He’s not a freak who talks to dead people.  He’s a charlatan who claims to talk to dead people.

Didn’t they used to run creeps like him outta towns way back when?

If they were lucky they’d only get run out of town, usually it was burned at the stake.

It is narrow minded to assume someone is a fraud just becaus eyou don’t understand and cannot do what they can. Prove he is a fake or leave him alone. Don’t you have anything better to do? John Edward has teh last laugh anyway. He has a tv show, what do you have?

It is narrow minded to assume someone is a fraud just becaus eyou don’t understand and cannot do what they can.

You’re right, Becky, that would be narrow-minded if I were just assuming he’s a fraud without good reason to think so.

The problem is I do understand and I could, if I wanted to, do what he does. It’s a skill anyone can learn if they want to spend the time needed to get good at it. I can point you to dozens of professional magicians who can pull the very same trick just as effectively and not a one of them will try to claim they did it because they were in contact with your dead relatives. Hell, I can point you to magicians who do it better than Edward does and still won’t claim it’s because they’re psychic. I’d say you’re the one who doesn’t understand what Edward does in his act.

Prove he is a fake or leave him alone.

The burden of proof is on the one making the claims. Edward claims he can speak with the dead so the burden of proof is on him.

But let’s address your challenge anyway. What would you accept as “proof” that he’s a fake? As I said, I can point you to a number of professional magicians who do the same trick, some even better, without claiming it to be anything other than a trick. Would the testimony of several people who have made a living doing the same trick as Edward be enough to convince you? Doubtful.

How about if I show you a book that will teach you how to do the same thing Edward does, but it doesn’t claim to develop your “latent psychic abilities” because there’s no such thing. Would pointing you to the book Tradecraft: The Art and Science of Cold Reading be enough to convince you Edward is a fake? Probably not.

How about a simple application of logic. Accepting for the sake of this argument that there is an after-life, I don’t buy into that idea at all, but for the sake of this argument we’ll say that it does exist; wouldn’t you tend to think that there’d be something way more interesting to do in the after-life than stand around a television studio on the off-chance that a failed ballroom dance instructor will give you the opportunity to tell your loved ones about some trivial event such as new rugs they’ll get in the near future?

If he’s really talking to dead relatives, how come none of the relatives ever say anything bad about the person they’re talking to? How come you never hear anything like “Your mother said she loves you dearly and she’s doing wonderful on the other side, but she still thinks you’re a dumbass for marrying that lazy-bum of a husband of yours.” Now THAT would be amazing.

Of course, the logical approach won’t convince you either because you want to believe Edward can talk to the dead and you want to believe that everything is wine and roses once you kick the bucket. He’s telling you exactly what you want to hear and you’d rather live in a comfortable lie than deal with an ugly truth.

Don’t you have anything better to do?

What? You don’t think trying to educate folks that they’re being deceived by a fraudulent conman isn’t a worthy past time? I suppose you folks do tend to bring this stupidity upon yourselves. I guess that means you wouldn’t want me to tell you if you were about to spend money for a car that runs on water either. After all, I can’t prove that a car that runs on water doesn’t exist someplace.

John Edward has teh last laugh anyway. He has a tv show, what do you have?

He certainly does have the last laugh and at your expense, not mine.

Yes, Edward does have a TV show. What, pray tell, is that supposed to prove other than he is able to attract enough viewers to justify to TV execs to give him a show? Do you think that by having a show this somehow validates his ability? I suppose the fact that Alan Alda played a doctor on TV and made it look real means you’ll let him perform surgery on you in the near future? Hey, that Doogie Howser sure was wicked with a scalpel too, bet he could work wonders for you!

”Cold Reading”
from Joe Nickell’s article
http://www.csicop.org/si/2001-11/i-files.html

By contrast, today’s spirits-whom John Edward and his fellow mediums supposedly contact-seem to have poor memories and difficulty communicating. For example, in one of his on-air séances (on Larry King Live, June 19, 1998), Edward said: “I feel like there’s a J- or G-sounding name attached to this.” He also perceived “Linda or Lindy or Leslie; who’s this L name?” Again, he got a “Maggie or Margie, or some M-G-sounding name,” and yet again heard from “either Ellen or Helen, or Eleanore-it’s like an Ellen-sounding name.” Gone is the clear-speaking eloquence of yore; the dead now seem to mumble.
The spirits also seemingly communicate to Edward et al. as if they were engaging in pantomime. As Edward said of one alleged spirit communicant, in a Dateline “He’s pointing to his head; something had to affect the mind or the head, from what he’s showing me.” No longer, apparently, can the dead speak in flowing Victorian sentences, but instead are reduced to gestures, as if playing a game of charades.

