Intergalactic Skeptic Takes Radio Gig National

By Maggie McKenna

Falls Church’s Rick Wood has tales of the most bizarre kind. He has met a man who believed he was flying in a UFO with a psychic Sasquatch, a woman who believed that she was intimate with a lizard and then time-traveled with him, and another man who sued former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore for failure to provide UFO protection. And the list goes on.

For the past five years, Wood has hosted his own radio talk show dealing with paranormal activity from a skeptic’s point of view. In other words, his role is to hear accounts of the paranormal and to use reason to discredit them.

Sponsored by the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), Wood’s local show, based out of Falls Church, became nationally syndicated on July 1 over Cable Radio Network.

“Paranormal behavior is kind of like professional wrestling,” he says. “It’s fun to watch, but if you believe it’s true it can do real damage.”

Growing up in Front Royal, a primarily rural area, Wood first became interested in the paranormal during his youth. “I thought I had a couple paranormal experiences,” he says. “I worked for a lady with a haunted house and thought that I had experienced a couple things.”

Talking to the News-Press last week, he mentioned specific times when he would be mowing her lawn and “got a feeling” that someone was looking over his shoulder. Moreover, where he grew up, “people don’t look at you funny when you say you ran into a ghost,” he said. “Specters and spooks seemed to be a rational approach.”

Wondering if there was a better way to explain weird happenings, he became interested in finding a more humanistic or scientific way to understand odd phenomena. “Maybe there were more prosaic reasons for these things,” he thought. “Was it real or just a creepy feeling?”

Wood began intensively researching paranormal activity and found that there were certain patterns that always took place when people believed that they were having a paranormal experience. “When people see ghosts,” he explained, “they’re waking up from sleep, going to sleep, by themselves thinking about someone, or they heard a story about a haunted place. Seldom does anyone experience the paranormal with someone else present.”

When doing research, he noted that almost all of the stories he’d heard about “close encounters” had those things in common.

Wood got his start in radio thanks to local station WEBR, a Fairfax County public access radio station. The show was his first foray into broadcasting and was originally titled “My Prerogative.” It dealt with paranormal activity and guests included people who believed they had been abducted by aliens, seen a ghost or experienced other paranormal activity.

“I wasn’t serious about the show until someone in the U.K. heard about it on the Internet several years ago,” he said. The show gained international interest after it was sponsored by NetTalk U.K. overseas and Omnisound domestically, and broadcast by Audiomartini.

The show is the most widely syndicated “skeptical radio talk show” in the world. It is unique to the radio landscape as it has the same guests as talk shows dealing with the paranormal, except Wood sets out to disprove their ideas and beliefs.

After dealing with many believers in the paranormal during his youth, he wanted to debunk paranormal myths and help his guests think more rationally. “People have hyperactive imaginations,” Wood said. “If these things were real, they would show up in pictures or constantly be there. They shouldn’t defy the laws of physics.”

Wood also debates the validity of psychics such as renowned medium Sylvia Brown. “It’s tragic when people go to a psychic and believe it,” he said.

Wood does not shy away from having controversial opinions, as he also contends that God does not exist. “God is by nature supernatural,” he said. “I do not believe in a supernatural entity watching over our lives. It is important to lead a moral and just life because it makes things easier for us, but when we die we will be all dressed up with nowhere to go.”

He holds that Jesus did not exist as even a historical figure, but simply as a myth. He recently hosted a debate on intelligent design between Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptic Society, and William Dembski, senior fellow of the Discovery Institute.

Wood links religious beliefs with paranormal beliefs. “Most adults believe in a God, so it is not hard for them to believe in ghosts,” he said. “There are still Creationists who believe that Europe was only created 6,000 years ago, and even biologists who believe in Creation. Religion is fine as long as it does not become a belief system.”

Wood has also hosted a number of colorful guests on his show. “I’ve had Holocaust deniers, Frank Drake and Jill Tartar of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, and many ghost hunters,” he said. Stanton Friedman, the man who recreated the supposed UFO landing at Roswell, New Mexico, was also an interesting guest. Wood expressed his fervent disbelief in the existence of extraterrestrial life.

Along with Friedman, a nuclear physicist, they recreated a timeline of the Roswell landing and debated the reliability of witnesses. Wood does not believe there was a landing, nor that the government knew about it and possesses alien technology. “If we had alien technology from Roswell, why is it the best we can do is a digital toaster?” he said with a laugh.

As of July 1, Wood’s show is the most widely syndicated skeptic talk show in the world, airing on 350 stations nationwide. It is broadcast on omnisoundradio1.net and crn.net daily. “I don’t pretend to have all the answers,” Wood says. “I just ask people to think critically.”