 Hello everybody, welcome to TAM 2013's Workshop 4B, Preserving Skeptical History. My name is Daniel Lockston. I'm a writer, researcher and illustrator for Skeptic Magazine, published by the Non-Prophet Skeptic Society. I'm the guy who does junior skeptic. I also write books, including the latest one, co-authored with Donald Prothorough, Abominable Science, which we're pre-releasing right here at TAM today. I'm joined by Tim Farley. Tim is a computer software engineer and a regular contributor to the virtual Skeptics Webcast and the Skeptic Society's Skepticality podcast. Tim is the creator of the JRAFS Today in Skeptic History, an app for iOS. He's also the creator of the websites WatchTheHarm.net and Skeptools.com. Tim will be presenting original research for us today, which I'm very excited about. Susan Gerbeck is the creator of the Gorilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project, which organizes and coaches people about how to make responsible, well-sighted contributions to Wikipedia on topics related to skepticism for in science and the paranormal. She is the co-founder of the Monterey County Skeptics and a steering member of the Independent Investigations Group, the IIG. Robert Schaefer has been a regular contributor and columnist for the Skeptical Inquirer since 1977. He is the co-founder of the Bay Area Skeptics and Skepticism's foremost critic of UFology. He is the author of books including The UFO Verdict, Examining the Evidence, and UFO Sightings, The Evidence. A very special expert participant today is Ray Hyman. Ray is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon and the world's most respected critic of parapsychology. In 1976, he was a co-founder of PsyCOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, now called CSI, and his involvement in what is now called Scientific Skepticism goes back decades earlier. Ray is the author of books including The Illusive Quarry, a Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research, and a co-author of Waterwitching USA, a Skeptical Appraisal of Dowsing, which was first published in 1959. I'd like to say a few conceptual remarks here, and then we'll go, we'll segue straight into my short presentation about research tools, and then my colleagues will take up the fun stuff about where we have come from and what you can do about it. Should scientific skeptics care about history? You've chosen to attend a workshop with a rather dusty title, Preserving Skeptical History, so I imagine that you have opinions about this yourself, but you'd be surprised how often the question comes up in the literature. It really breaks down into two different questions. Should skeptics care about preserving or studying our own history? And should we care, and to what extent should we devote resources and time and attention to the study of the history of claims and hoaxes? On the first of those questions, I've invested quite a bit of time in recent years on the exploration of skeptical history because this seemed necessary. There's a lot of skeptical history, and it's important to understand our place in that ongoing story. Any serious field talks about the hard-won lessons of the past, the state of its own scholarship, and the road map for future development. It's important to know something as skeptics about what skeptics have learned, but understanding our own history is something of a neglected area in skepticism. It's not just that skeptics sometimes forget or mythologize our own history. Some folks are actually scornful of the very idea of understanding where we have come from. Sometimes the entirety of the last three decades work and beyond is rejected as the irrelevant province of the old guard, as quaint, obsolete, or unimportant. You won't be surprised that I don't buy this who cares argument, but I'm familiar with it. Such sentiments have been around for a long time, certainly for well over a century. And for this reason, serious students of hoaxes and offering science claims have often felt a need to explain or apologize for the importance of studying our history. As an example, I'm going to offer a comment made by my boss, Michael Shermer, back in 1996. Michael had learned from Stephen J. Gould that a rigorous investigation of extraordinary, of an extraordinary claim, mesmerism, had once been commissioned by the King of France. It was conducted by some big names in the history of science, including Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier. The results were published in 1784 in French. 200 years later, they had still never been translated into English. This was a really astonishing bit of neglect on the part of the skeptical literature and Michael decided to fix it. In 1996, the commission's report was published in English translation for the very first time in the pages of Skeptic Magazine. And we've since made this available online as well in eSkeptic. This was awesome stuff, but it brings me to Michael's comment about skeptical history. In his introduction to this key source, profoundly relevant right now to ongoing energy healing claims, trained historian Michael Shermer found it necessary to argue it is not a waste of space. Because the history of skepticism and the skeptical movement should be tracked and recorded as any field should be. And this is the first scientific investigation that we know of into what would today be considered a paranormal or pseudo-scientific claim. I find this kind of an amazing thing for a trained historian to feel obligated to say. Now returning to the second question, should skeptics study the history of the paranormal? Here the answer is even simpler. Much of what we call scientific skepticism is the study of the history of the paranormal. Scientific skepticism operates within an empirical framework. It is closely tied to the ethos of science. But most of what we actually do as skeptical investigators is not science. Instead, most of what we do, much of what we do at least, is to ask and sometimes to answer this question, what really happened? What really happened in this case? Was it paranormal or was it something that we can explain? This is fundamentally a historical question. And the tools we use to answer it are very often the tools of historical sleuthing. Often it's not possible to cast light upon a friend's science claim, except through historical means. Let me give you a quick example. Many of you are familiar with this iconic 1967 film still, allegedly depicting a Sasquatch. I argue something in abominable science, which will be unpopular with skeptics and with proponents alike. No one knows if this film shows a Sasquatch or a guy in a suit. That is, the film itself cannot tell us. As evidence, the film is consistent with a monster or a guy in a suit. We can't do any experiment or make any observation that will specifically tell us what happened in this one-off event in the past. But we can place a film in its historical context, and this can help us to evaluate the paranormal claim at the heart of it. It is important to know, for example, that a man named William Rowe, described a nearly identical encounter with a nearly identical monster ten years before the Patterson-Gilman film was created. It's also important to know that Patterson not only was familiar with the Rowe case, but had personally drawn this picture which looks for all the world like a storyboard for his never replicated film. If this case has ever demonstrated once and for all to be a hoax, it will be historical evidence that settles it. A confession from the surviving one of the two filmmakers or the discovery of a suit that was used in the film. So history matters to skeptics. Historical sleuthing is part of who we are. So how do we do this? I'm gonna give you a lightning tour of a few of the tools I use for my work on genersceptic and other projects. I should emphasize that I'm not a trained historian. My training is in visual art and in sheep herding. But writing for skeptic has forced me to pick up a few tricks, cobble together a few tricks along the way. My major strategy is pretty straightforward, read a lot of stuff. There's just no getting around this. Acquiring deep knowledge about skepticism in general or any paranormal subtopic in specific requires a substantial ongoing investment of engaged active research. It isn't enough to pick up some talking points from podcasts or blogs, you have to dig down. And it matters what you dig down into. To get to the bottom of things, you have to go to the bottom of things, to the roots. But how to find the roots? Susan's going to tell you more about the power and value of Wikipedia. So I'll just agree here that Wikipedia and the top Google hits are very useful first stops on any new research project. I usually start there, just like anyone else. But some warnings here