In Memoriam

By John Blanton

Skeptic Robert Baker died August 8 in Lexington, Kentucky, at the age of 84. He was most famous for his studies of false beliefs in ghosts. He often collaborated with skeptic Joe Nickell, and together they produced Missing Pieces: How to Investigate Ghosts, Ufos, Psychics, & Other Mysteries.

His early interest in the occult came through his encounters with religious extremism. A preacher his family knew as a mild-mannered man turned into a raving fanatic at the pulpit. His father assured him that "Religion makes some people crazy." Early life experiences also clued him in to the absurdity of ghosts.

He served as an (Army) Air Force cryptographer during World War II, and later earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1951. He eventually retired from the University of Kentucky in 1988.

He met Nickell while the latter was a student at the U of K. Besides Missing Pieces, Baker also produced Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions From Within (1992) and Mind Games (1996). He edited Child Sexual Abuse and False Memory Syndrome (1998) and A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown and Other Essays for a Scientific Age (1963).

The Washington Post tells of some of the cases he studied:

In the 1960s, he visited a traumatized young Kentucky wife who was convinced that she was seeing a "golden-haired 3-year-old girl" in her home.

"After talking with her and her husband," he wrote, "I quickly learned that she was the only one who ever saw or heard the child. Moreover, I learned that she and her spouse wanted children desperately but had no luck. I urged them both to consider adoption, and as soon as they took these steps, the 3-year-old spirit disappeared forever."

He is survived by Rose Baker, six children, and seven grandchildren.

The previous was excerpted from a story by The Washington Post. See the following link. Buy books by Baker from Amazon.com by clicking on the links in the on-line copy of this newsletter.

In Memoriam

by Gary P. Posner

Philip J. Klass, a co-founder of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and a friend and mentor to me, died on August 9 at age 85 following several years of declining health.

Though best known to the general public as the world's leading UFO skeptic - and reviled as such by many "believers" - in "real life" Phil was one of its most honored aerospace journalists. Readers of Skeptic magazine may be familiar with his cutting-edge Skeptics UFO Newsletter (which I copy-edited), but his professional peers knew him as a groundbreaking reporter on more serious matters, having been the first - in the mid-1950s - to publish articles on such topics as inertial guidance technology, infrared missile guidance and detection, and the future microelectronics revolution. His one non-UFO book, Secret Sentries in Space (1971), was the first to deal with spy satellite technology. Phil's six books on UFOs include UFOs Explained (1974), which is still widely regarded as the best in the field.

My relationship with Phil began in 1977, during my metamorphosis from "believer" to "skeptic," when I received a copy of UFOs Explained in the mail - free of charge - in response to a letter I had written to him. At about the same time, I had also written to Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the country's #1 pro-UFOlogist. Hynek was also gracious in replying, but his letter's references to Phil's book were so demonstrably false that, armed with my new present, I proceeded to write Hynek four pages, including a point-by-point rebuttal. Upon reading a copy of that letter, Klass replied in part, "What you have dared to say to the "Galileo of UFOlogy" [as Hynek had recently been dubbed in Newsweek] has long needed to be said ... You are the first, to my knowledge, to brazenly comment that the Emperor is NAKED!"

Most of Phil's long and distinguished professional career was spent in Washington, D.C., with Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, as senior editor for its avionics coverage (a term he coined from "aviation electronics") until his official retirement in 1986. In subsequent years he continued to put in comparable hours for Aviation Week without portfolio, until his health no longer permitted. Some highlights of his avocational career in UFOlogy, which typically occupied several hours a night, were discussed in my 1999 Skeptic interview with Phil (Vol. 7, No. 4).

With his wife Nadya, in 2003 Phil moved to Merritt Island, Florida, but I don't think he ever had an opportunity to enjoy his new environs. My last communication from him was a cryptic instant message, in response to mine, upon his return home following a hurricane evacuation last year. My most recent e-mail several months ago was never answered, and his Washington Post obituary indicates that he spent his final days in a nursing home.

To say that Phil Klass' shoes can never be filled may risk cliché. But in this instance, I'm afraid the shoe fits.

This article is reprinted from the eSkeptic newsletter, which is published (almost) weekly by the Skeptics Society, ISSN 1556-5696. Contents are Copyright (c) 2005 Michael Shermer and the Skeptics Society. Permission to print, distribute, and post with proper citation and acknowledgment.

by John Blanton

School is back in session, and the circus is in town. Well heeled, with financial and moral support from religious conservatives, the Discovery Institute is mounting an attack on evolution on a broad front. The World Wide Web is a cornucopia of information, not all of it true.

