Gallery of Wackos

A list of prominent people who perpetuate misinformation, pseudoscience, or unfounded claims.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
--Albert Einstein

Throughout the ages, wackos have proclaimed the truth, no matter how unfounded or false. Sometimes they turn out to be true...by accident. Skeptics simply need credible evidence before taking proclamations seriously. Critical thinking and evidence are disempowering to wackos. While some wackos are outright frauds, many are well-meaning though delusional.

Presented below in alphabetical order is a list of some of the wackos from the Skeptoid newsletter. Sign up to read about a new wacko each week or a new wonder of the week, and more.

Sathya Sai Baba was a typical Eastern guru, though he had an atypical awesome hairstyle. He was born in India and leveraged his heritage to its fullest advantage among Westerners seeking unconventional enlightenment. His schtick was to cause trinkets such as watches and rings magically appear, using what Western magicians recognize as the simplest of tricks, but which his followers consider evidence of his divinity. Though he never seemed to make anything useful appear, like money or food to give to the poor and hungry.

There are some 1,200 Sathya Sai Baba Centers in 114 countries around the world, and a minimum of some six million people who consider themselves his followers. His accumulated wealth by the time of his death in 2011 was £5.5 billion¹.

Like most people of this ilk, he was frequently and publicly criticized for enjoying sexual favors from his female devotees and allegations of sexual abuse of boys, as well as for tricking people into following him with his simple sleight-of-hand magic tricks. He knew how to use this to his advantage, pointing out that every great leader is put to such trials, most notably drawing comparisons between himself and Jesus Christ. And true to form, every time he was publicly criticized, his numbers grow.

Some people admire him for becoming staggeringly wealthy by cheating people into unfulfilled promises with misrepresented magic tricks, while other people detest his lack of ethics.

¹American billion of 1,000,000,000 (10⁹), not the British English billion of 1,000,000,000,000 (10¹²)

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Braco is a Croatian new age mystic who promotes his "healing gaze". He gazes at you, and heals all your ills. But wait, there's more. You can even buy a DVD of Braco gazing at the camera, and that will heal you too.

The following email is from a Skeptoid listener in Denmark:

Braco's stunt was to charge his audience (a couple of hundred people) about $10 each to sit in a large theater and watch a woman prepare his entrance for 15 minutes or so. Next he entered the stage in spotlights, smiling and looking at people. He sat himself on a chair in the middle of the stage and stared at the audience for 5-10 minutes, he then got up and left the room without a word. After a short "debriefing", the seance was over.

Several people were crying and many rushed to the foyer to buy his $35 DVDs. The girl that sold them assured them (on TV) that the "magic powers" worked just as well from the DVD. Want to give Braco's magical gaze a try? His touring calendar is on his web site, Braco.net.

As you can guess, neither Braco nor anybody else in his organization offers any information about how or why Braco's gaze might have physiological effects, but as a substitute, they've filled his web site to the brim with a red herring to distract you from that: Gobs and gobs of quasi-spiritual new age nonsense.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Edgar Cayce (prounounced like Casey) is one of the first celebrity psychics from the early twentieth century.

His big thing was coming up for miracle cures for people by appearing to go into some sort of sleep-like trance. An assistant would record his medical recommendations which included any sort of made-up quackery you can think of: poultices, colonic irrigation, strange diets, even bizarre electrical contraptions. Sadly, some people reason that this is a sound way to practice medicine, and to this day, hundreds of Edgar Cayce centers exist around the world, dispensing miracle medical cures, New Age religious advice, and fortune telling.

Cayce was also renowned for his dream interpretations and promotion of themes such as astrology and reincarnation. Evidently these topics were obsessions of his throughout his life, even in early childhood. He died in 1945, evidently failing to foresee or forestall his own death, and evidently unable to reincarnate. Nevertheless, many consider him unerring.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Early in his career, Deepak Chopra was a useful human being, working as an endocrinologist. But back in the 1960's he got caught up in the whole Eastern Wisdom craze, and learned a far more profitable career: How to separate people from their money by selling them quasi-spiritual Eastern babble. He studied this as a protege under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, another featured wacko here.

Deepak's special brand of peddling nonsense is characterized by his invoking of the Appeal to Quantum Physics fallacy. No matter what mind-body-spirit hooey he promotes, he justifies it with quantum physics. Deepak has never studied quantum physics and has never said anything that indicates he even knows what it is.

Dr. Steven Novella once wrote:

Deepak Chopra has made a career out of misunderstanding quantum mechanics.

Prof. Lawrence M. Krauss wrote in Scientific American:

I have read numerous pieces by him on why quantum mechanics provides rationales for everything from the existence of God to the possibility of changing the past. Nothing I have ever read, however, suggests he has enough understanding of quantum mechanics to pass an undergraduate course I might teach on the subject.

