Psychic Ability Versus Intuition

Back in April, Vice posted an article about a recent study in which almost one in five American claimed to have psychic abilities. I actually don't find that number particularly surprising, since the question was about psychic ability in general. Lots of people have experiences that seem psychic, which is why paranormal beliefs exist in the first place. Psychic abilities are "real" in the sense that people keep experiencing them. The debate is over what their actual nature is.

A new survey of 2,000 adults from Talker Research found that 19% of respondents straight-up believe they have psychic abilities, another 71% lean on intuition at least some of the time, and over the past year, the average person logged around 18 moments they’d describe as psychic. Only 11% said they don’t buy into it at all. So what’s actually happening?

Nobody was predicting earthquakes or lottery numbers. The experiences people pointed to were more like: knowing something was off before anyone confirmed it (33%), clocking that someone was lying (28%), or just feeling like it was time to leave a situation (26%). Twenty-five percent had a bad feeling about something before it went awry. Twenty-four percent thought of someone right before that person texted. Psychic or just paying attention? Depends on who you ask.

Adam Dickinson, a former FBI intelligence analyst, didn’t dress it up. “Intuition is your body compressing years of experience and pattern recognition into a clear signal you can feel right now.” The people who sensed dishonesty before it surfaced, or finished someone’s sentence before they got there—they’re reading data. They’ve just been doing it long enough that it no longer feels like work.

The part of the survey that deserves more attention is the anxiety overlap. Thirty-five percent of respondents said they genuinely can’t tell the difference between a real gut feeling and anxiety spiraling. Dickinson’s way of separating the two: get still, get neutral, and notice whether the inner voice feels steady or frantic. “That urgent, demanding tone is usually anxiety trying to control uncertainty,” he said. Not intuition. Just the nervous system doing its thing.

While this is a skeptical take that assumes psychic senses could not possibly exist, otherwise I don't really disagree with most of it. There is a difference between psychic awareness and intuition, but a lot of the time what is happening when you get "a feeling" about something is definitely the latter. Psychic abilities aren't called "paranormal" for nothing, after all.

Thomas Edison's Spirit Phone

Here's a fun article from Atlas Obscura. It seems that Thomas Edison invented a "spirit phone" that was intended to communicate with spirits of the dead. In the 1920's spiritualism was still going full-force, and researchers were very interested in the implications of apparently physical manifestations that occurred during seances.

In 1920, the inventor shocked the public when he told American Magazine: “I have been at work for some time, building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” Edison, who was known for having hundreds of patents of inventions and creating an efficient version of the light bulb, added that this new invention would not function by “any occult, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means, employed by so–called “mediums”, but by scientific methods. I am engaged in the construction of one such apparatus now, and I hope to be able to finish it before very many months pass.”

Edison’s idea became known as a “spirit phone”, and caused a media storm. For years many historians believed the invention to be a joke or a hoax; no blueprints or prototypes of a spirit phone could be found. But while he may not have actually contacted the dead, there is evidence he experimented with the idea. In 2015 the French journalist Philippe Baudouin found a rare version of Edison’s diary in a thrift store in France. This version includes a chapter that was not printed in the widely known 1948 English edition, called the Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. This missing chapter was dedicated to his theory of the spirit world, and how it might be possible to contact it. Baudouin re-published the French edition as Le Royaume de l’au-delà.

Edison was such an extreme self-promoter that it's hard to imagine him not taking credit for contacting the spirit world if his device ever worked. That fact alone suggests that it never did. The article goes into more detail about Edison's model of how he thought the spirit world worked, and from that account I think I can see what the problem was. Detector sensitivity would have beem an issue with the electronics of the time, but beyond that I doubt something based on Edison's model would work even with the latest technology.

Assessing James Randi

James Randi, founder of the capital-S Skeptic movement, passed away this last week at the age of 92. Over the years I have posted various articles about the Skeptics, and while I consider they methods useful for debunking fraudulent "celebrity psychics," I also think that the movement - and especially Randi himself - took an unnecessarily adversarial position with respect to actual scientific research of the paranormal.

I have been asked on a couple of occasions about this, and why I had a problem with his attitude. I do try to test my magical techniques in as scientific a manner as I can and don't have a problem with the findings of mainstream science. But skepticism - real skepticism, not the movement variety - should be based on an honest consideration of the evidence. Randi's approach never seemed honest to me, especially his constant accusation of fraud when presented with evidence he found hard to dismiss out of hand.

On the occasion of Randi's death, I considered writing up a piece expressing my assessment of the man, his legacy, and my issues with his approach to the paranormal. But before I could do that, I came across this article from Boing Boing which expresses my thoughts at least as well as I would have. It even includes some material of which I was previously unaware.

Born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge in Toronto in 1928, Randi became a celebrated stage magician and escape artist who appeared in prestigious venues and on television shows, including Happy Days. His stage aesthetics and devices were often brilliant and original. Randi toured with rock icon Alice Cooper in 1973, designing a mock beheading-by-guillotine for the proto-metal star. When claiming the garland of skepticism in the early 1970s, the MacArthur-winning Randi announced his intention of exposing phony faith healers and grifter psychics.