regarding internet research. Not everything is digitized, you still need paper. Not everything digitized is on Google. Most of the historical information you're after is locked up in specialized archives often behind paywalls. And not everything relevant is in English. But broad online sources are good for identifying a first round of commonly cited primary and secondary sources. Having done that, my next step is to get those sources and read them, books, journals, newspaper articles. My goal is always to read everything myself so that I know what the originals really said. Then I figure out what sources those sources refer to and I get those and the chain builds out from there. With one source leading to another one bibliography leading to the next. Sometimes this is easier said than done. The paranormal literature is infamous for crapping citations and for cut and paste copying from one source to the next. Sometimes the trail gets lost quite quickly or branches out in too many directions to follow. One of the places I luck to help me get my bearings is skepticism's primary semi-technical periodical literature. Many national and regional groups around the world have published decades of useful material. And often this remains locked up on paper offline. The biggest English language publications in North America are the Skeptical Enquirer and Skeptic Magazine. The Skeptical Enquirer has been published continuously since 1976. Skeptic Magazine has been published continuously since 1992. And both magazines have been moving older articles online for free as quickly as their resources allow. Tons of articles are available for free at skeptic.com and psychop.org to just run a search at either site. Both organizations also sell back issues and I have a nearly complete collection of both, consult them all the time. In some cases, skeptical publications have collected, collected their entire output in searchable DVD or CD-ROM archives. These are essential resources. These are really cheap, like 30 bucks each kind of thing. These are two collections that I consult routinely. The great power here is searchability. If this quick tour has a theme, that's it. Searchability is the advantage you have that skeptical researchers didn't have even ten years ago. Newspapers are the bread and butter of historical research. Thankfully, many are now digitized and searchable. But it's hard to really grasp how many thousands and tens of thousands of national, regional and local newspapers have existed over the past three centuries. For this reason, an ecosystem of services and portals have grown up, each offering a little digitized slice, a little sliver of the world's output of newspapers. The one I use most often is the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database. This requires access to a major library portal, but it's immensely powerful. ProQuest allows brute force searching across several major US newspapers at once, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution, and others. My other favorite is the Times Digital Archive, that's the Times of London. This is essential for me when running the back trail and mysteries like the Loch Ness Monster, or the Crystal Skull of Dew. Newspaperarchive.com is a pay service that I subscribe to. It's a big glitchy, technically. The coverage is patchy. But it archives a vast number of regional newspapers around the world, regional marketing newspapers that you wouldn't get from another source. I've used many others, some free, some behind paywalls. For my story on the MOA, I use the Free Papers Past Archive created by the Dashel Library of New Zealand. My Moe Kaleam-Bembe research was built on the African newspapers collection from the Center for Research Libraries. But still, for all the searchability, even now, not everything is digitized. Microfilm is still a thing. I still use it, sometimes you still have to. The research for plominable science involve person weeks of eyestrain in dimly lit basements. A lot of my research involves periodicals, but books are just as important, often more so. I've been fairly aggressively growing my junior skeptic research library for the past several years. Whenever I come across a reference to a book that I think might be useful for my research in the future, I make an effort to acquire it. Or if it's out of my reach financially, I make a note of it for later. And this involves spending a lot of money, books are expensive. The problem is that I don't have a lot of money. So like most skeptical researchers, I face considerable challenges in terms of my financial resources. So how do we find books on a budget? Not everything is digitized, but an incredible number of scanned books are now available and searchable online for free. This is possible because under US copyright law, most sources created before 1923 and some created after are in the public domain. A very powerful tool is Google Books. Google has scanned millions of books old and new, and this allows you to quickly identify many of the sources that have discussed your topic. Many Google Books allow you to preview a few pages, or at least a snippet. Even better, many allow you to read the entire book for free. You can read these books on your desktop, you can search inside them, and you can also link to particular pages in an email or blog post. Most important, you can download these entire books into popular e-book formats, or PDF, and keep a permanent copy on your desktop. Again, all free. Keeping permanent copies is very useful. When I started doing Genius Skeptic, I relied almost entirely on library books. And I quickly ran into the limits of that, which is that people ask you questions later that you can't answer without having that book. So I keep a permanent copy of everything now. Every reference I use, digital or print, are preferably both, except in rare exceptions, but I try to. Google Books is not the only such archive offering free, complete books. Another I use often is the Internet Archive, archive.org. This is handy because it offers both scanned PDFs and searchable HTML text. I archive a PDF copy and use that for checking the accuracy of the HTML. And I use the selectable text for my notes, it's faster. Another is Project Gutenberg. All these are indexed by Google. Just include Gutenberg or archive.org in your search. There are others all over the world, so I'm easy to access. I'm less so. What if you need or prefer a hard copy of an out-of-print book? Most of my research is still done with dead trees. I mark it up with pencil, I fill them with post-its. It's just how I work. One option is to print entire books at home. It's pretty cheap to run off an entire book. From a PDF using a laser printer. I do this now and again. It's even cheaper if you print on an industrial scale, which has led to a proliferation of print-on-demand book vendors. I often order these from Amazon. They're a bit of a secret weapon for researchers. I order a ton of these, but you have to watch out never to order any that were made using optical character recognition because these are typically full of gibberish. Often they mangle the very information you're after, like names and dates. Always order books that are actually scanned from an original copy. You can buy cheap commercial reprints. A lot of books have been produced over and over again. They've been in print continuously for 100 years or more. Now, I haven't emphasized the library in this talk, awesome as libraries are, because I want permanent copies of everything. But here's a trick I often use for rare books and ephemera held in libraries and archives. Just take pictures. Take pictures with your digital camera. Film is free now. A thousand pictures is the same as one picture. It doesn't matter. Many librarians actually prefer you to take pictures of their collection rather than putting things onto a scanner tray or a Xerox machine, because it's easier on the spines of the books. You don't necessarily have to have a big rig. An iPhone might do the trick. I fairly often have colleagues who have sources that I need. Just take a picture, email it to me. I've got it in two minutes from across the country. My skeptical research relies heavily on used books. And here there is one big secret weapon, abebooks.com, formerly called the Advanced Book Exchange. This is a kind of eBay for professional used book dealers. Book dealers from all over the world lists their inventory here. You can price, you can search, and price compare all of them. I've bought hundreds, literally hundreds of books through Abe Books. It's a great way to find rare sources at reasonable prices, way better than the Amazon Marketplace. Sometimes really rare sources. So I'm gonna leave you with a little research victory story. Back in 2005, I was hitting a dead end in my