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Paranormal phenomena

Early in his career, Clarke had a fascination with the paranormal and said it was part of the inspiration for his novel Childhood's End. Citing the numerous promising paranormal claims that were later shown to be fraudulent, Clarke described his earlier openness to the paranormal having turned to being "an almost total sceptic" by the time of his 1992 biography. Similarly, in the prologue to the 1990 Del Rey edition of Childhood's End, he writes "...after... researching my Mysterious World and Strange Powers programmes, I am an almost total skeptic. I have seen far too many claims dissolve into thin air, far too many demonstrations exposed as fakes. It has been a long, and sometimes embarrassing, learning process." During interviews, both in 1993 and 2004–2005, he stated that he did not believe in reincarnation, saying there was no mechanism to make it possible, though "I'm always paraphrasing J. B. S. Haldane: 'The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine. ' " He described the idea of reincarnation as fascinating, but favoured a finite existence.

Clarke was known for hosting several television series investigating the unusual: Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1980), Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Power (1985), and Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Universe (1994). Topics examined ranged from ancient, man-made artifacts with obscure origins (e.g., the Nazca lines or Stonehenge), to cryptids (purported animals unknown to science), or obsolete scientific theories that came to have alternate explanations (e.g., Martian canals).

In Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, he describes three kinds of "mysteries":

Clarke's programmes on unusual phenomena were parodied in a 1982 episode of the comedy series The Goodies, in which his show is cancelled after it is claimed that he does not exist.