Wissenschaftsbetrug  gegen die Astrologie

auch abgedruckt in den “Apokryphen der Astrologie”, erschienen 2008 bei;

www.astronova.de

Kriminelle in der amerikanischen Wissenschaftlerscene

Report by Dennis Rawlins

Note P.G. (Oct. 14, 2001): This important article was published 20 years ago in FATE Magazine (No. 34, October 1981, pp.67-98).

 The text concludes : "With enemies like these [CSICOPs team], do the occultist kooks need friends?" I would reply : Astrology needs : tamquam sub clipeo Ajacis, against quack mercenary "astrologers" !

For a complete chronology of the Mars Effect controversy (mainly till 1993), see Jim Lippard review. Correct under "1945" : "L. Lasson claims that eminent professionals are born slightly more often (or less often) when a characteristic planet rises or culminates. (Published where?)". Reply : in Ceux qui nous guident" (Paris, René Debresse), published in 1946 (see "L'erreur des astrologues", CURA, 2004). For a French analysis of the so-called "Mars effect", see Pierre Perradin's webpage. See also, by Michel Gauquelin : "Is There Really a Mars Effect?", and an article by Suitbert Ertel & Kenneth Irving, the authors of The Tenacious Mars Effect (London, Urania Trust, 1996).  

DENNIS RAWLINS is a cofounder of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and served on CSICOP's Executive Council from 1976 to 1979. Until 1980 he was an Associate Editor of Skeptical Inquirer.

He holds degrees in physics from Harvard University (B.A.) and Boston University (M.A.). His researches have been published in Nature, Astronomical Journal, American Journal of Physics, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings and other leading publications in the fields of astronomy, geophysics, geography and history of science. He is the author of Peary at the North Pole: Fact or Fiction? (1973) and was the first to release public news of a major ESP scandal (in 1974) at the laboratory of the late J.B. Rhine. Rawlins, 44, and his wife Barbara live in San Diego, Calif.

[Biographical note, FATE Magazine edition, p.71]

    EVER SINCE it came into being the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) has proudly proclaimed itself the scourge of the "new nonsense": astrology, ESP, UFOs and other phenomena of which it does not approve. Its pronouncements on these and other subjects have received widespread attention and uncritical acceptance in the news media.

    Critics such as Fate, professional parapsychologists and moderate skeptics like former CSICOP cochairman Prof. Marcello Truzzi, sociologist at Eastern Michigan University, have questioned the Committee's commitment to objective, scientific investigation of paranormal claims and have accused some CSICOP spokesmen of misrepresenting issues and evidence. But such dissenting views were little noticed by media writers eager to headline sensational -- although frequently unsupported -- debunking claims.

    The story that follows, written by a man who is himself skeptical of the paranormal, confirms what critics of CSICOP have long suspected: that the organization is committed to perpetuating a position, not to determining the truth.

[The Editors of FATE Magazine].

    I USED to believe it was simply a figment of the National Enquirer's weekly imagination that the Science Establishment would cover up evidence for the occult. But that was in the era B.C. -- Before the Committee. I refer to the "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal" (CSICOP), of which I am a cofounder and on whose ruling Executive Council (generally called the Council) I served for some years.

    I am still skeptical of the occult beliefs CSICOP was created to debunk. But I have changed my mind about the integrity of some of those who make a career of opposing occultism. I now believe that if a flying saucer landed in the backyard of a leading anti-UFO spokesman, he might hide the incident from the public (for the public's own good, of course). He might swiftly convince himself that the landing was a hoax, a delusion or an "unfortunate" interpretation of mundane phenomena that could be explained away with "further research."

    The irony of all this particularly distresses me since both in print and before a national television audience I have stated that the conspiratorial mentality of believers in occultism presents a real political danger in a voting democracy. Now I find that the very group I helped found has partially justified this mentality.

*  *  *

    CSICOP originated with the statement "Objections to Astrology," published in the September-October 1975 issue of The Humanist. "Objections" was signed by 186 scientists, including 18 Nobel prizewinners, who were justly upset at the growing newspaper exploitation of a public that wasn't being informed that astronomy and astrology aren't the same thing. "Objections" and its child CSICOP were both the creation of The Humanist's then-editor Paul Kurtz [1]  and received widespread national publicity.

[p.68]

    Unfortunately the statement was published (both in The Humanist and by Kurtz's own private publishing house Prometheus Books) in conjunction with a largely valuable article which included a misconceived attack (by Lawrence Jerome) upon the claims of the prominent French neoastrologers Michel and Francoise Gauquelin. Almost none of the signers read Jerome's analysis before publication.

    Concerned that such an attack could cause trouble for the rationalist movement, I contacted Kurtz for the first time by phone on November 3, 1975.

Br'er Kurtz, he could just hardly wait to sock that TARBABY ...

He admitted privately that I was just one of a number of scientists who had called him about this article immediately after The Humanist published it. But the "Objections" statement was rushed into print intact, along with the uncorrected article, by Prometheus.

    The embarrassment was compounded when Michel Gauquelin proved to be a more skilled statistician than his critic -- and intimated possible legal action. Kurtz, under some pressure from within the AHA for his antiparanormal effort, realized he had a problem. Publicly he admitted no error but privately was frantic to attack Gauquelin in print. Uncle Remus might say, Br'er Kurtz, he could just hardly wait to sock that TARBABY a second time to force him to release the stuck first fist.

    During that first phone conversation Kurtz urged me to write an article refuting Gauquelin -- in about two weeks -- to beat a deadline for the January-February 1976 issue of The Humanist. This is not, it need hardly be said, the way of well-researched scholarship.

    All that fall of 1975 Kurtz was mailing Jerome, me and UCLA astronomer Prof. George Abell reams of articles relating to Gauquelin, including the lengthy March 1975 report and alibis of the Belgian Comite Para which some years earlier, to its surprise, had confirmed the approximate successrate Gauquelin had predicted in his strongest alleged neoastrological correlation, now generally called the "Mars Effect": Gauquelin's results showed that 22 percent of European sports champions are born with Mars rising (Sector 1) or transiting (Sector 4), to express it roughly. Since Gauquelin divides the sky into 12 sectors, the purely chance probability of Mars' being in a prespecified pair of sectors is about 2/12 or 17 percent, well below the observed rate of 22 percent. For the 2088 sports champions in Gauquelin's sample, such a difference is statistically very significant (because of the largeness of the sample); the odds are millions-to-one against its having occurred by chance.

    I did what I could with the material at hand. Even while continuing to analyze this strange problem, I sent Kurtz a paper which he relayed to others interested in the case, among them

[p.69]

Jerome, Abell and Marvin Zelen (then director of the Statistical Laboratory of the State University of New York at Buffalo, but soon to move on to Harvard University). The paper, while suggesting that there might be a natural explanation for the Mars Effect, explicitly noted that if the European sampling was unreliable no amount of analysis (based on this sample) could be certain to detect that.

    Thus, since a fresh sample and analysis of it would be an enormous labor, my paper recommended that any new test offered Gauquelin be both (a) extremely clear-cut in its predicted result and (b) free from the complexities and subtle bias-problems of sampling and of the astronomical/demographical influences that affected the expected ("chance") level (to which experimental observed data, once collected, would be compared). I suggested a possible experiment that would satisfy these conditions: Could Gauquelin use the position of Mars in competing athletes' horoscopes to beat the posted odds on sporting events?

    At this time we all wondered, like other scientists on first acquaintance with the Mars Effect, if there was a possible "natural" (nonoccult) explanation. As seen from Earth, Mars appears near the sun more often than not. And birth rates are higher at dawn, when the sun enters Sector 1, so one would expect all births (not just sports champions') to be slightly more frequent when Mars is in Sector 1. For convenience I will call this astronomical/demographical intrusion (or "influence") the "Mars/dawn" factor. We will return to this since the Keystone CSICOPs' inability to compute this factor (until years after it was too late) was to prove their undoing.

    My manuscript (which gently corrected the "Objections"-affiliated false attack on Gauquelin) was not published in January-February Humanist on the grounds that it had arrived too late for the deadline -- although it had been written in less than two weeks. Instead Kurtz published two other papers in that Humanist issue: one by Abell, on astrology in general and Gauquelin in particular, which based its discussion of the gravitational effects of Mars on us upon a common popular-science misconception, causing an error by a factor of a few million. The other, by Zelen, was "A Challenge" to Gauquelin.

    The Challenge was a classic control experiment: isolate the sports ability variable by comparing the Mars horoscopic positions of the champions Gauquelin had already collected vs. the Mars horoscopic positions of all other persons (nonsports champions), the "control" group, born about the same time and place as the champions. If the control group exhibits the same hit-rate (a "hit": being born when Mars resides in celestial Sector 1 or 4) as the champions, 22 percent, then clearly sports ability has nothing to do with the Mars Effect, which is thus revealed as merely a by-product of purely natural influences. This is what the top CSICOPs expected to happen.

    If the nonchampions' hit-rate turns out to be what Gauquelin had said is correct for ordinary people, namely 17 percent, then the control experiment has come out in Gauquelin's favor, since sports ability is isolated as the link to the five-percent difference.

[p.70]

    The Challenge concluded (emphasis added): "We now have an objective way for unambiguous corroboration or disconfirmation. ... [Thus we may] settle this question" -- statements leaving no doubt at all that if Gauquelin met this test he would achieve confirmation of his claims.

    I was appalled at the potential disaster that awaited if Zelen's presumptions (that the European sample was unbiased and that the cause of the Mars Effect was a natural influence) were wrong. As I checked further into Gauquelin's output, I became convinced there were serious problems in these presumptions. Kurtz said I should speak with Abell whom I did not know personally. When I reached him by phone on December 6,1 said I was worried about the Challenge.

    Abell snapped, "Oh-what's-wrong-with-it?" as if uttering one word. I explained politely that the Challenge depended entirely upon the validity of the European sampling. Abell said he was sure that Gauquelin was honest and the Mars Effect was just a natural influence in the data. I agreed that it had looked that way at first to me too but that recent, still-proceeding attempts to verify the Mars/dawn factor's actual effect left me in skeptical suspension of judgment and thus in fear of possible trouble. Why gamble the outcome of a crucial experiment upon such an uncertain factor?

    But to Abell that just wasn't worth bothering about. He was more interested in who I was. Had he ever heard of me'? Had we met at conferences?

    I mentioned a few papers l'd published in top journals. In addition I pointed out a couple of errors in his upcoming paper (such as the gravitational effect of Mars previously referred to) and I urged that these be corrected before the issue went to

[p.71]

press. He said they didn't matter; he'd rather leave them as they were.

    Since Abell and Kurtz wanted to check Gauquelin's calculations, I offered to help since I had recently prepared an efficient computer program that would calculate all planets' positions to one arcminute accuracy, a program that could be adapted to the Gauquelin project. Abell said fine, just send it along. He spoke as if he were doing me a favor.

    Declining his generosity, l repeated my offer to do the work if it would help. He replied that it probably would be "easy" to compile such a program; after all, the astrological outfits now had computer horoscopes. So I suggested he try those routes. In case he wished to construct his own program, l imparted a few elegant mathematical shortcuts to assist him. l mention this because anyone who understood the necessary science would have quickly realized that I was an experienced specialist in this area.

    Nonetheless Abell subsequently told Kurtz and other CSICOPs that I was an "amateur" and he continued to say so until October 1978. This was a major factor in CSICOP's decision to ignore me, the only planetary-motion specialist ever involved in the Gauquelin project (which was, of course, a planetary-motion problem). At this point of no return, Kurtz depended upon Abell's astronomical advice in his decisions on the Gauquelin investigation. It was to take them two years (and help) to perform the calculations Abell had called "easy."

*  *  *

    I continued to examine the details of Gauquelin's claims and on January 23,1976, completed a mathematical analysis showing clearly that the "natural" Mars/dawn factor (a) couldn't come anywhere near explaining the Mars Effect and (b) had been already included by Gauquelin in his reports' expected-frequency values. Although Gauquelin's method was different from mine, our results were so similar that it was clear he had done this part of his experiments correctly.

    The Mars/dawn factor was the only possible "natural" influence (although Zelen and Abell didn't seem to realize it) that could have lifted the nonchampions' hit-rate from 17 to 22 percent.

I communicated this to Kurtz immediately and forcefully. Getting no response, I phoned Zelen on March 8 and made an utterly fruitless appeal. By this time the Challenge had been published. And more support for it was in press, to appear (over my strenuous objections) in March-April 1976 Humanist (page 53).

    The forces of antioccultism met in Buffalo, N.Y., on April 30 and May 1, 1976, to found CSICOP. I gave one of the Founders' Day speeches. It contained enough good press copy and one-liners to get me selected for the nine-man ruling Council of CSICOP.

    Founders' Day was above all a media event. Reporters were wooed and catered to. I certainly had no objection to that, having had largely pleasant encounters with the media. But I was naive about the one overriding reality: a Committee that lives by the media will inevitably be ruled by its publicists, not by its scholars.

    Once CSICOP was under way, I found myself not only on the ruling Council but also on the editorial

[p.72]

board. Although most of the Fellows sought, like me, to battle pseudoscientific bunk, they disagreed about the means. Except for the agreement to start a magazine (Zetetic, later Skeptical Inquirer) there was little cohesion on public policy, a vacuum that was filled (if not in fact caused) by tacit cohesion on Private Priority Number One for active CSICOP Fellows: maximum personal press coverage. [2] 

    Neither I nor most other Councilors were to be reinvolved in the Gauquelin affair for some time, since Kurtz was handling it in The Humanist, which he still edited.

    I referred to Gauquelin's results in a paper for Humanist publication sent to Kurtz on June 5, 1976, a paper soon thereafter sent to Marcello Truzzi and eventually published in Skeptical Inquirer (Fall-Winter 1977). It attacked Gauquelin's Mars Effect on various grounds, pointedly excluding the Mars/ dawn factor on which Kurtz, Zelen and Abell (hereafter to be called KZA) were gambling CSICOP's reputation.

    The September-October 1976 issue of Humanist published a paper by Abell and son, with commentary (formally coauthorship) by the Gauquelins. I did not see it until much later. Kurtz was no longer sending galleys or confiding to me the details of his increasing obsession with his neoastrological sTARBABY.

    The paper had a number of important features. For one thing, Abell affirmed Zelen's "unambiguous corroboration or disconfirmation" statement. As Abell put it, it "appears to be a definitive test." He went on, "The [control] test will be refereed by a disinterested and competent committee of scientists, and we hope that the results will be available in about six months." In fact, the test was never neutrally refereed -- and the time estimate was equally ironic.

    Reading Abell's article, I was struck, first, with the realization that every calculation was simple arithmetic. His computer analysis relied on an almanac provided by the U.S. Naval Observatory which listed Mars' celestial longitudes at a fixed interval. Instead of using spherical trigonometry to convert Mars' positions to equatorial coordinates (as the Gauquelin experiment required), Abell stuck with the ecliptical coordinates of the USNO program.

Investigators who live by the media are ruled by publicists, not by scholars.

    Since Abell had indicated in December 1975 that he intended to verify computationally Gauquelin's original calculations, I was amazed to read now, nearly a year later, that "we have not duplicated or checked the Gauquelins' original calculations" (my emphasis). How the devil could this be, when Abell had in hand (and was using in his simple-arithmetic analysis) a Mars almanac and all the birth data for the 2000-plus sports champions of Gauquelin's famous original Mars Effect study?

    Incredibly, it appeared that over all the intervening months, Abell, the CSICOP Gauquelin-test subcommittee's

[p.73]

sole astronomer, had not performed the elementary calculations of the astrologer he was taking on! Abell drove Kurtz crazy with stalls, mostly variations on not "having time" to do the work. Yet he found time to do all 2000-plus calculations -- the wrong way -- for the paper we've just been analyzing!

*  *  *

    When 1977 opened, it had been v s the better part of a year since I had had any contact with the Gauquelin matter. But Skeptical Inquirer (then Zetetic) editor Truzzi asked me to referee an antiastrology paper. l found to my astonishment that the paper was promoting The Humanist and Comite Para theory (which heretofore had not disgraced Skeptical Inquirer and CSICOP directly) that Gauquelin's results could be explained away by the Mars/dawn demographical influences.

    Incredulous that my 1975-76 warnings were still being ignored, l sent out on March 29, 1977, a full mathematical explanation of the Mars/ dawn problem -- to no avail. The unkillable Mars/dawn misconception appeared intact on page 50 of Spring-Summer 1977 Skeptical Inquirer.

    But Truzzi did not ignore the memo's implications. He phoned to ask if I would object to his sending the memo to Gauquelin to show him that not everyone on CSICOP disagreed with him. l told Truzzi to go ahead.

    That summer Kurtz phone me in an agitated state. Gauquelin had shown him the memo (apparently in early July). Then in August Gauquelin attempted to quote the memo in an upcoming Humanist paper. Feeling that this would be mistaken as support from me for Gauquelin, l wrote Kurtz to ask that he publish a very short paper (dated September 17, 1977), pointing out that (a) the Mars/dawn effect ( KZA's only "out," their sole semiplausible hope of justifying the Control Test) could not explain away Gauquelin's results; (b) there was in fact no "natural" explanation of the Mars Effect; (c) I believed that the sampling of sports champions was amiss; and (d) I didn't believe Gauquelin's claims merited serious investigation yet.

    Angry that I had let the Mars/dawn memo get into Gauquelin's hands in the first place, Kurtz urged that I ask Gauquelin not to make public use of it. He then used the memo's privacy (pretending this was my idea!) as a basis for deleting Gauquelin's comments on the memo -- and scratching my proposed September 17 paper altogether! [3] 

    I did not yet understand Kurtz's anxiety over heading off my public dissent. He neglected to inform me that in press at this very time was the upcoming KZA report on the Control Test (nonchampions) results. This report flew right in the face of the truth revealed in the very memo l'd agreed to keep private only because I believed KZA would pay attention to it.

    The KZA Control Test report appeared in November-December 1977 Humanist. It marked the beginning of the end of CSICOP's credibility

[p.74]

-- because it was at this point that the handling of the Gauquelin problem was transformed from mere bungling to deliberate cover-up.

The report marked the beginning of the end of CSICOP's crediblity.

    Before publication the KZA Control Test report was shown to the only other member of the Gauquelin subcommittee, Prof. Elizabeth Scott of the statistics department of the University of California at Berkeley, who was so upset ("I feel that the [paper's] discussion may be misleading") that she telephoned each one of the KZA trio (as I had done two years earlier). They ignored her.

    Back in December 1975 Abell had expressed an interest in checking Gauquelin's celestial-sector positions but had not done this even for his September-October 1976 Humanist article. Now the new report (November-December 1977 Humanist, page 29) stated (emphasis added): "The committee ... has not ... yet [!] checked all [any?] of the [Gauquelin's celestial] computations. Prof. Owen Gingerich (astronomer at Harvard) is in the process of reviewing the calculations concerning the position of Mars ..." In addition: "The committee has agreed to make an independent test of the alleged Mars Effect by a study of sports champions born in the United States. This test is now under way."

    As the data started to come in, KZA realized they were in deep trouble on the Control Test (based on European data entirely computed by Gauquelin) and so were forced to propose the fresh-sample American test in a July 1977 meeting with Gauquelin. By autumn the birth-record data were coming in for the American test. Now it was not a matter of just using Gauquelin's celestial calculations; CSICOP must compute positions not previously done -- and no report could be issued until this was accomplished.

    Kurtz started receiving the American birth data as early as September. Stung by his private knowledge that he'd lost the Control Test (as he confessed aloud at least once), he was frantic to get on with the diversion of retesting (using the American sample) as quickly as possible.

