The Man Who Was a “Zetetic Scholar” – Remembering Marcello Truzzi

I hadn’t thought much about Marcello Truzzi until about two months ago, when I saw a post on the Facebook page of UFOlogist Isaac Koi noting that the full archive of Marcello’s Zetetic Scholar is available on the Web, with the permission of his widow Pat Truzzi.  I remembered Marcello from more than fifty years back.  I remembered Pat.

I met him when I was a freshman at Cornell, sometime in the 1965-66 academic year.  He was 30 years old at the time, a grad student working toward his doctorate in sociology.  He and Pat lived in Hasbrouck Apartments, Cornell’s housing for married students.  I visited him there with my friend Steve, who was later to become my roommate, and we spent an afternoon talking.

I have no recollection of how we met.  I think someone who knew of my involvement with UFOs–which in my freshman year I had sort of set behind me, but not altogether–must have put us in touch.  I do remember his explaining to me why he was interested in UFOs and the paranormal, why he wanted my back issues of Fate magazine.  It wasn’t the detached, bemused, somewhat supercilious approach to these crazy people and their crazy beliefs that I might have expected from a sociologist.  Rather, he thought that somewhere amid the noise and the nonsense might lie the germs of a new science.

Marcello spoke of the phlogiston theory, the long discredited scientific doctrine that during the process of combustion a fire-substance called “phlogiston” is released into the air.  The eighteenth-century physicists who believed in phlogiston knew the weaknesses of the theory long before they were ready to give it up, he told me and Steve.  But they had nothing to replace it with.  Mid-twentieth-century science similarly had its anomalies, which had to be ignored or explained away because we had no conceptual framework in which to understand them.  Eventually we would find that framework.  But first the data had to be gathered.

That was where publications like Fate came in.

I remember us talking about religion that afternoon.  We disputed concerning it.  After years of calling myself an agnostic, I was undergoing a mini-religious revival, focusing on the Friday evening services at the campus Hillel.  These were my oases during the often lonely, often stressful weeks as a Cornell freshman, and it helped to let myself once more believe in the Deity to whom they were dedicated.  Marcello seemed to have little use for religion of any kind.

As far as I can recall, this was our one extended conversation during the four years I spent at Cornell.  This saddens me now that I realize how much I might have learned from him, but at the time it made good sense that we spent so little time together.  As a married man of 30, Marcello had little in common beyond intellectual interests–which counted for much less than I’d have imagined–with the horny, shy, bewildered, desperately romantic child I was at 18 and 19.  I think I did give him my old Fates; at any rate, they disappeared from my boyhood home where I’d kept them, and I don’t know what else I would have done with them.  Otherwise, we went our separate ways.

I did stop by to see him, though, during a visit to the campus in 1970 or 1971.  By then I was living in Berkeley, soaking up the smorgasbord of counter-cultural religious weirdness that the San Francisco Bay Area had to offer.  We talked about Anton Szandor LaVey and his Church of Satan, only a few years old at the time.  I remarked, rather smugly, that as far as I could tell Jesus was a good deal more popular than Satan in the Bay Area.

Not significant, Marcello told me.  Berkeley’s “Jesus people” (a.k.a. “Jesus freaks”) were hardly more than offshoots of the drug culture, brains fried by the chemicals they’d ingested.  LaVey and his Satanists would be quite happy to be outnumbered by “psychedelic Christians,” docile sheep to be manipulated and controlled by their Satanic masters.  I remember him attributing to LaVey and his followers a Nazi-like conception of themselves as super-humans, disagreeing with the Nazis only over their racism, which LaVey’s Satanism wanted nothing to do with.  “There are black Satanists,” Marcello said, and for whatever reason the remark stuck in my mind.

It was only long afterward that I discovered that, in the mid-1970s, Marcello joined with several others, including the popular science and mathematics writer Martin Gardner, to establish an organization called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).  By 1977, though, he’d left the group.  He had a very different conception from the others of what CSICOP was supposed to be doing.