The National Center for Science Education is one source of reliable information. Their weekly e-mail newsletter is free. Here is an excerpt.

Evolution education update: Evolutionapalooza in The New York Times

The big news from last week was the major three-part series in The New York Times, running August 21-23, 2005, devoted to the ongoing evolution/creationism struggle in the political, the scientific, and the religious sphere. Accompanying the series in addition were a William Safire "On Language" column investigating the etymology of "intelligent design" and "neo-creo" and a marvelous editorial column by Verlyn Klinkenborg on deep time and evolution. (In a further acknowledgement of the importance of the issue, the Times's website now has a special section devoted to its evolution coverage.) Overall, despite a number of minor errors, the series succeeded in portraying "intelligent design" as what it is: a religiously motivated, politically active, and scientifically bankrupt assault on the teaching of evolution in the public schools.

"Politicized Scholars Put Evolution On The Defensive"

First, on August 21, Jodi Wilgoren's "Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive" appeared on the front page of the Sunday Times, focusing on the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture (formerly the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture), described as "at the helm of this newly volatile frontier in the nation's culture wars." After sketching the history, tactics, and composition of the Discovery Institute, Wilgoren comments, "But even as intelligent design has helped raise Discovery's profile, the institute is starting to suffer from its success. Lately, it has tried to distance itself from lawsuits and legislation that seek to force schools to add intelligent design to curriculums, placing it in the awkward spot of trying to promote intelligent design as a robust frontier for scientists but not yet ripe for students."

Following the money, Wilgoren also writes that the Discovery Institute receives "financial support from 22 foundations, at least two-thirds of them with explicitly religious missions," such as the Crowell Trust, which describes its mission as "the teaching and active extension of the doctrines of evangelical Christianity," and the Stewardship Foundation, which seeks "to contribute to the propagation of the Christian Gospel by evangelical and missionary work." Although the Discovery Institute also receives funding for work unconnected with antievolutionism from secular foundations such as the Gates Foundation, its antievolution efforts are apparently unwelcome to the Templeton Foundation and the Bullitt Foundation, whose director was quoted as describing Discovery as "the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell."

According to the article, "Since its founding in 1996, the [Center for Science and Culture] has spent 39 percent of its $9.3 million on research, [Stephen C.] Meyer said, underwriting books or papers, or often just paying universities to release professors from some teaching responsibilities so that they can ponder intelligent design. Over those nine years, $792,585 financed laboratory or field research in biology, paleontology or biophysics, while $93,828 helped graduate students in paleontology, linguistics, history and philosophy." Wilgoren failed to report what the scientific payoff in terms of published results in the peer-reviewed scientific literature of Discovery's funding was, but the science journalist Carl Zimmer (author of Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea) provided the details on his blog, concluding: "Someone's not getting their money's worth."

Perhaps because of the scientific sterility of "intelligent design," the Discovery Institute turned instead to the "teach the controversy" slogan - teaching evolution, that is, in such a way as to instill scientifically unwarranted doubts about it. NCSE executive director Eugenie C. Scott commented, "They have packaged their message much more cleverly than the creation science people have ... They present themselves as being more mainstream. I prefer to think of that as creationism light." Yet not all of the Discovery Institute's supporters have received the message: for example, "this spring, at the hearings in Kansas, [Discovery Institute's president Bruce] Chapman grew visibly frustrated as his supposed allies began talking more and more about intelligent design." And it was not teaching "the controversy" but "intelligent design" that President Bush's remarks seemed to endorse.

Although the article initially misdescribed Ohio, New Mexico, and Minnesota as having "embraced the institute's 'teach the controversy' approach" in their state standards, a correction was later issued. The article also contends that fellows of the Discovery Institute "successfully urged changes to textbooks in Texas to weaken the argument for evolution" during the textbook adoption process, a claim rejected by Texas Citizens for Science, whose president Steven Schafersman writes, "The DI 'urged' the textbook changes, but they weren't successful, since the Texas SBOE voted 11-4 to adopt the biology textbooks explicitly without the changes demanded by the DI. The DI worked very hard indeed to diminish and distort the evolution content in the biology textbooks that were adopted, but they failed, and the textbooks were uncompromised."

By Robert Park