Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

Here's what I think really happened. Employed at a low-level position in Los Alamos, Bob Lazar applied for a job with the government hoping to work on alien spacecraft and didn't get the position either lacking education or work experience and was denied entry in Area 51. Perhaps he was psychologically screened out, or he flubbed the interview--I am only speculating. Instead of just returning to his other job or doing something else, he decided to make up a story about working there and is now famous for that. The general story that Lazar will eventually tell is nothing new. He repeats the same stories that UFO enthusiasts have been saying for years. There are two important innovations from Lazar. The first is that he identifies a location for the UFO research. Lazar didn't invent Area 51 as the location of the UFO research sites, but he made it famous. The second is that his entire claim hinges on element 115 and this is very important, and we'll get to it later. ...

On this 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing I thought it was a good time to tackle this conspiracy theory. If you want to read a debunking of the evidence of the conspiracy theory, there are a number of places that you can check for point by point refutations. I don't want to do that here because those other places do it so much better and I will only be offering a distillation of their points. Nevertheless, there are some important points to be made about the moon landing conspiracy theory that are more important than just arguing over the anomalous datum that conspiracists use to drive their point. Even when I was a conspiracy theorist, this was one theory that I could never swallow. Though I would love to claim that the believer in me was hiding an idealistic skeptic that could not square the evidence with the claims due to an innate epistemological understanding--I cannot honestly do that. I mean, it didn't make sense and I could see that much, but there was something ...