Secrets of the Psychics

About the Author

Massimo Polidoro was born March 10, 1969, in Voghera, in Italy's Lombardy region. As a teenager he corresponded with James Randi and, through a book and television series by Italian science journalist Piero Angela, discovered the broader skeptical movement built around the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) in the United States. He met Randi in person in Rome in 1988 and, with support from Angela, traveled to the United States and spent roughly a year in Florida as what several sources describe as Randi's only full-time apprentice in the art of paranormal investigation and psychic testing — learning firsthand the undercover, evidence-first fieldwork methodology this book is built around.

Polidoro returned to Italy as a founding member of CICAP, formally established on June 12, 1989 by Piero Angela together with a group of prominent Italian scientists, including three Nobel laureates; sociologist Lorenzo Montali served as the new committee's first secretary, physicist Steno Ferluga as its first president, and Polidoro himself went on to serve for many years as CICAP's national secretary and as director of its magazine, later renamed Scienza & Paranormale, which he edited from 1993 to 2006. He went on to earn a psychology degree from the University of Padua, with a master's thesis specifically on the psychology of eyewitness testimony to anomalous phenomena — academic training this article treats as directly relevant to how this book approaches witness testimony as evidence rather than proof.

Beyond CICAP, Polidoro built a substantial public career as a science journalist and communicator: he has been a longtime contributor to the Italian science magazine Focus, became the European representative for the James Randi Educational Foundation in 1996, and since 2002 has written a regular column for the American magazine Skeptical Inquirer. He is a research fellow of the U.S.-based Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI, the successor to CSICOP), has taught postgraduate science-communication coursework at the University of Padua since 2018, and is a recurring guest on Superquark, Italy's most popular science television program. He is the author of more than fifty books in Italian, of which this one and his earlier Final Séance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle (2001) are among his best-known English-language titles; this article treats his decades of hands-on field investigation, rather than any formal scientific credential in parapsychology, as the actual basis of his authority on the subject matter this book covers.

Historical Context & Origins

This book arrived in December 2003, roughly fifteen years into Polidoro's own career as a field investigator and fourteen years after CICAP's 1989 founding, at a point when the organization had already built a substantial case archive of Italian paranormal claims investigated using the undercover, physical-evidence-based methodology Polidoro had learned directly from James Randi in Florida in the late 1980s. The book functions as a career retrospective of sorts, assembling case investigations Polidoro had conducted and, in many instances, already published in shorter form in CICAP's own journal and in Skeptical Inquirer, into a single English-language volume aimed at an international audience that had, until this point, had little direct access to CICAP's specifically Italian body of casework.

The book's publisher, Prometheus Books, was at the time the leading English-language publishing house for skeptical and secular-humanist nonfiction, and this title sits within a broader wave of investigator memoirs and case-collection books — a genre this site's own library already documents through works like Bad UFOs and UFOs Explained — that collect a working investigator's accumulated case files into a single accessible volume rather than advancing one sustained argument.

Several of the book's chapters revisit investigations with a much older historical core, reaching back to early twentieth-century spiritualism: its treatment of medium Eusapia Palladino and the 1908 Feilding Report, of the friendship and eventual public falling-out between Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle over spiritualism, and of the "Margery" mediumship case Houdini himself helped expose, place this book in direct conversation with Polidoro's own earlier book Final Séance (2001), which covered the Houdini–Conan Doyle relationship at full length; this later book revisits some of that same historical ground more briefly alongside its contemporary casework.

Unlike this site's core UFO-focused library, this book was never framed by its author or its publisher as a UFO or ufology text; its historical context is the broader twentieth-century skeptical movement descended from CSICOP's 1976 founding, not the Cold War-era UFO research this site's Essential Reading list otherwise documents.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The book's organizing argument, stated across its opening chapter "It's all in the mind: on the mechanisms of deception in psychic fraud," is that most paranormal claims collapse under the same handful of explanatory mechanisms — cold reading, sensory leakage, statistical coincidence exploited after the fact, conjuring technique, and outright fraud — regardless of whether the specific claim involves a medium, a psychic surgeon, or a dowser, and that a trained investigator applying magician's-eye scrutiny and undercover fieldwork can usually identify which mechanism is at work in a given case.

Structurally, the book alternates between two registers: chapters revisiting well-documented historical cases from the early twentieth-century spiritualist movement — Eusapia Palladino's séances, the Anna Eva Fay mediumship that once impressed physicist Sir William Crookes, and the Houdini-era investigations of "Margery" (Mina Crandon) — and chapters describing Polidoro's own first-person, present-day undercover investigations, including a chapter in which he poses as a psychic himself for an hour to demonstrate how convincingly ordinary cold-reading technique can be performed, and chapters on a Russian psychic's metal-bending demonstrations, a claimed clairvoyance experiment, and the practices of self-styled Indian godmen.

A recurring methodological argument, distinct from any single case's outcome, is that documented physical evidence and controlled testing conditions — not eyewitness conviction, however sincere — are what actually distinguish a genuine anomaly from a performed or self-deceived one; several chapters, including "The chemistry of 'supernatural' substances" (drawing on laboratory work with University of Pavia chemist Luigi Garlaschelli) and "Investigating spirit moulds," apply direct chemical and physical analysis to claimed paranormal residue in a manner this article notes is structurally similar to how this site's own case files treat physical trace evidence in UFO cases.