Today, many people know Randi from the award-winning 2014 documentary An Honest Liar. But the laudatory and engaging profile tells its story in a fashion that skeptics traditionally decry: including only the magician's successful exposes (some of which were more questionable than the film allows) and obfuscating his darker and more lasting impact: making it more difficult for serious university-based and academically trained researchers to study ESP and mental anomalies, and to receive a fair hearing in the news media. Indeed, Randi ultimately cheapened an important debate over how or whether extra-physical mentality can be studied under scientifically rigorous conditions and evaluated by serious people.

In a typical example, The New York Times ran a 2015 piece about a wave of fraudulent and flawed psychology studies; its lead paragraph cited a precognition study by Cornell University psychologist Daryl J. Bem — without justifying why it was grouped with polluted research or even further referencing Bem's study in the article. (I wrote to the Times to object. The paper has used several of my letters and op-eds, often on controversial subjects — this time, crickets.)

The Bem study is interesting for two reasons. First, while critics have argued that Bem's "presentiment" findings must be the result of experimental error, they can never pinpoint what the problem with the methodology might be. To be fair, that doesn't mean there's couldn't be a problem with the methodology, only that it hasn't been identified. The second reason it's interesting is that a very similar methodology was used in studies constantly pointed to by researchers opposed to the idea of "free will."

Psychics in the Gig Economy

This article is from last month, but it is becoming more and more relevant as the discussion goes on about how the gig economy does not work well for many folks out there just trying to make ends meet. Drivers in particular - both for taxi services and food delivery services - complain that the companies exploit independent contractor exceptions, appropriate tips, and so forth. Workers that do appear to be doing well, though, are app-based psychics who offer services such as Tarot readings.

Calley Nelson has been reading tarot cards for over 10 years. She never expected to go into business when she was younger, fortune-telling just “kind of happened.” Today, it is her full-time job. “I mostly read at parties and special events, but I also have a private practice in Brooklyn where people meet with me either in my home office, over the phone or video chat,” Nelson told Salon. Some clients she finds through Gig Salad and Gigmasters, which are apps for entertainers for parties and events.

“My business started unofficially through word of mouth after I graduated college,” she said. “I started reading professionally at a popular Chicago dive bar in the Boystown neighborhood.” She said people kept asking her where they could find her online, but she didn’t have a website yet. So she made an Instagram. At the time, she was working two jobs: one as a bar back, and the other as a web editor at a healthcare company. “I was apprehensive about putting tarot on my professional editorial website at first so I kept the nightlife version of me separate from my day job,” she explained.

A friend recommended that she look into Gig Salad and Gigmasters, which staffs entertainment at parties and special events. Vendors can book the talent through the sites, a similar model to TaskRabbit. Nelson said she thinks apps can help “elevate spiritual businesses.” For her, she estimates half of her business is coming through apps. Nelson said Gigmasters and Gig Salad have membership fees around $200 for the year. Gig Salad takes a cut depending on your membership. For Nelson, that is a little less than 10 percent. Gigmasters, she said, takes $20 from each event she books. Nelson charges $120 for a 60-minute reading.

Uri Geller Brings Down The House

If by "bring down" you mean "made a pipe leak" and by "house" you mean the House of Commons. I missed this story back in April, but I'm catching up now.

After posting an open letter to Prime Minister Theresa May stating that he would stop Brexit with his psychic powers, the famed (and debunked) psychic made good on his threats. He claims to have caused a pipe to leak, which resulted in the temporary closure of the House of Commons. This is a logical extension of his old spoon-bending powers, but it also is a little sad. If I were going to try and influence a political body with magick, I could do so much better than a leaky pipe.

He shared a video on Twitter this morning of a leaking pipe at the Uri Geller Museum in Tel Aviv, taken at about 12.40PM UK time. He says this gave him the inspiration to carry out his sabbotage of Parliament.

‘This is when I got the idea! PARLIAMENT! I can’t sack them but I can soak them,’ tweeted Uri, who is a British citizen but lives in Israel. Uri Geller said coffee shop leak 'inspired' him to sabotage Parliament

It’s not like you couldn’t see it coming, after the 72-year-old self-proclaimed psycic warning sent an open letter to Theresa May last month saying: ‘I love you very much but I will not allow you to lead Britain into Brexit. ‘As much as I admire you, I will stop you telepathically from doing this – and believe me I am capable of executing it.’

At this point, many hardcore remainers might think that anything is worth a try, but it probably would have helped if MPs were actually talking about Brexit at the time of the flooding and not the introduction of the 2019 Loan Charge.

It's almost as if Geller were an ineffective superhero from The Tick or Mystery Men with the power to "kind of bend metal a little, you know, some of the time," like a super-super-low-budget Magneto. And speaking of The Tick, "Spoon!" should totally be Geller's battle-cry. But could he really not think of anything better to do than mess with a pipe? Mind-to-mind influence is way more effective than random parlor tricks like this, and the House of Commons wasn't even discussing Brexit when he alleges he did it.

