Ours may be an age of reason- or at least high-tech reducibility- but belief in the irrational, the occult and the supernatural seems almost as persistant and pervasive as it was in the Middle Ages. Indeed, thanks to the wonders of mass communications, public exposure to claims made for paranormal phenomena may be more widespread than in any previous era.

On the current world scene, belief in the paranormal is fed and reinforced by a vast media industry that profits from it and it has been transformed into a folk religion, perhaps the dominant one to date says Paul Kurtz, professor of philosophy at the Stat University of New York Buffalo.

Kurtz, editor of Free Industry is the founder of the Committe for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) a loose organization of psychologists, physical scientists, journalists, and concerned citizens. At a recent international conference, CSICOP members, most avowed skeptics, examined the apparent paradox of psychic spoon-benders, faith healers and poltergeists surviving-even thriving- side by side with Atari addicts (Atari addicts? Ed), biotechnicians and space scientists. They also attempted to assess the current state of popular delusions and their own efforts to counter the more outlandish beliefs.

Overall, the scorecard of the skeptics looks bad. Reports from Mexico, Holland, Austrailia, Canada and elsewhere confirm that public acceptance of clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, psychokinesis, levitation, and UFOs is still as strong as ever- and with only slight variations, still reported extensively and uncritically by the popular press.

Ironically, Kurtz points out, the persistance and growth of ancient beliefs may be due in part to the fast pace of sci-tech progress itself. "Present day science seems to demonstrate that virtually anything is possible. So people ask why is it not possible lfor the mind to engage in remote viewing of distant events and scenes, precognate or retrocognate, or exist in some form seperate from the body? Unfortunately, there is confusion between the possible and the actual. For many people, the fact that something is possible converts it into the actual."

When compared with conventional research, of course, some disiplines are easily indentifued as pseudosciences because they lack methods, systematics or theories. ("Has anyone ever heard of the First Law of Clairvoyance, or the Second Law of Telepathy or the Third Law of Psychokinesis?" asks Mario Bunge of McGill University.)

More important, parapsychologists and proponents of the paranormal are hard pressed to produce any incontrovertible examples of their phenomena. This is true despite efforts by devoted and often quite sincere researchers as well as recent attempts to link para-psychological claims with quantum mechanics to explain the apparent leaps over constraints of time and space.

"The past seven years (since the founding of CSICOP) have been no kinder to those seeking compelling evidence about the reality of paranormal phenomena than were the previous 70," says psychologist James Alcock of York University in Toronto. "The long-sought, reliably demonstratable psychic phenomenon is just as elusive as it has always been.