The Anatomy of Pseudoscience

An American couple present to the media the skull of a child they claim was obtained 60-70 years ago from a cave in Mexico. The cranial cavity of this skull is grotesquely enlarged, and the other features appear human, but in a distorted form. The media dub the skull the “starchild,” and speculate freely about the creature to whom it once belonged. Conservative scientists are convinced that the skull represents a severe congenital abnormality, but require more thorough examination before they can be more specific. Other investigators, however, reject this conclusion, and claim instead that the skull belongs either to an alien or an alien-human hybrid. They then begin an elaborate grass-roots campaign to convince the public of this startling conclusion, with some success.
Skeptics are all too familiar with the above sequence of events. The details, of course, change from episode to episode, but the themes are always the same. At the heart of the conflict is the difference in method between conventional, conservative, mainstream science, and what Carl Sagan dubbed “the cheap imitation,” or what skeptics call “pseudoscience.”

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