It works well for him. Estimates of his net worth are hard to come by, but he's sold more than 12 million books, charges $25,000 for a lecture, and owns several companies selling the message that quantum physics explains why you can have anything you want, so long as you wish for it hard enough. We create our own realities, after all...

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Meryl Dorey is the founder of the AVN (which supposedly means Australian Vaccination Network, but really means Anti Vaccination Network). She campaigns tirelessly against protecting health through vaccination, using some truly amazingly bad science. She demonstrates time and time again that her understanding of science and medicine is shockingly bad, far worse than the average person on the street.

Meryl continued to defend Andrew Wakefield, founder of the antivaccine movement, even after he was stripped of his medical license and had his most significant publications retracted.

She truly does believe, apparently, that her medical knowledge is superior to that of the whole body of medical science. One Australian skeptic analyzed her reply to a formal complaint lodged by the Health Care Complaints Commission and found:

The collection of references is, on the whole, laughable. At best she hasn't read the papers she cites and includes them out of ignorance, and at worst she is being deliberately deceptive.

In the New South Wales legislative council, one legislator said it best in 2002:

Only 60 per cent of children in the Byron Bay area in the 12 to 15 month age group - the very young and most vulnerable - are immunised. That is mainly because of the activities of a woman called Meryl Dorey, who lives in Byron Bay and who has decided not to immunise her children and who regularly claims that immunisation is not necessary. She campaigns against immunisation.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Jose Escamilla is known for the discovery of "rods" -- mysterious flying creatures that are invisible to the eye, but that show up on camera. How can this be? Well, if you've heard of rods before, you probably know. When a brightly lit insect flies in front of a camera when there's a dark background, it leaves a white streak on the film (or CCD) for the duration of the shutter speed. Its wingbeats during that period of time photograph as an undulating line along its side. Although anyone who understands the rudimentary principles of photography knows this, Jose has made a career promoting these as alien visitors. Seriously.

When The History Channel's Monster Quest did a show about his rods, I cringed, fearing they would promote them as real mysteries. Fortunately, and much to Jose's chagrin, they laughed at him pretty much the same way everyone else does.

I have to wonder if this guy is really serious, or just trying to scrape a living off of the gullible. But from reading his web site, I think it's probably the former. That's a scary thing.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

This wacko is so litigious that he is sometimes referred to as "that israeli self-proclaimed psychic whose name begins with U".

U.G. is the original spoon bending clown. I'm not suggesting that his sanity is off its rocker; merely that his ethics are offtrack.

He does only a handful of tricks, but is best known for popularizing the old trick of bending a spoon, apparently with his mind, but really with sleight of hand. Lots of magicians do this; why does he uniquely qualify as a wacko?

Because he is a charlatan. He tells people, including researchers and the people who sign research grant checks, that his "powers" are real. Millions of dollars have been spent studying his "powers" based on his assertion that it's a real tappable resource.

If you haven't, watch the video of his utter failure on national television when Johnny Carson was prepared for him. Johnny gave honest magicians free reign to give their entertaining performances, but he was not about to let his show be used to perpetuate a hoax.

U.G. is still out there, and is one of the world's most commercially successful magicians.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Rather than take basic pains to edumacate himself about medical science, Prince Charles instead uses his royal influence to promote just about every non-scientific alternative to healthcare he can find -- most notably homeopathy.

Charles' Foundation for Integrated Health was forced to close earlier this year when several of its officials were arrested for fraud. But it was a small drop in the bucket compared to the many years it promoted worthless therapies to the detriment of innocent victims. Its main goal had been to get the National Health Service to provide homeopathy at government expense.

How a 21st century adult with any kind of education or intelligence could get behind such an initiative continues to boggle my mind.

Prince Charles attempts to legitimize and promote the use of untested, unapproved, and implausible alternative therapies of all sorts instead of using modern evidence-based medicine. He has a "collaborativeagreement" with Bravewell, the United States' largest fundraising organization dedicated to the promotion of non-scientific alternatives to healthcare.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Yoshihide Hagiwara is a promoter of non-scientific nutritional products, and an advocate for potentially fatal alternative treatments such as chelation.

A former medical doctor and pharmaceutical researcher, Dr. Hagiwara later turned to the manufacture and sales of supplement products, mainly wheatgrass juice and green barley leaves. Through one of his companies, Barleygreen, he promoted them as superfoods along with the usual made-up claims that they detoxify the body and retard aging. As we know, such foods have almost zero nutritional value, but they're an easy sell since they so nicely fit into the "all natural" fallacy. Dr. Hagiwara died in 2006.

One with his background would know better, from which I can only conclude that he knowingly threw good medical information to the wind and turned instead to profiteering. That's wacko.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Answers in Genesis founder Ken Ham is behind the slick Creation Museum. He wants you to believe that Jesus rode around on a saddled dinosaur (literally), that farmers used dinosaurs as beasts of burden, and that every geological feature on Earth was created in just a few days during Noah's flood.

