This is the Guardian. What's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you?

For me it was seeing a cloaked figure at the end of my bed.

For you it might have been a ghost floating

down the hall of an old stately manner or discovering a book you lost long ago in a charity

shop while on holiday.

While some odd experiences are easier to explain, sleep paralysis, a trick of the light,

or amazing coincidence, others can be trickier to make sense of.

And for some, the only reasonable explanation is the paranormal.

Like a lot of teenagers, I was fascinated with the paranormal, and I I still am except I'm no longer a

believer in the paranormal. Chris French has been interested in strange goings on for a

long time. When I was an undergraduate student in the final year on a Friday night we'd come back from the pub and we'd get the wegee board out but we were doing it by them just purely for entertainment purposes. We didn't take it seriously at all.

Eventually he did take it seriously, or at least he took trying to understand the

psychology behind this stuff seriously.

For decades he's been studying, well, weird shit.

I remember being asked to kind of do some testing of a guy who claimed that he was

Magnetman, basically.

It turns out that the explanation is the same as it always is that if you have very smooth skin and you're a little bit sweaty things will stick to you, you know?

He's recently written in a book exploring the topics that have dominated his career.

So today I'm speaking to Chris about why so many of us end up believing in the paranormal

where our cognitive biases trip us up, and how this all links to conspiracy

theories.

From the Guardian, I'm E. Ensemble, and this is Science Weekly.

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