research into the origins of pyramid power. Every pyramid power source told the same canonical origin tale involving a pendulum dowser named Antoine Bovis. According to the story, Bovis had an epiphany while standing inside the Great Pyramid when he noticed that the carcasses of stray animals were supernaturally preserved. Skeptics had nibbled around the edges of the story, the Danish skeptics in particular, and I had to get some of their stuff translated to see what progress they had made. But where the hell did the story come from? Did this event happen at all? Who was this guy? Well, Abe Books allows you to create wants like Google Alerts. You can list an automatic search and it will, if something pops up in their inventory anywhere in the world, it will just send you an email telling you where it is and how much it costs. So I created one for Antoine Bovis early in my research. Near the end I got an email. A handbound package of his self-published 1930s pamphlets had turned up at an antique dealer in Germany. Now I ordered it half-flying because I don't speak German. The listing was in German. And I had to get it translated because I also don't speak French. But it was worth it because Bovis himself, this is the punchline, Bovis himself said that he formed his pyramid ideas through armchair reasoning and occult experiments in France being unable to go to see the pyramids in person. The standard story repeated for decades was totally Bovis, complete mythology. And that's the good stuff. That's the big payoff for historical research, learning something that the world has forgotten or perhaps never knew. Thank you. I'm Tim Farley and I decided to focus on the history of skeptic conferences and I'll explain why I only have a short time to talk. But this was a research project that I did myself. I've been doing, if you follow me on social media, I've been doing these little skeptic history posts I do. It's like today in skeptic history and little tidbits of information because I noticed there were a lot of people who were getting into skepticism online who weren't immersed in the history, hadn't done the reading and it was a nice little sort of entree. Today is James Randi's birthday. Here's some stuff about his biography or whatever and been doing it every day for four years. And as Daniel said, that eventually became the JREF iPhone app so you can have all those little facts in your pocket and it'll pop up. So I started to, last year, started to do some research to augment this database and I got interested in the idea of conferences. So why conferences? Well, we're at one. But this year is actually the anniversary of a couple of key conferences. The first conference that Psychop put on itself was done in 1983 and this year is the 30th anniversary of that conference. And the first conference that JREF put on, the first amazing meeting was 10 years ago this year in January of 2003. So you've got those two anniversaries coming. And then of course, if you know some of the history of modern skeptical organizations like JREF, Psychop and whatnot, you know that Psychop itself was created at a conference called The New Irrationalism in 1976. So conferences are sort of part of our DNA. So I thought, well, let's look at what kind of history are there, what was the first one, maybe that'll get me some interesting facts. And it sort of became a whole project. One of the things I noticed is information about conferences is often not preserved because the organizers are focused on running the event and they're focused on going on to the next event. And so they move on to their next event quickly and they throw stuff away. Conferences that have websites often will have this year's information and nothing else. No indication of what the past history of that conference was. So I thought that this was a shame. As an example of that, Jim Lippard told me about a conference that he presented at and I went to Google to find some information about it. It was only 10 years ago here in Vegas and the only reference to that conference that I can find in Google are Jim's slide decks. So it's hard to find this information. But the other reason I was interested in it is the idea of a proxy measurement, kind of measuring skepticism. How much interest is there in skepticism? Because obviously the JREF is very interested in that. How do we measure the number of skeptics? For a lot of other things like atheists or agnostics or things, there's sort of an overlap with categories that people survey, but not really for us. And if you use measurements like magazine subscriptions, you run into problems there because magazines are in a lot of trouble now because people have switched to the internet. If you try to do donors to organizations like JREF, well, that's, you know, there's some confounding variables there in terms of, you know, different campaigns and donations go up and down. And there's no polls that are done that we can leverage off of like the Pew poll often does things relating to atheism but not specifically skepticism. And if you were here last year, I gave a plenary talk in the big room and one of my slides was this graph about skeptic podcasts. It was a previous research project I did, just trying to do a census of all the skeptic podcasts there are just to find out how many there are. And I ran the data in terms of, this is just the number of titles, number of different skeptic podcasts there are. And you can see there's an interesting inflection upwards somewhere around 2008, 2009, it looks like we've had a lot of growth and it seems to be leveling off. But of course, near the edges of any graph is always a problematic area. And near the left edge of this graph is a big problem because podcasts didn't exist prior to 2004 or so. So I thought, well maybe we could look at skeptic conferences, they have a deeper history and that might tell us some interesting things. So I was nodding a lot when Daniel was talking about research and old books and going through the skeptical inquirers because it was a lot of stuff like that for me, going through back issues, looking at things like the ads for the conferences. Sometimes that would be all you had if no one decided to write an article about it after the fact. And archived copies of skeptic websites, he mentioned the internet archive in terms of old books but there's also part of that same archive keeps archived copies of sites that might even be gone. So if you can at least find the URL for a site and you know that something existed around a certain time, you can see what that web, you may be able to see what that website looked like at that time. And of course I consulted with a lot of other skeptics. So what did I find? I found between 1976 and the end of this year, the interesting thing about conferences is you know about them a little bit ahead of time, I found just over 500 events and they've been held in 25 different countries, at least as far as I can tell. I know my data is not complete and I think this is going to be an ongoing project to try to complete this data and fill it in because I think some other interesting things might come out of it. My scope, I limited to scientific skepticism events, events with programming similar to this event. And I limited to multiple speakers and an actual schedule. So for instance a skeptics in the pub event would not be included or a single speaker, one off type of thing. Something with multiple speakers and a schedule. And I specifically limited myself away from atheism, humanism, secular events. Those events are great and have a lot of overlap with this event but I wanted to focus on scientific skepticism. And this is what I came up, the summary of the data. You can see that a big focus in Europe and the United States and there's a big cluster of the rationalist organizations in India and of course Australia and New Zealand. I ran into another issue that Daniel talked about which is the language barrier. I only speak English well. So any country where the websites are not in English, I had trouble going through that data. So my data for India I think is problematic right now. I need to do some work on that and other countries as well. In the stats, the further stats I'm gonna talk about, I'm gonna focus on the events that happened in English speaking, primarily English speaking countries to kind of steer away from where I know there are problems in the data currently. So here are a few things I discovered. One is that the national organizations are the most consistent, particularly outside the United States. There are places like Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Netherlands and Hungary that have had annual events like clockwork since the 1980s in some cases. Some of the oldest events that are out there. And if you want to count