His best argument for this is that you weren't there to verify otherwise.

And he has some reach. His radio show Answers is broadcast on some 900 stations worldwide. All this is done, he says, to promote a literal interpretation of the Bible: to strip it of any meaning other than as a simple listing of events. Apparently, this is a desirable goal to some. I breezed through and I couldn't find any references to dinosaurs being used as beasts of burden or as transportation, but I'll attribute my failure to find this to Ken's evidently superior knowledge of the scriptures.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

It's a visit to the old-school files of classical wackos, the basic names that everyone should know in the field of pseudoscience and the paranormal.

Betty Hill was best known as half of the Betty and Barney Hill couple who launched the UFO abduction craze when they claimed to have been given medical examinations aboard a flying saucer in 1961, but in reality, it was almost all Betty's own invention.

Betty had been obsessed with UFOs -- to a perhaps pathological degree -- for her whole life, and this only magnified after her big story went public. She maintained that she met with aliens regularly, and that she would encounter them virtually any time she wanted just by driving out into the woods. She told stories of whole fleets of flying saucers in formation, levitating trucks flying down the freeway, and all manner of wackiness.

The lesson to learn from Betty Hill is that you shouldn't always take the validity of popular stories at face value. Look not only into the facts, but into the backgrounds and motivations of the people telling the story. As often as not, you'll find a crazy story is coming from a crazy person.

I'm not making fun of people with mental illness here, or exploiting Betty. I'm making a valid point about the origins of many unlikely popular legends.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Elaine Hollingsworth is a researcher and health expert who has dutifully studied disease and the medical industry and found that (a) only she can cure all cancers, and (b) the medical industry is corrupt.

Oh wait, I got that wrong. Turns out she's a former Hollywood actress (under the name of Sara Shane) and has no background whatsoever in research or medicine. Amazing then that she made these discoveries!

Her website, Doctors Are Dangerous, reveals that the doctors of the "sickness industry" are nothing but shills for drug companies. They're driven by profits alone and offer quack remedies.

Hollingsworth, on the other hand, sells you books (Take Control of Your Health and Escape the Sickness Industry), DVDs (One Answer to Cancer), and a whole raft of worthless supplements. Far be it from her to profit from quack remedies! Those bastard doctors.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Leonard Horowitz is a former dentist who left the realm of rationality in pursuit of the Almighty Dollar. Horowitz is best known for three anti-scientific medical claims:

HIV/AIDS was created by the US government as a genocidal weapon.

Vaccines are a conspiracy to kill people.

The SARS virus can be cured by one of his own naturopathic products (which the government is trying to suppress).

Horowitz's career now consists of speaking at alternative medicine conferences, creating his own self-published books and DVDs, and selling products online. He's received warnings of his illegal practices from the FDA, but he just ignores them and goes on spreading his dangerous misinformation.

Horowitz is not unique. There are many kooks on the Internet who do all this same stuff. And he has medical training. The lesson to be learned from such wackos is that nobody is immune to misinformation, no matter how trusted their background may be.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

David Icke (prounounced like Ike) is notable as much for his silver mullet as for his staggering conspiracy beliefs, most notably that most world leaders are reptilian aliens wearing electronic disguises. Ironic, judging by his looks, eh?

The headline on his web site DavidIcke.com is "Exposing the dreamworld we believe to be real." Watched The Matrix a few too many times, Dave? It's basically an online store for his many self-published books, like The Global Conspiracy. Here's a sample from his sales pitch from it:

This is the book that will wake up the masses and reveal at last in an undeniable way the incredible level of control a covert and evil controlling force has had over humanity for thousands of years. It shows how they manipulate your reality using advanced but hidden knowledge so you are little more that slaves who think you're free and are are doing exactly what you're covertly told to.

Would you like to know more about these reptilian beings? Let's let him explain in his own words:

...That is one key way the Reptilian geneticists changed the human species, switched off access to most of our brain capacity, the overwhelming majority of our DNA potential (hence the so-called 'junk' DNA that appears to have no function), and tuned the body-computer into the Moon Matrix, the Reptilian hive mind.

The crazy is strong in this one.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

John of God is one of Oprah's favorite people. He's a psychic surgeon living in Brazil, one of those guys who uses sleight of hand to apparently pull chicken guts out of your abdomen, and then tells you he has "healed" your illness, whatever it was.

Fans of psychic surgery may remember James Randi's appearance on the old Johnny Carson show, where he performed this trick (quite humorously) on an audience member, and showed how easily it is for tricksters like John of God to fool people.

John of God has received broad, fully credulous support from the American mass media. Even CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta promoted him with little criticism, thus drawing fire from the medical community. Oprah, ABC News, and others have all sent dubious "experts" to report of his miraculous achievements.

