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their mother in the sty.More enterprising ones explored the sty, and, if the door was left open, went outside.If the door was then closed, they squealed pitifully until let in.Next time the door was left open, they hesitated about venturing out.Then curiosity overcame them, and they decided to take the risk.These ‘explorers’ were, in fact, the most dominant and healthy among the piglets.
    I shall not press the comparison too far, since the members of CSICOP may be offended at being compared to non-dominant piglets.Besides, some of the most obstructive conservatives in the history of science have been highly dominant.I simply want to plead my point that CSICOP is not furthering the progress of science by shouting abuse at scientists who are engaged in paranormal research and demanding that they be driven out of the workshop of science (which means suspending their grants).By trying to repress research into the paranormal they are striking at the very essence of science.And in telling the rest of us to stop thinking about the frontiers of science and leave it to the professionals (i.e themselves), they are ignoring the fact that anyone who applies his intelligence to the solution of a problem is, by definition, a scientist.And that includes all the readers of this book.
    I am not trying to argue that we should drop all standards, and give serious consideration to every crank theory.But when I look at the number of fairly well-authenticated white crows in the field of paranormal research—telepathy, dowsing, psychometry, precognition—the attitude of CSICOP seems akin to Nelson clapping his telescope to his blind eye and declaring that he could see nothing.
    In a chapter of The New Age entitled ‘PK (Psycho-Krap)’, Martin Gardner remarks that ‘most professional parapsychologists will be embarrassed by ...the scribblings of such irresponsible journalists of the occult as Colin Wilson, Lyall Watson and D.Scott Rogo’.Whether my father’s work on the paranormal amounts to embarrassing scribbling I leave to the reader to decide; you are undoubtedly less biased than I am.

Preface
    If someone had told me when I was 15 that I would one day be the author of a bestseller called The Occult, I would have repudiated the idea with contempt.For at that age I had no doubt whatever that the greatest future hope for humanity lay in the idea of science.But then, I was 15 in 1946, and H.G.Wells was still alive, and Wells had been the single greatest influence on my ideas and my life.
    This was understandable.Wells, like me, came from a working-class background — his parents kept a not-very-successful shop in Kent, which soon went bankrupt.Thereafter, his mother, who was the driving force in the family, made an attempt to get him apprenticed to a draper’s shop, but he hated it as much as Charles Dickens had hated the blacking factory to which he had been condemned as a teenager.Wells ran away several times, until his mother got the much better idea of making him a schoolteacher.
    For me at 15, born in the industrial town of Leicester, there seemed no chance of the blacking factory or its equivalent, for the Victorian age lay far behind us, and my academic record had been excellent: I won a scholarship to a secondary school as easily as a good racehorse takes a ditch.Had my income not been needed at home to help support the family, I would have gone to university, got a science degree and gone on from there.
    But I can still remember my sadness when Wells died in August of that year at the age of 80.That month was also a turning point in my own life, for it was then that I left school at the age of 16, and the Labour Exchange sent me to a wool factory, where hanks of wool were wound on to bobbins before being used in hosiery factories (Leicester’s other main industry after the shoe trade).I worked from 8 am until 6 pm (plus Saturday mornings) with a half hour break for lunch, and it was the hardest work I had ever done.It was a