With psychic hotlines, UFO sightings and X-Files clones lurking amid the cubic zirconia and Abdomenizers on cable TV, American pop culture has been abducted by pseudoscience.
That, at least, is the opinion of the community of scientists and academics who make a sideline of trying to debunk claims of the paranormal, astrological and extraterrestrial.
"There is big confusion today in the public mind between pseudoscience and genuine science," said Paul Kurtz, chairman of the 20-year-old Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, or CSICOP, whose annual conference convened here recently. "The media are exploiting the paranormal and are not allowing reasonable scientific criticism of paranormal claims."
Kurtz and others in the skeptics community don't view The X-Files, Sightings and The Weekly World News as harmless entertainment. They believe the public is lapping up occult beliefs, and they see this as a threat to genuine scientific inquiry.
It's not just Fox TV, which broadcast last year's cheesy Alien Autopsy special, and the more peripheral networks that are peddling the psychic and spooky these days, however. NBC and CBS have aired speculative documentaries on lost civilizations, occult prophecies and other alleged ancient mysteries.
NBC's The Mysterious Origins of Man, shown in February and repeated last month, claimed that footprints in a creek bed in Glen Rose, Texas, indicated that man existed at the same time as the dinosaurs. Another two-hour NBC program reported the prophecies of Nostradamus and other psychics, with no dissenting views.
Meanwhile, CBS' 48 hours and CNN's Larry King Live gave scientific skepticism short shrift in programs devoted to the 1947 Roswell incident, in which the government is said to be covering up evidence that an alien spacecraft crash-landed.
"TV has become the most pervasive means of convincing you, me and the public that UFOs are real," said Philip J. Klass, senior editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology and a longtime UFO debunker.
Also troubling the skeptics: Time magazine's recent cover story on spiritual healing, a Disney World UFO exhibit (Alien Encounters from Tomorrowland), and even a National Institutes of Health program to study alternative medicine and therapeutic touch.
Kurtz, a kindly, rumpled philosophy professor and avowed humanist, decries the producers, editors, publishers and journalists who sensationalize paranormal reports for the sake of audience interest and advertising dollars. His organization is setting up a Council for Media Integrity to monitor pseudoscience content in TV, radio and print reports.
Among CSICOP's fellows and allies are Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan, entertainer Steve Allen, Nobel laureates such as Leon Lederman of the University of Chicago and scores of science teachers from around the country.
Together and separately, they battle public belief not only in poltergeists, flying saucers, cattle mutilations, vampires and Bigfoot, but also in astrology, the New Age movement and creationism. Lately, they've even taken on the cultural leftists who espouse postmodernism.
All are part of the "dark forces of superstition . . . that prey on the gullible," said Lederman.
Occultism is not new, Lederman added. But "even though anti-science has waxed and waned over the years, I have the impression that we are in the waxing days."
If the skeptic community has a fatal flaw, however, it might be the uncompromising way it has bashed anything not buttoned down with the scientific method. That makes enemies in a wide area of American culture. Kurtz, Lederman and others, for instance, apply their critical standards to religion as well as pseudoscience. They have taken on Scientologists, fundamentalists, chiropractors, homeopaths-even the very idea of religion.
Atheistic texts such as Living Without Religion are sold at a CSICOP convention next to books that debunk telekinesis and astrology. Kurtz founded Prometheus Press, which publishes both kinds of books, and also heads the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism.
"I believe religious claims need to be examined," he says, shrugging off the political problem this creates for his movement. "But we keep that separate from the work of CSICOP."
As might be expected, a group of quirky, outspoken and largely agnostic or atheistic scientists can develop plenty of critics among the people they skewer. But even a few skeptics have problems with CSICOP.
"I believe their work is fundamentally good, but I'm concerned that they've become the attorneys for the orthodox and the gatekeepers for the National Science Foundation," said Marcello Truzzi, a co-founder of the organization, who broke away from it.
As Truzzi sees it, the decline of mainstream religion in America has led to a surge of interest in alternative medicine and spiritualism among a significant minority of people. At the same time, the largely secular majority of Americans has turned science and medicine into a substitute religion. That has set up a contest between the two camps.
"The problem with CSICOP is that they have become the hard-liners, defending the science faith," said Truzzi, a sociology professor at East Michigan University and specialist in what he calls "deviant science." Said Truzzi: "They use ridicule against their opponents and are ultra-materialist in their outlook. That wins them few friends."
