The Bay Area Skeptics are proud to announce our new website, built on Drupal, the content management system used by such luminaries as The Onion. On this main page, you'll find our new BAS blog, featuring posts by our Board of Directors. We're also going to increase the online archive of BASIS, our newsletter; look forward to that in the next few months!
Have any comments or suggestions? Let us know!
I am considering buying my first home. It is a renovated 1924 Edwardian style San Francisco flat, very charming with original details. After doing some research on the building, I discovered that there was a murder in the building in 1966. A young single woman was found stabbed to death in the apartment, the killer was never found. The thing that made my hair really stand on end is she came from the same small town as me and went to the same high school. My question to your readers: Do I buy this place?? I feel like I'm being a bit superstitious, but the coincidences are just too bizarre. I like the flat, it has a good feel, but I would hate to move in and feel scared and uncomfortable. It will be the biggest investment of my life. Any thoughts would be appreciated.Now, I don't want to be too hard on the questioner, because it seems like she knows she's being irrational and really, it would suck to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on real estate only to discover that you couldn't get over your irrational creepy feeling. And a number of commenters seem to feel the same way she does:
I'm superstitious, so whenever I move into a new place I
On Dec. 31, 1981, Channel 7 (KGO) had psychic Jeanne Borger on "AM San Francisco" to make predictions of events for 1982. Among other predictions (which cannot
July 2007 news included the case of a cat named Oscar who allegedly predicted which patients in a hospice would soon die. As SF Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll noted (30 Jul 2007), this seems a bit of a stretch.
"... Oscar's 'uncanny knack of knowing when people are going to die' [looks fishy]. Apparently he walks aloofly around the halls of the Providence, R.I., nursing home where he lives, and then settles down with a person who, only a few hours later, dies. Oscar somehow intuits the imminence of death and provides succor in these last hours - or so the story goes.
"From the evidence, an equally viable theory is that Oscar kills people, but no one has mentioned that possibility.
"The staffers at the nursin
What price happiness? Apparently $59.95 and up (plus S&H)
Imagine that if you could, for as little as about 60 dollars (or up to about 250 dollars), get some
Aromatherapy is only one of oodles of alternative medicines and holistic treatments that have currently captured part of the public's wild imagination. These
There are those in the Bay Area who "earn" their daily bread from the pain, suffering, guilt, fear, and hate of others.
Rev. B. Woods Mattingley, Founder-Director of The Seeker's Quest, entitled the lead article in his current newsletter: "Why Do We Suffer Pain?"
His answer: "Most serious illness can be attributed to one of several reasons: karmic, in which current life pain results from the excesses or 'sins' of a past life.... Physical pain is also
Demand for alternative "healthcare" continues to grow faster than the American waistline; therefore, job prospects for alternative-medicine practitioners who can offe
We have all seen the sensationalized treatment that UFOs have received on TV, even from "responsible" news organizations, with their exciting but unsubstantiated cl
I recently ran across a short article about a California clinical psychologist whose license to practice was put on probation because he persuaded two
