Truth really is stranger than fiction—and more entertaining. . - book review

Real-life X-Files: Investigating the paranormal. By Joe Nickell. University press of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky. 2001. 326 pp. ISBN 0-8131-2210-4. Cloth, $27.50.

Anyone who has ever watched and enjoyed an episode of the long-running TV series The X-Files will find Nickell's book even more entertaining and delightful. There is a major difference between the TV tales and the stories in Nickell's work, however. While the X-Files are fiction, Nickell's accounts are true. Whoever said that the truth is both stranger and more entertaining than fiction describes this book exactly. The cases that Nickell investigates are not only as exciting as the show but they are also much more satisfying if one is also a lover of mysteries and enjoys watching a first-rate mind systematically track down and expose the fakirs and mountebanks who attempt to mystify and deceive us.

Consisting of forty-seven short chapters or investigations, the work is not only an antidote to anyone infected with belief in the paranormal or supernatural but it is also a mini-education in how to go about successfully investigating and clarifying claims of haunted houses, UFO appearances, mysterious lights, encounters with the dead, spontaneous human combustion, alien abductions, crop circles, alleged psychics and visionaries, weeping statues and stigmata, and miracle workers of various kinds.

Nickell, a former private detective, professional magician, and an authority on the detection of forged documents, brings this training and experience to bear in his investigations. For cases in which Nickell's broad and deep experience does not suffice he invents ingenious new approaches to solve the mysteries he faces. Opposed to the armchair and "debunking" approaches in all his investigations, Nickell uses a "hands-on" approach, supplementing most of his investigations with explanatory drawings and photographs.

Covering a period of well over thirty years, none of the investigations in this book have been anthologized before. Others have never been reported so fully, and regular readers of Nickell's columns in SKEPTICAL INQUIRER and Skeptical Briefs will be delighted with some of the new material and the results of his appearances on various TV talk shows.

In this regard one of the most amusing incidents of all was Nickell's confrontation with an alleged clairvoyant on the infamous Jerry Springer Show. The so-called psychic claims to be able to "read" the contents of a locked refrigerator he had never seen before. Though the "psychic" appeared to be quite successful in demonstrating psychic abilities, he was totally incapable of passing Nickell's simple test of reading a three-letter word on a card in a sealed envelope. The verbal exchange between Nickell, the alleged psychic, and Springer is hilarious.

Also delightful is Nickell's exposure of the scam artists in The Gypsies' "Great Trick." Nickell's version of this impressive "fooler" has been shown on the Discovery channel several times. Nickell's investigation of the notorious Flatwoods UFO monster is another classic example of human credulity and demonstrates how effective a little suggestion can be when naive and untrained observers confront the unknown.

These unusual and mysterious detective stories are suffused with the author's wit and engaging sense of humor. As he notes in his introduction, "I joke that I have been in more haunted houses than Casper and have even caught a few 'ghosts.'"

Nickell has never shied away from getting himself personally involved in some of the more daring and adventurous aspects of the cases he's studying. He has, for example, inflicted "stigmata" on himself with a knife, put sharp crystals under his eyelids, walked across a twenty-five-foot bed of fiery coals, and he has even appeared--not once--but twice on The Jerry Springer Show! If this isn't a display of the limits of human courage this reviewer doesn't know what is!

Above all, these investigations are predicated on a rational, scientific approach and, in his words, "since proving a negative is difficult (often impossible), the burden of proof must fall on whomever advances the claim. In addition, the maxim that 'extraordinary proof,' must apply, meaning that evidence must be commensurate with the extent of a claim. The principle of 'Occam's razor' also applies; it holds that the simplest tenable explanation--the one requiring the fewest assumptions--is to be preferred as most likely correct."

Nickell has followed these principles and has applied them in all of the investigations recounted in this book. Readers familiar with Nickell's other books will not want to miss this one, and those readers who have never been so fortunate as to have encountered this master of "explaining the bizarre are in for a treat!

Robert A. Baker is professor emeritus in psychology at the University of Kentucky.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group