the quackery organization in the Netherlands which technically was, you wouldn't have called it a skeptic organization but it started in 1881 and pivoted into alternative medicine in the 70s. Ironically right around the same time Psychop was came around. And so there's a big history there. The pure scientific skepticism events have evolved to kind of mixed events, particularly in the United States. There's a lot of events that kind of crossed that barrier and I did include if an event had atheist programming and had skeptical programming, I included that. That's another interesting area where you have to make some interesting decisions in India because what we would call a skeptic event, they would call a rationalist event and you almost can't have one without having some, what we would call atheist type topics here. It's just the nature of that culture and the nature of the problems that they face. A big new thing since 2007 is skepticamp which is what's called an unconference. It's an uncurated conference. There's no central organization that decides what's gonna be in that conference. People volunteer and provide the programming themselves. Another really interesting trend that's happening just in the last few years are large free events in the United States. Several organizations have set up events where they do fundraisers and they find other ways to fund flying speakers in and getting their venue and actually offer the event to the public for free. And one event, Skepticon in Missouri has rivaled the size of TAM with the number of attendees that they get. And the other really interesting thing is events inside of other events and there's several of these but they started with Skeptrack at DragonCon in Atlanta which is a skeptical programming track inside a science fiction fantasy convention. The idea being let's bring skepticism to people who might not seek out a skeptical conference. And there's several other ones of those. There's Balticon, there's one at Convergence and there's Skeptics on the Fringe which is sort of an event inside an event inside an event which is interesting in Enver. So here's my data. Again, I focused on the English speaking countries each pair of bars, the left hand bar is my total so that does include the non-English events. The right hand bar or if you can see the color the green bar is the English speaking events. And there's some variability there. I think maybe there are some holes in the data particularly as you go back in there. But as you can see just as with the Skeptic podcast there does definitely seem to be an inflection upward right around 2009. And maybe, not quite clear, maybe a leveling off in the last year or so. So by this measure you would say that we can clearly see that skepticism has grown quite a lot in just in the last four years, five years. And here's where that growth is. These are all events that just started in the last six years. Skepticamp of course I already mentioned but all these other titles, there's I think 16 titles here, 13 of them are new annual events that have repeated and two are series of events that are more often than annual. Like Skepticamp there had been 70 of them. And that's it. That's the results of my research. I hope you found it interesting. Hi, I'm Susan Gerbeck. Thank you for coming out today. I'll be talking about skepticism using this is more practical of how to do things and he said push a button. So I'll just push buttons until it does something. Right button, he said. Button. You have to be able to see the left one. Like a TV. Ah, okay. So I have a team of people who edit Wikipedia for skeptical content. Grilla Skepticism and Wikipedia which is Grilla Skepticism is a term coined by Mark Edward to talk about our project of how we try to really focus on topics that are skeptically related. One of the things I'm gonna talk to you about today is not necessarily some of the things I've done with let's say Bill Maher, Jimmy McCarthy, Sothe Brown, but talking about our skeptical spokespeople because we need to have the backs of our skeptical spokespeople. Does that sound really odd? It sounds odd to me. You guys hearing it? What's wrong? It's not my voice, I promise. You got it? Okay. So one of the people we started with is Jerry Andrews and I got to pick Jerry Andrews because it's my project and I said that's what I wanna do. So I started with Jerry Andrews who many people from 10 years past know this is a dear friend of Ray Hyman's here and James Randy and if you don't know who Jerry Andrews is shame on you, you should know who he is and if you go to his Wikipedia page you'll see that I wrote this page, it rewrote it, it was already started and I decided that we need to start somewhere and we're gonna start with Jerry. So I'm not gonna let you sit here and read all these slides because that's just not the way we're gonna do things today. So we're gonna just go through these kind of quickly but what I have done is I've taxed my language teams and I have 17 languages. We are writing the Wikipedia pages in all languages because it is not all of us that we need to educate here today. We need to educate people outside of our choir and outside of our boundaries and the world needs to know who we are. I thought Jerry Andrews would be the perfect person to start with, not only because he's a quintessential skeptic and an all around kind of neat guy but he invented all his own optical illusions and he, you know, optical illusions are a great way to spread the love of magics, you know, the idea, it didn't need to be translated in any language either because an optical illusion is an optical illusion in any language, right? So I have these a little out of order but I'm gonna show you very quickly that we have already translated, oh, this is showing you the photos that I had uploaded by the estate of Jerry Andrews and you'll see that I was able to use some notable people in the pages and this right here is a picture with David Copperfield and Penn and Teller who visited Jerry Andrews' home which is called the Castle of Chaos which the Castle of Chaos was a, is now an Oregon national landmark, it's now a landmark because somebody cared and they put it on the landmark so we have preserved his home as well as the optical illusions but I have this on this page and it's very important that we get, oops, citations in here and you can see we have quite a few citations and I'll talk about those in a moment but we have translated his Wikipedia page into many languages and Portuguese, Spanish and I'm not necessarily what I'm clicking on is the page so we've also translated to French and Dutch and Russian and Swedish, I believe if that's not right and what do you think guys, Arabic, isn't that great? So we've got this page translated into many different languages and from these pages once they're translated then we can move on from there and start translating and work on other pages that will branch off of these so that you know how you go to Wikipedia and you go from link to link to link to link we wanted them to have something to do so if they start with the Jerry Andrews page they'll be able to go into the PsyCOP page, they'll be able to go to James Randi page, Arie Hyman page, blah, blah, blah, blah and get all of our history down as we go so really quickly as Daniel was saying we do not have, you know when we were creating our modern skepticism we didn't have anybody out there going hey, good idea, maybe we should keep track of this maybe we should take notes maybe somebody should film this or something no, they didn't know what they were doing back in the day that this was gonna be a phenomenon that we're gonna be meeting in Las Vegas in July they had no concept of this so we have to go back and try to retrace this history and try to recapture it and I have several ways I've done this because I don't like it when people tell me I can't do things so I'm just gonna find a way of doing it one of the things we've done is I take a lot of video and I have friends that take a lot of video and we like to get the citations in a way where here's a video we did of the Gerry Anders table that was here a few years ago and we've captioned my language teams have captioned that video in many languages so that as a citation if you're reading a Dutch page or a Swedish page or a Russian page or whatever hopefully my team has gotten through and has translated the video so that citation is much more valid to the person who's reading it we're out of here to translate okay here's Ray Hyman really quick I just wanted to talk about that we have I have rewritten Ray Hyman's page and right now it is hourly translated into Portuguese and it will be shortly translated into many more the goal is to translate everything so I'm always looking for people to help us out here here's