Michael Prescott's Blog

Outrage overload

A funny thing has happened to me lately. I seem to have lost a good part of my ability to become outraged.

I don't know if this is a good thing or not. On the plus side, it means I am calmer. On the minus side, I am perhaps more apathetic.

Whether good or bad, permanent or merely temporary, my current lack of outrage is certainly a new development. For years, it seems, I could get outraged - or at least royally ticked off - about nearly anything. Now I only shrug and murmur, "What fools these mortals be."

Case in point: A biologist writes an op-ed piece in the LA Times advocating the laboratory creation of man-monkey hybrids, not for any scientific purpose, but simply to show religious people that there is no clear dividing line between humans and animals. "It is a line that exists only in the minds of those who proclaim that the human species, unlike all others, possesses a spark of the divine," he writes disapprovingly.

Ordinarily the suggestion that scientists should literally monkey with human life in such a capricious and twisted way would inspire me to vehement invective. Not this time. How silly, I thought. Some people will say anything to get attention.

Another case: Not long ago I was mightily disturbed to read that a certain Deb Frisch, a university lecturer in psychology, had made inappropriate (violent and sexual) comments about a conservative blogger's two-year-old son. Now it appears that Frisch is still at it, writing equally sick things to the same blogger and to another one. Meanwhile, in an unrelated case, another blogger is being threatened by someone who appears to have physical violence in mind.

I ought to be getting upset about this, but somehow I can't seem to feel much about it, except that there is a vicious cycle at work here: deliberately provocative political blogging > a backlash of angry comments > even more in-your-face blogging > even angrier and more personal comments, and on and on until the situation escalates into something really dangerous. It shouldn't be like that, but it is. Who could expect otherwise?

Perhaps I can't feel outraged anymore because of the incessant attempts to provoke my outrage. Every day, cable news and blog sites and talk radio and print media all do their best to get me outraged about something. About anything. Outrage sells. Except at a certain point, I seem to have immune to it. Like a kid who's had the mumps and is now immunized against a recurrence of the illness, I have absorbed so much outrage and released so much adrenalized anger that suddenly I find myself at least temporarily immune. It's a weird, lonely feeling.

And I can't even get upset about it.

Night's fall

I must admit to taking a certain cruel and malicious pleasure in watching the disintegration of M. Night Shyamalan. The director who came to prominence with the superb occult thriller The Sixth Sense, and followed it up with the intriguing though flawed Unbreakable, has been on a downward spiral for some time. Signs had some powerful moments but didn't quite work. And then there was The Village, surely one of the very worst movies to come out of Hollywood in the last, oh, hundred years - a movie so pretentious, dull, nonsensical, labored, and incoherent that it makes Ed Wood look like John Ford.

Along the way, Shyamalan has become more and more full of himself - taking larger roles in his own movies, hawking the American Express card on TV, and bloviating about his own unappreciated genius. He is supported by the usual enablers - dizzy fans who think their hero can do no wrong, lazy critics who write positive reviews of movies they slept through, studio execs who don't dare say a discouraging word to a director who's currently hot.

Well, he ain't so hot anymore. His latest release, Lady in the Water, is underperforming at the box office even as it is raked over the coals by critics and eviscerated by word of mouth. This should come as no surprise. The script for Lady was so poor that Disney passed on the project despite Shyamalan's strong commercial track record. When a studio as money-hungry as Disney lets a brand-name director like Shyamalan get away, you know the script must have sucked like an Electrolux. Perhaps the fact that Shyamalan based the script on a bedtime story he told his children was a harbinger of things to come. Bedtime stories, after all, rarely make much sense ... and are mainly intended induce sleep.

Now the movie is out, and the reviews are in. For fun, I ventured over to Rotten Tomatoes to see how Lady in the Water was faring on their Tomatomometer - a roundup of critical commentary from print media, TV and radio, and the Net. The verdict: Rotten.

Here are some of the choicer comments.

