Team Dubious

Part 3

by Ellen Barry

It is in the face of this tsunami of new beliefs that the skeptics now stand "with our finger in the dike," says Barry Karr, executive director of the Buffalo, New York-based Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), which systematically picks apart extraordinary claims. Other skeptics use other flood images; Laurence Moss, head of the Skeptical Inquirers of New England, describes his work as "trying to take water out of a sinking ship with a thimble." From the skeptical standpoint, it's an apt metaphor: faith is hard to compete with when your only weapon against it is fastidious fact-checking.

"If I had to sum it up in a sentence, we are interested in why people believe what they believe even in the face of counterevidence, or when there's no evidence," Karr says. In many cases -- belief in alien abduction is a signal example, he says -- material evidence seems beside the point. "People still believe it. It's almost like a new religion."

CSICOP is not the first to fight this battle. In the grand tradition of systematic debunkers in the United States, the grandest was Harry Houdini, who devoted his later years to discrediting the post-World War I mania for the occult. Outraged by the unethical use of magic, Houdini would sit in on sessions with mediums and attempt to unmask them as they engineered "signs" in the pitch dark. In one instance, he covered a trumpet with soot so that when the lights came up after a "miraculous" performance by a ghost trumpeter, the medium's hands were marked. Houdini's tradition has been carried into the present by James "the Amazing" Randi, who in 1986 won a MacArthur "genius" grant for his exposés of "psychic surgeons" and faith-healing televangelists.

But for non-celebrity debunkers such as the Skeptical Inquirers, there are no MacArthur grants or television specials. Instead, a group of what Moss describes cheerfully as "curmudgeons" -- mostly male, mostly white, mostly engineers and academics -- meet the first Wednesday of every month at a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge to discuss the declining state of American reason. They have forums: the journals Skeptic and the Skeptical Inquirer come out regularly with lengthy, case-by-case dissections of "China, Chi and Chicanery," "Alien Autopsy's Overwhelming Implausibility," and "Not-So-Spontaneous Human Combustion." Perhaps most important, they are also making concerted efforts to affect media coverage by offering themselves to harried journalists as expert witnesses.

Other projects are more aggressive: a group of local skeptics recently road-tripped to sit in the studio audience for a Jenny Jones show featuring alien abductees and "moaned and groaned" at the guests' stories until the host repositioned herself as a skeptic, says Moss. This fall, local skeptics are hoping to sponsor an "anti-New Age fair" at Babson College, where skeptics will be on hand to make their case against such phenomena as crystal healing.

It's a challenging mission, telling people their most cherished beliefs are hokum, but among skeptics there is a new sense of urgency. Public gullibility, they say, isn't just foolish -- it's dangerous. That's a conclusion that the US government also seemed to reach this summer, when it issued a point-by-point denial of the alleged 1947 alien landing in Roswell. UFO beliefs, after all, seemed harmless enough until 39 people killed themselves in Rancho Santa Fe; the Roswell theories seemed benign until they became interwoven with militia gospel. All of a sudden, the paranormal is political.

Or that's how the skeptics see it. "There is a danger when you think that if you just pray hard enough you can be cured," Karr says. "Calling up a psychic and asking them to solve a problem is dangerous. When you give up your own decision-making process and give it over to someone else, it's dangerous for society."

This shift of public confidence is the real crisis, the skeptics say. Confidence in scientists, which soared in the post-World War II atomic euphoria, has been dropping ever since, according to Moss. And as alternatives proliferate, Western science -- which gave us such unambiguous pluses as anesthesia, sterilization, and the 80-year life span -- may get short shrift both in the government's budget process and in the court of public opinion. Last year, the National Institutes of Health allocated $12 million to a study of alternative medicine, a project that skeptics say glosses over the question of whether it works in the first place. Andrew Weil's Spontaneous Healing (Knopf), an alternative-medicine primer, entered its 52nd week on the New York Times best-seller list on Sunday.

In the meantime, Novella, a neurologist, finds his own credibility questioned on a daily basis. This is when skepticism gets personal.

"My patients come in, and sometimes I have to win them over," Novella says, exasperated. "Sometimes I have to win them back over to Western medicine. Some are almost hostile, you know? It's a very different world."

Part 4

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.