News Feeds

Skeptic: Are space aliens visiting Earth? 

James Fox: I was the biggest skeptic. And here I am, having delved into this, traveled around the world, and met with witnesses, military radar operators, and fighter jet pilots. I honestly feel like I have less of an understanding today of what’s going on than I did over 30 years ago. I really don’t know if the phenomenon is real. 

What are its origins and intent? I don’t have the foggiest clue. I really don’t. I wish I knew. And I’m starting to come to the realization that I’m just not going to know. I’m probably never going to find out. And it’s kind of frustrating. 

Skeptic: And here you are 30 years later. I’ve watched all those films. You go on Amazon Prime and type in UFOs, and there are just pages and pages of them. But yours are, by far, the best. The Phenomenon, and then your recent one, Moment of Contact, really stand out head and shoulders above the others. 

I know The Age of Disclosure is the big talking media event at the moment. That’s fine. But I like your films better. It’s clear, when you pile it all together as you do, with striking visuals and beautiful cinematography of the people you’re interviewing, that there’s something going on. 

So I guess the question is: What is it? 

Leslie Kean says in her book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Recordthat 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 and Mars, meteors and meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sun dogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off the clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected in the cockpit window, temperature inversion, lenticular clouds. And the list goes on. 

So what we’re really talking about here—and you’ve very adroitly put this together—is that remaining five to ten percent that really stands out. 

If we can agree that 90 to 95 percent have prosaic explanations, what do we do with those anomalies? In the history and philosophy of science, it’s always the anomalies that drive new revolutions and discoveries. The old theory doesn’t account for this, so what does? 

Maybe we just say, “I don’t know.” But somebody must know. This isn’t like some paranormal or supernatural phenomenon, like whether there’s a god or not. NASA isn’t going to find out if there’s a god. But NASA could find out if aliens have come here, in principle. 

Marco Rubio was in your latest film, and I’d like to think that if we had something he could tell us, he would tell us what it is. 

Fox: It’s certainly interesting when you think of someone at his level within government. He’s not retired. He’s current. He was a senator at the time of the interview. 

I remember interviewing Jimmy Carter. I think I was one of the first people to get Jimmy Carter on camera admitting that he had looked into UFOs during his presidency. He also had a sighting, which he talked about when he was running for president. 

Then I got to interview President Gerald Ford. And then the Clinton’s Senior Advisor John Podesta. And, indirectly, President Bill Clinton. And all of them said they tried to get to the bottom of the UFO phenomenon, and one of the things I walked away with was along the lines of what Rubio said: presidents are often kept out of the loop. Carter said that they made inquiries and essentially weren’t happy with the answers they were getting. 

John Podesta said the same thing during the Clinton administration. I don’t know if you remember this, but Lawrence Rockefeller was putting some serious pressure on the Clinton administration for transparency on the UFO topic. In fact, he went as far as saying, “If you don’t, I will publish an article about it in every magazine, state to state.” So Clinton said, “Okay, give me a case you want me to look into.” 

They came back and said, “Roswell.” Evidently, the Clinton administration made a serious effort to look into it, and they weren’t happy with the answers they were getting. They felt they were just getting the runaround. 

Of course, I don’t have a president directly saying, “I was kept out of the loop.” But I have President Ford saying he wasn’t happy with the answers he was getting. Carter said they made inquiries, but the responses were all over the place. And I know the Clinton administration, according to Podesta, wasn’t happy either. They felt they were getting the runaround. 

Let’s just say, for a moment, that we suspend judgment. If there were some unknown government agency—not elected officials—operating in complete secrecy, and if they did have, hypothetically, in their possession a non-Earth origin spacecraft or nonhuman intelligence and wanted to keep it secret for whatever reason, I probably wouldn’t tell the president either. 

Elected officials come and go every four to eight years, so it kind of makes sense that if you wanted to keep a secret of that nature, you wouldn’t want to give it all to the president. I don’t know. That’s just speculation. I’m told—and I could be wrong—that the last president who had a pretty good or bigger picture of the UFO topic was President George H.W. Bush. 

Skeptic: Well, Trump’s latest statement on this is that he’s talked to a lot of people who seem convinced there’s something there, but he hasn’t seen anything that convinces him. Maybe it’s what you’re saying, that presidents just don’t know everything. 

Fox: It really makes you wonder. When I was still on the fence about what UFOs represent, I went to the 50th anniversary of Roswell in 1997. I am interested enough to be out there poking around and asking questions, and I met many people who had been firsthand witnesses to the event when they were in their 20s or 30s. Now they were in their 70s and 80s, and across the board they told me on camera that their lives were threatened if they spoke up. They literally said that not only would they be picking their bones out of the desert, but their family’s bones as well. I’m not saying I categorically believe that just because they said it. But the different people I met seemed genuinely convinced that those threats were coming from above. 

Skeptic: Why don’t the whistleblower laws we have in place protect those people now? 

Fox: I don’t know. I’ve tried to get them to come forward to participate in different films I’m doing, but something is causing many people to not want to go public with what they know. That said, I agree that the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence has to be to believe it, so at the very least you want them to talk or reveal details that can be verified. 

This chart, Appendix I to Project Blue Book Status Report No. 8, shows the frequency of unidentified flying object (UFO) reports during the months of June, July, August, and September 1952. (Credit: U.S. National Archives)

David Grusch has made some pretty extraordinary claims, and if they’re true, the implications are profound, not just for the United States, but globally. These people seem legitimately fearful, not just about losing their security clearances, but about their personal safety. 

I’ve met some of them behind the scenes. Maybe they’re lying to me. They didn’t come to me; I came to them through other people. But they’ve said the protections are not in place. There isn’t enough security for them. They believe they’ll lose their clearances, lose their jobs, and some even fear they could lose their lives. 

In the 1950s, you had the massive flyovers of Washington, DC, over two consecutive weekends. You had orders to scramble jets to intercept these.

I’m not saying I believe that or don’t believe it. But that fear is a legitimate concern among the individuals I’ve met with. In 2023 they tried to pass the UAP Disclosure Act, which included whistleblower protections. It passed in the Senate but not in the House. 