But if people feel better after giving him their money, what's the harm? John of God (and his staff of 30+ psychic surgeons) claim they can cure "cancers, AIDS, blindness, asthma, drug addiction, alcohol abuse, tumors, physical problems of any kind, debilitating psychological problems and/or spiritual desperation." Telling sick people that his act cures them is terribly wrong.

He says his patients should continue their medical treatment, but I don't buy that. If he really wants you to think medical care is good, why does he take your money?

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist extraordinaire. Everywhere this guy looks, he sees the government out to get him. He uses his program on the Genesis Communications Network to try and convince the world that what he sees is real. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines these symptoms as delusional disorder. So I don't mean this to make fun of Alex, because he and others like him are most likely treatable. Rather, I offer the example of Alex as a cautionary tale.

If he were to see his entry in this Gallery of Wackos, he would probably, in all honesty, believe that I'm being paid by the government to write this (I am, after all, a Disinformation Agent™). In the mind of the truly obsessed conspiracy theorist, there is no gray; only black and white. Nothing is complicated. There are only the evil overlords, the blind "sheeple" victims, and the few enlightened "patriots" who are able to see this.

If you want to be truly entertained and see just how deep Alex's paranoia gets, check out his websites infowars.com and prisonplanet.com, which guarantee that Skeptoid will never run out of material.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Is Ray Kurzeil a genius? Absolutely. Has he won just about every science and technology award on the planet? Yes. How many honorary doctorates has he been given? Seventeen, at last count.

He also thinks he's going to live forever, thanks to a combination of what he believes is the impending "technological singularity" (a prediction shared by few other futurists) and his own notions about vitamin megadosing, detoxification, intravenous chelation therapy, the magic of organic food, and just about every disproven alternative health scheme you can name. He rolls this all together under the umbrella of a yet-to-be-named new religion which he believes all people should embrace.

This additional honor upon which I am bestowing Ray is not to say that his contribution to the world is a net negative. He's gifted the world with many great inventions, and his focus on health and technological developments are shared, at least in principle, by many great thinkers. He's just kind of a nut, but probably of the kind that's better to have around than to not.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

For decades, Bob Lazar claimed to have worked as an engineer at Area 51, working directly on captured alien spacecraft powered by some sort of gravity drive. This guy made uncounted appearances on television, and was given an unchallenged platform to say whatever the heck he wanted. On the few occasions when Lazar was asked why there are no records of his attendance at any of the schools he claimed to have gotten his degrees from, he said the government erased his records. Men in Black were, apparently, sent to every legitimate alumnus' house and exchanged their yearbooks with copies missing Lazar's picture. Yeah, right.

Recently the Air Force lifted the confidentiality orders on the people who did legitimately work at the Groom Lake facility inside Nellis AFB (which is the real name of the place that Lazar wrongly called Area 51), and surprise surprise, none of the real engineers and employees ever heard of Lazar or of his gravity spaceships. But they can, however, tell you everything about what was actually going on there. Sorry, Bob.

Please, media, apply some basic grain of critique to your reporting.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Louis is an Indian solid-state physicist, and so far as I've found, he's a perfectly good one. So why is he on this list of wackos? For straying outside of his discipline, into cell biology, and promoting to the mass media the idea that some perfectly unremarkable rain, colored red by a common algae, must have been alien.

He made some pretty serious methodological errors, as detailed in Skeptoid episode #224, because he doesn't know what he's doing in cell biology. Moreover, he chose to ignore the perfectly well publicized finding that the rain was red because of its cargo of Trentepohlia algae. Why? Who knows. I hope the reason is not because promoting his alien story is the most notoriety he's ever had, and why stop a good thing.

Guys like Godfrey Louis give all scientists a bad name.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Most of you have probably heard of the swath of death and destruction Jenny McCarthy is cutting through America's children, but in case some of you haven't, you should know.

While it's true that she's a former Playboy bunny who made her name picking her nose on MTV, that's hardly a valid criticism of what she's done ever since. As the primary spokesperson for the antivaccine movement in the United States, she's the one most directly responsible for the deaths that have resulted.

So far, in California alone, ten infants and children have died from pertussis (whooping cough), a vaccine preventable disease, either because they were not vaccinated or because they were too young and were exposed to other unvaccinated children. Jenny McCarthy must be dancing in the streets to celebrate this victory.

Her much-publicized romantic relationship with comedian Jim Carrey provided her with an alleged $50 million dollar fund to continue her fight against vaccines, and Carrey often appeared alongside her at her allies. Fortunately, when they split up in April 2010, the flow of cash seems to have stopped, and her public presence appears to have diminished somewhat. So we hope, anyway.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Born in 1937, Billy Meier sees a UFO about every day, and produces so many photographs, bits and pieces of alien spaceships, and sound recordings that it almost -- almost -- seems like he makes them himself.

