I couldn't find a pinned thread with suggestions for new episodes, and I understand that Safe-Keeper means video when he/she asks about "Skeptoid episodes we'd like to see", so I'll start a new one. Please point me in the right direction if I've overlooked something (besides the gazillions of other threads dedicated to specific theories). 
1. Who downed Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870?
Exactly 30 years ago, an Italian Jet Airliner was shot down, blown up or crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the island of Ustica, en route from Bologna to Palermo. 81 people died.
Just yesterday, the conspiracy version of this story hit the front webpage of the German Tagesschau, which is (was?) the bedrock of respectability in my country, at least in its TV incarnation. The tale goes that the plane was accidentially downed by NATO aircraft in a firefight with Libyan jets. The latter had been trying to evade the Italian radar, but were spotted by an American AWACs plane and subsequently intercepted by fighters from the nearby French aircraft carrier Clemenceau or some unnamed US carrier.
So far, so conspiratorial. The details were hushed up by the Italian government and NATO, of course - the official line has been that Flight 870 suffered an in-flight explosion, either through a malfunction or a bomb. But the conspiracy goes that Italian Air Force personnel and RADAR operators who were on duty that night (June 27, 1980) have been killed in great numbers over the years, most spectacularly two pilots, Ivo Nutarelli and Mario Naldini, who allegedly responded to an alarm that night. They collided in mid-air at an airshow in Ramstein, Germany on August 28, 1988 - an accident which also killed 70 onlookers and injured 1000 more. To quote and translate from yesterday's Tagesschau, "did they know something they weren't supposed to know? Were their planes manipulated?" Allegedly they had a court date with Itavia 870 investigaters just a few days later. A number of "witnesses" are supposed to have killed themselves or died shortly before such dates.
All Germans and maybe some Americans are aware of the Ramstein catastrophe - after all, it happened on a US Air Force base -, but I don't know if it means that much to the rest of the world. The Ramstein angle is of course what generates most of the interest over here. The Italian part sounds like it belongs into Caesar's times or a Dan Brown novel, but then Italy is walking more on the wild side than us boring, cold-blooded northerners. The Italian ex-President Francesco Cossiga is reported to have advised journalists to "investigate this case in some other country, or they might experience a car accident or food poisoning".
Wikipedia has a page on this titled "Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870". It is a translation from the Italian version for the most part and doesn't read as conspiratorially good as the German Wikipedia, so I'd advise those interested to get a Google translation of the page "Itavia-Flug 870" from de.wikipedia.org. (I'm still on probation and not allowed to post URLs).
To stay on the same level, I'd also like to know Brian's take on
2. The Lockerbie Disaster: Did Al-Megrahi do it, or who did, after all?
I'm predisposed to believe he didn't do it, after reading Paul Foot's abridged Lockerbie investigation (The Great Lockerbie Whitewash, 1989-2001) in John Pilger's "Tell Me No Lies".
Something more scientific:
3. Aquatic Ape Theory
Do we humans have unique water adaptations that other great apes don't have?
David Attenborough did a 2-part radio series on this: Scars of Evolution on Radio 4 (still online). There is also a debunking site (WeWeWe.aquaticape.org).
4. How many species have died out in the last 24 hours?
This could get every environmentalist up in arms, but to artificially inflate the dangers of deforestation by using bogus-sounding numbers does more harm than good. In their view, so much logging equals XXX many (undiscovered) died-out species.
Does anyone have a link to the scientific formula?
5. Global warming: "We will manage to reduce our carbon footprint by (double digits) % in the next (20-50) years and thereby save the planet...
... no need to think about dealing with reality."
Dan Carlin did a nice "Common sense" podcast episode (Droning on about Pakistan, second half) about this.
I think that discussing solutions to the inevitable problems is still widely regarded as heresy - don't talk about it, or our leaders won't do their utmost (i.e. make inflated "commitments") to defend us against climate change. Positive thinking, or "The Secret" applied to global thinking, I mean, warming. If I don't face the facts, they will go away.
Which, in my view, almost proves that environmentalists don't believe in Global Warming.
(I do.)
That's a meal of what I'd like to know more about without having to do too much type- and eyework.