Skeptic: In your film The Phenomenon, you end with an interview with Gary Nolan at Stanford. He says he’s seen stuff and he knows stuff. You ask him: “All right, can you tell us what you saw?” And he says he’s not going to say one way or the other. 

Why would a tenured college professor be worried about telling you what he saw? Aren’t there protections in place for freely speaking his mind? 

Fox: This is what I’ve been told: because it’s national security, people can just be picked up. There’s no due process. You can be taken and put behind bars. It doesn’t have to pertain specifically to UAPs or UFOs. It could be nuclear secrets or something like that. The concern is violating NDAs or anything related to national security. 

Skeptic: I asked Garrett Graff about this. He has a 500-page book called UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life, Here and Out There. He’s a good journalist and historian. He wrote books on the FBI, 9/11, Watergate, and Raven Rock—about the government’s Cold War doomsday plan, where the heads of the cabinet would go to underground bunkers. 

He said, “The problem I have with government conspiracies is that they presuppose a level of competence that is not on display in the rest of the work the government does. I just don’t believe the government is capable of keeping a secret at scale like this for any meaningful period of time.” 

He gave an example from his next book, a history of D-Day, Operation Overlord, the biggest and most important secret the U.S. government ever had. There were six, eight, maybe ten complete breaches of secrecy in the six to eight months beforehand. One guy accidentally mailed a copy of the invasion plans to his mom in Chicago. One officer got drunk and started talking about the invasion at a cocktail party. Another officer left a briefcase with invasion documents on a bus and had to chase it down the street to get it back. 

As Graff concluded: “That’s one operation over six months. So to me, I don’t see the capability of the U.S. government to keep meaningful secrets about a UFO program over such a long period of time.” 

Fox: That’s a really good point, and I do have a response to that. If you think about it, in the 1940s there actually was an admission that something of non-Earth origin was recovered. It was announced as such, and then it was covered up within 24 hours. 

A lot of the people directly involved later went on the record and said the original press release was true. They said, “I was there. I touched the debris. My son touched the debris.” You can believe them or not. 

In the 1950s, you had the massive flyovers of Washington, DC, over two consecutive weekends. You had orders to scramble jets to intercept these objects, with authorization to fire if they could. Then you had the huge press conference with General John Samford. It was the biggest press conference since the end of World War II, and he said quite a bit. 

After that came the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel, where the policy of ridicule was adopted. In the 1960s, The New York Times published an article quoting former CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter, saying that publicly they were making fun of it but privately they were taking it very seriously. 

In the 1970s, there was a United Nations event where people who had officially investigated UFOs for the U.S. Air Force participated, along with other witnesses. 

So, there have been leaks for decades. People have come forward and tried to get the truth out. I think what’s different today is that in 2017 a handful of intelligence insiders, in protest of excessive secrecy, walked evidence into The New York Times, which published it on their front page. That changed everything. 

You also had former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid confirming that he launched an investigation into UFOs. So people at high levels were taking it seriously. 

But I think the policy of ridicule, adopted around 1953, really stuck. It was a very effective campaign by the Air Force and the CIA. If you think about it, when military or commercial pilots report things that don’t make sense, that should be taken seriously. There’s nothing funny about that. 

So that’s my response—it has been leaking. 

And that doesn’t even touch on the reports of close encounters of the third kind. You have close encounters of the first kind, second kind, and third kind. That classification was designed by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who investigated UFOs for the Air Force from 1947 to 1969. Close encounters of the third kind are when witnesses claim to see occupants associated with the craft, whether on the ground or otherwise. 

Skeptic: Okay, so the three hypotheses on the table are ordinary terrestrial explanations like balloons, birds, aircraft, and so on. Then extraordinary terrestrial explanations, like the Chinese military or our own agencies developing superadvanced technology. And the third option, the “other,” maybe extraordinary extraterrestrial, but what would go into that category? Space aliens? 

Fox: I like “other” because I don’t know. Maybe it’s us coming back from the future. Maybe they’re right here. Who knows? 

Skeptic: None of us knows for sure, but in your work you do come across as fairly confident that this is probably not ordinary terrestrial or even extraordinary terrestrial, so that leaves … aliens. 

Fox: I’d put my life on it at this point. I’m at 99 percent that something extraordinary is whizzing around in our airspace. What it is, I don’t know. But I’m absolutely convinced of that. And I didn’t start out that way. 

Skeptic: So, what do we make of eyewitness accounts? 

Scott Kelly, the astronaut and pilot, was asked at a NASA press conference about pilots reporting UAPs, meaning trained professionals saying they saw something. 

Kelly said, “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.” 

He told a story about flying off the Virginia Beach Military Operating Area. His radar intercept officer in the back of an F-14 Tomcat was convinced they’d flown by a UFO. Kelly didn’t see it, so they turned around to look again. It turned out to be a Bart Simpson balloon. 

He also said that his brother Mark Kelly, when he was commander of STS-124, saw something in the payload bay while preparing to close the doors. They thought it was a tool or a bolt and considered doing a spacewalk to retrieve it. Before doing that, they took a picture. When they enlarged it, they realized it wasn’t a tool at all—it was the International Space Station, 80 miles away. 

Kelly said there are cases where pilots have tried to rendezvous with a buoy because they thought it was their wingman. He concluded that it’s a very challenging environment to work in, especially at night. 

Fox: No question—many cases fall into those categories: misidentified aircraft, misidentified objects. That’s why I generally like to focus on mass sightings. 

For example, I investigated a case in Australia. I went in with the same skepticism I have with most cases, because my initial reaction is often, “It can’t be, therefore it isn’t.” It seems implausible that you could have a mass sighting and the whole world not know about it. 

But I investigated this case. I met with some of the witnesses almost 50 years later. The incident happened in 1966 at a school just outside Melbourne—Westall High School—and the primary school nearby. According to the teachers and students, there were almost 400 people outside in broad daylight. 

There was a disc hovering above the school, doing things it shouldn’t be doing. Teachers were watching it, including the science teacher, Mr. Greenwood. Then it came down and landed. 