He's best known for his regular contact with the Plejaren alien race. He's even published some of their wisdom in German (Billy is Swiss). Other alien species have made 21 assassination attempts on Billy, by his own count. Most of these were fought off by his Plejaren allies. A lucky man!

In all seriousness, Billy Meier is taken quite seriously by many UFO believers. Think about that every time you stop and reconsider whether these people are truly nuts or just misled by the sensationalist media.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Joseph Mercola has built his entire career upon the All-Natural fallacy. He is best known for his website, mercola.com, on which he sells every conceivable flavor of unscientific alternatives to medicine. His philosophy is based on a total rejection of everything learned since the development of modern medicine and the scientific method. His basic advocacy is for a "paleolithic diet", the idea that total health can be achieved through eating only those foods that were available to stone age people before the development of agriculture.

I find it amusing that the vast majority of his sales are for worthless vitamins and supplements that were not available to stone age people.

To me, it's deeply offensive and immoral to recommend that any sick or injured person should reject medical help, and instead buy some snake oil from his web site. Yet he manages to live with himself.

Probably most of his customers are not especially ill. From those people, he simply takes money and returns nothing of any demonstrable value.

Even if we give Mercola and his ilk the benefit of the doubt and grant that he truly believes his own sales pitches (which I strongly doubt), he knows that he is at odds with the overwhelming majority of evidence. He must have some serious cognitive dissonance going on.

Mercola has received FDA warning letters for violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act. Maybe this is one rat we'll eventually see skinned.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

David Wynn Miller is a wacko and I mean it with the full force of the word.

He is of the opinion that -- get ready for this -- using weird punctuation and capital letters means you are no longer liable to pay taxes. Got that? Here is a sample from his wacko website (which is not to be missed):

     ~6 FOR THE NAME: "UNITED-STATES", IN A COURT-ROOM-DOCUMENT IS WITH THE NAME-MEANING-CLAIM OF THE TWO-OR-MORE-CONTRACT-STATES-(NO-CITIZEN-STATE-PERSON)CONTRACVT-STATES-CORPORATION-VESSEL(C.-S.-C.-V.) AS THE TWO OR MORE-PERSONS WITHIN A CONTRACT-CLOSURE BY A CLOSED-PAPER-COURT-AREA. [HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE 50-USA-STATES]FOR ALL FOREIGN-COURTS OF A FOREIGN-GLOBAL-AREA WITH THE 7.2-BILLION-FOREIGN-PARSE-SYNTAX-PEOPLE ARE WITH THE CLAIM AS THE SINGLE-VESSELS IN A DRYDOCK-BUILDING WITH A CONTRACT AS THE "BILLS OF THE LAIDING" WITH THE LOCAL-PORT-AUTHORITIES C.-S.-S.-C.-P.-S.-L. OF THAT AREA OR WITH THE FRUD & MISLEDING-STATEMENTS OF THE TITLE-~15: CONTRACT-STATES-CLAIMS SECTION-~1692-~e AND: TITLE-~18: U.-S.-C.-S.-~1001 OF THE FICTIONAL-LANGUAGE-CRIME BY AN AILING-PERSON POSING AS A FIDUCIARY.

What's really nuts is that he has a following, and is making scads of money from this. He calls this Quantum-Math-Communications and Language, for reasons known only to himself. He teaches classes on it, mainly to people who have to defend themselves in court. So far using bizarre grammar as a legal defense has not worked out too well for anyone, but that's never stopped people from handing over their money before.

Authorities have also noted that the little punky boy who shot Congresswoman Giffords in Arizona used Miller's grammar style on his Internet postings and appears to have been inspired by him.

Oh, and Miller also prefers that you call him Judge Miller. Also "King of Hawaii". And I'm not kidding. This guy should get some kind of wacko gold medal.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

James L. Oschman has a slick website promoting his DVD, The Living Matrix, that invokes the quantum fallacy and other fallacies in support of "information as medicine" that includes the claim that patients can heal if they believe that they're healthy. This kind of faith healing is no substitute for actual medicine, no matter how sciencey it sounds. And his book, Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, is full of anecdotes and speculation in support of "energy medicine", the outmoded pre-chemistry notion of vitalism (vague unmeasurable "energy").

James L. Oschman has done real science in the past, but he is now well into pseudoscience that appeals to the masses and does not stand up to scientific criticism.

Torsten Pihl

Why is Dr. Oz considered a wacko, you might ask? He seems a reasonable enough fellow. I deem him a wacko because he thinks it's OK to spout untrue medical nonsense in exchange for the large dollar amounts that spring forth from Oprah's TV network. He's actually a real doctor, and he knows better. He knows that he spews garbage, he just thinks the money's worth it. That is wacko.

