When professional skeptics get it wrong

When the Afghanistan government collapsed, people were looking at the image that portrayed the old regime fall. People were trying to find the photo of the helicopter on the rooftop. One of the most popular photos was of a crowded plane full or refugees trying to flee the country.

There was a similar photo that was also distributed:

 

 

But this photo had been taken in the Philippines in 2013, and was quickly identified as a fake but many fact-checking sites.

Unexpectedly (or not?), as reported by Jordi Llàtzer in his podcast Espurna, some people began to tag the first photo, the real photo, as a fake, supposedly confusing the two photos. Was this accidental? It would be a very smart move to publish a similar fake photo, to create disinformation, if you don't want the legit one to be distributed.

Another example of what we could call failed skepticism is the recurrent debate around the novel (and movie) "Picnic at Hanging Rock". 

 

Being a fan of the movie myself, I had researched the web to find out if the novel and film were based on true events or not. It turned out that they were not. The verdict was that the story was fiction, because no newspaper of the time referred to it. But what if the skeptics had looked in the wrong place? An investigation by Janelle McCulloch, author of "Beyond The Rock: The Life Of Joan Lindsay And The Mystery Of Picnic At Hanging Rock", discovered evidences that the story could have been inspired by a real event:

"McCulloch then turned to online archives and found a document distributed to Victorian police stations at the time. This police gazette detailed that a couple of girls had disappeared in the late 1800s – their ages and descriptions matching that of the novel."