S. D. Tucker – författare

If only the war had lasted another six months, then Hitler would have won … because his scientists stood upon the very brink of inventing flying saucers. That, at least, is the myth as it is currently being peddled today, in books, pamphlets and online; and, if it were true, squadrons of Luftwaffe spacecraft would certainly have made mincemeat out of British Spitfires and American B-52s. But, of course, it is a complete fiction.And yet the sinister myth of Nazi UFOs is surprisingly well developed. If you listen to its champions, escaped Nazis and their indoctrinated offspring are simply hiding in secret Antarctic bases, inside the Hollow Earth, somewhere upon another planet, or even within another dimension, just waiting for the right time to strike again – and this time, armed with saucers and in close alliance with Aryans from other star systems, they stand poised to finish what they started. Some even claim that Hitler and his chief henchmen did not really die in 1945, but were borne away in spirit on flying saucers. Such theories seem insane – but do they have a hidden purpose?White supremacists around the globe have adopted Nazi ufology to draw the gullible into the wider orbit of Far-Right ideology; after all, if the standard version of history is so wrong as to fail to acknowledge that Hitler helped invent UFOs, then what else might historians have got wrong about the Third Reich? Might the Nazis actually have been right all along? Could the Holocaust have been a total hoax? Once they have swallowed the first lie, a person might easily swallow several others.The stories in this book are bizarre: Nazi saucer-pilots fighting alongside Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War; alien boot-prints whose soles bear swastikas being found in the wake of UFO-landings; the leader of America’s Nazi Silvershirts claiming to be in psychic contact with men from other galaxies; and Allied pilots being buzzed by fiery glowing ‘foo fighters’ during the Second World War. They may seem harmless at first, but they are not. Is it really the white race’s destiny to conquer the icy reaches of space under the banner of the ‘Aryan world spirit’? Perhaps not, but the conquest of their victims’ inner space, not outer space, in the name of Hitlerism is what these latter-day Goebbels truly desire.

These islands have long been a stronghold of eccentricity and peculiar behaviour. For whatever reason, eccentricity seems to have been enthusiastically embraced as being one of the defining characteristics of the British people, one of the many things that have become part of our national identity. Is it our status as an island people, set apart from the rest of the world, that has made so many of our countrymen turn in on themselves and go a little strange? Has our long libertarian tradition of the idea of the freedom of individuals to live their own lives as they please, just so long as they do no harm to anybody else, allowed weirdness to flourish within our land? Or is there just something dodgy in the water?There are probably plenty of reasons, but one thing is for certain: historically, this country has produced some of the strangest people who have ever lived, and in this book Steven Tucker compiles the details of both some of the most well-known and the most obscure oddballs ever to have been eligible to hold a British passport. From the psychiatrist who acclaimed lobsters as being capable of love, to the mermaid-impersonating vicar who invented the Harvest Festival, to the mad aristocrat who invented a tiny gun for shooting wasps, this wild ride through our history’s most colourful characters will both amuse and entertain.

Science has a reputation as the most logical and rational of human pastimes – but this has not always been the case. From the inventor Nikola Tesla, who fell in love with his favourite pigeon and tried to broadcast his own thoughts, to the wannabe chemist August Strindberg, who injected apples with drugs to see if they could get high, numerous scientists have conducted bizarre experiments down the centuries. Some of them were genuine geniuses; others were simply lone loons. History is littered with their wreckage, and this book tells the story of the very strangest.Proposing that science has become a kind of modern religion, and telling the tale of such noted pseudoscientific fads and fallacies as alchemy, spontaneous generation and the doomed quest to raise the dead, Forgotten Science is sure to make you laugh at the same time as making you think. Science at school was never this weird.