One suspects, of course, that it is not the imagined spirits who have changed but rather the approach today’s mediums have chosen to employ. It is, indeed, a shrewd technique known as “cold reading"-so named because the subject walks in “cold”; that is, the medium lacks advance information about the person (Gresham 1953). It is an artful method of gleaning information from the sitter, then feeding it back as mystical revelation.

The “psychic” can obtain clues by observing dress and body language (noting expressions that indicate when one is on or off track), asking questions (which if correct will appear as “hits” but otherwise will seem innocent queries), and inviting the subject to interpret the vague statements offered. For example, nearly anyone can respond to the mention of a common object (like a ring or watch) with a personal recollection that can seem to transform the mention into a hit. (For more on cold reading see Gresham 1953; Hyman 1977; Nickell 2000.)

It should not be surprising that Edward is skilled at cold reading, an old fortunetelling technique. His mother was a “psychic junkie” who threw fortunetelling “house parties,” one of the alleged clairvoyants advising the then-fifteen-year-old that he had “wonderful psychic abilities.” He began doing card readings for friends and family, then progressed to psychic fairs where he soon learned that names and other “validating information” sometimes applied to the dead rather than the living. Eventually he changed his billing from “psychic” to “psychic medium” (Edward 1999). The revised approach set him on the road to stardom. In addition to his TV show, he now commands hundreds of dollars for a private reading and is booked two years in advance (Mui 2001).

”Hot Reading”
Although cold reading is the main technique of the new spiritualists, they can also employ “hot” reading on occasion. Houdini (1924) exposed many of these information-gathering techniques including using planted microphones to listen in on clients as they gathered in the mediums’ anterooms-a technique Houdini himself used to impress visitors with his “telepathy” (Gibson 1976, 13). Reformed medium M. Lamar Keene’s The Psychic Mafia (1976) describes such methods as conducting advance research on clients, sharing other mediums’ files (what Keene terms “mediumistic espionage"), noting casual remarks made in conversation before a reading, and so on.
An article in Time magazine suggested John Edward may have used just such chicanery. One subject, a marketing manager named Michael O’Neill had received apparent messages from his dead grandfather but, when his segment aired, he noted that it had been improved through editing. According to Time’s Leon Jaroff (2001):

Now suspicious, O’Neill recalled that while the audience was waiting to be seated, Edward’s aides were scurrying about, striking up conversations and getting people to fill out cards with their name, family tree and other facts. Once inside the auditorium, where each family was directed to preassigned seats, more than an hour passed before show time while “technical difficulties” backstage were corrected.
Edward has a policy of not responding to criticism, but the executive producer of Crossing Over insists: “No information is given to John Edward about the members of the audience with whom he talks. There is no eavesdropping on gallery conversations, and there are no ‘tricks’ to feed information to John.” He labeled the Time article “a mix of erroneous observations and baseless theories” (Nordlander 2001).

Very Hot
Be that as it may, on Dateline Edward was actually caught in an attempt to pass off previously gained knowledge as spirit revelation. During the session he said of the spirits, “They’re telling me to acknowledge Anthony,” and when the cameraman signaled that was his name, Edward seemed surprised, asking “That’s you? Really?” He further queried: “Had you not seen Dad before he passed? Had you either been away or been distanced?” Later, playing the taped segment for me, Dateline reporter John Hockenberry challenged me with Edward’s apparent hit: “He got Anthony. That’s pretty good.” I agreed but added, “We’ve seen mediums who mill about before sessions and greet people and chat with them and pick up things.”
Indeed, it turned out that that is just what Edward had done. Hours before the group reading, Tony had been the cameraman on another Edward shoot (recording him at his hobby, ballroom dancing). Significantly, the two men had chatted and Edward had obtained useful bits of information that he afterward pretended had come from the spirits. In a follow-up interview Hockenberry revealed the fact and grilled an evasive Edward:

HOCKENBERRY: So were you aware that his dad had died before you did his reading?
Mr. EDWARD: I think he-I think earlier in the-in the day, he had said something.

HOCKENBERRY: It makes me feel like, you know, that that’s fairly significant. I mean, you knew that he had a dead relative and you knew it was the dad.

