Phactum

History

Phactum, the newsletter of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT), ran across roughly thirteen years from April 2006 through April 2019. The earliest issue the archive holds is dated April 2006, the latest April 2019. The publication was a regional outlet of the CSICOP-aligned sceptical society network that proliferated across the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, the Philadelphia chapter operating in close geographic and institutional proximity to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which had been founded in Philadelphia in March 1992 and ran its own newsletter through 2011 from the same metropolitan area.

The publication's editorial structure was open. The April 2006 issue's lede invited members directly: "What is on your mind? Global warming? End Times? UFOs? Natural cures? Ghosts? Intelligent Design? Loch Ness Monster?" The invitation framed Phactum as a space for member-contributed pieces across the full range of paranormal, fringe-science, and pseudoscientific claims active in the Philadelphia region at any given moment. The publication carried meeting announcements, member essays, book reviews, and case-specific commentary in equal measure.

The thirteen-year run covers the period in which UFO claims shifted from the post-Roswell-revival 1990s register toward the post-2017 disclosure-era register. The newsletter sits at the regional-society level where the broader institutional disputes about evidential standards, hypnosis-based methodology, and government secrecy played out in members' meetings, in invited speaker presentations, and in the local-press treatment of cases active in the Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey region.