Yes, psychic abilities are just like spells in that sometimes their effects don't manifest the way we expect. Now it could be that he's spent the last month using mental influence to defeat each of May's attempts to get a Brexit plan through Parliament, and the idea is now as unpopular as it's ever been. So maybe I'll cut him a little slack. You know, maybe…

Because let's face it - I was hoping for something really dramatic once the spoons started rolling. Instead, I got a leaky pipe. It's a bit of a letdown, almost as if he didn't really do anything and just took credit for something that happened on its own.

Canada's Last Witchcraft Case Dropped

Here's some good news from Canada. The ridiculous "pretending to practice witchcraft" law is finally dead, as the last case brought under the archaic law has been dropped. Timmins psychic Tiffany Butch was charged in December, just before the law expired. Last week the charges were withdrawn, ending the era of Canadian witchcraft prosecutions.

Butch was charged on Dec. 11, 2018 by the Timmins Police Service with pretending to practice witchcraft – fortune telling contrary to section 365(b) of the Criminal Code of Canada. Two days later that section of the Criminal Code was formally repealed.

Speaking on the Crown’s decision to withdraw the charge, Sabourin said, “I don’t believe they felt it was in the public’s interest, particularly in view of the fact the first charge was a Practising Witchcraft charge which days afterwards was removed from the books because it was seen as so archaic and not applicable to our Canadian laws.
“The Crown supplanted that with a (charge of) fraud under ($5,000), and from my perspective, there certainly wasn’t evidence to support that.”

Butch said it’s an old trick amongst competing psychics to send a friend or family member for a reading and then have them go to the police alleging fraud in hopes that it will discredit the competitor and hurt their business. Butch admitted, after the charges were laid, “I was in a daze because I didn’t understand what was going on because none of my customers were bothering me, or threatening me or was trying to report me or even asking me for refunds.

“I think the Crown attorney finally realized, and possibly the judge realized, that this is two psychics at war, which is an old witch’s tale in a small town. This happens when you have two psychics in a small town.”

Uri Geller Versus Brexit

The spoons are gonna roll, people! That's the prediction of fully-debunked-but-still-claiming-psychic powers stage magician Uri Geller, whose original claim to fame was his purported ability to bend spoons with his mind. The trick isn't actually all that hard, which led to a high-profile debunking by none other than arch-skeptic James Randi himself. Geller is now threatening to use his (debunked) psychic powers to stop Brexit by means of telepathy, which he's totally going to do if the prime minister won't play ball. Theresa May, fear his spoony wrath!

In an open letter to the prime minister, the Israeli-British TV personality said he felt “psychically and very strongly” that most Britons were anti-Brexit and promised to stop the process telepathically. He wrote: “I feel psychically and very strongly that most British people do not want Brexit. I love you very much but I will not allow you to lead Britain into Brexit. As much as I admire you, I will stop you telepathically from doing this – and believe me I am capable of executing it. Before I take this drastic course of action, I appeal to you to stop the process immediately while you still have a chance.”

Geller, who is currently in Israel, used to live in Sonning, which lies in May’s Maidenhead constituency. In his letter, he said he had known the prime minister for 21 years and that she had visited his home. He added: “Three years before you became prime minister, I predicted your victory when I showed you Winston Churchill’s spoon on my Cadillac, which I asked you to touch.” He also claimed he is using the power of his mind to ensure that “Jeremy Corbyn never gets the keys to Number 10 Downing Street”. “I will ensure that they bend out of all proportion to ensure that he never takes up residence there,” he wrote.

To be fair, Randi is known to play as fast and loose with his debunking efforts as a lot of phony psychics do with their powers. So it's not entirely beyond the bounds of probability that Geller might have some psychic abilities, even if the spoon-bending thing is a stage magic trick. He's calling out what he's going to do ahead of time, so we can watch and see. If Brexit goes through and/or Jeremy Corbin becomes Prime Minister, those are just more failures to add to the list. On the other hand it's possible that he could succeed, so like a good scientist I will wait and see.

Note that I barely follow British politics and have no idea what's going to eventually happen. But Geller sticking his spoon into the mix is just plain hysterical.

John Oliver Versus Psychic Mediums

John Oliver recently posted a great takedown of the psychic industry, particularly television mediums, on Last Week Tonight. The full video of the segment is included above. Oliver goes over cold reading and hot reading, and shows some pretty impressive failures by celebrity mediums. While Oliver scoffs at the entire notion of psychic abilities, whereas I do not, the segment is entertaining and educational. For every real psychic out there, it sounds like there are dozens of scammers hiding in the woodwork and waiting for opportunities to make some quick and easy cash from grieving families. And that's just awful.

One of the reasons I stay out of the magick/psychic business is that everybody I've seen who's been successful in that area has a bit of the huckster in them - not to say that their abilities are fake, or that their techniques don't work, but rather there is a certain feel to them that I just don't like. I don't want to be one of those people, and I would honestly feel bad about taking money from someone for a spell if it doesn't work. Sure, I could try the whole "charging for success only," but I know how that goes because I've run several small businesses. If you give anybody an opening, they'll try to weasel out of paying. So that's not a viable option either.