"Have you ever been approached by someone who was really drunk, and they tell you some rambling, incoherent story? Well, that's what watching this movie is like." -- Mike McGranaghan, AISLE SEAT

"Crazy as this might sound, it turns out that self-indulgent ramblings designed to put your children to sleep are pretty much the opposite of art." -- Liam Lacey, GLOBE AND MAIL

"Lady in the Water isn't just another disappointment. It's a jaw-dropping catastrophe -- a picture so wrong-headedly intoxicated with itself you view it through an embarrassed haze." -- Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

"Who am I to knock the work of the man who, in his own film, casts himself as a writer whose ideas will inspire a future leader who will save the world -- an artist whose work will not be fully understood in his own time, but only many years later?" -- Jim Emerson, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

"The story is exceedingly dull; to become involved in it would require not just a suspension of disbelief, but a suspension of mental faculties altogether. [A] bewildering misstep for a director of Shyamalan's caliber." -- Kurt Loder, MTV

"In Lady in the Water, Shyamalan's descent into self-parody is complete." -- Shawn Levy, OREGONIAN

"When film historians discuss what happens when a filmmaker of limited talent has a huge success and then goes out of control, this is the movie that will be cited." -- Daniel M. Kimmel, WORCESTER TELEGRAM & GAZETTE

"Far-fetched is the kindest thing to say about Lady in the Water, a disjointed and mind-numbing story." -- Diana Saenger, REVIEWEXPRESS.COM

"Shyamalan's most alienating and self-absorbed project to date." -- Lisa Schwarzbaum, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

"Hollywood cannot pollute the ozone with anything more idiotic, contrived, amateurish or sub-mental than Lady in the Water." -- Rex Reed, NEW YORK OBSERVER

"You won't see anything else like it this summer, and you'll be really glad about that." -- Frank Swietek, ONE GUY'S OPINION

"Lady in the Water marks M. Night Shyamalan's official leap off the deep end. Not everyone agrees on Shyamalan's talent as a filmmaker, but few, up till now, have questioned his sanity." -- Dana Stevens, SLATE

"Silly and sappy ... Shyamalan continues on his steady descent in quality." -- Steve Rhodes, INTERNET REVIEWS

"An act of spectacular (if unwitting) self-immolation." -- Lou Lumenick, NEW YORK POST

"M. Night Shyamalan doesn't have an ego problem. He's just a humble screenwriter and director who makes himself a star of his own movie -- as a character who is a writer, whose words will save the world from despair and destruction." -- Michael Booth, DENVER POST

"A screenplay so eye-rollingly dippy that it plays out like something a bunch of second graders cooked up on a rainy day playing fort in the living room." -- Donald Munro, FRESNO BEE

"Stunningly self-indulgent claptrap." -- Nell Minow, MOVIE MOM AT YAHOO! MOVIES

"'Narf' and 'scrunt' are more than weird character names. They are the sounds you may involuntarily make while watching this thing." -- Michael Elliott, MOVIE PARABLES

"Has M. Night Shyamalan lost his damn mind?" -- Sean Burns, PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY

"Embarrassing. Stupid. Incomprehensible. A mess. Absurd. Fake." -- Boo Allen, DENTON RECORD CHRONICLE (TX)

"Shyamalan's latest exercise in foundering pretension may be the silliest movie of all time. Seriously. ... Will someone please lock up this pompous stiff in Johnny Depp's Dead Man's Chest and throw away the key?" -- Thomas Delapa, BOULDER WEEKLY

"I just want to punch this movie right in the face." -- David Cornelius, EFILMCRITIC.COM

"You wonder if Shyamalan has crossed from mere self-regard into actual mental illness." -- Josh Bell, LAS VEGAS WEEKLY

And finally, the most devastating comment of all:

"Lady in the Water doesn't have even The Village's slim virtues." -- Andy Klein, LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT

Ouch.

Rich Little is 112 different people

Victor Zammit has posted "voice comparisons" of the medium David Thompson and four of the spirits who purportedly materialized in a Sydney seance. This link allows you to download them as a Word file.

He writes,

You will notice that all voice graphs are different ... If the voice analyses software confirms all the above, it will mean huge consequences about the acceptance of the afterlife. This will be one of the most persuasive empirical ways to show that the afterlife exists.

The software he used is a freeware program, Audacity. I have this myself. The trouble is that the standard readouts it displays merely indicate the volume of the voice. Thus it is easy for the same person to produce very different readouts simply by talking louder or softer.

