Shadow of a Doubt

History

Shadow of a Doubt was the electronic monthly calendar of the National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS), the Washington DC regional society in the broader CSICOP-aligned network. The inaugural issue is dated May 1994. The publication was distributed by email (subscribers wrote to ncas@cs.umd.edu, an account hosted at the University of Maryland College Park computer science department) and announced the society's monthly Saturday-afternoon programme at the Bethesda Library, 7400 Arlington Road, Bethesda, Maryland. The format remained substantially the same across the twelve-year run: a speaker name, an abstract for the talk, biographical context for the speaker, the venue and time. The publication ran in parallel with NCAS's print quarterly Skeptical Eye, which carried longer-form investigative pieces and review essays.

The 105 issues the archive holds span May 1994 to May 2006. The inaugural May 1994 issue announced William R. Corliss as the first speaker. Corliss was the cataloguer of scientific anomalies whose Sourcebook Project had been assembling abstracts of unexplained observations from the scientific periodical literature since 1974. His talk was titled "The Ubiquity of Anomalies", and the abstract framed his work as a quarter-century survey of "those observations of nature that elude accepted scientific paradigms" across 12,000 volumes of scientific publications and approximately 3,000 catalogued anomalies. The inaugural speaker choice locates NCAS's editorial register at the more methodologically open end of the broader sceptical movement: the society opened with a Fortean cataloguer of unexplained natural phenomena rather than with a debunker.

The April 1995 calendar carries Richard Dengrove on "The Rosicrucians: Our Secret Masters?", a treatment of the long history of Rosicrucian self-presentation from Benjamin Franklin-era American advertising through to the Solar Temple deaths of November 1994. The May 2006 issue, the last the archive holds, carries Roberta I. Shaffer on "Junk Science & Junk Justice: How Does Our Legal System Litigate With Science?", an analysis of expert-testimony standards in American courtrooms grounded in Shaffer's then-current role as Executive Director of the Federal Library and Information Center at the Library of Congress. The twelve-year arc of the publication runs from the cataloguing-of-anomalies opening through to the formal legal-evidence treatments characteristic of the discipline's late-period institutional engagement.

NCAS itself was founded in 1987 (see Skeptical Eye for the formal print history). The relationship between the two NCAS publications is constant across both runs: Skeptical Eye carried the editorial and analytical work, Shadow of a Doubt carried the programme and the speaker abstracts. Together the two publications give the archive a continuous documentary record of which speakers the Washington DC society was inviting, which topics they were taking up, and how the broader national sceptic-movement conversation was being received at the local-society level across the late 1980s, the 1990s, and the early 2000s.