The BBC's "Horizon" programme
When I was about eleven, a friend of my father's introduced me to Erich von Daniken's book "Chariots of the Gods". Amazing! Ancient astronauts visited the Earth and directed our evolution!

There followed a few years of credulous ingestion of anything vaguely paranormal. I had a pyramid I could sit in, made from dowel with bits of plastic tubing as connectors. I made orgone accumulators out of paper and silver foil. I scanned the skies for anything out of the ordinary. I attempted to remote view, apply psychokinesis, and read minds.

At the same time, I also loved science. To me, this weird stuff was just more science with a different set of textbooks. One day soon, I thought, "mainstream" science would catch up and provide mechanisms to explain all this amazing evidence.

And then Horizon (Nova in the US) transmitted "The Case of the Ancient Astronauts" - which you can now view on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DsOjqHm-VY

They nicely presented von Daniken's case, giving him plenty of rope, and then demolished it soundly. He even admitted to simply making stuff up.

This was a major turning point in my life. Just because something was in a book, didn't mean it was true. The entire parapsychological edifice didn't crumble overnight, but it was fatally undermined.

Now I'm firmly in the "proper science" camp. Perhaps the belief system would have collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity everntually, but for me, I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to that one single episode of Horizon.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Tue 7 Apr 2015, 21:12, 6 replies)

My grandad had a Reader's Digest Encyclopaedia of the Paranormal
I used to try and read as much as I could of it when we went to visit, it was like he had forbidden knowledge or something. It took me a while to realise that just because there was a proper encyclopaedia about things they weren't necessarily real.
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Tue 7 Apr 2015, 23:06, closed)

Yeah this gets a click from me
Simply because a lot of it relates to my thought processes as I was growing up.
( spanishfly is so fucking sexy people impersonate him, Tue 7 Apr 2015, 23:25, closed)

Went through the same myself as a kid.
The problem only occurs when you discard all the evidence against the wibble beliefs, a la The Goat.
( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Tue 7 Apr 2015, 23:55, closed)

ah but thats what the lizards *want* you to think

(katie hopkins telling it where its at, Wed 8 Apr 2015, 13:02, closed)

I have a copy of "Space Gods Revealed".
Sadly I lost my copy of Von Daniken.
They're great fun to read together.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Wed 8 Apr 2015, 19:38, closed)