SCIENCE SAYS ...

Donald R. Prothero and Timothy D. Callahan. UFOs, Chemtrails and Aliens: What Science Says. Indiana University Press, 2017.

Despite the pretentious ‘What Science Says’ subtitle, which rather suggests that Prothero and Callahan have somehow been appointed official spokespersons for ‘Science’ - whatever that may be as a single entity – this book is actually a pretty fair review of the sceptical approach to the subjects listed in the title.

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LEAPING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION

Charles M. Wynn and Arthur W. Wiggins, Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction: Where Real Science Ends… and Pseudoscience Begins, Oxford University Press, 2017

In her farewell address to the American Statistical Association last year, outgoing president Jessica Utts, who analysed parapsychological experiments for the US government and concluded that they support the reality of psi, drew attention to the irony that many scientists, in their denial of such evidence, adopt the mind set and methods of pseudoscience. 

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SCEPTICAL UFOLOGY - THE LAST WORD?

Robert Sheaffer. Bad UFOs: Critical Thinking About UFO Claims. Sheaffer, 2016.

Robert Sheaffer is a long-standing American UFO sceptic, whose blog, also called ‘Bad UFOs’ has been a voice of reason in the US online UFO world, forensically explaining (not ‘debunking’) many famous UFO sightings.
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EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING - SORT OF

Guy P. Harrison. Good Thinking: What You Need to Know to be Smarter, Safer, Wealthier, and Wiser. Prometheus Books, 2015.

Most people would agree that it is wise to consider the relevant facts before making important decisions. However, most busy people can't spare the time to analyse every activity or argument in great detail in order to decide if it is rational. Many of us believe, or at least take seriously, various questionable theories or practices, such as astrology, ghosts and hauntings, lake monsters, or abductions by space aliens.
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WRONG ABOUT ALMOST EVERYTHING

Alex Tsakiris. Why Science is Wrong About Almost Everything. Anomalist Books, 2014.

Alex Tsakris, who runs a podcast called Skeptiko, is basically the paranormalists’ version of the typical American shock-jock, who only invites people onto his show who disagree with him in order to sandbag them, berate them and grandstand to the audience. Like the other shock-jocks he is markedly less critical with those who espouse his world view.
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BULLSPOTTING

Loren Collins. Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation. Prometheus Books, 2012.

Having discovered that some of his beliefs were mistaken, Loren Collins became increasingly interested in pseudoscience and misinformation, and how to detect and deal with widely believed falsehoods. His original intention for this study was to try to kill off one of the more bizarre conspiracy theories of modern American politics, the Obama 'Birthers'.
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DON'T PANIC!

Robert E. Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford. The Martians Have Landed; A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes. McFarland, 2012.

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Guy P. Harrison. 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True. Prometheus Books, 2012.

Bartholomew and Radford’s book carries on from a number of other titles by Bartholomew, looking at social delusions, as well as another book on panics and hoaxes co-edited with Hilary Evans. This seems to be a rather slighter volume with over thirty topics dealt with mostly in fairly short chapters.
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LOOKING AT THE BELIEVERS

Erich Goode. The Paranormal: Who Believes, Why They Believe, and Why It Matters. Prometheus Books, 2012

Erich Goode is a sociologist and thus, for the purposes of this book he defines paranormalism as beliefs labelled by scientists as contrary to scientific law. The book, then, is about this labelling process and its consequences, and not about whether any particular belief could be true or not.
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DENYING SCIENCE

John Grant. Denying Science: Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions and the War Against Reality. Prometheus, 2011

One of the blurbs on this book describes John Grant as "the living heir of Martin Gardener", this is, I think, less than fair to Grant. Martin Gardner often took on soft targets and subjected them to ridicule, Grant takes on the big boys.
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SCEPTICISM, OLD AND NEW

Michael Shermer. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies. How We Construct Beliefs as Truths. Times Books/Henry Holt, 2011

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Edmund Parish. Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of the Fallacies of Perception. Facsimile reprint, Cambridge University Press, 2011 (Cambridge Library Collection: Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge)

Editor of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer examines the possible neurological and evolutionary origins of our willingness to believe all sorts of things, for example the need to see patterns in events, and the tendency to attribute events to the actions of conscious agencies. Much of this is fairly well travelled ground by now but still worth going over again. In general much of what Shermer says makes a good deal of common sense, but there are problems in some of his arguments.
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FRINGE BENEFITS

Steven Volk. Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable and Couldn't. HarperOne, 2011.