At that point, you have to say either everyone is hallucinating, everyone is lying, or something extraordinary happened. There’s no real ambiguity. The kids ran up to it. They got within six or seven feet of it. It was sitting on the ground in broad daylight. They described it as a disc. 

Those are the cases I like to dig into. You have a large number of people with everything to lose and nothing to gain. They’re not selling books. They’re just saying, “This is what I saw.” 

Skeptic: Those cases are compelling because you can’t explain them away as one person having a hallucination or a nightmare. 

I’m at 99 percent that something extraordinary is whizzing around in our airspace. What it is, I don’t know. 

Fox: You don’t have to believe Grusch. You don’t have to believe Eric Davis, or anyone else individually for that matter. But how about this? Why don’t we lock arms, as a community of civilians, and see what we can do to rattle the cages of our elected officials? 

Why not try to create an environment where immunity is provided to these individuals making these outrageous, incredible claims? The implications are global. Maybe there’s a way to create a platform and call their bluff. 

We could say, “Okay, Mr. President, wave the magic wand. Provide immunity. Let’s have an open congressional hearing. Let’s bring this out.” If we could make that happen, it would be extraordinary. And why wouldn’t we at least try? Because if it’s true, then it has to come out. And if it is true, it would be the biggest story of the modern era. I can’t think of a bigger story. 

Skeptic: Agreed. All the SETI scientists—people like Carl Sagan—they’ve all said this would be the greatest discovery in the history of humanity. Not just the history of science. 

When you think about how fast technology advances, it’s staggering. Look at what we’ve done in a century—from the Wright brothers to the moon. From 1903 to 1969, we went from the first powered flight to walking on the moon. Or look at computers and Moore’s Law, where everything keeps doubling. 

If you extrapolate that out a thousand years, or a million years, an advanced civilization could do things we can’t even imagine. Avi Loeb points out that aliens could have visited Earth two million years ago and we’d have no idea because all evidence of their visit would be erased by time. 

But going back to the second hypothesis—extraordinary terrestrial—the reason to be skeptical that it’s Russian or Chinese technology is this: if Russia had something that advanced, we’d see it in Ukraine. And if China had something that far ahead, how would that even be possible? If you look at cell phones, laptops, jets, everything is roughly on par. Nobody is decades ahead. It’s not like we’re flying biplanes and they have stealth bombers. We all spy on each other. Tech companies compete fiercely, but nobody is more than maybe a year ahead of anyone else. 

How would anyone develop something this advanced without the rest of the world knowing? 

Fox: I remember Christopher Mellon saying to me, “Do you have any idea how our government would respond if these incursions over supersecret military installations had a Russian or Chinese flag on the tail?” He said it would be a full emergency response. 

Skeptic: So if it’s real—if it’s not an illusion or misperception—it can’t be extraordinary terrestrial. It would have to be extraterrestrial. You’d need thousands of years of technological development here on Earth to do what’s being reported. 

Fox: I interviewed a World War II pilot who also had a role with Project Blue Book. He had a sighting in 1955. His name was Colonel William Coleman. He later worked at the Pentagon and was a public spokesman for Project Blue Book before it was terminated. 

He was flying a B-25 bomber in 1955, in broad daylight, over Alabama. I think he was either heading to Florida or coming back—I don’t remember that detail. He had a couple of engineers with him, I believe from Lockheed and Boeing. 

They saw an object off in the distance and were observing it through the canopy. Then it crossed right in front of them. According to Coleman, they were completely gobsmacked. It was a disc-shaped object with no wings. 

He said, “I decided to chase it.” So he pushed his B-25 to maximum continuous power. He said, “If I went any faster, the engines would blow up.” 

Either everyone is hallucinating, everyone is lying, or something extraordinary happened. 

They started out around 9,000 feet and ended up at treetop level. He told me, “James, we were looking out of the cockpit, and this thing was right there. We thought we were going to collide with it.” 

Weird Science-Fantasy #26. This special issue was written as a challenge to the U.S. Air Force regarding alleged cover-ups of documented UFO sightings. (Credit: © 1954 EC Comics, CC BY-SA 4.0) The comic panels that follow appeared in this issue.

He said he was so low that if he turned right to avoid it, the wings would have hit the treetops. So he had to pull up first, gain a little altitude, then bank to the right. He lost sight of it briefly. When they leveled off, he looked out the window and saw this disc-shaped object moving across a recently plowed field. 

He said it was stirring up dust in spirals on either side of it. Then, when it decided to take off, he said it was gone in the blink of an eye. 

What’s interesting is that if his account is true—and I don’t know why he would make it up, given that he was a colonel in the U.S. Air Force and a former World War II pilot—you hear the same description of the technology over and over again. It parallels what someone like David Fravor describes: no wings, no tail, maneuvering in ways that shouldn’t be possible, disappearing instantly. 

You hear these accounts again and again. It really makes you wonder what on Earth these people are seeing. 

Skeptic: Now, back to Roswell. What’s wrong with the explanation that it was Project Mogul: high-altitude balloons with acoustic sensors designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests? That became the official explanation later. 

This comic relates to a July 19, 1952, series of multiple sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) over Washington, DC. Excerpted from Weird Science-Fantasy #26 (© 1954 EC Comics, CC BY-SA 4.0) via U.S. National Archives.

Fox: If you look at Project Mogul in 1947, it was essentially a series of conventional weather balloons tied together with a sensor box. Intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel said, “I dealt with weather balloons every damn day. I know what a weather balloon looks like.” 

Later, in the 1950s, Project Mogul became more advanced and looked more exotic. You could maybe argue that explanation then. But not in 1947. Back then, it was just multiple weather balloons strung together. 

We really dug into that distinction when we made The Phenomenon. We had two of the three key people involved: General Roger Ramey, Colonel Thomas DuBose, and Jesse Marcel. 

Jesse Marcel said it was not from Earth. DuBose said the weather balloon explanation was a cover story for what they actually picked up in the desert. He said it was so highly classified that it was beyond anything else. 

There’s no single witness with a photograph that makes you say, “Okay, this is definitely alien.” But when you put all the different pieces of the puzzle together, in my opinion, it was something truly extraordinary. 