Mr. EDWARD: OK.

HOCKENBERRY: So that’s not some energy coming through, that’s something you knew going in. You knew his name was Tony and you knew that his dad had died and you knew that he was in the room, right? That gets you . . .

Mr. EDWARD: That’s a whole lot of thinking you got me doing, then. Like I said, I react to what’s coming through, what I see, hear and feel. I interpret what I’m seeing hearing and feeling, and I define it. He raised his hand, it made sense for him. Great.

HOCKENBERRY: But a cynic would look at that and go, ‘Hey,’ you know, ‘He knows it’s the cameraman, he knows it’s DATELINE. You know, wouldn’t that be impressive if he can get the cameraman to cry?’

Mr. EDWARD: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Not at all.

But try to weasel out of it as he might, Edward had obviously been caught cheating: pretending that information he had gleaned earlier had just been revealed by spirits and feigning surprise that it applied to Tony the cameraman. (And that occurred long before Time had suggested that an Inside Edition program-February 27, 2001-was probably “the first nationally televised show to take a look at the Edward phenomenon.” That honor instead goes to Dateline NBC.)
In his new book Crossing Over, Edward tries to minimize the Dateline exposé, and in so doing breaks his own rule of not responding to criticism. He rebukes Hockenberry for “his big Gotcha! moment,” adding:

Hockenberry came down on the side of the professional skeptic they used as my foil. He was identified as Joe Nickell, a member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which likes to simplify things and call itself CSICOP. He did the usual sound bites: that modern mediums are fast-talkers on fishing expeditions making money on people’s grief-"the same old dogs with new tricks,” in Hockenberry’s words.
Edward claims to ignore any advance information that he may get from those he reads, but concedes, “it’s futile to say this to a tough skeptic” (Edward 2001, 242-243).

Edward may have benefitted from actual information on another occasion, while undergoing a “scientific” test of his alleged powers (Schwartz et al. 2001). In video clips shown on Dateline, Edward was reading subjects-who were brought into the hotel room where he sat with his back to the door-when he impressed his tester with an atypical revelation. Edward stated he was “being shown the movie Pretty in Pink” and asked if there was “a pink connection.” Then he queried, “Are you, like, wearing all pink?” The unidentified man acknowledged that he was. Yet Edward had thought the subject was a woman, and I suspect that erroneous guess was because of the color of his attire; I further suspect Edward knew it was pink, that as the man entered the room Edward glimpsed a flash of the color as it was reflected off some shiny surface, such as the glass of a picture frame, the lens of the video camera, etc. I challenge Edward to demonstrate his reputed color-divining ability under suitably controlled conditions that I will set up.

Inflating “Hits”
In addition to shrewd cold reading and out-and-out cheating, “psychics” and “mediums” can also boost their apparent accuracy in other ways. They get something of a free ride from the tendency of credulous folk to count the apparent hits and ignore the misses. In the case of Edward, my analysis of 125 statements or pseudostatements (i.e., questions) he made on a Larry King Live program (June 19, 1998) showed that he was incorrect about as often as he was right and that his hits were mostly weak ones. (For example he mentioned “an older female” with “an M-sounding name,” either an aunt or grandmother, he stated, and the caller supplied “Mavis” without identifying the relationship; see Nickell 1998.)
Another session-for an episode of Crossing Over attended by a reporter for The New York Times Magazine, Chris Ballard (2001)-had Edward “hitting well below 50 percent for the day.” Indeed, he twice spent “upward of 20 minutes stuck on one person, shooting blanks but not accepting the negative responses.” This is a common technique: persisting in an attempt to redeem error, cajoling or even browbeating a sitter (as Sylvia Browne often does), or at least making the incorrect responses seem the person’s fault. “Do not not honor him!” Edward exclaimed at one point, then (according to Ballard) “staring down the bewildered man.”

When the taped episode actually aired, the two lengthy failed readings had been edited out, along with second-rate offerings. What remained were two of the best readings of the show (Ballard 2001). This seems to confirm the allegation in the Time article that episodes were edited to make Edward seem more accurate, even reportedly splicing in clips of one sitter nodding yes “after statements with which he remembers disagreeing” (Jaroff 2001).

