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This article kind of expands on the points brought up in J.E. Exposed. It is talking about the techniques used have been used for generations dating back hundreds of years. Also, John Edwards goes on a "hit" based system. He throws stuff out to the audience and hopes for a "Hit" then goes off of that and keeps driving on it.

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This article is showing how John does what he does. Cold, warm and hot readings. Cold is when he throws something out there like "I got someone who's name starts with a P". Warm is when someone is grieving so they wear a piece of the lost ones jewellery. John picks up on this and targets in. Hot is when the psychic gets information on a person ahead of time.

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This article is going over his early years and how he discovered his powers and became famous. His mom's side of the family accepted his powers but his dad was always skeptical. He himself actually used to make fun of psychics. He then had to grow thick skin to overcome the skepticism as he was trying to show the world his "powers".

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In this, He goes on live TV and does a reading. He actually makes an elderly lady cry because he was talking to her about her late husband. He brought up the socks. This kind of seems like its not a big deal until she started talking about the fact that he used to come home and throw off his shoes and put on his "Mommy socks" (socks she knit for him).

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This interview is Oprah asking in depth questions. This is basically a tell all where John Edwards explains how his "Powers" work. He says that the body is just a vehicle and within that vehicle is the energy that makes us who we are. When that "Vehicle" ceases then the energy is let loose. That is how he communicates with the dead because he feels the energy.

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In this video, Dr. Phil sits down with John Edwards and gets a reading done. The big thing with this interview is the ending. John says he senses that someone shot himself in the head. Dr. Phil said no he knows no one. The one of the produces comes out and says his room mate shot himself in the head his name was Kreiger.

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opyright 2001 Michael Shermer, Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, e-Skeptic magazine (

CROSSING OVER ONE LAST TIME TO EXPOSE MEDIUM JOHN EDWARD

By Michael Shermer

History is not just one damn thing after another, it is also the same damn thing over and over--time's arrow and time's cycle. Fads come and go, in clothing, cars, and psychics. In the 1970s it was Uri Geller, in the 1980s it was Shirley MacLaine, in the 1990s it was James Van Praagh, and to kick off the new millennium it is John Edward. Edward's star is rising rapidly with a hit daily television series "Crossing Over" on the Sci Fi network and a New York Times best selling book "One Last Time." He has appeared, unopposed, on Larry King Live and has been featured on Dateline, Entertainment Tonight, and an HBO special. He is so hot that his television show is about to make the jump to network television, as he is soon to go opposite Oprah in CBS's afternoon lineup.

Last month Skeptic magazine was the first national publication to run an expose of John Edward in James "The Amazing" Randi's column (in Vol. 8, #3, now on newsstands and bookstores or at www.skeptic.com), a story that was picked up this week by Time magazine, who featured a full-page article on what is rapidly becoming the Edward phenomenon. There is, in reality, nothing new here. Same story, different names. In watching Edward I'm amazed at how blatant he is in stealing lines from medium James Van Praagh. It reminds me of entertainers, commedians, and magicians who go to each others' shows to glean new ideas.

Time's reporter Leon Jaroff, quoting from the Skeptic article, wrote a skeptical piece in which he reported the experiences of an audience member from an Edward taping. His name is Michael O'Neill, a New York City marketing manager, who reported his experiences as follows (quoting from the Skeptic article)

"I was on the John Edward show. He even had a multiple guess "hit" on me that was featured on the show. However, it was edited so that my answer to another question was edited in after one of his questions. In other words, his question and my answer were deliberately mismatched. Only a fraction of what went on in the studio was actually seen in the final 30 minute show. He was wrong about a lot and was very aggressive when somebody failed to acknowledge something he said. Also, his "production assistants" were always around while we waited to get into the studio. They told us to keep very quiet, and they overheard a lot. I think that the whole place is bugged somehow. Also, once in the studio we had to wait around for almost two hours before the show began. Throughout that time everybody was talking about what dead relative of theirs might pop up. Remember that all this occurred under microphones and with cameras already set up. My guess is that he was backstage listening and looking at us all and noting certain readings. When he finally appeared, he looked at the audience as if he were trying to spot people he recognized. He also had ringers in the audience. I can tell because about fifteen people arrived in a chartered van, and once inside they did not sit together."

