Michael Prescott's Blog

OK Juan. I guess we see things differently. – AOD

Tonight, Saturday, at 10 PM Pacific, Coast to Coast radio will have this program:

In the first half, joining Dave Schrader (email), Michael Weston talks about portraying Houdini in the FOX TV Series Houdini and Doyle. Then, researcher and astrologist David Jaher, will discuss his new book, “The Witch of Lime Street” about Margery the Medium, who came to embody the raging national debate during the 1920s over Spiritualism with her most vocal advocate, Sherlock Holmes’ creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, believing thoroughly in her powers, while Harry Houdini was convinced she was nothing but a charlatan. In the latter half, author and Doyle researcher, Matt Wingett, will trace Doyle’s journey, by the letters and articles he wrote exclusively for Light, a magazine dedicated to the mystical and occult.

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“OK Juan. I guess we see things differently.”
It is fine that you are skeptical of ectoplasm, mediums only physical, etc., but you have to admit that all psychic researcher has addressed the spiritual through the physical.

Eric Newhill: “How can something that is local – a physical body and brain – produce non-local effects?”
A quantum-mechanical example: perhaps entanglement effects could enable biological structures in the brain to still affect matter at external locations (including other brains) and be similarly affected (in this hypothetical example consciousness is assumed to be trapped in physical brains because it is a function of them). An analogical example: Perhaps the brain and its consciousness (assumed in this example to be inextricably bound up in the brain’s biological structures) can be considered like a radio transmitter/receiver, where it can affect and communicate with an external T/R. In both hypothetical cases, consciousness has “nonlocal” effects even though that consciousness is trapped in the physical brain.
I don’t really consider such ideas viable, but I can see how some parapsychologists and other at least partially open-minded thinkers try to accept the reality of psi effects as a minimum violation of materialistic principles while refusing to accept survival (which has even bigger theoretical problems and exceeds their “boggle threshold”). It does seem to be kind of like wanting to have their cake and eat it too. This would account for the apparent attractiveness of super-psi or living-agent-psi as an explanation of mediumistic communication.

Off topic:
Here is a web page with links to over 100 free psi-related ebooks. Most are old; many are from the 1800s. Works by a number of respected psi investigators are included. Names well-known to the psi community include Emamuel Swedenborg, Arthur Findlay, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Sir William Crookes, to name a few. Here’s the link:
http://www.spiritwritings.com/library.html

James Oeming,
Bookmarked, thanks!

I haven’t read through all of the comments, but the people saying that apports are never personal and it’s always “just junk” are wrong. Check out the recently translated YouTube documentary about Marcello Bacci, the ITC experimenter from Italy. Apports began dropping on the camera crew. A woman was interviewed who had received a highly symbolic gift from her deceased son during a visit to Bacci’s. Private circles I am familiar with regularly produce apports, and they are almost always significant in some way.

Cyrus, I wasn’t mocking the Scole alien, just using a little bit of humour. I’ve puzzled over it, and wondered, if it is trickery, just how it was done, because it’s really good. Sure, someone in Hollywood could come up with something like that, but these were older people in Britain in the ’90s. And that of course is just one of the many interesting images they came up with.

Cyrus,
I am not impressed with the Bacci videos but unfortunately I do not understand Italian that well so the English translation was all I had to go on. The few apports, i.e., two rose (viola) petals, stones seem very mundane to me. Very little coverage was given to the “highly symbolic” apport as the video quickly went on to other things.
If there is a video providing better information please provide the link. In the video I saw the so-called apports were found on the floor by people just walking around. An explanation that occurred to me was that Bacci had these small things in his pants pocket and the pocket had a small hole in it through which Bacci would push the ‘apport’ which travelled down his pant leg , landing quietly on his shoe an then on to the floor as he walked around the room.
I also thought that the video was edited badly ignoring a response from the spirit when a question was asked by skipping to another scene.
I need better evidence for apports than this video. – AOD.