Audacity also has a bare-bones analysis tool, but all it does is graph the frequency (pitch) of the sounds along with the decibel level (volume).  A person can easily vary the pitch of his voice. A mimic like Rich Little could produce dozens of different graphs. But he's still just one guy.

The readouts shown by Zammit are not the ones used by  the built-in analysis tool, anyway. They are simply a record of the fluctuating volume of the voices. Volume can be affected not only by the loudness of the speaker's voice, but also by his proximity to the microphone.

I tested Audacity. Compare Zammit's readouts with the ones I got, using only my own voice at different levels of volume:

(Click image to enlarge)

Zammit promises that more sophisticated analysis, using voice print software, is on the way. This may prove significant. The Audacity comparison, however, proves nothing. It is meaningless.

Here's how ...

... to write a breakout blockbuster in today's highly sane publishing world.

From The Independent:   

If you're one of the 40 million readers of The Da Vinci Code, get ready to stretch your credulity still further. An author is about to claim that she is the living embodiment of the Holy Grail, a direct descendant of the physical union between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ. She's American, she's 43, and she means it - every word.

Even though it seems her claim comes straight from the world of fictional make-believe, Kathleen McGowan, a married mother of three, is about to tell her story in a "partly autobiographical" novel that hopes to trade directly on the vast worldwide audience captured by Dan Brown. It promises to light almost as many fires of controversy as Brown's novel itself.

For, however outlandish Ms McGowan's claims, they are being taken seriously by one of the world's most respected publishing houses. Simon & Schuster is publishing her book and ploughing a marketing budget of more than a quarter of a million dollars into promoting it. It has already invested a seven-figure sum in the rights to her book, The Expected One. "I certainly expect there will be a backlash," said Ms McGowan. "But I have the support of my family and friends and that's what I draw from."

Claims to such a genetic lineage might normally draw scepticism from a world where an author's credibility can make or break a book. But rights to Ms McGowan's story of religious intrigue have been sold in more than 20 languages and the first print run in the US alone is 250,000. Her novel - which was first self-published last year and sold just 2,500 copies - goes on sale in Britain next month. It is the first part of a trilogy.

So there you have it. To write a major bestseller, all you need to do is be completely crazy and promote a theory about yourself that the homeless guy down the street, directing traffic while wearing a tinfoil hat, wouldn't believe.

It's simple!

Give her an inch and she'll move a foot

I've written a little about the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino recently. I think the phenomena exhibited in a series of sittings in Naples in 1908 were genuine, and stand as strong evidence that some "physical" or materialization mediumship is legitimate.

Yesterday a commenter directed me to part of an article written by some Italian skeptics who attempt to debunk Palladino. Titled Eusapia Palladino's Sapient Foot, it was written by Massimo Polidoro and Gian Marco Renaldi, members of CICAP, the Italian Committee for Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. I call it "part of an article" because the report breaks off in midsentence - actually in midword - and I don't know how much was omitted. Nevertheless, the thrust of the skeptics' argument is clear.

Essentially they believe that Palladino was able to free one hand or one foot or (sometimes) both feet from the investigators' control. Then she was able to manipulate objects within reach. This trickery went undetected because the light was too dim for the investigators to see clearly.

This thesis fails utterly to convince me, and I want to briefly show why. First, the authors claim that it would have been an easy matter for Palladino to tilt the table to one side with the pressure of her hand on the tabletop, then slide a foot under one of the table legs, and then raise the entire table off the floor. The trouble is that the investigators often looked under the table while it was raised and checked all four legs. Had Palladino's foot been wedged under one of the legs, surely they would have seen it.

The authors suggest that Palladino's heavy skirt might have concealed her fancy footwork. In some cases, perhaps, but it hardly seems likely that the skirt (even if it did cover her feet) would be overlooked when investigators were specifically examining the table legs.

Furthermore, some of the table movements took place in bright light. They were even photographed. We are not talking about a totally dark seance room.

The authors make the questionable claim that dim light actually helps the medium to commit trickery, by allowing her to see how well or poorly she is being observed and controlled. This opinion runs counter to all other wisdom on this subject; the consensus has always been that darkness aids the fraudulent medium, and light (even dim light) helps the investigators. If dim light is really an asset to frauds, then why have so few fake mediums taken advantage of it? Almost all the physical mediums who were exposed as fakes operated in the dark.