Skeptic: That’s the problem. It’s almost impossible to disprove. No matter how many people you talk to—Marco Rubio says he looked into it and found nothing—you can always say, “Well, he wasn’t in the loop.” 

So what would it actually take to get a final answer? Short of Marco Rubio standing in a hangar with a spaceship, with a CBS News film crew, saying, “Here it is.” 

Fox: Okay. Let’s say I have a pretty good idea that photographic evidence exists—not just from doctors, but from military, firemen, police, and crash-recovery personnel. I interviewed the Chief of Police. He told me there was definitely photographic evidence. At one point, he himself had a photograph. 

Now let’s say I got my hands on one of those. Maybe a short video shot in 1996. I have it analyzed, and specialists say it checks out. I put it in the film, along with all this testimony. 

Would that make a difference? Or would people just dismiss it anyway? 

Skeptic: Would that make a difference? Yes. But because this is such an extraordinary claim, the evidence has to be commensurate with that. 

I don’t need to see it with my own eyes. I never saw the Chinese spy balloon myself, but I believe it was real because it was covered everywhere: the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, the President. We all saw the footage, the debris, the confirmation. 

Something like that. That’s why Avi Loeb and I have our thousand-dollar bet. We agreed that two out of three major scientific institutions—NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, or the American Association for the Advancement of Science—would have to say, “Yes, we have confirmed extraterrestrial intelligence.” 

This interview, by Michael Shermer, has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

James Fox is a film director widely regarded as one of the leading voices in UFO filmmaking. He is known for documentaries such as The Phenomenon, The Program, and Moment of Contact, several of which are frequently cited among the best UFO documentaries ever made.

After an AI from OpenAI found a trick to solve an 80-year-old conjecture from Paul Erdős, mathematicians have borrowed the same technique to solve another important problem

Correction: Colin told me this: “One minor correction: Theory and Society isn’t a new journal. What’s new is the newly approved ‘Peer Review’ paper category they offer. We had been working with the Springer Nature people for close to 6 months back and forth, and finally they approved it and implemented it on the journal website’s backend so it appears in the drop-down menu when people submit articles.

Luana sent me this tweet, which I’d missed, announcing the founding of a new section of a scientific journal that exists to critique articles in other journals (with the original author given the right of reply). Click on the screenshot if you want to go to the original tweet:

 

To see the Wall Street Journal op-ed by Kevin McCaffree and Colin explaining the journal, click on the screenshot below—or you can find the article archived here.

Some excerpts:

We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.” But science isn’t like a thermostat regulating your home’s temperature. It’s a human institution run by fallible human beings. Scientists and scholars are susceptible to career incentives, moral fads, groupthink and fear. When those pressures capture journals or entire fields, peer review can become less a filter for error than a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense.

. . . Decades of studies on publication bias, replication failures and political bias in the social sciences have shown that peer-reviewed papers are often less reliable than the public assumes. John Ioannidis’s famous 2005 paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” remains disturbing because its basic insight about the fallibility of medical research remains true. In fields that rely heavily on narrative or qualitative methods, or that touch on politicized topics (as much social science does), ideology influences which questions are asked and which conclusions are professionally acceptable.

The authors then mention the Sokal hoax as well as the “Grievance Studies affair” involving submission of bogus papers to social-science and humanities journals by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghassian. (There were no submissions to STEM journals in either “affair” unless you consider gender studies journals as being in STEM.

A bit more:

This problem is growing more serious. Across swaths of the humanities, social sciences, medicine and biology, some narratives have become taboo. Papers presenting contrary evidence or dissenting viewpoints are rejected without comment. Letters to the editor, which are supposed to provide a quick way to respond to flawed work, are ignored or unavailable. The result is an ideologically biased literature that’s presented as an expert consensus and cited by journalists, courts, school boards, medical associations, government agencies and lawmakers to justify policies that affect millions of people.

The most obvious answer is better peer review. But ideologically captured fields have little incentive to correct themselves. As a result, objections to progressive orthodoxy are relegated to social-media threads, blog posts and newspaper opinion sections.

This is where the myth of “self-correcting” science becomes a problem. People assume the system will fix itself, but first someone has to notice the problem and create a mechanism for correction.

That is what we have done. As an editor-in-chief and a member of the editorial advisory board of Theory and Society, an interdisciplinary journal published by Springer Nature, we are proud to announce a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.” The purpose is to avoid procedural traps that can prevent legitimate criticism from being published and to recover what peer review was supposed to be: serious, good-faith analysis by experts seeking clarity and truth.

As in postpublication peer review, a Peer Review article may address a paper from any scholarly journal so long as it raises concerns about methods, evidence, logic, definitions or theory. The focus must be on claims, arguments and scholarly standards, not the author’s character or motives.

Submissions, limited to 2,500 words, will undergo a simple merit review rather than endless rounds of gatekeeping. An editor or subject-matter expert will ask a straightforward question: Is this critique coherent, serious and reasonable enough to deserve scholarly attention? If so, it will be accepted.

This is a good idea, and I can easily see myself writing a short response to some pieces that I find deficient. (Some of my website critiques of “sex-is-a-spectrum” posts might have been appropriate.

The only problem is what to do with papers (not just critiques) that try to air subjects that are forbidden or inflammatory.  Those might be suitable for The Journal of Controversial Ideas, but I’ve never seen a straight science/data paper there. (Granted, I haven’t looked at every issue.)

Anyway, pass this news along to those who might be interested.

Are people suffering from a persistent, debilitating, and apparently incurable psychiatric condition, such as incapacitating suicidal depression, entitled to physician and/or government assistance in dying? (This procedure is also called “physician-assisted suicide”, or “medical assistance in dying”: MAID).  Of course anybody can kill themselves without the help of doctors or the government, but I’m talking about formal programs, often involving ingestion or injection of pentobarbital or secobarbital. This is available for those suffering from apparently incurable and suicidal mental illness in five countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Spain (see details below the fold). All of these countries require, as is proper, a rigorous vetting program by mental-health professionals and doctors to see if all recourses have been tried and if the patient truly want to die and sees no point in living.

