Michael Schmicker

Michael Schmicker is an investigative journalist and nationally-known writer on scientific anomalies and the paranormal.

He has been a featured guest on national broadcast radio talk shows, including twice on Coast to Coast AM (560 stations in North America, with 3 million weekly listeners). He also shares his investigations and writings through popular paranormal webcasts including Skeptiko, hosted by Alex Tsakiris; Speaking of Strange with Joshua Warren; the X-Zone, with Rob McConnell (Canada); and "Parascience and Beyond" (England). He reviews books for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and serves on the Board of Advisers of the Rhine Research Center and is a member of both the American Society for Psychical Research as well as England's Society for Psychical Research. He is the author of "The Witch of Napoli," and co-author of "The Gift, ESP: The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People" (St. Martin's Press, hardcover, paperback, Kindle e-book (USA); Rider/Random House (UK). His first book, Best Evidence, has emerged as a classic in the field of scientific anomalies reporting since its first publication in 2000. His writings also appear in three anthologies, including "The Universe Wants to Play" (2006), "First of the Year 2009" (2009), and "Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth" (2011).

He began his writing career as a crime reporter for a suburban Dow-Jones newspaper in Connecticut, and worked as a freelance reporter in Southeast Asia for three years. He has also worked as a stringer for Forbes magazine, and Op-Ed contributor to The Wall Street Journal Asia. He is one of the original “founding authors” of Red Room.Com, an online writers community with over 12,000 members.

His interest in investigating the paranormal began as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand where he first encountered a non-Western culture and people who readily accept the reality of ghosts and spirits, reincarnation, psychics, mediums, divination,and other persistently reported phenomena unexplainable by current Science. Before joining Peace Corps, he studied documentary film production at New York University and the British Film Institute. He spent his first year in Bangkok teaching English to middle school students at the royal Buddhist monastery of Wat Bowonniwet, and the subsequent two years writing and producing with Thai colleagues a Sesame Street-inspired educational television series for the Thai Ministry of Education, complete with puppets, animation, and cinematic tricks borrowed from Richard Lester's madcap work. The TV program, "Meet Mr. Maytree" represented Thailand in the international Japan Prize contest for educational television excellence.