Phoenix Skeptics News

History

Phoenix Skeptics News was the bimonthly publication of the Phoenix Skeptics, an Arizona regional society in the CSICOP-aligned sceptical movement of the late 1980s. The archive holds six issues across Volume 1, spanning 1987 through to 1988. The publication ran on a bimonthly cadence and was edited and produced by the society's founding membership in Phoenix.

The held issues document the meeting-driven editorial form characteristic of regional sceptic-society newsletters of the period. The October 1987 issue records a Halloween meeting hosted at the home of Hans Sebald, the Arizona State University sociologist who had written on Satanism and youth subcultures. The November meeting opened with a 1983 videotape of James Randi's address at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine on psychic surgery. The publication's content interleaves meeting reports, member commentary on local press claims, and reprinted material from the national CSICOP network.

The short publication life means the archive's holding is essentially the founding period of the Phoenix Skeptics. Volume 1 Number 6 from 1988 is the latest issue held. Whether the society continued publishing under a different title or wound down after Volume 1 is not documented in the archival material itself, and the holding stands as the documentary record of the Arizona regional society's founding-era activity in the late-1980s sceptical movement.