Psychological thriller
Debunked
Some truths are stranger than fiction. Some lies are better.
Callum Ferris makes his living on a Glasgow podcast, taking apart claims of the paranormal. Then his grandmother, on her deathbed, says something she had no way of knowing. Following a run of deaths among fringe consciousness researchers, he finds an operation that turned the strangest science of the last century into a trading edge, and people prepared to kill to keep it.
The opening
I have watched, in a professional capacity, forty-one people greet on cue for strangers pretending to be their dead husbands. I have a spreadsheet. It has colour-coded tabs.
A pal once asked, not unkindly, whether I needed a hobby that didn't involve quantifying other people's grief, and I told her the spreadsheet was the hobby, which she found less reassuring than I'd intended.
None of the forty-one prepared me for my own grandmother.
An hour before the end she opened her eyes, which by then had been shut so long I'd started addressing my remarks to the general vicinity of her face like a man leaving a voicemail.
"There's your grandfather," she said. "In his good jumper."Debunked
Eleven months later, not one of those words has agreed to stick to my grandfather's jumper. They just sort of slide off it and sit there, looking at me.Debunked
Princeton ran a lab testing whether minds could nudge machines for nearly thirty years. The Global Consciousness Project has watched random number generators around the world since 1998. The US government paid for remote viewing. Debunked invents the people and the danger. Not the research.
