Welcome to the website of Ottawa Skeptics. Please contact us if you have any questions or information about local strange occurrences or claims. We enjoy researching and answering people's questions about the paranormal, conspiracy theories, alternative medicine, and other issues that are 'on the fringe' of science. Please check out our extensive topics section to learn more about the topics that we deal with.
If you live in the Ottawa region and would like to join us, please register an account and come to an event. Even if you don't live in Ottawa, you're more than welcome to register and participate in our forums.
We should consider giving out an award in this category. Here is a possible winner for June 2008 – Jeremy Arney, Canadian Action Party candidate for the federal electoral district of Saanich-Gulf Islands, BC. Have a listen, but be warned, the video contains unsettling levels of arrogance, ignorance and disdain:
If that sounded too off-the-wall to possibly be correct, that's because it is, in fact, completely wrong. But let's see how wrong it is.
One percent of all skeptics are members of Ottawa Skeptics ... or at least, that's my extrapolation from TAM 6 attendance. It might be a bit of a generalization.
Held at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, TAM 6 was bulging at the seams with over 900 attendees, the highest attended TAM so far, and remarkably, when one speaker asked who was attending for the first time, most of the room seemed to raise their hands. It was a great indication of JREF's vitality and growing popularity.
Ottawa Skeptics were a visible force at TAM. By my count, we had at least eight there (Jon, Dana, Nick, Barry, David, Mike B, Mike L, and Lee – beat me up if I missed someone) and happily were joined by Richard as a new member by the end of the conference. Glaringly noticeable in our logo'ed red T-shirts, mentioned by our questioners, acknowledged by a panelist, and generously represented on stage by a red-shirted Lee for his presentation, our attendance was "impactful," if I can borrow a recent Bushism. We even got a shout-out by Steve (a.k.a. Eamon Knight) on the Pharyngula blog.
The law in Ontario requires that people in a position of care for children (eg. school personnel) are required to call in the Children's Aid Society, if they have “reasonable grounds” to believe a child is being abused. The CAS in turn is required to act on all such reports and make an investigation of the case. So when the staff at Terry Fox Elementary School in Barrie decided they had reasonable grounds to believe that Victoria Leduc, an 11-year-old student with autism, was being sexually abused, they did what they were legally obliged to do: called the CAS, and informed Victoria's mother Colleen. The CAS did what they are required to do: came to the Leduc home and interviewed Victoria's mother. Happily, the case-worker quickly determined that it was a false alarm and closed the file: Victoria was not being abused
So what did the school's “reasonable grounds” consist of? There seem to have been two. Victoria had apparently been displaying sexualized behaviour – normally, this might be an indication of abuse, however, this sort of age-inappropriate sexualization often occurs in autistic adolescents, who have difficulty comprehending conventional social restraints. However, the other one, the trigger that first moved the school administration to construct the abuse theory was this: Victoria's educational assistant had been told by her psychic that a child in her care whose name started with 'V' was being abused by a man in his early 20's.
On Wednesday June 11, MPs and the press in Ottawa were invited to the Chateau Laurier for a pre-screening of Expelled starring Ben Stein. The pre-screening was hosted by Canadian Walt Ruloff, self-made multimillionaire, financier and executive producer of the film. Thankfully, there were only 22 people in attendance and none were either press or MPs as far as I could tell. The audience was mostly made up of conservative party staffers, interns, and civil servants who were sympathetic to the film’s agenda. It also contained one conspicuous skeptic who was interested not only in the film but the motivations behind it.
Are those lights in the sky actually Canadian military drones? We get mail, and this question came to us from J. in Gatineau. We're not exactly sure about the specifics of "those lights," but it seems like a reasonable question. At least, it seems to be a more reasonable hypothesis than one based on alien visitation. It's also an appropriate question for our group since we have contacts in both the Canadian Army and the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) community.
Do the Canadian Forces (CF) have UAVs? If so, are they being flown over my house? And is one of them watching me read this article right now? We interviewed "unnamed sources close to the investigation" and risked a visit from men-in-black to find out.
.jpg)
Are those lights in the sky actually Canadian military drones? We get mail, and this question came to us from J. in Gatineau. We're not exactly sure about the specifics of "those lights," but it seems like a reasonable question. At least, it seems to be a more reasonable hypothesis than one based on alien visitation. It's also an appropriate question for our group since we have contacts in both the Canadian Army and the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) community.