Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) was organized on May 1, 1976, at a meeting of the American Humanist Association at the State University of New York at Buffalo, with Paul Kurtz, then editor of The Humanist, as co-chairman.¹² Its journal, The Zetetic, was renamed the Skeptical Inquirer after its first year and was published from Buffalo and later from Amherst, New York.¹ CSICOP filed a complaint against NBC with the Federal Communications Commission in November 1977 and was a co-defendant in a libel suit brought by Uri Geller in 1991.¹³ It became the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), a program of the Center for Inquiry.⁴⁵

Founding

The Humanist published a statement, "Objections to Astrology," in its September/October 1975 issue under Kurtz's editorship. It carried 186 signatures of scientists, and Prometheus Books, the publishing house Kurtz founded, issued it in 1975 with additional endorsers.⁶ Marcello Truzzi, a sociologist at Eastern Michigan University, had meanwhile proposed a group called Resources for the Scientific Evaluation of the Paranormal in his newsletter, and in late 1975 he told readers that The Humanist had started forming a similar body, the "Committee to Scientifically Investigate Claims of Alleged Paranormal and Other Phenomena."⁶

The committee was organized on May 1, 1976, at an annual meeting of the American Humanist Association devoted to "The New Irrationalism: Antiscience and Pseudoscience," with some twenty-five sponsoring members.² Kendrick Frazier gives the date as April 30, 1976, at an international symposium on the Amherst campus of SUNY Buffalo, sponsored initially by The Humanist, after which the committee "became an independent organization."¹ Kurtz's founding statement said: "Many individuals now believe that there is considerable need to organize some strategy of refutation."¹ The New York Times gave the founding 24 column inches on May 1, 1976.¹

Kurtz and Truzzi were co-chairmen. Lee Nisbet, listed in the first issue also as executive director of The Humanist, was CSICOP's first executive director, according to Alcock.⁶ The first issue of The Zetetic listed Fellows who included Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, Sidney Hook, Ray Hyman, Leon Jaroff, senior editor of Time, Philip J. Klass, James Prescott, a psychologist at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, James Randi, Dennis Rawlins, Carl Sagan, B. F. Skinner and Marvin Zelen. Its address was Box 29, Kensington Station, Buffalo.² James Alcock listed the original Executive Council as Kurtz, Truzzi, Gardner, Randi, Hyman, Klass, Rawlins and Nisbet, with thirty-five Fellows.⁶

Truzzi's editorial in the first issue said: "Though it is likely that most of our results will prove negative, our central purpose is not one of debunking paranormal claims."² Truzzi left the committee after the first year, resigned as editor of The Zetetic, which became the Skeptical Inquirer under a new editor, Frazier, and started Zetetic Scholar. He told the New York Times in June 1978: "I don't doubt that 99 percent of occultism is empirically false, but the approach to it has to be based on an examination of the evidence by people qualified to do that, not on outright condemnation." Kurtz replied that "we do believe it's important that, when claims of the paranormal get wide public attention and belief, the skeptical position also get media attention."⁷ A copy of the article is among the "Parapsychological Phenomena Open Source Literature" documents in the reading room of the Central Intelligence Agency.⁷

Staff of the Office of Technology Assessment wrote in a 1989 workshop report that "few scientists were involved in the creation of CSICOP" and that "the organization has always been led and operated by non-scientists."⁸

Fairness Doctrine Complaint Against NBC

CSICOP filed a complaint with the FCC under the Fairness Doctrine against the NBC program "Exploring the Unknown," narrated by Burt Lancaster and broadcast on November 8, 1977. After the commission rejected the complaint, CSICOP filed a petition on April 27, 1979, in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. It was represented by David S. Lichtenstein and the law firm of Rothwell, Cappello and Berndtson. The brief argued that the program contained "controversial material of public importance" and that "NBC did not provide a reasonable opportunity to present contrasting views." It focused on segments in which psychic powers were said to cure illness and in which "psychic surgery" was shown.⁹

Incorporation, Offices and Staff

CSICOP was incorporated in 1978, "with the Board of Directors and the Executive Council holding ultimate responsibility."¹⁰ Rawlins wrote in Fate in 1981 that CSICOP began as an offshoot of the American Humanist Association and that in 1978, "after a year of not telling AHA anything of the ongoing legal proceedings," it separately incorporated. He also wrote that Kurtz told him by telephone that he had been fired as editor of The Humanist "after 11 years at the post."¹¹ The committee became independent of The Humanist shortly after its founding.¹