Last week an ABC television producer flew out from New York to film me for an investigation of Edward they are conducting. The segment began as a "puff piece" (as she called it), but a chance encounter in the ABC cafeteria with 20/20 correspondent Bill Ritter, with whom I worked on an expose of medium James Van Praagh a few years ago, tipped her off that Edward was, in fact, a Van Praagh clone and that his talking to the dead was nothing more than the old magicians' cold reading trick. After waching the 20/20 piece the producer immediately realized what was really going on inside Edward's studio. She began to ask a few probing questions and was promptly cut off by Edward and his producers. ABC was told they would not be allowed to film inside the studio and that they, the Sci Fi network, would provide edited clips that ABC could use. The ABC producer became suspicious, and then skeptical. She has been trying to get an interview with Edward to confront him with my critiques, but they continue to put her off. In fact, she just phoned to tell me that Edward's publicist just left a message on her voice mail (with a date and time) stating that Edward was not available for an interview because he is out of state, yet the producer just caught him on television live in studio on CBS New York! Something fishy is going on here and I know what it is.

The video clips I was shown make it obvious why Edward does not want raw footage going out to the public--he's not all that good at doing cold readings. Where I estimated Van Praagh's hit rate at between 20-30 percent, Edward's hit rate at between 10-20 percent (the error-range in the estimates is created by the fuzziness of what constitutes a "hit"--more on this in a moment). The advantage Edward has over Van Praagh is his verbal alacrity. Van Praagh is Ferrari fast, but Edward is driving an Indy-500 racer. In the opening minute of the first reading captured on film by the ABC camera, I counted over one statement per second (ABC was allowed to film in the control room under the guise of filming the hardworking staff, and instead filmed Edward on the monitor in the raw). Think about that--in one minute Edward riffles through 60 names, dates, colors, diseases, conditions, situations, relatives, and the like. It goes so fast that you have to stop tape, rewind, and go back to catch them all. When he does come up for air the studio audience members to whom he is speaking look like deer in the headlights. In the edited tape provided by Edward we caught a number of editing mistakes, where he appears to be starting a reading on someone but makes reference to something they said "earlier." Oops!

Edward begins by selecting a section of the studio audience of about 20 people, saying things like "I'm getting a George over here. I don't know what this means. George could be someone who passed over, he could be someone here, he could be someone that you know," etc. Of course such generalizations lead to a "hit" where someone indeed knows a George, or is related to a George, or is a George. Now that he's targeted his mark, the real reading begins in which Edward employs cold reading, warm reading, and hot reading techniques.

1. Cold Reading. The first thing to know is that John Edward, like all other psychic mediums, does not do the reading--his subjects do. He asks them questions and they give him answers. "I'm getting a P name. Who is this please?" "He's showing me something red. What is this please?" And so on. This is what is known in the mentalism trade as cold reading, where you literally "read" someone "cold," knowing nothing about them. You ask lots of questions and make numerous statements, some general and some specific, and sees what sticks. Most of the time Edward is wrong. If the subjects have time they visibly nod their heads "no." But Edward is so fast that they usually only have the time or impetus to acknowledge the hits. And Edward only needs an occasional strike to convince his clientele he is genuine.

2. Warm Reading. This is utilizing known principles of psychology that apply to nearly everyone. For example, most grieving people will wear a piece of jewelry that has a connection to their loved one. Katie Couric on The Today Show, for example, after her husband died, wore his ring on a necklace when she returned to the show. Edward knows this about mourning people and will say something like "do you have a ring or a piece of jewelry on you, please?" His subject cannot believe her ears and nods enthusiastically in the affirmative. He says "thank you," and moves on as if he had just divined this from heaven. Most people also keep a photograph of their loved one either on them or near their bed, and Edward will take credit for this specific hit that actually applies to most people.

Edward is facile at determining the cause of death by focusing either on the chest or head areas, and then exploring whether it was a slow or sudden end. He works his way down through these possibilities as if he were following a computer flow chart and then fills in the blanks. "I'm feeling a pain in the chest." If he gets a positive nod, he continues. "Did he have cancer, please? Because I'm seeing a slow death here." If he gets the nod, he takes the hit. If the subject hesitates at all, he will quickly shift to heart attack. If it is the head, he goes for stroke or head injury from an automobile accident or fall. Statistically speaking there are only half a dozen ways most of us die, so with just a little probing, and the verbal and nonverbal cues of his subject, he can appear to get far more hits than he is really getting.

