The Paranormal’s Creators . . . and Some of Its Present Promoters
One of the intriguing things about pseudoscience and the paranormal is that each field has been initiated and championed by just a handful of proponents and promoters. Mainly through popular books and articles (today it would be blogs, infomercials, and cable TV shows), of varying credibility and quality, they’ve made their impassioned appeals for the public’s attention. Science has its famous heroes, but it doesn’t work the same way. Collegiality and cooperation (and peer competition) mark all science, and any new scientific field quickly expands to dozens or hundreds of people working on the problems and ferreting out errors. Advocates of pseudoscience and the paranormal work more in isolation, and so those who have been successful (popularly if not scientifically) become closely identified with their “specialties.”
For this issue’s cover article, “Creators of the Paranormal,” Joe Nickell abandons his usual case-by-case investigatory style to survey the people who created our modern concept of the paranormal and its main topics. Joe nimbly portrays such people as “unexplained collector” Charles Fort, first ghost hunter Harry Price, UFO “inventor” Raymond A. Palmer, ESP “discoverer” J.B. Rhine, cryptozoology father Bernard Heuvelmans, Bermuda “Triangulator” Vincent H. Gaddis, ancient astronaut huckster Erich von Däniken, and other famous/notorious characters. Each, he says, took a concept—a fantasy, myth, or speculation—and transformed it into a kind of “reality.” Their motives varied. Some, Nickell notes, were credulous but principled. Some were out to make a buck. Others “wished to stir things up and enjoy the fray.” Their creations proved popular, some enormously so, but they have turned out to be, almost without exception, scientifically barren.