Alfred Paul "Al" Seckel (September 3, 1958 – 2015) was an American collector and popularizer of visual and other types of sensory illusions, who wrote books about them.

[2] News coverage arising from his connection to Jeffrey Epstein has stressed Seckel's misrepresentation of his education and credentials.

In 1983, Seckel and John Edwards co-created the Darwin fish design, which was first sold as a bumper sticker and on T-shirts in 1983–84 by a southern California group called Atheists United.

[6] When the emblem evolved into a million-dollar business, Evolution Design threatened to sue distributors of look-alike and derivative products.

[2] An article published in New Scientist in 1985 states that the Southern California Skeptics were "the fastest growing chapter of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP)".

[11] Author George P. Hansen, in an article published in 1992, stated that incidents involving Seckel had embarrassed CSICOP because "he did not hold the academic credentials he claimed.

His book The Art of Optical Illusions placed first on the American Library Association's "Top 10 Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers" list for 2001.

[4] During the late 1990s, Seckel collected the papers of a number of early molecular biologists (including Rosalind Franklin, Aaron Klug, Max Perutz, Rollin Hotchkiss, and Sven Furberg) for rare-book dealer Jeremy Norman.

[24] After the Wellcome Trust purchased the papers of Francis Crick in 2001 for $2.4 million, Norman pursued individual sale of the items in his collection through Christie's.

[26] Although former colleagues and associates of James Watson and Crick attempted to raise the asking price of $3.2 million in an effort to have the collection donated to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the collection was eventually acquired by molecular biologist J. Craig Venter, with the stated aim of keeping the critical resource available to scholars by housing it at the J. Craig Venter Institute.

[4][27] In a San Diego Reader article from 1994, Tom McIver (author of Anti-Evolution: An Annotated Bibliography) accused Seckel of failing to disclose financial information as leader of the Southern California Skeptics and misrepresenting his academic credentials.

[30][31] In attendance were scientists Murray Gell-Mann, Leonard Mlodinow, Gerald Sussman,[27] and Frances Arnold,[31] in addition to the actor and cryptocurrency proponent Brock Pierce.