Tampa Bay Skeptics Report

History

The Tampa Bay Skeptics Report began with Volume 1 Number 1 dated Summer 1988. The founder and editor across the publication's long run was Gary P. Posner, an internal-medicine physician based in the Tampa Bay area who built the Tampa Bay Skeptics as one of the early Florida regional groups in the CSICOP-aligned sceptical society network. The publication ran for twenty-six volumes through to the final issues in roughly 2013. The archive holds 95 of those issues. The closing volume in the archive's run is incomplete and marks the publication's effective end.

Posner's editorial method was ground-level case work in central Florida. The lead piece in the first issue, written by Posner under his medical credential, was titled "Physician, Heal Thy Group" and addressed a specific event: the Reverend Willard Fuller of Palatka, Florida, the figure known as the "psychic dentist" and documented by James Randi in chapter 12 of The Faith Healers, had performed his traveling clinic at Port Charlotte on 26 February 1988 before a crowd of about forty. Judy Ciarcia, health reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, attended in her professional capacity, and Posner's piece worked through what she had seen and what the published faith-healing literature said about it.

The format established in the first issue continued through the run. Local figures making claims appeared at local venues; members of the Tampa Bay Skeptics attended in person and produced detailed accounts of what the speakers said, what the visible effects appeared to be, and how the claims sat against the published clinical, technical, or astronomical literature. The publication's geographic focus was tight: central Florida psychic practitioners, regional UFO lecture-circuit speakers, alternative-medicine clinics operating in the Tampa Bay catchment area. National cases received treatment when Posner's medical training added a particular angle, but the publication's standing investment was in the local circuit.