When he first started appearing on Oprah, he gave generally good medical advice. And then it gradually morphed into simply nodding an endorsement of whatever witchcraft alt-med promoter Oprah had on as a guest. And now that he's finally graduated to having his own show, he has descended into unapologetic, full-blown promotion of magical healing methods. Energy healing, distance healing, faith healing, you name it. Whatever's sensational is what sells.

Here's a really good article that takes him to task, Oprah's Favorite Doctor Promotes Quackery. Forward this article to people you know who love Dr. Oz.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Fred Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church, has invented his own version of Christianity best illustrated by his demonstrations at the gravesides of American servicemen, where he and his delusional followers (mostly relatives and friends of his) say that God killed the soldier to punish the United States for allowing homosexuality. "God Hates Fags" is his signature banner.

Fred Phelps is offensive to everyone, conservative or liberal, or even just normal people not filled with hate and insanity. His own son Mark, who managed to avoid inheriting the Crazy Gene, wrote to the local paper:

I believe in God and the Bible, and my father's behavior doesn't fit the description of behavior that would show in the life of one who loves God; behavior characteristics such as Love, Joy, Peace, Longsuffering, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self-control. Instead, my father's behavior characterizes, I believe, Hate, Outbursts of Wrath, Contention, Jealousy, Vengefulness, Misery, Harshness, and Selfish ambition. He mis-states the truth about his own behavior, about others, about the Bible, with apparent ease and regularity. He behaves with a viciousness the likes of which I have never seen. He accepts no genuine accountability in his life and is subject to no one. His lifestyle betrays the sacred trust of what a pastor, husband, father and grandfather should be. I suppose if a comparison were made between the life of Jesus Christ and my father, there would not be much to compare.

Phelps loves to point out that dead American servicemen are burning in hell. That's what I call a wacko.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Elizabeth Clare Prophet, was a quasi-Christian New Age spiritualist who died in 2009. She was best known for The Summit Lighthouse ministry and publisher, and the Church Universal and Triumphant, through which she made all sorts of predictions that were supposedly prophecies.

Prophet (what a name) received her prophecies from the "ascended masters", New Age characters who are spiritually enlightened beings who used to be humans in past lives. She was all into Indian gurus and the Dalai Lama and basically anyone who purported to have some special Eastern-influenced enlightenment. This was the source of her visions, which most notably included a prediction of a nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union. Her followers packed up provisions and loaded bomb shelters in preparation.

She got into this through marriage to Mark Prophet, her second of four husbands, who was practicing "ascended masters" prophecy when they met. Evidently the masters liked her too.

She appropriated the Montessori name to launch a chain of churches calling themselves Montessori schools (anyone can do this, as the name Montessori is in the public domain). Hers was a uniquely bizarre blending of New Age mysticism, Eastern religion, and Christianity.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

V.M. Rabolú is a transcendentalist and author who is passionate about helping humanity by making things up out of whole cloth and stating them as fact, and he wants to extend his sexual repression to others. If humanity could find a way to reproduce without fornication, that would be a good thing, and homosexuality is a "sexual atrocity".

In his book, Hercólubus or Red Planet, Rabolú warns of the impending doom from a collision with a large red planet that is humanity's punishment, sea monsters created by atomic tests in the Pacific (like something out of a Japanese monster movie), and details the civilizations on Venus and Mars (never mind that there are actually no civilizations there). To mitigate the catastrophe, we must disintegrate psychological defects with the lance of the Divine Mother and chant mantras to move into the Fifth Dimension that is the Astral Plane so that we can gain wisdom and be rescued by interplanetary solar-powered invincible spaceships. And throughout all this, those darned scientists ignore the truth!

V.M. Rabolú died in 2000 so the fulfillment of his "very short-term prophecy" keeps fading ever so dimmer.

Torsten Pihl

Dean Radin is a standard name you should know in the field of woo. Dean's big claim to fame is the Global Consciousness Project, in which he believes that major events that affect the emotions of many are foretold by fluctuations in random number generators. Needless to say, people who understand statistical analysis are not impressed by his claims. If major events could actually be predicted, then that would be impressive. Instead, anomalies that were generated some time before a major event were cherry picked after the event. That's mundane and unimpressive.

But he continues to publish -- not through legitimate science journals, because they won't generally accept work that can't pass peer review -- but through the mass media. His books include Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, a title in which he uses the word "quantum" just as scientifically as does Deepak Chopra; and The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena which, in case you had any doubt, states outright the pre-existing belief he's out to justify every time he sits down at his desk.

Guys like Dean behave very unscientifically when they realize that their theories have failed to convince any significant number of legitimate researchers; and so rather than investigating whether he might be wrong himself, he goes on promoting hypotheses that he has been given sufficient cause to believe are wrong.