Edited or not, sessions involving a group offer increased chances for success. By tossing out a statement and indicating a section of the audience rather than an individual, the performing “medium” makes it many times more likely that someone will “acknowledge” it as a “hit.” Sometimes multiple audience members will acknowledge an offering, whereupon the performer typically narrows the choice down to a single person and builds on the success. Edward uses just such a technique (Ballard 2001).

Still another ploy used by Edward and his fellow “psychic mediums” is to suggest that people who cannot acknowledge a hit may find a connection later. “Write this down,” an insistent Edward sometimes says, or in some other way suggests the person study the apparent miss. He may become even more insistent, the positive reinforcement diverting attention from the failure and giving the person an opportunity to find some adaptable meaning later (Nickell 1998).

Debunking Versus Investigation
Some skeptics believe the way to counter Edward and his ilk is to reproduce his effect, to demonstrate the cold-reading technique to radio and TV audiences. Of course that approach is unconvincing unless one actually poses as a medium and then-after seemingly making contact with subjects’ dead loved ones-reveals the deception. Although audiences typically fall for the trick (witness Inside Edition’s use of it), I deliberately avoid this approach for a variety of reasons, largely because of ethical concerns. I rather agree with Houdini (1924, xi) who had done spiritualistic stunts during his early career:

At the time I appreciated the fact that I surprised my clients, but while aware of the fact that I was deceiving them I did not see or understand the seriousness of trifling with such sacred sentimentality and the baneful result which inevitably followed. To me it was a lark. I was a mystifier and as such my ambition was being gratified and my love for a mild sensation satisfied. After delving deep I realized the seriousness of it all. As I advanced to riper years of experience I was brought to a realization of the seriousness of trifling with the hallowed reverence which the average human being bestows on the departed, and when I personally became afflicted with similar grief I was chagrined that I should ever have been guilty of such frivolity and for the first time realized that it bordered on crime.

Of course tricking people in order to educate them is not the same as deceiving them for crass personal gain, but to toy with their deepest emotions-however briefly and well intentioned-is to cross a line I prefer not to do. Besides, I believe it can be very counterproductive. It may not be the alleged medium but rather the debunker himself who is perceived as dishonest, and he may come across as arrogant, cynical, and manipulative-not heroic as he imagines.
As well, an apparent reproduction of an effect does not necessarily mean the cause was the same. (For example, I have seen several skeptical demonstrations of “weeping” icons that employed trickery more sophisticated than that used for “real” crying effigies.) Far better, I am convinced, is showing evidence of the actual methods employed, as I did in collaboration with Dateline NBC.

Although John Edward was among five “highly skilled mediums” who allegedly fared well on tests of their ability (Schwartz et al. 2001)-experiments critiqued elsewhere in this issue (Wiseman and O’Keeffe, see page 26)-he did not claim validation on Larry King Live. When King (2001) asked Edward if he thought there would ever be proof of spirit contact, Edward responded by suggesting proof was unattainable, that only belief matters: “. . . I think that to prove it is a personal thing. It is like saying, prove God. If you have a belief system and you have faith, then there is nothing really more than that.” But this is an attempt to insulate a position and to evade or shift the burden of proof, which is always on the claimant. As Houdini (1924, 270) emphatically stated, “It is not for us to prove the mediums are dishonest, it is for them to prove that they are honest.” In my opinion John Edward has already failed that test.

More Info
guide to Cold Reading
http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/coldread.htm

More Cold Reading
http://skepdic.com/coldread.html

I think that John Edwards presentation style is a bit lame but that has to do with his lack of training.  I think that you ought to hang out at a Spiritualist church and do it undercover and see what you can dig up.  I visited a church once where nobody knew me and the medium who was doing the service described my uncle and even mentioned the exact date of his death as well as got his first and last name.  Nobody knew me as I had never been to this church before.  He decribed and even moved like my uncle.  It was truly amazing as I at the time DID NOT KNOW some of the facts that this medium related including the date of passing June 15. I asked my mother about it and she was pretty blown away.

anyway, that is my experience.  The medium didn’t ask me any questions other than asking if they could come to me.  so there is no way in hell that he could have known what he told me and I did not even know some of the things until I asked my mom. 

Anyway, take care and God Bless you!

Roger Clark

I agree I have investigated mediumship for years and have had dozens of readings.  While I have met a few who were not that good, I have been amazed at the specific details that they were able to come up with out of thin air.  I suggest that skeptics visit a good medium and see for themselves as I think that the experience would change their minds!