I would rather just publish my magical techniques either here or in print and let them speak for themselves. Either my methods work, or they don't.

Canada's Stupid Witchcraft Law

For several years now, the Canadian government has been discussing the repeal of a law prohibiting "pretending to practice witchcraft." The law may finally be going away, but not before two more people were charged with the offense. The criminal cases themselves seem sound - according to the allegations, both defendants defrauded their clients using psychic and fortune-telling scams. My problem with the law is not that it prohibits scams, but rather that it carves out a special exception for "witchcraft-related" scams when it seems to me that what is going on is more properly fraud and can be handled under the same statutes.

Two Canadian women have been charged with pretending to practise witchcraft, breaking a little-known law in Canada's criminal code that could soon be out the door. The first charge was levied against Dorie "Madeena" Stevenson, a fortune teller from Milton, Ontario on 18 October after a months-long investigation. She is accused of defrauding a client of C$60,000 ($45,700; £35,700) in cash and property.

A week later, Toronto psychic Samantha Stevenson was also arrested in a similar but unrelated investigation. Police allege she convinced a man the only way to get rid of "evil spirits" in his home would be to sell it, and transfer the proceeds into her account.The accused often advertise themselves as a psychic or religious healer, and demand large sums of money to help remove curses or evil spirits from clients, police say.

"What we typically see is a tendency for perpetrators to take advantage of persons when they are in their most vulnerable state," wrote Det Sgt Dave Costantini of Halton Regional Police, in a press release. "Victims are manipulated into believing something bad will happen to them unless they remit cash. We even see incidents where victims are required to make purchases and remit these purchases in order to be cleansed. When victims cannot be squeezed any longer, the perpetrators rely on the victim's embarrassment in not contacting police."

The charges could lead to Canada's last witch trials, as the section of the law banning pretending to practise witchcraft will soon be repealed. In June 2017, the federal government proposed a bill repealing dozens of outdated sections of the criminal code, including the law against pretending to be a witch.

To be clear, if the allegations are true I don't have any problem with these folks being convicted. What I have a problem with is that there's a special law just for those who "fraudulently pretend to exercise or to use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration." Fraud, as I see it, is just fraud and should be charged accordingly. An example: if I'm a confidence artist and I defraud somebody with a stock-picking scam, should it matter whether I tell them I have a computer model picking the stocks or if I tell them I have a psychic doing it? Isn't fraud just fraud?

"Extreme Witchcraft?"

A number of news outlets are reporting on claims by Kimberly Thompson, a former drummer for singer Beyonce Knowles, has accused her former employer of tormenting her with "extreme witchcraft." According to this article from the British tabloid Metro, Thompson made these claims while trying to file a restraining order against the singer. The judge threw out her request, because, quite frankly, her charges are utterly bizarre.

Kimberly was part of Beyonce’s all-girl backing band but has claimed that her breaking point came a year ago when two psychics told her that Beyonce had cast a spell on Kimberley’s kitten, who had been regularly attacking her. ‘I was getting abused. Every time I came home from work to rest, I was just being abused to the point where I’m still healing from a scratch on my rib cage. It drew blood, it was awful. It was so manic and gnarly that I ended up calling two psychics. I got the word from the first psychic and I didn’t want to believe it,’ she told DailyMailTV.

‘So I called later to get a confirmation to make sure, because I didn’t want to believe. They were like the cat has a spell on it. I said what about [Beyoncé] and they were like yes, [Beyoncé] put a spell on the cat and you need to get rid of it right away, otherwise you’ll be in really, really, huge trouble.’ She also claimed that Beyoncé used witchcraft that allowed her to be ‘manipulated sexually’, alleging that the Formation star did this by ‘jumping into other bodies’ to watch her be intimate with partners.

If Thompson hasn't figured it out yet, she's still being abused by these two psychics. When you call up a fake psychic and tell them you're having trouble with a pet, the first thing out of their mouths is almost always "the pet is cursed." Then you say something like "I'm having problems with person x in my professional life. Could they have done it?" and the fake psychic always answers "yes." Then you call up another fake psychic and say "I was told person x cast a spell on my cat. Is that true?" Fake psychic #2 will also always answer "yes" unless they have some other angle. This is super basic cold-reading stuff. I could whip up a version of the old Eliza program on my computer that could do it at least as well.

Psychic Animals Here to Stay

A few years ago, World Cup Soccer went wild for "psychic animals" that seemed to possess the ability to predict the outcomes of matches. The animals would be offered two bowls or containers of food, one bearing the flag of each country. Then the one they selected would be deemed the winner - and a few of those animals proved quite accurate. This year, a Russian cat named Achilles has been selected ahead of the 2018 World Cup tournament as its official "animal psychic."

Achilles, a white-furred deaf cat who lives at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, has been selected to predict the 2018 FIFA World Cup winners.

The male clairvoyant cat was also picked as the official oracle to forecast the traditional pre-match predictions for last year’s Confederations Cup, where he correctly predicted three of the four-match outcomes, reported Russian News Agency Tass.