The executive office was at Box 29, Kensington Station, Buffalo in 1976, at 1203 Kensington Avenue, Buffalo, in 1979 and 1980, and at 3151 Bailey Avenue, Buffalo, with a mailing address at Box 229, Central Park Station, in 1984.¹² By 1996 it was across from the Amherst campus of SUNY Buffalo.¹ The chairman received no CSICOP salary, and the committee was "financed entirely through subscriptions and donations and is always severely pressed for funds," according to Frazier.¹

Nisbet was listed as executive director in 1980 and 1984. In the Fall 1988 masthead, Mark Plummer, a lawyer, was executive director, Nisbet was special projects director and Barry Karr was public relations director.¹²¹³ The same issue listed seven subcommittees, with Hyman chairing Parapsychology, Klass chairing UFOs, and Plummer chairing Legal and Consumer Protection.¹³ Karr was executive director in July 1995.¹⁴ Karr's last day as executive director of CSI was July 3, 2025; he had begun at CSICOP as a SUNY Buffalo undergraduate during the committee's fifth year.¹⁵ Stephen Hupp is executive director, and Hyman and Alcock are on the Executive Council.¹⁶

On December 9, 1982, the Executive Council clarified that local, regional and national skeptics' groups sharing its goals were "autonomous, not officially or unofficially affiliated with CSICOP."¹⁰

The Mars Effect

Kurtz, Zelen and the astronomer George Abell had proposed a test (the Zelen test) of the claim by Michel Gauquelin that sports champions are born more often than chance with Mars in particular sectors of the sky. Gauquelin carried it out and published it in The Humanist in November/December 1977, and the participants disagreed about its results.¹ Four articles on a further test using American champions appeared in the Winter 1979-80 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer. Kurtz, Zelen and Abell reported that 55 of 408 champions, 13.5 percent, were born in a key sector. Rawlins, who was on the editorial board and had been retained to calculate the celestial positions, wrote in the same issue that the European rate was 21.65 percent against an expected 17.17 percent and that "I do not doubt the rates, analysis, or odds." The Gauquelins and the authors each answered in the issue.¹⁷

Rawlins published an account in Fate in October 1981, "sTARBABY." He wrote that Kurtz telephoned to ask for an advance look at the results, which were "to be strictly confidential"; that a CSICOP check for 100 dollars accompanied the first installment of 72 athletes' birth data and that Kurtz later mailed "unsolicited cash"; that when the key-sector score stood at 22 percent after 120 names Kurtz "groaned"; and that Kurtz and his co-authors had converted a test of nonchampions, who scored at the chance level, into an attack on a subsample of champions. Rawlins wrote that at the point of the later control-test report the handling of the Gauquelin problem "was transformed from mere bungling to deliberate cover-up."¹¹ Frazier wrote that Rawlins "intensified his criticisms to a personal level, was eventually dropped from the Executive Council," and that the Skeptical Inquirer printed his commentary "Remus Extremus" with responses by the Executive Council, Kurtz and Abell in Winter 1981-82.¹ Alcock wrote in 2026 that Rawlins left after a 1978 Executive Council meeting in Washington, D.C., following his criticism of "a further analysis of certain astrological claims by Kurtz and others."⁶

In Spring 1983 Abell, Kurtz and Zelen published a reappraisal agreeing with four criticisms of their statement on the first test and three criticisms of the American test, and wrote: "We regret that at the outset we had not the foresight to exercise a great deal more care in our experiments and in reporting them." They maintained that the American test "gave results highly inconsistent with a Mars effect for athletes."¹

Parapsychology and Military Research

Hyman reviewed The Geller Papers in the first issue of The Zetetic, and on June 11, 1976, a subcommittee of the Fellows invited Geller to submit to tests, giving him 45 days to reply.² David Marks and Richard Kammann published "The Nonpsychic Powers of Uri Geller" in The Zetetic, volume 1, number 2, Spring/Summer 1977, and Marks published "Remote Viewing Revisited" in the Skeptical Inquirer in Summer 1982.¹⁸

In 1979 the Army's Grill Flame review of remote viewing considered Hyman for its scientific evaluation panel. A memorandum of the Under Secretary of the Army's office of July 17, 1979, stated that "Dr. Snyder of VPI has been asked in place of Dr. Hyman," and a memorandum of conversation of January 17, 1980, recorded that Hyman "was rejected not because of any action by Gale, but because of a protest memo from MG Thompson to Dr LaBerge."¹⁹

