I have always been somewhat skeptical. Even when I was eight years old, I had a sneaky suspicion that I was only seven! Just kidding. Actually, joking apart, I recently discovered that I was into skepticism at a surprisingly early age. When I was at school, a local bookstore used to come along once a month and sell their wares at a reduced price. My family was never one to resist a bargain, and so they encouraged me always to drink deeply from this fountain of cut-price paperbacks. A few weeks ago, I went into my parents’ loft, looked through a box of books from all of those years ago, and was surprised to discover a large number of skeptical tomes. It turns out that while my more credulous classmates were being brainwashed into believing in fairies, pyramid power, and UFOs, I was reading the likes of The Loch Ness Mystery Solved and Bigfoot On Trial (apparently he was found guilty but escaped from prison and has never been seen since).
Fast forward ten years, and my enduring fascination with the science of the supernatural, coupled with an interest in magic, resulted in my enrolling for a degree in psychology at University College London (UCL). Way back then there was no easy way for people with the same niche interest to find one another. If, for instance, you were into trainspotting or taxidermy, your best bet was to hang around the relevant sections in a public library in the hope of meeting a fellow enthusiast. Quite frankly, it could be as terrifying as it was haphazard.
However, when I was in my second year at UCL I got lucky because I discovered that one of the faculty—a psychologist named David Marks—was also interested in psychic stuff. A few years before, David had written a wonderful book called The Psychology of the Psychic, which was all about the techniques used by fake psychics to deceive people who hadn’t read his book. David kindly agreed to meet up and introduced me to the world of organized skepticism. Over the next few years, I went along to meetings of the London Skeptics, discovered the joys of Skeptical Inquirer, and slowly became part of an extensive network of like-minded people.