The South Shore Skeptic

History

The South Shore Skeptic was the newsletter of The South Shore Skeptics, a regional society convening monthly at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, on the south shore of the Cleveland metropolitan area. The archive holds three issues from 1997: Volume 13 Numbers 4, 5, and 6, covering the January-February, May-June, and July-August quarters. The numbering implies an inaugural issue in 1984 or 1985. The convener listed across the three held issues is Page Stephens (telephone 676-4859), and meetings were held in Room 18 of the Life Sciences Building at 3036 Front Street, Berea, on Friday evenings at 7:30 PM.

The three held issues capture a programme that ranges across the principal sceptic-movement topics of the mid-1990s. The January-February 1997 issue advances the March meeting under the title "Why We are Here: the reason The South Shore Skeptics exist", treated by Page Stephens, and announces the resurrection of an unnamed previous speaker on videotape. The articles in that issue cover human belief and scepticism, a review of the January meeting on creation controversy, and a piece titled "Surfin' the Internet For Skepticism". The May-June 1997 issue carries Dr. Joe Bauer's presentation "The Best Documented UFO Case of All Time: Photographic Evidence for UFOs", a treatment of photographic-evidence claims from the sceptical position. The July-August 1997 issue advertises William Cohen-Kiraly, a Cleveland graphic designer, on web sites of interest to those with a sceptical bent, with the explicit framing that the tour would include both sceptic and "enemy territory" sites. The same issue carries an obituary for Bill Voss, a society regular.

The South Shore Skeptics sits in the local-society tier of the broader CSICOP-aligned network. The three held issues, all from 1997, are too small a sample to support claims about the run's trajectory. They do show that by 1997 the society had been operating for at least thirteen years on a stable monthly format at a stable Baldwin Wallace College venue, and that its programme by that date had moved from the foundational debunking topics through to the emerging web-mediated sceptic-press infrastructure that would substantially displace the print-newsletter form across the following decade.