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By Root 401 0

James “the Amazing” Randi. I do not recall exactly when or where I first encountered him. I believe it was on The Tonight Show when he was demonstrating how to levitate tables, bend spoons, and perform psychic surgeries. Randi didn’t convince me to become a full-fledged skeptic overnight, but it got me thinking that if some of these psychics were fakes, perhaps they all were (and if not fakes, at least self-deceived). Herein lies an important lesson. There is little to no chance that we can convince True Believers of the errors of their thinking. Our purpose is to reach that vast middle ground between hard-core skeptics and dogmatic believers—people like me who thought that there might be something to these claims but simply had never heard a good counterexplanation. There are many reasons why people believe weird things, but certainly one of the most pervasive is that most people have never heard a good explanation for the weird things they hear and read about. Short of a good explanation, they accept the bad explanation that is typically proffered. This alone justifies all the hard work performed by skeptics toward the cause of science and critical thinking. It does make a difference.

Fast-forward ten years. My first contact with organized skepticism came in the mid-1980s through the famed aeronautics engineer and human-powered flight inventor Paul MacCready. I originally met Paul through the International Human Powered Vehicle Association, as he was interested in designing them and I was interested in racing them (I had a ten-year career as an ultra-marathon cyclist). One day he phoned to invite me to a California Institute of Technology lecture being hosted by a group called the Southern California Skeptics (SCS). SCS was an offshoot of CSICOP and one of many that had spontaneously self-organized around the country throughout the 1980s. The lectures were fascinating, and because of my affiliation with Paul I got to meet some of the insiders in what was rapidly becoming the “skeptical movement.” Paul was acquainted with such science luminaries as physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann and the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, as well as with Randi and the magicians Penn and Teller, so it seemed like skepticism was a real happening. In 1987, CSICOP hosted a convention at the Pasadena Civic Center that featured Carl Sagan as their keynote speaker. Carl was so inspiring that I decided to return to graduate school to complete my doctorate.

By the end of the 1980s, however, the Southern California Skeptics folded and the skeptical movement came to a grinding halt in the very place that so desperately needed it. In 1991, I completed my Ph.D., was teaching part-time at Occidental College, and was nosing around for something different to do. I had just published a paper in a science history journal on the Louisiana creationism trial that featured the activities of SCS, who had organized an amicus curiae brief signed by seventy-two Nobel laureates (encouraged by fellow Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann) and submitted to the United States Supreme Court. One of SCS’s former volunteer staff members, Pat Linse, heard about the paper, tracked me down, and dropped by to pick up a reprint copy. During that visit she expressed her frustration—and that of many others—that skepticism in Southern California had gone the way of the Neanderthals. Subsequent meetings with her and others inspired us to jump-start the skeptics movement again by launching a new group and bringing in James Randi for our inaugural lecture in March 1992. It was a smashing success as over four hundred people crammed into a three-hundred-seat hall to hear the amazing one astonish us all with his wit, wisdom, and magic.

With that successful event we were off and running. I starting planning a newsletter, but when Pat saw a sample copy of a bicycle magazine I was publishing (Ultra Cycling magazine, the publication of the Ultra-Marathon Cycling Association and Race Across America that I had cofounded in the early 1980s), which was sixty-four pages long,