Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of columns from Massimo Polidoro as he recounts stories from the history of the modern skeptical movement and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).
Before CSICOP had a name, a mission, or a public face, it already had a problem.
The idea of forming a nonprofit skeptical organization was born in the summer of 1973, as we have seen in my previous column, when James Randi began sharing his thoughts with Martin Gardner and Ray Hyman about the urgent need for a coordinated response to the growing wave of paranormal claims. One early working name for this hypothetical group was SIR: Sanity in Research. In a letter to Randi dated August 14, 1973, Hyman made it clear that the organization should offer “something POSITIVE rather than project an image of being a debunking organization.”
At the same time, Hyman was acutely aware of a potential problem. A group prominently associated with Randi, Gardner, and him, he warned, risked being immediately labeled as belonging to “the hard-headed, skeptical extremist wing. This is a defect, I feel, and one that we should try to overcome. If we want to reach individuals who are not already confirmed skeptics, then we have to avoid coming on as radical debunkers.”
From an Idea to a Shape
The challenge, then, was strategic as much as philosophical: how to remain intellectually rigorous without alienating the very audience the group hoped to reach. From these exchanges, we already see that if Randi was the bold catalyst and Gardner the intellectual reference point, it was Ray Hyman who consistently played the role of strategic conscience, asking not just what needed to be challenged but how and for whom.
One solution, Hyman suggested, was to clarify that the group’s purpose “is not to debunk the supernatural nor to prove that extra-sensory is impossible. Rather our goal is to help individuals and organizations evaluate evidence.” How?
In an audio cassette recording from the period, Randi proposed that SIR might offer advice to groups already conducting research on ESP. He reasoned that “any serious organization could hardly refuse to accept such help.” Hyman, however, was unconvinced:
I am afraid that this might be somewhat unrealistic. Scientific laboratories are notoriously touchy about safeguarding their independence and protecting themselves from interference by outsiders, including sponsoring agencies. They also can be quite sensitive to any suggestion that they may lack certain expertise in scientific judgment or may require monitoring of some sort by an outside agency. It would take tact and diplomacy of a miraculous sort to convince most ESP researchers to accept our advice.
History would soon prove him right.
Hyman instead pointed to a different—and potentially far more effective—approach: The group could focus on sharing “tools and precautions that are frequently overlooked by people who encounter psychics or seemingly supernatural happenings.” Psychology, he noted, had revealed countless quirks of perception, memory, reasoning, and emotion that routinely mislead people when they try to make sense of bizarre events. This knowledge, Hyman believed, could and should reach a much wider audience, especially young people.
He had recently tested this idea firsthand, after giving a talk on mentalism and the supernatural to a fifth-grade class. He performed a few magic tricks, then explained how easily the human mind could be fooled. Hyman wrote:
We had a fantastic discussion. They asked me questions of a much more searching nature than I get from my college students. The teacher finally had to break off the interaction, after two hours, because recess had come. He said that he had never encountered a previous topic that held the class’s interest for such a long period of time. What struck me was how easy it is to convey a few principles to children at this age which might be sufficient to protect them from a variety of things that ordinarily deceive adults.
It was a powerful insight, one that still resonates today. “If an organization such as SIR could prepare kits of materials for grade schoolteachers,” observed Hyman, “this could go a long way towards inculcating safeguards before the children become set in their belief systems.”
And yet, despite the clarity of the vision, momentum stalled. Months passed. Letters were exchanged. Ideas were refined.
But nothing, for the moment, actually happened.
Big Ideas, Small Steps
“I have not thought much more about Randi’s idea for the SIR foundation,” Hyman wrote to Gardner in a letter dated November 2, 1973. Ironically, while the group was united in its skepticism toward extraordinary claims, it proved far less certain about how to organize itself in ordinary, practical terms.
And yet, despite that apparent hesitation, the idea stubbornly refused to fade. Just a couple weeks later, Hyman reported to Gardner about a lunch he had with Leon Jaroff, science editor of Time magazine. “If you get to the area in December or January,” Hyman wrote, “he is anxious to meet you, and he, too, is talking about setting up some sort of organization to provide information on psychic matters. If and when you know you will be in NYC, let me arrange, for lunch with Jaroff, possibly Randi also (at same lunch).”
By early December, Hyman’s interest had clearly reasserted itself. On December 4, he wrote directly to Randi, reaffirming his desire to create a skeptical group—though with an important caveat. Randi’s original vision included overseeing parapsychological experiments in laboratories, as well as actively exposing figures such as Geller, Ted Serios, and others. Hyman, however, proposed a different emphasis.
