Michael Schmicker

Michael Schmicker is an American parapsychologist, pseudoscience promoter and spiritualist.

Style over substance
Pseudoscience
Popular pseudosciences
Random examples
v - t - e

Schmicker claims to be a nationally-known writer on "anomalies" and the paranormal. He is a member of the crank Journal of Scientific Exploration and discussed his woo beliefs on Coast to Coast AM.[1] He has said that psi has been scientifically proven in an interview with Alex Tsakiris.[2]

In his book Best Evidence he has written that there is scientific evidence for all kinds of debunked woo topics such as ectoplasm, poltergeists, psychokinesis, and reincarnation. He ignores most of the skeptical literature on the paranormal and takes anecdotal evidence at face value. Schmicker has admitted after his research that he believes 98% of alleged paranormal phenomena turn out to have a naturalistic explanation but the remaining 2% has real scientific evidence for the paranormal.[3]

As a devout spiritualist, Schmicker has supported the crank views of Michael E. Tymn and has written that Leonora Piper and other fraudulent mediums were in contact with spirits.[4]

Publications
  • Best Evidence: An Investigative Reporter's Three-Year Quest to Uncover the Best Scientific Evidence for ESP, Psychokinesis, Mental Healing, Ghosts and Poltergeists, Dowsing, Mediums, Near Death Experiences, Reincarnation, and Other Impossible Phenomena That Refuse to Disappear (2002)
  • The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People (2002)
  • The Universe Wants to Play: The Anomalist 12: A Nonfiction Anthology (2006)
  • The Listener (2010)
gollark: Oh, and also, pass proposal but translated to Latin, pass proposal 3 days ago, pass proposal *in* 6 days, and randomly reassign all rule numbers.
gollark: It may take a little while to do the necessary votes, but it would be ENTIRELY worth it.
gollark: I think we should use instant runoff voting, with the options to choose between being pass proposal, fail proposal, revote proposal but the second most popular option is unavailable, wait 16 hours and then revote, fail proposal but pass its dependents instantly regardless of other rules, crab, pass proposal and next/previous proposals, reclassify proposal as an SCP, pass the proposal but with every second letter removed, pass the proposal but backward, and frog.
gollark: Because I deployed the bees.
gollark: ||S||||p||||o||||i||||l||||e||||r|| ||t||||a||||g||||s|| ||a||||r||||e|| ||a|| ||t||||y||||p||||e|| ||o||||f|| ||b||||e||||e||||s||||.||

References
  1. Michael Schmicker Biography
  2. Michael Schmicker Interview
  3. A Book by Michael Schmicker
  4. Michael Schmicker Spiritualist Reviews
This pseudoscience-related article is a stub.
You can help RationalWiki by expanding it.
This article is issued from Rationalwiki. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.