In the portion of the article that can be read online, there is no reference to the amazing variety of other phenomena produced by Palladino, which included cold breezes, musical instruments playing by themselves, partial spirit forms, the movement of smaller tables that were beyond Palladino's reach, and the complete levitation of Palladino, seated in her chair, onto the tabletop in decent light. No doubt the authors would attribute some of this to Palladino's "sapient foot" - claiming, I imagine, that she slipped one foot out of her shoe, thrust her leg backward, and was able to pluck the strings of the guitar in the curtained-off area behind her, using her bare toes. But the observers reported that many instruments would play at once. How did Palladino's magical toes perform this feet - er, I mean, feat?

Even if we could imagine some means by which she played a variety of musical instruments simultaneously with her feet, we would be no closer to understanding the other phenomena. No amount of legerdemain (or leger de pied?) can explain the levitation of Palladino and her chair high off the floor and onto the table, while the investigators observed closely and passed their hands under the chair.

While some people will never be convinced by any account, and probably not even by first-hand observation, I think most who study the Palladino case will reach the conclusion that she was for real. A good resource on this topic is The Limits of Influence, by Stephen E. Braude; a brief excerpt from the book, pertinent to the Naples sittings, may be read here.

Incidentally, in my earlier posts I referred to four investigators at Naples. While the number of sitters varied, there were actually three principal investigators - Feilding, Carrington, and Baggally.

Guest blog - Victor Drainit

For a change of pace, today I am proud to present a guest blogger, the noted Australian defender of psychic phenomena, Mr. Victor Drainit.

Victor, an accomplished plumber who has unblocked several major clogs, is known for his lucid and balanced approach to the field of afterlife investigations. His work is often cited in peer-reviewed journals, and he is widely respected by all sides for his impeccable research. Known to friends and foes alike as "The Thunder from Down Under," Victor enjoys boxing with kangaroos, throwing another shrimp on the barbie, and racing across the postapocalyptic wastelands in a desperate quest for oil. He also likes to garden.

It is an honor to have him with us today.

----

Hello, I am Victor Drainit, and I'm pleased to be offered this opportunity to appear on Michael Prescott's blog.

ARE YOU AWARE that the brilliant US television series MEDIUM is now the highest rated TV series in history and that last week's episode was seen by MORE PEOPLE than the total audience for the World Cup? The debunking skeptics HAVE NO ANSWER to these facts.

TOP scientists including Charlie Sheen agree that on 9-11 the Pentagon was hit by a missile fired by a flying saucer that was piloted by the invisible extraterrestrial parasites that are EATING MY BRAIN. This fact is NOT in dispute.

I challenge any closed-minded flamboyant extroverted materialist debunking skeptic to PROVE that the invisible extraterrestrial parasites do NOT exist. Here are my terms: I will put up $500 trillion of my own funds and the skeptic will put up a matching amount. The loser will forfeit the full amount of the wager, to be paid in a money order drawn from the Bank of Xenu in the star system Rigel-4.

Must double meds ... must double meds ... must double meds ...

HIGHLY CREDIBLE witnesses report that the ghost of US President Alexander Hamilton has been seen wandering the halls of the White House. This fact is NOT in dispute. The ghosts of US Presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Jefferson, and Daniel Webster have also been witnessed on multiple occasions by high ranking US government officials and statesmen. NO ONE denies this!!!

On my Web site, "A plumber presents the facts about the afterlife," I give 349 reasons why invisible extraterrestrial parasites are EATING MY BRAIN. Reason # 297: As a plumber, I often use a mechanical "snake" to invade clogged pipes. Similarly, the extraterrestrial brain-devourers assume the form of snakes and then infest my neurons at the subatomic level. This fact is ENTIRELY CONSISTENT with the latest developments in quantum physics and is NOT in dispute.