These islands have long been a stronghold of eccentricity and peculiar behaviour. For whatever reason, eccentricity seems to have been enthusiastically embraced as being one of the defining characteristics of the British people, one of the many things that have become part of our national identity. Is it our status as an island people, set apart from the rest of the world, that has made so many of our countrymen turn in on themselves and go a little strange? Has our long libertarian tradition of the idea of the freedom of individuals to live their own lives as they please, just so long as they do no harm to anybody else, allowed weirdness to flourish within our land? Or is there just something dodgy in the water?One thing is for certain: historically, this country has produced some of the strangest people who have ever lived, and in this book Steven Tucker compiles the details of both some of the most well-known and the most obscure oddballs ever to have been eligible to hold a British passport. From the psychiatrist who acclaimed lobsters as being capable of love, to the mermaid-impersonating vicar who invented the Harvest Festival and the mad aristocrat who invented a tiny gun for shooting wasps, this wild ride through our history’s most colourful characters will both amuse and entertain.

‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are …’ Are you a giant Nazi iceberg?On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union’s famous satellite Sputnik was launched into orbit, and the Space Age began. Or did it? Sputnik may have marked the beginning of humanity’s physical exploration of the universe, but we had already been exploring it with our minds for thousands of years, often with some very surprising results. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of Sputnik’s launch (and seventy years since the first flying saucer sighting, in 1947), S. D. Tucker seeks out the strangest, most surprising and downright silliest ideas about outer space that have arisen throughout history.Human beings have always gazed up at the twinkling stars and wondered what exactly they are; the heavens an inky-black canvas upon which people have projected their fantasies and those of the societies they lived in. From tales of crumbling canals and lost civilisations on Mars to the mind-boggling proposal that flying saucers were piloted by alien bees with jewels for eyes, mankind has gone down a lot of blind alleys before finally finding the scientific answers that were needed to initiate the blast-off that took us up to the moon in 1969.This entertaining and revealing book explores stories of the stars invented before Sputnik, the Space Age or modern science were even a glimmer in the eye of mankind, and goes on to consider the odd and tenuous theories about space that still exist to this day. Whether you’re intrigued by the notion of living planets singing and having sex with one another, the universe’s secret roof, or the moon’s hidden finger, Space Oddities will offer you a close-up telescopic view of the weird and wonderful world that people throughout history have imagined lies beyond the stars.

The Trickster-god is a strange and rather wonderful mythological figure who is found in folklore and legend right across the world, from the Norse Loki to the Greek Hermes to the Raven and Coyote of the Native American peoples. The ultimate ‘cunning fool’, he and the many subversive tales told about him have been studied down the years by anthropologists, historians, literary theorists and psychologists from Ted Hughes to C. G. Jung. But in the twenty-first century, should the Trickster also be studied by parapsychologists and ghost hunters?Nobody believes in gods like Hermes or Loki anymore, but that does not mean that people do not still tell one another tales about such Tricksters and their mischievous ways. They do, but in disguised form - the disguised form of the poltergeist.Belief in Trickster-gods, this book argues, has today been transformed into popular belief in Trickster-ghosts, with those noisy, disruptive, roguish spirits known as poltergeists fulfilling largely the same imaginative function as more traditional Trickster-figures like Robin Goodfellow once did. By playing childish tricks upon us, poltergeists appear to reveal our current world-view to be in some way incomplete, breaking the accepted circles of ‘official’ materialistic, scientific logic and provoking laughter at their irreverent audacity in doing so. Rather than being intended to frighten, perhaps the true purpose of certain ghost stories is in fact to amuse, perplex and provoke?Whether true or not, such ghost stories still function as genuine Trickster-myths, providing those who read them with access to a hidden realm lurking somewhere just beyond the rational, in which the usual rules of science, logic and reality simply do not apply. Perhaps in doing so they act as a kind of ‘emotional safety-valve’, intended to allow mankind temporary respite from the sometimes oppressive social forces surrounding us. Covering a wide global selection of reported poltergeist phenomena from ancient times right up to the present day, and then subjecting them to a process of literary, historical and sociological analysis, Blithe Spirits is one of the most unusual, original and wide-ranging books about the subject ever to be written.