    By October 20 Kurtz, who was getting nothing from Abell and Gingerich, phoned and asked me, betraying not the faintest sense of irony, if I could do the work. He was so relieved at my consent that he instantly added me to the subcommittee on Gauquelin (presumably to replace Elizabeth Scott, now a nonperson). A CSICOP check for $100 accompanied the first installment of 72 athletes' birth data.

    Kurtz told me that this time he wanted an advance look at the results, to see what was going to happen. He stressed that his sneak peek was to be strictly confidential. In all innocence I probably broke security first thing by phoning Abell in Los Angeles on October 22 to ask where in San Diego I could gain access to a computer. (I'd

[p.75]

only just moved to California.)

    Abell protested that he was doing the work with Gingerich, and what the devil was Kurtz in such a rush for anyway? Although I agreed that Kurtz was pushing, I remarked he'd waited two years and one might forgive some impatience. Abell tried to talk me out of getting involved but I stressed that this was entirely Kurtz's idea, not mine. He and Gingerich were free to compute these or any other data but Kurtz was hot to get a look at the way things were going to come out.

    Abell gave me the name of John Schopp of the astronomy department of San Diego State University (SDSU) who'd helped Abell with a textbook he'd written. So on October 27, two days after the birth data arrived, I drove out to SDSU and met John and his colleague Fred Talbert. Fred got me hooked up that evening. I fed the problem into the computer, ran off the 72 positions and mailed a printout to Kurtz on the way home.

    It's revealing that a lone "amateur" could perform at one sitting a project that the combined CSICOP forces of UCLA, Harvard and SUNYAB didn't get anywhere with for years, despite their access to a highly accurate U.S. Naval Observatory planetary-position program.

    In succeeding weeks Kurtz mailed me further birth data as well as unsolicited cash. At one point (after 120 names) I told him by phone (he preferred hearing the accumulated score instantly, without waiting the few days the mail took) that the key-sector score was now at 22 percent. He groaned. l emphasized that the sample size was too small for the result to be statistically meaningful. He drew no comfort from this remark. l asked if he were sure that this was a clean sample. He was, so I assured him that the score was bound to revert to roughly 17 percent as the sample got larger -- unless astrological claims were true, which I certainly didn't believe.

    Nonetheless he continued speaking in a pained voice, as someone cursed with a demon that would not go away.

    Meanwhile KZA's November-December 1977 Humanist Control Test report appeared. No one then on CSICOP's Council (other than Kurtz) had seen it before publication. [4]  Yet it committed CSICOP to a cover-up course which ultimately sucked the whole Council into sTARBABY's goo, as one's willingness to go along with the cover-up (to protect The Cause) became a test of loyalty.

    In the report KZA tried to obscure the clear success Gauquelin had scored. The Control Test had entailed analyzing 16,756 nonchampions born near (in time and space) 303 champions (a subsample of the original 2088 champions). KZA had believed that they too would score at 22 percent in key sectors ( I and 4) thus establishing that the champions' 22 percent hitrate was "natural."

    Instead the nonchampions scored at exactly the chance -level (17 percent) that Gauquelin and I had predicted from our Mars/dawn-corrected expectation-curve analysis.

    Faced with this disaster KZA pulled a bait-and-switch. (Thus the report will be hereafter called the BS report.)

[p.76]

Suddenly converting their nonchampions test into a champions test, they attacked the subsample of 303 champions! The subsample had of course been chosen simply as a means en route to testing the point KZA had proposed the Control Test Challenge for in the first place, namely, was chance level 17 percent or 22 percent?

    Since the 303 had scored at 22 percent (like the full 2088) the only ploy left was to protest that this 22 percent (of the 303) was not strongly statistically significant (not as strong as for 2088). Now, anyone familiar with statistics knows that no sample of 303 cases can produce strongly significant results if one is trying to measure 22 percent versus 17 percent rates. But you don't have to know statistics to realize that the attack on the 303-champion subsample's nonstrength could have been done before the 16,756 nonchampions were collected and calculated -- at enormous cost in time and labor to Gauquelin (all 303 champion birth data had been calculated and published years ago).

    To sum up: the whole purpose of the Control Test -- of collecting nearly 17,000 nonchampions (the control group) -- had been to test whether Gauquelin's champions' 22-percent hitrate was just a "natural" (nonastrological) function of the time and place of birth. Had the nonchampions control group shown at the 22-percent rate also, the "natural" hypothesis would have been confirmed and Gauquelin's neoastrology would have been disconfirmed.

    However, the opposite occurred. The nonchampions' rate turned out to be 17 percent, establishing the champions' 22-percent rate as a real, highly significant above-chance result.

    I first read the Control Test report in March 1978 after seeing a letter in the March-April issue of Humanist from Lawrence Jerome who "congratulated" CSICOP for confirming his erroneous 1975 analysis!

Willingness to go along with the cover-up became a test of loyalty.

    Incredibly Jerome was claiming Confirmation by the Zelen-Abell test, ¡f his (and their) belief that astronomical/ demographical biases explained Gauquelin's 22-percent rate. "The [Control] test proved no such thing," I wrote Kurtz. "To the contrary, [Zelen and Abell] confirmed Gauquelin's expectation values ... showing that there was indeed about a 17-percent probability for being in sectors I and 4 for nonchampions.... If I believed the European sample was clean (which I don't), I would count the [Control] test as a major proof in support of Gauquelin."

    Years later I learned that Abell (as well as Kurtz) had known the awful truth all along. In 1980 1 obtained a copy of the smokiest Smoking Gun in this case, a letter written by Abell to Kurtz on April 29, 1977, privately telling him what l've explained here in preceding paragraphs -- the same thing l'd often explained to KZA.

    The Smoking Letter answers the same key question that hung over the Watergate conspirators: When did

[p.77]

they know? The answer is astonishing: over half a year before the cover-up Control Test report was published.

    The letter admits that "in a sense" Gauquelin's calculation of a 17-percent chance-level had been "vindicated." Abell says the very test CSICOP had urged Gauquelin to carry out had shown his findings to be "significant." He also says that the 22 percent applied to both the 303 subsample champions and the full 2088.

    The Smoking Letter to Kurtz reveals that KZA knew they were in trouble. But as Abell learned pronto, Kurtz wasn't about to publish any letter that admitted Gauquelin had won the Control Test. He was going to pretend that nothing had gone wrong.

    Abell cosigned the BS report. Despite later claims that he didn't know what he was signing, Abell has never broken publicly with this report's united front.

    Early in April I wrote KZA again, exhibiting in tabular form further difficulties with their report. KZA had suggested that the subsample of 303 champions showed geographical variations. This move had broken the subsample into subsubsamples! (The smaller a group, the weaker its ability to prove anything statistically.)

    My April 6 letter's tables simply showed that none of the deviations (of, say, Paris' hit-rate vs. Belgium's) were statistically significant. [5] 

    Again, Br'er Kurtz, he lay low: still no written reply.

    In mid-April Kurtz visited California and we saw quite a bit of each other. He couldn't stop talking about the Gauquelin business. In the middle of conversations on other matters he would grow silent and go back to discussing some possible "out."

    During this visit and subsequent phone conversations Kurtz tried out various schemes for getting off the hook. My favorite was the notion that Gauquelin fudged the nonchampions to force the score down to 17 percent. [6] 

    Hilarious. First, if fraud or bias was involved, it would be lots easier to work it on the smaller original champions sample. Second, it was ridiculous to suspect fraud simply because the nonchampions came out at the very level chance would predict!

    This is "scientific investigation" which CSICOP claims as its middle name?

*  *  *

    Incredibly, despite all, I remained largely unsuspicious -- indeed I was downright enthusiastic -- about CSICOP as a whole.

    Late that spring of 1978 I was back East visiting my family. Simultaneously Kurtz was in a tizzy because the last American data in the Gauquelin test had come in and he was as frantically impatient as ever to get them computed -- even waking my family one night and then, after finding I wasn't in, hanging up so abruptly that I found a note by the telephone the next morning asking me who this "Curts" was.

    Since I was about to fly to Europe (and my files were back in San Diego)

[p.78]

I suggested Kurtz get Abell, Gingerich or Jerome to try to do the work. But Kurtz kept pleading.

    So I postponed my European trip.

    I bothered the Loyola College computer people for a computer number and time. Next I hired trusted friend Mary Kidd to determine time zones (for the whole American test to date). Since she was sympathetic to astrology (and was not told that Gauquelin was involved), this would eliminate possible bias on my part. Needless to say, this is the sort of precaution that should have been applied (much more rigorously) at the sampling stage.

    Mary interrupted her affairs to rush the zone-determinations work and get it back to me. I went right to the computer and stayed up all night typing in the program and the data. The next morning, June 8, all 325 athletes' sector-positions were computed, tabulated and dropped in the mail to Kurtz.

    No sooner was this task finished and the American test supposedly completed than Kurtz phoned me up and said oops, we accidentally missed a lot of names -- they'll be sent right away to the states' birth-record offices and we'll get the birth data back late this summer .

    So the whole push-and-shove aggravation of all those helpful people had been as needless as the original Control Test Challenge.

    I returned to San Diego some weeks later. The last 82 names came in at summer's end.

    I ran off the final data at SDSU. The cumulative score was not 22 percent or 17 percent but only 13'/2 percent -- strongly anti-Gauquelin. On September 18 I sent Kurtz a table of the totals for all 407 American athletes along with a brief report on the results which included gentle corrections of the various past errors published by CSICOP Fellows throughout this affair.

    Since I had performed all the science of the American experiment that had reversed the earlier (Control Test) Gauquelin victory over CSICOP (lifting a three-year curse from Kurtz's shoulders), I innocently thought that Kurtz could hardly refuse again to publish my dissent. In a covering note I made it clear that this time I would insist. The moment Kurtz read this, l was a dead CSICOP in his royal eyes.

Br'er Kurtz, he lay law. Still no written reply.

    When the report arrived on September 20, Kurtz phoned to gush about how much he liked it, adding, however, that Zelen and Abell might not agree. Then he casually asked if I could send along the readout of individual positions too. He spoke of the upcoming Council meeting and press conference (to be held in Washington, D.C., on December 6, 1978) and assured me my travel fare would be paid.

    The very next day, without even waiting for the data to arrive, Kurtz wrote Abell to suggest that KZA confer and prepare the test report for publication (excluding me). He did this, l remind the reader, less than 24 hours after assuring me he was eager to publish my September 18 report.

    Kurtz's letter also called on Zelen and Abell -- the very men whose long

[p.79]

immobility on the Gauquelin project had led to my being asked to do the computation -- to verify the work! Kurtz enclosed for Abell the readouts of the first 325 celestial-sector positions without saying anything to me about it, since I had emphasized that providing answers is the worst way to get independent checks of them.

    It is obvious from his September 21 letter that Kurtz's promise, made the day before, to publish my report was being rethought.

    Sure enough, once the calculations for the last 82 athletes had reached him, Kurtz phoned me and made two things clear:

    (1) He wasn't so sure that The Humanist was the right place after all for my report. He mentioned Skeptical Inquirer. (Later he welched even there.)

    (2) He didn't think he could pay my way to the meeting in Washington.

    With Kurtz's letter Abell received my answers for 325 of the American athletes. Ten days later Abell still had not reproduced them. With Kurtz frantically pushing for verification Abell was feeling the pressure. On October 5 he called to rage at me for over an hour. I call it the Jaws phone call.

    Abell started it by complaining that KZA hadn't-had-the-time to compute the 407 data, adding that I had. He asked me to describe my method to him allegedly because he was supposed to check my work. Since he now had all the answers from Kurtz, there was no longer any good scientific reason not to. So I did -- especially after finding that Abell still had a misconceived idea of how to perform the sector calculations.

    Abell asked me to send a copy of my computer-program so that he could verify it. l responded that obviously it would be simpler just to check a few of the answers he now possessed via hand-calculation out of the American Ephemeris & Nautical Almanac.

    Nevertheless Abell persisted, eventually justifying himself by saying he wanted to check out all the ordmag 1000 lines of the program to insure its accuracy! At any rate, l refused to give the program to anyone talking such transparent nonsense.

    Abell couldn't believe that my calculations were correct because the score had come out at 13 1/2 percent instead of 22 percent. He wondered if I had tampered with the sample. I replied the sample came from Kurtz.

    By choice I had had nothing to do with gathering the sample. Obviously neither had Abell. Nonetheless Kurtz insisted that Abell coauthor the lengthy published Skeptical Inquirer report. Unfortunately "coauthorship" in a Kurtz publication need not require that you cowrite "your" paper -- or even read it before publication. Your name gets tacked on to add prestige -- and you get to read all about it when it's published!

    Abell asked countless questions about my academic training. Obviously unaware that my papers on planetary motion had been published in eminent astronomical journals here and abroad, he demanded, "How do I know you're not just a bullshitter?"

    On October 6, the day after the Jaws call, Abell phoned San Diego State University to verify his suspicion that someone besides the "amateur" had actually done the Gauquelin experiment computations. He visited SDSU

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on the 11th, questioning at least two more scholars, who told him I had seemed quite competent when I delivered a recent lecture to an astronomy department symposium.

    Between September 20 and late October I spoke fairly regularly with Kurtz regarding the Gauquelin problem and the upcoming December 6 Washington press conference. His private intentions surfaced as soon as his use for my work was finished.

Kurtz private intentions surfaced as soon as his use for my work was finished.

    Soon enough it became apparent that not only was Abell being invited to the press conference, he was to be the CSICOP spokesman on astrology in Washington -- this despite Kurtz's open admission in our conversations over the previous months that there had been a screw-up in the UCLA and Harvard experts' calculations. But now suddenly he began disremembering he'd ever said that!

    I had now to face the fact that Kurtz was trying to suppress my dissenting report and (by not paying my travel fare) keep me from the December Council meeting, while inviting to Washington as a prominent CSICOP authority the very person whose appointed task I had myself performed.

    I phoned Kurtz on October 23 in one final attempt to impress upon him the fact that he was locking CSICOP into an investigation that would curse the Committee to its dying day. It was the only time I ever raised my voice in any CSICOP dealings.

    I hammered at Kurtz that the Control Test project he had led us into had been irretrievably lost and it was discreditable to pretend otherwise. Even if Gauquelin had faked the control (nonchampions) sample (which I don't believe for a moment he did), such a point cannot be raised post hoc -- because CSICOP should have had the foresight to keep the sample-taking from getting into Gauquelin's interested hands in the first place, especially since prior to the challenge I had warned KZA not to trust Gauquelin's sampling. What use is it to run tests if the side whose hypothesis loses can just scream "fake" as it pleases?

    Kurtz seemed uncharacteristically subdued. Finally, when I pointed out that he was backing down on his promise to publish my report in The Humanist, he said he couldn't publish it there now for the simple reason that a day or so earlier he'd been fired as Humanist editor after 11 years at the post.

    Concurrently a subplot was developing. On October 15 Councilor James Randi phoned and I mentioned some of my problems with KZA. On the 18th, when Randi phoned again, l remarked how odd it was that I had no written record (despite requests for such made over many months). Would Randi speak with Kurtz and get some firm answers? The next day Randi wrote a trial letter to Kurtz and sent me a checking copy before mailing it.

    In the letter Randi agreed I was right in arguing that the Gauquelin test had been ill-designed and should not have been done. Now that the whole thing had backfired, Kurtz --

[p.81]

out of his depth when he attempted a scientific experiment -- was clearly responsible. Randi also criticized Abell for snooping into my background. If this was the way CSICOP business was going to be conducted, then CSICOPs were no better than the parapsychologists who covered up their mistakes. Randi asked why my expenses to the Washington meeting were not being paid [7]  and concluded by admitting that he was "mad," saying he seldom wrote such a letter except to parapsychologists. He assured Kurtz that no one besides him, Martin Gardner and me would see it.

    I called Randi on the 21st and urged him to phone Kurtz to get his immediate reaction to the letter. For obvious reasons I didn't want to give Kurtz a lot of time to concoct fresh excuses.

    After he had talked with Kurtz Randi called me back on the 23rd saying only that KZA had still not confirmed my calculations. Randi's call, which indicated trouble was brewing, seems to have inspired Abell. Two days later, using the method explained to him on October 5, he got the same answers as I had. He phoned me the news that evening (October 25) and urged that I do an expectation-curve for the American sample. I suggested he do the math. As a matter of fact l'd already done it myself and had mailed copies of the results to Gardner and Randi two days earlier.

    On October 23 I had sent some background documents concerning sTARBABY to Randi and Gardner. Gardner wrote back six days later, chuckling about what an incredibly hilarious foul-up the whole thing had turned out to be. To a further packet of documents he repeated his feeling of deep amusement but he wasn't interested in doing anything about it.

    When Kurtz phoned me on October 31, 1 (as a member of the CSICOP subcommittee on Gauquelin) asked for copies of Committee records and his correspondence with the various appropriate parties on the Gauquelin experimentation, thus putting to the test my hypothesis that he was deliberately avoiding the written word. Kurtz refused to send anything and said the dealings had been almost entirely by phone. (Later I saw copies of important correspondence and learned this was not true.)

    On November 2 I wrote KZA asking:

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    (1) What was being looked for in the Control Test?

    (2) Did KZA and Humanist readers know this from the start?

    (3) Wasn't the test designed to show that the control group (nonchampions) would or wouldn't score at 22 percent like the champions? And if the control group had scored at 22 percent, wouldn't you have publicly concluded that Gauquelin lost the challenge?

    (4) If you carry through your current plan to declare the Control Test "invalid," what if Gauquelin then challenges you to repeat it yourself? (Gauquelin would have won regardless; Abell later figured this out . )

    (5) If a "valid" repetition isn't possible, are we not back at square one, where we were at the time of warnings not to get into this mire?

    (6) If the Control Test is repeated, what do we look for?

    (7) What will be your and CSICOP's position if the test again comes out in Gauquelin's favor (as I know it will)?

    (8) Did you (or colleague) make any pretest estimates of approximate magnitude of astronomical/demographic [Mars/dawn] effects -- before issuing a challenge, the outcome of which depended entirely upon this question? Were you acquainted with any of Gauquelin's detailed quantitative discussions of these matters?

    (9) The Bait-and-Switch (BS): "Why collect 16,756 new nonchampions -- and then attack [in the BS report] a [sub]sample of 303 old champion data because it is too small when it is in fact typical of the whole (22 percent success, just like the full sample of 2088, which is certainly not too small) and is about twice as large as you requested in your original challenge (Humanist, January-February 1976, page 33)? ... I have no written reply ... to this or any other point raised since the beginning of our involvement with the Gauquelin question ... I will ask the CSICOP editorial board to have the nonchampions [Control] test refereed by neutral judges before the Committee becomes any further entangled in this endless thicket, via publication in the hitherto-spared Skeptical Inquirer."

    I had strongly protested the high-handedness of the choice of Abell as speaker at the annual meeting because of his involvement with sTARBABY. I emphasized that CSICOP had plenty of astronomers associated with it (Carl Sagan, Bart Bok, Edwin Krupp and others), all of them nearer Washington than Abell who lived all the way across the country, in the Los Angeles area.

    Frustrated at being presented with a fait accompli regarding the permanent attachment of the sTARBABY albatross to CSICOP, I indicated that, since this had been done without consultation with me-(the sole astronomer on the Council), I was being forced to register a dissent (which had repeatedly been denied me in the pages of Kurtz's magazine) perhaps at the same press conference at which the damage to CSICOP was to occur, in order to ameliorate that damage. Such a prospect chilled the Council.

    Kurtz's initial move was a threat that Zelen and Abell would be on hand personally to settle my hash at the private December 5 Council meeting. I asked if that were a promise.

