Joe Nickell
| Joe Nickell | |
|---|---|
Nickell at the 2010 European Skeptics Congress in Budapest
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| Born |
December 1, 1944 West Liberty, Kentucky |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Ph.D. in English |
| Alma mater | University of Kentucky |
| Occupation | Skeptic, investigator, author, editor |
| Known for | CSICOP |
| Spouse(s) | Diana G. Harris (m. 2006) |
| Children | 1 |
| Website | http://www.joenickell.com/ |
Joe Nickell (born December 1, 1944) is an American prominent skeptic and investigator of the paranormal. He has helped expose such famous forgeries as the purported diary of Jack the Ripper. In 2002 he was one of a number of experts asked by scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to evaluate the authenticity of the manuscript of Hannah Crafts' The Bondwoman's Narrative (1853–1860), possibly the first novel by an African-American woman. At the request of document dealer and historian, Seth Keller, Nickell analyzed documentation in the dispute over the authorship of "The Night Before Christmas", ultimately supporting the Clement Clarke Moore claim.
Nickell is Senior Research Fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and writes regularly for their journal, the Skeptical Inquirer. He is also an associate dean of the Center for Inquiry Institute. He is the author or editor of over 30 books.
Joe Nickell is the son of J. Wendell and Ella (Turner) Nickell, and grew up in West Liberty, Kentucky. His parents indulged his interest in magic and investigation, allowing him to set aside a room in their house as a crime lab. In 1968, he avoided the draft by moving to Canada where he began his careers as a magician, a card dealer, and a private investigator. When President Jimmy Carter granted unconditional pardons to draft dodgers in 1977, Nickell returned to the United States.
In late 2003, Nickell reconnected with his college girlfriend, Diana G. Harris, and learned he had a daughter, Cherette, and two grandsons, Tyner and Chase. Harris and Nickell married in Springfield, Illinois on April 1, 2006. Harris has assisted Nickell in his investigative work. Cherette had always been told that her biological father was her mother's first husband, although she questioned the lack of family resemblance. On her wedding day, one of the guests mentioned that her parents weren't married when she was conceived. Later Cherette asked her mother about her father and sensed an equivocation in the answer. More conversations with her mother and a DNA test proved that Nickell was her father. Nickell used his daughter's claim that her search was the result of an intuition as the basis for an article on the unconscious collection and processing of data. Nickell concluded,
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