Hermitage cats press secretary, Maria Khaltunen, claims the feline was chosen for the role because he demonstrated "capabilities for choice, analysis and unusual behavior.” In addition, Achilles is deaf, which means he will not be easily distracted by surrounding noises.

For the 2017 Confederations Cup, the white cat was made to choose between two bowls of food, each with a different country’s flag. “This decision has been made, the papers have been signed,” Khaltunen told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency on Monday.

According to Khaltunen, Achilles will receive a fan identification card (otherwise known as a fan passport). He will also go down in history as the only animal to have attained the prestigious documentation. "Animals are not given [Fan IDs,] as there are questions concerning photos," Khaltunen said.

Now here's where this gets interesting. The main skeptic claim about psychic animals is that what's really is going on is that hundreds of people have animals doing this, and simply by chance some of them will turn out to be right. Over time, this creates a sort of "sifting process" where the only animals left in the pool by the end of the tournament are the ones that chose correctly. So the most successful animals are not psychic, just lucky.

But when you pick an "official" psychic animal ahead of time, that whole dynamic changes. Since one of the basic tenets of probability theory is that each subsequent pick in cases like this should be entirely independent of past picks. So if this is all due to chance, the odds that Achilles will be able to pick successful matches again should be pretty low. If he's successful this time around as well, I would say that warrants further paranormal investigation.

Rupert Sheldrake has provided some evidence of rudimentary psychic abilities in animals, and has proposed his morphic resonance hypothesis to explain it. If Achilles can repeat his performance this year, with all the experimental variables declared ahead of time, it means that at the very least what is going on is probably not sheer luck.

Another Bad Psychic

In Monday's post I commented that using magick to make a living was pretty difficult. Magick can certainly help you do better and make more money at whatever you do, but it's no substitute for regular work. Now there is one exception to that rule of thumb, but I don't recommend it. You can become a fraudulent psychic. Fraudulent psychics can make big money, at least until they get caught by the authorities.

Detectives say their investigation began in November of 2016, when the first victim, a 33-year-old a military veteran, approached detectives during a fraud awareness seminar hosted by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.

The man reported he had been scammed by 31-year-old Gina Wilson. He began seeing her in 2015 to help with “emotional distress.” According to the sheriff’s office, Wilson told the man to stop taking his prescribed medications, alter his bank accounts and to stop seeing his therapist and doctor. The victim says he paid Wilson approximately $92,000 before he realized he was being scammed.

During the investigation detectives, learned of a second alleged victim, a 61-year-old Palm Harbor woman, who began seeing Wilson for help with her grief after her husband passed away. PCSO says Wilson assured the woman that she could help her late husband “pass over to the other side.”

The victim says when Wilson asked for a large sum of money to perform a ceremony at the grave site, she realized she was being scammed and contacted authorities.

No legitimate alternative healer, let alone a legitimate psychic, is ever going to tell you to stop taking medication or ceasing conventional medical treatment. If they do, they're probably fraudulent. This applies to faith healers and the like as well. Since magick manipulates probability, it's going to work better along with mundane steps such as conventional medication. With any sort of spell, you want more avenues of probability open for it to work, not less.

Also, money has no special magical significance besides simply being money. So even for a ritual that requires cash, the amount is never magically significant. From a ritual perspective, you can do the exact same thing with ten dollars as you can with thousands. One of the classic fake psychic scams is have a client bring some large sum of money for a ritual and make a show of burning it. The psychic uses some sort of stage magic trick so that the money is not actually burned, and then pockets it after the "ritual."

For the most part I find the capital-S Skeptics annoying, but this is one area in which they do good work - exposing frauds who are exploiting belief in magick and psychic powers to scam clients. Criminals like Wilson give both psychics and magicians a bad name.

New Documentary on Psychic Spies

Hopefully this new documentary is as good as the trailer makes it look. It covers Project Stargate, the remote viewing program that was operated by the CIA until 1995. The CIA recently declassified a bunch of information about the program, and the makers of this documentary have taken advantage of it to take a look inside what really went on there.

From everything I've studied over the years, Project Stargate did produce some successes. Some of the remote viewers they recruited and trained produced remarkably accurate information. The program was done in by several converging forces. First, the rise of satellite photography made some remote viewing entirely unnecessary. Second, the program became politically unpopular within the Clinton administration, which led to funding cuts. Finally, the CIA was never quite able to put together a protocol by which anyone could be trained as a successful remote viewer.

That last bit shouldn't have been surprising to anybody, but apparently it was. The idea that psychic ability is unlike any other human ability, in that all of us are precisely and equally psychic, is ridiculous. Obviously some people are more talented than others, and it should be recognized that getting accurate information is hard. That is, it requires a high level of natural talent in addition to training. The New Age movement has a lot invested in the "equally psychic" idea, and that's probably where the CIA got it from. Still, it's just wrong.