another this is what I was gonna say we can't find our history because a lot of cases it does not exist so what I've done is I have asked other people and this is what I do is to create the videos these are not fancy there's nothing smacky wonderful about any of these things this is a video I created just almost on a whim I sat Ray Hyman and Jim under down down and I said I have this problem finding a citation that I needed on Ray Hyman's page or Gerry Anders' page or the Skeptic Toolbox page or the whatever page I know that there's a story out there but there's no citation for it so if you sit them down and you interview them guess what you have a citation nobody's told me I can't do this so I'm continuing to do it and so far nobody's questioned it because you just do it with confidence that's the way it is then you caption it then you caption it in other languages and the next thing you know you've got citations all over the ying ying so what I've done is I've done many interviews with Ray Hyman and not only about Ray Hyman but Ray Hyman's memories of other people he's known so we need to make sure we're getting our history down so that we have it for later time let's capture this this is a photo that was uploaded I believe by Robert right Robert has been very generous to take some of the old photos that he has just had on wherever he had and said oh somebody wants use of these photos and I'm like yeah so he uploaded them for us and we're able to do this is Ray Hyman here isn't he cute? and some of the different photos you know find these scattered on some of the pages that I've done work on and my team has worked on this is Barry Byerstein a hero of mine and a hero of many others and I know Daniel was heavily influenced by Barry Byerstein and a couple other people that I've ran into oh William B. Davis the smoking cancer man on X-Files I rewrote his Wikipedia page because he quoted I had him on Google Alert I had Barry Byerstein on Google Alert William B. Davis had mentioned that he was a big inspiration for him so I got in touch with William B. Davis and rewrote his page but Barry Byerstein is another person that we've worked on and then here's James Alcott and look at some of the photos we've got up there nice nice and this is a photo that DJ Grody took and uploaded for me as well and you know we don't know when our history when a photo is gonna be history or what's gonna be important so we really need to take lots of photos which I do and let's get them in places where people can see them and get them so that they can be used and so that they're usable this is a very important picture in skepticism I mean look at that that's amazing Ray Hyman, Paul Kurtz, James Randi and Kendrick Frazier right there on the very end this big smile. So this is the skeptics toolbox just linking into what this is my last slide so you guys almost done this is what Tim Farley was saying about conferences yes our conferences are extremely important as well as our history and this is the skeptics toolbox page was extremely difficult to write and I did this last summer because guess what we don't have any history for this so Wikipedia relies on citations so I had to go out of my way to all the things that Daniel was saying we went into old magazines skeptical inquire magazines and I was looking at the ads and it was just incredible all the things we had to do to come up with enough citations for to create the Wikipedia page for the skeptics toolbox but there's a couple newspaper articles out there very not very many and I went through and I interviewed everybody I possibly could James Alcott and Ray Hyman of course and Lauren Pancras and Harriet Hall and everybody I could think of that had been tied to the skeptics toolbox created citations by doing interviews with them and then going back and recreate and then publishing the YouTube video and then turning around and citing it again so this is how I was able to create the skeptics toolbox page this was really a love of mine because this was my first introduction to skepticism was the skeptics toolbox which will be in Eugene, Oregon this August and Hint, Hint so we are always recruiting for a group of skepticism on Wikipedia I have a need for all of you and probably a thousand more of your friends to help me out in all languages and if you're interested you can contact me by any means possible except telepathy of course but I did give you my business card so as you came in I'm Susan Gerbeck thank you very much I'm Robert Schaefer going to I guess I'm sort of a part of skeptic history myself and that I've been with PsyCOP since not from the beginning but from very soon afterwards I wanna take a little different issue here that is skeptic history is more than just recording papers and books and interviews and things like that it's that but it's more than that because context is something that's very important and to know what was being done why was it being done some of this stuff may look very strange when you look at it from today's perspective but if you look at it in the context of what was happening back then you have to understand that context in order for to really understand and make sense out of it the early skeptic movement was PsyCOP really and nothing but PsyCOP for oh 20 years or thereabouts or 15 years was shaped by the paranormal claims that were being made at the time especially in the late 60s and early 70s it was all this talk about the age of Aquarius and or whatever the new age was going to happen there was a very much a sense that this whole opening up of a new non-material understanding of the universe in the popular culture not only in the popular culture but also in some scientific areas there were very serious proposals being made and more than just proposals actual work was being done in an organized manner to try to bring things like UFOs psychic power and astrology and so on into the body of science and so that's really what got PsyCOP started and for example, Ellen Heineck Jacques Valet, James McDonald and so on there were scientists in good standing they were making the claim that UFOs represented a challenge to science there was advocacy of scientific publications, journals and so on, the popular press, TV and so on claiming that while we have all these sightings from incredible persons and so therefore there must be a phenomenon so therefore science must study this science must set up a thing for UFOs and whatever Phil Klass went on the war path over this without any, pretty much by himself he had no organizational support there were congressional hearings on UFOs twice, not once, but twice one of them headed up by Gerald Ford later became president Carl Sagan was on here but not really as a strong skeptic at that point in time you'll see that he is saying that well he was merely pointing out that there was nobody else there there was nobody there who was strongly skeptical of extraterrestrial visitations and he says it's not a view that he agrees with later on he did become much more skeptical AAAS held a symposium on UFOs mostly at the urging of the believers that Alan Heineck and James McDonald were strongly pushing for this Heineck wanted to have articles in Science Magazine about UFOs they let him have a letter instead not an article a lot of these people were sitting on the fence they were just a very non-committal or very narrowly technical to talk about aspects of perception is something without really saying whether they thought UFOs belonged in science or not the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics founded a UFO subcommittee and they were gonna stuff it with completely with just with believers and again, Philip Lass was going on the war path over this and finally they included him at the last minute he was the one skeptical voice on this, it hit this thing pointed at the screen pointed at the screen and hit to the right well, it's just not going all right, just hit the right arrow on the keyboard on the right, okay, we'll do it now the right arrow on the keyboard left arrow, right arrow I didn't, right arrow didn't go anywhere all right, I'll find you F5 all right, that's it, all right claims of psychic powers were widespread champion by Margaret Mead who was the head of the AAAS at that time this later was challenged by John Wheeler who said this was a the decade of permissiveness and to throw the pseudos out but that didn't go anywhere there were so many papers supporting Uri Geller and others who supposedly had powers of spoon bending and so of course Randy in this case went on a war path largely by himself at least out in the public eye there was other going on that people didn't see there was a pro ESP show on Nova the case of the ESP which talked about remote viewing and so on left the viewer with the impression that there