Martin Gardner chuckled over the incredibly hilarious foul-up.

    On November 19 Kurtz called in the worst shape l'd ever found him. The prospect of a discordant CSICOP voice's being heard at his orchestrated press conference had badly frazzled his nerves. During the conversation he invoked, rather emotionally, our past mutual efforts -- for example in removing editor Truzzi.

    I believe he felt genuinely bewildered and betrayed. To him reportage of contrary results was basically a political, not a scientific, matter. There was no chance of communicating on this. To me Kurtz was a censor. To him I was a traitor. Both of us felt a lack of gratitude.

    He got to the point: he didn't want any trouble in Washington. In a strong, emotion-strained whisper he virtually hissed, "I'll do anything to avoid trouble."

    I said fine, just get me some written answers to my questions on the Control Test and don't invite Abell to speak at the meeting. Kurtz said he had "no time" (sound familiar?) for written replies; then, contradicting his own account of October (when he'd

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said to me, hey, let's invite George), he added that Abell had been invited way back in August.

    Kurtz had earlier maintained his long secrecy about Abell's speech invitation because he thought I would want to speak instead (and would otherwise be so miffed I mightn't finish the U S data if I learned of Kurtz's intentions) So now he offered to let me speak too I told him that he obviously didn't understand the problem

    Yet one must realize that in his own mind Kurtz had every reason to believe he'd found his solution Another chapter in our ongoing anthropology lesson: the clash of two alien cultures, public relations vs. scholarship

    Kurtz tried another let's-make-a-deal ploy, bursting out. "But I agree with you" He went on to blame the whole sTARBABY mess on Zelen and Abell! They had led him into the pit! But he would do nothing beyond private assent

    After we had finished! I phoned Randi to report Kurtz was trying to buy silence on the Gauquelin mess. By the next day (November 20) a Council deal had been concocted (and offered) that would have me chair the astrology section of the press conference. Of course this would entail my introducing Abell. My reply was the old adage that a man who can't be bribed can't be trusted

    At this Kurtz exploded in raging fear that his holy press conference would be ruined. He immediately phoned the Councilors and expressed concern that I might attack the Gauquelin project from the floor during the conference; some way had to be found to get me kicked off the Council. (This sudden search for a pretext to eject me -- the first suggestion of the need for my demise -- should be kept in mind because Council is now at great pains to dredge up any other sort of "offense" on my part as the good reason for booting me To borrow from the business world, let us recall the immortal words of J. P. Morgan: "For every action there are two reasons: a good reason and the real reason.")

*  *  *

    Randi and I drove to Washington together on December 4. Late that afternoon while Michael Hutchinson and I were in Randi's suite, Kurtz called to speak with me.

    He immediately accused me of lying and conspiring against him (this only a few days after trying to organize a secret movement to have me thrown off the Council for the crime of dissent). [8]  I asked him to cite a single falsehood l'd ever told him. Unable to name one, he asked me to say what I thought his deceits were. I offered to provide a partial catalog if he were really interested -- but would do it at the Council meeting the next day.

    Kurtz wanted to know if I intended to attack sTARBABY at the press conference. When I refused to make any promises, Kurtz grew more furious. We couldn't have a "schism," he said.

    Council met the next day at Councilor Phil Klass' apartment. I noticed that Randi was his usual friendly self when Kurtz wasn't around but when he was within earshot Randi

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made different noises. He repeatedly cracked loudly, "Drink the Kool-Aid, Dennis." (This was shortly after the Jonestown Kool-Aid mass suicide.) During the afternoon meeting, when we established a rule for expelling Councilors, Randi bellowed that it is called the "Rawlins rule."

    Randi meant, of course, that expulsion could come for public dissent. No other Councilor present (Gardner was not) said a word to suggest any other inference. I might add that two months later Randi foolishly boasted about how he "had to work to keep Dennis in line" in Washington, having convinced himself, apparently, that his threats had kept me quiet.

    How these things grow! In 1975 and 1976 it was just a dumb, arrogant mistake by only three CSICOP Fellows. In 1977 it was their BS report, deliberate deception-cover-up. The next year, 1978, brought Kurtz's attempts first to bribe me and then (secretly) to eject me. Now there were Randi's threats.

    As we were milling around, one Councilor asked where Abell was. Indeed, where was Abell? This, after all, was the awaited moment of the showdown Kurtz had threatened -- to blow away the amateur (Zelen also didn't show.) CSICOP's leader announced that Abell had a cold and was confined to his room. I wondered if it was a paranormal flu bug that might wane just in time to permit Abell to give his press-conference speech next day. (It did.)

    The evening session studiously avoided the prescheduled Gauquelin discussion. Finally I raised the issue. Klass helpfully jumped in to say that it was too late in the evening. Kurtz perversely objected that Abell and Zelen weren't there Randi said not a word -- but Skeptical Inquirer editor Ken Frazier said l'd waited patiently and Ray Hyman suggested we discuss the matter.

    I started right out by saying that this was an issue that would determine whether the Committee was worthy of existence. The provisional hope to jettison sTARBABY was now impossible. The language of the original Control Test Challenge and subsequent testaments to its "definitive" nature had left no way around the fact that we had lost and Gauquelin had won.

Randi repeatedly cracked, "Drink the Kook-Aid, Dennis"

    Klass, ever ready with useful remarks, interrupted to say that all this sounded like "just a lot of griping."

    Randi continued to say nothing except at one point he suggested that I not answer even the direct questions of a reporter at the upcoming press conference.

    Kurtz wouldn't admit that sTARBABY was a loss. He fell back on the alleged support of the absent Abell and Zelen. so I reminded him of our November 19 phone conversation in which he had tried privately to blame the whole mess on them I then produced and read Councilor Gardner's letter calling the Control Test a hilarious mess At this point Kurtz sprang from his seat and roared, "Well, you're wrong!" He grabbed the

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letter, glanced at it in disbelief and announced that Gardner didn't know what he was talking about.

    Continuing with his helpful suggestions, Klass urged that I state the problem in writing! (I was the only party who had )

    During all this Kurtz never took into account the depth of my reluctance to harm CSICOP, a movement I had cofounded with him So to Kurtz's surprise and temporary relief I said nothing at the press conference and did not even raise my hand to ask a question Naively, I still had hopes for CSICOP -- shortly to be dashed forever

    From the press conference we went to lunch I was asked to sit with Abell and Kurtz Disturbed that I was yet again getting into a nonwritten exchange, I quickly went over to Ken Frazier and Bob Sheaffer and told them that things were probably going to be said to which there ought to be an outside witness Would either come and sit in on it? Not a chance -- both flatly refused It was then I knew CSICOP would probably never get well

    Abell and I were introduced. He remembered to mention his cold and at first sniffed convincingly (especially for someone with no red around his nose) but neglected to do so later. [9] 

    Now, 10 minutes after the completion of his press conference with no embarrassment, Kurtz's plan to suppress my dissenting September 18 report came out of the closet As the three of us sat down to lunch, Kurtz and Abell said they and Zelen would write the published report and in it thank me for doing the calculations. Whereas earlier Kurtz had tried to disavow blame for sTARBABY, this time it was Abell who was unloading responsibility for it When I expressed abhorrence of the BS report, Abell replied that he was in Europe and didn't read it before cosigning it Kurtz shot back, "Oh, yes, you did!" [10] 

    A few minutes later Christopher Evans (since deceased) came by and took the empty fourth chair at our table Within seconds of his joining us Abell had told him of his BBC television series and all three were talking of such matters. Right then it dawned on me I had come to promote open-ended scientific research -- but the real purpose here was media wheeling and dealing And that is why we were meeting at the temple of CSICOP's faith, the National Press Club

    The subsequent afternoon proceedings dealt primarily with international organizing and publicity schemes But no one seemed interested in defining what all the hoopla was for. Which was reasonable enough -- because that was what it was for.

*  *  *

    On January 17, 1979, I wrote a memorandum on the dirty dealing I'd witnessed. I sent it and another memo ("On Fighting Pseudoscience with Pseudoscience") to most of CSICOP's Fellows. I inquired of Bart Bok if he could find a competent astronomer to take over my duties.

    The first Fellow to phone Randi

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about the memoranda asked him about various charges they contained Randi admitted uncomfortably that they were true as far as he knew -- but then he quickly changed the subject

    More often, however, the Councilors -- the same ones who had chided me for ad hominems -- declared, "Dennis is just a wild man " Someone who acts on principle probably does appear to CSICOPs to be a creature from the antipodes.

    Since we're speaking of "wild": Klass and Randi reacted to my January memos by claiming they couldn't understand the indictment!

    Klass added another fantastic touch to Council's reaction, contending that it was fruitless to try to "turn back the clock like Uri Geller." Funny, I used to know a Phil Klass who circulated long lists of conflicting statements made by Allen Hynek, going back many years, asking if these are the same Allen Hyneks. And this was the same Phil Klass who now wasn't interested in the past?

    Many of CSICOP's Fellows fell for the unity pitch or copped a none-of-my-business plea A letter from one Fellow amused me in light of Council pretenses that it didn't understand the charges His letter, dated January 26 1979, makes plain how clear my January memos were The writer understood that the experimental results supported Gauquelin, that Kurtz, Abell and Zelen had screwed up the test and that CSICOP's leaders, primarily Kurtz, had tried to cover up the mess, thereby creating a "Buffalogate." This writer said he had long harbored doubts about the way CSICOP was being run.

    A later letter written by the same Fellow contains a prescient sentence: "I regard your charges as very serious. ... Something must be done before we read about all of this in FATE "

    I received a long letter from J. Derral Mulholland, one of the world's leading celestial mechanics experts He permitted me to distribute the letter to CSICOP's Fellows

    The letter said Mulholland had been unaware that CSICOP had an elite Council that apparently was answerable to nobody Council members evidently were using CSICOP's name to advance their personal ends. Some persons associated with the organization were making pronouncements on subjects outside their area of competence. If CSICOP were to remain scientifically credible, it had better use scientific methods such as controlled tests with predefined criteria for success and failure, and nonprotaganists should judge the results. Alibis, image problems and economic concerns were irrelevant to the real issues.

"Something must be done before we read about this in FATE."

    I proposed Mulholland as a Fellow, someone who might replace my astronomical input. This proposal was never even acknowledged.

*  *  *

    By April 1979 Council, which had held its breath for months breathed again, this time a deep sigh of relief: no resignations and no news stories. Kurtz phoned on April 9, hoping to placate me. I said to put the

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answers to my questions on sTARBABY in writing. That was that.

    The next day Frazier offered this alibi for nonpublication of my September 18 report: he wished someone would write an article that straightened out the "mess" once and for all, but there seemed no way to resolve the matter, even though Frazier confessed to a "gut feeling" that I might be right in some of my criticisms .

    He claimed that my writings on the controversy were unclear and overheated. But in fact CSICOP's own eventual referee reports found my September 18 report (which for now Frazier refused for lack of clarity) to be clearer than KZA's report on the same material Also my original unanswered questions to KZA were all exceedingly polite -- before the censorial outrages starting in autumn 1978.

    I replied on April 19:

    ... incredible -- even aside from the various matters you (along with the rest of the Council) continue to shut your eyes to. In particular, you [all] still attempt to pretend that you don't understand the [sTARBABY] problem and don't know how to go about doing so. This is a ploy fully worthy of the kooks. As you well know, I have urged the refereeing of the matter for months. The only reply has been: silence.

    What sort of Committee claims (in its very title) to be in the business of testing occult claims, yet can't even find a way to evaluate its own first and biggest test? What use is its testing, if the Committee cannot be counted upon to report the results honestly?

    As for the no-compromise pose:

    (l) Most of the Councilors (including Kurtz and Abell) either know or strongly suspect the truth. The problem isn't what's the truth but how to deal with it, p.r.-wise.

    (2) Even without any scientific background one can just observe:

    (a) Which side has made a complete. Open. written record -- vs. a year of refusal to commit answers in writing, while frantically juggling stories privately?

    (b) Which has tried to silence the other by expulsion?

    (c) Which has called for refereeing-arbitration? Which has steadfastly ignored the suggestion?

    In any controversy within the Committee, it is always possible that the mistaken party will (instead of owning up) put up a smokescreen of alibis and pseudocomplexities (just like the occultists do, every time they lose). In that case is the attitude of the Council to be that, well, the whole matter is too complicated to adjudicate?!

    At this time Kurtz attempted to persuade Gauquelin to agree to the suppression of even my mild September 18 report. He also tried to dissuade Gauquelin from visiting me during the latter's April trip to San Diego.

    He never told me any of this. Instead he pretended (as he had the previous year) that he might be willing to publish my report if KZA got to sum it all up afterward. And this is roughly how it was done eventually.

    However, my challenge to call in outside refereeing (as Abell had promised in September-October 1976 Humanist) to determine the truth did not tempt the Committee.

    During this period Randi would occasionally phone up for a friendly "just-happened-to-be-thinking-of-you" chat. l suspected he was trying to draw out of me statements of anger or of dissatisfaction. Despite his private rages Randi wished to make no public waves. When I asked him why, he repeated the tired old alibi that the occultist kooks would whoop it up if Kurtz fell. But he claimed that he had dressed down Kurtz (privately) in Washington in December. He stated

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without qualification that Gardner Hyman and he all supported my scientific position on the sTARBABY mess. (I knew, however, that he was telling all inquiring Fellows that a little old nonstatistician like himself just couldn't understand the problem.)

Skeptical Inquirer editor Kendrick Frazier confessed to a "gut feeling" that I might be right in some of my criticisms.

    Next Randi (and soon afterwards Bob Sheaffer) tried to get me involved in new projects, i.e., diversions. As part of this effort Randi asked my advice on the Helmut Schmidt parapsychology experiment which some CSICOPs had been investigating. I simply urged that it be approached with all the caution KZA had thrown to the winds in 1975 and 1976. He assured me how cautious he was in the testing for his well-publicized $ 10,000 prize for proof of psychic abilities (for which he acts as policeman, judge and jury -- and thus never has supported my idea of neutral judgment of CSICOP tests. "I always have an out," he said.

*  *  *

    Things had quieted down by late spring 1979. All the while I was mercifully occupied at sane, non-CSICOP projects.

    Then on June 24 Randi phoned mentioning he'd just talked with Truzzi. Randi seemed suddenly anxious to settle the sTARBABY problem. Two days later he wrote a letter to the Council stamped CONFIDENTIAL on both pages. It said he hoped he and the other Councilors could find a way out of a long-standing problem. Randi observed that CSICOP was always under the watchful eye of irrationalists who chortled at every apparent failing, as witness the response to Truzzi's resignation. [11]  At the Washington meeting he had feared the Gauquelin affair would be brought up in front of reporters. That would have been unfortunate because CSICOP cannot afford to wash its dirty linen in public.

    But then Randi hit upon a solution. Why should CSICOP worry about the Gauquelin matter? If (Randi's emphasis) the thing was a mistake, Councilors should decide once and for all that it was never a CSICOP project and be done with it.

    Randi's letter touched on another subject of interest to both sides of the paranormal controversy, relative to my proposal (in an early issue of Skeptical Inquirer) that the American Association for the Advancement of Science reevaluate its decision to let the Parapsychological Association be affiliated with it if the PA could not produce a repeatable experiment. A petition I had circulated among the Fellows had drawn support from some of CSICOP's leading lights.

    His letter said that when physicist

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John Archibald Wheeler denounced the parapsychologists (as he had done the previous January) and urged that they be kicked out of the AAAS, Councilors "cheered." But they "forgot" [12]  that I had suggested the same thing and been rebuffed. [13] 

    Curiously, the following November Randi cosigned a letter to the PA stating, "We have no intention of requesting the 'expulsion' of the Parapsychological Association from the AAAS and would be opposed to such a move" (Spring 1980 Skeptical Inquirer). I will leave it to the higher theologians on the Council to reconcile this statement with the foregoing CONFIDENTIAL document's statement, "We cheered."

    I might have been more impressed with the CONFIDENTIAL letter had it not been for another piece of mail that arrived the same day. It was a letter from Jerome Clark of FATE asking me to relate the sTARBABY episode for publication.

    The mystery of Randi's strangely sudden desire to open up sTARBABY evaporated. Before answering FATE I called Randi (on July 6) and asked whether perchance Truzzi had mentioned FATE during their communication just before Randi phoned me on June 24.1 got a well-we-talked-about-a-lot-of-things response and hmm-well-maybe-we-did

    I mentioned the coincidence of his let's-get-moving CONFIDENTIAL letter arriving the very day I heard from FATE after six months of CSICOP inaction. It was about a 200-to-one shot. He suggested "synchronicity." (And CSICOP is supposed to be antiparanormal.)

    Randi also admitted (having learned elsewhere that I already knew) the Kurtz-NisbetKlass-Randi plan to try to silence my dissent at the December 6 National Suppress Club meeting.

    We hung up on slightly better terms than l'd expected although I remained quite disgusted that only the threat of FATE exposure had produced even token motion toward nonsuppression.

    I had asked Randi the big question, the question all CSICOPs will be asking themselves for years to come: Why? Why get involved in a conspiracy that was as stupid as it was low? Why do something that would mark him and CSICOP for the rest of their lives? The reply was ever the same: We can't let the mystics rejoice. A lifetime price -- just to prevent a little transient cuckoo chirping.

    On August 11 Randi again wrote the Council to discuss CSICOP's response to the FATE interview with Truzzi, saying the latter had been dumped because he wanted the journal (then called The Zetetic) to be a scholarly rather than a popular publication. [14] 

    I told the Council l'd be open with FATE. Part of my reasoning was that,

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although I didn't wish to hurt rationalism, I felt that realpolitik cynics were taking advantage of that very reluctance and their increasing power was endangering rationalism's reputation. These were the wrong people to be carrying the cause's banner.

    As the FATE-story realization set in, Council reacted like the White House when it learned that John Dean had sat down with the prosecution. The awareness of how much I knew and what would happen if I told all -- this was the stuff of nightmares. Thus a new game plan was needed: Be nice to the wild man. Soothe. Flatter. Laugh at his jokes. Project as honest and self-critical an image as possible -- at least until the problem subsides again.

    By August 24 Frazier had received from Kurtz a 45-page package of four papers; the shortest of them was my original September 18 report on my Gauquelin results. Kurtz evidently hoped to bury the embarrassing parts (mild as they were) of my report in the sheer volume of print.

    Since I had repeatedly requested refereeing, the board decided it would have to go through the motions.

    Refereeing in professional journals is the backbone of the legitimate scientific community. In serious journals the process requires months of careful examination, often back-and-forth communication among author, editor and referees.

    But if this were done now, some blunt, explicit revisions l'd already promised (last April 5) might have time to find their way into my previously-gentle September 18 report. So, professing fear that Gauquelin might "skoop" (sic) CSICOP, Frazier suddenly sent the 45-page, four-paper package to various CSICOPs (not neutral referees as promised in September-October 1976 Humanist) -- with the demand that the results be back within 10 days! Maybe it was just another of our paranormal coincidences that I was away from home while this was going on.

Council reacted like the White House when it learned John Dean had sat down with the prosecution.

    All of this activity took place without my knowledge -- although I was the author of one of the papers, the calculator of the entire study, a Councilor and associate editor of the magazine. Thus two referees, as yet unaware of the problems with the Control Test (defended in KZA's paper in the Gauquelin package), were insulated from my pointing these out to them. And my own paper was being rushed into print not only without my approval of its form but in actual defiance of my written statement that I would have to revise it in the direction of bluntness.

    When I returned to San Diego late on October I, 1979, 1 learned that Frazier had left a message on September 24 saying that his deadline was October 1. Still no mention of the secret rush-refereeing, which I learned of only upon telephone questioning the next day. I asked for copies.