Harvard's Gould warned scientists at the meeting against becoming a "priesthood of rationalism" while ignoring the many ways in which scientific insights can emerge. He also suggested that skeptics "should watch our language" when criticizing the claims of others.
Dennis Rawlins, an astronomer and onetime CSICOP fellow, made a more troubling (for scientists) accusation in the organization's early days: that researchers fudged the results of an astrology test because the data did not debunk the alleged "Mars effect," which supposedly favors athletes born under that planet.
Rawlins wrote in an essay on the controversy: "The conspiratorial mentality of believers in the occult represents a real political danger in a voting democracy. Now I find that the very group I helped found has partially justified this mentality."
Increasingly, UFOs and ghosts are becoming old hat, however, and CSICOP skeptics are aiming at a more ideological target, which they call the "anti-science movement." In this group are postmodernists and feminists who apply "social critique" methods to science and see the scientific method as just one of many ways of viewing the world.
Skeptics were gleeful about a hoax pulled by mathematician Alan Sokal on the journal Social Text, an article in which Sokal appeared to argue that the physical world was simply a construct of a conservative male mindset.
Paul Gross, director of the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia, decried feminists who see conventional science as "man's rape of nature." He also criticized a political and academic permissiveness that has channeled research money into the study of alternative medicine.
"Quackery is no longer quackery," Gross said. "It is just `other voices.'"
Still, the skeptics' bread and butter issue remains the public fascination with UFOs. The X-Files has become a favorite whipping boy for the skeptics. A number of CSICOP members criticized X-Files creator Chris Carter at one conference session, telling him that his show was fostering ignorance and suspicion.
Carter countered by reminding the scientists that his show is fiction, not fact, and that Shakespeare, Dickens and other writers used ghosts and the paranormal in story-telling.
"The show is only as scary as it is believable," Carter said. "All I want to do, in a very smart way, is to scare the pants off everybody. But it's a fictional show. It is drama."
"Anyone who takes it at face value is gullible anyway," he added. "And you have your job to do as scientists to change that."
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John Yemma is a staff writer on the Boston Globe. Reprinted with permission from the July 1, 1996 issue of the Boston Globe. Copyright 1996 Boston Globe.
It may seem ironic that a conference titled "Science in the Age of (Mis)Information" and focusing in part on the media's role in promulgating that misinformation was itself somewhat of a media event. But the 20th anniversary conference of CSICOP -- the first World Skeptics Congress -- was attended by media from all over the world. The Associated Press did an opening-day story. CNN, the BBC, Australian radio all were there. National Public Radio's Science Friday program (Ira Flatow, moderator) broadcast two hours live from the conference. The Boston Globe did a big nationally syndicated feature (see other story). The New York Times published excerpts from some of the conference papers (Week in Review, July 7). New Scientist did a column (July 13). Other journalists came from all over.
The concern of course is that while many responsible news organizations (especially those having professional science writers) are doing their best to present science well, honestly, and in proper context, their efforts are being swamped, in terms of what the public gets, by highly publicized television pseudo-documentaries, talk shows, and other entertainment programming that is awash with pseudoscience, paranormal-powers-as-fact, and creationism presented as a scientifically valid alternative to evolution "theory."
This is why CSICOP announced at the conference creation of a Council on Media Integrity to try to address this problem. Scientific luminaries such as Glenn T. Seaborg, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, science communications researchers such as George Gerbner, and scientific journalists such as Sir John Maddox (editor emeritus of Nature), Gerald Piel and John Rennie (former publisher and present editor, respectively, of Scientific American), and Alun Anderson (editor of New Scientist) are among the council members. Whether the council will be able to do anything about this kind of willfully disseminated misinformation is anyone's guess.
"The media have now virtually replaced the schools, colleges and universities as the main source of information for the general public," said philosopher and CSICOP founding chairman Paul Kurtz. "The irresponsibility of the media in the area of science and the paranormal is a worldwide problem. We surely do not wish to censor the media," he said. "We only ask that they provide some balance and provide some appreciation of the scientific approach."
The council probably will ask the networks, at a minimum, to make some distinction between those "documentaries" produced by its entertainment division or outside producers and those by their news divisions. But network producers have generally been oblivious to all recent scientific complaints of their entertainment offerings, such as that notorious anti-evolution "documentary," The Mysterious Origins of Man, rebroadcast June 8 despite an avalanche of scientific criticism.
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Ken Frazier is editor of The Skeptical Inquirer, CSICOP's bimonthly magazine.