The standard reference is William Broad & Nicholas Wade: BETRAYERS of the TRUTH. Fraud and Deceit in Science. Oxford University Press, 1985. The book is carefully researched and contains a wealth of material. Strongly recommended.

Martin Gardner's FADS & FALLACIES in the Name of Science, Dover, 1957, contains a mixture of subjects. In some cases the word hoax seems appropriate.

SCIENCE, Good, Bad and Bogus by the same author (Oxford University Press, 1981) is essentially a crusade against parapsychology. (Gardner is, after all, one of the founding fathers of CSICOP, a.k.a. The Church of Fundamentalist Materialism). There is, however, also some material about fraud by well-known scientists such as Gregor Johann Mendel (father of genetics), Paul Kammerer ("The Case of the Midwife Toad"), Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko and William T. Summerlin, chief of transplant immunology at Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.

John Sladek, sf writer and disciple of the Church of Fundamentalist Materialism is the author of THE NEW APOCRYPHA. A Guide to Strange Sciences and Occult Beliefs. Granada Publishing Ltd, 1978. This book is very much in the spirit of Gardner's.

And don't forget James "The Amazing" Randi, stage magician and another of the founders of CSICOP. Randi is a prolific writer who has published such immortal masterpieces as FLIM-FLAM! and AN ENCYCLOPEDIA of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. (St. Martin's Press, 1995)

Well-known UFO debunker Philip J. Klass must not be forgotten either:
UFOs Explained, Random House 1974, UFO's: The Public Deceived, Prometheus Books, 1983 and UFO-Abductions: A Dangerous Game, Prometheus Books 1988 (updated 1989) may not be terribly convincing, but are nevertheless compulsory reading for students of the UFO question. Here are brief descriptions of his books.


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