What you see in the records of Project Stargate is amble proof that ESP exists - that is, proof that at least some individuals can use psychic means to obtain accurate information at much higher rates than chance would predict. However, what you also see is that most of the best hits came from a handful of individuals. Most people can be trained to do remote viewing. Some of those people will get accurate information. And of the people who get accurate information, some of them will be able to do it a significant amount of the time. And the percentage of people who fall into that last group is a pretty small number.

But so what? I've mentioned before that I think the American obsession with creating studies that "prove ESP exists" is kind of silly. We should be investigating these phenomena to see what is happening in each case. For a lot of people, I'm pretty sure the answer is going to come out that they're usually making it up. Others are going to be flat-out frauds running scams. The point, though, is to identify those who are having legitimate experiences. Trying to convince a bunch of skeptics that "it's real" before you even get started on more important work is practically guaranteed to be a losing strategy.

A Skeptic Reviews America's Psychic Experiments

New Republic has a review up today of a new book on psychic experiments conducted by the United States Government, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U. S. Government’s Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis by Annie Jacobsen. I'm including the Amazon link because if you take a look at the critical reviews, there are several that point out inconsistencies and omissions in the narrative that sound legitimate. The reviewer, on the other hand, appears to be a smug capital-S Skeptic who seems to generally like the book itself, but spends most of his time going on about what a waste of time all these programs were because, of course, psychic abilities don't exist.

This experiment is only one of the strange stories—many of them recently declassified—in Annie Jacobsen’s Phenomena: The Secret History of the U. S. Government’s Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. As with her previous books on Area 51, Operation Paperclip (the secret project to bring Nazi rocket scientists to the U.S. after the war), and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops new technology for the Defense Department), this one begins with the fallout of World War II and the extreme measures the military-industrial complex took to unlock and weaponize psychic abilities in the early days of the Cold War. Spanning over 50 years, Jacobsen’s tale takes us from the immediate postwar years to the CIA’s experiments in the 1960s and ‘70s. The Defense Department, she tells us, began its own experiments in the 1980s and ‘90s, before their final incarnation, Project Stargate, was finally decommissioned in 1995.

Later in the article, which I'm not going to quote, the reviewer tries to debunk remote viewing by citing a single failed experiment. However, if you dig into the Stargate material, there were also plenty of successful experiments that produced some reliable intelligence. I am not convinced everyone can be trained to do remote viewing effectively, but I think anybody talented enough to do practical magick should be able to develop a reasonable level of skill at it. One of the problems with trying to deploy these abilities on a large scale is identifying talented people in the first place who are worth the investment of time and money.

Although Jacobsen’s book demonstrates an alarming pattern of government activity, the phenomena themselves are what makes her book so fascinating, and often troubling. “My intention … for this book,” she writes, “was not to prove or disprove anyone or any concept, but to report objectively on the government’s long-standing interest in ESP and PK phenomena.” That being said, she cuts these charlatans a great deal of slack while subtly undermining their critics, creating a reading experience that’s alternately frustrating and exhausting. And while she couldn’t have predicted this before finishing the book, Phenomena arrives at the beginning of a presidency that is thriving on conspiracy, distortion of fact, the discrediting of reliable sources, and outright paranoia. With the President of the United States quoting the National Enquirer as a legitimate news source, we’re in desperate need of a thorough account of the overlap between the government and the occult—but given our current climate, such a book also requires greater moral clarity.

I guess "moral clarity" to this reviewer means that the book should make it clear that the James Randi, capital-S Skeptic position is obviously correct and that any believer in psychic or paranormal phenomena is hopelessly deluded. Obviously, I don't subscribe to that viewpoint. Personally, I like that the author of the book took a more neutral position, because arguing over the existence of psychic powers can consume a great deal of energy and is ultimately boring. People experience them. Of course they exist in that sense. So what we should be trying to figure out is what's going on, not "whether it's real." As a point, the Skeptic favorite "mass hysteria" is precisely as poorly understood as "psychic ability," and is really no more credible as I see it.

Remote Viewing Mars

The Central Intelligence Agency has recently declassified more information from its remote view program, called Project Stargate. This program was started in the 1980's and ran until it was shut down in 1995.

According to accounts from people who worked with the program, one of its most important contributions to parapsychology research was a protocol by which a significant percentage of people could be trained as effective remote viewers. This is an old idea in the occult community, referred to as "astral projection" or "travel in the spirit vision." According to the lore, if you can learn to do it correctly, you can obtain all sorts of information about faraway places that you otherwise could not possibly know.

Slate reported this week that in with this latest batch of declassified material is an account of an attempt to remote view the planet Mars, which apparently took place in 1984. That was early on in the program, and my understanding is that at that time the protocol was still in development. Nonetheless, a transcript of the session contains some interesting and possibly testable pieces of information - once humans finally are able to travel to the red planet.

After this introduction, you’ll find a seemingly unedited transcript of the interview, a dialogue that reads like some fragment of a lost Samuel Beckett play. You need not crawl through the full seven pages of dialogue to get a sense of its strangeness. Here’s a representative sample from the start. (All ellipses in the following are original to the document and seem to indicate long pauses.)