By “scientific investigation,” Marcello really meant scientific investigation, balanced and open-minded, with respect for advocates of the paranormal, UFOlogists included.  For his partners, “scientific investigation” meant debunking, using the media to beat back what they regarded as the “irrationalist” assault on the foundational ideas of Western civilization, as embodied, say, in newspaper horoscopes.  It was to be a take-no-prisoners operation.  That wasn’t quite what Marcello had in mind.

So he started his own publication, Zetetic Scholar: An Independent Scientific Review of Claims of Anomalies and the Paranormal.  (Zetetic–from a Greek word meaning “search out, inquire.”)  Pat Truzzi was Associate Editor; “consulting editors” included the debunker Gardner, but also UFO-friendly academics David Jacobs and J. Allen Hynek.

“The ZETETIC SCHOLAR,” Marcello wrote in an editorial for the first issue (1978), “will attempt to create a continuing dialogue between proponents and critics of claims of the paranormal. Concerned mainly with enhancing communication, we are interested not only in adjudication of the claims but with the sociology and psychology of the disputes themselves. We will seek to balance science’s proper skepticism towards extraordinary claims with its need for objectivity and fairness.”

An extraordinary claim, Marcello liked to say, requires extraordinary proof.  This maxim became a common cultural property after it was taken up by Carl Sagan, after whom it’s come to be named.  But Marcello didn’t build into it the smirking assumption that UFOlogists and paranormal advocates couldn’t rise to the challenge.  There might really be “extraordinary proof,” and if so, Marcello wanted to know about it.

For over ten years, from 1970 onward, Marcello and his one-time colleague Martin Gardner exchanged letters addressing their philosophical differences.  Their correspondence was published in 2017 as Dear Martin / Dear Marcello: Gardner and Truzzi on Skepticism.  I’ve ordered a copy of the book and look forward to learning more from it about the remarkable man whom I could have known much better than I did.

The main point of contention between them was Marcello’s vastly greater openness to the paranormal and those who championed it.  But did religious differences also play a part?–only, in the opposite way from what you’d expect.  Gardner, for all his mockery of “fringe” beliefs and the “cranks” who held them, was a man of faith, believing in God, life after death, the power of prayer.  While Marcello … the man I remember from fifty years ago would have had nothing to do with any of that.

Perhaps the Truzzi-Gardner letters will provide a clue.

I did see Marcello once more.  I believe it was the early summer of 1988.  My father had recently died; my wife and I were visiting the Cornell campus, where my parents met in the 1930s.  (It was a sort of farewell to my college days, although I didn’t know it at the time.  I’ve never been back since.)  Marcello was no longer at Cornell–he was Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.  But he was on campus for a conference, I imagine of the Society for Scientific Exploration, the organization that embodied his approach to the paranormal.  It was extraordinary that we happened to run into each other.

We greeted each other like the old friends we were.  He told me about the Society.  He told me about Zetetic Scholar–or was it the Society’s new publication, Journal of Scientific Exploration, which first came out in 1987, the year  Zetetic Scholar ceased to appear?  Either way, when I got back to North Carolina I enthusiastically sent him a check for a subscription.  The check was cashed but I never received anything, nor did I ever hear from Marcello again.

I confess the episode left me feeling a bit sour.  During the years that followed, I heard through the academic grapevine about Marcello’s struggle with cancer, and when I learned that he had died–in 2003, though I can’t remember how or when I heard about it–I wasn’t surprised.  Deeply saddened, though.

“He was not a religious man,” his good friend UFOlogist Jerome Clark remembered, “but … he was not afraid to die.”  According to Jerry, whom I count as one of my own oldest friends, “Marcello felt he was a true skeptic, who doubts, rather than a debunker (he later preferred ‘scoffer’), who denies …

“To the end he doubted, but he did not deny.  He thought that whether or not they were ultimately proved to be as extraordinary as they seemed, the issues raised by anomalous experiences, and investigated by serious, critical-minded ufologists, cryptozoologists, and parapsychologists, are legitimate ones which science dismisses or ignores to its own detriment.

“In our last conversation he spoke of the fundamental uncertainty that underlies all existence and understanding.”

by David Halperin
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