Daniel John Neiman is the owner of the paranormal website “Anomalous Experience” and pretty much a crank of all trades – he is, for instance, a creationist and parapsychology proponent, and fills out his creationist and parapsychologist views with an impressive array of pseudoscience and New Age nonsense. Neiman seems to be currently residing in South Korea, but he’s American enough to qualify for an entry here.
Neiman’s proclaimed area of specialization seems to be altered states of consciousness, and he has written numerous articles on this (and creationism) for the New Dawnmagazine and for The Near-Death Experience Research Foundation. Not exactly Nature, these outlets let him publish tripe like “Intelligent Design: Scientific Facts Point Us in a New Direction,” which consists mostly of old creationist PRATTS and preciously little by way of facts or science. In general, his writings exhibit the stylistic characteristics of his chosen genre: deepity, technobabble, Deepak Chopra-style nonsense, mind-body woo and fluff-and-sugary handwavings about energy, with an admittedly personal strain of weapons-grade, fundie-style denialism thrown in.
His magnum opus is probably the book Enter the Light(2012), which seeks to connect all manners of pseudoscience, from intelligent design creationism to alien abductions and out-of-body experiences. (“It covers the groundbreaking science in intelligent design and the placebo effect, as well as paranormal phenomena that suggest our reality is grounded in a supreme conscious intelligence which we are all part of;” none of this is, despite Neiman’s assertions, even remotely related to science, of course.) Apparently out-of-body experiences prove the existence of a “multi-dimensional reality”. It really does not, and Neiman does – like most New Age promoters – evidently not quite grasp what “dimension” (or “prove”) could possibly mean. Another, unsurprising crackpot trademark is his complete ignorance of any actual scientific literature concerning the topics he takes up.
Neiman has also been caught trolling various blogs and forums claiming that the medium Daniel Dunglas Home was never caught in fraud, which is rather easily shown to be false. But then, Neiman seems to think everymedium is genuine, even those who actually admitted to be frauds. (That’s just part of the conspiracy, you know.)
Diagnosis: Another prolific producer of wooey word-salads to pollute the Internet, Neiman’s brand of bullshit has its followers, though he is probably a minor figure in the grand scheme of things.
Hat-tip: Rationalwiki
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