Man, I so wanted to believe I was psychic as a kid! I think I read some sort of kooky Time-Life books on the subject, and at some point I picked up the encyclopedic Directory of Possibilities by Colin Wilson and John Grant, which was a sympathetic and open-minded look at all sorts of stuff (orgone boxes and ghosts and white holes and the big bang vs. steady state theory and kirlian photography and extraterrestrial life and bigfoot and dowsing and ...). I read it cover to cover and spent a certain amount of time trying to predict the order of cards in a shuffled deck, but I never got any results. I'm not sure at what point I stopped thinking that a lot of that stuff might actually be true. Actually, Douglas Hofstadter's skeptical tendencies may have been an influence here, thinking about it -- both his own skepticism and his recommendation of other skeptical writers.

Incidentally, Ira Glass had a youthful fascination with Erich von Däniken. This apparently led to some interesting discussions at the Baltimore Hebrew College, which he went to three days a week as a teenager.

There was a copy of Chariots of the Gods around in the house when I was growing up, but I don't think I ever read it.