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Marcello Truzzi,
67, Always Curious, Dies
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Marcello Truzzi died rather suddenly around three o'clock, local
time, on
the afternoon of February 2, 2003, in Michigan. As recently as a
week
before his death, he was talking with his friend Jerome Clark about
his
excitement in working on his planned personal autobiography.
Truzzi's swift
passing, thus, is a surprise to his friends and his family. He had
been
suffering from colon rectal cancer during the last seven years, but
would go
in and out of remission. His Michigan friends note that he fought
his
cancer so diligently that he actually bought about four extra years
of life
Truzzi was associated with the beginnings of the intellectual
understandings
of skepticism in America, first with his association with the
Resources for
the Scientific Evaluation of the Paranormal, whose members included
Martin
Gardner, Ray Hyman, James Randi, and Marcello Truzzi, all magicians.
Also
during the early 1970s, Truzzi was also publishing a privately
circulated
newsletter called the Zetetic. In 1976, Truzzi was the co-founder,
with Paul
Kurtz, of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims
of the
Paranormal (CSICOP), but he would later break from Kurtz and CSICOP.
In
1978, he began publishing the Zetetic Scholar, and created the
Center for
Scientific Anomalies Research. He was a sociologist at Eastern
Michigan
University in Ypsilanti.
Marcello Truzzi's family was a rather famous Russian Italian circus
family,
being part of Circus Truzzi in Russia. Indeed, Truzzi was born in
Copenhagen, Denmark, on September 6, 1935, when his family was there
on
tour. His family moved to the USA in 1940. He continued, throughout
his
life, to have a passionate and intellectual interest in magic,
juggling,
sideshows, carnivals, and circuses, as well as sociology,
anthropology,
psychology, and folk culture. I shall always recall our frequent
email
exchanges on everything from hoaxing and anomalistic phenomena, to
ice falls
and cryptozoology. He loved to coin words like "pseudoskepticism"
and
"cryptometeorology."
An extraordinary wordsmith, Truzzi edited books on a variety of
topics
(criminal life, anthropology, sexism, revolution, sociology, police
law), as
well as coauthoring several books. Some of these include Caldron
Cookery: An
Authentic Guide for Coven Connoisseurs (with illus. Victoria Chess;
1969),
The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime (with Arthur Lyons;
1992), UFO
Encounters (consultant), and The Complete Idiot's Guide to
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (consultant).
He will be deeply missed. |
© Loren Coleman 2003
Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman is the author of
twenty books, including
Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America
(Paraview Pocket, 2003). His website is
www.lorencoleman.com. |
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