Prepare to feel queasy.Are you suffering from a life-threatening illness? Do you possess chronic fatigue, sexual dysfunction, severe mental impairment, or have to endure constant, debilitating pain? If not, then you might do so after reading this book! Snake-oil salesmen, preying like vultures upon the hopes and fears of the sick and the dying, are nothing new. Up until relatively recently in history, before the miraculous medical advances made during the 20th and 21st centuries, doctors killed many more patients than they ever cured – and it was no wonder when you consider some of the appalling quacks who have felt themselves qualified (often fraudulently) to call themselves doctors. Was it really possible to diagnose a person’s illness by sniffing their soul through their hair, as one medical man thought? Did Jesus give His followers enemas? Can a man fart his own hair out? Is letting a tapeworm live inside your body a wise way to lose weight? Is it possible to exist off an ultra-low-calorie diet of thin air alone? Is McDonalds’ secret menu of interdimensional foodstuffs a sure-fire path to good health? Could an alien potato from the moon hold the secret to defeating cancer? Is deafness caused by having constipated ears? Should you really wear underpants laced with nuclear radiation? The answer to all these questions is undoubtedly ‘NO!!’, but that hasn’t stopped certain desperate people down the centuries from believing that it might have been ‘YES!!’, such has been their eagerness to find a way out of the medical dead-ends they have found themselves stuck in.This book tells the story of some of the strangest and most insane doctors, surgeons, quacks and food-faddists from throughout history, as well as the often cruel (and always absurd) diet crazes, treatment regimes and beliefs they unleashed out onto an unsuspecting world – proving once and for all that the one thing there really isn’t a cure for is human gullibility.Now open wide and say ‘Aaargh!’

When it comes to matters of the economy, have you had enough of ‘experts’ and their foolish, untrue predictions? If so, then you could read about the financial ideas of the lunatics within. At least they’re funny. Economics is often dismissed as the ‘Dismal Science’, with its prognostications frequently amounting to little more than pseudoscientific guesswork. However, you don’t need to know your Karl Marx from your Adam Smith to be able to tell that the following proposals are as dodgy as a nine-bob note. From the idea of trading in rotting ‘vegetable-money’ to discourage the hoarding of capital and the optimistic notion that it might be possible to destroy the North Korean economy with chocolate biscuits, to the US presidential candidate who accepted tax advice from outer space, this book tells the story of some of the loopiest economic ideas of all time. How does the ghost of the founder of Panasonic assess the current state of the Tokyo Stock Exchange? Can you keep your credit rating following reincarnation into another body? What are the hidden relations between gravity and share prices? Do vampires control the stock market? How can eating haunted paintings improve the Russian economy? Is Jesus Christ a Pakistani economist working undercover in the NHS? Can gold have sex and babies? And a little more ‘grounded’ –was Hugo Chávez actually serious and why did Brexit happen? Buy this book or pay the high price of not finding out! Forget Freakonomics– prepare to meet the freaks.

Science has a reputation as the most logical and rational of human pastimes – but this has not always been the case. From the inventor Nikola Tesla, who fell in love with his favourite pigeon and tried to broadcast his own thoughts, to the wannabe chemist August Strindberg, who injected apples with drugs to see if they could get high, numerous scientists have conducted bizarre experiments down the centuries. Some of them were genuine geniuses; others were simply lone loons. History is littered with their wreckage, and this book tells the story of the very strangest.Proposing that science has become a kind of modern religion, and telling the tale of such noted pseudoscientific fads and fallacies as alchemy, spontaneous generation and the doomed quest to raise the dead, Forgotten Science is sure to make you laugh at the same time as making you think. Science at school was never this weird.

Join Steven Tucker on this unique exploration of the myths and legends, and the tales of the fantastic that are supposed to have happened along the Mersey's shores. Some are just stories; but others apparently have some kind of truth behind them, from pig-killing poltergeists, to tales of Spring-Heeled Jack, to the 'great leprechaun invasion' of 1964. Some are funny, and others are terrifying. Others, such as claims that both Adolf Hitler and Jack the Ripper were one-time Liverpudlians, are nothing more than attention-seeking urban legends. Paranormal Merseyside not only deals with hauntings, UFO sightings and legends from the city of Liverpool itself, though; the surrounding towns and settlements, places like Widnes, Runcorn, St Helens, the Wirral, Frodsham, Rainhill, Southport, Formby, Newton-Le-Willows and Warrington, are also included.