On the Scene: Revenge of the Nerds

Midsummer. a thousand years ago our ancestors danced around bonfires and, doubtless, slaughtered a maiden or two. These days we like to think that we have moved on. True, the Scandinavians still throw a good midsommar, but, even there, virgins are no longer sacrificed, at least in the conventional sense of the word. Progress, schmogress. For all our science we still live, as Carl Sagan puts it, in a demon-haunted world. Naturally, there have been changes. The nearest soothsayer is now only a 900 line away. Of course we no longer think that ghouls will steal our offspring—but give those creatures space ships and we will believe they are abducting children, carrying out ghastly experiments, and, for all we know, spoiling the crops. Scratch away our sophisticated veneer, and the New Age very quickly goes dark.

All is not lost, however. The epoch of Shirley MacLaine has its opponents, and one thousand of them recently gathered outside Buffalo. The occasion was the first World Skeptics Congress, a four-day-long discussion of “Science in the Age of (Mis) Information” sponsored by CSICOP—the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP does what its name would suggest. Over the past twenty years it has encouraged the exposure of a sorry sequence of spurious spacemen, cranks, and charlatans. CSI-COP’s fascinating magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, sells around 50,000 copies

Midsummer. a thousand years ago our ancestors danced around bonfires and, doubtless, slaughtered a maiden or two. These days we like to think that we have moved on. True, the Scandinavians still throw a good midsommar, but, even there, virgins are no longer sacrificed, at least in the conventional sense of the word. Progress, schmogress. For all our science we still live, as Carl Sagan puts it, in a demon-haunted world. Naturally, there have been changes. The nearest soothsayer is now only a 900 line away. Of course we no longer think that ghouls will steal our offspring—but give those creatures space ships and we will believe they are abducting children, carrying out ghastly experiments, and, for all we know, spoiling the crops. Scratch away our sophisticated veneer, and the New Age very quickly goes dark.

All is not lost, however. The epoch of Shirley MacLaine has its opponents, and one thousand of them recently gathered outside Buffalo. The occasion was the first World Skeptics Congress, a four-day-long discussion of “Science in the Age of (Mis) Information” sponsored by CSICOP—the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP does what its name would suggest. Over the past twenty years it has encouraged the exposure of a sorry sequence of spurious spacemen, cranks, and charlatans. CSI-COP’s fascinating magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, sells around 50,000 copies