One alternative, legal everywhere and mentioned in the piece below, is voluntary stopping of eating and drinking (VSF), which, depending on what you do, will cause death within a week or two.  Some countries, like the Netherlands, will give hospice care to mentally ill people who are not approved for MAID but choose VSF, helping those patients ease out of life when their bodies start to shut down.

While physician-assisted suicide is legal in many places, including 11 states in the U.S., as well as Washington D.C.—laws permitting it have recently passed in Illinois and New York, and will take effect this summer—these are all for people suffering from terminal medical conditions.  The U.S. and all countries other than the five listed above do not allow physician-assisted suicide for other coniditons, whether or not the government assists or helps pay for it.

For a number of reasons I list below, MAID for psychiatric conditions has become quite controversial,  While I tend to side with those who allow it, I also agree that stringent medical and psychological vetting is necessary before a doctor is allowed to help someone die who has such conditions.  In the Free Press article below, author Rupa Subramanya first describes the death of Iris Dekker in the Netherlands, and then discusses the many issues around the procedure.

Click to read, though you’ll have to be a subscriber.

One gets the feeling from the posted article above, which is generally objective, that Subramanya really does oppose MAID for psychiatric conditions, and partly for religious reasons.  In a new hourlong conversation with Coleman Hughes, however, Subramanya pulls no punches; she clearly doesn’t think MAID is ready for primetime.  Coleman is a bit more in favor of it, but also has reservations.

First, a bit about Iris Dekker, who sought MAID in the Netherlands after over a decade of deep depression and suicidality.  She in fact tried to kill herself twice, once by hanging and once by cutting, but her parents found her in both cases and aborted the attempt. She also had a physical condition that may have been related to her mental illness:

Depression was not new to the Dekkers. Omar [Iris’s father] has a history of it, as do other members of his family. But Iris’s was different. Her symptoms were psychological and physical—a condition called functional neurological disorder, associated with severe psychological distress and depression. It often presents with symptoms like paralysis, seizures, and chronic pain, and was once referred to in medical psychology as hysteria. Iris had spent more than two years in a wheelchair after a seizure left her unable to walk.

In the end, after she had tried everything, including electroconvulsive therapy and ketamine treatment, Iris asked for MAID. But she became worse while waiting for approval and so practiced VSF until she died, with her pain palliated by physicians, at age 19.  Her parents didn’t want her to die, but in the end realized that there was no likelihood of a cure, and supported her. The end:

Watching her fade away, Omar felt the full weight of what was happening. He recalled the final night with his daughter as he held her in his arms and listened to her breathing. “In my heart, as a father—and also as a nurse—I was thinking, I have to do something,” he said. “And at the same time, I knew: No. This is what she wants.”

In her final moments, Iris could no longer speak or respond. When she took her last breath, Omar saw a smile on his daughter’s face.

“She looked so happy,” he said. “I couldn’t give her more love than letting her go.” Iris died on March 1, five days before her 20th birthday.

Letting go of those we love is very hard. We take it for granted that it’s humane when we’re dealing with pets who have terminal medical issues, but we cannot know when animals are undergoing unbearable mental suffering. But humans can tell us.

*********

It seems obvious, as I said, that Subramanya doesn’t like the idea of MAID, nor does she say how it could be implemented properly.  Statements like these are what makes me feel that way:

The Dekkers agreed to talk to me in detail about their daughter’s decisions—and theirs. They also showed me medical records for Iris. I tried to understand how loving parents could be persuaded that the best decision for their daughter was an early death. What I found was a system that turns young people’s ambiguous wishes into a diagnosis of incurable depression. The process raises questions about the treatment not only of a few teens like Iris who choose to die by euthanasia, but countless others who are confronted with the idea that their psychological suffering is beyond help.

. . .With each failure, Iris and her parents heard the same conclusion from specialists: Her condition was “treatment resistant,” and doctors had exhausted their options. In fact, the conclusion that depression such as Iris’s can be incurable is itself controversial among psychiatrists. As one recent paper in Psychological Medicine noted, clinicians “cannot accurately predict long-term chances of recovery in a particular patient with treatment-resistant depression.”

In the podcast with Coleman, Rupa makes it clear that while she’s not opposed to assisted dying, she is pretty much opposed to the process when it’s applied to psychiatric illnesses or even, as is legal in Canada, to people who have incurable suffering from a medical condition, like going blind or having diabetes.  I won’t counter her arguments, though I disagree with many of her claims. I just want to list below some of the reasons people oppose MAID for purely psychiatric conditions.  All of these save the first are mentioned in either the article or in the podcast. I have made the list and give my reactions to it.

1.) Religious reason #1: only God can take a life or determine when someone should die, suicide is against religious dictates, etc. I will not deal with this because I don’t believe there are gods and thus don’t think these reasons are worth considering seriously. But they are of course worth countering and discussing. I simply won’t entertain the proposition that “God knows best.”

2.) You can never tell when depression might be alleviated; many people who tried to kill themselves because of depression have later recovered and think their suicidal ideation was mistaken. True, but for someone like Iris Dekker, who had tried everything, saying “you might get better” is letting someone suffer forever despite having made a gazillion attempts to find a reason to live. Note that Subramanya reports that psychiatric MAID is rare even where legal:

Even in countries that have been at the forefront of assisted dying, psychiatric euthanasia is still rare. The Netherlands had 174 cases of psychiatric euthanasia in 2025—about 1.7 percent of its euthanasia deaths and 0.1 percent of deaths overall. Of the 338 euthanasia applications received at the Euthanasia Expertise Center in 2025 from patients younger than 30 that involved psychiatric suffering, only 11 were approved. None were minors.

This worry can be alleviated by a process of rigorous vetting, which, given the statistics above, seems already in place. While it of course cannot guarantee that someone allowed MAID could some day recover from psychiatric illness, if they’ve tried many ways to get better and yet still remain suicidal after years, it seems cruel for someone else to say that we should let them live because we don’t know what would happen. It is in effect trying to control someone else’s existence.

3.) The slippery slope argument: MAID for mental illness will lead not only to expansion of the process to those who don’t really qualify, but also, as Rupa says, “people who were socially isolated, people who were homeless, people who were on disability and people who just felt a great sense of despair.”

