Skeptical reporter @ 2013-05-03

Skeptical Reporter for May 3rd, 2013 Announcement: Romania will host the first international humanist conference in Eastern Europe, on the 25th of May. The conference „Education, Science and Human Rights” is hosted by the Romanian Humanist Association in partnership with the International Humanist and Ethical Union and the European Humanist Federation. The event will take place at the Parliament Palace and has speakers such as PZ Meyers and Richard Wiseman. So, if interested, don’t hesitate to purchase a ticket now. In most of the world, the use of graphology in recruitment is marginal. But in France - despite an appreciable decline of writing in recent years thanks to computers - the technique is proving remarkably resilient. Reliable figures are hard to come by. Graphologists themselves say that between 50% and 75% of companies make some use of hand-writing analysis, even if it is only occasional. The last independent study was in 1991, and it found that a massive 91% of public and private organisations in France were then making use of handwriting analysis. According to psychology professor Laurent Begue, there is no scientific basis for the use of graphology: "Lots of studies over the years have shown that it is all a load of rubbish, and not fit for use in any professional setting. If you ask a group of graphologists to study the same piece of handwriting, they all come out with different interpretations. It's no different from astrology or numerology." According to Begue, most graphologists are able to pull off the trick because they use the content of candidates' letters - the detail about their lives, motivation and so on - to draw up a psychological profile. Former Senator Mike Gravel has stated that the White House helped keep the truth about the “extraterrestrial influence that is investigating our planet” from the public. “It goes right to the White House, and of course, once the White House takes a position, ‘well there's nothing going on’...it just goes down the chain of command, everyone stands toe,” Gravel declared. He is one of six former congress representatives who were paid $20,000 by the UFO advocacy group Paradigm Research to participate in a Congressional-style Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington, where witness after witness has presented first-hand accounts of UFO sightings and extraterrestrial visits. Gravel says the strongest accounts of alien encounters are from former military officers, such as retired Air Force Captain Robert Salas, who testified that UFOs temporarily disabled nuclear weapons on his watch. Gravel says the media has aided what he sees as a government cover-up by not taking reports of ET encounters seriously. Nobody knows what exploded over Siberia in 1908, but the discovery of the first fragments could finally solve the mystery. The Tunguska impact event is one of the great mysteries of modern history. On 30 June 1908, a vast and powerful explosion engulfed an isolated region of Siberia near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. The blast was 1000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, registered 5 on the Richter scale and is thought to have knocked down some 80 million trees over an area of 2000 square kilometers  The region is so isolated, however, that historians recorded only one death and just handful of eyewitness reports from nearby. But the most mysterious aspect of this explosion is that it left no crater and scientists have long argued over what could have caused it. The generally accepted theory is that the explosion was the result of a meteorite or comet exploding in the Earth’s atmosphere. That could have caused an explosion of this magnitude without leaving a crater. Andrei Zlobin from the Russian Academy of Sciences has announced that he found three rocks from the Tunguska region with the telltale characteristics of meteorites. If he is right, these rocks could finally help solve once and for all what kind of object...