[ INVESTIGATIVE FILES JOE NICKELL
Joe Nickell, PhD, is CSI’s senior research fellow. He has worked professionally as both a stage magician and a private investigator, and he is author of such books as Looking for a Miracle and The Science of Miracles.
Supported by records citing eye witness testimony, St. Joseph of Copertino was a seventeenth-century religious marvel who laid claim to the power of levitation. Reportedly, as stated by the title of a new book by Michael Grosso (2016), he was The Man Who Could Fly. Although I had addressed both the topic of levitation and Joseph himself briefly in a book (Nickell 1993, 211–216) as well as in a BBC television documentary (“Secrets” 1999), I determined to look more deeply into the strange life of “the flying friar.”