From the authors of Quackery, a visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science. 

From the easily disproved to the wildly speculative, to  straight-up hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science—it’s a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things such as Big Foot, astrology, and the existence of aliens. Did you know, for example, that you can tell a person’s future by touching their butt? Rumpology. It’s a thing, but not really. Or that Stanley Kubrick made a fake moon landing film for the US government? Except he didn’t. Or that spontaneous human combustion is real? It ain’t, but it can be explained scientifically.   

Pseudoscience is a wild mix of history, pop culture, and good old fashioned science–that not just entertains, but sheds a little light on why we all love to believe in things we know aren't true. 

Introduction
 
Pure Nonscience
Flat Earth
Spontaneous Human Combustion
Gasoline Pills
Perpetual Motion Machines
World Ice Theory
Body Divination
Phrenology
 
Aliens! Ghosts! Bigfoot! Atlantis!
UFOolgy
Bermuda Triangle
Crop Circles
Ghosts and Ghost Hunting
Cryptozoology
2012 Phenomenon
 
Wishful Thinking
Cryonics
Astrology
Ley Lines
Personality Psychology
Auguries
Polygraph
The Superstitions Hall of Fame
 
Grifters, Nihilism, and Denialism
Levitation
Fake Moon Landings
Climate Change Denial
Lawsonomy
Dowsing
 
Sources
Index
Acknowledgments
Photo Credits
 
 

"A fizzy survey of outlandish theories from throughout history.... Kang and Pedersen bring dry humor to the proceedings, as when they close out their discussion of “rumpologists” who purport to divine a person’s future from the shape of their rear end with the quip: “No word yet on how a surgical Brazilian butt lift might alter your fate.” Though the authors debunk bigfoot, crop circles, and ghosts, the most intriguing chapters discuss more baroque theories, such as 20th-century Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger’s contention, derived exclusively from dreams, that much of the universe was created after a “waterlogged star” crashed into the sun and sprayed ice blocks deep into space, where they gave rise to countless solar systems. A wry takedown of bogus beliefs, this entertains."
 —Publishers Weekly