Cyrus wrote,
||Private circles I am familiar with regularly produce apports, and they are almost always significant in some way.||
As I said, I could be wrong. In reports I’ve read, the evidence has sounded fishy. They’ve always been small and ordinary objects (i.e., easily obtained, hidden, and produced). I’m curious how spirits would get hold of coins and things like that… it’s a bit odd when you think about it. But any of the following would greatly impress me:
1. Objects of a large size that would be hard to hide and produce.
2. Objects not of earthly origin: unusual technologies, minerals, other substances, etc. Please no extraterrestrial viruses, however.
3. An object belonging to a specific person that could not possibly have been reproduced. Something long lost or destroyed would be even better.
4. Notes from or images of the deceased in Afterlife.

All one has to do to debunk the Scole Experiments is duplicate the exposed film examples. I don’t know what to think of the Scole experiments overall but surely someone out there , some magician that is, could duplicate the film exposures. Come on now, Skeptics, let’s get serious and duplicate those film experiments. – AOD

Victor,
“So this critical question remains: where was her brain and what exactly was it doing when it was supposedly outside her body for that very long, blank period exceeding 6 h of real time?”
What a stupid, stupid question. – AOD

Amos
“All one has to do to debunk the Scole Experiments is duplicate the exposed film examples.”
You’d have to duplicate the lights as well and a mathematician present during one session advanced the idea of a parallel universe in respect of these. They landed on and went inside his hands.
You sound like you must “debunk” at any cost. Why?

Vitor,
Read what you quoted and peeked at the beginning of the paper as well. It certainly is hard to sort out everything: Skeptics try their best to negate every single detail, while proponents tend to be more reasonable yet of course have an incentive to portray accounts in a positive light. It would be nice to read a rebuttal to Marsh’s paper.
Marsh writes,
“Most recollections are intensely geo-physical, anthropomorphic, banal and illogical: their dream-like fantasy provides nothing revelatory about life without a brain, or importantly, about other supposed cosmic contexts.”
I don’t know about “geophysical” and “anthropomorphic”; these would seem to indicate that most accounts take place in space (though not “here”) and in the body, which sounds correct, though I don’t find those things to be negatives for our side of the story.
I have read more than a few NDE accounts, and to call them “dreamlike” is tantamount to a willful misrepresentation, inasmuch as experiencers insist that they are *not* dreams. Moreover, as we have pointed out many times here on this blog, there’s no reason for NDEs to be anything *but* random dreams or hallucinations if they *are* in fact random dreams or hallucinations.
“Banal” is a matter of opinion. NDEs tend to include some pretty basic spiritual content which I suppose Skeptics are bound to consider worthless. “Illogical”–I haven’t seen this. I did a search on the term in the paper, as well as on “dream,” and the author does nothing to provide examples of why he finds NDEs to be dreamlike or illogical; he simply asserts that they are so. I did not, however, read the whole thing, so he may have provided examples, albeit not in direct connection with these two words.
As for NDEs not providing information about life without a brain, that isn’t true either: more than a few experiencers have talked about trans-physical states, but such are very hard to describe using ordinary language.
I have done a bunch of research myself about translating dreams into memory. I’ve gotten in the habit of noting, in regular or lucid dreams, my experience and seeing how I remember it later. In general, it’s quite difficult to convert dreams into regular waking memories, and some people barely remember any at all. For this reason, the fact that Pam Reynolds remembered one thing but not another is hardly damning, and we don’t have her to talk to now (as she is deceased) to fill in those details. There is also the curious fact that people undergoing ordinary anesthesia very rarely report NDEs. If it were so easy to confabulate an OBE related to a surgery, one would expect people undergoing surgery to report them all the time. They don’t. And those who *do* report them having undergone general anesthesia or simple unconsciousness (as opposed to cardiac arrest), such as Nanci Danison and the woman who was knocked unconscious by an IED in Iraq (I forget her name) seem to have a different type of experience. (NDEs that arise from an acute fear of death, as in a fall, seem similar to those arising from cardiac arrest.)
Skeptics are required to negate everything little thing, but our side does not require *everything* to be true, only a few things. My belief is based on an aggregate of the evidence. The Pam Reynolds case is pretty impressive, but I don’t require it to believe that something is going on.

“So this critical question remains: where was her brain and what exactly was it doing when it was supposedly outside her body for that very long, blank period exceeding 6 h of real time?”
The author will not mean mind rather than brain?
“What is clearly evident is that Reynold’s case provides no exemplary proof of anything.”
The case in insolation is not proof of something but in conjunction with other NDEs, especially considering lucid and ordened experiences while neural activity collapses and veridical and extrasensory experiences, completely ignored by the author, it points to an afterlife.

