Fellow Skeptics:

I returned Sunday from the WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS book tour just in
time to watch the season finale of THE SIMPSONS and THE X-FILES, both of
which were appropriately skeptical. Homer Simpson's daughter was reading
JUNIOR SKEPTIC MAGAZINE (an obvious reference to Skeptic magazine, which
warmed my heart to no end), while Homer explained that if they were unable to
find the aliens he thought he saw in the woods at the end of a 20-beer
drinking bash the night before, they could just make up a bunch of stuff and
sell it to the Fox network, who will buy anything! When they did finally
encounter the alien it turned out to be an old man they knew who was out of
his mind and glowing green from hanging out at the nuclear power plant too
long! 

X-Files opened with Scully explaining to the FBI head dudes that she was
assigned to the X-Files to keep Mulder on an even keel (because she is a MD
and has training in the hard sciences), but now that he's dead she can report
that after four years of paranormal and alien mysteries it was all a hoax,
perpetrated on Mulder (because he is so vulnerable to such beliefs after he
lost his sister to what he believed was an alien abduction) and the FBI by
the military in order to replace the old bad guys (the Ruskies) with the new
bad guys (the aliens, even though they don't exist), in order to fuel the
flames of public anxiety to keep those defense dollars coming in. Of course,
this was not the series finale, but the SEASON finale, so it was unclear at
the end whether the hoax was itself a hoax, or whether the hoax was real!
Stay tuned, but at least we've made a little skeptical progress here.

The W. H. Freeman-sponsored book tour for WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS was
a smashing success, with literally hundreds of media appearances (if you
count the radio phoners that are syndicated everywhere), both national and
regional. I'll be lecturing in more detail on the tour as part of the annual
Skeptics Society's conference this weekend at Caltech--The Science Gap--as
well as writing about it in a future issue of Skeptic or another publication.
But here are a few highlights: 

Turns out G. Gordon Liddy, "the G Man" as his fans call him, is a big fan of
Randi, Penn and Teller (he appeared in a movie with them called "The
Invisible Thread"), and is a total skeptic. He plugged the book endlessly and
after my hour, continued plugging the book the next hour when some woman
called in to recant her horrific story of her abduction by Scientology, which
began innocuously enough with the personality test (everyone fails it, of
course), and ended with her sitting in a deserted hotel room talking to a
picture of L. Ron Hubbard, which talked back to her! Since I had "the man"
sitting next to me in the studio who knows more about conspiracies than most
of us, I asked Liddy how he answers conspiracy theorists. He said there are
two major problems: (1) Ineptness-- government bureaucrats are too inept to
pull off complex conspiracies; (2) Leakage--he quoted Ben Franklin who said
"three people can keep a conspiracy if two of them are dead."

Weird Things has been picked up for the Behavior Science Book Club and the
Newbridge Natural Science Book Club, and has been reviewed very positively so
far in the San Diego Union-Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe,
The Indianapolis Star, the Detroit Free Press, The Tokyo Weekender, and quite
negatively in the NY Press (a freebie rag on every street corner) in which
the author bashed both myself and Elaine Showalter's book, "Hystories,"
because we tried to provide answers to mysteries, rather than just asking
lots of questions. As a clue to the depth of his knowledge, he called
Holocaust denier David Cole (a high school drop out), a "Jewish Scholar."

I don't believe in synchronicity, but sometimes things happen that take me
aback. On Friday, in San Francisco, I was on the Ronn Owens show (the #1
rated show in SF, higher than Rush, he boasts) for an hour. As I was leaving
the building, walking in was Dr. Dean Edell, the syndicated radio medical
host who received the Skeptics Society Edward R. Murrow award last year for
excellence in journalism. He looked up from what he was reading and
exclaimed, with a shocked look on his face, "SHERMER?!" Turns out he was
reading the Boston Globe review of my book, which was syndicated in a San
Francisco newspaper, and he was planning on discussing the book that very
day. And there I was, book in hand, which he had not had a chance to pick up
yet! Obviously the book got a nice on-air review from the good doctor. 

In San Diego I discovered what I am now calling THE PECKING ORDER PROBLEM in
science. On the morning news television program I was given three minutes,
the author of CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE WOMAN'S SOUL was given 6 minutes, while a
guy who had a chicken who imprinted to a duck got 8 minutes (it was so
ridiculous to see this chicken and duck prancing around on the anchors' desk
messing up their papers and notes). To make matters worse the guy couldn't
remember who discovered "imprinting," so I blurted out from the sidelines,
"Konrad Lorenz." They were impressed with my "extensive" knowledge of science
history. Oh ya, Konrad Lorenz and imprinting. No one's ever heard of that! So
I told the producer that between the Chicken Soup and the imprinted chicken,
the station had a real pecking order problem about science. I got a mild
laugh off air, anyway.

On Fox's Good Day L.A. I did a "psychic" reading on one of the hosts, by
first casually pumping the producer for information about the type of car she
drives ("I see a white convertable"), future trips ("I see travel in your
future--San Diego maybe"). I had her going for awhile until she figured it
out and said, "Oh, you've been talking to my producer." To which I responded,
"Yup, that's how the psychics do it." I did the same thing to an attractive
radio host in San Francisco who was in her middle 30s, no wedding band,
children's photos on the desk, and cold medicine on the desk. "I sense you
are in a relationship right now, not a marriage, and one of you is more
committed than the other. There are children, a boy and a girl. You are
concerned about your health. You've been feeling a little low lately. Etc."
She laughed and realized what was going on, to which I said "that's how the
psychics do it: just paying attention to your surroundings."

More stories later. All in all a successful trip. Thanks to W. H. Freeman for
the first class hotels, media escorts, good media contacts, etc. And all of
this, of course, is good for the skeptical cause. Every interview began with
something to the effect of "And now for a skeptical point of view, the
publisher of Skeptic magazine, the director of the Skeptics Society, and the
author of Why People Believe Weird Things...." We couldn't buy this sort of
coverage of our small but important cause.

Michael Shermer