Carl Wyant

A sceptical mini-history of the crashed flying saucer saga

Everyone will enjoy this book. Well, everyone except paranormalists, ecological alarmists, pseudo-scientists, feminists, left-wingers, the entire New Age community, and of course those eternally doom-ridden types who seem determined to drag everyone else down to their own level of self-imposed suffering.

Pull up a chair and hearken to the tale of the Great Drought of '94

Our intrepid correspondent finds himself suffering from that most fashionable of psychological afflictions, Multiple Personality Disorder!

Are the End Times drawing nigh? Are fires and floods from heaven on the brink of seething down in wrathful purge, damning the damned and raising the faithful? Is God's finger poised on the panic button?

It may interest skeptics to know that I have solved the world's energy problems. The concept is surprisingly simple... but then works of great brilliance often are.

"Mind my left ear." cautioned Mrs X, "there's a needle in it."

Sometimes feeling better isn't a good sign at all... Carl Wyant recalls an occasion when faith healing showed itself better at handling symptoms than causes.

Are Skeptics pussy-footing around by not attacking the major source of superstition and pseudoscience -- religion?

It's a mindbending situation, but I guess you'd have to call me a skeptical believer. Like parapsychologist Susan Blackmore, personal experience inclined me towards the idea that supernatural events really happen.

Juan Perez may not be one of the most well known Great Skeptics of History, but he was one of the bravest. Hilary Evans tells his story in "Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors". Towards the close of the eighteenth century, Perez, a Madrid workman, was arraigned by the Inquisition for denying that there existed a Devil with power to seize the human soul. He admitted this sin and explained why:

by Howard Blum; Simon & Schuster 1990