Joe Nickell

Joe Nickell

Type	Person
Also known as	Nickell
On the Timeline	1 event, 1973

Joe Herman Nickell (1 December 1944 – 4 March 2025) was an American sceptic and investigator of paranormal claims, including UFOs, ghosts, monsters and religious relics.^[1][3] He was a senior research fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and an associate dean of the Center for Inquiry Institute. He wrote the "Investigative Files" column in Skeptical Inquirer from 1995 until his death.^[1][3] For many years he was known as "the world's only full-time professional paranormal investigator".^[3] He wrote or edited more than 30 books. In UFO research he co-edited The UFO Invasion (1997) and offered sceptical explanations of cases such as the Flatwoods monster, Kelly–Hopkinsville and Pascagoula.^[1][4][5][6] He rejected the label "debunker".^[1]

Early life

Nickell was the son of J. Wendell and Ella (Turner) Nickell. The Wikipedia account says he was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and raised in West Liberty. The Center for Inquiry's obituary gives West Liberty as his birthplace.^[1][3] His parents indulged his interest in magic and investigation, letting him use a room in their house as a crime lab.^[1] He earned a B.A. from the University of Kentucky in 1967.^[1] In 1968, at 24, he moved to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. There he began working as a magician, card dealer and private investigator. He returned after President Carter's 1977 pardon of draft evaders.^[1] Back at the University of Kentucky he earned an M.A. (1982) and a PhD in English (1987), focusing on literary investigation and folklore.^[1]

Career

Nickell worked as a stage magician, carnival pitchman, private detective, blackjack dealer, riverboat manager and university instructor. He listed more than 1,000 personae on his website.^[1][3] He wrote his first Skeptical Inquirer article in 1983. He became a CSI fellow in 1988, joined its Executive Council in 1993, and became a senior research fellow in 1995.^[3] His notable work included the following:^[1]

• Exposing hoaxes. He helped expose the James Maybrick "Jack the Ripper diary" as a hoax.
• Authenticating texts. He evaluated the manuscript of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative for Henry Louis Gates Jr., and supported Clement Clarke Moore's authorship of "The Night Before Christmas".
• Undercover work. He went undercover among Spiritualist mediums at Lily Dale, New York, as profiled in The New Yorker.
• Film. He advised Hilary Swank on her role as a paranormal investigator in The Reaping (2007).
• Houdini. He conducted the Center for Inquiry's annual Halloween Houdini Séance.

"I don't like debunkers and I don't like dismissers," he said. "If I'm studying vampires, I don't have to believe they exist to talk about the history of vampires."^[1] CSI's executive director Barry Karr recalled him searching for ghosts aboard the Queen Mary, inspecting crop circles in farmers' fields, roaming Loch Ness, and studying Qigong in China.^[3]

Books and methods

Nickell's books fall into religious, forensic, paranormal and historical-mystery categories. They include:^[1]

• Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1983, revised 1998)
• Pen, Ink, and Evidence
• Camera Clues
• Detecting Forgery (1996)
• Missing Pieces: How to Investigate Ghosts, UFOs, Psychics, and Other Mysteries, with Robert A. Baker
• Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings (1995)
• Real-Life X-Files (2001)
• Lake Monster Mysteries, with Benjamin Radford
• The Science of Ghosts (2012)
• The Science of Miracles (2013)

In CSI Paranormal (2012) he set out his method:^[1]

• investigate on site
• check the details of an account and research precedents
• examine physical evidence
• analyse how a phenomenon developed
• test a claim by experiment
• try to recreate the "impossible"
• go undercover when necessary

He applied this method to the Roswell UFO among other cases.^[1] He often quoted Baker: "there are no haunted places, only haunted people".^[1] In 1982 he and relatives drew a 440-foot condor in a Kentucky field by plotting coordinates, to show how the Nazca Lines could have been made.^[1]

UFOs and aliens

With Kendrick Frazier and Barry Karr, Nickell edited The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Coverups (1997). It is an anthology of Skeptical Inquirer articles on UFO history, abductions, Roswell and crop circles, and it includes six of his own.^[1] He held that alien encounters result from misinterpreted natural phenomena, hoaxes or fantasy-prone personalities.^[1] On abductions he said people "may be perfectly sane and normal. ... They probably were having these powerful waking dreams," adding: "Hypnosis is the yellow brick road to fantasy land."^[1]

He drew an "alien timeline" of cartoon figures to show how alien types had varied since 1947, from little green men and hairy dwarfs to cyclopean figures and robots. After the Betty and Barney Hill case, he said, the big-headed, big-eyed humanoid became "the standard model".^[1] "We tend to make the various entities that we're interested in in our own image," he said. "ET is our futuristic relative coming from the future back to save us."^[1] His case explanations included:

• Flatwoods (1952). In 2000 he suggested the light was a meteor and the "monster" a barn owl on a branch, made to look humanoid by the shadows.^[4]
• Kelly–Hopkinsville. He proposed that the family misidentified great horned or eagle owls, and that a meteor explained the light one witness saw.^[5]
• Pascagoula. He called Charles Hickson's behaviour "questionable" and said Hickson later embellished his claims. He suggested Hickson fantasised the encounter in a hypnagogic "waking dream state". He argued that Calvin Parker's corroboration probably reflected suggestibility, since Parker first told police he had passed out.^[6] See Pascagoula abduction.
• Mothman. He attributed it to misidentified barred owls and their eyeshine.^[1][7]

Other investigations

Nickell argued that the Shroud of Turin is a 14th-century work, consistent with the 1988 radiocarbon dating, and he made a credible copy using a bas-relief method.^[1] He traced lake-monster sightings to lines of swimming otters.^[1] In 1992 he clashed with Ed and Lorraine Warren on Sally Jessy Raphael. He said he had never met a house he thought was haunted, while the Warrens "have not met a house they didn't think was haunted".^[1]

Honours and personal life

Nickell received CSI's Distinguished Skeptic award in 2000 and the American Humanist Association's Isaac Asimov Award in 2004. He shared the Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking in 2005 and 2012.^[1][3] In October 2011 the asteroid 31451 Joenickell was named for him by its discoverer, James E. McGaha.^[1] In 2003 he learned through a DNA test that he had an adult daughter, after her mother, his college girlfriend Diana Harris, sought him out. He wrote of "a new appreciation of intuition". He and Harris married on 1 April 2006.^[1] He died in Buffalo, New York, on 4 March 2025, aged 80.^[1][3] Karr called him "an icon and hero within the skeptical community". The New York Times also published an obituary, which could not be opened for this revision.^[2][3]

On the UAP Timeline

• Pascagoula abduction (11 October 1973) — Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker say they were taken aboard a craft near Pascagoula, Mississippi.

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Joe Nickell”, “Flatwoods monster”, “Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter”, “Pascagoula incident”, “Mothman”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.