    When the material arrived on the sixth the consensus of CSICOP's own referees was in my favor (versus

[p.91]

Professors Kurtz, Zelen and Abell) in all major departments: (a) clarity, (b) technical competence, (c) honesty and (d) defensibility of conclusions. No scientific criticisms were leveled against my report, while the two statisticians among the referees criticized the KZA paper on various grounds.

    Only one of these two referees had been forewarned (not just by me) about the problems with the 1977 BS report, the central nonsense of which KZA were again ladling out. Appalled, he counseled neutral refereeing by appropriate experts before rushing into publication

    Here are some excerpts from the referee report (on KZA contributions to the Gauquelin package) by the sole Councilor trained in statistics:

    I would be irresponsible if I did not point out serious defects in the documents in their present form .... ambiguities should be avoided -- especially if they can be interpreted as evasions or ways to wriggle out of a prior commitment ... quibbling over whether to include [a very few] females in the sample ... looks like post hoc playing around to push the data in their [KZA's] favor. At what point did they [KZA] decide NOT to include females -- after they knew the results or before? The same can be said over the splitting of the data to try to show that the major effect is carried by the Paris [-born athletes]. Again this is post hoc. Besides the splitting of the small sample into even smaller subsamples, of course, lowers the power [of the study's significance] considerably .... What is important is that the entire sample, taken as a whole, shows the [Mars] effect .... Such post hoc rummaging [for possible hitherto-unnoted trends in the data] has to be kept in perspective. It can supply ideas and hypotheses for a new study but it has no basis for drawing conclusions [for this study].

    I suspect that as a LEGAL debate G won this first round [Control Test. Afterwards, it appears other factors] than a true Mars effect ... might account for the correlation. But, as originally stated, G has won.... I hope that they [KZA] can see that a neutral reader ... can interpret their criticisms as post hoc attempts to wriggle out of an uncomfortable situation.

*  *  *

    The first weekend after my October 2 call to Frazier, Kurtz phoned, dripping charm. I urged that if the package was to be published, the statistician-Councilor's referee report ought to be published instead of KZA's.

    I revised my September 18, 1978, report in the promised direction of bluntness and submitted it to Frazier on October 8,1979, telling him that if there were any alterations not cleared with me, l wanted a note printed with the paper stating that deletions had occurred over the author's protest and that the missing portions could be obtained directly from me.

    On the morning of October 12 Frazier was happily protecting Skeptical Inquirer's innocent readership by blue-penciling out all my report's revelations of KZA's fumbling (leaving intact, of course, all its negative scientific revelations about Gauquelin's claims, including the nonreplication [13 1/2 percent versus the 22 percent in the French data] in the American sample [15] ). Suddenly he came upon my request for a printed note regarding the existence of unauthorized deletions. He lunged for the phone and got through to me with the opening salutation, delivered in a loud growl, tense with rage, "I am pissed off at you." He

[p.92]

said my note was "blackmail."

    Frazier went on in this vein for some time before easing off to mere exasperation. I reminded him that I had said a year ago that CSICOP would publish non-neutrally-refereed BS sham over my dead body (which is just the way it happened) in a magazine of which I was a responsible associate editor. If Frazier insisted on printing -- at great length -- what five of his six associate editors privately deemed questionable science and/or intentional pretense, l would insist just as adamantly on protesting such in my brief paper. As the person who had actually performed the experiment, l felt that this was perfectly reasonable.

    Frazier, editor of a magazine born to tear down dumb beliefs, said such criticism would create dissension and "confuse" the readers. We finally left it that he would send an edited version and see if we could agree.

    Instead, as the final deadline approached, Frazier just sat on it. l finally phoned on October 20 and left a message -- no reply. I telephoned again two days later and was curtly informed that the report would be published his way or not at all. He said that Kurtz opposed publishing my report at all.

    I received Frazier's edited version the next day. l phoned him small (undisputed) changes on October 27 and 28 and on November 4, quietly but pointedly reminding him on each occasion that I protested his substantial deletions and his bowdlerization of my very mention of these deletions (into a version designed to indicate to the reader that no deletions had occurred).

    On November 6, two days after a last request to Frazier to reconsider, I circulated a memo to all my fellow associate editors:

    Alone among the Councilors, l still have no compensation for travel expenses to the last Council meeting (c $230). I have booked a flight to this one -- the cost will be nearly $400 just for the plane, and I have to stay 7 days (at my own expense) just to keep the rate down to that. This must be paid in a (very) few days -- and I won't do that unless all 630 dollars are here beforehand.

    My upcoming Skeptical Inquirer article ( l 979 winter) on the Gauquelin matter has been neatly censored here and there, so I have asked to add a statement saying so and suggesting that readers who wish to consult the original version may do so by contacting me. This sentence has itself been bowdlerized (so that it reads as if no tampering occurred). It seems to me that to distort the meaning of a contributor's statement over his explicit protest, especially when he is an "Associate Editor" -- whatever that means -- is a serious matter. Therefore, I will here ask the other members of the Skeptical Inquirer Editorial Board whether they concur in this action ... none of this should be published until the KZ&A [Control Test] is competently, independently refereed. Another point I have vainly stressed to Ken [Frazier]: there has been some faint hope of dissociating CSICOP from this disaster. The forthcoming package seals the matter forever: opening and closing arguments (and pseudoscientific obfuscations of the clear outcome) coauthored by CSICOP's Chairman and a CSICOP Fellow who is [senior] editor of the forthcoming Scribner's book [Science and the Paranormal] attacking everybody else's pseudoscience (full of CSICOP contributors).

    I must also say that these same two gentlemen have each attempted privately to blame the other authors for the adventure. They had an amusing argument on this point in my presence 1978/12/6. Yet they now [in their upcoming articles] have the brass to pretend to Skeptical Inquirer's readership that there is nothing amiss. This is deliberate sham. And I think most (if not all) of you know so or strongly suspect it.

[p.93]

    When he read this Frazier blew his stack again and on November 9 wrote a memo declaring he had deleted only "one sentence from a late-added footnote" (emphasis in original). False -- there were in fact a dozen deletions.

    Frazier's letter conveniently confused his right to edit (which I never had questioned) with his right to alter the meaning of a brief note telling the reader where to obtain the unedited version.

*  *  *

    On November 15 Randi phoned trying to find out whether I meant my November 6 promise not to come to next month's Council meeting in New York City unless both 1978 and 1979 fares were paid. (After badgering from Frazier, Kurtz in early November had sent the 1979 fare only, citing a ridiculous excuse for not sending the 1978 fare.) I replied to Randi that if he cared (his ostensible reason for calling) he should tell Kurtz to wire the still-unpaid 1978 fare.

    I also made an offer which, in view of all that had happened, was about as forgiving as one could possibly be: I said that Council would have no more trouble with sTARBABY if Skeptical Inquirer would publish the dissents of those Councilors who knew the truth about it -- the same suggestion made to Frazier a month earlier in regard to publishing the statistician-Councilor's referee report. They were not interested .

    I heard nothing further. Even my November 6 note to Martin Gardner, asking him if he planned to be at the meeting, went unanswered.

    As might be expected, at the December 15, 1979, meeting Kurtz (who never really believed I wasn't coming) carefully held a closed-door minipress conference that was kept a secret even from some attending Councilors until they were in the room and the doors were closing.

    Equally surprising to some Councilors was the decision, made that same day, to hold an "election." [16]  No prior announcement had been made -- which violates every established code of parliamentary procedure.

    By another of our paranormal coincidences, only one person was "not renominated" and I was replaced by Abell. It was then decided to put off the Abell announcement for some weeks so that there would seem to be no connection.

    A comedy high is the December 21 letter I received more than 10 days after the meeting from Randi, the appointed bearer of the tidings that I had been unanimously dumped or, as he so delicately put it, "not reelected." Randi hoped we could continue to be good friends. Also, since I was still on the editorial board, he urged me to write regularly for Skeptical Inquirer.

    I thought it was curious that one who was such a horror that he merited unanimous expulsion should at the same time be asked to stay on as associate editor and publish lots in the CSICOP journal.

    Along the same line, I received a January 5, 1980, letter from Abell, four solid pages of "gush" (Abell's word). I felt I was in danger of spiritual diabetes from the syrup that had

[p.94]

been poured over me all through 1979. (The funniest inundation had come from, of all people, Gardner, at Randi's behest.) The truth is, my admiring "friends," who "reluctantly" (Randi's adverb) voted my ejection at the December 15 meeting, had a long argument at this very meeting trying to identify the boob responsible for getting me onto the Council in the first place!

I felt I was in danger of spiritual diabetes from the syrup that had been poured over me all through 1979.

    My reaction to ejection was not quite what Council expected. On December 31 I wired Frazier a request that a note be printed at the end of my upcoming Gauquelin-package article stating that "following editorial disagreement over these articles" I had been "unanimously ejected," which was undeniably true.

    Frazier refused this (in a January 9 letter) as "inappropriate and inaccurate in its implication of cause and effect."

    Back on December 18 Frazier had written me to say that Skeptical Inquirer Assistant Editor Doris Doyle had emphasized it was too late to make any further changes in the Gauquelin package. Yet, nearly a month later, on January 12, Doyle told me that even then there was time for alterations. Consistency was hard to come by.

    So on January 14 I sent Frazier another Mailgram:

    Since the mechanicals are still with Doris (who says you refused my ["following editorial disagreement"] statement), please replace "Further commentary ... from the author" with: "Deletions from this paper are available from the author at his address. This December CSICOP Council unanimously decided soon to replace me on the Council with George Abell." If you kill one sentence, consider the other separately. (If some particular words or phrases bother you, have Doris phone me today regarding my OK of possible changes.) I repeat my request for written reasons for your censoring my attempts to make these simple statements to Skeptical Inquirer readers.

    At this point, I am not interested in promises regarding future letters column space, since what can one make of Council's word, after its recent clandestine "election" and customary secrecy regarding Abell's upcoming elevation? -- Dennis Rawlins, Associate Editor?

    Frazier replied the next day by decreeing that he would allow no more changes. Any announcement of my nonreelection to the Council would have to be carried in Skeptical Inquirer's news column because, he said, it was "irrelevant" in a research report. On February 16 I took Frazier up on his offer and prepared this statement for the news column.

    I am resigning from the Skeptical Inquirer Editorial Board (effective on SI publication of this notice) in reaction to the Board's handling of empirical testing (when the results do not come out as expected) as well as (among other matters) the CSICOP Council's surprise December "election" in New York (not even known to some attending Councilors until a fraction of a day before it occurred) -- at which private event it was unanimously decided that I should be "not renominated" (in absentia) and that (after a cosmetic interval) George Abell was to be elevated to Councilor. What this sleight of ballot switch portends for the

[p.95]

future scientific level and integrity of the ruling body of CSICOP can be most quickly understood from a careful reading of our [Abell's and my] respective contributions (especially the pre edited versions) in the 1979-80 Winter SI.

    The Council wants to make it perfectly clear that Abell's (public) support for -- as against my long-contained (now surfacing) criticism of -- CSICOP's conduct during its four-year involvement in testing Gauquelin's neoastrology, has NOTHING to do with Council's December move. SI readers who wish to believe in this paranormal miracle of acausal synchronicity are urged not to contact me at the below address.

    Meanwhile I privately urged that the other Councilors think of rationalism's reputation ahead of their own immediate interests and resign.

    On April 10 Frazier reneged: "The resignation letter you asked to be published is not appropriate for publication. Such internal matters are best dealt with by private circulation. [17]  I feel strongly about that."

    Although my letter of resignation stated that it became effective only when published, Frazier tossed me off the editorial board anyway -- without giving me notice or cause. Abell was my replacement.

    One other dissent has been kept from Skeptical Inquirer readers. The identity of the mystery guest in dissent-space? George Abell! In 1980 Abell hired UCLA grad student Albert Lee to compute the expectation curve for the Gauquelin experiment. According to a May 3, 1980, letter Abell wrote to Gauquelin, Lee's results agreed with Gauquelin's and mine. Thus Abell learned (some years too late) that 17 percent, not 22 percent, is the chance figure after all. Poof goes the Control Test (based upon the hope that Gauquelin's 22-percent Mars Effect results were merely chance level in disguise).

    As the truth becomes undeniable, what will CSICOP do? Perhaps as the Smoking Letter (as well as the prospect of total exposure in FATE) is considered, CSICOP may be heard to protest that it was most anxious to get the truth to the public but delayed somewhat in the interests of cautious science -- thereby explaining, of course, things like 10-day refereeing and rushing a Challenge to press to beat a publishing deadline.

EPILOGUE

    I can sum up by noting that:

    CSICOP's idea of internal scandal-preventing is not to eject the culprits but to eject those who expose them. A Watergate analogy would be to throw Sam Ervin out of Congress and keep Nixon as President on his promise not-to-do-it-again.

    The foregoing account was drafted between March 26 and May 15, 1980. The great bulk of it, however, was not typed until December 1980 through January 1981 due in part to the press of researches in nonparanormal-related areas of scholarship. I was reminded of CSICOP in October 1980 by three incidents that occurred together and not coincidentally:

    (1) I was dropped as a CSICOP Fellow without being informed, much less being told why in writing.

    (2) I was attacked (along with Gauquelin) in the most insulting fashion in the letters section of Fall 1980 Skeptical Inquirer by the same Fellow

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whose mistakes in "Objections to Astrology" began sTARBABY.

    (3) The last October event explained Item One -- my ejection from the full Committee. Council announced its annual meeting and press conference for December 12, 1980, at UCLA. The gathering was described as a closed "press seminar," only for Fellows and invitees.

Klass growled through clenched jaw, "You're sick!" It was a free-for-all orgy of fantasy.

    I telegraphed Kurtz on December I to suggest that the neoastrology test be openly debated at the meeting. I received no reply.

    Therefore I simply appeared at the meeting, correctly judging that Kurtz wouldn't risk creating a scene by having me ejected bodily before his beloved press corps. I was privately assured that the Gauquelin matter would be discussed at 5:00 P.M. As insurance that it be held, I stood up during the question-and-answer period and mentioned in passing that there would be a 5:00 P.M. hearing concerning sTARBABY and the reasons for my ejection from CSICOP. No Councilor contradicted me.

    At 5:00 Kurtz stood up and, instead of announcing the promised discussion, adjourned the press conference.

    Twice bit, thrice shy. In anticipation I had with me four pages of XeroXed exposŽ material. After a few minutes' abortive attempts to have Randi and others honor their promise, I simply distributed the material to everyone in the room, including the two or three press persons who had been sufficiently interested in CSICOP to show up.

    Phil Klass, looking unwell, rushed over to growl through clenched jaw, "You're sick!" He said that after all this time I should drop it, in effect using the cover-up's long success as a justification for its perpetuation.

    The Council then retired to a private meeting. Over Kurtz's protest I just walked into the meeting. Kurtz then tried to preannounce a five-minute limit to a Gauquelin discussion. I never got five minutes of straight narrative. It was a free-for-all orgy of fantasy, with Councilors interrupting so often that they interrupted each other's interruptions.

    The Council agreed there was not the slightest connection between my unique expulsion and my equally unique insistence on honest reporting of sTARBABY. It was just that I had behaved rudely.

    I pointed out that before Kurtz tried suppressing me, beginning in September 1978, I was patient and gentle, a trusting chump.

    My request that offenses justifying expulsion be specified brought on the Morganisms. Kurtz could come up with only two pre-September 1978 claims:

    (1) A letter I had written on February 6, 1978, to the University of Toronto regarding an astrology conference to be held there the next

[p.97]

month. Supposedly I had put pressure on the university to cancel the meeting. I refuted this phony charge by reading from a Xerox copy of the letter, which made it clear I was objecting only to the grossly unbalanced composition of the proposed panel (which certainly would have disgraced the university); in fact I had encouraged the invitation of a broad selection of experts on both sides, hoping for a meaningful confrontation. Kurtz then referred to an alleged phone call I made to the university president. The only catch is that I never phoned the president of the University of Toronto.

    (2) Then Kurtz seriously attempted to define my other excommunicable offense as my proposal that the American Association for the Advancement of Science reevaluate the Parapsychological Association's affiliation with it! The other Councilors in attendance were too astonished to comment. (Kurtz and Frazier had themselves published this proposal in my article in Fall-Winter 1977 Skeptical Inquirer.)

    Obviously it was a hoked-up scenario. When I asked, a Councilor admitted that kicking me off the Council had not even been discussed until just a week before the December 1978 press conference, where Council feared I would expose sTARBABY. Indeed, only 10 minutes previously Council had attempted again to suppress my public dissent at the press conference we had just left.

    There were other moments of humor. Phil Klass claimed he didn't understand the neoastrology dispute, reviving the alibi first heard early in 1979.1 asked then why Frazier had chosen Klass as one of CSICOP's instant referees and why Klass had in fact written one of the five private referee reports. Incredibly, Klass denied having done so! I instantly produced and circulated a Xerox copy of this nonexistent report. As it began passing around the table, Klass said that he had recommended against publishing the package. Those who were reading his report, dated September 10, 1979, learned the very opposite. I knew the refereeing had been pro forma but I wasn't prepared for such obliging confirmation .

    The bottom line is:

    Every one of the Councilors who say they know something about the sTARBABY knows that it was a disaster. Yet Skeptical Inquirer readers are given to believe nothing went wrong.

    The last word Frazier allowed to appear was a letter from Lawrence Jerome (Fall 1980, page 85) in which CSICOP offered congratulations to itself for its Gauquelin project.

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Notes

[1] CSICOP began as an offshoot of the American Humanist assosiation. In 1978, after a year of not telling AHA anything of the ongoing legal proceedings, CSICOP seperately incorporated.

[2] Bob Sheaffer, Kendrick Frazier, and Martin Gardner never showed a passion for the limelight.

[3] I had not begun keeping count of the number of Gauquelin-related papers of mine Kurtz had rejected. In retrospect it is obvious that his reason was that all of them dissented from the KZA party line on Gauquelin. The only paper of mine Kurtz had published was also the only one that did not discuss Gauquelin; it was on ESP (July-August 1976 Humanist); thus in Kurtz's Humanist this astronomer was allowed to discuss matters psychological -- but not astronomical!

[4] I don't even know how many Councilors saw it after publication until questions were raised about its honesty. For example, athough I was on the Humanist mailing list, no copy came to my address.

[5] The following May I was startled to see an identical attack by Eric Tarkington in Phenomena. When I phoned Kurtz in shock at the embarrassment of having correct analysis published in that proastrology journal while CSICOP was publishing crap, his reply was, "Nobody reads [Phenomena]."

[6] KZA publicly: "Nowhere did we wish to suggest that Gauquelin 'cheated' and we regret any such implication" (Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1980, page 67).

[7] An interesting bit of history, since Kurtz still says my nonreimbursement wasn't brought to his attention until a full year later. And Council pretends to believe this.

[8] That Councilors Kurtz, Randi, Philip Klass, and Lee Nisbet conspired to keep dissent (read "schism") from sullying the press conference was eventually admitted from the inside in a July 6, 1979, conversation. (See also June 26 document prepared by Randi and marked "Confidential," discussed below.)

[9] On December 12, 1980, Abell gave a completely different reason for not showing up at the scheduled showdown. He said he wasn't invited!

[10] Abell's December 12, 1980, version: he doesn't remember now whether he read it. In 1979 Abell cosigned yet another KZA paper which repeated the same old BS argument. Then he conseded (privately in 1980) I'd been right all along on the math -- leaving Kurtz and Zelen holding the sTARBABY bag. Everyday entertainment at CSICOP!

