The Sense of Being Stared At
Dr Robert A. Baker, a retired psychology professor at the University of Kentucky, and a CSICOP Fellow. In the Skeptical Inquirer he dismissed the sense of being stared at as false: "Skeptics.... believe that it is nothing more than a superstition and/or a response to subtle signals from the environment."
Dr David Marks, a CSICOP Fellow and professor at City University,
London. He is the author of The Psychology of the Psychic (2000), in
which he rejects a wide range of "paranormal" phenomena, including my
research on the sense of being stared at. He attacked this research in
2000 in the Skeptical Inquirer in an article co-authored with John Colwell.
To read my reply to them in the Skeptical Inquirer Click here. He attacked this research again in 2003 in The Skeptic, and also tried to explain away my work on return-anticipating dogs. You can read my reply in The Skeptic Here
Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Director of the Skeptic Society, the host of the Skeptics' Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology, and the author of a regular column in Scientific American called "Skeptic". In an article in USA Today (Feb 26, 2003) about my new book The Sense of Being Stared At, And other Aspects of the Extended Mind, he was quoted as saying, "The events Sheldrake describes don't require a theory and are perfectly explicable by normal means". It turned out he could not substantiate this claim, and had not even seen my book. I proposed an online debate. He accepted this challenge in March, and said he will "get to it soon". In May he told me, "I have not gotten to your book
yet". I enquired again in December if there had been any progress, but he said he had been too busy.
It only takes a few minutes to make an evidence-free claim to a
journalist; dogmatism is easy. It's much harder work to look at evidence itself. But watch this space. Shermer repeatedly tells the readers of Skeptic magazine that "skepticism is a method, not a position". Is this true in his case?