Interesting case of a possible spirit photograph taken on the scene:
http://fizzxo.com/photo-fatal-motorcycle-crash-powell-county-circulates-online-stanton-kentucky/

Here’s the new proponent book on NDEs:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0997560800/?tag=iandsorg-20

Does anyone know of any genuine physical mediums from the past? If you look up into this subject all of the mediums were caught in fraud…
Mina Crandon, Helen Duncan, Florence Cooke, Kathleen Goligher, Jan Guzyk, William Eglinton, Carlos Mirabelli, Ada Besinnet, Davenport brothers, Einer Nielsen ·
etc… all caught in acts of deception employing tricks like charlatans.
I look at photographs online of ‘ectoplasm’ and they are nothing more than cheesecloth or gauze. ·
I don’t get why some folk still cling to this stuff. It has highly damaged the view of psychical research amongst the press and public. I believe we should distance ourselves from such fraud and focus on robust evidence from ESP experiments or valid mental mediums.
·

Hi Michael – I’ve always found Professor Braude to be one of the most credible and clear minded writers, and thinkers in the parapsychology space.
(I like his books – have read a fair amount of his “field reports” over the years, watched some of his interviews – and whatever credibility I give to physical mediumship in 2016, pretty much emanates from my faith in the rigor of his approach to validation and ruling the obvious – and the obscure, out)
That said – and while I don’t want to denegrate the seriousness of the organizations involved in this “in house disagreement” – I DID notice that Jock Brocas – the “President” of the organization listed on the doc (ASSPR?) and owner of the publication where one of Tom Butler’s responses was published (and per Braude’s response – the person the article was erroneously credited to him as well, putting him somewhere front and center in this story) is a well known con artist/grifter with a history of newsworthy scams that have cost people money.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/debt-gym-boss-becomes-60-1052479#ZoDzEXepo5vcghEK.97
http://www.martialartsplanet.net/forums/showthread.php?t=93728
(I know this from the martial arts world – a community where Jock told a lot of tall tales and was pretty universally known to be a person not to be trusted and entire forum threads like above were dedicated to his stories 🙂
So I’d advise – if Professor Braude doesnt’ know this, and is publishing in publications owned/managed or touched in any way by Jock Brocas – he probably should! 🙂
(because that work – no matter how good – by dint of association – is NOT going to stand scrutiny if anyone with Google and a few hours of free time start to poke around 🙂

Alec Harris is reported by his wife Louie Harris to be able to translocate his physical body from one room to another or from an upstairs bedroom to outside the front door. I find that report difficult to believe and for that reason I discount most of the Alec Harris story. – AOD

Paul,
After extensive reading about and studying reports related to the paranormal, with a couple of exceptions I am ready to discount it all. I admit I have not seen or experienced any of it myself. Most of what I understand about it comes from hearsay information. I believe, from many years of experience that humans are prone to imagination and fabrication when they report what the think they have heard or seen. – AOD

Hey Paul, I thought you might ask me what my “couple of exceptions” were. (Actually I have more than just a couple.)
First of all I think that the Leonora Piper case spanning a period of many years under the watchful eyes of several very perceptive men is a case that is difficult to refute or discount if you will.
Second I think that the Patience Worth case is difficult to explain especially if one considers all of the materials produced by Patience Worth and Pearl Curran and their method of production over a period of almost 25 years.
Chico Xavier comes in third after Patience Worth producing 100s of books through automatic writing.
The modern mediums, Christopher Stillar, John Edward and George Anderson each have some amazing ‘hits’ which are difficult to explain and the related study by Gary Schwartz of Edward and Anderson and others seems to provide very good evidence that those men were doing something above the normal abilities of most people.
And of course, I don’t know what to think of D.D. Hume but he produced some amazing effects that haven’t been adequately explained in my opinion.
Certainly I agree that discounting is not the same as calling fraud. That is why I used the word discounting rather than fraud. You see, I try to pick and choose my words carefully especially in this age of disinformation. – AOD