[11] See Jerome Clark and J. Gordon Melton's "The Crusade Against the Paranormal," September and October 1979 FATE, for Marcello Truzzi's account of these events.

[12] Not true. Randi phoned me on Januari 9, 1979, the moment he read press coverage of Wheelers proposal, trying to reignite my interest. Sheaffer wrote me along the same lines a few days later. Yet when Frazier published Wheller's statement (Spring 1979 Skeptical Inquirer) he did not mention that he had published my similar proposal a few issues back!

[13] By the Council, yes; but backed by Fellows B.F. Skinner, W.V. Quine, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague de Camp; Carl Sagan and Ken Frazier supported the request that AAAS clarify the affiliation.

[14] In reality Truzzi had been replaced at CSICOP's August 9, 1977, annual meeting by a prearranged conspiracy to which Randi and I were both parties. Privately we all (except Ray Hyman, who was not in on it) spoke freely of the fact that the real reason was our disapproval of Marcello's softness on the mystics and slowness to print tough skepticism. But this reality did not look open-minded, so naturally another reason was given to the public. (When I circulated a letter giving some of the real reasons, Council was horrified.)

[15] But the potential significance of the 13 1/2-percent result, which disconfirmed the Mars Effect's 22 percent (at a 10,000-to-one level), was lost due to KZA's 1977 precedent and subsequent obsession with post hoc sample splitting in their own favor.

[16] Gardner told me on November 23, 1980, that there had been no election, just a boot (the official minutes, dated Januari 8, do not even mention the matter), adding a week later that since Kurtz owns the CSICOP mailing list, parliamentary rules are "crap."

[17] I guess that's why Frazier prevented my stating in Skeptical Inquirer that deleted material was available from my private address!

Kook Killers As

Keystone CSICOPs

Backfired “Scientific” Investigation

Necessitates Its Backfired Coverup

CSICOP's Smear: Dumbest Ever?

A Gang That Wouldn't Have Known an Able Scholar If It Stepped on One

And PROVED It

(Hey, a “Scientific” Committee's Gotta Have Some Empirical Success)

?  A quarter-century ago, DR provided a highly detailed chronicle of the neo-astrology test-backfire (& its coverup) by the academic-star-studded Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP: www.csicop.org), in his now-easily-Google-able 1981 article, “sTARBABY”.

[All citations here to the article use the pagination of the 32pp offprint distributed by FATE.

If consulting the original FATE 1981 October issue, merely add 66 to the page-number of any reference-citation here.]

?  Anti-Cult Movement's Embedded Cultishness:

DR had long since moved past this unpleasantness (since it was hardly an experience anyone would wish to relive, and dwelling on such a panorama of human frailty cannot be healthy) — when he increasingly found that CSICOP csuckups (& dupes) are continuing to specially internet-post ever-more reality-detached false excuses and desperate libels, to try explaining-away the embarrassing and unregenerate — albeit valuably revealing — misbehavior of CSICOP in connexion with the founding “Scientific Investigation” of the vaunted Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal: the infamous foulup?suppression?threats?lies?smears spiral-down-quackmire that attended CSICOP's 1975?? testing of neo-astrologer Michel Gauquelin's alleged “Mars effect”, the occultist claim that sports ability is correlated with the astrological house the Sun resides in, at an individual's birth.

?  Since CSICOP was always just an establishment goon-squad, the sTARBABY tale is simply another chapter in one of history's most persistent lessons: establishments that are publicly-oriented (i.e., we're not here primarily discussing academically-serious bodies like the National Academy of Sciences) are by their very nature characterized by certain inter-related features. These include: power-obsession, intellectual rigidity, vindictiveness, lying, suppression, and (above all) lack of any principle, besides the Vicar of Bray's.

?  One who investigates the sTARBABY controversy via internet will quickly see that virtually nobody outside the CSICOP cult lauds its sTARBABY actions, since it's easy to see who told the truth in John-Dean-esque detail. CSICOP long since lost this dispute, but shares the mentality of other leaders one might think of, in being unable to admit it — meanwhile pretending to be the very exemplification of rationality and integrity.

?  CSICOPpers' main there-was-not-either-a-coverup argument is that dissenters' articles were published (in some cases, importantly censored and-or fatally too-late [which is a kind of censorship]) — without noting several items:

[a] CSICOP's continued smearing and lying show that not only did a coverup occur but — it's still occurring — three decades later, and counting.

[b] Councillors' several bribes and threats (micro-detailed in “sTARBABY” and never denied by CSICOP, for a reason well known to the perps) constitute a slightly more important coverup issue — second only to the fact that the guilty parties still rule CSICOP with utter — almost sneering — impunity.

[They have selfishly confused political survival with achievement, when their main achievement has been a unique disgrace of rationalism. The mark of their integrity persists over the decades. A 1997 Skinq article on the “Mars Effect” concluded it didn't exist, without noting that DR had in 1975 warned Kurtz it didn't and was based upon corrupt data. Indeed, the article, while citing K, Z, & A, pretends DR (who computed “their” test) never existed. The paper is posted at www.skepsis.nl/mars.html.]

[c] Does publishing a dissenter's article show CSICOP's no-coverup purity if said article is countered with printed sand-in-the-eyes pseudo-science by those ruling (and-or being rewarded by) CSICOP, while the dissenter is being threatened?

?  CSICOPs' disgraceful fantasy-alibi junk is frequently augmented by irrelevant and ad hominem diversions from the simple facts DR published a 1/4 century ago.

How can CSICOP claim that there was never-ever-ever a coverup of the sTARBABY affair and-it's-old-news-anyway? — even as its own dishonest and vicious slander about this history continues (and has indeed all-along primarily constituted that very coverup), just as thriving and current as a generation ago & probably much more wide-spread via internet. Can a Committee selling a repulsive, shyster-level defense-document called “Crybaby” (still posted by Paul Kurtz & Free snicker Inquiry at

http://www.freeinquiry.com/skeptic/resources/articles/klass-crybaby.htm) even try to claim it isn't deliberately using character-assassination? And: hey, aren't crybabies the sort who run away and hide from confrontation? — which has been CSICOP's not DR's response to sTARBABY. Classic psychological projection.

[CSICOP's ad-hominem-generating delusion (stoked by Kurtz & A.Randi): DR's existence is the problem with the sTARBABY saga. This nuttiness crested with a 2005/8/10 A.Randi-triggered phonecall to DR's wife, inspired by the further wish-fantasy that DR had died. (Evidently some ecstatic CSUCOPs had taken seriously DR's “Epitaph”.) Silly dream. Yes, DR will eventually disappear. (Though his well-known scholarly achievements will probably not entirely disappear.) But the sTARBABY stain will never die. Indeed, CSICOP's cultist pathology has so far ensured that the stain has instead monotonically grown. And set.]

?  Rationalist DR urges the reader to netsurf for the slander — and to get down far enough into this muck (most especially “Crybaby”) to perceive fully the depths to which the 2nd-hand slander-machine of institutional-rationalism-“hero” CSICOP-Chairman-for-Life Paul Kurtz has sunk. Also to see the demented communal portrayal of DR, showing at the very least the isolation of the slanderers from realization of DR's status among genuine scientists and scholars.

(Note also that while DR cites all his detractors' websites [not just out of fairness but to demonstrate the quality of his enemies' ethics and intellect], not even the most professedly neutral “rationalist” accounts of the sTARBABY affair have so-far told their readers where to find DR's website: evidently, CSICOP rightly understands that, vis-à-vis sTARBABY, the more one knows about the real DR, the more obvious the truth.

[Note fellow-atheist Kurtz' insensitivity to analogy or empathy here. The “mainstream” medium shies away from citing websites doubting god's existence for the very same reason: the more one is exposed to realities, the less likely delusions will be believed.]

Also: not a single CSICOPper who's attacked DR lately has ever phoned DR to get his side of anything — because insecure cultists never do that.) All of this is symptomatic of the same careerist poison that originally corrupted CSICOP's and Chairman Rug's reputation for honesty among knowledgeable onlookers, and has by now lodged as irremovably as arsenic within the organization's cultish body.

?  CSICOP's Grand-Theft Smear:

The sTARBABY affair proper will be dealt with below. However, it's worth taking a short time-out to look at CSICOP tactics, especially since seeing-through botched ad-hominem attacks requires no scientific background whatever, by contrast to the sTARBABY-coverup's statistical trickery. So, we examine a smear that's as dumb and careless as it is deliberately vicious and dishonest.

(On the vile level of Bush-Rove attacks [on McCain in 2000; in 2004, upon Kerry's record; and in 2006, on his careless joke], in that the perps positively know that the target isn't guilty — but, for a Higher-Purpose, they figure the lie is a useful tactic anyway.)

During the above-recommended net-searches, you will readily find repetition of a CSICOP lie that DR stole travel-funds, a lie that CSICOP has itself (Skinq 1981-1982 Winter p.66) put on sale for (if it sold over 40 copies) more net cash than it's mock-arguing about, in peddling CSICOP Councillor P.Klass' “Crybaby” (which 1st broadcast this attack). In truth, the only genuine theft here was Chairman Kurtz' stealing from then-CSICOP-Councillor DR his rightful travel-funding (to the annual CSICOP Councillors-meeting, to confer, debate with, and warn Council at a key juncture in CSICOP history) — when debate-ducker Kurtz withheld DR's full 1978 + 1979 travel-expense total (c.$230 + c.$400 = c.$630), sending only a $350 cheque despite repeated requests for the entire amount. Since DR cashed the cheque, while still out $280 ($230 of it just for ultra-cheap cross-country 1978 travel — even neglecting food, etc) but didn't go to the 1979 meeting, CSICOP charges he stole $120 ($350 ? $230). Comments:

?  If DR had committed a shameful act, it is curious that he put a public spotlight on his “theft” before Council did! — when “sTARBABY” (p.16 footnote, pp.27-28) revealed that DR had been punitively (idem p.13 vs. p.14) not-reimbursed for his cross-country 1978 travel. (DR could have added: cross-country 1977 travel to NYC meeting, countless phone-calls 1975-1979, among other CSICOP-related expenses and work that represented ordmag $1000 in losses.) DR had in 1979 vainly requested re-imbursement for 1978 & 1979 travel, stating (doubtless to Council's can-we-be-this-lucky? delight) that he would not come to the 1979 meeting unless the total for both was received ahead of time (a reasonable caution, given Kurtz' 1978 reneging — and his 1979 rage at DR's heresy on PK's Gauquelin project) — so Kurtz cutely sent roughly (but not quite) the cost for the cross-country 1979 trip, not the total. (Details: “sTARBABY” pp.27-28.)

?  Can CSICOP produce a copy of any document showing that it asked DR to re-imburse CSICOP (for a $120 fiscal discrepancy) during the two years that passed between the heinous Grand Theft (1979) and the miraculously-timed 1981 CSICOP-bookkeeping Revelation of it (allegedly in CSICOP's suddenly-un-brain-dead Buffalo office), which resulted in Kurtz' unleashing this diversionary smear IMMEDIATELY following the 1981 publication of “sTARBABY”?

[Has the Jungian synchronicity here hyper-ironically pseudo-justified the “P” in CSICOP: has our Committee humiliated its sponsors by embedding a Paranormal claim into its salvation-by-smear tactics?]

Since no such document ever existed, we may ask: is it perhaps less unreasonable to wonder whether a character of Kurtz' sneakiness (see, e.g., the double-cross at “sTARBABY” p.13 vs. p.14) might carry on a 2 year non-mention of the $120 discrepancy with canny deliberateness, figuring that if DR were notified of this loose-end and sent Kurtz the difference: CSICOP would gain $120 but lose the only hook PK could think of, on which to hang a charge of dishonesty by DR.

[By this point in our saga, it won't be news that Kurtz is no genius. But one might suppose that even he would realize why his ploy has backfired (staining his own and not DR's rep), obviously achieving the very opposite of his intent because: if Kurtz had credible evidence of serious DR theft (or indeed any misbehavior that mattered throughout the sTARBABY history), why would he have to resort to this not-credible, not-even-serious nit? Backed, let us not forget, by the whole Council, which signed the published Skinq statement selling “Crybaby” (though cautiously not actually signing it), which featured the Grand Theft.]

?  Is it CSICOP's contention that DR spent several years (1975-1978) voluntarily performing highly specialized mathematical projects for CSICOP, which constituted what were (at that time) CSICOP's only reliably-computed astronomical investigations (never once requesting a cent for these, though P.Kurtz mailed DR a few unsolicited $100 cheques [in token payment for the work] during PK's most desperate period: “sTARBABY” p.9, or [before 1978] for travel costing hundreds of dollars) — all so he could keep lying-in-wait, to finally pounce in 1979 and swindle Paul Kurtz out of a contextually trifling amount (barely $100)? NOTE WELL: CSICOP's Council (by announcing Councillor P.Klass' ravings for sale) would unanimously have you believe so.

(Given DR's 1976-1978 generosity in time & effort to advance CSICOP's titular goal and to protect it from technical and ethical disasters, plus his years of spending his own funds [asking for no recompense at all] as a contribution to the CSICOP effort [so long as he saw it as a worthy charity, an illusion that had vanished by 1979]: it was pretty difficult to portray him as a greedy thief — which is why the transparently desperate resort to a $120 trifle inadvertently reveals the very reverse of the Kurtz smear-machine's intent.)

[All of which brings us up against the question that DR asks of all the eager smearers unleashed by the spectrum of phonies he's exposed over the years: who's really being hurt by such low tactics? In each of these cases, DR asks: which side is increasingly respected for genuine creativity and frankness? On the other hand: which side is ethically disemboweling itself by ever-more-transparent careerist priorities? Does the latter party seriously believe that such spiritual suicide can go on for decades without cost? Without an internal corruption that lingers forever as a chronic-disease, burrowing into one's withering conscience? Without knawing lifetime-fear of sudden new-evidence embarrassments? — and thus the horrid truth's realization by those trusting souls one has persistently lied to and relayed fantastic smears through? Question: If providence is a natural by-product of intelligence, then (even aside from ethical considerations): just how bright are those who choose such paths? See “sTARBABY” p.24.]

Ironic contrast: nearly all of the DR-slandering Councillors have — via grants, books, etc — cashed-in bigtime (for amounts whose total is obviously hundreds of times larger than DR's Grand Theft) from their allegedly-virtuous crusade against kooks. DR never even tried to do so, since that was not his understanding of CSICOP's purpose.

[The rock-bottom reason for CSICOP's decades of smearing DR is to cover up a scandal (even while denying a cover-up ever existed), an embarrassment which revealed the reportorial dishonesty endemic to CSICOP's world of popsci-income-über-alles & technical duffer-dum. In brief: “sTARBABY” might lower some fiscal inflows.]

It's a propagandist's white?black challenge to invert such wide contrasts in both acquisitiveness and integrity — but, then, one of CSICOP's own longtime Councillors has privately laughed off CSICOP as primarily a low-class propaganda-mill.

?  When DR cashed Kurtz' cheque ($350) towards a cross-country trip for the 1979 meeting, he was obviously not attempting theft but was thereby [a] ensuring re-imbursement for his 1978 loss, even while [b] still (ibid p.28) urging CSICOP's transmission of the rest of funds (c.$280: mostly the cost of his trip to the 1978 meeting) that would yet be required if he was to go to the 1979 Council meeting. DR was prepared to make that trip if the money arrived, but did not wish to find himself still out hundreds of dollars (net) to an increasingly untrustworthy-looking (ibid, e.g., pp.14, 18, 20) Chairman, if he went and then Kurtz continued to refuse to pay up. (Only the lowest type of cultists could transform such caution into a “theft” of $120 = $350 ? $230.) Kurtz didn't pay — and (knowing all the expenses DR had borne on his own for years in CSICOP service) naturally had no grounds for requesting the $120 difference back. And he didn't.

?  Why was Kurtz playing such games? Simple: he was planning to boot DR from the Council at this private meeting — so he naturally preferred playing all-ways-coy about funding DR's travel to that same meeting. (Just one more example [of many] of arbitrariness that ill-becomes an allegedly rationalist icon.) So: exactly whose dishonesty is revealed by the whole non-sent cheque incident?

?  Considering careerist Kurtz' wealthy life-style and his own fiscal power-plays (involving hundreds of thousands of dollars) that caused his sometime difficulties with the American Humanist Association, this whole neon-red herring is a mote-vs-beam hyper-farce.

[DR was known as the most naïvely-idealistic-unacquisitive of all CSICOP's active Councillors, never once trying to make a buck out of what he foolishly regarded as an anti-exploitation rationalist mission. (Even while his fellow Councillors were hustling grants and publicity-schemes worth tens of thousands of dollars. Indeed, this is exactly why DR had no persuasiveness among CSICOP's publicity-equals-money Councillors, who went into full Pavlovian salivation when Abell & [then-]prof B.Singer offered them chapters in their upcoming Scribner's book, Science & the Paranormal.) In the same tradition, DR has for years sent out his journal DIO as a public service free of charge to prominent institutions and libraries. So it is rather weirdly comic to watch Kurtz of all people attempting to portray him as fiscally grabby. Contrast-query: does Kurtz' Prometheus Press give away ITS most special contribution to civilization?]

?  Has anyone repeating CSICOP's smear bothered to check the record to find out whether CSICOP was any more prescient in character-prediction than in astronomical investigations? How has DR's putative dishonest greed played out since sTARBABY? Regarding integrity: DIO has never had a problem admitting its own (very rare) mistakes immediately, openly, repeatedly, prominently, humbly, and thoroughly (see the small [nonetheless quite redundant] list of these errors at DIO 11.2 [2003] p.31 n.2), with grateful thanks to our correctors, plus strong self-criticism — even to the point of lampooning himself. (In huge print, right on the cover of his own journal: DIO 11.2 [2003]; see also, e.g., ibid n.21.)

[Maybe it's just a side-issue that (despite occasional oblique forays) the great majority of DR's academic output has been in genuine scholarship, not in the CSICOP world of pop-sci desperados and kook-mud-wrasslers.

DIO has produced a stream of academic and ethical contributions, discoveries, and analyses, ensuring it an academic status and immortality that is not even in the same galaxy as CSICOP's. (Which helps explain why not one of this avalanche of dozens of scholarly contributions is ever mentioned when CSICOP postings discuss DR.) Might as well cite some of them here (just click to brief summary below), since the average CSICOPper-reader will likely not be motivated to seek the facts elsewhere — not that any of it will change the cemental mind that CSICOP is supposed to be opposing, not emulating.

sTARBABY's History

?  The fact that DR was right on the science of the Gauquelin test's backfiring seems generally stipulated-to even by most of the wackiest CSICOP cultists. (Hardly deniable, after DR's 1981 revelation of the fact [“sTARBABY” pp.22, 25-26] that the majority of CSICOP's own hitherto-private referee reports had taken his side on the matter.) But to this day, CSICOP apologists have promoted a wide-spread new myth and-or lie that despite admitted scientific disaster, there was NOT a coverup.

[This alibi lately seems to be evolving into: well, OK, but it didn't last long. Yet another lie: it's still going on.]

Which is a pretty daring hoax to attempt, when you've repeatedly threatened the party who insisted on honest reportage, and then ejected him to make sure that the rest of the cult understood the penalty for any future attempts at similar watchdog-integrity.