However it should be noted that Dean rocks on the banjo and on the violin. Not everyone is all bad, and this is important to note.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Gene Ray, better known as the Time Cube guy. It's not really fair to pick on Gene, because he's clearly mentally ill, and he's never convinced anybody of his theories, therefore he's also not hurting anybody. But a study of Gene does provide a pretty good example of what a lot of delusional conspiracy theorists are like.

Gene Ray, who describes himself as "the wisest man who ever lived" and "Dr. Gene Ray", has been the subject of a documentary film and has been an invited speaker at several universities... not because anyone believes his Time Cube theory, but because a glimpse into such a personality is a good cautionary tale.

The central theme of his Time Cube theory is that everything is somehow cubic: time, creation, the universe, religion, name it. The number 4 pops up everywhere in his lecturing. He hasn't seemed to catch on that a cube doesn't have 4 of anything (it has 12 edges, 8 corners, and 6 sides).

The best thing you can do right now is to take a look at the Time Cube web site. You'll read, basically, hatred of everyone and everything: hatred of humans, academia, government, religion, males, females, races, and especially science.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Troy and Josh Rodarmel are the founders of Power Balance. In only three short years, they stumbled into a multimillion dollar business model that sweept the world: Cheap rubber bracelets that they claim boost your strength, balance, and flexibility. By "cheap" I mean pennies to manufacture, but they sell for around $30 to $60.

How do these bracelets accomplish these medical miracles? Well, they won't say, other than a vague reference to energy fields and frequencies, that bears no resemblance to any known phenomenon in biology or physical sciences.

But regardless of the mechanism, Power Balance customers seem to believe that it works. It's sold using an old stage magician's trick called applied kinesiology, where the performer uses subtle cues to fool you into thinking you're stronger or weaker by slight changes to the angles at which he applies pressure to you. I find it hilarious that they didn't even bother to change the name of the trick. People do use Google, you know... don't they???

Fortunately, the Australian magazine Choice, one of the world's foremost consumer publications, just awarded Power Balance their Shonky award, given out to scams and ripoffs and other generally worthless products.

Power Balance knockoffs are now everywhere (aptly-named Placebo Bands are a cheap alternative), showing how easily the public is fooled by scientific sounding language. This underscores the importance of basic science education and critical thinking. Support Skeptoid!

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Comedian Joe Rogan is not wacko in a malicious sense, and he's not wacko purely in the comedic sense. His wackiness stems from a crazy way of viewing the world, no doubt due in part to his drug use and his frequent employ of an isolation tank to trip out.

You may know him as a comedian and a TV host, but he also goes around promoting a good number of conspiracy theories. He seems to be most serious about hundreds of thousands of Americans having been insiders to a conspiracy to fake the Apollo program, including the murders of Grissom, White, and Chaffee to keep them from blowing the lid. Apparently, this was sufficient to frighten all of the other 100,000 conspirators to the point that there's never once been a whistle blower.

Clearly, an expert.

He also believes the US has antimatter weapons (because of all the evidence and sound underlying theory, probably), that Kennedy was murdered by the government, and basically anything else that supports a view wherein being elected by American voters turns anyone into a bloodthirsty Machiavelli. If it's on the fringe, Rogan appears to usually think it's true.

It's a good thing he's in the entertainment industry, because he does indeed provide much good entertainment.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia is an evangelical lawyer who, in 2006, decided to create a version of Wikipedia centered on Young Earth fundamentalism, as a resource for homeschooled children. He's big on the term "liberal bias", using it to defend the need to create Conservapedia by countering Wikipedia's liberal bias. OK, so that's not really all that controversial; many conservatives might agree with that. But Schlafly takes it to a degree I never would have guessed: He also believes that the King James Bible has a liberal bias, and he's working on a new translation called the Conservative Bible Project.

Conservapedia is notorious for placing Adolf Hitler on the page about evolutionary biology, and other bizarre attempts to shoehorn science into some kind of evil plot against Christianity.

When you have access to as many resources as Schlafly, and still dismiss the vast majority of evidence in order to cherrypick (or invent) your own special factoids, you can only be described as a wacko.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Richard Schulze of HerbDoc.com. Oh, excuse me, I meant Dr. Richard Schulze, since he has unaccredited degrees from the "School of Natural Healing" (that required no coursework or curriculum). So far as I can tell, his "education" cost him a grand total of $295.

With this impressive background, which has included the courageous rejection of medical science, "Dr." Schulze dispenses natural cures from his "clinic", which does not appear to have any published address.

Thousands of patients healed themselves of every disease and illness. Thousands more worldwide experienced "miracle cures".

Really! It's true! Don't believe it? He has testimonials.

Probably nothing that "Dr." Schulze dispenses is going to do serious harm, except to the wallet, of course. But his website is overflowing with illegal medical claims, and sooner or later the authorities will catch up to him. When they do, a few subtle changes of wording will do it, or perhaps a change of URL, and once again he'll be taking money from innocent victims who don't know any better, and giving them worthless "supplements" gilt with sciencey-sounding language.