Readers often ask me, "Victor, what will happen to those closed-minded flamboyant extroverted materialist debunking skeptics when they 'cross over'?" HIGHLY CREDIBLE sources such as the invisible extraterrestrial parasites that are EATING MY BRAIN have told me that such individuals will wander in the outer darkness for EONS, mumbling and grumbling to themselves like shopping-cart people, searching fruitlessly for their meds, which they must have left around here someplace, damn it, I just had the goddamn prescription refilled yesterday ... After CENTURIES of torment they will ONLY GRADUALLY rise to the higher spheres, where they will be met by invisible extraterrestrial parasites who will EAT THEIR BRAINS. These facts are NOT in dispute.

A recent survey that came to me in a dream reveals that 99.87% of the world population ACCEPTS THE REALITY of invisible extraterrestrial brain-eating parasites. The narrow-minded skeptical debunkers HAVE NO ANSWER to this fact.

Readers often ask me, "Victor, how EXACTLY do you define a closed-minded flamboyant extroverted materialist debunking skeptic, and how can we, your readers, recognize these people and avoid them?" This is an excellent question and I am glad I made it up. The closed-minded, narrow-minded, materialist, debunking, extroverted, materialist, flamboyant, closed-minded skeptical debunking skeptic can be identified easily, as follows. If a person disagrees with me, Victor Drainit, on ANY issue whatsoever, THEN HE QUALIFIES as a closed-minded materialist debunker skeptical skeptic. It does NOT matter if he accepts the reality of psychic phenomena and life after death. It does NOT matter if he has written dozens and scores and even hundreds of essays supporting these positions. All that matters is that he has criticized ME, Victor Drainit, because I am the WAY, the TRUTH, and the LIFE, and no one enters the kingdom except through me, for I AM the resurrection and the life, forever and ever, amen. NO ONE disputes this.

----

Thank you, Victor Drainit, for that cogent guest blog. You can hear more of Victor's opinions in your local psychiatric hospital. 

Fish bites man

A TV station in Texas is reporting that a fisherman caught a fish with "human-like teeth." A photo of the fish does indeed show small but distinctly human teeth in the lower jaw.

Assuming the story is not a hoax, I wonder if it has any relevance to an idea sometimes floated in evolution - that a variety of advanced characteristics are built into the genes of even the simplest organism, and that it is only a matter of "turning on" the appropriate gene in order to "express" these characteristics. Thus, human-like teeth are potentially available to fish or salamanders or whatever, but ordinarily the relevant gene combinations are not activated. Of course, this raises the question of how and why genes that can produce advanced features would preexist in the earliest and simplest organisms ...

On the other hand, the fish could be a fake. Some people will do anything to get on TV. 

Palladino

As a follow-up to my previous post, I thought I would present a summary of the Eusapia Palladino case which I found in an old book (originally published in 1925), The Facts of Psychic Science, by A. Campbell Holms. I would have preferred to quote from either Sittings with Eusapia Palladino, by Everard Feilding, or The Limits of Influence, by Stephen E. Braude, but both books are in my winter home. It is invariably the case that when I need a book, it's conveniently lodged in my other residence, a mere 2,000 miles away!

Anyhow, Holms' summary is good enough to give some idea of the sittings, which took place in 1908 in the investigators' hotel room in Naples, Italy. He notes that one of the investigators, Hereward Carrington, "who had been for many years a peculiarly hostile sceptic of mediumistic phenomena, was completely converted by his experiences with Eusapia." The same had earlier been true of the investigator Cesare Lombroso.

Describing Eusapia's seances generally, the light was usually very poor, the medium constantly demanding less and less. Towards the end of the seance, when she became entranced and the more important phenomena occurred, one could usually just distinguish the hands and faces of the sitters in the dim, red light. On many occasions, however, when the medium was at her ease with friendly sitters, important phenomena occurred in bright light....

Flitting points of light and cold winds were often produced. Levitations of the table, lasting two or three seconds, occurred at every seance. On exceptional occasions the table remained up for over a minute.... This phenomenon often occurred under the most stringent test conditions; while a sitter on either side held the medium's hands and one of them placed his arm across her knees, another got below the table and held her ankles; and sometimes a night-light was placed under the table. The sitters often tried to force the levitated table downwards, but always found that the resistance offered, though stout, was a peculiarly elastic one, similar to what is experienced when a buoyant, floating body is pressed downwards....