Don Addis wrote in "The Lighter Side" of the Summer 1984 Skeptical Inquirer, in a column titled "Psychic Arms Race? Give Me a Break!": "We find the Pentagon reportedly has been doing psychic research for possible use in espionage and war, fearing an ESP arms gap between us and the Soviet Union." He named Russell Targ as one source of the news report.²⁰ On November 9 and 10, 1984, CSICOP held a conference at Stanford University, "Scientific Facts and Fiction." Sidney Hook, identified as a fellow of the Hoover Institution, gave the keynote address. A panel titled "The Psychic Arms Race" was moderated by Kurtz and included Hyman, Klass, Martin Ebon, author of a book of that title, and Jaroff.²¹

A fund-raising letter from CSICOP dated March 23, 1985, and co-signed by Hyman said, according to a report by John A. Palmer, Charles Honorton and Jessica Utts for the board of the Parapsychological Association: "in these days of government budget-cutting the Defense Department may be spending millions of tax dollars on developing 'psychic arms.' . . . Please help us in this battle against the irrational."²² In 1984 the United States Army's Army Research Institute had asked the National Academy of Sciences to form a committee on techniques for enhancing human performance. The National Research Council committee was chaired by John A. Swets, and its parapsychology subcommittee by Hyman.²³ Palmer, Honorton and Utts wrote, in a section headed "Anatomy of Prejudgment," that Hyman and Alcock "were members of the CSICOP Executive Council in 1985, when the NRC Committee was formed," that Hyman had been chairman of CSICOP's Parapsychology Subcommittee "since its inception," and that Alcock was the author of the only paper on parapsychological techniques the NRC committee commissioned.²² The fall 1988 masthead of the Skeptical Inquirer listed Hyman as chairman of that subcommittee.¹³ Frazier's summary of the report in the Skeptical Inquirer quotes its conclusion: "The committee finds no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena," and its statement that "there is no reason for direct involvement by the Army at this time."²³

In the Summer 1986 issue the Skeptical Inquirer printed "Some Remote-Viewing Recollections" by Elliot H. Weinberg, identified as director of research of the Office of Naval Research from 1971 to 1979 and then director of the Navy Center for International Science and Technology. Weinberg wrote that "during a period when I had some governmental responsibility for keeping track of research trends and for recommending funding priorities, I was asked to review the field of paranormal research, particularly what was coming to be known as 'remote viewing,'" and described visits to Hal Puthoff and Targ at the Stanford Research Institute, where, he wrote, Pat Price "claimed to be able to read the numbers on Soviet submarines currently in port in, say, Sebastopol."²⁴

Five members of the Executive Council, Kurtz, Alcock, Randi, Frazier and Klass, and a staff member spent two weeks in China, from March 21 to April 3, 1988, at the invitation of the newspaper Science and Technology Daily, whose editor-in-chief, Lin Zixin, was their host. Kurtz wrote that "we were asked repeatedly if it was true that the CIA and the KGB are studying psychic phenomena for use by the military."²⁵ Dolan M. McKelvy, a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, quoted in an Air War College research report of May 1988 a February 1987 Omni article, which stated that Klass had telephoned the University of Nebraska about a forum on anomalies research, protested that CSICOP's views were not represented, and threatened legal action, after which the university cancelled its sponsorship of such conferences.²⁶

In the workshop report of February 22, 1989, on experimental parapsychology, Office of Technology Assessment staff described CSICOP as "a primary source of criticism and skepticism" and recorded that a participant "documented a long series of exchanges with the management of the journal Science."⁸ The Defense Intelligence Agency's "Project Star Gate Research and Peer Review Plan" of June 1994, classified secret and not releasable to foreign nationals, contains in Appendix G a rejoinder by Utts printed in Statistical Science in 1991. In a section headed "Satisfying the Skeptics," Utts wrote: "Parapsychology is probably the only scientific discipline for which there is an organization of skeptics trying to discredit its work." She recounted CSICOP's founding by Kurtz and Truzzi and wrote: "While I believe that the skeptics, particularly some of the more knowledgeable members of CSICOP, have served a useful role in helping to improve experiments, their counter-advocacy stance is counterproductive."²⁷

In 1995 the American Institutes for Research engaged Hyman and Utts for the CIA's evaluation of the Stargate Project. The Skeptical Inquirer for March/April 1996 printed Hyman's "Evaluation of the Military's Twenty-Year Program on Psychic Spying" and a major portion of the AIR conclusions, by Michael D. Mumford, Andrew M. Rose and David Goslin, under the title "CIA Concludes No Value to the Program."²⁸