was this amazing facts about remote viewing that were being done and being used and so again Psycop got really involved in that one the Pentagon was sponsoring all kinds of research on crazy stuff if you read the book and not so much the movie but the book The Men Who Stare at Goats by John Ronson I mean you'll read about things like General Stubblebein who thought that he could walk through walls because your body is just mostly empty space and the atoms and all you had to do was get the right frame of mind and he would just walk right up to this wall and wap but convinced that one of these days he was going to be able to successfully walk through it this is the kind of thing that was going on and it's funny that John Alexander who turns up in that book in many places they have him sort of like this guy in the background who's pulling the strings it seems that if it involves a Pentagon and psychic powers and things that Alexander's involved in it he wrote that this night the armies 1984 study on the human potential techniques said Ray Hyman was the only guy on the committee who really knew anything from the standpoint of psychology and science and whatever and so he became a virtual leader of the study and the person the group turned to for explanation in other words he's blaming Ray for the fact that the Pentagon stopped funding this who and such which I think he deserves a round of applause there was also neo astrology not astrology but neo astrology that was coming up in a big way because this fellow from France Michel Gauhan was a psychologist but he was going to be a scientist he was going to put astrology on a scientific basis and this turned into a big thing later it was supposed to be a Mars effect the Mars effect is supposed to be if you are a sports champion it is more likely allegedly that at the time of your birth that Mars would be in a particular rising quadrant of the sky then if you know then if it were just random and Paul Kurtz criticized the Mars effect in this in the Humanist magazine in 1975 this was before Psycop but just before Psycop because really what was happening was Kurtz who was the editor of the Humanist magazine at the time started to bring in articles critical of parapsychology astrology things like this so he was kind of turning the humanist into what would later become this wire at least in part Kurtz just said this can't be right this is the Mars effect it has nothing to do with where Mars is when you're born whether you're going to be a sports champion or not but it turned out actually in this particular study Gauhan did do it right when you get a big data set you're going to have all kinds of strange correlations and they look for every possible correlation they could find you look for enough correlations you're going to find one somewhere and it turned out at least in that one sample in that one study the Mars effect was correct well then Dennis Rawlins who was one of the Psycop fellows and I think he was a founding fellow was it Rawlins that found it yeah he was a founding fellow he published something called Star Baby in other words with the analogy of the Tar Baby that you can't get rid of once you pick it up and that's essentially what this was but he was very harsh and critical of everybody and Kurtz and some of the others who were worked on this Zaylin and Abel and whoever else was working on that then Philip Klass wrote a response and that was published in Fate Magazine which is you know the biggest magazine for the New Age and the Wu types then Philip Klass who for the most part you know at UFOscap he wrote Cry Baby accusing Rawlins of misrepresenting the facts about this there were many subsequent efforts to try to replicate the Mars effect and they were all for the most pretty much unsuccessful here so but because of this controversy Psycop came up with the policy that doesn't investigate anything and you can imagine what the critics of Psycop had to say here is a committee which is a committee for the scientific investigation of claims and they say we don't investigate anything people what gives well that was not a good thing there were also many controversies and you have to realize what was happening in the context of these things Marcella Truzzi was a co-founder of Psycop along with Paul Kurtz but he charged later he left actually only stayed with Psycop about one year he charged that Psycop was made up of pseudo skeptics who what does it tend to block honest inquiry in my opinion he says when an experiment of the paranormal meets the requirements they move the goalposts well where can you find an experiment that actually validates or verifies the psychic claims or paranormal claims well the only one really was the Gaukeland and that was pretty much it looked like just a random thing so but Truzzi he envisioned a very different kind of skeptics organization he wanted to have the believers people like Alan Heineck in there and then we would closely have this fruitful dialogue but most of the skeptics felt this was not a very viable way to go I Philip Klass used to always say look the believers they have dozens of organizations if you believe in UFOs or you believe in psychic powers or whatever you've got plenty of organizations where is the organization for the people who don't believe in these things we got to have at least one such organization and I think that view pretty much prevailed just as an example of what Truzzi his thinking at the encounters an Indian had conference trying to look into essentially just one question was the whole conference were Betty and Barney Hill abducted by aliens or is this some sort of a delusion or whatever and Truzzi says recent controversies initiated by post-modernist and social constructivists about scientific method and its validation process have further eroded confidence in the positivism and materialism that is characteristic of most UFO critics in other words he's blaming us for being people who believe in that scientific questions have answers can have answers he to him it was much too complicated to ask whether or not they were actually abducted by aliens he could see how are you gonna have a skeptical organization with a guy like that in charge I don't see how it's possible he had his own thing after that I mean his own little following in his own publication about other controversies in 1991 Randy left Psycop because well he was getting sued everywhere harassment by Erie Geller every not just once or twice but every jurisdiction where he would go Geller would then file suit later you know claiming that he was libeled and whatever and it really everybody got the feeling that Kurtz was pushing Randy out so to basically to try to protect Psycop so Psycop wouldn't be sued but it left a lot of people with a very bad feeling of about how this was done of course then JRF was founded and so here we are now there's also a schism some people thought this was bad when the skeptics society was founded there had been a local group there the Southern California skeptics which had some bad stuff was going on and the group found itself leaderless so Michael Schirmer basically put together from the ruins of the what remained of the Southern California skeptics he put together a skeptics society also in Pasadena because the whole Pasadena connection was there before and but some people in Psycop didn't like this and I heard some people grumbling oh who does he think he is you know founding a skeptic society his own skeptical group we have a skeptical group here we franchise this like Colonel Sanders or something that's how you're supposed to do it well I never felt that way you know I felt that the more skeptic groups we have the better so anyway I hope in this short time I've been able to explain helping to see a little bit of the context of what was happening and some people are concerned about I heard one comment here just the other day about well it's good to know that there were schisms and controversies and such before I know my gosh and an array you said something about what you've touched on a few of them you probably know a few more than I do so I'll turn it over to Ray I can speak from here can you hear me okay uh what Robert had to say was quite interesting and he only touched upon the surface and these things are complicated Kim Scheinberg who was doing the book on Randy and now it's walked down for many reasons but she went around and interviewed everyone who was involved in the founding of PsyCOP she interviewed Paul Kurtz G.M. Alcock me several times Jerry Andrews you know she went around and interviewed everyone she could and what the interesting point was she got a different story a completely different story from everyone so uh okay so what I want to say it reminds you of that uh the first modern skeptical organization