The book is explicit that its scope is general paranormal-claims investigation rather than any single phenomenon: chapters on poltergeist claims, table-tipping, human magnetism, and miraculous religious phenomena sit alongside the mediumship and psychic-fraud material, and at no point does the book frame UFOs, alien contact, or extraterrestrial visitation as within its subject matter — a distinction this article treats as central rather than incidental to how the book should be read by a UFO-focused audience.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

This book's single most direct, already-documented connection to this site's own case-file library is the Florence Stadium Sighting (Case File #108, Disputed), where this exact edition is cited on this site's resources library as background on Polidoro's own investigative methodology, and where Polidoro's key-figures card on this site credits him with covering the case's chaff-based explanation directly on his own video series. This site's case file itself documents the sighting's central physical-evidence dispute: whether the "bambagia silicea" (silky wadding) that fell over the Florence stadium and Duomo on October 27, 1954 was military chaff, as CICAP researcher Vincenzo Gassi proposed in 2014 based on chemical composition matching, or something less conventional, as CUN founder Roberto Pinotti has argued. This book does not itself discuss the Florence case — its citation on this site documents Polidoro's general investigative approach, not a specific chapter about this sighting.

Because this book itself contains no UFO case material, the more substantive connection for a reader of this site runs through shared investigative philosophy rather than shared subject matter, and this site's own Bad UFOs (ER-029) by Robert Sheaffer and UFOs Explained (ER-032) by Philip J. Klass are its closest thematic siblings on this list: both apply the same undercover, physical-evidence-first, cold-reading-and-conjuring-literate skepticism this book demonstrates on psychic claims, but aimed specifically at UFO sighting reports instead.

This site's Escaping the Rabbit Hole (ER-079) by Mick West shares this book's core investigative stance most directly among this site's UFO-specific titles: both authors argue that rigorous, patient, methodologically transparent investigation — not blanket dismissal or credulous acceptance — is what actually resolves extraordinary claims, whether the claim involves a psychic surgeon's sleight of hand or a Navy pilot's gun-camera video.

Within its own pages, the book's most historically significant case is its treatment of the 1908 Feilding Report on Eusapia Palladino, a genuinely famous episode in the history of psychical research in which a team of trained investigators, including magician Everard Feilding, initially came away persuaded of Palladino's genuine mediumship before later exposing her use of a freed foot to simulate paranormal effects — a cautionary case, distinct from anything in this site's own UFO archive, about how even trained, skeptical investigators can be fooled without sustained, repeated scrutiny.

Critical Reception & Controversies

The book's most notable pre-publication endorsement came from Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, quoted on the book's promotional materials calling Polidoro "a true sleuth" whose readers "will learn from him many entertaining and instructing tales" — a genuine, named literary endorsement distinct from the skeptical-movement circles the book's other reception is drawn from.

Reviewer Austin Cline, writing for About.com's atheism/agnosticism section, praised the book's readability specifically, writing that "Polidoro is not just a good investigator, he's also a good storyteller — he really makes these investigations sound interesting," a assessment that credits the book's narrative craft as much as its investigative content.

Reader reception on Goodreads has settled at a modestly small but positive 4.07 out of 5 rating from 15 ratings and 3 written reviews as of this article's research; reviewer Kenny Biddle called it "an essential addition to the library of those who investigate or simply wondered about the validity of psychic phenomenon," while reviewer William Hall offered a more qualified reading, noting the book is "slanted towards all paranormal is fake" while still holding that "the cases here are important so investigators can eliminate the fraudulent" — a genuine, published reservation about the book's framing rather than uniform praise.

Because this book sits within the skeptical-movement literature rather than mainstream trade nonfiction, it drew little attention from major outlets like Kirkus Reviews or Publishers Weekly in available records; its most substantive critical engagement instead comes from within the skeptical community itself, where Polidoro's standing as a CICAP co-founder and Randi's own trained apprentice has generally been treated as a credibility asset rather than a source of independent scrutiny — a dynamic this article notes plainly rather than treats as a weakness unique to this book, since it is common to investigator-authored case collections across the skeptical genre.

This site applies the same standard to this book that it applies to every title on its Essential Reading list: the book's own psychic-fraud exposures are Polidoro's documented investigative conclusions, not independently re-verified by this site, and readers should weigh his specific evidentiary claims — the freed-foot explanation for Palladino, the cold-reading mechanics behind the Russian psychic's metal-bending — on their own merits rather than on Polidoro's reputation alone.

Influence & Legacy

This book's most concrete, already-documented legacy on this site is its existing citation on this site's own resources library under ISBN 1591020867, tied to the Florence Stadium Sighting case file — a citation this article converts into a full independent breakdown for the first time, consistent with how this site has previously handled other paranormal-adjacent titles like Remote Viewing Secrets (ER-078).

Within the international skeptical movement, this book represents one of the clearest English-language introductions to CICAP's own body of casework, translating investigative methodology developed largely in Italian for the CICAP journal and Scienza & Paranormale into a form accessible to the broader CSICOP/CSI-affiliated skeptical readership this book's publisher, Prometheus Books, primarily served.

Polidoro's own subsequent career has continued to build directly on the investigative reputation this book helped establish internationally: he remains a research fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, continues writing his regular Skeptical Inquirer column, and was entrusted by James Randi himself, together with Randi's partner and Penn Jillette, with writing Randi's authorized biography following years of recorded interviews — a project this article notes was still in progress as of available public reporting, illustrating the degree of trust Polidoro's investigative track record, substantially built on cases like the ones in this book, earned within the skeptical movement's own inner circle.

This book's influence on this site specifically is methodological rather than evidentiary: it stands alongside Bad UFOs, UFOs Explained, and Escaping the Rabbit Hole as a demonstration of what disciplined, undercover, physical-evidence-first skeptical investigation looks like when practiced consistently over a long career, a standard this site applies to its own UFO case files regardless of which specific book first modeled it for a given reader.

The Book

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