated as 1948. Rather, it should be calculated as 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank in the Six Day War. Thus, the Tribulation would begin in 2007. Next, he decided a generation might really mean 100 years, rather than 40. Thus, the Tribulation might well begin in 2048 (1948 + 100) or even 2067 (1967 + 100). 

The end-times scenarios that so animate Pete Hegseth and many of the proselytizers at the Air Force Academy aren’t really based that firmly on the Christian scriptures.

The event that will supposedly herald the Tribulation is the Rapture—the belief that, just before the horrific catastrophes of the end-times are about to take place, true believers will be taken up to heaven, thus saved from all the horrors specified in the Book of Revelation. This elaborate doctrine is based on just two verses from the Pauline epistle 1 Thessalonians, 1 Thess.14:16, 17: 

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so, we will be with the Lord forever. 

The “we” Paul was referring to in these verses was quite literal, since the Christians of the first century believed the world would end with their generation. Consider, for example, the following passages from the Gospel of Matthew, First (Mt. 10:23): 

When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. Truly I tell you, you will not finish going through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes. 

This view that Christ would return to the earth in the generation of the first believers is made even more explicit in MT. 16:27, 28: 

For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall requite every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you: There are some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. 

Since Jesus didn’t return in the lifetimes of those to whom he was speaking, to requite everyone according to their works, i.e., the Last Judgement, and since Paul and the Christians of the first century did not rise to meet God in the air, how is it that end times prognosticators see the verses above as applying to today, some two thousand years later? Christian apologists go to great lengths to explain these contradictions. One of these rationalizations is that, “the Son of man coming in the glory of his father” refers to the Transfiguration, when, according to the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) Jesus was supernaturally transformed on a mountain in the presence of three of his disciples.¹⁹

While this interpretation is rather adroit it fails to explain the allusion to the last judgment in Mt. 16:28. A less adroit rationalization is that Mt. 16:27, 28 refers to the miracle of Pentecost (Acts 2:1–12) when the Holy Spirit supposedly descend upon the disciples, allowing them to speak in other languages than their own. Both rationalizations violate Occam’s Razor. The simplest and most direct interpretation of the verses above is that both Paul and the author of Matthew believed in the imminent return of Jesus, and that the verses above were never intended to refer to events two thousand years in the future.²⁰

They are, in fact, extrabiblical elaborations, wild fantasies based on teasing bizarre interpretations out of tenuous biblical passages

The end-times scenarios that so animate Pete Hegseth and many of the proselytizers at the Air Force Academy aren’t really based that firmly on the Christian scriptures. They are, in fact, extrabiblical elaborations, wild fantasies based on teasing bizarre interpretations out of tenuous biblical passages. As an example of this, consider the Rapture, a mainstay of modern end-times narratives. As noted above, the entire biblical support for this is just two verses from a single Pauline epistle, 1 Thessalonians 14:16, 17. In fact, the modern fundamentalist scenario of the Rapture, that has believers suddenly and mysteriously disappearing en masse as a prelude to the Tribulation, was the invention, in 1830, of a single maverick theologian of dubious credentials, John Nelson Darby (1800–1882).²¹

Perhaps Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the proselytizers at the Air Force Academy, and those military officers who see the President as anointed by God to bring about Armageddon, and who reference the Bible to back up their views, should read one more Bible verse, purporting to be the words of Jesus, concerning when the end will come, Matthew 24:36 (KJV): “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”