Skeptics View Paranormal Claims With Critical Eye : San Diego’s Doubting Thomases Want Scientific Validation

It’s not so much what is true as what is false. That’s not the official motto of the San Diego Skeptics, but it could be.

Dedicated to revealing the hucksters, frauds, phonies and misguided zealots among us, the Skeptics have staked out expansive territory stretching from UFOs and astrology to faith healers and mediums.

Propelled toward the goal of encouraging scientific examination of the paranormal, the Skeptics--both locally and nationally--have taken aim at the creationist movement, particularly attempts by creationists to force public schools to teach evolution as theory rather than fact.

The group doesn’t think of itself as a bunch of do-gooders, or a vigilante truth squad or mind police, says Elie Shneour, director of Biosystems Research Institute and president of Biosystems Associates Ltd. in La Jolla, and one of the founders of San Diego Skeptics.

Want Claims Validated

What Shneour and his associates want are that paranormal claims--be they embodied in psychics, Laetrile clinics, fortune tellers or the Bermuda Triangle--stand the test of scientific review. “We should all be from Missouri. We should all ask for proof,” Shneour says.

As important as unmasking hoaxes might be, particularly when they hurt people, the Skeptics’ ultimate challenge is prodding people to question authority.

“People who’d have us trust their judgment over our own rely on one fundamental principle: authority carries weight,” Shneour has written in the Skeptics newsletter, called Sanity. “Authority comes in many packages. Sometimes it involves an academic degree, or being the winner of a prestigious prize. Other times, it’s conjured up in a reference to some arcane study . . . or it could be implied by a long years of experience, an important title, or having a friend in high places. Others will tell you their authority is based on being able to read the stars and planets, tea leaves, or the future.”

Worked on Mars Probe

Shneour, 61, an author and a former biochemistry professor at Stanford and UC Berkeley, has, among many other activities, served on the National Academy of Sciences team that helped set up the Viking Project, a space probe that searched for life on Mars. He fervently believes that what’s at stake in having people think critically, to detect reason from authority or emotion, is nothing less than America’s national security.

He points, for example, to Louisiana, where public schools were compelled by state law to teach evolution as theory rather than fact. The law was overturned this year by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Los Angeles-based Southern California Skeptics helped sponsor a friend of the court brief that was signed by 72 Nobel laureates.

“We fought a case that should have been won in the 1920s. It’s amazing that we still have to fight this battle . . . when it’s something so clear-cut,” Shneour said in a recent interview. “It’s like fighting people who would maintain that the Earth is flat. It’s ridiculous we have to fight this type of thing while the Soviet Union and Japan, our competitors,” are unencumbered by such division.

“The question is whether our kids will learn science that will make them successful in the 21st Century,” said Shneour, explaining that the Skeptics try to avoid matters of the heart, taste and religion. “But when someone tries to make religion into science, then we step in.”

Eyeing Santee Group

The Skeptics are keeping a wary eye on the Institute for Creation Research, a Santee-based group that is one of the leading promoters of creationist thinking in the country.

Not surprisingly, those at the institute view the Skeptics as an anathema.

“The Skeptics,” says Duane Gish, the institute’s vice president who holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from UC Berkeley, “are an atheist organization.

“That’s why they are opposed to any effort directed to secure evidence that the universe and living things were created rather than evolved through self-transformation.”

Gish claims what the Skeptics really “are working for is freedom from religion not freedom of religion. They want to erase anything that would imply the existence of God.”

Debated Evolution

Last year, Gish debated the issue of evolution versus creation with a top Skeptics official at a public forum at Beverly Hills High School. Others from the institute have participated in similar events in San Diego.

The Skeptics, though, do more than battle creationists, and while they take their work seriously, they also know there is a lighter side to life.

They’ve appeared on local television breaking mirrors, walking under ladders and past black cats on Friday the 13th. They’ve walked on smoldering coals in a demonstration showing there is a difference between temperature and heat--and, as result, pain.

Acting as a sort of counterweight to Shneour--with his extensive academic credentials, Nobel laureate friends and his own medical research laboratory--is Ernie Ernissee, who, when asked how he would be recognized by a stranger at a restaurant meeting, replied: “I’m the one who looks skeptical.”

Works as Engineer

Ernissee is 38 and works as a Sorrento Valley engineer. He is helping develop computer-controlled irrigation systems. About three years ago he co-founded Skeptics in San Diego with Shneour.

“He (Shneour) had the expertise and I had the enthusiasm,” explains Ernissee, whose real first name is Robert.

Expanding on a comment attributed to circus showman P.T. Barnum about a sucker being born every minute, Ernissee says: “Barnum was wrong. I think the rate is much greater.”