uh was May 1st 1976 we had our organizational meeting and this is being referred to already and uh PsyCOP started now in that uh group unfortunately many of them are not around anymore original Martin Gardner's gone uh field class uh George Abel uh and a few others Paul Kurtz and so on uh now someone came a little bit later it was still around that's Susan uh she's uh but Susan was there during some of our awkward situation in fact I don't think we ever had an awkward situation and it's for good reason uh right after we were founded we the first issue soon after we founded in the fall of 76 uh the first issue of what now is a skeptical inquiry what was called a Zetetic was published and uh at that time Trutzi was the editor and remember he's written out of history in many other histories we see here but Trutzi and Paul Kurtz were the co-chairs first co-chair of PsyCOP and they were the ones who gave a terrible name committee for scientific investigation of the claims of the paranormal and we never we tried to pronounce it like siskip or you know but as our enemies who were very nice and they gave us they told us how to pronounce it PsyCOP we were the cops who were uh trying to oversee PsyCOP so anyway so it became PsyCOP but I when I tried to get Kurtz right at the beginning of the very first meeting our organization meeting I tried to get him to in the other group to have us short of sex your name Paul said no we can't do that uh because we already printed the stationery uh what's that yes on small things on stamps and stuff like that in fact our executive committee used to meet uh bringing people all from all over with Susan from England and so on Susan Blackmore from England stuff like that and we spent a lot of our time going over the budget about how much we're gonna spend for stamps and stuff like that so on stuff like that yes he was a penny pincher but when he wanted to have a new center something like that he spent all the money in the world even didn't money didn't matter so uh it was uh similar to anyone else was born in during the depression we're penny pinches on just little things but not the big things okay so what I want to do is I want to say by the way the very first issue of the skeptical inquire which was called the Zetetic when he published it the very first article and again that's some people have repressed that very first article was an article by a colleague of Trutze's uh he was a sociologist and it was an attack on Paul Kurtz and on the campaign against astrology it was a defensive astrology so that's how I have very first article so you can see already we're having troubles right at the beginning and uh let me say this the first issue of the skeptical inquire uh it was the Zetetic then uh uh had these objectives I want you to read what our objectives were that they would put down there listen carefully uh to establish a network of people interested in examining claims of the paranormal okay it's the first second to prepare bibliographies of published materials that carefully examine such claims third to encourage and commission research by objective and impartial inquirers in areas where it is needed four to convene conferences and meetings five to publish articles monographs and books that examine claims of the paranormal six to not reject on a priori grounds antecedent to inquiry any or all such claims but rather to examine them openly completely objectively and carefully okay now you read those they seem like harmless enough uh but then you think about it if I were head of a parapsychological association or if I were head of a UFO group uh I would be happy to have these objectives too how do they there's nothing in these objectives say who we are why we hear what we're trying to do uh... and why we're needed even nothing like that these are all things to do that other people do and anyone can run conferences okay so what that's a great objective I suppose to run conferences and meetings and people do that uh... so that sorry we're in trouble and my feeling is that everyone this I was right from the beginning I was saying look let's decide what we want to do why we're here what's the problem we're facing how we're going to accomplish it what are we trying to achieve and uh... everyone was kind to me they'd listen and then they go on they say let's have a conference let's do this and that they want to get going and there were people uh... I knew Randy and Randy Martin Gardner and I three of the founders there at that organizational meeting already had our own organization started in 1973 and so we were pulled in by Marchello uh... I got the impression Marchello met Kurtz in an elevator and they suddenly said yeah let's start psychos and like that and Marchello said okay I can bring you Ray Hyman, Martin Gardner and Randy and Kurtz said I'll try to bring some guys too and uh... so we didn't know these other people no one been vetted we met we formed this group and immediately before we can say to any well these are the objectives you see the great objectives harmless objectives uh... meaningless and uh... we made those objectives and uh... we went on our ways and we had all uh... he's uh... you've heard other people I could uh... list many many other tragedies that happened fiascas that happened as a result that we didn't know each other for example one of the first people one of the original members and he's gone down in history and he's not there he's vanished but a guy named Professor Zimmerman he was a colleague of uh... Kurtz in the philosophy department at University of Buffalo and he was on it to me how he got there and what I don't know but the very first meeting we had after we organized Randy gave a talk on Nury Geller and he bent keys and he bent spoons he did a good job as usual and Professor Zimmerman got up member one of our original founding members gets up and he says Randy you're you're very unethical I object completely to what you just did you bent those keys you bent those spoons and you claim you did it by trickery but you didn't explain how you did it by trickery and I think you did it psychically and then you were unethical to say you did it by trickery he was so that there was already I knew we were in trouble because we had vetted him I'd figure out and he disappeared I don't know whether someone got rid of him quickly but he disappeared we never saw him again uh... in executive counsel and I think he may realize he was in the wrong counsel something like that and he may have disappeared himself but anyways and then the very first organization meeting after our organization just after we published the first issue of the skeptical inquirer we met we had this meeting and um... uh... suddenly twitzy says uh... you know they're upset because people saw this first issue and there is this article the very first article is a critique curts and astrology and people saying what's that article doing in our first issue why is it there and twitzy said of course it should be there uh... remember our journal is supposed to and our goal is to create a dialogue between believers and non-believers and this journal should be a journal which half of it should be for give a voice to the skeptics and half to the believers and everyone else was aghast poor field class i was gonna have a heart attack right then and there i thought this is the first time we're learning what some of us are trying to do and the other thing twitzy said and also this should be a journalist going to be a scholarly journal it's going to be an academic journal and the other said no we're going to talk to the public to the regular world we want a journalist going to reach the public and twitzy said no no no it's going to be academic and uh... uh... we're going to my other things uh... twitzy had some other ideas about about things which certainly would write opposite of what many of the other members had but then things got even worse we go along we had another member i won't mention names anymore who his idea and he didn't come out until uh... because no one had specified what they wanted to do his idea is that what i would call militant skepticism his idea is we go around bashing them people there and he literally uh... uh... at one time he called the president of the university of toronto at three p m his time three a m i'm sorry woke him up and berated him because president of the university of toronto had not invited uh... this our member to be a part of a panel that was being run at the university of toronto and he was a world's expert and that guy should invited and as well as i think i'd be rated then a uh... major reporter who is a big supporter of psych up uh... major reporter in uh... canada got hold of uh... our she mentioned his name uh... our uh... our uh... anyways he got hold of him and said