Forty-two years have passed since the birth of CSICOP, the Committee for the SciF entific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, CSI), and its magazine, Skeptical Inquirer. Soon after its birth, there was a wave of skepticism across the globe. A great visionary was at the center of the explosion: Paul Kurtz, a philosophy professor who saw skepticism as a global worldwide endeavor. The Australian Skeptics took off in 1980 with Mark Plummer as president. A decade later, in the mid-1980s, CSICOP encouraged skeptics all over the world to form their own groups.
Mark Plummer, then executive director of CSICOP, and Wendy Grossman, founder of the magazine The Skeptic in the United Kingdom, toured Europe in this mission, resulting in many new groups.