THIS BOOK FOLLOWS Discarded Science (2006), which is primarily concerned with scientific hypotheses – from the woeful to the wonderful – that have fallen by the wayside, and Corrupted Science (2007), which examines the ways in which science has been corrupted either by human weakness or more usually by human mendacity, whether grounded in greed, religious belief, bigotry, ideology, politics or any mixture thereof. Both books naturally contain a fair amount about the pseudosciences, especially those related to alien visitors in either the ancient past or, via UFO, the present; but the pseudosciences are not their focus.

In Bogus Science the concern is far more with the stuff that walks vaguely like science, quacks vaguely like science, but in fact isn't science at all: it's bogus science, or pseudoscience. This isn't to say that there's not a lot of genuine science within these pages – there is – but it's there in the context of illuminating the bogus.

One thing I realized soon after undertaking Bogus Science was that, whereas in the other two books I could have as my aim some approximation, however rough, of comprehensive coverage of the field, the pseudosciences have today become – in part but only in part because of the internet – so prolific, ubiquitous and many-aspected that I didn't have a hope of succeeding in any kind of quasicomprehensive approach. Instead I took my inspiration from the title of that 1973 classic A Random Walk in Science, compiled by R.L. Weber and edited by R. Mendoza. I decided that for the sake of my own sanity and quite possibly my readers' it was better to concentrate on relatively few areas in some detail than to try to touch every possible base with what would necessarily be infuriating briefness. What you have in your hands, then, is not an entirely random walk in pseudoscience, but it's quite deliberately a stroll that goes along some lanes and not others.

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