Nicholas Kollerstrom (born 1946) is an English historian of science and author who is known for the promotion of Holocaust denial and other conspiracy theories.
[2][3] Formerly an honorary research fellow in The Department for Science and Technology Studies (STS) at University College London (UCL), he is the author of several books, including Gardening and Planting by the Moon (an annual series beginning in 1980), Newton's Forgotten Lunar Theory (2000), Crop Circles (2002), and Terror on the Tube (2009).
[15] In 1990, Kollerstrom was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society,[16] and in 1994 he was awarded a PhD by University College London (UCL) for a thesis entitled The Achievement of Newton's "Theory of the Moon's Motion" of 1702.
[17] He was also awarded a Leverhulme scholarship and an honorary post-doctoral research fellowship in UCL's department of science and technology studies.
The group held an informal public inquiry in November 1986 at Hampstead Town Hall, addressed by Tam Dalyell and Clive Ponting, among others.
The LISG produced no legal cases that supported its mission, and was shut down in 2017 after Kollerstrom's co-founder Phil Shiner was revealed to have engaged in widespread fraud during LISG's unsuccessful existence (Shiner was disbarred and left bankrupt by his fraudulent actions, and was convicted and given a two-year suspended prison sentence for his crimes in December 2024).
[2][25] In 2006 he appeared in a video by David Shayler supporting a fringe conspiracy theory that the men accused of the 7 July 2005 London bombings had not carried out the attack.
[6] According to the BBC, Kollerstrom found that the Luton–London train on which the bombers were at first said to have travelled had been cancelled, which led the government to correct the official account of the men's movements.
[27] Kollerstrom's book Terror on the Tube: Behind the Veil of 7/7, An Investigation was published in 2009, and he was interviewed that year for the BBC series The Conspiracy Files.
[28] In 2007, on the website of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), a Holocaust-denial group, Kollerstrom argued for a fringe view that the gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp had been used for disinfection purposes only and that only one million Jews died in the war.
[5] The following month he was interviewed by Iran's Press TV, which re-published one of his CODOH articles, which denied the use of gas for killing in Auschwitz.
[1][3][32] The historian of science, Noel Swerdlow, suggested in Isis in 2010 that the publishers of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (2007) should withdraw it and replace the entries Kollerstrom had written on John Couch Adams, John Flamsteed, and Isaac Newton; Swerdlow wrote that a "line has been crossed that should never be crossed".
[38] Writing in 2017 about the relationship between conspiracism and historical negationism, Nicholas Terry, a historian at Exeter University, referred to Kollerstrom as a "classic example of so-called crank magnetism".
[41] Kollerstrom has regularly appeared on the David Icke-associated Richie Allen Show, including on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2016.
"Sex difference in response to stress by lunar month: A pilot study of four years' crisis-call frequency", BMC Psychiatry, 3(20).