Project Alpha and the Libel Suits

In the summer of 1983 Randi placed two young magicians, Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, in the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research at Washington University in St. Louis. Frazier wrote that the laboratory "eventually lost its private funding and shut down."¹

Eldon Byrd sued Randi in 1989 for 38 million dollars, and Geller sued him in 1991 for 15 million dollars, with CSICOP named as co-defendant in each. In the Byrd case, according to Frazier, CSICOP was found not to have libeled Byrd, while Randi was found liable and the jury set damages at zero. In the Geller case CSICOP moved on January 15, 1992, for summary judgment and for sanctions under Rule 11; Geller did not respond by April 29, 1992, and the district court granted the motions as unopposed on July 2, 1992. On July 27, 1993, it entered judgment against Geller for 149,000 dollars, the fees and costs incurred by CSICOP. On appeal CSICOP asserted that Geller had neither satisfied the judgment nor posted a bond and that "he has secreted his assets abroad." The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed on December 9, 1994.¹³ CSICOP financed its defense in part through a Legal Defense Fund, and by early 1995 had not received any money from Geller.¹ Randi separated from CSICOP, partly to protect it from further suits.¹

Finances and the Center for Inquiry

Kurtz left the American Humanist Association, founded the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism in 1980, and founded the Center for Inquiry in 1991, which the Internal Revenue Service classified as a supporting organization for CSICOP and the Council. Ronald A. Lindsay, president and chief executive of the Center from 2008 to 2016, wrote that its bylaws provided for three directors chosen from the CSICOP board and three from the Council's board, along with at-large members, that in practice the at-large member was Kurtz, and that Kurtz "not infrequently remarked to me and Barry Karr, the executive director of CSI, that 'skeptics don't give money.'" Lindsay wrote that the original Center "had to be dissolved because it could not exist on its own as a supporting organization," that a unified organization followed in which CSICOP and the Council became programs of the Center, and that the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science merged with it.⁵²⁹

In November 1996 CSICOP announced a "Fund for the Future" campaign: "a ten-year effort to add 20 million dollars to the Center for Inquiry endowments," a combined goal for CSICOP and the Council for Secular Humanism, with Gardner and Steve Allen as honorary co-chairs.³⁰

The Center for Inquiry Inc. (EIN 22-2306795, Amherst) reported revenue of 2,344,993 dollars for 2011, 4,195,295 for 2014, 10,870,343 for 2017 and 5,443,648 for 2023.³¹ Its return for 2024 reports revenue of 6,992,396 dollars, contributions of 5,628,081 dollars, expenses of 6,474,802 dollars, assets of 6,706,828 dollars and 32 employees, and states its mission as "to sponsor programs and activities that advance humanism and skepticism." The return gives a formation year of 1980, the ProPublica record for the same employer identification number gives an IRS ruling date of April 2001, and Lindsay dates the founding of the Center to 1991.⁵³¹³² Edward Tabash was chairperson. The directors included Richard Dawkins, Barry Kosmin, Leonard Tramiel and Andy Thomson; Robyn Blumner was chief executive and president at 196,373 dollars plus 28,439 dollars in other compensation, Karr was chief financial officer and treasurer at 103,188 dollars, and Richard Conn Jr. was legal director.³² The Center for Inquiry Development Fund (EIN 16-1553194), formed in 1998 to support the Center, reported assets of 7,038,557 dollars for 2011, 14,515,096 for 2017 and 32,460,035 for 2023, and 34,857,998 dollars for 2024 against expenses of 92,880 dollars and no employees. The Center for Inquiry Holding Corporation (EIN 16-1403907) holds property leased to the Center.³²³³

The Center for Inquiry Inc. reported total assets of 1,692,625 dollars for 2011, 4,403,716 for 2015, 10,588,408 for 2017, 8,546,778 for 2021 and 5,588,342 for 2023, against expenses of 2,125,311 dollars for 2011, 4,833,092 for 2017 and 6,126,775 for 2023. The Development Fund reported assets of 8,757,236 dollars for 2014, 8,819,443 for 2016, 21,038,435 for 2019 and 30,781,982 for 2021, with revenue of 300,138 dollars and expenses of 407,308 dollars for 2016 and expenses of 49,540 dollars for 2021.³¹³³

Frazier's January/February 2007 editorial in the Skeptical Inquirer was titled "It's CSI Now, Not CSICOP."⁴