Joe Nickell, Paranormal Investigator and ‘Actual-Life Scully,’ Dies at 80

Earlier than Joe Nickell turned, in his phrases, “the world’s solely full-time skilled paranormal investigator,” he was:

a magician
a blackjack vendor
a non-public investigator
a poet
a bingo caller
a riverboat supervisor
a professor of literature
a carousel operator and
a calligrapher.

He listed roughly 1,000 extra “personas” on his web site.

“God assist us if Nickell ever has an id disaster,” he stated a buddy favored to joke. “There’ll be 20 of him working round not talking to one another.”

Mr. Nickell (pronounced nickel) by no means feared such a crackup. He seen his varied personas as the various aspects of a single persona that supplied him with investigatory dexterity and made him “a sharp-tongued and amiably pompous previous gumshoe,” as The New Yorker described him in a 2002 profile.

Working for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a program run by the nonprofit group Heart for Inquiry, and as a columnist for Skeptical Inquirer, the group’s journal, Mr. Nickell investigated ghosts, poltergeist exercise, apparitions, the Loch Ness monster, crop circles and a number of reappearances of Jesus, together with one on a tortilla.

“A few of it’s like satire,” Mr. Nickell instructed The New York Occasions in 1997, “virtually prefer it’s reached a comic book stage.”

However in a profession that made him notable in each high and low tradition — he appeared on the tabloid program “The Sally Jessy Raphael Present” and revealed books with college presses — Mr. Nickell performed his inquiries with a “kinder, gentler skepticism,” as he put it, than his contemporaries did.