William Bramley - THE GODS OF EDEN p. 423 ...the CIA and FBI investigated many people who reported UFOs. The U.S. Air Force cooperated by issuing regulations in 1958 instructing Air Force investigators to. give the FBI the names of people who claimed to have contacted UFOs in some way, on the grounds that such people were "illegally or deceptively bringing the subject to public attention." Although these regulations have been eased and the FBI reportedly no longer investigates UFO cases, there existed back in the 1950's and early '60's a definite intention within the American govemment to inhibit public reporting and discussion of the UFO phenomenon. Today, the U.S. government is publicly out of the UFO business. Most of the debunking torch has been passed to a private group called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal ("CSICOP"). CSICOP boasts an impressive roster of scientific and technical consultants, many of whom hold professorships at prestigious universities. CSICOP has inspired the creation of local branches usually known as "skeptical societies." CSICOP publishes a quarterly journal called The Skeptical Inqulrer. A basic premise upon which CSICOP operates is that UFOs are not proven to be extraterrestrial craft. CSICOP also dehunks all other phenomena that it considers phony or "pseudoscientific," such as clairvoyance, spiritualism, Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness monster and all spiritual phenomena. It brands any effort to seriously study UFOs or spiritual phenomena as "pseudoscience"Qa term it bandies about freely. CSICOP naturally practices only "real" science. Many CSICOP and local skeptic members are quite energetic and some of them appear regularly on radio and television shows. The influence of CSICOP today is quite strong. In addition to its presence in universities through CSICOP- affiliated faculty, CSICOP has exerted influence in the media. Celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan, for example, is listed as a Fellow of CSICOP. Other Fellows have included Bernard Dixon, European editor of Omni magazine; Paul Edwards, editor of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy- Leon Jarotf. managing editor of Discover magazine; Phillip Klass, senior avionics editor for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine; and the late B. F. Skinner, author and famous behaviorist who did so much to promote the stimulus-response model of human behavior in our own generation. CSICOP has gained a following primarily because the organization successfully promotes an image of objectivity. In CSICOP's statement of purpose, for example, we read the following words: The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal attempts to encourage the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims from a responsible, scientific point of view and to disseminate factual information about the results of such inquiries to the scientific community and the public. The Committee is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization. The Committee sounds like a wonderful organization. The world can greatly benefit from objective research into UFOs and paranormal claims. It is especially important for serious researchers to sort out the legitimate from the fraud, and that is not always easy to do. Sadly, CSICOP does not provide the objectivity needed to accomplish that task. The result of a CSICOP investigation has always been. to my knowledge, an utter debunking. This has puzzled those people who cannot understand how some evidence can possibly be rejected if it is looked at objectively. The solution to this puzzle comes by discovering who started CSICOP and why. CSICOP was founded in 1976 under the sponsorship of the American Humanist Association. The American Humanist Association is, of course, dedicated to advancing the philosophy of "humanism." "Humanism" itself is difficult to define because it often means different things to different people. Essentially, humanism is a school of thought concerned with human interests and human values as opposed to religious interests and values. It deals with questions of ethics and existence from the perspective of human beings as physical entities on Earth. "Religious humanists" will have spiritual and theological concerns but will approach them from a human-centered focus as opposed to the God-centered or spirit-centered orientation of most religions. The best-known form of organized humanism in the United States today is called "secular [non-religious] human- ism." Secular humanism admits only the reality of physical existence and rejects spiritual and theological reality. It is a philosophy of strict materialism. Many secular humanists adhere to the stimulus-response model of human behavior. The founding and current chairman of CSICOP is Paul Kurtz, professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. For many years, Mr. Kurtz had served as the editor of The Humanist magazine. He was one of the drafters of the Humanist Manifesto 11 and authored a book entitled In Defense of Secular Humanism. His book is interesting because it expresses some of the doctrines and goals of the organized secular humanist movement. Those doctrines and goals are significant in light of the role that Professor Kurtz and other secular humanists have played in founding CSICOP. On the subject of spiritual existence, Professor Kurtz wrote: Humanists reject the thesis that the soul is separable from the body or that life persists in some form after the death of the body. According to the Humanist Manifesto II: Rather, science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces. As far as we know, the total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context. Such ideas are fine for those people who choose to believe them. The point I am making is this: individuals and organizations which actively promote such ideas will find it difficult to be genuinely objective when they investigate evidence which flatlv contradicts their established view. They have already declared what they believe and what they reject. Objectivity is even more difficult when those same people actively seek to spread their way of thinking as a social goal. According to the Humanist Manifesto II: We affirm a set of common principles that can serve as a basis for united actionQpositive principles relevant to the present human condition. They are a design for a secular society on a planetary scale. We see in this quote that there exists a united intention among many secular humanists to create a worldwide secular society. The founding chairman of CSICOP, Professor Kurtz, helped draft the document which announces that intention. There is nothing wrong per se with having such a goal. It is common for activist religions and philosophies to try to shape the world in their own images. There is, however, a price to be paid for such activism: CSICOP and its affiliated skeptic groups lose their credibility. They have to be viewed as advocates for a certain point of view, not as disinterested investigators. They are prosecutors in the courts of inquiry, not the judges or juries. We see in groups like CSICOP a problem that has existed for centuries. Most ideological battles are fought by extremists. Secular humanists, for example, represent a materialist extreme and they often do battle with modern "Christian fundamentalists" who represent the "religious" extreme. Both sides are extremist in that they hold views which can only be kept alive by ignoring large bodies of evidence. They make easy targets for one another because they both have so many flaws; yet people are encouraged to side with one or the other on the basis that because one side is so wrong, the other side pointing out those wrongs must be right. This can be dangerous logic to follow. It happens frequently that two people will passionately debate a fact, each certain that he or she is correct, but when they finally learn the truth, they discover that they were both wrong. Two lunatics can argue endlessly over which of them is the real Napoleon Bonaparte, but woe to the outsider who takes sides and swears allegiance to either one of them! As extremists fight, the truth often lies ignored in a completely different direction.