Again, this can be alleviated by rigorous vetting, and by involving doctors and therapists who aren’t in the business of willy-nilly approving candidates for MAID, just as there should be procedures preventing doctors from prescribing opioids for no good reason. Of course no system is perfect, but when you see someone like Iris Dekker, who has suffered greatly for years and wants to die–and has tried to die by her own hand–slippery-slope arguments need to be contested.  There’s no need to go all the way to the bottom of the slope once you step off the summit.

4.) Laws like Canada’s that allow MAID if you’re suffering not from terminal illnesses, but from other medical conditions, are not supportable because you can’t judge what is “intolerable suffering.” 

Again, rigorous vetting is the best way to deal with this.  Who better than (objective) mental-health professionals and doctors can judge whether suffering is “intolerable”. especially when multiple drug and/or psychiatric regimens ahve been tried?

5.) The social argument (from Rupa): suffering should be solved and endured collectively rather than by personal choice. 

Here’s what Rupa says;

We’re fully rational actors making these decisions entirely on our own. But in reality, our choices are shaped by our relationships with people. It’s shaped by the environment that we’re in, and it’s shaped by economic conditions, whether we feel loved, supported, or abandoned. So his argument is that autonomy is never fully independent because we make decisions within this context. I think with Canada, and then you have a political class in a place like Canada that is more than happy to enable all of these things. And so I feel like all of these things have come together in Canada, in the Netherlands as well.

I don’t really understand this argument, but it figures in the example of Rupa’s father (see below). If someone is suffering and can’t be cured, why should this be a problem that can’t be solved by the individual?  And of course the state does get involved when MAID is considered.

6.) Different doctors have different standards for “intolerable suffering.” Further, at least in Canada, some doctors, says Rupa, tend to get on oversight committees who are on board with MAID, so the procedure becomes easier to get. Rupa says this:

I think that some of the doctors I’ve spoken to think that they’re basically God. they feel powerful in making these decisions one doctor I spoke to she’s a prolific maid provider in British Columbia in Vancouver and she loves the limelight she loves talking about the patients she’s euthanized over the years and she started off I think she was a she went from delivering babies to now euthanizing people and she told me look and she said this elsewhere as well that I like to push the boundaries as much as I can when it comes to medical assistance anddying and that was pretty extraordinary to me. [JAC: remember, this is a transcript taken from the podcast, so there are infelicities of speech as well as outright errors in transcription.]

Again, choose well known and objective physicians; that is the best you can do. And of course usual more than just two or three doctors. Remember that MAID for mental illness is not yet legal in Canada.

7.) Hastening death is “the path of least resistance”, and in many cases may be less expensive and time-consuming than treatment for years and years. Here’s another quote from Rupa:

You do have cases where people can change their minds, but eventually the system decides that it should be the option. There was another case of a man with cancer who became delirious and very unresponsive in hospital. And according to this report, the doctors aroused him, shook his head and interpreted his blinks and the responses he was mouthing as consent and then proceeded to kill him that very same day. So basically, what all of this tells me is that. . .  there’s a medical culture now which is hastening death. And, you know, as one ethicist put it to me, he said this is the path of least resistance now.

If the law is made with the input of ethicists, this should be prevented. Again, the solution seems to be rigorous vetting and oversight rather than letting people suffer forever. And of course you can give control over your medical treatment to others via “do no resuscitate” orders and the like (I have these).

8.) MAID “normalizes” euthanasia and suicide.  Another quote from Rupa:

Hughes: Are you saying because of MADE, we’re entering this culture of normalization of suicide? And because of that, Some young people, they form that expectation that like, yeah, I have a right to die because of this culture. And then if they get rejected, they seek other means where like maybe in the past, without that culture of normalizing euthanasia and suicide, maybe they wouldn’t have even gone down the road. Is that sort of what you’re implying?

Subramanya: Yeah.

“Normalizing euthanasia” does not necessarily mean making it the go-to option.  And we are talking about euthanasia, not “regular” suicide.

9.) Religious reason #2: One role of religion should be to keep people off the slippery slope. Here’s an exchange from the podcast:

Hughes: But if you don’t have a religious view that life is sacred and that suicide is a sin, then it’s possible to talk yourself into it and kind of reason your way into ending your life if you really are at a low point and you are suffering, right? Is that what this is?

Subramanya: Yes, I think religion is certainly one institution when you look at the fact that as I mentioned earlier We’ve become a very individualistic society where suffering is no longer done communally, it’s not experienced communally, but on your own, where previously, you know, you’d go to the church or to the temple or to the mosque or whatever religion you belong to. But now, you know, a lot of us live in isolation, especially young people, you know, who are, I think, we’re still seeing some of the effects of the pandemic rapidly. right now where young people have been struggling with loneliness and alienation and mental health issues and then where suicide is not treated as something that you prevent but increasingly something that you facilitate so religion for sure. If you’re talking about how institutions once played a very important role in making us feel connected, that’s changed quite a bit.

Subramanya seems to have forgotten that it is also religion that’s been the main obstacle to any form of MAID, even for terminal illness (Mother Teresa is one example of someone who thought Jesus will take people when he’s ready). Is Subramanya suggesting that we should try to foist religious solutions onto someone seeking MAID?  Too late: religion is disappearing now, and you don’t go proselytizing someone who is suffering.

When Subramanya tells this story about her father, who found a reason to live, she seems to use it as an example of why anyone, however ill, can find a reason to live.  But people differ in how they bear suffering:

. . . I learned that my father in India was diagnosed with primary central nervous system lymphoma. They found a cyst in his brain and he needed a very urgent brain biopsy. As I was writing about Keanu’s death, this 27-year-old young person with type 1 diabetes and blindness and that he had given up on life, I was watching my own father fight desperately to hold on to his. And five months later, my father can’t speak because the part of the brain on which they operated controls speech. He has undergone chemotherapy and radiation.

He’s doing really well. His cancer is in remission. But what strikes me most is Not just merely his resilience, it is his desire to live. I mean, despite the pain and exhaustion, the loss of speech, the humiliations that he’s experienced, that serious illness brings about in people. You mentioned your mother who had who died of cancer. He’s soldiering on. He still loves life. And he wants more time. He’s fighting for every single day. And he finds joy in ordinary moments.