This is a really good book on the paranormal, because Steven Volk, a mainstream journalist, takes the sensible and rarely used line on these topics, which is that he just doesn't know what it all represents and seeks to get beyond the usual believer/skeptic yah-boo stuff.
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CLEANING UP THE OIL SLICK

Chris Edwards. Spiritual Snake Oil: Fads and Fallacies in Pop Culture. See Sharp Press, 2011.

In many ways this book follows on from Stephen Law's Believing Bullshit, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, only Edwards takes on specific targets. These are the New Age writers Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance; James Redfield, the author of the Celesetine Prophecy; Rhoda Byrnes, author of The Secret and Depack Chopra (in particular his book Afterlife), a couple of Christian apologists, Francis Collins and Dinesh D'Souza; and two representatives of what might call scientistic religion Ray Kurzweil and Simon Young.
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CLEARING UP THE BOVINE EXCREMENT

Stephen Law. Believing Bullshit: How to Not Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole. Prometheus, 2011.

Stephen Law is a philosopher at Heythrop College, University of London, an institution which began life as a Jesuit training college in the 17th century, and provost of the Centre for Inquiry UK which is the sort of grown up version of Centre for Scientific Inquiry, taking on the big boys of organised religion rather than bigfoot and fairground fakers. 🔻

MAN-BEASTS AND MONSTERS

Joe Nickell. Tracking the Man-Beasts: Sasquatch, Vampires, Zombies and More. Prometheus, 2011

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Bart M. Nunnelly. The Inhumanoids: Real Encounters With Beings That Can't Exist. CFZ Press, 2011

Human beings have always been fascinated by stories about those beings which seem to exist in the liminal zone between human and animal. These two books cover a wide range of such creatures from very different perspectives.
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EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS

Jonathan C Smith. Pseudoscience and Extraordinary Claims of the Paranormal: A Critical Thinker's Toolkit. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 

Clearly aimed at a college or university undergraduate audience, psychologist Jonathan Smith examines various claims of the paranormal and suggests programmes of skeptical thinking. Smith suggests that critical thinkers should assess the value of their sources of information, whether the claims are logically consistent, and if there non paranormal alternative explanations. 

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RANDI'S PRIZE

Robert McLuhan. Randi's Prize: What the Sceptics Say About the Paranormal, Why They Are Wrong, and Why It Matters. Matador, 2010

Robert McLuhan makes some very valid points about many of the sceptical writers on psychical research and parapsychology, in particular the way that many of them dismiss the subject with a wave of the hand or through polemic, tend to quote one another uncritically, and rarely do justice to the original reports.
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WEEPING STATUES

Wendy Grossman and Christopher French (editors). Why Statues Weep: The Best of 'Skeptic'. Philosophy Press, 2010.

It’s always difficult to review an anthology, as the quality of contributions can vary greatly and the reviewer’s interest in different topics can vary. I think the only way you can judge a compilation such as this by how well it reflects the overall contents of the magazine. 🔻

SCIENCE & SUPERSTITION

Gregory L. Reece. Weird Science and Bizarre Beliefs. I. B. Tauris, 200

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Robert L. Park. Superstition: Belief in an Age of Science. Princeton UP, 2010,

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Macello Gleiser. A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe. Free Press, 2010.

The liminal zone between reality and fantasy is a strange haunted place, as a boy back in 1977 Gregory Reece had an experience - or dream or fantasy - in which he and a friend saw a great bird circling in the holiday summer sky. As the boyhood world in which dream and reality intermingled faded into the adult world of daylight reason and common sense, he labelled this experience a fantasy. It had fallen off the liminal tightrope into the world of labels. 

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BELIEF & SCEPTICISM

Martin Bridgstock. Beyond Belief: Skepticism, Science and Belief in the Paranormal. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

This book by an Australian academic and member of the Australian skeptics movement, is not particularly concerned with refuting specific paranormal claims, but with a more general defence of skepticism as a mode of thought. It includes a brief history of skeptical thought from the Greeks onward.
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SKEPTICS V. BELIEVERS: NO-SCORE DRAW

Chris Carter. Parapsychology and the Skeptics: a Scientific Argument for the Existence of ESP. SterlingHouse, 2007.

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Henri Broch. Exposed! Ouija, Firewalking and other Gibberish. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

One of the main features of the debates surrounding a range of anomalous claims, is the quasi religious divide into rival ideological camps marked 'believer' and 'sceptic' which is rarely encountered elsewhere in science, however rancorous these disputes can become. Perhaps the only other examples which come to immediate mind are the debates surrounding human induced global warming, or some of debates surrounding AIDS.

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