The professional sceptics debunking conspiracy theories
Michael Marshall is Britain’s only full-time, paid sceptic. He attends flat earth conferences, distributes flyers outside psychic shows and lurks in anti-vax Telegram groups, all to promote critical thinking over pseudoscience and damaging conspiracy theories.
“Any of us could, at our worst, find ourselves in an emotional hole where our reason is compromised,” he says. “If we’re watching each other’s backs, we can stop each other from falling into such traps.”
When Marshall first started working in the field 15 years ago, scepticism was about debunking UFOs and sasquatches. While psychics remain a steady bête noire, interest in flying saucers has faded, replaced by a rise in dangerous pseudo-medical claims. These range from Gerson Therapy (a wholly unproven alternative cancer treatment consisting of specific juices and coffee enemas), to the followers of Joseph Mercola, the ‘alternative medicine proponent,’ branded the “most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online” by the New York Times.
Fighting back against conspiracy theories
“Since I became a full-time sceptical investigator, I get emails from families whose loved ones have died and they’ve since learnt they’d declined traditional treatment for ‘alternative medicine’,” Marshall says. “Inevitably, they discover their deceased loved one had signed up to Joseph Mercola’s mailing list – and want me to expose it.” Why the shift from UFOs to quack-medical claims? “Youtube algorithms confirmed people’s biases,” he says.
In 2014, Marshall joined The Good Thinking Society, a small charity founded by science author Simon Singh, which promotes rational inquiry by battling against pseudoscience. “We are pro-science and pro-evidence, which means we are anti-woo and anti-quack,” the charity’s website says. “We like scepticism, but not cynicism. We like nerds and geeks, but we hate bogus things without a jot of evidence.” From challenging alternative medicine, Marshall says, it was an “easy leap” to “take on the anti-vaxxers” whose influence surged during Covid.
The British sceptical movement is now at a critical moment. In an AI-driven world, fact and fiction can blur; misinformation can be easily amplified because algorithms can’t be relied upon to spot truth from lies, or to unpack nuance. Activists like Marshall aim to reorient those caught in conspiratorial thinking back to rationality.
Their impact is real. One campaign persuaded Gofundme to remove ‘miracle cure’ fundraisers; another led to the NHS blacklisting homeopathic treatments such as diluted arsenic, snake venom and ground-up bees (after the Good Thinking Society threatened the Department of Health with a judicial review). The charity’s campaign prompted the NHS to officially acknowledge that such treatments were ineffective, with the institution finally blacklisting homeopathy in 2017.
Marshall says conspiracy theorists have “much louder megaphones” now, pointing to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the US US secretary of health Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (RFK). The latter has a particularly powerful platform from which to promote damaging and disproven conspiracy theories, such as that wireless 5G technology can cause cancer, that AIDS is not caused by HIV, that fluoride causes diseases and that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates exaggerated the pandemic to promote vaccines.
The former witch turned sceptic
Dr. Susan Blackmore doesn’t fit the sceptic stereotype. She ‘trained’ as a witch, has rainbow-dyed hair and first became interested in the supernatural after a near-death experience.
“I was a sleep-deprived undergraduate at Oxford, had smoked a little cannabis and went down a tunnel towards a light, looking down at my body” she says. “It felt more real than anything in my life.”
Determined to prove her Oxford lecturers wrong, she pursued paranormal research – only to find nothing. She eventually joined sceptic groups.
Part of her pre-sceptic journey involved attending séances and hanging out with other witches. “I was invited to a coven – we’d chant spells for world peace,” she says, something she concedes hasn’t worked out so well. She quit when they asked her to sew her own cloak: “I hate sewing!”
In the 1980s, she found herself on the board of both the London Society for Psychical Research and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal – one filled with believers, the other with sceptics. Their stated goals, she notes, were strikingly similar: to investigate, without prejudice and in a scientific spirit, strange phenomena.
The now honorary associate at the National Secular Society, who has fully revoked her former psychic beliefs, says that paranormal claims “will be with us forever – what’s frightening is how easily people get captured by social media and disinformation now.”