I’ve had more than one medium attempt to give me a reading including some that others swore were absolutely fantastic at it. So far I have yet to meet a single medium who has demonstrated anything in the way of knowledge they couldn’t have possibly had any way of knowing.

Are you sure these mediums are telling you what they know or are they just telling you what you want to hear?

I don’t care what you believe, but you don’t have to be so negative and nasty as to what John Edward does.  In the bible Moses was a prohet of God who spoke about visions is he a fake?  I believe John is true to his word and not a phony.  I read up on this, read his books watch the show and I believe what he says.  You have a right to your belief without knocking someone else.

I don’t care what you believe, but you don’t have to be so negative and nasty as to what John Edward does.

You’re right. I don’t “have” to be so negative and nasty about what John Edward does, but I choose to be anyway. The man is a fraud and a scam artist. He’s selling the metaphysical equivalent of snake oil.

In the bible Moses was a prohet of God who spoke about visions is he a fake?

Yes, he is. What kind of answer did you expect from an atheist? I don’t believe Moses even existed let alone spoke with God. I tell you what, the day that John Edward parts the Red Sea is the day I’ll stop saying mean things about him, OK?

I believe John is true to his word and not a phony. I read up on this, read his books watch the show and I believe what he says.

Hey, at least you’re willing to own up to your own stupidity publicly. Some people just seem to have a need to believe in the ridiculous and you’re in good company so I suppose you can take comfort in numbers.

You have a right to your belief without knocking someone else.

Yep, you’re right again, but that would take all the fun out of it.

I think instead of being mean spirited and insult people like John Edward, it is important to study their claims with statistical methods. 

Under a controlled situation, is he able to beat the laws of probability? Roger Clark has a good point. If what he wrote is true, then the chance of the psychic being right about his uncle’s first and last name and exact date of death would be millions to one. If a psychic is able to be this correct within his next one million predictions, then it is statistically significant.

I think some psychic performers use a combination of real intuition and trickery to maximize performance.

I really don’t know if there is any study that clearly proves statistical significance on unusually skilled performers such as Edward. I do know of many that disprove psychic ability. But we should be excited if a real psychic is discovered, perhaps shining light on the mind of mankind.

James Randi, world renown performer, writer, and lecturer, has carried a check around in his pocket for more than 30 years.  (It used to be a check for $10,000, I think it’s now $1,000,000.) He will award this check to anyone who can demonstrate “psychic” abilities which Randi himself cannot DUPLICATE under the same conditions. Nobody has ever collected that money, and this truth speaks for itself. For a real psychic, it would be an easy million dollars, wouldn’t it?  A lot of people believed in Miss Cleo before she was indicted for mail fraud. 

Go ahead, have faith in whatever you want, but if you must insist on deciding what’s true and what’s not true based soley on faith, and not science, then be prepared to answer to those who are more scientifically minded, and who require higher standards of proof than “I believe.”

The bottom line is this:  When I hear an otherworldly voice, I believe it.  When someone else hears an otherworldly voice and says it wants to talk to me, I keep close track of my wallet.

Cold Reading is a sideshow ruse that’s been popular among less ethical performers for centuries.  Magicians like myself are familiar with the stories of mentalists and mediums from a bygone era.  Most people haven’t seen a mentalist work, and so along comes John Edward.  Just because this kind of magician hasn’t been popular for a hundred years, and an unsuspecting audience has never seen these tricks before, it does not make him psychic.  It’s still the same sideshow.

In fairness to him, I’m not entirely sure HE knows he’s cold reading.  Edward may believe that the “hits” are coming from the great beyond, even though the information is coming to him subconsciously in other ways.  Does that make him honest?  If he genuinely believes he has “the power” and still manages to achieve what he does through prosaic means on an entirely subconscious level, how does that make him any different than the ventriloquist who really believes his dummy is alive?

I’ve seen the show many times, and I must admit, the TV producers make it look very convincing.  But is it “real”?  Sure.  It’s just not what John Edward says it is--voices of the dead.  It’s an interaction with the living.  And anyone who wants to pay money to see the show, or buy one of his books, please do it because you enjoy it… not because your life’s decisions hang on John Edwards lips.  He’s just providing comfort and a sense of miracles to people who pay him for it.  Why does he claim it’s real?  It’s his act.  Would you sit and watch it if he started out by saying “What you are about to see is a demonstration of cold reading, and it’s just for fun… it’s not real.” You’d be watching Joe Millionaire instead, wouldn’t you?

