A paranormal investigator known as the “real-life Scully” who died last month was remembered as “an icon and hero within the skeptical community” credited with cracking hundreds of mysteries.
Joe Nickell called himself “the world’s only full-time professional paranormal investigator,” and was known for digging into some of the world’s biggest myths before he died on March 4 at the age of 80 from an undisclosed cause, according to reports.
The Skeptical Inquirer – where Nickell had worked as a columnist for decades – wrote last month that he probed various enigmas, including historical, forensic and paranormal.
“Joe was a hands-on investigator who could be found aboard the Queen Mary looking for alleged ghosts, or in a farmer’s field investigating crop circles, or roaming the shores of Loch Ness looking for Nessie, or touring China studying traditional Chinese medicine and examining the claims of Qigong masters. This barely scratches the surface,” said Barry Karr, the executive director of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which, along with the publication, is owned by the Center for Inquiry.
“Joe was a true polymath who often left you in awe of his depth of knowledge in, it seemed, a limitless number of subjects. He was a walking and talking encyclopedia with a never-ending curiosity to know even more and bring on the next mystery!” Karr continued in a statement to the outlet.
“What a tremendous loss. He can never be replaced.”
Karr called him an “icon and hero within the skeptical community.”
Nickell, also known as the “real life Sherlock Holmes,” told the New Yorker in 2002 that his goal was to conduct investigations with a “kinder, gentler skepticism.”
“I’m tired of these debunkers coming by my office and saying, ‘Hey, Nickell, seen any ghosts lately? Har har har,’” he said.
“I’m not saying there’s a 50-50 chance that there is a ghost in that haunted house. I think the chances are closer to 99.9 percent that there isn’t. But let’s go look. We might learn something interesting as hell.”
He said on his website that in contrast with “mystery-mongerers” on one side of the spectrum and “so-called debunkers” on the other side, he believed “that mysteries should actually be investigated with a view toward solving them.”
He also listed more than 1,000 personas that helped him with his job, including magician, private investigator, federal fugitive, food-server, beer master and bigfoot hunter.
Nickell was born on Dec. 1, 1944 and died in his Buffalo, NY home, his daughter told the New York Times in an obit published this weekend.
“He didn’t treat a ghost story as a ghost story or a U.F.O. story as a U.F.O. story,” Kenny Biddle, the chief investigator at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, told the Times.
“It was all a mystery. He loved sifting through the evidence, like, ‘OK, what actually happened here?’”
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