No. It'd be closer to the truth to say that the point of this forum is to provide skeptics a place to discuss topics of interest around the themes of skepticism and critical thinking.
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We simply do not have enough facts about what really happened to his arm to properly debunk anything.
"Here, unless you skeptics can conclusively debunk this
rumor anecdote, I reserve the right to continue believing it might be evidence of the particular fantastic thing I choose to attribute it to." The Stump-The-Skeptics rhetorical game is the more adversarial version of the sort of mental exercise skeptics might engage in as examples of how to approach problems critically or how to recognize poor reasoning. But in practical terms, being presented with an anecdote gives little opportunity beyond speculation. Since there is no way to collect additional evidence to test any of the many hypotheses that might apply, there is little chance of finding an empirically supported explanation. And this is why anecdotes have very little value themselves as evidence.
Skeptics freely admit they can't conclusively explain a lot of the phenomena and observations that are attributed to various supernatural, paranormal, or conspiratorial causes. This is simply the problem of history; we can't rewind the clock and replay those events, paying closer attention to parts that might test a hypothesis. And we can't necessary extract that evidence from what the record of the event has left us. So for the most part we're content to leave them unexplained, with the tentative presumption that the cause was
probably mundane.
What made the mark on the subject's arm? All we can do is guess, because we can't even look at the marks ourselves to rule in or out any specific chemical agents that might be consistent with the appearance of the marks. Or we can't rule in or out specific pathologies. The claim is made that doctors were unable to find a medical cause. But again it's all hearsay. What doctors? What were there exact findings?
Skeptics can say that mysterious occurrences are consistent with known phenomena. And this lets us reason parsimoniously about possible specific causes. But often that's the best we can do, even with piles of evidence. We can't be exactly sure what sparked the Apollo 1 fire, even after months of investigation, a forensic disassembly of the spacecraft, piles of recorded sensor data, and the design documents. All we can say is that it is consistent with an electrical spark from abraded wires igniting nearby combustibles in a saturated oxygen environment. The same is often true in other happenstance tragedies. We may not have an answer, but we can think through things enough to say that some hypothesis is at least consistent with known phenomena, and therefore the explanation is probably mundane.
So yes, solving mysteries is something that's likely to appeal to many of the regulars here. But unless you give us a way to test hypotheses with evidence, no one here is likely to be interested in it as a skeptical exercise. And I can't see that anyone would be inclined to commit to any explanation by way of debunking.