So, you know, for me, you know, as someone who’s written quite extensively about death, I look at my father and I wonder like what Why is he so different from someone who is 73 years old here in Canada, perhaps given a similar diagnosis and chooses made? Or why does a 28-year-old give up on life? And I don’t think my father in India is an outlier in the sense that he wants to live as much as possible. I think in places like India, you still have strong cultural family ties. I think religion continues to be extremely important. And I think these are factors, these are things that are increasingly, they’re disappearing in the West.

Once again we see religion mentioned as a way to keep people off the slippery slope of MAID. But what if you are not religious and cannot force yourself to believe? Someone like me, for instance.

In the end, I see both the article and podcast (not Hughes) infected with religiously-tinged arguments. I’ve long viewed the Free Press, while ideologically appealing in several ways, as too soft on religion—too eager to see it as caulk for our “god-shaped” holes.  This article may be one example.

Click on “continue reading” below to see descriptions of the five countries medical assistance in dying is legal for those with psychiatric issues:

From Grok:

My question:  Which countries allow medical assistance in dying for psychiatric problems or other mental issues?

How Grok answered:

As of May 2026, a small number of countries explicitly permit medical assistance in dying (MAiD, which includes physician-administered euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide) where a psychiatric disorder or other mental health issue is the sole underlying medical condition (or the primary source of unbearable suffering). In these jurisdictions, the person must generally be an adult with decision-making capacity, make a voluntary and well-considered request, experience constant and unbearable suffering with no prospect of reasonable improvement, and have exhausted relevant treatment options. Psychiatric cases remain relatively rare (typically 1–2% of total MAiD cases where data are available).Here is the current list of countries where this is allowed:

• Netherlands: Euthanasia is legal for psychiatric disorders under the 2002 law if the patient has “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement.” This has been in practice for over two decades, with official reports documenting dozens of cases annually (e.g., 115 psychiatric cases in 2021).
• Belgium: Euthanasia is permitted for “constant and unbearable physical or mental suffering” from an incurable condition (including psychiatric disorders) since the 2002 law. Requests require multiple written statements, medical confirmation, and review. Psychiatric cases are reported (e.g., 26 in 2022).
• Luxembourg: The 2009 law allows euthanasia or assisted suicide for an incurable medical condition causing unbearable physical or mental suffering with no prospect of improvement. Psychiatric disorders qualify under the same criteria as in the other Benelux countries.

 

• Switzerland: Assisted suicide (not physician-administered euthanasia) is permitted. A 2006 Federal Supreme Court ruling explicitly extended this to individuals with “incurable, permanent, severe psychological disorders,” provided the person has decision-making capacity and the wish is autonomous (not a symptom of a treatable mental disorder). Right-to-die organizations facilitate this, often with psychiatric evaluation.
• Spain: The 2021 Organic Law on the Regulation of Euthanasia allows MAiD (euthanasia or assisted suicide) for a “serious and incurable illness” or “serious, chronic, and incapacitating condition” causing constant and unbearable suffering (physical or mental). While a 2023 Constitutional Court ruling sought to limit purely psychiatric cases to those with a somatic basis, practice and recent cases (including a high-profile 2026 euthanasia of a 25-year-old woman with mental illness after legal proceedings) confirm eligibility is possible under the law’s broad criteria.

Understanding, at a deep level, the differences between legitimate science and pseudoscience is increasingly critical in our modern world. Science, in my opinion, is perhaps the most powerful tool humans have collectively developed for understanding the universe in which we find ourselves. (I would clarify that it is complementary with philosophy which is important to ensure that we are thinking clearly, rigorously, and consistently.) Pseudoscience pretends to be scientific but is essentially doing it wrong. There are many underlying reasons for the existence of pseudoscience – it is sometimes just poor quality science due to poor training or sloppy technique, it may result from a motivation to achieve a desired result rather than letting the empirical chips fall where they may, researchers may not appreciate their own biases, or it may be part of a dedicated campaign motivated by profit, politics, ideology, religion, culture, or just wishful thinking.

I spend a lot of time studying and writing about certain classic pseudosciences because I think they are especially instructive, and acupuncture is definitely on the short list.  I just wrote about it last week, specifically about a gullible article in the NYT which has bought into the pro-acupuncture propaganda. That piece resulted in lots of feedback, some of which doubled-down or extended the pseudoscientific arguments often made for acupuncture, so I wanted to reply to some of those and further clarify my position.

One common feature of pseudoscience is the use of vague or fluctuating definitions. Science requires unambiguous definitions, which is why it so often relies on technical jargon which evolves to be incredibly precise. This is one of the things I love about science, and why I think everyone should study it to some degree, at least enough to become functionally scientifically literate. Science forces you to think clearly, precisely, and consistently. If we take a seemingly simple question, for example, such as “does acupuncture work”, we first have to operationally define “acupuncture” and also “work”. You also have to include – work for what? I am usually careful to do so when addressing this question.

“Acupuncture”, as defined by just about every source I have ever consulted, is defined as a technique that involves sticking needles into acupuncture points. That seems to be a universal and necessary component to “acupuncture”. The points themselves often differ. There are different traditions, different locations, and different functions of the alleged points. There are other traditional elements to acupuncture, such as the existence of a distinct life force (Qi) that flows through specific channels in the body known as meridians. There is also sometimes described a “de-Qi” sensation, which is itself vaguely defines, but is claimed to indicate when a needle has been placed in the correct location to an adequate depth. Acupuncture may also include moxibustion, which is the burning of herbs on the needles, or “electroacpuncture” which involves electrically stimulating the needles after insertion.

Each of these alleged phenomena must be tested by themselves, controlling for all variables as much as possible. It is possible (speaking hypothetically), for example, that some acupuncture points exist but others do not, or that the points exist but de-Qi is not necessary. Each variable must be isolated as much as possible – the points, needle insertion, electrical stimulation, the patient interaction, etc.