A PR problem exists for those in organised sceptical societies: they risk coming across as the bah-humbug killjoy crowd, or, as Marshall describes it, the ‘well, actually’ person. It’s something Marshall has encountered his whole life. It has always bothered him when he suspects charlatanism, whether it’s a psychic or a quack cancer-cure salesperson. Both, he says, amount to defrauding vulnerable people.
“I was always the person in my friendship group who was upset there were people out there pretending to be psychic, capitalising on grief,” he says. “There’s something incredibly grubby and exploitative about finding someone in their worst moment and deciding that’s when you can start selling to them.”
His solution is to first understand, then debunk. “I want to immerse myself in as much unreason as possible to try and understand what draws people into it.”
Modern scepticism is far from joyless. Founded by eccentric magicians including Harry Houdini and The Amazing Randi, it remains a movement of curiosity. Perhaps surprisingly, sceptics are often keen to engage with woo-woo ideas. They attend seances, train as witches and present the annual ‘Rusty Razor’ award to the most outlandish pseudoscientific claim.
Sceptics vs cynics
This is because a modern sceptic is curious, open and claims to always be led by science. As The Good Thinking Society says, this differentiates them from cynics, who are immediately dismissive towards things such as seances, witchcraft and anything considered ‘spiritual’. A good sceptic will attend the seance or join the anti-vax group chat so they can follow the lines of rational enquiry. They are there to deeply listen, to rigorously test, to fastidiously analyse, to assess all evidence and be open to all possibilities – but, crucially, to always bring it back to things that can be substantiated by the facts.
Spending so much time wallowing in the ridiculous means sceptics often have a good sense of humour. Marshall recalls attending London’s Mind, Body, Spirit festival (dubbed Mind, Body, Wallet by sceptics). A ‘psychic’ at a group reading claimed to hear from “Michelle.” Silence. “Michelle – or ‘‘Chelle,” (pronounced ‘Shell’), she said – “something to do with ‘Shell’”. “Yes!” an audience member said. “I can take a Shell! My late husband used to go to a Shell garage!” It shows, Marshall says laughing, how far people are willing to go to make the ‘life after death’ narrative work for them.
It highlights just how eager some people are to believe – and how dangerous that can be. “If this so-called message from the dead fits, then that loved one isn’t really gone forever, and I don’t have to sit in my grief,” Marshall says. He’s never been to a psychic show where there weren’t tears. “It’s about love, loss and the hardest emotions. It’s not about gullibility. Despite there being entertaining, borderline ludicrous moments like the Shell garage story, we shouldn’t laugh or pity them. Sceptics aren’t superior.”
It took him time to reach this understanding. “You go through a sceptical adolescence before realising it’s about meeting people where they are.” The same values, he says, should be applied to anti-vaxxers and conspiracists.
During the pandemic, he spent months in a local Telegram group promoting Covid denial. As an observer, he could “see what the other side were saying” and get a better understanding of what leads people to desert science and reason. He saw firsthand why people fall for misinformation. “It’s never about [lack of] intelligence,” he says. “They’re very smart, they find justifications for the unjustifiable because they have an emotional reason to do so.”
That reason is often a loss of control. “Most were scared and confused. They lost one community and found another.”
Hearts and minds
He even convinced one man to leave the Telegram group for the Skeptics’ group (Marshall prefers the spelling with a ‘k’). “He was in a bad place, and the pandemic led him down a black hole.” What helped? “I wasn’t judging, lecturing or laughing.”
But such conversions are rare. “You can’t completely change most people’s minds,” he says. Instead, you “lower the cost” of small shifts in perspective. “Don’t point score. Sometimes you’ll get them to take a left in the maze and hit a brick wall they didn’t know was there. They’re the conversations I get really excited about.”
The phrase, popular amongst rationalists, that most irks Marshall is: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
“The thing is, feelings don’t care about your facts,” he says. “People won’t listen to facts if their feelings aren’t in the right place.”
The temptation is to patronise and talk down to conspiracists, which leads them to feel dismissed or insulted. If, instead, they feel heard, even if you don’t agree with them, they’re in a better place to listen – and perhaps make a turn away from misinformation.
• Gary Nunn is author of The Psychic Tests: An Adventure in the World of Believers and Sceptics