Miscellaneous Beliefs

Listed here are a range of beliefs, many loosely attached to beliefs in the occult, parapsychology, and visitations from outer space.

Beyerstein, Barry L., & Beyerstein, Dale F. (Eds.) The Write Stuff: Evaluations of Graphology -- the Study of Handwriting Analysis. Prometheus Books, 1992. A series of articles that present both sides, but most are highly critical of the idea that handwriting is diagnostic of personality or that analysis of handwriting can predict anything.

Hunt, S. Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game. (*). Harper & Row, 1985. A sympathetic account which warns of the dangers of contacting Athe other side@. Criticisms can be found elsewhere.

Kusche, L. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved. Prometheus Books, 1995. There is no mystery to be solved, since most of the Amysterious@ events alleged to have taken place in the Bermuda Triangle did not even take place there and those that did mostly have quite prosaic explanations.

McCrone, Walter. Judgment Day for the Turin Shroud. Microscope Publications, 1996. A scientist explains why the famous shroud is a fake and suggests how it was done.

O'Leary, Stephen. Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric. Oxford U. Press, 1994. One of many fairly recent books on the power of the millennium to focus ideas about the end of the world. Damian Thompson's The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium (University Press of New England, 1997) and Paul Boyer's When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Beliefs in Modern America (Harvard, 1992)are also useful books on the topic.

Randles, Jenny & Hough, Peter. Spontaneous Human Combustion. Berkeley, 1992. Tries to present a case that some people do spontaneously catch fire and burn up.

Schnabel, Jim. Round in Circles. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994. The definitive discussion of crop circles, mysterious, large circles and other figures produced in crop fields in England and Canada. These have been attributed to alien visits, but the authors argues that they are produced by live humans with a certain sense of humor.

Spitz, Herman. Nonconscious Movements: From Mystical Messages to Facilitated Communication. Erlbaum, 1997. A detailed analysis of involuntary and unconscious movements that underlie séances, Ouija boards, facilitated communication with autistic children, and automatic handwriting among other phenomena.