In semi-darkness, Eusapia was often levitated, chair and all, on to the table.... And Prof. Poro reports that while she, sitting in her chair, was raised above the table top, he and another sitter passed their hands under her and the chair. In good light articles of furniture were often seen to advance untouched towards the medium, and a small table sometimes [seen to] climb up, apparently with difficulty, on to the larger one, round which the sitters sat....

Eusapia used to sit at the table with her back close to the curtains of a cabinet [a curtained-off corner of the room]. Inside, there was a small table, and various musical instruments, a banjo, tambourine, musical-box, bell, etc., and in the darkness these would begin to play or come out and play in different parts of the room, or all would play together in the cabinet to an accompaniment of raps and tilting of the table. These noisy demonstrations were frequent. The curtains often bulged outwards, as if blown by a wind, and sometimes they enveloped a sitter's head; there was no wind or other apparent cause of the movements....

It is interesting to contrast this summary, which by no means exhausts the phenomena observed by capable, experienced investigators working in red light, with the entry on Palladino given by skeptic James Randi in his book An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. Here it is in its entirety:

Palladino, Eusapia (née Palladino, then Signora Raphael Delgaiz, 1854-1918) Born in southern Italy, spirit medium Palladino was accepted by many scientists, particularly those like Charles Richet and Schrenck-Notzing, who were devout believers in all spiritualistic claims. She specialized in levitation of tables.
      A cantankerous, vain, difficult person, she became an international celebrity, and sometimes sat for tests, though she was often caught cheating on these occasions and on other non-controlled sittings as well. The prominent investigator Hereward Carrington (né Hubert Lavington, 1880-1958) brought her to America, became her manager, and took her on tour. In America she continued to be caught cheating, and Carrington came to the conclusion that she sometimes cheated (when she was caught), but that the rest of her performance (when she was not caught) was genuine.
      Part of her success was probably due to her petulant attitude, which she used to discourage proper examination of her performances. As with others in her trade, she needed to control the circumstances around her and managed to do so very effectively, throwing temper tantrums and walking out of tests when things were not to her liking. She was also noted among investigators for her seeming lack of acquaintance with soap-and-water, being the source of a heavy variety of unpleasant body odors, especially in the closed séance room. She provided her examiners with plentiful reasons to regret having taken on such a formidable woman.
      In spite of all this, and her repeated exposures, Carrington remained thoroughly convinced for the rest of his life that Palladino was genuinely in touch with Summerland.

There is no dispute that Palladino would cheat when she could, a fact she cheerfully admitted to investigators. She was an eccentric who seemed to regard the process of scientific testing as a game. This "trickster" mentality is not at all unusual among people with psi abilities, as George P. Hansen's book The Trickster and the Paranormal has shown in detail. Palladino's propensity to cheat under imperfectly controlled conditions spurred serious investigators to adopt the tightest controls possible. In these conditions, when fraud was virtually ruled out, the most interesting and impressive phenomena often occurred.

Randi spends much of his summary painting Palladino as a noisy, temperamental, unwashed peasant woman (which she was), but somehow neglects to include any mention of the Naples sittings or the other successful tests of her abilities. I suppose he assumes that, as an accomplished magician himself, he could easily duplicate Palladino's feats.

I doubt it.  Years after the Naples sittings, Palladino visited America, where Howard Thurston, the most respected stage magician of his day, attended one of her seances. Afterward, Thurston was moved to declare, "I witnessed in person the table levitations of Madame Eusapia Palladino ... and am thoroughly convinced that the phenomena I saw were not due to fraud and were not performed by the aid of her feet, knees, or hands."

Let's get physical

At the risk of confirming my newfound reputation as a diehard skeptic, I thought I would write just a little more about "physical" mediumship. Previously I raised some questions about a recent seance conducted by David Thompson in Sydney, Australia. Now I'd like to link to a report of another Thompson seance, this one from 2003.

The report was written by the late Montague Keen, a respected figure among researchers in this area. Serious attempts were made to guard against fraud. Nevertheless, I am not sure the precautions were as airtight as they should have been.

