To most Americans, Britain looks tiny. With a little reshaping, the entire mainland would easily fit inside Wyoming. Even so, intense localization outside of London makes it difficult to spark a national movement. The Skeptic never tried; its editors hoped the magazine would inspire others to organize their own local activities. The more skepticism the better.
One who did try is Michael Heap, a Sheffield-based retired clinical psychologist and university lecturer who, along with fellow Northerners Tony Youens and Wayne Spencer, set up the Association for Skeptical Enquiry (ASKE).
Heap, like me, began reading Skeptical Inquirer in the 1980s and was inspired by it to attend the 1985 London conference. He liked the event and hoped it would spark a movement in the UK, but “nothing really happened until The Skeptic” in January 1987. Even then, Heap wasn’t entirely satisfied because we weren’t doing much beyond publishing. In the letters pages, however, he found fellow northerners interested in starting a group. In 1997, they convened in a Manchester pub, chose the ASKE name, and decided their principal aim was to have an organization that people could join and a magazine of their own, which they began publishing soon afterward. “It wasn’t fantastic-looking,” Heap says, “but we had good, high-quality papers.” The group also hoped to serve as a contact point to provide expert opinions for the press and ran a series of well-received public meetings, including an attention-getting event in Sheffield during Science Week.
Though small, as an association, ASKE was eligible to join the European Council of Skeptical Organisations (ECSO), founded in 1994 as an umbrella for member groups across Europe, some of which have thousands of members. ASKE twice hosted the European Skeptical Congress in the U.K., in 2011 and 2015. Both were good events with a more academic cast than the highly successful annual QED event, drew attendees from across Europe, and inspired them to organize further events in other countries. For Heap, the connection to Europe is an important motivator; he remains on ECSO’s board.
ASKE’s most enduring contribution, besides the magazine, may be its ongoing tests of claimants.
“Several members pledged thousands of pounds for the psychic challenge,” Heap says. One or two queries a year are serious, but, “a lot of them, I can’t make out what they’re claiming. Or the website says, ‘please fill in the form’ and they write direct. The last one was a man who emailed and said he had a photograph of death.”
One claimant said he didn’t need to come to Sheffield for testing; he told Heap he could identify a photo of a random place given a set of choices. “We did a pilot with him. He actually guessed correctly from a set of six. Then he failed the next two, the real trials, and we didn’t hear from him again.”
ASKE’s best applicant was a dowser, “a very pleasant, very smart retired engineer in Milton Keynes.” Chris French helped Heap devise a test, and they traveled to Milton Keynes to carry it out. “He failed completely, but it was an interesting day. He accepted that he thought he would succeed, and didn’t. My take on this was that this chap has been doing dowsing for years and years and has convinced himself that it works and feels he has a lot of evidence on his side that it works. We test him, it doesn’t work, but he doesn’t dismiss the rest of the evidence. It’s reasonable for him to say that he couldn’t pass the test but that doesn’t mean I don’t have the ability.”
This is where Heap’s background as a clinical psychologist shows. “I always stress with people that it doesn’t mean they lack the ability, but they haven’t demonstrated it on this occasion. For some people, it’s cognitive dissonance—they don’t want to think that they failed.” Heap believes that at least a few of ASKE’s claimants had clear psychological problems. One very young, very intelligent claimant who said people could read his thoughts came from China to be tested, but backed out at the last moment saying the pilot test subjects were too old. During a chat afterward, Heap says, “I could tell he was teetering on psychosis.”
Heap felt he had to tread carefully with several other claimants. “I don’t want to become part of their delusional system,” he says. Another claimant who said people could read his thoughts, whom Mike Marshall helped test, had to be handled gently after a group member, a criminal lawyer, discovered he had been imprisoned for armed robbery.
ASKE’s small size limits the tests it can take on and bars some other activities. “I occasionally get letters from people who’ve had bad experiences with mediums. I can’t take up their campaign for them.” He keeps the records, partly because the press sometimes ask him for leads like those.
With misinformation proliferating, it’s natural to ask if skepticism has failed. Heap thinks not. He’s believes the media’s view of 1980s and 1990s favorite topics, such as mediums, astrology, UFOs, and alternative medicine, has substantially shifted. Then, he says, “The media were relatively happy with these things. Something like alt-med was seen as benign and maybe offering alternatives.” Now, prominent media commentators are ranting about alt-med and conspiracy theories while promoting evidence-based medicine. We must hope he’s right.