Robert McLuhan

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Can such things be?

Paranormal

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The Twilight Zone
Robert McLuhan is a British author, pseudoscience promoter and spiritualist.

He has no formal training as a scientist.

Contents

[edit] Paranormalia

McLuhan runs a blog called "Paranormalia" where he posts tirades against atheism and rants against scientists and skeptics for dismissing his beliefs in parapsychology and woo. Popular threads on his blog include "Fuck-off Atheism"[1] "Russell Targ's The Reality of ESP"[2] and "Michael Tymn on Leonora Piper".[3] McLuhan believes that fraudulent mediums such as Leonora Piper, Eusapia Palladino, Eileen Garrett and Gladys Osborne Leonard were actually genuine. He also believes poltergeists are real and rejects psychology as an explanation for claims of the paranormal.

McLuhan has written on his blog that everything from reincarnation and spiritualism to psychokinesis has been scientifically proven.[4] He also denies global warming[5] and is a supporter of intelligent design.[6]

McLuhan is a friend of the spiritualists Michael Prescott and Michael E. Tymn and has been credited by Prescott as having "debunked" the skeptics. McLuhan has also been cited on the skeptiko forum.

[edit] Randi's Prize

He is the author of Randi's Prize (2010) in which he claims to debunk the skeptics on the topic of the paranormal; however, McLuhan did not not read many texts from the skeptical literature of the paranormal and misses many important works.[7] McLuhan dedicates over 40 pages to the medium Eusapia Palladino and admits she cheated on occasion but wrote she had genuine paranormal abilities of levitation; this is in opposition to the scientific community who discovered the trick she used to "levitate" the table. McLuhan also believes the séances involved in the scole experiment were genuine.[8]

[edit] Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia‎

See the main article on this topic: Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia

In 2013, McLuhan on his blog wrote that a group called Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia‎ (GSoW) were coordinating the actions of editors at the online encyclopedia to label paranormal subjects as pseudoscience and promote a skeptical point of view about psychic phenomena. He also claimed edits of GSoW had destroyed Rupert Sheldrake's Wikipedia article.[9][10] However, there was never any evidence the GSoW group had ever edited the Sheldrake Wikipedia article. According to the skeptic Tim Farley, "none of Susan's editors are editing that article. It's completely a conspiracy theory".[11] And since Wikipedia policies actually require that pseudoscience and other fringe views be marginalized, the group's work was completely in sync with the encyclopedia's goals.

In 2014, McLuhan was interviewed on a paranormal podcast where he expressed his opinion that Ian Stevenson had proven reincarnation. He also criticized Wikipedia for allegedly claiming "paranormal effects" do not exist and promoted a conspiracy theory that skeptics have ruined paranormal articles on online encyclopedias. McLuhan claimed he in the process of creating his own paranormal encyclopedia in opposition to wikipedia.[12]

[edit] Publications

  • Randi's Prize: What Sceptics Say About the Paranormal, Why They Are Wrong, and Why It Matters (2010)

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] External links

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