“I think I would be more interested in making the organization one that focused on disseminating the other side of the story on psychic matters,” he explained. “This could be done through supplying information kits, video and audio tapes, booklets, bibliographies, and books. We could also provide local schools, colleges, and other groups lectures and/or demonstrators. We could commission films, books, and the like.”
He elaborated further in another letter written the same day to Gardner: “Our goal would be to let individuals and organizations know there is another side to the stories the media keeps telling them about UFO’s, Uri Geller, psychic surgery, astrological forecasts, and the like.”
A crucial question soon emerged: How could such an ambitious project be funded?
“Hopefully,” Hyman wrote, “some publishers, foundations, and other concerned citizenry might help to finance the operation by gifts, grants and subscriptions. It might be that the foundation would also obtain some income through commissions on lecture fees, royalties on published materials, etc.” Hyman argued that independence depended on sustainability: “If the organization became self-supporting, it would help maintain its independence. Probably it would be best to begin on a modest basis at first. The organization might need a full-time director and some clerical staff at the outset.”
New Allies, Old Ambiguities
While these discussions were unfolding, Randi was actively reaching out to other potential allies. Among them was sociologist Marcello Truzzi, from the Ypsilanti campus of Eastern Michigan University.
“Truzzi,” Randi later told me, “had come from a famous Italian circus family, was knowledgeable about juggling, conjuring, and such arts. He quite frankly told me that he was ‘not a believer in the paranormal’ and in the beginning he seemed a very good ally for our cause. I would have soon found out how wrong I was.”
For some reason, Truzzi thought that the group in formation was going to be a “consulting firm” and said so to Hyman. “I told Marcello that I think what we had in mind was more in the line of a nonprofit foundation rather than a consulting firm.” Hyman then wrote back to Randi in a letter dated December 12, 1973: “I also told him that it was still in the dream stage.”
The dream, however, was slowly taking on substance, though it would take time.
After nearly a year of letters and phone calls with Randi and Gardner, Hyman finally traveled from Oregon to New York in March 1974. On Tuesday, March 18, Gardner, Jaroff, and several others met for lunch at the René Pujol restaurant. Randi could not attend. The following day, Gardner, Randi, photographer and magician Charles Reynolds, journalist John Wilhelm (he too, like Jaroff, was from Time), and Hyman met again, this time at an Italian restaurant: Anlotti’s, according to Hyman’s notes (neither restaurant exists today).
“During both luncheons,” Hyman later told me, “we discussed Uri Geller, other pseudosciences, the nature of a possible skeptical organization, as well as sources for funding. Leon Jaroff informed us that he had ties to industrialists who might contribute.” That Friday, March 23, 1974, Randi and Hyman took the train from Grand Central Station to Hastings-on-the-Hudson, where Gardner lived. “We spent the day at Martin’s discussing and planning for our skeptical organization.”
What’s in a Name?
Hyman, a meticulous note-taker, soon attempted to organize the ideas that had emerged. On April 12, 1974, he outlined several priorities. Before mission statements or objectives, however, one issue stood out above all others: “We need a name.” SIR—originally conceived as a playful counterpoint to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), then involved in research on Geller—was no longer convincing. It was a small problem on the surface but one that revealed how difficult it was to give a clear public identity to an enterprise that was still finding its own shape.
“The name we choose is extremely important,” Hyman wrote. “I would like something short, descriptive and distinctive. But so far I have been unable to come close to anything that is acceptable. It is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a short name that conveys what we have in mind. One thought is to name it after an individual such as the Joseph Jastrow Society.”
That idea, too, was soon abandoned.
Other proposals followed in the months ahead. After an August meeting, Hyman jotted down several possibilities, such as Institute for Constructive Skepticism and The Skeptical Seekers. “I lean towards something that has the flavor of Foundation for Constructive Skepticism or Institute for Responsible Criticism,” he wrote in a letter to Gardner and Randi dated September 9, 1974.
Alongside these name debates, a growing list of practical requirements took shape (“We need an entrepreneur to take charge of helping to organize … We need to draft a preliminary prospectus … We need to set targets and objectives…”). And amid these sober considerations, some proposals emerged that were anything but conventional.
One, in particular, stood out: “Train a ‘straw man’ who will be able to convincingly infiltrate major scientific laboratories and convince the investigators that he is a true psychic. The point would be to demonstrate vividly that scientists are simply not equipped to cope with such deception.”
For a group committed to careful reasoning and methodological rigor, the proposal was strikingly theatrical. It would certainly have been spectacular and newsworthy.
But could such an elaborate plan be realized, when even the existence of a skeptical organization was still, in Hyman’s words, very much a dream?