Probably the most unevadable evidence of coverup (since it's right in print) is CSICOP's publication (Skinq 1980 Fall p.85) of L.Jerome's congratulations to CSICOP on its sTARBABY project. (The 2nd time Kurtz had used a Jerome letter for KZA-“success” self-congratulation. Earlier 1978 incident: “sTARBABY” p.11.) The letter Kurtz published of course insulted DR. I.e., boot an honest critic, and then use your ill-gotten editorial power to dance-stomp on his (supposed) grave. This is nakedly power-mad, vindictive, see-what-happens-to-my-critics Kurtz. It's also HCAndersonly-naked dumb Kurtz: without that utterly outrageous, gratutious, upside-down-world letter, the “sTARBABY” article might never have come to pass — for this supposedly-last-word letter made real all DR's worst predictions as to what CSICOP under Kurtz would turn into. (In spite of Council's repeated assurances [e.g., “sTARBABY” p.22] to DR that it would rein him in. Fat chance.)

[Note that the present DR postings similarly might not have happened had not CSICOP cultists posted fantastic slanders (triggered by Kurtz' promotion of “Crybaby” et-ilk). Would a rationalist icon (or even a smart crook) throw mud and needlessly awaken a sleeping challenger?]

?  Note: CSICOP's sole “evidence” against the existence of a coverup has never been anything but: CSICOPpers' longtime-unanimous insistence that it couldn't be true. (Which borrows the fave anti-reality tactic of the very superstitions CSICOP supposedly opposes.) As if CURRENT lockstep-cultism disproves PRIOR lockstep-cultism?

Anyone doubting that CSICOP's behavior was a dishonest and cowardly disgrace ought to take just 1 minute to read the details of DR's 1979/4/19 note to CSICOP — written during the height of Kurtz' dodgings: “sTARBABY” p.22.

[Note typo: for “no-compromise” read “no-comprehension”.]

?  Thus the following moderately detailed summary — which may have to be augmented in the future (DR genuinely hopes not), depending upon whether anyone else of CSICOP's originators cares finally to own up to the truth of the case.

?  DR isn't holding his breath.

A. In 1975, SUNYAB's Paul Kurtz published in The Humanist (which he then edited) the famous 186-scientists-condemn-astrology statement. It was a good idea, but Kurtz unfortunately bundled it with an article which attacked the French neoastrologer Michel Gauquelin (G) on an invalid basis. G threated suit; so, in panic, Kurtz agreed to test G's theory, using the genuine statistical expertise of SUNYAB statistician Marvin Zelen (later Harvard & Jimmy Fund) and apparent astronomical expertise of UCLA astronomer George Abell. Simultaneously, Kurtz and others (including DR) formed the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (“CSICOP”, most wisely pronounced: “SickCop” or “SuckUp”.)

[Note: DIO's 1st document on sTARBABY was posted on 2006/6/21, referring to CSICOP as the “Keystone CSICOPs” and “SickCop”. Immediately at the next Council meeting (2006/9/23), CSICOP dropped the “COP” part of its name, citing as its excuse that the original name had caused some to confuse it with pro-paranormal groups. (An alleged factor that had obtained for the last 30 years without causing a change.) If CSICOP can't even tell the truth about something this trivial…. So: CSICOP [as DR will often continue to call it] has seen this site. But has so far been afraid to tell its audience where to find it. DIO suggestion: retain the old name's 2nd “C”. (In honor of CSIC's yet-lingering inability to face the obvious: that 30y of personal attacks on DR IS part of the sTARBABY coverup — whose very existence CSICOP laughably continues to deny exists. “CSIC” triggers the right pronunciation — and it so neatly stands for “Committee for Smearing Its Critics”)]

In 1977, CSICOP started its journal, Skeptical Inquirer (“Skinq”), to — as DR naïvely thought — continue the fight against growing world irrationality.

B. Kurtz, Zelen, & Abell — henceforth “KZA” — were soon running their 1976-published test specifically on G's strongest-looking claim: that natal positions of Mars had a statistically significant correlation with high sports ability. As a positional astronomer (Abell was not), and a member of CSICOP's founders and board, DR repeatedly warned CSICOP Chairman Kurtz (e.g., 1975/11/15 typed report, solicited for and written for Humanist publication — the key warning in which was only too-late finally published by Skinq in 1977) and his fellow researchers, Abell (telephone 1975/12/6) & Zelen (telephone 1976/3/8) against running their Kurtz-Zelen-Abell (KZA) proposed test as designed.

[During this period and later, DR emphasized these symptoms to KZA and pointed out that the “Mars Effect” was simply astrology under a fancy name.]

DR's reasons for caution (all repeatedly transmitted to KZA):

1. DR was suspicious that a natural effect, which the trio thought explained the correlation, was unable to do so.

2. If the sample was prebiassed, disaster awaited. Note symptoms of bias DR cited in his 1975/11/15 report & in Skeptical Inquirer [Skinq] 2.1 [1977] p.81.

3. While plunging into an astrology test that ultimately dragged the names of some of the world's leading scholars into association with fraud and lying character-assassination, KZA not only didn't know the relevant astronomical math — they also didn't know the 1st thing about the astrological tradition, e.g., that the two celestial sectors [1&4], for which G was claiming above-chance correlations, were effectively the Ascendant and Midheaven, which have consistently been astrologers' fave celestial spots at least since Hipparchos' 130 BC Commentary — over 2100 years ago. I.e., the sTARBABY history was no accident. It initially required mere arrogance, ignorance, technical inability — before evolving into bribing, threatening, suppression, lying, back-ground snoopery, and smearing. In short, max-macho-stupidity plunged CSICOP and its cheering-on pop-science establishment into a mess that would inevitably evolve into max-disgrace.

4. Having already been for years involved in exposing fraud (e.g., Skinq 2.1 [1977] pp.69-70 & 73, a journal which KZA presumably read) in astrology's patron saint C.Ptolemy, DR was wary of trusting an astrologer's sampling. (And gave specific statistical reason for suspicion in the Mars Effect case; as well as sph trig & statistical analyses of Ptolemy's fakery: ibid p.73 n.6.) Nonetheless, KZA plunged ahead (“sTARBABY” p.5) in utter — and revealing — innocence of and-or [Abell] competitive contempt-for DR's years of astronomical publications in the world's leading professional journals, including his discovery of planetary perturbation-amplitude as a function of distance (MN Royal Astr Soc 147:177f [1970]), as well as inducing the most accurate estimate of Pluto's (not-ready-for-planethood) mass anyone published until direct confirmation of Pluto's tinyness (1976-1978, i.e., at the very time both of CSICOP's Expert-Astronomer clowns [OG&GA] were scoffing at DR expertise). KZA spurned all DR warnings. Thereby ending up wasting dozens of pages, years of time, and eons of rationalist credibility — fruitlessly smacking their dukes ever deeper into a lost-cause-from-the-start sTARBABY.

[Abell finally became utterly unhinged. (See his 1978/10/5 Jaws phonecall [“sTARBABY” p.14], which he was ashamed of 'til the day he died. Apparently, this impulsiveness was not unique. An L.A. reporter described him to DR as tempermentally ready-fire-aim. Which is a succinct summing up of the K&A mentality that blindly plunged into a test without ever for a moment considering possible risks to the rationalist movement.) This, out of long-building frustration at his own embarrassing math-limitations, plus the inexplicable-to-him 1975-1979 delay in his cut-throat-pushing DR out of his path onto the CSICOP Council. Though Abell had once been a contributing researcher [still justly remembered for his discovery of Abell clusters, though this had virtually nothing to do with sophisticated positional-astronomy math], he had by the mid-1970s turned his ambitions rather to pop-media. Also revenue from his textbook. [Which includes a sample horoscope that shows he wasn't even familiar with lunar parallax — an effect most astronomers (besides National Geographic assassin-consultants: DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡4 Note C; [p.29]) have known about since the 2nd century BC.] Abell's consistently offensive attitude towards DR included a rabid and long-unkillable suspicion (who's insane, here?) that some secret party was doing DR's astronomical work for him!! — which (externally) calmed down only upon his success in getting DR eliminated from Council in GA's own favor. Let's just sum it up by observing that Abell never made DR's mistake of seeing CSICOP as a cooperative idealistic venture of non-competitive comrades.]

I note that DR's [a] warning of bias-symptoms in G's results and [b] pointing out G's astrologer-background are attacked in “Crybaby” as the sort of evil DR bigotry and ad-hominem approach that justified DR's ejection. (Albeit much later, of an odd sudden.) Question: Does anyone offer a prize for new world's records in resentful-ineducability?

[“Crybaby” & CSICOP attempt to justify censoring DR's 1978/9/18 report (and booting DR) because of an “ad hominem” attack on Gauquelin in this report. (Read the “Crybaby” quotes of DR's alleged “ad hominems” and see if they are anything but factual. Klass even calls the fact that G had done horoscopes “irrelevant”.) Note that DR's implications of untrustworthiness in G's work made fools of CSICOP's investigators, who'd entered into their G-project while rebuffing repeated DR warnings of this. It is, needless to add, tear-drainingly touching to ponder CSICOP's censorial concern for G's welfare, but one would think that a “skeptical” mind (which CSICOP is supposed to be devoted to be internationally encouraging) might wonder: was this sweet censorship primarily intended to protect G? Or CSICOP?]

C. During my 1st contact with Kurtz (phone: 1975/11/3), he urged that I quickly (within c.2 weeks, to beat a publishing deadline!) send him a paper on the Mars Effect (for the American Humanist Association's Humanist, which he then edited), on which he sent me reams of background material. In the DR report (sent 11/15 but not published, possibly due to Abell's helpful-proprietary advice) DR instead proposed a far simpler test-challenge (which CSICOP has still never adopted, since doing so now would imply which Councillor knew what he was doing, all along): could Gauquelin simply show practical value in his purported discovery, by using horoscopy to regularly beat the posted odds on sports events? (See Skinq 2.1 [1977] p.82.) The KZA test went on (& ate page-space) seemingly-interminably up into 1978 in the Humanist; when the test eventually came out in favor of Gauquelin, DR then attempted to keep CSICOP from being damaged by association with the Humanist in the KZA-test quackmire — emphasizing to Council that up-to-now (a temporal point deceitfully omitted in Council-hawked “Crybaby”) CSICOP was clear of the mess, since only the Humanist had run KZA's stuff on G, so far. But Kurtz was by this time in so deep into the KZA test (and so weirdly obsessed — as if his rep would rise or fall on the awesome achievement of actually beating a neo-astrologer!) that he was determined to keep on suppressing dissent (from early on and right through: “sTARBABY” pp.4, 8 footnote, etc, etc), socking away at his sTARBABY and through epochal and demented egoism dragged CSICOP (and thus by horrific association, the names of CSICOP's many eminent [if windowdressing] scientist Fellows) into the neo-astrology disgrace, a fateful mistake which his trio then compounded by attempting (via standard bad-loser sample-slicing&dicing statistical Jimmying) to pretend that absolutely nothing had gone wrong.

[Deliberate sham on Kurtz' part. Contra CSICOP's party-line post-disaster one-eighty (from Councillors-are-genii to Kurtz-&-other-Councillors-didn't-understand-anything!: “sTARBABY” e.g., pp.21-22), Kurtz knew perfectly well he'd lost the KZA Challenge. He'd been in visible and repeatedly audible (almost pathetic) agony over incoming Mars Effect test-data (e.g., “sTARBABY” p.10), including in the presence of DR and his wife Barbara during PK's 1978 April visits with us, back when we were close friends and supposedly soldiers-together. (We had initially bonded partly because Kurtz [like DR] is an atheist, creditably not part of the “soft” wing of humanism.) Details: “sTARBABY” p.12.]

Such papal reluctance to admit fallibility appears to come bundled, standard, with institutions' moguls. (See similarly “Contributions” and “Germs”.)

[Testers' finger-pointing attempts to blame others for CSICOP's neo-astrology mess constitute among the funnier scenes in “sTARBABY”: see, e.g., pp.18&20.]

D. Though deliberately having no rôle in sampling, DR was the astronomical and statistical computer of its entire 2nd neoastrology test. The successful one. And was paid for the work by CSICOP cheque.

[Note: CSICOP's cheating on reportage of the 1st test was not only dishonest — it also (as DR anticipated: “sTARBABY” p.22) ensured that all DR's work on the 2nd test was wasted, since the (other) kooks would naturally emulate CSICOP by sample-splitting the valid (2nd) test into seeming meaninglessness, too. Which of course is just what has happened ever since….]

Drawing on DR's scientific expertise only became necessary because the bigname-astronomers whom Kurtz had (for two frustrating years) vainly counted upon to do the job (UCLA astronomer Abell & Harvard historian Owen Gingerich) had of course never been able to get it done.

[With typical CSICOP integrity, “Crybaby” attempts to explain-away this embarrassment by citing a Gingerich “leave”. Comments:

[a] Klass silently ignores Abell's non-functionality.

[b] Kurtz was goosing both Abell and Gingerich for far longer than Klass implies (see “sTARBABY” pp.9-10), and got nothing from either — until long after DR had already instantly transmitted all the results. Abell had been looking at G's European data since 1975 (ibid p.9), and data on the 1976 Jan-Feb Humanist Challenge had been coming in since that year, and data for the 2nd test were arriving in 1977. Yet neither Abell nor Gingerich had successfully computed a single Mars sector when Kurtz finally in late 1978 asked DR to do the job.

[c] Klass never mentions that Gingerich's people were in fact at work on the computations. Were all OG's people on leave for a year? My, but Harvard must be generous.]

This time (since the sample was unbiassed by either side), the test naturally came out against astrology's validity. But simultaneously with victory in the 2nd test, CSICOP was attempting to cheat its way out of its loss of the 1st test (above) — using post-hoc sample-splitting.

So, DR pushed for open admission of the truth.

TREASON!

E. Result: CSICOP at its 1978 meeting instituted an ejection-rule for Councillors — which the magician James Randi, sometimes known as The Amusing Randi (DR's self-purported friend&protector [read: keeper]) there loudly referred to as “the Rawlins rule”, lovingly adding “drink the Kool-Aid, Dennis” (and CSICOP thinks it's anti-cult?), later boasting of how well such repulsive tactics had kept “valuable” DR “in line” — so that no-one-would-ever-know of brand-new-Randi-pals Kurtz&Abell's fumblings. [Good job, Randi.] See below; also “Detractors”. (Notice that these cloddishly threatening remarks — in Kurtz' and other CSICOPers' presence — were never denied in any CSICOP “reply” to DR's charges, probably because too many persons were in the room and because more than one CSICOP Councillor taped conversations, so that anyone misreporting a CSICOP-related conversation is taking a hell of a risk. One more reason why the various devastating verbatim quotes in “sTARBABY” carried enough weight to terrify CSICOP's smearers into fear of denying them, and into running away from such substantive matters by trying to create arguments about side-trivia (see “Crybaby”) and into running away from their own 1981 press-conference.)

[Council's behavior clumsily betrayed its guilt with an obviousness that showed how little its members (other than Ray Hyman) understood the cultishness of its own people. To Kurtz' elated relief, rationalism's vaunted “skeptics” proved to be as nutty as their Enemy. Almost none wanted to have to face the obvious: CSICOP's Leader [a] had disgraced The Cause — and [b] was so determined to hold on to his personal power, that he did not care how low were the means used to effect that over-riding end. (See, too, equally-surprised BJClinton and his equally-indiscriminate grovellingly servile Liberal-lobby sup-pliants at DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §H [pp.50-55].)]

F. CSICOP's & Randi's hysteria was in reaction to DR's succinct oldie (in response to CSICOP's attempts to buy him off with a section-chairmanship):

“A man who can't be bribed, can't be trusted.” Result: CSICOP ejected from its board — and systematically smeared as insane — the astronomer (DR) who had warned against the botched test and performed the competent one. And simultaneously replaced him with the astronomer (Abell) who had co-overseen the bungled 1st and couldn't compute the 2nd one (for 2y) until phoning DR (1978/10/5) to find out how.

[I.e., he couldn't even re-compute the 2nd test (until phoning), despite Kurtz having sent him all the answers — over DR's specific request that this not be done, so DR's and Abell's results would be independent, a common-sense precaution that has been standard procedure in multiple astronomical computation at least since Newcomb & Oppolzer in the 19th century. (Intelligent procedure meant nothing to Kurtz, since he was in an unceasing panic for years over the G-test, and always frantically sought speed over propriety. Priorities which, of course, are exactly those that got him into the neo-astrology mess in the 1st place.)]

CSICOP actually believed that it could do this and be just as trusted as before. So who's crazy?

G. CSICOP is supposed to be fighting evasive behavior; but if you want to experience evasion at its mouth-frothing wildest, then enjoy (on the internet: easy via Google) the logic of CSICOP boardmember, attack-animal, and diversion-artist Phil Klass (CSICOP's own Ann Coulter), as he tries to explain all this away in his “Crybaby”. Phil wants you to understand that: CSICOP's ejecting the whistleblower (at an unannounced election) had absolutely NOTHING to do with the ejectee's insistence on honest science reportage about CSICOP's bungled KZA test. (For a Roman Church parallel, see DIO 4.3 [1994] p.132 n.33.)

H. Unfortunately for this fantasy, CSICOP has never been able to produce a single document in which Kurtz urges DR's expulsion, until less than one week before the 1978/12/6 press-conference where he was terrified of DR's potential public dissent. On the final page of “sTARBABY”, DR mentioned that at the 1980/12/12 CSICOP Council meeting, a Councillor had agreed that DR's expulsion had never been considered until this time. But since this was all verbal, the point was (typical of CSICOP's integrity) never publicly admitted — and was then explicitly denied in the Council's unanimously-signed, knowingly false document (published at Skinq 1981-1982 Winter p.66) and at least implicitly denied in all other CSICOP smear-material.

[Only Ray Hyman could honestly say that he wanted DR off CSICOP before the spectre of open DR reportage on sTARBABY loomed. He & DR openly agreed on that — which made it all the weirder to find him signing the above-cited document which pretended that this applied to the whole Council. But then such disjuncts are common in cults. E.g., the first person to warn DR that Kurtz was acquisitive, and not excessively bright or honest [DR is embarrassed to acknowledge that this was well before DR realized the truth], was no other was PK's [off-again-on-again] pal A.Randi. Another DR-enlightener was an old friend connected with educational TV who phoned Kurtz to try putting CSICOP on the air — and will NEVER forget the encounter. Sharing DR's understandable astonishment when learning the true character of this university-professor of philosophy (who is occasionally presented in the media as a “Leader” of the rationalist movement), DR's friend has recounted the central exchange (after brief preliminaries) on several occasions (e.g., 1979/1/18 & 2004/12/8).

Reacting to the proposal of putting CSICOP on educational-television,

Kurtz: “What's in for me?”

Caller: “You mean money?”

Kurtz: “Yeah.”.]

I. Unfortunately for CSICOP, proof of the truth regarding the timing and causes behind DR's expulsion (“sTARBABY” p.18) has survived in hard and contemporary documentary form, as we are just about to see. (Again: note that CSICOP has still produced zero pre-1978 December documents to the contrary, because there aren't any.)

J. As a sample of the documentary background DR may start now placing serially in evidence, I will quote from a long-neglected letter of 1978/11/30 (less than a week before the CSICOP meeting at which chief-heretic DR was to be “contained”).

[Jim Lippard has posted this letter as a bare item in his valuable Chronology, though its crushing destruction of CSICOP's entire“Crybaby” post-hoc slanderous fabrication may not be entirely clear to readers without the present contextual analysis.]

It is from CSICOP's former Editor (and longtime friend of CSICOP Councillor Prof. Ray Hyman), the late Prof. Marcello Truzzi (whose son Chris gave DR quoting permission: 2004/6/5), written to Bette Chambers, sometime President of Kurtz's American Humanist Association, relaying news of the internal tempest just reported to Truzzi by Hyman:

Ray Hyman called me last night to tell me of the fireworks that may emerge from the [1978/12/6 CSICOP] meeting. It seems that Dennis Rawlins is mad as hell and now plans to attack the astrology study by Kurtz Zelen and Abell from the floor. Paul is afraid of this since the international press will be there. I understand that Paul is thinking of cancelling the public part of the thing just because he doesn't know how to contain Rawlins. Paul is also apparently seeking advice about how he can get Rawlins off the Executive Council.

