Edward Guimont

It’s one of the most influential social psychology studies ever. Was it all a lie? A classic book on UFO believers and their "cognitive dissonance" after aliens failed to land is called into question.

NEW: When Propecy Fails is one of the most famous social psychology books of all time, a look at a small group of UFO believers when the “spacemen” failed to land. I wrote about a new study from an independent researcher who says the book is not what it seems. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Few things bug me more than higher ed leaders saying that we lost our mission and lost the trust of the public, when we have actually been the target of a decades-long smear campaign by the right wing that worked. The moment we’re losing our mission is right now, in capitulation.

Got a Black Hebrew Israelite history book at the airport bookstore on the way to #HSS2025

Maybe Conceptions of the Watery World in Greco-Roman Antiquity by Georgia L. Irby. As for specific examples, not sure what sources go into them best, but Porphyrios the Byzantine whale, and the story of Alexander the Great's bathysphere and his fight with a sea monster.

Can anyone recommend a good text / source for sea monsters and imagined marine life in early modern period? Niche request. Cheers!

Hope Alexandra Pelosi makes a documentary about this that I can hear @willsloanesq.bsky.social talk about some day.

Trump: "Nobody knows what magnets are."

Time’s Arrow A Quarry Farm Testimonial Visit the post for more.

You can read my writeup of my stay, which included watching the Star Trek: TNG episode with Twain in his own house, here:

Shadow of the Comet: Mark Twain, Astronomy, and Space Fiction Abstract. Mark Twain was born in 1835, the same year Halley’s Comet appeared. Near the end of his life, Twain became convinced he would die with the comet’s return in 1910, which he did. This article ...

My article on Mark Twain's interest in astronomy, written with research done at @marktwain.bsky.social, is now out:

I've got an article in November's @historytoday.com on the remarkably durable hypothesis that Earth is hollow, from Halley to Symmes to underground feminist utopias to UFOs. You know the drill — to the centre of the Earth (I've probably used that one before).

A promotional image for an edited collection called "Lands of the Lost: A Field Guide to Dinosaur Parks Physical, Fictional, and for the Future." The collection editors Dr. Victor Monnin & Dr. Alison Laurence are putting out a call for contributions. Abstracts are due January 10, 2026 to dinoparkfieldguide@gmail.com. Find the full call at: https://tinyurl.com/dinoparks The background image is of the outdated-but-adored Iguanodon models at Crystal Palace Park.

A call for 🦕🦖🦣 contributors! With Victor Monnin, I'm editing a collection about extinct animal parks—it's a field guide, of sorts, that turns a critical eye on places real, imagined, and yet to be. Find the full CFP for LANDS OF THE LOST here: tinyurl.com/dinoparks #PaleoSky #HistSci #EnvHist #STS

Flat-out stupid Questions for discussion

In honor of today’s holiday in the US, I present an article I wrote for @eclasproject.bsky.social on how Columbus came to be seen as the one who disproved the Flat Earth:

eclas.shorthandstories.com/lent/flat-ou...

French remake of the Secret Mall Apartment in Providence.

When a Superpower Declines, Shared Reality Dissolves When the Soviet Union fell, Russians lost their sense of past and future at once. Collective hallucinations flourished in the void. In the United States, our reality is now disintegrating in a similar way.

When the Soviet Union fell, Russians lost their sense of past and future at once. Collective hallucinations flourished in the void.

In the United States, our reality is now disintegrating in a similar way.

Forget Dr. Zaius... Dr. Fauci is the real ape in our politics if you ask me!!!

The Most Interesting Man of the Van Vleck Observatory He doesn’t always drink beer, but when he does, he drinks his own. One of the difficulties of dealing with the types of archival material that rest in a historic observatory is that, while we have …

Page, a former member of the Robertson Panel, was at this time director of Van Vleck Observatory at Wesleyan University. Van Vleck was founded by two astronomers from Ladd who knew young H. P. Lovecraft. Page also drove Erwin Rommel's car: underctskies.wordpress.com/2016/02/18/t...

From Journal of UFO History Vol. 1 No. 3 (Jul/Aug 2004). The man in the goatee between Fuller and McDonald is Richard C. Hoagland, of Space Shuttle Enterprise, Face on Mars, and Hale-Bopp fame.

Collecting Old Weird Paperbacks with Jerrold Coe Podcast Episode · The AP Strange Show · 09/28/2025 · 1h 32m

This week, I had a wild chat with Dr Jerrold Coe about the weirdness of paperback forteana in the 50s, 60s, and 70s- the pulpy madness of recycled stories, crazy cover art, and myth making for fun and profit.
Coe writes about these titles on his blog, Paperbacks 🧵

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

2026 - 20 Years of BATW Events Page — Britain and the World

🚨THIS IS NOT A DRILL🚨
#batw2026 is celebrating two decades over two weeks!

Join us online 18-19 April 2026 or in person in Boston 24-25 April 2026!

Check out and share the CFP. You won’t want to miss it! britainandtheworld.org/2026-20-year...

Important to remember that everyone involved in renaming the DoD to the Department of War is afraid to take the subway.

Worries about vaccination rates in dogs As rabies seems to be spreading more in wildlife, veterinarians are especially worried about vaccine hesitancy spreading among pet owners, a dangerous trend that could lead to more dogs — and their owners — becoming infected. A 2023 study published in the journal Vaccine found in a nationally representative sample of Americans that nearly 40% believed canine vaccines were unsafe and 37% believed that vaccines could lead their dogs to develop cognitive issues, such as autism.

Dogs are getting vaccinated less and rabies rates are rising, in part because 37% of Americans think vaccines will give their dogs... pawtism.

www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

How have I not known until now that Richard C. Hoagland was a member of NICAP?

Have to give credit, this is the one thing I thought he wouldn’t be able to control his base’s response to.

Beginning the journey of reading through the APRO Bulletin for a project related to the history of ufology for next year’s plate.

This was over 20 years ago now but my memory was no, which is partly what made it so shocking, it seemed to come from a very serious place as opposed to any kind of humor (which wouldn't have been off from a comedian in the early 200s), which made it even more at odds with his public persona.

The most shocking bit to me wasn't just the homophobia but that it seemed to be informed by Christian conservatism and a belief that all gays were going to Hell, which seemed so strange a belief for someone like Nelson to have, as opposed to the general homophobia of the era.

My college's nerd club put on a small convention every year and we'd typically get a local celeb to attend. Around the time Nelson gave that interview of his politics, we were able to get him as the guest, and everyone was shocked when he made truly homophobic comments to a gay student.

Words/phrases Democrats should never use:

* bipartisan
* my Republican friends
* real, valid, legitimate, serious, important (to describe issue raised by Republicans)
* yea (when voting on Republican bills)
* distraction (to describe bad thing Republicans did)
* woke (in derogatory sense)

I hope the second weekly episode is called RePosting Through It.

The Cracker Barrel logo featuring their new slogan “White people are devils created by the great scientist Yakub”

Okay I guess I can see why this new logo is controversial