The seance was held in the home of one Denzil Fairbairn. The room in question had no windows and only one door, which was blocked by a sitter's chair. It was thoroughly searched, and Thompson and the sitters were searched, as well.

Keen notes,

The chair (owned by [the homeowner]) in which the medium sat was an old-fashioned upholstered, heavy, wooden construction which I examined carefully, having regard to a claim by the magician Ian Rowland, when commenting on television on Thompson’s reputed feats, that this could be done by illusionists when the ends of the chair arms were not securely connected to the posts, thereby enabling the medium to raise his arms from the post and slip the cable ties off his arms: a suggestion I examine later. I could find no loose connections, and was unable to move the arms or see or feel anything abnormal underneath the chair.

Keen addresses the issue of a possible accomplice, observing,

The only other "regulars" on whom suspicion might rest were Bianca [the medium's wife], Paul the leader who was seated next to me, and whose voice and location would have clearly identified him, and DF, the host, who was seated at the opposite end of the room from the medium. Any of these possibilities would have easily and immediately detectable by those present, as well as likely to be defeated by listening to the tape recording.

The close arrangement of the chairs, as shown in photos, would have made it difficult for anyone to leave the circle without being detected. The room was only 15' X 9'6" in Keen's estimate, and was crowded with more than a dozen people. There were items on the floor between the two rows of facing seats, which would have further impeded stealthy movement in the dark.

I still wish something else had been placed on the floor - crinkled newspaper, perhaps - to pick up any footsteps, or that some other means had been employed to make it less likely for someone to leave the circle.

In contrast to the total darkness of the Sydney seance, dim red light was allowed at one point. It showed the medium apparently still secured to his chair, extruding what was purportedly ectoplasm. But the light was low, visibility poor, and I'm not sure much was gained by this part of the experiment.

Now, where are the weaknesses in the protocol?

My first area of concern is the fact that David Thompson was secured to the chair by his wife Bianca. Keen says that this was done "under [his own] close supervision" and that he tested the plastic ties afterward and confirmed that they were tight. Nevertheless, it would have been preferable if the ties had been applied by someone unconnected with the medium.

It is also somewhat problematic that Bianca sat nearest to Thompson. A better protocol would have placed Bianca and any other "regulars" as far away from the medium as possible. In fact, it would have been better if no "regulars" had been in the room at all.

Keen notes that among the various items left on the floor for use in the experiment was "a pair of pliers which were employed by Bianca to cut the ties to release her husband after the sitting." Here I think we have a real problem. The pliers' availability in the seance room naturally suggests the possibility that someone could have picked them up, freed the medium, and then resecured him with fresh ties before the lights came on.

Because of these lapses, a critic could suggest the following scenario: Bianca secures Thompson to the chair, thus ensuring that she knows the precise location of all the ties. In the dark she retrieves the pliers from the floor and cuts the ties, freeing her husband. (Since she was frequently called on to play various musical recordings, she could not have had her hands held throughout the seance.) Thompson is then able to maneuver in darkness, move objects, do the voices, etc. He reverses his sweater (which was found reversed after the seance) and then he and Bianca attach new ties (smuggled into the room) to replace those that were cut.

Please note that I am not asserting that it happened this way. I'm only saying that the possibility of a scenario of this kind cannot be absolutely ruled out.

To have precluded this explanation, the experimenters might have prevented Bianca or any other "regular" from participating in the seance, or at least placed them at the farthest distance from the medium. They might have removed the pliers from the room. They might have spread material on the floor to detect footsteps. They might have insisted on continuous hand-holding throughout the seance, with no interruptions. They might have secured the "regulars" to their chairs, if only with Velcro strips that would make noise when torn off. They might have demanded a closer inspection of Thompson under the red light - and especially an inspection of the plastic ties, to see if they were still secured. They might have marked the ties in some way so that if they were cut and replaced, the substitution would be noted. 

With all this said, I will again baffle and annoy the skeptics by saying that I think some "physical" mediumship is genuine, and that the Eusapia Palladino sittings in Naples, supervised by Everard Feilding, are perhaps the best-documented case on record. Several of those sittings were conducted entirely in red light, bright enough to read by, and the experienced investigators (some of whom were skilled in magic, and who had collectively exposed scores of fraudulent mediums) had ample opportunity to examine the phenomena at length.