K. This letter utterly refutes CSICOP's & “Crybaby”'s central alibi-contention that DR was expelled for any other reason than fear of what was deemed Treason: public dissent on the KZA test. (Question: How did a group of alleged rationalists get themselves into a position of imitating churches by resorting to suppression? Answer: CSICOP's position was as vulnerable to the light of reason as religion's — so it could only maintain it by artificial protection.) The letter specifies exactly when and why the expulsion was desired. (See above.)

L. Birth & Death:

Since Council has specifically, cohesively, and unanimously denied the truth (which was always obvious anyway), we may perhaps be wryly amused that CSICOP has the mirrorless nerve to call anyone else a liar. Or to attack DR's character, given the behavior of some among its own high figures, e.g., mailing-list appropriation; curious college-credits; the XXXcesive acquisitiveness of a certain chairman's publishing company; a CSICOP leader who's not notoriously numerate (outside money) assuming senior authorship of refined astronomical-statistical analyses he didn't compute a digit of — a sham born of (revealing) vanity, and seeding the death of CSICOP's credibility, as it got CSICOP too-deep-in to what had hitherto been just an Amer Hum Assoc test to ever back out, which led on to the entire wagon-circling sTARBABY scandal.

M. The 1978/11/30 letter exposes CSICOP's entire party-line on sTARBABY as an agreed-upon lie — by a committee supposedly representing rationalism and science in the fight against occultism's kooks & deceivers. It thus reveals active Councillors for exactly what critics outside and inside have described CSICOP as: a pack of self-promotion experts, scientific non-experts, and desperate cultists, who preferred falsely to smear (or go along with a smear of) an honest scholar's accurate account, in order to pretend that its own precious publicity-generating organization (the protection of which was now a priority ahead of all morality) possessed a competence and integrity which it in truth grievously lacked. (CSICOP Boardmember Ray Hyman in-private [1980/1/12], on CSICOP [the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal], trying to do Scientific Investigation: “It's like plumbers trying to do hairdressing.” The problem was that too few able scientists were involved since, as Ray summed up CSICOP with admirable succinctness: it's just a propaganda group for the skeptical side — at a very low level.)

N. The only published statement by the CSICOP Council itself on DR's expulsion [Skinq 1981-1982 Winter p.66] cannot cite specific sins (since Council was naturally terrified that if its falsehoods were specific, hard evidence might appear, proving it lied). Nor could it risk denying any of a huge array of quotes, which in each case the quoted party knew perfectly well was accurate.

[Read those quotes and then try to believe that nobody was hiding anything. Note that the whole reason for bringing-in-pseudo-neutral Klass to “investigate” sTARBABY was to have a 2nd-hand document issued, so that none of the cowering perps need go the record denying any of the data published in “sTARBABY”. Hey, it worked for the “science press”, didn't it? (Big surprise: the establishment press covering-for the establishment.)

But the press attitude was more than suppressive. It was political. The pinnacle of the media's non-neutrality regarding sTARBABY:

As the affair was peaking, DR was asked by a Horizon interviewer what he thought of CSICOP. In the sTARBABY context, and given that CSICOP's middle name (now surname) is “Scientific Investigation”, the only frank answer was that CSICOP was a fraud. This info was helpfully fed-privately to CSICOP (behind DR's back) and then used as a justification for ejection. One later commentator has wondered why DR objected to this incident, justly adding that CSICOP had every right to know what DR had said — as if DR was objecting to the press-person for not keeping the statement secret. Now, let's get serious here: if one makes a statement to the press, it's hardly a sign of desiring secrecy! However, secrecy is what happened, and that has been DR's objection: that the press secretly snuck the statement to CSICOP (a statement which its own question had elicited) and then didn't publish either it or the evidence backing it. Is it the rôle of the press to spy for Approved organizations and to keep the public (which it laughably alleges it serves) from even knowing what its spying has found out?]

So CSICOP instead opted for a lawyer-tactic smear-diversion, by trying to find statements in DR's Skinq 1981-1982 Winter account, “Remus Extremus”, which it could “refute”.

[Both CSICOP's attacks were

[1] anachronistic, and

[2] avoided the main issues raised in “sTARBABY”:

[a] test-disaster and

[b] its coverup by statistical trickery & [verbatim-quoted] threats.

I.e., meet article X with

[i] a signed statement attacking article Y, and

[ii] a non-CSICOP-signed smear-article (“Crybaby”) attacking trivia in article X.]

The alleged mis-statements were then called typical of DR's “demonstrably false and defamatory claims”. So, let's see just how false were the even the side-issue statements CSICOP denied, in order to portray DR as a liar:

a. That Kurtz owned the CSICOP mailing list. Well, when DR wrote that he did, it was true. When DR soon after asked Skinq Editor Frazier how things were going, with the Council's attempt to get the list from Kurtz, he said that Council still was working on it. So the charge was not only true, but mention of it was intended to push for a healthy change on the list's status.

[Indeed, fear of its destruction-by-desperate-megalo-maniac may have played a huge rôle in Council's curious willingness to go along with whatever PK demanded — a (supposedly) temporary ethical lapse which ultimately necessitated attempting to post-justify the path taken, by pretending DR was insane. That's how initially well-intended people, who get into bed with power-players, become step-by-step corrupted.]

The suggested change is stated to have occurred; if so, this helped CSICOP — which returned the favor by converting it into alleged DR False-Libel.

b. A ballot-score is displayed, for an (unannounced) election which several Councillors had (prior to “Remus”) told DR had not occurred. (Despite request, no Councillor had been willing to confirm its existence in writing. Councillor Gardner said it had not been an election but an ejection.) My article's questioning of it was based on their statements. So who's lying?

c. DR stated that Kurtz had been removed as Humanist Editor for “fiscal unaccountability”. In Skinq 1981-1982 Winter (pp.63-64) appears a 1981/10/16 letter from AHA Pres. Lyle Simpson, denying this, again to show DR a liar. Well, DR immediately and vainly wrote Simpson (1981/10/19) about this:

… When I inquired 1978/10/23 (at the top of AHA) re the causes of Kurtz' loss of Humanist Editorship, the 1st phrase mentioned in summing up was ‘fiscal unaccountability.’ Those were the precise words — and their accuracy has been reverified to me and to [Councillor & Skinq Editor] Frazier [from the same extremely high AHA source] in the last few days.

The 1978 report [which L.Simpson co-signed] by the A.H.A Board of Directors (majority of 10 out of 14) ‘To the Members of the Editorial Board of The Humanist’ (sent to various CSICOP Councillors at my request 1978/11/29) specifically states on its p.4: ‘the Executive Committee added the AHA Treasurer [to the interim management committee, against Kurtz' wishes] for reasons of financial accountability, and because the new charter was not yet written.’

Your own [full] 1981/10/16 letter says that the Board vote to relieve Kurtz as Editor (1978/10) was taken on the issue of whether or not the Board ‘had the right to determine [Humanist] business management matters … or whether … editorial autonomy included business matters as well as content. Dr.Kurtz stated that he could not be [Editor] unless he had control of both …. ’ [emphases added] It is clear from your letter (and from a variety of other information) that Kurtz wished to be fiscally accountable to no one but himself — and that the AHA Board terminated him over this issue. (Re the fact that Kurtz was for awhile fiscally unaccountable, we see on p.2 of the 1978 report: ‘Since about 1969, total control over large portions of AHA funds had been vested under the sole authority of the editor.’ [emphases added])

Therefore, my mild statement in “Remus Extremus” stands as verified by your [full] letter of “denial”, namely, that Kurtz was “released as Humanist Editor for fiscal unaccountability”.

O. The foregoing items are CSICOP's only Council-signed alleged proofs that DR accounts are untrustworthy. Again: both purported DR sins (publishing statements on Kurtz' unaccountability, regarding both lists & finances) occurred after DR's ejection from Council. (Did CSICOPers somehow psychically know ahead-of-time that these sins were going to occur?! Some rationalists.) Likewise, “Crybaby” cites the Grand Theft to show why Council ejected DR — despite the temporal inconvenience that the 1979 Theft was allegedly not “discovered” until 1981. (Or: did “Crybaby” inadvertently here let slip that Councillor Klass was in-on a sudden-discovery-of-Grand-Theft-if-we-need-ever-it ploy back in 1979?) We may search in vain through CSICOP's pre-post-erous p.66 signed statement for the specific official cause of the ejection at the time.

Other than this, CSICOP's p.66 statement denied no facts. (Early statements from all involved, are the best resource for detecting crime — as both the police and the defense-lawyer clique know all too well, which is why the latter saddled the former with the anti-truth Miranda rule.) It instead offered odd-hominem Klass' ad-hominem-titled account as “detailed” (not vouching for its accuracy), just vaguely claiming that DR had become “very difficult to work with” — which translates: we still haven't been able scare or bribe him into silence about CSICOP's attempts to deceive the public about:

0. CSICOP's loss of its astrology-test.

1. Its attempts to statistically cheat its way out of that loss.

2. Its threats against and ejections of the party that insisted on scientifically accurate, honest, & competent reportage.

(J.P.Morgan [“sTARBABY” pp.18&31]: “For every action, there are two reasons. A good reason. And the real reason.”)

3. Why it protected and-or promoted (instead of ejecting) those involved in these deceits.

(Note: At the time of DR's expulsion, no reasons at all were cited for this decision, either publicly or even in communications to him. And the “election” wasn't pre-announced anyway, which is contrary to all standard rules of legitimate organizations. When this point was put to CSICOP Councillor Martin Gardner (1980), he replied delicately that such rules were “crap”, since Kurtz owns the show.)

P. Klass' “Crybaby” excrescence (which CSICOP was too terrified [of lurking hard documentary refutation] to referee or even co-sign — while nonetheless distributing it) is pathetically unable to overturn the all-too-plain facts provided in DR's now-wellknown account of the affair, “sTARBABY”. The CSICOP “response” has been almost pure character-assassination (embodied in the very title of Klass' “Crybaby”), with the intention of fooling its loyal clan into disbelieving “sTARBABY”'s statements, as if their accuracy depended upon DR. (Very few do. As future generations will be able to confirm in astonishing detail.) CSICOP was warned early on that this was the case, which is why denials of essential facts were and are so scarce. A DR memo [“Minefield Dancing”] warned that almost all quotes were provable and thus that lying would be like dancing through a minefield, adding that he was not going reveal right away the very few items which weren't provable — i.e., he wouldn't help CSICOP know where it could & couldn't lie.

[Klass' “Crybaby” knowingly twists this reasonable tactic to make it appear deceitful and-or uncooperative. But DR's approach was: since loyal-Kurtz-CSUCOPper (“sTARBABY” pp.19-21) Klass' initial tactic was to find out how bad the evidence was (i.e., what alibis & lies might work), DR wouldn't bite at Klass' attempt at a pre-getting-story-straight discovery-process. (Keep in mind: DR had given his full, highly detailed account already. CSICOP was at this time hiding from the press, not wanting to commit itself to a story — until finding out what it could get away with.) Results: [a] No CSICOP denials of essential facts. [b] End of any reasonable controversy over the truth of the case.]

Q. For the central CSICOP Council, the result was akin to the Nixon-White-House's post-Dean-testimony catatonia. (Which, as in the prior case, immediately revealed who was telling the truth.) Few CSICOP-devotees appear to have noticed that (knowing of DR's record-keeping), Klass & CSICOP were conspicuously careful not to deny the many verbatim quotes in DR's published accounts (“sTARBABY” and “Remus Extremus”). Few nonpartisans reading these articles' facts and undenied quotes will have much doubt that CSICOP:

 . Bungled its middle name (“Scientific Investigation”).

a. Then tried to keep the public from knowing about it. After all, when you

i. run a secret election to exile someone,

ii. refuse his challenge (“sTARBABY” p.29) even to publish the very fact of this ejection, and finally

iii. call off your own precious 1981 press-conference [note near-cancellation of press-conference in 1978, and closed-door mini-press-conference of 1979 (“sTARBABY” p.28), both instances also arising out of fear of the sTARBABY aftermath: above] at the very moment “sTARBABY” appeared —

well, if you behave so, then trying still to cling to a there-never-was-a-coverup pose can only place you in the netherest regions of utter irrationality & untrustworthiness. (Not to mention: snickerable ineptitude. In both science & coverup.)

Wasn't CSICOP created to oppose that sort of behavior?

R. Though it has brought exile from the pop-science community CSICOP swims in, DR is proud that he published “sTARBABY”. It appeared in Fate (1981 October) because other forums (including the AHA's ironically-titled Free Mind) were afraid to touch a scandal that disgraced (by association) the many prestigious scientists who had foolishly put their trust in Chairman Rug. As scrupulously as DR was able, he provided in “sTARBABY” an accurate Keystone-CSICOPs-pratfall history of The Committee's carelessly-designed & backfired neo-astrology test — and gave rich detail of CSICOP's attempts at coverup, continuing to this day, largely by publicly slandering the party it had failed to intimidate into silence. The reaction which most clearly reveals just how accurate “sTARBABY” was: immediately upon its appearance, Kurtz — who LIVES for the media spotlight — actually cancelled his 1981 press-conference, in (utterly needless) fear of press questions about “sTARBABY”. Hey, no coverup here….

[And the lapdog US “science press” uniformly [100.000%] let CSICOP get away with it, since much of it too (even science writers not directly attached to CSICOP) sees the sTARBABY saga as giving aid&comfort to the occultist Enemy, regardless of principle. (The sole [small] popular article appearing in the US was in Penthouse-Bob Guccione's OMNI.) In fairness, it must be added that one of the best-known science reporters in the world said that he simply would no longer cover any CSICOP doings: “just a bunch of nuts”, not worth the ink. (Has CSICOP ever understood how much popular coverage it has lost over the decades, due to the best of the press' all-too-accurate perception of CSICOP's actual idealism, neutrality, & trustworthiness?) While DR was perfectly willing to field questions without preparation (and without asking CSICOP to send documents to see what was or wasn't provable), Councillors ducked the press for as long as possible, trying to get their story straight; i.e., they ran for cover — even while claiming (to this day) there was not either a cover-up. (See BJ Clinton's similarly embarrassing gyrations [“BJ, SJ, & OJ”] at DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §H1 [p.50].]

S. A final comment on slander-as-policy:

All sorts of CSICOPers freely accused DR of insanity or wildness or somesuch, though Skinq readers seem never to have noticed that no documents were produced in evidence of such a charge — merely occasional organized claims of verbal encounters. (Since Phil Klass regularly taped all manner of stuff, I challenge [his estate] to produce any aural record backing the CSICOP fantasy that I misbehaved in any way at public meetings. Or private conversations. Won't happen, because the alleged behavior never happened.) Perhaps the only close participant in the sTARBABY affair that didn't toss around such accusations was DR, who knew that (though Klass sometimes seemed or acted borderline) his opponents weren't crazy. (Though CSICOP Councillor Hyman disagrees: see Lippard Chronology.) They were simply deceiving (or assenting in deception), to protect very clear and real pragmatic (ultimately financial) interests.

T. It may seem strange or even pathetic that several pretended scholars should have internally defined themselves primarily as CSICOPers. Since they contribute virtually nothing creative to the serious scholarly community, their sense of achievement must come from a crusade of mugging intellectual drunks (which is what pro-wrassling of occultists comes down to) — clinging so to this bullying warfare-career, that normal ethics become expendable trivia. (Crap, to quote a famous Councillor.) But that imbalance was at the core of the origins of the sTARBABY affair: THE-CAUSE-Above-All. Again: these guys think they're fighting irrationality?

U. Here is the heart of the sTARBABY affair (so laboriously diverted-from by heartless CSICOP). The entire sleazy serial-tragedy represented a watershed disaster for the rationalist movement's main advantage (over occultism):

an honest grounding in reality

— without which the battle becomes merely one side's propaganda vs the other's, just the sort of mud-wrassling-level fracas which kooks, publicity-addicts, & hoaxers delight in.

[This was DR's simple, sole principle throughout sTARBABY. (Can present CSICOPpers not understand that as bad as bungling was, the KZA attempt to deceive the public was theintolerable offense, for an institution representing leading rationalists.) So CSICOP diverted attention (via ad-hominems & anachronisms) into a kaleidoscope of colorful imaginary avenues, to make simplicity look complex. See what RayH and I mean about CSICOP as a propaganda outfit?

One of the rare non-anachronistic charges in “Crybaby” (still repeated on A.Randi's website) is that DR had made a phone-call to Univ Toronto astronomer Rob't Garrison after midnight. Since CSICOP had been told by DR that this was not true, Klass shows his integrity in “Crybaby” by not actually stating it to be true but instead quoting another party's article making the accusation. (I.e., making DR responsible for kook-symps' lies about him.) Klass' reservoir of dirt was so thin that he just couldn't resist stooping to something this dubious — and obviously so trivial that no one even thought of ejection over it. (Had this or any other Morganic “offense” by DR been serious, an organization of the slightest decency would have asked DR to answer the charges before it made a decision on ejection. Has any CSUCOP noticed that nowhere does “Crybaby” cite any such procedure? How could it when nothing of the sort ever occurred? Note that when “Crybaby” speaks of such stuff, it pseudo-judiciously states that we-hoped DR would behave better. Hope is a wonderful thing of course. But, gosh, hasn't anyone noticed something? Where do we find in “Crybaby” quotations from CSICOP letters to DR (or even references to phonecalls to DR), urging him to cease his “wild” (pre-dissent-on-KZA) behavior. No such references appear in “Crybaby” because no such communications ever existed. It's such observations that explain why DR gets special chuckles watching Kurtz-csuckups pretending on the internet to be impressed by “Crybaby”. If these “rationalists” can't have the consistency and integrity to apply to such childishly transparent trash the same critical principles they claim to bring against paranormal trash, they should (to borrow from the [pre-bribe] Randi's admonition to fumblers, get out of the game altogether.]

V. No matter how many enlightening pop articles Skinq publishes (and many have been excellent, all along — some much too good to be in any way associated with an unregenerately dishonest organization), from now to doomsday, that will sadly be the eternal substantial-science legacy of CSICOP.

W. Was DR the only CSICOP Councillor to take seriously the otherwise-pretentious title “Committee for the SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION of Claims of the Paranormal”? (Recently shortened to CSI — thereby only accenting the sTARBABY irony.) Should the group have been called instead Committee for Non-Testable Propaganda Against the Paranormal?

Evidently no one on the rationalist side even cares that, thanks to the rationalist movement's bumplessly-continuing exaltation of Chairman Rug (as if cheating and threatening and deliberately smearing one's way out of agreed-upon test-results don't even matter):

no one can ever again trust rationalists to play fair in empirical confrontations.

One might object that CSICOP is simply one group. Problem: CSICOP was backed by a constellation of (largely inattentive, window-dressing) stars of academe, science, and rationalism: Carl Sagan (Cornell Univ), Ernst Nagel (Columbia Univ), Isaac Asimov. (Not to mention Scientific American's encouragement via Martin Gardner and Gerry Piel.) If I were an occultist, I would find it hard to imagine there ever would be a more centrist organization through which to seek meaningful interaction and empirical testing. Thus, a highly precious opportunity for demonstrating genuine scholars' desire to deal honestly with occultist claims existed — but has been squandered-away by the vanity of pseudo-knights ….

