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Written by Administrator
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sexta, 10 setembro 2004 |
 Marcello Truzzi, 67, Always Curious, Dies
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.
He was an Associate Member of the Parapsychological Association.
For more information on Marcello Truzzi, see the
tribute website set up by George Hansen.
Obituary contributed by
Loren
Coleman
Another obituary, written by his friend Jerome Clark, can be
found on the
Anomalist website. We thanks the Parapsychological Association Board (www.parapsych.org) for the permission to publish the above material.
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Last Updated ( sexta, 25 agosto 2006 )
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