Ernissee is the one who goes undercover, as he did last year, when he and another Skeptics member attended a faith healing staged by a television evangelist in Golden Hall. But neither Ernissee, who played the part of a Vietnam veteran still suffering pain from old shrapnel wounds, nor his friend were ever called upon to be “cured.”

Thinks He Was Spotted

Despite his limp and cane, he thinks the faith healer and his assistants spotted him as a fake from the start.

Prepped for the faith healing by one of the Skeptics mentors, James Randi--a self-taught magician who has made a career of exposing the methods of faith healers and psychics, including the “mind power” spoon-bending techniques of Uri Geller--Ernissee says he saw two appeals that are standard at such sessions.

According to Ernissee, one spiel consisted of the evangelist telling the audience: “Take the largest bill you’re carrying now and put it into the basket. Don’t hold on to it, because God can see that $50 dollar bill behind grandma’s picture.” The other appeal went like this, “I want you to look in your checkbook and see how much the largest check you’ve written all week is, and write me a check just a little larger.”

The requests for money, Ernissee says, were preceded by the evangelist telling the group, “I’ve only done this once in all the time I’ve been preaching.”

Angered at People’s Actions

Ernissee says he was angered when he saw people throw away their prescription medicine as a show of faith, a problem that the Skeptics say is also common at Laetrile clinics in Tijuana.

If the Skeptics stand for anything, Shneour says, it’s for stopping fraud “when it hurts people, limits their lives, or diminishes their potential.”

There are those, however, who feel not only that the Skeptics are being presumptuous but are inherently doomed to failure because of their insistence on scientific proof as an explanation for the paranormal.

Dora Marks, better known as the Rev. Dorothy, a 55-year-old psychic, fortune teller and palm reader who operates two palm reading businesses in National City, maintains that science can’t measure the “gifted,” such as herself.

Calls Skeptics Wrong

“They are definitely wrong,” says Marks, who has practiced fortune-telling for 40 years. “Ninety percent of the world is psychic.

“I’m a gifted psychic. I can see the future . . . I foresee things, dream about things,” she said. “It has been proved that psychics can tell what’s going to happen. There was Jeane Dixon, everyone was saying she was crazy and cuckoo, but she predicted when (President) Kennedy would be killed.”

Marks, who says she reads cards, analyzes life lines on the palm and consults her crystal ball to tell a person’s future, says there are frauds in her business but that it doesn’t take someone like the Skeptics to finger them.

“You can tell a (psychic) fraud from a real one,” she said. “They don’t know what they’re saying and don’t know how to answer you. You can tell right away. You go to see one with the gift, and you know.”

Unsure of Attraction

There’s one thing Ernissee and Shneour are convinced of, and that is that San Diego, more than most places, is a magnet for those involved in paranormal activities, be they the outright unscrupulous or true believers, though they aren’t sure why.

“In that sense,” says Shneour, “it’s a Midwestern city transplanted on the West Coast. Of bigger concern, though, is the competition in the marketplace of ideas. Poised against the Skeptics are not only individuals directly active in promoting the paranormal, but an entire media business--from supermarket tabloids and movies to books, daily newspapers and magazines--that profits from keeping alive reports of paranormal events, such as UFO sightings.

“These (reports on paranormal events) are big money makers . . . we’re talking about a large commercial industry, a billion-dollar industry,” Shneour said. “That’s what we’re up against.”

Another thing the Skeptics are up against is cultivating a local audience. At its peak, the Skeptics had about 300 members, of whom 70 or so could be deemed hard-core followers. The problem is many of these members were scientists or in some other way were connected to science, and, as a result, the Skeptics found they were preaching to themselves, rather than to business and working people.

No Place to Meet

Compounding the problem was the lack of finding a consistent meeting place or hall in which to hold functions. One meeting was held in Ernissee’s kitchen. It wasn’t long before the group--a volunteer organization which relies on $25 yearly dues from its members--found itself short of money. As a result, in the last few months, the San Diego Skeptics have aligned themselves with the Los Angeles-based Southern California Skeptics, an organization with more than a thousand members and a regular meeting hall at Caltech in Pasadena.

The Skeptics are hopeful of rejuvenating their San Diego chapter, if for no other reason than to avoid the monthly trip to Los Angeles. One thing they are certain about, however, is that today, more than ever, there is a need for the Skeptics.

“All of us have a belief system. We couldn’t operate without having faith in things,” said Shneour. “But people today like simple answers. When someone comes up with a straightforward and easy answer, it’s very easy to accept. An easy easy answer is very appealing.”

“Life has become very complicated and people get very confused. I think what people have to realize is if you’re going to live in a modern world, you have to accept change and uncertainty as a part of modern life.”