Friday, October 27, 2023

THE SKEPTICAL MOVEMENT IN MEXICO

(Photo from Facebook)
Mario Méndez-Acosta is a civil engineer (National Autonomous University of Mexico), a journalist and  theMexican Society for Skeptical Research-SOMIE's founding president.

Skepticism in Mexico arose from a group of friends reading Martin Gardner's book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, during the sixties.

In 1982, while I was working for Jorge Saldaña's TV program Sabados del Trece in Mexico City, a character named Altamirano was introduced, who presented children who supposedly read with their fingers, while blindfolded. It was demonstrated there that they spied through the blindfold. 

A friend, Carlos Calderon, a stage magician and engineer, put us in touch with an American citizen, Ralph McCombe Snader, who in 1979 had organized the Mexican section of CSICOP. Through both of them we brought James Randi to Mexico, who examined the children in a Gessel camera at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Faculty of Psychology) that had been provided to us there by Dr. in Psychology Serafin Mercado. 

Randi unmasked the charlatan and published an analysis in that school's magazine.

Snader proposed that I head the Mexican section of CSICOP and I began to travel to the conferences of this organization in the USA, where I met, among others, in 1984, Paul Kurtz.

Kurtz proposed to organize an international conference in 1989, we accepted, and decided to create a civil association to be called the Mexican Society for Skeptical Research (SOMIE). The conference was successfully held in 1989.

In addition to myself, Mauricio Schwarz, Víctor Vázquez, Carlos Calderón, Héctor Chavarría, Héctor Escobar, Rafael Fernández Flores, Luis Ruiz Noguez, Juan Zuckerman and many others participated in the organization. The organization published magazines on skepticism in general and skeptical ufology for more than ten years.

Héctor Chavarría, Juan Chía, Héctor Escobar, Mario Méndez Acosta, 
Patricia López Zaragoza, and Carlos Calderón at a meeting of skeptics in 1992.

Mario Méndez Acosta in TV program ¿Y usted qué opina? [What do you think?] "Ovnis" [Ufos], March 9, 1992.

 

Mario Méndez Acosta, Héctor Chavarría, Héctor Escobar, Oscar García and Luis Ruiz Noguez at a meeting on UFOs, 1995. 

 El Investigador Escéptico [The Skeptical Inquirer], the Mexican Society for Skeptical Research's Bulletin  


Perspectivas ufológicas [Ufological Perspectives] magazine and book 500 years of Ufos in Mexico

Razonamientos, Revista de Pensamiento Humanista 
[Reasonings, Magazine of Humanist Thought]

(English translation by Deepl.com of the Spanish article EL MOVIMIENTO ESCÉPTICO EN MÉXICO, and reviewed by Manuel A. Paz y Miño)








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