Some all-time classics mentioned (or unmentioned) in the other thread:
* The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"
* The K-Conspiracy (y'know)
* Satanic rituals and abuse in the early 90's (see: Damien Echols, West Memphis 3)
* Living Vietnam POWs...
1. Who downed Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870?
Exactly 30 years ago, an Italian Jet Airliner was shot down, blown up or crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the island of Ustica, en route from Bologna to Palermo. 81 people died.
Just yesterday, the conspiracy version of this story hit the front webpage of the German Tagesschau, which is (was?) the bedrock of respectability in my country, at least in its TV incarnation. The tale goes that the plane was accidentially downed by NATO aircraft in a firefight with Libyan jets. The latter had been trying to evade the Italian radar, but were spotted by an American AWACs plane and subsequently intercepted by fighters from the nearby French aircraft carrier Clemenceau or some unnamed US carrier.
So far, so conspiratorial. The details were hushed up by the Italian government and NATO, of course - the official line has been that Flight 870 suffered an in-flight explosion, either through a malfunction or a bomb. But the conspiracy goes that Italian Air Force personnel and RADAR operators who were on duty that night (June 27, 1980) have been killed in great numbers over the years, most spectacularly two pilots, Ivo Nutarelli and Mario Naldini, who allegedly responded to an alarm that night. They collided in mid-air at an airshow in Ramstein, Germany on August 28, 1988 - an accident which also killed 70 onlookers and injured 1000 more. To quote and translate from yesterday's Tagesschau, "did they know something they weren't supposed to know? Were their planes manipulated?" Allegedly they had a court date with Itavia 870 investigaters just a few days later. A number of "witnesses" are supposed to have killed themselves or died shortly before such dates.
All Germans and maybe some Americans are aware of the Ramstein catastrophe - after all, it happened on a US Air Force base -, but I don't know if it means that much to the rest of the world. The Ramstein angle is of course what generates most of the interest over here. The Italian part sounds like it belongs into Caesar's times or a Dan Brown novel, but then Italy is walking more on the wild side than us boring, cold-blooded northerners. The Italian ex-President Francesco Cossiga is reported to have advised journalists to "investigate this case in some other country, or they might experience a car accident or food poisoning".
Wikipedia has a page on this titled "Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870". It is a translation from the Italian version for the most part and doesn't read as conspiratorially good as the German Wikipedia, so I'd advise those interested to get a Google translation of the page "Itavia-Flug 870" from de.wikipedia.org. (I'm still on probation and not allowed to post URLs).
To stay on the same level, I'd also like to know Brian's take on
2. The Lockerbie Disaster: Did Al-Megrahi do it, or who did, after all?
I'm predisposed to believe he didn't do it, after reading Paul Foot's abridged Lockerbie investigation (The Great Lockerbie Whitewash, 1989-2001) in John Pilger's "Tell Me No Lies".
Something more scientific:
3. Aquatic Ape Theory
Do we humans have unique water adaptations that other great apes don't have?
David Attenborough did a 2-part radio series on this: Scars of Evolution on Radio 4 (still online). There is also a debunking site (WeWeWe.aquaticape.org).
4. How many species have died out in the last 24 hours?
This could get every environmentalist up in arms, but to artificially inflate the dangers of deforestation by using bogus-sounding numbers does more harm than good. In their view, so much logging equals XXX many (undiscovered) died-out species.
Does anyone have a link to the scientific formula?
5. Global warming: "We will manage to reduce our carbon footprint by (double digits) % in the next (20-50) years and thereby save the planet...
... no need to think about dealing with reality."
Dan Carlin did a nice "Common sense" podcast episode (Droning on about Pakistan, second half) about this.
I think that discussing solutions to the inevitable problems is still widely regarded as heresy - don't talk about it, or our leaders won't do their utmost (i.e. make inflated "commitments") to defend us against climate change. Positive thinking, or "The Secret" applied to global thinking, I mean, warming. If I don't face the facts, they will go away.
Which, in my view, almost proves that environmentalists don't believe in Global Warming.
(I do.)
That's a meal of what I'd like to know more about without having to do too much type- and eyework.
Some all-time classics mentioned (or unmentioned) in the other thread:* The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"
* The K-Conspiracy (y'know)
* Satanic rituals and abuse in the early 90's (see: Damien Echols, West Memphis 3)
* Living Vietnam POWs...
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