uh... uh... asked him what about the story there and then he he bought her out to he he he he made it down to change me he made an enemy out of her and we had other problems with him but all of this i'm saying that lovers could have been avoided right at the very first vetted each other we we've said what are we trying to do we would uh... in fact we would have quickly found out that some of us have such extreme views that that they don't go without the weekend they're too far out okay so i could go on to some other things like that but let me just tell you what the month i want my bottom line to be the message i want to carry out here we have been in business for at least thirty seven years and uh... we have one thing one goal that seems to be we all agree to is that we support the scientific method we like to get evidence and based on uh... objectivity in science and stuff like that but at no time though i know of that as after thirty seven years i do not know of any evidence at all that would be scientific criteria to show that we've had any kind of impact now i say any kind of impact because we may be having some impacts but not the kind of impacts we want to have but we don't even know we have any and my feelings my my hope is my plea is because uh... in the thirty seven years i certainly won't be around uh... we try to do something we should try and do something begin to find ways of measuring and uh... what we're doing and by scientific methods the very time to do that means we're going to have to spell out what we're trying to do what kinds of goals we want to have long range short range uh... do we want to see our task as informing of being a resource of uh... are persuading or even proselytizing uh... where we are trying to all these things what we're trying to accomplish and how can we operationalize uh... criteria checking out how well we're doing now i know this is a very difficult thing to do be extremely difficult but my model is uh... what the germans what the americans what the british did during world war two kept coming across situations where they they want to have question answer questions about how to find uh... germans submarines uh... how to decide where the bombs are going to come in all kinds of stuff like that standard statistical methods and so on just couldn't do it they couldn't work on because they had incomplete data and they had uh... uh... only subjective inputs and even how to handle it they got together as scholars they even got people from not just from scientific departments they got linguists they got other people uh... they brought in uh... mathematicians info uh... computer technicians everything and these people did amazing things they developed all kinds of new techniques some of us still classified some of us only coming being declassified and i think about that what we do have a skeptical movement of people here even we have a fantastic amount of talent that's being not used not use it all for try to handle our problems we have mathematicians we have uh... statisticians we have uh... information technologists we have just to get some of these to volunteer some of these to help us frame the problem of how we measure our impact how we just help decide what our impact should be we want it to be how we measure it how we go about finding ways of deciding how well we're doing i think should be an easy task and not an easy task but a doable task and so i hope that before another thirty seven years without that we really go do something towards really defining our goals and finding ways of measuring how well we're doing it was a while back but you look too young for it to be that while back me with i was just about how long ago it was i joined the executive committee of psychop i don't remember when it was and i feel even older because i can't remember a lot of these intrigues you got forgotten about that when i joined it i was already on the committee of the society for psychical research in london in other words the major european believers organization investigating mediumship and paranormal claims and so on and so on and the aims and objectives of that society are i go back in my memory let's hope that the words will just spring out to examine without prejudice or pre-possession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man either real or supposed which appear to be inexplicable on any currently recognized hypothesis isn't that exactly what psychop yes was supposed to be doing i think we could have borrowed all our objectives from the society of psychical research so there i was on two committees which claimed to be doing the same thing and the uh... psychop people hated the fact that i would you know went along with some of the believers and was it interested in all these whatever and the uh... spr people hated the fact that i went along with those wicked skeptics from the other side and i felt that it wasn't just the atlantic i was kind of spread out from one side to the other uh... so that was just a little memory give you yeah it's called the internet way back machine it's if you go to web dot archive dot org they keep basically a copy of everything that obviously it's impossible to get every single web page yes an excellent tool if you need to see something as it looked you know six years ago of course you have to know what the url was to that website so if it's a defunct website sometimes it can be problematical to know what to look for there's no way to search it like you can google but knowing the url you can say alright i know this url like you could see what the front page of psychop dot org looked like five years ago six years ago sometimes i look at old old copies of uh... skeptic dot com just to feel good about how much progress we've made so if uh... psychop didn't do investigations where did joe nickles work fit into that uh... this question about investigations is is funny i don't know comes up in many ways the position that we took was uh... i think a sensible one from where we looked at at the time is uh... the triple a s the uh... various scientific societies don't do investigations themselves they encourage it sometimes even support even finance it we just don't have the capacity to do individual investigations at that time so we and of course by the way it's ironic that it came out in in relation to the uh... mars effect controversy the mars effect country has nothing to do with psychop it started uh... seven years before psychop uh... paul curts zealon uh... and uh... about georgia bell with the three of them they got together and they carried out this investigation and carried it all out it overlapped a little bit into the family was like a but we had nothing to do we know nothing about it actually we had no control except for paul curts he was and paul uh... was serving simply serving as since he's not a scientist he was serving as the uh... so the go-between man for zealon who is a mathematician statistician he developed what's called a zealon test for that and georgia bell and actually most of the work was done by george because zealons too busy to do much so paul did most of the work and he didn't know what he doesn't know the science but he went back he went to france and got records from uh... uh... and he came back and he ran the experiments at some extent this is all under the guidance of zealon and bell but mostly about georgia bell handle all this yeah but the point that they were making with that policy was that psychop itself does not do investigations but the individuals composing psychop can do investigations so you can't blame psychop for anything that they do you can only blame them but to me it was a matter of cost efficiency we didn't have the you know we had a limited resources and we put you resource i said well skeptical inquire makes a lot of it we do a lot of good with the skeptical inquire we also were serving as a good resource you know we provide information for people and and when reporters call uh... we give it you know we can find them someone to talk to now we can do without too much money but to conduct investigations to build uh... a new uh... center of inquiry in each city of the world it's very expensive constant and uh... so and also carry out investigations is very expensive so but i don't think uh... i had never had in mind that we never would say that we never would do it but it's not something we do as an organization because it's not what we do we encourage it we don't do it it's just like having uh... you know uh... we have also too many cooks for the brothel the organization doesn't do research as individuals who do research so so i don't make a big i don't know what the big deal is people are always looking to make big deals out of something right do we have any more questions thank you very much everybody