I don’t think John Edward has enything to apologize for.  W.C. Fields once said, “Never give a sucker an even break.” It’s your job not to be a sucker, or you pays your money and you takes your chances, my friends.

Ugh.

No offense, but alot of you know jack squat about what you are even talking about.

Let me get this out straight first: I don’t know if he’s real, I don’t know if he’s fake. I read both sides of the story...actually all but Edward’s. I have not read his books, and have only read articles and scientific testing, such as what Gary Swartz has done. I also read articles from CSICOPS, even though frankly, many members of their organization are about as closed-minded as they come. It’s like going to the republican party for information on the democrates: you are always going to hear from people who have already made up their minds. I read both sides because I want to come to fair conclusions.

Whenever I hear the proof that he is not real, many people go right to the cold reading gig. However I see many flaws in these theories. One, you will notice that many times Johnny-boy has made referances to things that account to barely anyone in the population. Such as a inside joke, certain ‘special’ meanings to the family member, etc. Time after time I hear the statment of ‘how he rattles off names starting with an ‘M’. However, I have noticed several times that he goes father than that...in fact almost all the time, he starts adding to it. ‘M’ becomes ‘Macy’ or ‘Matty’ or something along those lines. Some of the things that have happened during these readings just arn’t covered by the cold reading reasoning. Yes we all may know a Charlie. But how many of you have a joke about onions with your relatives?

I won’t even bring up the evidence in Swartz’z book which documents alot of this stuff.

Another interesting thing to think about: in some of the above papers (found at CSICOPS, ones i have read many times) I love how they will disreguard plenty of people who say that John Edward, when they received a reading say that there was absoultly no way he could have known what he did because they did not talk about it at the studio or with him, or sometimes even with anyone, and yet one guy from Time magazine mentions something ‘fishy’ is going on, and BOOM they land all over it as their evidence, disreguarding all personal testemonies, or other such evidence. How is that right?

I read Hyman’s critique of the experiments that Schwartz did, and it just wasn’t very satisfactory. He talked about the probablility and how there may be fault there, but it doesn’t take a genious to figure out some of the examples were just not very likely to happen. The very first case was a good example, it involved 5 tested mediums and they all came up with similar information even though the mediums were NEVER able to talk with eachother and were being wathced! They set up cameras, they did blind readings where the mediums could not see the person, they did only ‘yes or no’ questioning which provides NO leads. In other words, Swartz tested his ass off on alot of this stuff, though it was not perfect,( but ususally not in ways that would greatly effect the results) in the end the skeptics admitted that ‘fraud was not evident’ however did not rule out cold reading. In several papers I’ve read, the skeptics pointed out all the nagative findings that they could latch onto and totally disreguarded solid notion that something other than cold reading was going on.

So many bring up Houdini. That ‘Houdini defrauded so many mediums that they must all STILL be fake’. Do you know how those mediums worked? The Fox sisters for example, had this foolisly stupid way of talking to the dead through tapping sounds. It was them tapping under the table it was found. Also, many mediums asked around for information.

This isn’t the way mediums do it now a days if they are faking, so why do we keep going back to Houdini? Another thing: this was, how many years ago?  I think it’s time we start re-examening things instead of going back to results so long ago-it’s time for a new study.

It’s not scientific. If you are going to say he’s a fraud, I want some emphirical evidence. I do not want studies of cold reading, i do not want theory. I want TESTS I want NUMBERS.

Which is why I am more frustrated with people who say ‘it’s fake end of story’. Because they ususally don’t do laberatory testing. In fact, I will quote Hymen (Hymen is BTW, a list of the top debunkers at CSICOPS and has written several papers on cold reading and mediumship) says that the ‘testing of mediumship has no place for orthodox science’. So apparently they will say it’s not true and a bunch of crap, but they will say that it should not be tested scientifically.

If you want anything near to fair, read ‘The Afterlife Experiments’. (ignore that ‘proof of an afterlife’ on the cover, frankly they just put it on there for book sales-Shwartz himself is still skeptical and says it’s ‘quite a leap to suggest ‘proof’ of an afterlife)

Then to be fair, go and read ‘How Not to Test a Medium’ By Hymen. Then to be fair go to Swartz’s site which you can find via google and you will find a response to that critique.