For instance, when a heavy table levitated, one or more of the investigators actually crawled beneath it to confirm that all four legs were off the floor, that Palladino was not lifting the table with her knees, and that no mechanical device was used. (Not that a mechanical device could have been installed without their knowledge; the sittings took place in their own hotel room.)

The extensive precautions and careful observation in the Naples case render any skeptical explanation problematic. The only "explanations" I've heard are that a) the four investigators were collectively hallucinating, and b) an accomplice managed to enter the hotel room through the door to the adjoining room. But collective hallucinations of this sort are unknown, and if an accomplice had entered, he would have been seen in the red light. Besides, the table wasn't lifted by an accomplice; the investigators studied it from above and below while it was levitating.

For more on the Palladino sittings, see Stephen E. Braude's The Limits of Influence.

The bottom line is that, in my opinion, remarkable physical phenomena can occur in the seance room, but in order to be sure that the effects are genuine, the precautions must be airtight and the observations must be impeccable. In the case of the David Thompson seance reported here, I think would be premature to conclude that verifiable paranormal events took place.

The last trumpet

The subject of "physical" mediumship - as opposed to the "mental" variety - has come up lately on this blog, so I thought I would link to a Web page that gives some idea of why this area is so controversial.

The page in question comprises four articles on an embarrassing incident from several years ago involving British medium Colin Fry, who remains active today. In a seance in 1992, a trumpet with illuminated tape on its side was apparently floating about the room in total darkness. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, the lights in the room came on, revealing that Fry was actually holding the trumpet in his hand. He had escaped from the chair to which he had been secured by flex-cuff ties, and was obviously creating the "spirit" phenomena himself.

Although many people concluded that Fry was a fraud, others gave him the benefit of the doubt, claiming that an "intrusive spirit" had taken possession of Fry while he was in his trance, and that this same mischievous spirit had turned on the lights. Questions about how the flex-cuffs were cut apart also raised the possibility, in some people's minds, of paranormal interference.

Personally, I am not inclined to cut Fry any slack. He was caught manipulating the trumpet. But you know me - I'm one of those hardcore skeptics!

According to this discussion (dated 2003), Fry is at least loosely connected with David Thompson, the medium whose recent demonstration of his abilities in Sydney sparked our little controversy. Says one participant:

Thompson and Fry work together. I scheduled a seance for a family member with Fry at Hayward's Heath, less than an hour's  drive from Brighton. They both use the same venue there. There were about two dozen people present but Fry didn' show up and Thompson took his place. I later spoke to a radio talk show host in Australia since Thompson was going there to perform. I told him to look out if certain spirits would appear as they did in the UK. . Well these same spirits showed up in Australia as well.

Fry and Thompson jointly signed a letter turning down a request to subject their powers to scientific testing.

You may recall that one remarkable claim in connection with the Sydney seance was that David Thompson's sweater was reversed and rebuttoned, even though he apparently remained secured to his chair at all times. In the discussion linked above, another participant explains how it is possible to get out of flex-cuff ties without cutting them:

Magician Ian Rowland has demonstrated on TV how this is done. The ends of the arms of the chair are not securely connected to the posts as most people would assume. David can simply raise the arm up off the post, slip the cable ties off the ends of the arms and proceed to do all manner of things with his free hands. And then when the show is near the end, he slips the cable ties back over the ends of the chair arms and reconnects the arms to the posts, giving the impression that his hands were securely fastened to the chair the whole time, when if fact they were not, even though the cable ties were never broken.

In another discussion on the JREF forum, which is part of skeptic James Randi's site, someone professed bewilderment at the fact that I could find fault with one materialization seance while endorsing other ones. I guess the all-or-nothing attitude is not limited to one side or the other in this debate.

Really, is it so hard to grasp the concept of evaluating each claim on a case-by-case basis? Well, apparently it is hard, since a lot of people prefer to take the easy way out and simply decide that it's all genuine or it's all bogus - no exceptions. This at least saves them the trouble of thinking.

For people who do want to think about physical mediumship in a serious way, a good place to begin is Stephen E. Braude's book The Limits of Influence. You can learn more about Braude , a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, at his Web site.