"[Subject]: … I’m seeing, ah … It’s like a perception of a shadow of people, very tall … thin, it’s only a shadow. It’s as if they were there and they’re not, not there anymore.

[Monitor]: Go back to a period of time where they are there.

Sub: … Um … (mumble) It’s like I get a lot of static on a line and everything, it’s breaking up all the time, very fragmentary pieces.

Mon: Just report the data, don’t try to put things together, just report the raw data.

Sub: I just keep seeing very large people. They appear thin and tall, but they’re very large. Ah … wearing some kind of strange clothes."

"Blood Miracle" Fails

AS 2016 comes to an end, the general consensus appears to be that it was a pretty bad year. Not only was this the year of one of the weirdest presidential elections in American history, it also was the year of a seemingly unusual number of unexpected deaths. Some of this is probably standard cognitive bias at work - people have a tendency to fixate on the recent past and idealize or forget things from longer ago. But this last Friday, something ominous took place at an Italian cathedral.

In Naples, Italy, a vial of dried blood kept in a cathedral crypt is said to spontaneously liquefy three times a year. Dec. 16, the anniversary of the 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, is one of the liquefaction days. So far, so good! But last week, on the appointed day, the blood remained stubbornly dry. “We must not think of disasters and calamities,” the local abbot said in response, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes one think about disasters and calamities.

The blood supposedly belongs to Saint Januarius, also known as San Gennaro, who was martyred around the turn of the fourth century, according to lore. As the Italian newspaper La Stampa reports, previous occasions of the miracle’s failure coincided with the beginning of World War II and a local cholera outbreak.

It gets worse. Baba Vanga, a blind clairvoyant from Bulgaria who died in 1996, apparently predicted the recent failure. Believers say Baba Vanga also predicted that Barack Obama would be the last American president, which suggests something alarming will take place before inauguration day. “The Nostradamus of the Balkans” also supposedly predicted the 2004 tsunami, the rise of ISIS, and 9/11: “Horror, horror! The American brethren will fall after being attacked by the steel birds.” (It’s not clear why she didn’t just call them “airplanes.” Do not question Baba Vanga.)

So to apply a little critical thinking here, it's hard to determine how accurate these prophecies are when presented with only snippets and interpretations. I will grant that if the "steel bird" prediction was specific enough to name New York City or September 2001 it might be an impressive hit. However, I'll bet that it didn't, and not only that, I suspect that the phrase "steel bird" was used precisely so it could just as easily apply to planes, missiles, or pretty much anything else that flies - making the prediction more likely to "come true."

As far as the blood miracle itself goes, it's hard to say what might be going on. Scientists have argued that the "miracle" is a natural phenomenon, and even if we consider it paranormal anyway, the start of World War II and a local cholera epidemic are nowhere near the same scale of event. In fact, if you look closely enough at just about any day you can find something bad that happened somewhere in the world. So the liquefaction could depend on some natural factor and have nothing to do with any calamities.

Seeing if anything unusual happens between now and Donald Trump's inauguration will make for a good test. As is generally the case with these predictions, they usually fall apart the moment that they are subjected to strict scrutiny. But I suppose we'll be able to say for sure in a month.

Psychic Animals Called It

This Chinese monkey totally wants to make America great again.

Going into Tuesday's election, pretty much all the polls turned out to be wrong. In a surprise upset, Donald Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to win a majority of votes in the electoral college. The election was very close, with Hillary Clinton winning the nationwide popular vote.

The pollsters may have been wrong, but one demographic saw it coming - psychic animals. On Monday, Huffington Post reported that psychic animals around the world had picked Trump to win.

Various people around the world have attempted to predict the election results by asking animal oracles for their input.

The Shiyanhu Ecological Tourism Park in China’s Hunan province recently had Geda, a simian seer known for accurately predicting the winners of European soccer matches, take a stab at political forecasting, according to The Washington Post.

The monkey, whose name means “goose bumps,” was presented with life-size cutouts of Trump and Hillary Clinton. Geda not only chose Trump ― he climbed onto the cutout to give the man a kiss.

The article includes more examples of trials involving psychic animals, all of which came out in Trump's favor. So here's the question - are these animals really psychic? Some have shown seemingly remarkable abilities to make predictions, beyond what chance would expect. British biologist Rupert Sheldrake has done some interesting experiments with psychic pets, though few mainstream scientists accept his results.

And here's another - will Trump turn out to be the president who embraces the support of these psychic animals and genuinely cares about their issues? I mean, I don't know what those are, but they must want something, right?

Maybe He Is Psychic After All

Mike Lee, the Chicago man who predicted that the Chicago Cubs would win the 2016 World Series back in 1993, has finally issued a statement to the media. Apparently, the prediction was not a random joke, but rather came to him in a dream in 1983. So it's possible that this could be a genuine case of psychic perception that happened to be preserved in his 1993 high school yearbook.

But Lee, now a 41-year-old software engineer living in the Chicago suburbs, kept a low profile by design. “My attitude was, ‘You have to play the games,’” he told The Huffington Post. “I didn’t want to be a distraction. The players shouldn’t be asked about my prediction.”