Sadly, guys like him are a dime a dozen. The money's there, it's easy, and he's happy to snatch it up based on a $295 "degree".

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Not many people have worked so hard to get themselves nominated as a waco as Charlie Sheen has.

He has an obvious addiction problem, which really sucks for those around him, but that's not why we're featuring him here.

Sheen is one of the heros of the conspiracy theory crowd, most notably 9/11 "truthers" who believe the US government perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. As part of his campaign, he's regularly appeared on Alex Jones' conspiracy theory radio program. In 2009, Sheen showcased his wackiness with his 20 Minutes with the President essay which was a fictional account of him confronting Obama about 9/11.

He went on the show again and unleashed a mind-spinning tirade of bravado. Fortunately for the world's collective intellect, his problems with addiction and the battles surrounding his TV series dominated the interview, as even that drivel is less harmful to the world than 9/11 garbage. (This was the interview that prompted CBS to cancel his show.)

So, a note to conspiracy theorists: A fine representative you've chosen to hook your wagon to.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Rupert Sheldrake is, among other things, the world's leading advocate for the psychic ability of dogs. That's right, dogs are psychic. Woof.

After a brief career in academia as a plant biochemist, he then turned his time and attention to Eastern philosophies. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and a Visiting Professor and Academic Director of the Holistic Thinking Program at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. From his web site, Sheldrake.org:

Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative biologists and writers is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to avision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory.

Morphic fields and morphic resonances, in case you're not aware, are terms he made up. What they might refer to is known only in the depths of his own profound imagination.

He has pretty deep cred among his followers. One Japanese student was convinced that Sheldrake was mind controlling him, to the point that he once stabbed Sheldrake in the leg. That's how you know you're really getting to your audience.

He's gotten the most attention in the past few years for a series of experiments in which he found that a dog seemed to be able to predict when its owner would come home by running to the window. He concluded that dogs are therefore psychic. When other researchers have replicated his experiments, nothing deviating from random chance has ever been found.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Andrew Wakefield is, more than anyone else, personally responsible for the worldwide anti-vaccine fear, that's bringing back so many preventable, fatal diseases that we all thought had been eradicated. Thanks a lot, pal.

He used to be Dr. Wakefield in the UK, a surgeon, but got kicked out of the profession in 2010 when it was discovered that his seminal anti-vaccine 1998 paper published in the Lancet was a piece of crap. The British General Medical Council made some three dozen charges against him and found that he'd acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly". He's now no longer allowed to practice medicine, but he hasn't really been doing that for a while. He's still pursuing his true passion, rabid anti-medicine, and travels and lectures extensively trying to dissuade parents from vaccinating their children against preventable disease. He's still out there, folks...

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Andrew Weil has written many books, mainly focusing on diet. If you follow his dietary recommendations, you'll probably end up as healthy as anyone. No problem there.

The problem comes in the form of his "integrative" philosophy. This means integrating science-based medicine with unscientific therapies, the latter of which he provides through his Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. Such centers rarely provide the science part, as that's covered elsewhere; thus, they essentially are exclusive providers of therapies which are either not proven to work, or proven not to work. That's why we call them alternative medicine. Should universities really be teaching this to students as if it's medical science?

Oh, and he's also a big proponent of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Oprah Winfrey is one of the most influential women in the world. Arguably, she is not wacko in the sense of being insane or anything. She is, by all accounts, very sharp and knows exactly what she's doing.

What she does is promote anything that's sensational, and that's how she gained the attention of one of the world's largest viewing audiences. Her show and magazine promote anything that shocks, surprises, or titillates us. That's her only criteria. Probably 80 or 90 percent of it is true and perfectly harmless, but that remaining 10 or 20 percent is given equal credibility by viewers who have no reason to suspect their trusted hostess has not done good research. Oprah doesn't care what she tells them; only that they keep watching.

As a direct result of Oprah Winfrey's shockingly unethical rise to riches, many people believe in unscientific alternatives to healthcare, ghosts, psychics, sham health products, and other magical beliefs. The real extent of the damage she's done to the world's collective intellect is probably greater than that done by anyone else in history.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl

Mahesh Yogi, known to millions as guru to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and pretty much everyone else in Hollywood who wants to appear politically correct.

The Maharishi, who died in 2007, introduced transcendental meditation to the West. He popularized Yogic Flying - where you sit crosslegged and hop, and call it flying. He had a passion for Rolls Royces, private jets, lavish residences, and - apparently - young women. The Beatles' manager once said "This guy knows more about making deals than I do. He's really into scoring, the Maharishi." At time of his death, estimates of the value of his "borderless" empire ranged from two to six billion dollars.

But it was all based on "ancient wisdom" so it's OK. ...not.

Brian Dunning
Edited by Torsten Pihl