Skepticblog

This morning while eating my breakfast, I was bombarded with yet another foray of paranormal hype from my kitchen radio. You can’t even crawl out of bed without hearing about something sensationally weird from the media. This time Paul Harvey was ballyhooing the latest Russian psychic wonderkind, Natalya Demkina. Without a shred of skepticality in his presentation, Mr. Harvey told the tale of the young girl’s ability to see through people and scan their innards, giving out medical advice that he said was astounding scientists all over the world. Mr. Harvey ended this puff piece with his signature, “Now, … that’s NEWS!” Really?

Ever since Ray Milland donned thick Ray Charles style dark glasses and did his thing in Roger Corman’s  “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” (1963) I have been fascinated with the idea. The tag line: “Suddenly he could see thorugh clothes, flesh …and walls” always appealed to me as a teen, especially the “seeing through clothes” bit. Who could resist being captivated by watching a grown man having the ability to do that? It was almost as exciting as the prototypical teenage Invisible Man locker room fantasy. And all this with the added bonus of having classic character actors like Don Rickles and Morris Ankrum to liven up the juicy plot. With one of the most existential endings since “The Incredible Shrinking Man”shrank down to infinity, I knew after seeing Milland’s Dr. Xavier performance that I had to check out the whole concept as far as my young magician mind could take me. Being skeptical even back then, I never fell prey to the comic book con and sent away for my own pair of “X-Ray Specs,” but I was tempted. 

Later, as iI grew up  watching performers like the legendary Kuda Bux, who appeared several times on “You Asked for It” doing his own act as the original “Man with the X-Ray Eyes,” I began to learn some of the techniques involved in putting on such a show and eventually saw through the con. Fantastic demostrations like  being able to read books, serial numbers and duplicate drawings while his eyes were apparently securely covered in layers of silver dollars covered with bread dough and wrapped in bandages were really impressive. It still is. Never mind that Kuda still needed his reading glasses later in the evening when he was off stage playing cards in the library of the Magic Castle, Kuda was an amazing teacher and personality I will always have fond memories of. A very wise man from the East, he never took medical or legal questions, preferring to stick to random numbers, words and drawings.  For the last few decades, believers in psychic powers switched over to calling these sorts of sightless vision antics “remote viewing,” but now I hear coutesy of Paul Harvey’s WGN syndicated “news and comment,” we have come full circle to yet another Russian girl claiming to be able to see deseased body parts. Yuck. I think I liked the “moving objects with their mind” Russian girls better.

Cute as she is, Ms. Demkina has already been pretty well de-bunked by CSICOPers Ray Hyman and Richard Wiseman on a (as far as I know) yet to be seen Discovery Channel special. Her averages on being able to see what internal organs were amiss in selected human targets wasn’t very impressive. There’s a good chance I could do much better using hot and cold reading methods and my own “Stainless Steel Blindfold Act” that I bought from a magic dealer. I would probably make it much more entertaining as well according to all the reports I have read about Natalya. You can see my own version of Kuda’s act on the Skeptic Society lecture I did called “The Psychology of the Psychic and the Believer.” If I was not aleardy fairly well known as a mentalist here in the USA, I might be able to go over to Russia and put on a pretty good show for their scientists. Why we always seem to get their latest psychics and none of our own get imported over there is a question that begs to be answered. We could do without a few of them. I’m guessing the land of the free and all that makes us easy pickings. Anybody with an exotic name like Nina, Natalya or Alla Vinogradora gets instant recognition by the tabloid media and with a little publicity is soon touted as the the latest super-psychic. Montell gets his sponsors, the mighty network gets their ratings and everyone is happy.  But are we really all that happy?  Does any radio or television network do surveys to find out if we as a consumer society are truly satisfied with only one side of this kind of supernatural swindle?

