Search results for ""Author S. D. Tucker""

Science has a reputation as the most logical and rational of human pastimes – but this has not always been the case. From the inventor Nikola Tesla, who fell in love with his favourite pigeon and tried to broadcast his own thoughts, to the wannabe chemist August Strindberg, who injected apples with drugs to see if they could get high, numerous scientists have conducted bizarre experiments down the centuries. Some of them were genuine geniuses; others were simply lone loons. History is littered with their wreckage, and this book tells the story of the very strangest. Proposing that science has become a kind of modern religion, and telling the tale of such noted pseudoscientific fads and fallacies as alchemy, spontaneous generation and the doomed quest to raise the dead, Forgotten Science is sure to make you laugh at the same time as making you think. Science at school was never this weird.

Read more less

If only the war had lasted another six months, then Hitler would have won … because his scientists stood upon the very brink of inventing flying saucers. That, at least, is the myth as it is currently being peddled today, in books, pamphlets and online; and, if it were true, squadrons of Luftwaffe spacecraft would certainly have made mincemeat out of British Spitfires and American B-52s. But, of course, it is a complete fiction. And yet the sinister myth of Nazi UFOs is surprisingly well developed. If you listen to its champions, escaped Nazis and their indoctrinated offspring are simply hiding in secret Antarctic bases, inside the Hollow Earth, somewhere upon another planet, or even within another dimension, just waiting for the right time to strike again – and this time, armed with saucers and in close alliance with Aryans from other star systems, they stand poised to finish what they started. Some even claim that Hitler and his chief henchmen did not really die in 1945, but were borne away in spirit on flying saucers. Such theories seem insane – but do they have a hidden purpose? White supremacists around the globe have adopted Nazi ufology to draw the gullible into the wider orbit of Far-Right ideology; after all, if the standard version of history is so wrong as to fail to acknowledge that Hitler helped invent UFOs, then what else might historians have got wrong about the Third Reich? Might the Nazis actually have been right all along? Could the Holocaust have been a total hoax? Once they have swallowed the first lie, a person might easily swallow several others. The stories in this book are bizarre: Nazi saucer-pilots fighting alongside Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War; alien boot-prints whose soles bear swastikas being found in the wake of UFO-landings; the leader of America’s Nazi Silvershirts claiming to be in psychic contact with men from other galaxies; and Allied pilots being buzzed by fiery glowing ‘foo fighters’ during the Second World War. They may seem harmless at first, but they are not. Is it really the white race’s destiny to conquer the icy reaches of space under the banner of the ‘Aryan world spirit’? Perhaps not, but the conquest of their victims’ inner space, not outer space, in the name of Hitlerism is what these latter-day Goebbels truly desire.

Read more less

Prepare to feel queasy. Are you suffering from a life-threatening illness? Do you possess chronic fatigue, sexual dysfunction, severe mental impairment, or have to endure constant, debilitating pain? If not, then you might do so after reading this book! Snake-oil salesmen, preying like vultures upon the hopes and fears of the sick and the dying, are nothing new. Up until relatively recently in history, before the miraculous medical advances made during the 20th and 21st centuries, doctors killed many more patients than they ever cured – and it was no wonder when you consider some of the appalling quacks who have felt themselves qualified (often fraudulently) to call themselves doctors. Was it really possible to diagnose a person’s illness by sniffing their soul through their hair, as one medical man thought? Did Jesus give His followers enemas? Can a man fart his own hair out? Is letting a tapeworm live inside your body a wise way to lose weight? Is it possible to exist off an ultra-low-calorie diet of thin air alone? Is McDonalds’ secret menu of interdimensional foodstuffs a sure-fire path to good health? Could an alien potato from the moon hold the secret to defeating cancer? Is deafness caused by having constipated ears? Should you really wear underpants laced with nuclear radiation? The answer to all these questions is undoubtedly ‘NO!!’, but that hasn’t stopped certain desperate people down the centuries from believing that it might have been ‘YES!!’, such has been their eagerness to find a way out of the medical dead-ends they have found themselves stuck in. This book tells the story of some of the strangest and most insane doctors, surgeons, quacks and food-faddists from throughout history, as well as the often cruel (and always absurd) diet crazes, treatment regimes and beliefs they unleashed out onto an unsuspecting world – proving once and for all that the one thing there really isn’t a cure for is human gullibility. Now open wide and say ‘Aaargh!’

