“I’m always amazed that there is another area that I’d never thought of — crop.circles.  Aliens have come and made perfect circles and mathematical equations…in wheat!. Who would have thought it? Or they’ve come and eviscerated cows — on a large scale, systemically. Farmers are furious. I’m just always impressed by the depths of inventiveness that the new stories that are debunked in Skeptical Inquirer reveal…but then on more sober reflection, it seems to me the stories are fantastically unimaginative. That compared to the stunning, unexpected stories of science across the board, they have a kind of dreariness to them, a lack of imagination, a human chauvinism to them.   That’s all they can imagine extraterrestrials doing? Making circles in hay?“

“…the last way for skeptics to get the attention of those people is to belittle, or condescend, or to show arrogance toward their beliefs. They are not stupid; it is a problem of society more than anything else. If we bear in mind human frailty and fallibility, we will have compassion for them. [….]  The one deficiency which I see in the skeptical movement is an us-versus-them [attitude]…a sense that We have a monopoly on the truth, all these other people who believe in these stupid doctrines are morons or worse — that’s it, if you’ll listen to us, if not, to hell with you — that is nonconstructive. That does not get our message across. That condemns us to permanent minority status. “