My problem with all this is not the entertainment part of it. Everyone is free to make a buck with illusion and mystification. I do it myself whenever possible. It’s the medical disgnosis part of the shtick that worries me. I’m not especially threatened by a teenage girl who says she can see through me, just uneasy about the survivabilty of anyone seriously ill who would choose her “examination” over a trained physician. I don’t know about you but my Blue Cross PPO doesn’t cover Russian teenagers. I have heard of getting a second opinion, but this is ridiculous. In a recent Skeptical Inquirer article, “Girl with the Normal Eyes” author and investigator Andrew Skolnick says Natalya Demkina earns about $2,600 per month, which is more than forty times the average monthly income of government workers in her home town of Saransk. No wonder she’s in the “news.”

The bottom line with these claims boils down to the same thing it has for me for as long as I can remember thinking through it: If a person had such an ability, why on earth would they traipse around the globe being tested by skeptics, selling themselves on media channels and generally making themselves conspicuous? It’s totally illogical. The very few people I have met in my quest for what I call a  “modest psychic” (and yes, there have been a few who left me wondering) were more like Ray Milland in the X-Ray flick; totally terrified by thier “gift.” The last thing a person with such reality-bending powers would want to have happen would be to be recognized as genuine or actually being caught out in possession of them. They would be hounded by science and the military and be one very dangerous person. A person like that could singlehandly change the course of medical history. Since absolute believers agree that psychic powers have no limit when it comes to time or space; forget about bending a key or making a metal bar move. What if such a person could move a defense communications satellite just one micron off it’s orbit just by thinking about it?

I’m drifting into Dr. Who territory now, but I hope I’ve made my point: It’s science fiction, not fact. Most of these outrageous claims are so simple to de-construct if we would just take the time to think them through. Yet even the smallest glimmer of reasoning out something like a person with x-ray eyes is clearly evaded by our society. It’s so much easier to just accept it like we do with the rest of the daily “news.” No wonder we are in such a mess.

The writing is on the wall. We know what we need to do. We know deep down what questions we should be asking, but as a society we don’t seem to be asking any questions at all. In closing his article, Andrew Skolnick sums up our situation as skeptics (and as the Skeptologists) this way:

“We’ve asked the producer/director several times when the documentary may be broadcast in the United States. We have not received an answer. I am afraid that Discovery Channel may consider the program too skeptical for the American audience. I hope I will be proven wrong.”

I hope so to. Otherwise we may be doomed. Sometimes I fear it might already be too late.

On a happier note: The Palmistry book I wrote about last week and another tome; “Psychic Blues” have both received glowing reviews from The International Brotherhood of Magicians in their magazine “The Linking Ring.” go to https://skepticblog.org/downloads/TheLinkingRing.doc to have a look. This review will hopefully go a long way to help dispel the nasty “exposer” tag that has dogged my magic career since the unfortunate NBC special “Secrets of the Psychics Revealed!” aired to over nine million viewers back in 2003. On that show I was revealed (totally against previous verbal agreements with the producer BTW) using a well-known “force” or the switching out of one set of numbers for another that eventually produced an accurate prediction previously sealed in an envelope placed in clear view throughout this process. This minor breach of magician propriety caused quite a stir within the “magical fraternity”  and mentalists in particular. It’s a long bitter story. The short version is that yes, I might have sleightly stepped over the dreaded “Masked Magicain” line if one really wanted to split hairs over the issue of exposure of basic magic tricks to the public. For those so easily offended by a trick “move” as old as the hills; I have no defense for that slip up. In the bigger picture, I’m still confident that within the context of showing how psychics fool the gullable, the ends justified the means and I still stand by the rest of the show where the more “mediumistic” scams were revealed. Fake psychics do use mentalist tricks to gain the confidence of their dupes. I have seen it with my own eyes too many times. Read all about it in “Psychic Blues” or stay tuned to “The Skeptologists” television series. It was a great relief for me to read in this review that a writer for a major international magic magazine finally “got it” and agreed that there is much to be investigated, analyzed and even argued about when it comes to that foggy cross-over zone where performing magic and illusions ends and blatant criminality of the worst kind kicks in.