Southern California Skeptics Say Their Mission Is to Reason Why

It’s a virtuoso performance. Joe Nickell, tweedy, professorial, supremely self-confident, in front of a Caltech lecture audience, is disparaging the renowned Shroud of Turin as a fraud.

He quotes from the Gospels. He throws out scientific citations. He theorizes with crushing conviction. He marches through a provocative slide show, ending with a shot of the shroud’s now-famous bearded visage.

The purported face of Jesus winks.

Nickell is implacable. Like a musketeer in brown herringbone, the University of Kentucky professor slices and slashes, seeming to demolish the controversial claim that the shroud is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus, reducing it to so much shredded wastepaper.

Various teams of researchers have studied the shroud, a number of inquiries are still in progress and the debate over its authenticity continues to raise doubts in the minds of many researchers--but not in the mind of Nickell.

“The evidence against it is so utterly devastating,” he concludes. “It’s worse than the Hitler diaries.”

Cool Wind of Logic

The audience of about 300, gathered on a Sunday afternoon for the monthly meeting of the Southern California Skeptics, applauds lustily. This is what they’re here for: to witness for the umpteenth time a malaise of muddle-headedness dispersed by the cool wind of logic, giving a hard-edged clarity to the afternoon.

For restless intellects, the skeptics are the hottest show in town these days. If you want a seat at the organization’s regular meeting on the second Sunday of every month, you’d better arrive early at the Baxter Lecture Hall, where the lectures can target anything from Erich von Daniken’s far-out theories about spacemen having landed on Earth in prehistoric times to the latest fad in the human potential movement, from seances to the Bermuda Triangle, from UFOs to ESP.

Two years ago, the organization even held a fire-walking demonstration, setting up a bed of burning coals on the Caltech sports field and inviting members to walk through barefoot.

The idea was to debunk self-help groups claiming to teach people how to gain control of their mental and physical health, with fire-walking as the litmus test of their system’s validity.

Anybody can do it, said the lecturer, because the touch of a foot cools the embers faster than the skin heats up. Besides, he said, fire-walkers often walk on wet grass, giving bare feet an insulating layer of moisture.

Southern California Skeptics has 1,800 members, cerebral, inquiring people who do not like to be told how to think, according to the group’s leaders.

Al Seckel, who organized the group in January, 1985, said that one of his favorite jokes sums up the contentious, challenging spirit of the organization. It goes like this:

Intellectual 1: Challenge authority!

Intellectual 2: Why?

The members come from all walks of life, said Seckel, a graduate of Cornell in physics and math, who took leave from Caltech, where he was a candidate for doctoral degrees in both relativistic astrophysics and biochemistry, to start Southern California Skeptics.

“We’ve got cab drivers, housewives, magicians, Nobel laureates, you name it,” he said, though the former science teacher added that the group “tends towards Caltechers.”

Among the members are Edwin Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory; Frances Crick and Roger W. Sperry, both Nobel laureates in medicine; William Jarvis, president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, and James Randi, a magician.

For $25 a year ($15 for students and senior citizens), members get invitations to all of the group’s events and a subscription to the organization’s bimonthly magazine, LASER (Los Angeles Skeptics Evaluative Report), which exposes the latest fallacies, hoaxes, myths, intellectual fads and pseudo-scientific notions.

Though there is rarely a careless, half-baked remark at a lecture, this is not an organization of “nerds and academics,” insisted Seckel.

“It’s a fun group,” he said. “From what I hear, it’s the social place, the pick-up joint. People have a blast.”

But many seem to be serious-minded people who have wrestled with some destructive irrationalities in their lives.

“I come from a background of fundamentalist Christianity, where people could claim to be saved or born again yet still talk about ‘niggers,’ ” said Timothy Rutt, an editor of accounting publications who was attending his first lecture. “People aren’t using their critical faculties nowadays. We have faith healers running for president, and strange claims are the order of the day.”

Checking Things Out

The point is not just to debunk, said the group’s chairman, Al Hibbs, who recently retired as the senior staff scientist in the Jet Propulsion Lab technology and space department.

“The real point is to show people how they can go about checking out things for themselves,” he said. “Ordinary people can check the validity of some very strange propositions.”

Seckel, 28, worries that Southern California Skeptics, which is loosely affiliated with the national Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, will be perceived as a bunch of negativists.

“Why not look at the real mysteries, the ones for which there’s at least some evidence?” he said, citing the black hole theory as an example. A black hole, scientists believe, is a star that has collapsed under its own gravitation and is so dense that not even light can escape from it. “Look at . . . the idea that time slows down as you enter it, that a watch is going to move at a different rate for an outside observer than for someone in a black hole,” Seckel said. “Or how about the idea that you age infinitesimally more slowly on the first floor of a building than on the top floor?”

For many, the organization offers a counterbalance to an endemic “anti-science attitude,” Seckel said.

Under Seckel’s guidance, the emphasis has been largely on education.

Recently, for example, Southern California Skeptics board member and Caltech physics professor Murray Gell-Mann got 72 fellow Nobel Prize winners to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to reject a Louisiana law calling for “balanced treatment” of evolution and creationism in public school science classes.

Shroud Viewed as Hoax

In the debate over the Shroud of Turin, Nickell speculated that it’s a hoax, perpetrated by a 14th-Century artist. He said there’s even historical evidence for that, citing a report from a 14th-Century French bishop that referred to “the scandal and delusion” resulting from the public exhibition of the shroud and its use to extract money from pilgrims for souvenirs.

Nickell, a former stage magician who teaches technical writing, said the image of Christ is too “picture-like” to be authentic.

The ultimate test will come sometime in 1988, when scientists will use new radiocarbon dating techniques on the Shroud of Turin. If it is shown to date back only to the Middle Ages, it will be proved a fake.

Nickell has little doubt as to the outcome. “No burial cloth in the history of the world ever had an image like this one,” he said.

The debate over the shroud that Sunday was, by the group’s standards, a tranquil one. Other lectures have attracted flinty, hard-nosed believers, ready to argue their beliefs to the death.

“We used to have a Big Foot enthusiast who’d come in and try to disrupt the meetings,” Seckel said.