Benjamin Radford - Phantom Clown Panics

For our Sunday, April 12th meeting, AFS is delighted to welcome our old friend and well-known skeptic Benjamin Radford to speak about evil clowns!

Most evil clowns are fictional, but some bad clowns are reported to roam streets and parks looking for innocent children to abduct—yet seem to vanish just before police can apprehend them. Some say they are real, while others claim they are figments of imagination. They are known as phantom clowns, and were first sighted in 1981, when children in Boston reported that clowns had tried to lure them into a van with promises of candy. Other reports surfaced in other cities and in later years, with the same pattern: Parents were fearful, children were warned and police were vigilant, but despite searches and police checkpoints no evidence was ever found of their existence. They returned in the fall of 2016 when reports spread across America—and later around the globe—of these menacing clowns.

Join researcher Benjamin Radford as he explains the history, causes, and nature of this bizarre phenomenon. This presentation is based on his 2016 book Bad Clowns, which was featured in numerous publications including People Magazine, Time, Newsweek, BBC, and NPR.

Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and a Research Fellow with the non-profit educational organization the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He has written thousands of articles on a wide variety of topics including urban legends, the paranormal, critical thinking, and science literacy.
He is author of over a dozen books including Hoaxes, Myths, and Manias: Why We Need Critical Thinking (with Bob Bartholomew); Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us*; Lake Monster Mysteries (with Joe Nickell); Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries*; Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore; Investigating Ghosts; Big—If True: Adventures in Oddity; and most recently, America the Fearful: Media and the Marketing of National Panics.

Radford was a regular columnist for LiveScience.com, Discovery News, Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and the Skeptical Briefs newsletter. Radford created Playing Gods: The Board Game of Divine Domination, the world’s first satirical board game of religious warfare. He is also an award-winning filmmaker, writing and directing two short films: Clicker Clatter (2007), Sirens (2009), and State of Nebraska v. Crotchy the Clown (2025).

Radford is one of the world’s few science-based investigators of the ”unexplained,” and has done first-hand research into mysterious phenomena including psychics, ghosts and haunted houses, exorcisms, miracles, Bigfoot, stigmata, lake monsters, UFO sightings, reincarnation, crop circles, and many other topics. He is perhaps best known for researching and solving the mysteries of the Santa Fe (NM) Courthouse Ghost, the Pokemon Panic, phantom clown attacks, and the Hispanic vampire "el chupacabra."
Radford holds a Masters degree from Dartmouth in Public Health, a Masters from SUNY-Buffalo in Education, and a Bachelors in Psychology from the University of New Mexico. Radford has appeared on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the Travel Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Learning Channel, CBC, CBS, BBC, CNN, and other networks with three letters. He also served as a consultant for the MTV series The Big Urban Myth Show and an episode of the CBS crime drama CSI. Radford has appeared in numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, Wired, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Ladies’ Home Journal.