Ah yes, the prediction. It may have been printed in the yearbook 23 years ago, but Lee said it actually came to him in a dream in 1983. “I saw the words, ‘Cubs World Champions 2016’ on the Wrigley Field sign and I heard Harry Caray calling home runs,” he said.

Lee may have predicted it, but he actually forgot about it until former classmate Marcos Meza reminded him, according to WGN TV. “When [Lee and I] connected on Facebook in 2009 I sent him the photo and told him we were nearing 2016. He posted the photo of his prediction on August 8th,” Meza told the station. “After my Dodgers lost it was time for me to make this go viral and BeLEEve in the Cubs for 2016.”

It's not clear if Lee has had any other psychic dreams besides this one, which tends to be the big problem with random psychic ability. It sometimes gives you information that's accurate, but not in a form that is particularly useful. It's possible Lee bet on the Cubs and made himself some money, but my guess is that he probably didn't.

One of the reasons we work magick in the first place is gain more control over these otherwise mostly random events. When you can induce a psychic vision, rather than just waiting around for them to happen, you will find many more opportunities to take advantage of them.

So Is He Psychic?

Recently the Internet has been buzzing with the story of Michael Lee, who predicted that the Chicago Cubs would win the 2016 World Series. Lee's prediction was made in 1993, in his high school yearbook. At first everybody assumed that the quote was fake and the accompanying image photoshopped, but subsequent research has determined that the quote appears to be genuine and may actually date back to 1993.

Some background - the Chicago Cubs haven't won the World Series since 1908, and have been considered "cursed" by many fans ever since. But this year, after a remarkable turnaround, the Cubs are in fact playing in the World Series, and as of this writing are tied 1-1 with the Cleveland Indians. If they do go on to win the series, the prediction will be fulfilled. So is Lee psychic, or is it all a big coincidence?

Admittedly, faking a yearbook pic is well in the realm of a capable photoshop hoaxer. However, one Reddit user named number1makeitso claims to have found four other copies of the same yearbook, and that Lee’s prediction is in those yearbooks as well. The user posted them on Imgur as evidence:

And Lee’s former classmate Marcos Meza never forgot the prediction, according to WGN TV. “When [Lee and I] connected on Facebook in 2009 I sent him the photo and told him we were nearing 2016. He posted the photo of his prediction on August 8th,” Meza told the station. “After my Dodgers lost it was time for me to make this go viral and BeLEEve in the Cubs for 2016.”

The station has been in contact with Lee, who, fittingly, lives in the Chicago area and is waiting to see if his prediction comes true.

So it's hard to say if Lee might have had some special insight, or if this is simply a case where one out of potentially millions of predictions happens to have matched the data. The Cubs' playoff losing streak has been a running joke among sports fans, so it's likely that they would be the subject of a humorous prediction. I also don't know if similar yearbook predictions have been made for them in other years as well, since as far as I know nobody has bothered to look.

But assuming the the prediction is genuine, the more unique it turns out to be, the more unlikely it is that Lee would just happen to get the year exactly right. Psychic abilities can be maddeningly unpredictable - somewhat ironically, especially when they involve predictions - and it might just be that when he let his mind wander in search of what sounded like a good year, he actually connected with something.

Psychic Mail Fraud Shut Down

A long-running phony psychic operation that swindled its customers out of nearly two hundred million dollars was recently shut down by federal authorities. The company operated through the mail, sending fake seemingly personalized messages to millions of people. The letters claimed that a psychic had personally seen that the individual targeted would come into a large sum of money so long as he or she purchased products from the scammers.

A federal judge has approved a consent decree that bans Montreal’s Infogest Direct Marketing, Hong Kong’s Destiny Research Center Ltd and six individuals from using the U.S. mail system to send ads, promotional materials and solicitations on behalf of alleged psychics, astrologers and clairvoyants.

In a scheme dating to 2000, the defendants were accused of sending seemingly personalized form letters in which French psychics Maria Duval and Patrick Guerin predicted great wealth, such as winning the lottery, for people who bought products and services to ensure their good fortune came to pass.

One such letter touted how Duval and Guerin shared “clear visions” that recipients would come into “massive sums of money on games of chance,” so long as they paid $50 for a “mysterious talisman” and a copy of “My Invaluable Guide to My New Life.”

Authorities said people who bought products or services would be “bombarded” with additional solicitations. More than 56 million pieces of mail were sent in the past decade, they added.

One of the interesting points about this case is that this is the exact same method used by many "Prosperity Gospel" evangelists, as John Oliver uncovered in his epic takedown of the movement. If federal authorities want to crack down further on similar scammers, it should go after some of those ministries.

It's completely legal to tell someone that if they donate money, they will be seen more favorably by God and/or will be rewarded in the afterlife. There's no way to prove or disprove either of those claims. But when an evangelist tells you that when you donate money you'll get back a lot more money, the whole thing becomes a scam.

Ministers who do that should not be able to hide behind "religious freedom" laws to keep their operations going as they enrich themselves at their followers' expense.