Polidoro Massimo

Liberevento authors

Massimo Polidoro

Journalist, writer, university lecturer and science popularizer

He is considered one of the leading international experts in the field of the psychology of the unusual, the paranormal and mysteries in general. National Secretary and co-founder, together with Piero Angela, Margherita Hack and Silvio Garattini, of CICAP (Italian Committee for the Control of Claims on the Paranormal). Thanks to a scholarship donated by Piero Angela, he studied for over a year in the United States with the American illusionist James Randi, the most famous investigator of unusual phenomena.
Back in Italy, he graduated in psychology at the University of Padua, then specializing in the psychology of the unusual and that of deception – skills thanks to which he has been conducting investigations, research and experimentation on mysterious or paranormal phenomena for years. Since 1989 he has directed the journal Scienza & Paranormale, since 1996 he has been European director of the James Randi Educational Foundation, since 1997 he has been editorial director of a popular science series of the Avverbi publishing house in Rome and in 2004 he created the magazine Magia, of which he is also editor. Between 2004 and 2007 he was a professor of “Scientific Method, Pseudoscience and Psychology of the Unusual” at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Milano-Bicocca. The only course of this type ever activated in Italy. He is the author of nearly thirty books and over five hundred articles on puzzles of various kinds, from alleged paranormal phenomena to unsolved crimes and historical mysteries. He collaborates regularly with all the publications of the Focus group and with The Skeptical Inquirer. He was a guest of the Liberevento Cultural Festival in 2024 with “La meraviglia del tutto” (Ed. Mondadori 2024).