The truth is out there
It’s a good time to be a skeptic, but you knew that. And
upstate New York
is a great part of the world for skepticism. The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
(www.centerforinquiry.net) is right around the corner at 1310 Sweet Home Road
in Amherst.
They’re the folks who publish Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which
lets you ponder Yetis and weeping Virgin Mary statues and palm reading without
insulting your intelligence. Such luminaries as Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov
were involved in the early years of the organization. No other magazine
explores concerns about dead Beatles and theories of intelligent design in the
same volume.
Amherst
also boasts the headquarters of Prometheus Books, which has been building a
remarkable backlist since 1969. Sagan, Asimov and others cross over from the
CSICOP fold, but the Prometheus family is huge in comparison even to mainstream
publishers with a hundred or so books published each year. Among my favorites
are: Shockingly
Close to the Truth!: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologistby James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock and On the Wild Side: The
Big Bang, ESP, The Beast 666, Levitation, Rainmaking, Trance-Channelingby Martin Gardner.
Moseley spent much of the past 50
years as a player in the UFO subculture. He gossips a great deal and reveals a
lot of the reality of pulling the wool over your neighbors’ heads. It’s the
book that Moseley says he’s been trying to write all that time. One of the major
players in the popular science crowd, Gardner makes sense of nonsense — the
motivations and misunderstandings that drive people to idiocy. The world might
just be a saner place if everyone read a little Martin Gardner and worked a
little harder at separating reality from fiction.
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2006.