Read more less

The Trickster-god is a strange and rather wonderful mythological figure who is found in folklore and legend right across the world, from the Norse Loki to the Greek Hermes to the Raven and Coyote of the Native American peoples. The ultimate ‘cunning fool’, he and the many subversive tales told about him have been studied down the years by anthropologists, historians, literary theorists and psychologists from Ted Hughes to C. G. Jung. But in the twenty-first century, should the Trickster also be studied by parapsychologists and ghost hunters? Nobody believes in gods like Hermes or Loki anymore, but that does not mean that people do not still tell one another tales about such Tricksters and their mischievous ways. They do, but in disguised form - the disguised form of the poltergeist. Belief in Trickster-gods, this book argues, has today been transformed into popular belief in Trickster-ghosts, with those noisy, disruptive, roguish spirits known as poltergeists fulfilling largely the same imaginative function as more traditional Trickster-figures like Robin Goodfellow once did. By playing childish tricks upon us, poltergeists appear to reveal our current world-view to be in some way incomplete, breaking the accepted circles of ‘official’ materialistic, scientific logic and provoking laughter at their irreverent audacity in doing so. Rather than being intended to frighten, perhaps the true purpose of certain ghost stories is in fact to amuse, perplex and provoke? Whether true or not, such ghost stories still function as genuine Trickster-myths, providing those who read them with access to a hidden realm lurking somewhere just beyond the rational, in which the usual rules of science, logic and reality simply do not apply. Perhaps in doing so they act as a kind of ‘emotional safety-valve’, intended to allow mankind temporary respite from the sometimes oppressive social forces surrounding us. Covering a wide global selection of reported poltergeist phenomena from ancient times right up to the present day, and then subjecting them to a process of literary, historical and sociological analysis, Blithe Spirits is one of the most unusual, original and wide-ranging books about the subject ever to be written.

Read more less

In today’s world, science itself, which we are constantly being told is a neutral vehicle for wholly objective ideas and theories, is increasingly being hijacked and abused by the toxic modern cult of identity politics, of both left and right. But should we be too surprised by any of this? No, because this exact same sorry process has happened time and again before, under the rule of totalitarian political cults like the Nazis and the Soviets, both of which vigorously promoted various pseudoscientific theories of ‘Aryan Science’ and ‘Marxist Science’ on the sole grounds that they were ideologically correct as opposed to being factually so. Nazi racial pseudoscience and belief in nonsense like the ‘World Ice Theory’, which claimed that stars did not really exist and were actually just reflections of the sun off giant floating space-icebergs, were widely encouraged in the Third Reich, and used for long-term military weather-forecasting purposes. Likewise, the ideas of the renegade biologist Trofim Lysenko, who developed a deluded ‘anti-capitalist’ theory of genetics opposed to Darwin’s, were responsible for widespread famine in the USSR when Stalin allowed him to apply them practically towards the nation’s crop-harvests. Those academics and functionaries who disputed these clearly false pseudoscientific notions often found themselves in deep trouble – or, ultimately, dead. In this incisive and challenging study, author S.D. Tucker explores the often weird and fanciful theories that were proposed and took hold under these extreme regimes – and in doing so sends a word of warning to the modern world of the internet and social media where similar bizarre ideas are expounded and consumed with frightening gullibility. Everywhere from Western universities, schools and hospitals to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, absurd stories of sexist glaciers, racist gravity, socialist trees and NATO-backed mutant extra-terrestrial potatoes are being promoted as items of politically mandated scientific fact by compliant collaborators and credulous social media followers. Pseudoscientific narratives are even now used to justify the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, much as they were once used to justify the Nazi conquest of Europe or the spread of Communist revolution across the globe.

Read more less