Schwartz is not a member of parapapsychology (a field which is highly suspect) nor is he a member of CSICOPS. He repetedly talks about the importance of scientific testing, and let the ‘results speak’. Of course he is ridiculed for his interest and testing of these subjects, and though it’s still inconclusive, the studies are hinting that there may actually be something to all of this.

The need for proof may come onto the medium, but I feel that for me to totally cast it away, I need more evidence than what is given. We need to stop generalizing mediumship, we need to start testing. The skeptics who state that this is cold reading have made up their mind that there is no such thing as a person being able to talk to the dead, for if they hadn’t made up their mind they would look at mediums case by case instead of generalizing them all, and come up with some numbers instead of untested hypothesises.

(another thing to think about: if you want an observation of an assumption, look at the very first paragraphs of Nikell’s paper.

Constantly mediums have said that the information comes to them in ‘snipits’ and feelings, and emotions and flashes of pictures.

If the ‘afterlife’ is another dimension like it has always been hypothesised, why do we expect them to talk as if they were in this dimension? Why do we expect it to be as clear as a radio signal?

That is why, if these abilities are real, they would never pass the James Rhandi test. Rhandi expects results that are as good as me walking up to you and talking to you right now. If we are dealing with a paranomal universe of some sort, it’s just not going to work like that.

Another thing to also think about: Harry Houdini’s experiment with mediumship after his death. He gave a long string of coded letters and numbers that would later give a sentance, frankly it was quite complex. I don’t know about you but generally the avergae person can’t even contain memory of such a code in real life either. But *shrugs*

I’m too tired for this argument. But frankly, do your reaserch people. Sheesh.

Actually I’ve done quite a bit of research on the whole talking-to-the-dead routine. I’ve spent time watching Edwards technique and I’ve compared it to the performances by other known magicians who perform the same routine and the truth is Edwards isn’t even that good at cold reading.

First off you can’t rely on his taped show to provide an accurate picture of his ability as it’s edited. A better indicator are the performances he attempts on live television such as the Larry King show where he doesn’t have the benefit of editing to help out. In these situations his ratio of misses to hits is less than what one would expect from random chance, but all it takes is one good hit to convince folks he’s in contact with “the other side.”

You bring up Dr. Schwartz and his experiments in trying to test these claims and the fact that many other scientists criticize him unfairly. This is true to an extent, but those scientists and skeptics who have taken an honest look at Dr. Schwartz’s research have found some serious problems with the testing methodology which is part of why he gets such criticisms. It’s clear that Dr. Schwartz isn’t proficient at designing proper double-blind studies and it casts doubt on all of his findings.

Lastly I find it somewhat amusing that you’re trying to make the argument that the “afterlife” is another dimension where the conditions may be such that normal communication with folks still in this one may be difficult at best. Assuming for the moment that this is true then how is it possible for the “psychics” to get detailed information of any kind at all? Such as the “inside joke” that you mentioned earlier as proof that the psychics must be somehow tapping into another realm.

What I want to know is even if this limited form of communication is all that’s possible and that any detailed information will come only in small snippets, why haven’t any of the psychics revealed anything in the way of truly important information from the other side? Surely these small snippets would be sufficient to communicate information that would solve any number of murder mysteries still on the books over the years, but it would seem that murder victims have yet to decide to speak to the likes of Edwards as not a single case has been resolved in such a manner. This is just one example of relevant information that has yet to come out of any of Edward’s readings.

Instead, we get references to inside jokes and predictions of “new carpets” in the future for the people receiving the readings. This is probably the best evidence against the reality of this supposed ability is the fact that nothing of any consequence ever comes out of these readings.

It would be nice to provide tests and numbers, but I seriously doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon for the simple reason that there’s no benefit in it for the psychics. They know that enough people are out there who have a psychological need to believe their ability is real to ensure they’ll continue to make money regardless of any lack of proof of their claims.

Sylivia Brown is another talk-to-the-dead psychic who has agreed in the past to be tested by James Randi on Larry King’s show. That was 865 days ago which is almost two and a half years. Since then she has done nothing but make excuse after excuse as to why she’s not gone through with the test. Could it be she doesn’t really want to go through with the test as she’s afraid it may reveal her scam for what it is? She makes millions of dollars off of it every year through book sales and very expensive private readings. Would you jeopardize all of that to try and prove your ability was real?

Just let me say that it is not our place to prove it is or is not real.
In the way science is advanced it is the one making the calim must show proof.
And remember,,,,,extrordinary claims require extrordinay proof.
Just my 2 sence.