Further, when medical scientists ask whether or not a treatment “works” they are usually talking about “efficacy” (and this is the technical term they will use in the literature and to other experts). Efficacy means that there is a specific beneficial effect established beyond any non-specific or placebo effects. Efficacy can generally only be well-established with double-blind placebo controlled trials. But to be fair, there is a lot of nuance here. Many interventions cannot be ethically blinded (like whether or not someone undergoes surgery), and so efficacy must be inferred from multiple different study types controlling for as many confounding variables as possible. It also helps to use objective outcome measures (such as survival). But it is virtually impossible to make efficacy claims based only on subjective outcomes of unblinded interventions. However – acupuncture can be blinded, so much of this nuance is not relevant here.

So – we can technically restate the question “does acupuncture work” as “do acupuncture points have specific efficacy?” Again, this question must be asked for each potential indication. This question has been investigated with hundreds of trials for dozens of indications, many of which are reasonably rigorous with sham acupuncture or placebo acupuncture controls and reasonable double-blinding. The totality of these studies strongly show that there is no efficacy to any acupuncture points for any indication. We can add this clinical data to what we know about scientific plausibility. It has never been established that acupuncture points exist. There is no physiological or anatomical underlying basis for their existence. There is no reason to hypothesize that they exist outside of cultural beliefs. There is no internal consistency to their number, location, or effects – which follow patterns of cultural tradition, institutional and personal preference. As a scientific concept, acupuncture points are a dead end that have been sufficiently ruled out and should be completely abandoned. We can say the same thing about Qi as a distinct life energy or force, and of meridians as channels through which Qi (or whatever) flows.

It therefore does not matter how desperately one retcons or redefines “acupuncture”. Some respondents tried to say that “Qi” really just refers to known energies, like heat and electricity. That is classic pseudoscience, and historically clear retconning, but it also doesn’t matter. They are stuck in an unscientific approach to the question “does acupuncture work”, which they think they can rescue by redefining acupuncture. Regardless of any definition for the broader concept, science does not work that way. We need to operationally define and isolate specific elements, and we can say that there is no Qi, meridians, or acupuncture points. It is also common to try to redefine “works” as including placebo effects (and then falsely touting how amazingly powerful placebo effects are). Again – this is slight-of-hand, and doesn’t matter to the real question – does sticking needles in acupuncture points have specific efficacy. The answer is clearly no, whatever your thoughts about the practical use of placebo effects in medicine (that’s a separate article).

We can also ask – does sticking needles in the skin have specific efficacy. The answer here also appears to be no – at least in properly controlled trials poking the skin without penetration was as effective as penetrating the skin to a depth typical in acupuncture treatments. In fact there is now a treatment referred to as “dry needling” which is an attempt to divorce the sticking of needles in the skin from any concept of Qi, acupuncture points, or meridians. Is there established efficacy for dry needling for any indication? No. Meta-analyses and systematic reviews show mixed but mostly negative results. It may not be possible yet to rule out a short term mild effect for pain, but that’s it (and even there, some reviews find it is worse than placebo).

But acupuncturists (including some responding to me) insist that dry needling is contained under the umbrella of “acupuncture” (while dry needlers insist it is not acupuncture). This is all a semantic game – and it doesn’t really matter from a scientific perspective. As I discussed – it doesn’t matter how you play with these definitions. Scientifically you have to state a specific, ideally operational, definition and a specific question. When we do this – none of the possible components of acupuncture seem to exist or have specific efficacy.

The post Retconning Acupuncture first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

AI start-ups with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding are hiring mathematicians and building AI systems that they hope will not only solve mathematics, but also build more intelligent AI

The cost of CAR T-cell therapy means that the highly effective cancer treatment is unavailable in many parts of the world. But a new way of making these cells could dramatically drive down the cost

For more than a century, pianists and music teachers have argued over whether a performer’s touch can actually change the tone color of a piano note — and now scientists say the answer is yes. Using a cutting-edge sensor system that tracked piano key movements at 1,000 frames per second, researchers discovered that elite pianists subtly manipulate keys in ways that listeners can genuinely hear, even if they’ve never played piano before.

Helen Phillips, winner of the Climate Fiction prize for her novel Hum, on if stories can make a difference, her anxieties and writing about the climate

Massive amounts of dust swirl around active nuclei at the centres of galaxies, and these discs could give rise to vast numbers of rocky planets, some even the size of stars

The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (LVK) detector network has a new trick up its sleeve to improve the instruments’ sensitivity to gravitational waves: it’s called Astrophysical Calibration and it plays a role similar to auto-tune in music production.

In December 2019, astronomers detected a one hour brightening of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a classic gravitational microlensing event. These occur when a compact object bends a distant the light of a distant star as it passes in front of it. The object responsible in this instance, named Phoebe, has a mass of roughly three times that of our Moon making it far too small to be a stellar black hole, but consistent with a primordial black hole formed moments after the Big Bang.

Physicists have thought for decades that microscopic black holes can theoretically emerge not from exploding stars but from delicate "critical states" in which space and time organise themselves into a crystal like structure. Now, for the first time, researchers from TU Wien and Goethe University Frankfurt have derived an exact mathematical formula describing this bizarre phenomenon using a surprising trick involving infinitely many dimensions!

The JWST has shown us some strange things about supermassive black holes (SMBH) in the early Universe. Many of them are far more massive than we think they should be. Now astronomers working with the JWST have found one that seems to have formed before its galaxy did.

From Kenya's Tree of Life to a Svalbard glacier, these stunning photos are taken from a new book by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, whose The Earth From Above was a smash hit 25 years ago

The New Scientist Book Club read Silvia Park's near-future sci-fi novel Luminous in May, and had lots of good things to say (along with a few complaints)

Feedback has been flooded with answers (both correct and inspired) after wondering if there is a word for something that is an exemplar of the thing it describes.

From clearing people convicted of murder to identifying a monarch's remains, Michael Le Page is fascinated by The Secrets of Our DNA, an insider's must-read book

The ideas of survival of the fittest and winning at all costs are closely entwinned with Darwinism, but they shouldn’t be. A rethink from a more communal perspective is in order

Watson's death last month prompted sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson to read his acclaimed 1973 debut and find out what she'd been missing. She found it fascinating – but reflective of its time