"The 41-year-old has a friend who demanded that Schreiber confess that he's an actor and that his life is a simulation, like The Truman Show. He's met someone who claims to be half-reptilian, as well as another person who claims to have seen the Virgin Mary at the foot of her bed. This last person is his own partner, Fenella."
"As an example, he explains, we talk a lot about Charles Darwin, his voyage on the HMS Beagle, the fantastic idea of natural selection and the evolution of species. What we don't know is that Darwin was almost not allowed on the ship because Captain FitzRoy didn't like the shape of his nose! There's an explanation for this: it was the era of phrenology, the pseudoscience that believed cranial structures revealed a lot about individuals."
Dan Schreiber compiles cases of fringe beliefs and bizarre claims from around the world. A Polish ghost hunter warns spirits might strike because people believe in them less. An Australian ornithologist seeks a bird that whistles 1920s popular songs. Silicon Valley scientists speculate humans might live inside a computer simulation. Schreiber recounts a friend who demanded a confession that life is a staged simulation, a person claiming to be half-reptilian, and his partner Fenella who says she saw the Virgin Mary at her bedside. Many people dedicate their lives to defending such convictions. Schreiber wrote The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage Into the World of the Weird (2022).
Read at english.elpais.com
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