[The sTARBABY cheat-fest is a first in rationalism's largely honorable history. Let's at least try to keep it unique. But if the rationalist community not only fails forcefully, publicly, and substantially to sanction the perps (dream on …) but contrarily glorifies them, then neutral observers may understandably conclude that honor in the community is more spiel than real.]

With Michael Shermer's untainted Skeptic (www.skeptic.com) available for years as an alternative for free thinkers, what has organized rationalism's easy standards towards an ethical albratross told us about the wider movement?

[The sTARBABY affair started with attempts to paper-over a science-scandal that a few CSICOP-connected bunglers had gotten deep enough into, that truth-admission was considered too damaging to The Cause. By not stitch-in-time attending to that problem, rationalism has now got a much larger problem. Look up Paul Kurtz on the internet: the rationalist movement has showered him with its highest honors for decades. Dozens of prominent rationalists continue effectively to endorse his exaltation. I.e., rationalism's papering-over problem is now far weightier than a quarter-century ago, regarding what sTARBABY showed about rationalism-as-cultism. (And about the whole CSICOP Council. To appreciate the situation by only partly-apt analogy: imagine if the Kurt Waldheim late-realization had involved not merely KW but the entire ruling body of the UN.) It was DR's concern over this very point that impelled DR's determination forcefully to warn the community of what was at stake: see “sTARBABY” p.17 [“hitherto-spared” — and note how “Crybaby” distorts this last-hope-try into alleged hypocrisy]; p.25 [“rationalism's banner”]; p.27 [“seals the matter forever”]. At the time of sTARBABY, DR asked (“sTARBABY” p.20) Bart Bok to find a competent astronomer to replace DR on the Council and (ibid p.30) asked all those tainted by involvement in the coverup to “think of rationalism's reputation ahead of their own immediate interests and resign”. A quarter century later, DR sees no reason to withdraw this request.

Quite to the contrary: the longer the rationalist community fails to excise the sTARBABY poison from its system, the harder for neutral observers ever to take seriously organized rationalism's claim to care for truth. And fair play with dissenters. Within or without.]

X. Another sTARBABY consequence is the continuing internet flap over the meaning of Randi's private remark (“sTARBABY” p.23) on the unloseability of his Challenge to psychics “I always have an out.”

It turns out that Randi has two utterly contradictory alibis:

[1] Randi's initial story (which required nearly 2 decades to concoct) for the “out” statement is cited in a 2000/1/17 communication from Matt Kriebel. (As of 2007/6/13, it could be found at

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.skeptic/msg/c1e88067b489be96.) In this trial-balloon version, Randi claimed that the “out” referred to his stage act, not the Challenge. Thus, according to Kriebel, DR is typically-sneakily mis-using a quote to lead the reader to “a flase [sic] conclusion”. Kriebel adds that DR has been “rather weasily” in not making clear DR's own statements in the contexts of sTARBABY's quotes.

[DIO readers are encouraged to consult Kriebel's fantasies in his original posting, while comparing them to the reality of the actual text of “sTARBABY” — and, as we are about to see, Randi's own later version! Understand: Kriebel has abusively arrived at the truth of not just the “out” statement but of a vast dark plan of dishonest use of quotes throughout the entire “sTARBABY” account — on no other evidence than a fellow cultist's unchecked bare statement on a single incident. And CSICOP thinks it's anti-cult….]

[2] Fast-forward to the 2007 Wikipedia entry on Randi's foundation

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi_Education_Foundation), which now instead states that Randi's full “out” statement was not out of context, after all, but was truncated by awful DR.

[Whose evilness is all that remains fixed, even as the evidence adduced to demonstrate it now flips 180°. See similar oscillating-evidence-for-unshakable-tenet retreat by the Muffia & Gingerich cults, who for decades tried to weasel out of an ever-accumulating vise of evidence that Gingerich-hero C.Ptolemy had stolen the Ancient Star Catalog, an astrologer-theft now universally acknowledged by genuine scholars of the subject and perhaps even Gingerich.]

According to the New&Improved Version, Randi's “out” statement was indeed about the Challenge, after all. But Randi now says his full statement was: “Concerning the challenge, I always have an 'out': I'm right!”

DR comments:

[a] The last sentence is invented. (And obviously irrelevant. After all, CSICOP was right that there is nothing to astrology — but that hardly saved them from sTARBABY-disaster.)

[b] What happened to flatout-contradicting version#1? — which claimed that the Randi statement had nothing to do with the Challenge and that stating it did was just weasily-DR's typical deceit.

[c] If, as part of a smear campaign to cover for your own cult's crimes against truth, you wish to accuse someone of dishonesty, well, try to get your story straight about just what the dishonesty was. Otherwise, observers just might figure out who the real weasel-liar is.

[d] These are the ANTI-dishonesty stars of rationalism?

[e] DR hopes that readers will not make the same confusionm, which the press and its public are prone to make in other areas, of confusing publicity-seeking pop icons with legitimate scholarship. There is a genuine rationalist tradition: Lucretius, Mill, Russell, etc. CSICOP's cultist falsehoods are not exactly in the tradition of these immortals.

Y. In any case, arguing about Randi's always-have-an-out statement is a max-needless waste of time — because only the most cemental “rationalist” could fail to notice that THE WHOLE sTARBABY AFFAIR (in which Randi was central, treacherous, and (threatening) is the very epitome of always-have-an-out “weaseling”, which has continued for 3  decades.

Z. Postscript:

CSICOP's latest slimy writhe:

the evolving Wikipedia coverage of “The Mars effect” (still posted as of 2007/1/4), which merits preservation (and DR has ensured such) as a classic distortion of the sTARBABY saga.

[Wikipedia commendably prefaces its “Mars effect” page with a prominent warning that the entry is unsatisfactory. And the Wikipedia Mars effect entry's two-sidedness on the point in question has since been much improved.]

It promotes the fantasy that those poor-deluded CSICOP-critics just haven't understood that the Kurtz-published 1976 Humanist “Zelen Test” of Gauquelin's neo-astrology was proposed NOT to find out whether it was valid but merely as a judicious preliminary and-or side-issue probe! — a probe which CSICOP merely continued in order to find out [DR: waaay too-late] if the data were unbiassed.

[See “sTARBABY” p.11 comments on KZA's bait&switch. Curiously, the Wiki article commendably realizes that DR had already revealed strong evidence of bias before the Kurtz-Zelen-Abell test and before KZA finally (even later than that) awoke to it — and accurately notes that this is why DR had advised Kurtz [1975/11/15] against ever issuing the Zelen challenge in the 1st place.]

This is someone's deception (not necessarily the anonymous partial-author's) — and an awfully clumsy one at that: far too easily checkable. See quotes at “sTARBABY” (Fate 1981 Oct; p.5 of reprint); or the original 1976 Jan-Feb Humanist paper (evidence you somehow won't find in CSICOP-peddled “Crybaby”): “A Challenge” to Gauquelin, “We now have an objective way for unambiguous corroboration or disconfirmation …. [so we can] settle this question”. Hardly a cautious preliminary probe. (See also “sTARBABY” p.7.) Which is exactly why DR warned Kurtz, Abell, and Zelen against such a course.

[Hmm. If Kurtz-et-ilk aren't guilty-as-charged on sTARBABY, then: why do those who cultishly suck-up-to-CSICOP-Chairman Kurtz have to resort to illogic and fabrication to get-him-off?

Note: Wiki's author tends to call KZA's test the “Zelen test”. CSICOP propaganda has thus Orwellianly re-named an experiment once proudly proclaimed (Humanist 1977 Nov-Dec) as that of CHAIRMAN Kurtz & Zelen & Abell — before “sTARBABY” appeared. (I.e., despite repeated warnings [ibid pp.4ff], Kurtz full-throttle pushed the others aside, to make himself the weighty Pb-guy — the Captain-Smith of rationalism's Titanic disaster.)]

The Wiki author's argument (his caps): the test “was NOT a test of the Mars effect, but a test of the base-rate (chance) expectation.” Cute ploy. However, as every observer of the affair (scientist or no) is aware, the original 1976 Zelen paper's control-group plan of testing the Mars effect was: see if the natural base-rate equals G's Mars-sports correlation rate of 22%, not the expected random 17% rate. If the base-rate (from c.17000 data) turns out to be 22%, G is refuted. If 17%, G is vindicated. The result was 17%, so G “won” — as all statisticians who've looked at the matter realize: Elizabeth Scott of UCal Berkeley (“sTARBABY” p.9), Ray Hyman of U.Oregon & CSICOP (ibid p.26), Persi Diaconis of Stanford U, Richard Kammann of U.Otago. (Kammann's valuable account is available via Jim Lippard on the web — detailing the history of CSICOP's losses in both statistics and trustworthiness.) Note the private remarks even of Kurtz & Abell at “sTARBABY” pp.9, 12, & 27.

[The Wiki author's argument is almost on the level of saying that Houdini wasn't debunking ESP when he replicated Conan Doyle's favorite psychic effects — because H was not testing ESP but just doing ordinary-laws-of-nature magic.

No. Like Houdini, Zelen was attempting to show that G's neo-astrological stats had an ordinary natural (non-astrological in this case) explanation. So this was not a probe but a definitive Challenge (and was originally so titled in the 1976 Humanist) to G's neo-astrology, aimed at giving a final judgement upon his claim.]

WHO'RE These Folks?

Concluding irony:

Does it help the rationalist community to have pols&dolls who're popularly (if misguidedly) perceived as among rationalism's standard-bearers, behaving-for-private-profit irrationally? Persistently. Evidence-imperviously. Interminably….

With enemies like these, do the occultist kooks need friends?

APPENDIX

Partial Summary of purportedly greedy-nutty-wild-dishonest-amateur DR's post-CSICOP adventures — none of which, curiously, are ever mentioned on CSICOP smear-sites.

[Nor even are his pre-CSICOP discoveries. Both précised elsewhere.]

(The following repeats material on other pages hereabouts, but this convenient compendium may save readers some search-bother.)

 . Discovery that the sole Babylonian attestation of yearlength was based upon well-known Greek solar observations. (This finding has caused the relevant cuneiform text's permanent British Museum display.)

a. Revelation of the star (10i Dra) that was used to orient the Great Pyramid. (Nature 2001/8/16, DIO 13.1 [2003].)

b. First critical edition of Tycho's 1004-star catalog, representing years of unfunded DR labor, establishing several notable advances over previous historical star catalogs. (These advances itemized at DIO 3 [1993] p.3.)

c. Several novel proofs of the usurpation of the Ancient Star Catalog (see, e.g., DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡8 §§C22, C25, C31 [pp.110-113]), which — along with key contributions by R.Newton, G.Graßhoff, K.Pickering, & D.Duke — broke (ibid §C2 [p.103]) the back of long-stubborn defenses of (ancient) astronomy's top plagiarist.

d. Exposure of the modern high official who gave the Brits a few extra years of theft of the planet Neptune (see DIO 9.1 [1999] ‡1; Scientific American 2004 Dec pp.92f).

e. Overwhelming victory in the ex-controversy over the Peary 1909 N.Pole claim. A needlessly protracted dispute, during which DR screwed-up on one document.

[This error has always been CSICOP's sole interest in DR's lifetime of research: see CSICOP's addenda to “Crybaby”, as it has been circulated and posted for years. CSICOP of course is blind to what this mistake has proved by the lethal contrast of DR's immediate, open, and strongly self-critical acknowledgement of error (e.g., DIO 1.1 [1991]) ‡1 §C3 [p.7], etc.) vs the integrity of CSICOP or NGS or AAS-HAD. Instead of smoke-screening, hiding, and-or opponent-smearing, DR swiftly (right after seeing evidence contra DR's initial false interpretation of the document) issued a total public retraction and wrote NGS-chief G.Grosvenor a letter of congratulation on GG's vindication on that document, stating in so many words that GG was right and DR was wrong.

[No reply. The document in question was also initially misidentified by the Peary Family; National Geographic (1989 June: time-sights, likely from 1906 Feb — false on both counts); and the hireling NGS-consultant “Navigation Foundation” — and was ultimately solved by DR and revealed by him (1989/12/11 NGS press-conference) as an 1894/12/10 Peary record, an identification which the NavFou has privately assented to. But never publicly.]

Isn't it curious that none of the huge, rich institutions (that the “science press” kisses up to) is ever capable of issuing such a swift, straight-forward retraction? Evidently, there something so uniformly sick in popular science journaldom that such frank behavior has been rendered impossible and has become obsolete.]

Elsewhere, DR was vindicated on all of dozens of other new contributions to the Peary N.Pole case, resulting in the end of that once-seemingly-impregnable hoax. See also DR's novel finds (which had started with Rawlins Peary … Fiction [1973] pp.70-75) on Peary's 1906 claim to have discovered an entirely non-existent “Crocker Land” in the Arctic Ocean, perhaps the northern-most land on Earth. These revelations finally culminated in a 1989 documentary find which has dramatically and unambiguously brought home even to non-specialists Peary's willingness to engage in conscious exploration fabrication.

But: take a look at the comments on the N.Pole dispute appearing in the final paragraph of Kurtz-Free-Inquiry-posted “Crybaby” to see the shamelessly & dishonestly unbalanced account CSICOP wishes its readers to think is the ultimate resolution of the Peary ex-dispute. Again: when you're out to smear someone, nothing positive is permitted.

f. Diary proof of the fraudulence of R.Byrd's alleged 1926 trip to the North Pole (New York Times 1996/5/9 p.1); plus R.Amundsen's priority there (University of Cambridge's Polar Record 36:25-50 [2000]) and his pre-eminence among all polar explorers.

g. Completion of nearly 200y of gradual critical establishment (1830s-to-2006) of the text of Ptolemy's Geography. The achievement was made possible by Aubrey Diller (1903-1985), long the world's leading expert in ancient geographical mss, who left his final work for publication by DR. This is the 4rd time DIO has issued the ultimate scholarly contribution of an eminent academic.

h. DIO has been provided without cost to ordmag 100 top libraries and ordmag 1000 scholars worldwide since its inception 16y ago. DR and his wife (while themselves living modestly) have also fiscally established several prizes, local and international — as well as totally funding Maryland's beautiful granite Rachmaninov memorial, co-sponsored by a number of Baltimore's leading families.

i. Only the homeopath-level special intelligence that peculiarly adheres to pyramidal-suckup cults could discern in such a career the insanity, unreliability, and grabby-greed which CSICOP's canny kook hunters chorally certify is in-there some-where.

j. For the similarly penetrating intelligence of O.Gingerich&co in another sphere, see Isis 94.3:500-502 [2003] p.502 or DIO 11.3 [2002] ‡6 n.12 [p.73]. Indeed, mathematically-challenged Harvard historian Gingerich was one of the “prestigious” pols — like Abell — whom Kurtz went to for years (exemplifying the very dumbest of pop-sci amateurs' catalog of common mistakes), vainly seeking accurate computations of planet positions and (sph trig computations of) celestial sector data. Only when his “experts” Abell & Gingerich kept giving him nothing but excuses [see “sTARBABY” p.6! — also pp.9-10, or “Crybaby”], did Kurtz in desperation finally [ibid p.9] turn the project's computation over to DR, who got it done in a matter of hours.

k. So, let's get this straight: CSICOP csucked up to the bumblers [because of their p.r. contacts] and ejected the scientist who had warned them not to get into their quacksand and had then tried to rescue the situation as much as possible by immediately doing for them the very math they were unable for years to accomplish?!! Is that what happened? Well … Yeah.

Hey, isn't it inspiring that not a single US “science press” personage has ever found a few minutes to put such revealing questions to this gang of ruthless celebrity-wannabees-posing-as-pure-hearted-academics?

[Note that any other genuinely competent specialist in this area presumably could've done the work if given 1/10 the time Kurtz gave GA&OG. Recall that earlier European testers, Belgium's Comite Para, also had no-problem doing such work.]

Moreover, Gingerich's longtime unremitting slander of DR played a rôle in non-scientist Kurtz ignoring DR's repeated early knowledgeable warnings (“sTARBABY” pp.4-6) of potential disaster with the KZA test, so OG bears serious responsibility for the entire sTARBABY stain on rationalism.

[Which probably doesn't concern piously religious OG in the slightest — he early-on expressed his distaste for CSICOP, telling Kurtz that it seemed (to holy OG) to be aiming at opposing things spiritual.]

OG's ignorant slanders of DR (and fellow Ptolemy-skeptic R.Newton [Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab], whose IQ was smiles above pathetic OG's) also contributed to Councillors' later contemptuous folly. (Via, e.g., M.Gardner, who disgracefully accepted-without-investigation ever-reliable Gingerich's assurances that top JHU physicist R.Newton was a crank and DR a mere amateur.) Incidentally, OG's bizarre dedication to libelling DR for decades (sample at DIO 4.3 [1994] ‡15 §H [pp.133-134]) grew out of DR's heretical sin of criticizing an astrologer (is CSICOP taking-in the irony here?): Claudius Ptolemy — one of several clumsy kook-plagiarists whom godly-Gingerich has fallen in love with over the years.

l. CSICOP Councillors made the same mistake DR's other academic enemies have made: misled by their own cultishly-smearing, self-feeding, fantasy-world (combined with oft-amusing technical semi-numeracy), each gang-cohesively convinced itself that DR was just a worthless malcontent who'd fade (any day now …) into well-deserved obscurity. They were so right, that DR's journal DIO now draws upon the wisdom of several boards containing not merely leading academics, but the world leader in at least 3 fields: celestial motion, secular time-variation, & cuneiform texts. Besides high-quality technical researches, DIO has — as one of its public services — spent a higher percentage of pages investigating, exposing, and condemning dishonest science than any journal in history. (The latest is just posted: 2007.) Which is why establishment-sycophants who attack DR invalidly are assured of:

[a] Compiling syc-up points with jaw-grinding science-institution archons — who automatically regard public criticism and fraud-discussions as simply washing-dirty-linen treason.

[b] Finding their debunking debunked and revealed to be the usual dim, bungled, & embarrassing junk.

[c] Inspiring DR to dissect establishment-cultism ever more acid-uously. (It's not that academic establishments are masochistic — no, they are [outside politics] just dumb. So dumb, that they can't even pick competent hit-men.)

[The DIO attribute which obviously makes it the revealingly-frequent recipient of syco attacks is: DIO does not shy away from fraud when it happens to be committed by powerful establishments. (A useful courage, naturally skew-portrayed — quoting DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡1 §C4 [p.7] — as a demented sin by polbrain-kisser B.Schaefer in S&T 2002 Feb p.40.) Nothing could more clearly distinguish DIO from CSICOP, which appears to have always seen itself as primarily a mud-wrassling pop-level goon-squad for the establishment — with mud-slinging P.Klass long starring as the goon's-goon: DIO 7.3 [1997] ‡6 n.47 [p.95].]

m. Nonetheless, DR's researches have drawn a much-appreciated array of praise from the very top of genuine academe (as against the pop writers, hustlers, pols, & institutional archons who've generally dominated CSICOP's active circle) — work that, since DR's CSICOP days, has resulted in papers in the areas of tidal theory (Royal Astronomical Soc), perturbational math (Nature), atmospheric refraction (PASP & Vistas in Astronomy), not to mention analyses of suspect exploration claims, e.g., DIO 10 [2000] — co-published with the University of Cambridge; and DIO 6.3 [2007]. A few of these findings resulted in prominent national and international media stories, including all three networks' evening news (1996/5/9), and several New York Times articles in either the science section or page-one: 1989/12/11, 1996/5/9, 1998/11/26, 2001/8/28.

All of which, though enjoyable, is curiously ironic, since DR will be most remembered (and merely among a few specialists, at that) for more inwardly rewarding inductive work (in science and scientific history) that is of virtually zero concern to the general public. Or CSICOP.

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