Science, Pseudoscience, and Science Falsely So- Called 297tifi c respectability, proponents such as the Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan
asserted that SETI had moved from “a largely disreputable pseudoscience
to an interesting although extremely speculative endeavor within the
boundaries of science.”^59
Alongside the construction of a much stronger and more organized
scientifi c establishment emerged a more structured means of communi-
cating scientifi c consensus to the general public, whether they were read-
ing textbooks in the expanding public- school system, scanning the daily
newspaper, or watching the evening news on television. But some observ-
ers inside and outside the scientifi c community continued to worry that
popular treatments of science were as much a source of pseudoscientifi c
ideas as they were a means to combat them. Complaints about the media’s
handling of scientifi c topics provided a constant drumbeat. Even more
insidious were the publications unfettered by the sorts of respectability
that often kept mainstream media in check. Condon’s 1969 denunciation
of scientifi c pornography laid responsibility squarely on “pseudo- science
magazine articles and paper back books,” which sold by the tens of thou-
sands and even millions.^60
Since the early 1950s concerned citizens had been agitating for the
formation of “one organization that could represent American science in
combating pseudo- science.” After decades of delay, champions of science
fi nally banded together in 1976 to police the public sphere. Aroused by
the popularity of Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collission (1950), Eric
von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods (1968), and Charles Berlitz’s The Ber-
muda Triangle (1974)—to say nothing of Uri Geller’s spoon- bending and
Jeane Dixon’s prophesying—a group of skeptics under the leadership of
philosopher Paul Kurtz formed the Committee for the Scientifi c Investiga-
tion of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), renamed the Committee for
Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) in 2006, and began publication of a pseudoscience-
busting journal that they soon called the Skeptical Enquirer. One supporter,
Carl Sagan, who became a crusader against pseudoscience during the last
third of the twentieth century, asserted in the journal that “poor popular-
izations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience” and
worried that there was a “kind of Gresham’s Law by which in popular
culture the bad science drives out the good.”^61
Inspired by CSICOP and the slightly older Association française pour
l’information scientifi que, publisher of Science et pseudo- sciences, similar
groups sprang up around the world. By 1984 there were organizations of
skeptics in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ecuador, Great Britain, Mexico,
the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden. During the next
quarter century the anti- pseudoscience movement spread to Argentina,