3. Hot Reading. Sometimes psychic mediums cheat by obtaining information on a subject ahead of time. I do not know if Edward does research or uses shills in the audience to get information on people, or even plants in the audience on which to do readings, but in my investigation of James Van Praagh I discovered from numerous television producers that he consciously and deliberately pumps them for information about his subjects ahead of time, then uses that information to deceive the viewing public that he got it from heaven.

The ABC producer also asked me to do a reading on her. "You know absolutely nothing about me so let's see how well this works." After reviewing the Edward tapes I did a ten minute reading on her. She sat there dropped jawed and wide eyed, counting my hits. She proclaimed that I was unbelievably accurate. How did I do it? Let's just say I utilized all three of the above techniques. After the show airs on ABC New York this week (Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday I'm told) I'll reveal the details in another posting. Most of the time, however, mediums do not need to cheat. The reason has to do with the psychology of belief. This stuff works because the people who go to mediums want it to work (remember, they do the readings, not the mediums).

The simplest explanation for how mediums can get away with such an outrageous claim as the ability to talk to the dead is that they are dealing with a subject the likes of which it would be hard to top for tragedy and finality--death. Sooner or later we all will face this inevitability, starting, in the normal course of events, with the loss of our parents, then siblings and friends, and eventually ourselves. It is a grim outcome under the best of circumstances, made all the worse when death comes early or accidentally to those whose "time was not up." As those who traffic in the business of loss, death, and grief know all too well, we are often at our most vulnerable at such times. Giving deep thought to this reality can cause the most controlled and rational among us to succumb to our emotions.

The reason John Edward, James Van Praagh, and the other so-called mediums are unethical and dangerous is that they are not helping anyone in what they are doing. They are simply preying on the emotions of grieving people. As all loss, death, and grief counselors know, the best way to deal with death is to face it head on. Death is a part of life, and pretending that the dead are gathering in a television studio in New York to talk twaddle with a former ballroom-dance instructor is an insult to the intelligence and humanity of the living.
www.skeptic.com and skepticmag@aol.com). Permission to print, distribute, and post with proper citation and acknowledgment. Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Director of the Skeptics Society, the host of the Skeptics Science Lecture Series at Caltech, and a monthly columnist for Scientific American.

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Expose of John Edward - Deconstructing the Dead

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opyright 2001 Michael Shermer, Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, e-Skeptic magazine ( CROSSING OVER ONE LAST TIME TO EXPOSE MEDIUM JOHN EDWARD By Michael Shermer History is not just one damn thing after another, it is also the same damn thing over and over--time's arrow and time's cycle.

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Updated November 03, 2015 19:34:34

Growing up in the working-class borough of Queens, New York in the seventies, the young John Edward's favourite TV show was I Dream of Jeannie.

"I was very intrigued by anything that was powers-related," he told Jane Hutcheon on One Plus One.

"The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, anything that had ESP (Extra Sensory Perception) attached to it."

Today, Edward is an internationally-renowned psychic medium.

Over the last 25 years he has performed thousands of psychic readings helping people communicate, he says, with those who have died, or as he calls it, "passed to the other side".

He describes himself as a bridge between the physical and non-physical world, acting as an interpreter to bring back information.

Today, with television shows, tours and talk-show appearances, he's helped to bring the paranormal to the mainstream.

But he still struggles when people ask him what he does for a living.

"If they don't know who I am and they [ask] what do you do? I say I'm a writer. It's just easier," he said.

The making of a medium

From an early age Edward knew he was somehow different, but he didn't start off a 'true believer'.

Psychic phenomena were widely accepted by his mother's Italian family, but his father, a New York City police officer, was sceptical.

"It made him very uncomfortable. I think it was because he couldn't control it and he couldn't understand it, so therefore it couldn't be possible," Edward said.

"By day I was a student and phlebotomist, and by night I was the psychic: two different worlds."

"My mum and dad didn't have a great relationship, and my dad had an alcohol problem."

His parents eventually divorced when he became a teenager.

Edward moved in with his mother and was suddenly plunged into the world of spirits and psychic readings, despite inheriting a healthy dose of his father's scepticism.

Psychic reading opens Edwards' world

It was a psychometric reading of Edward's high-school ring by a famous psychic named Lydia Clar that eventually put him on his path to becoming a medium.

She told Edward she had sought him out because she knew he was somehow gifted.

"[She said] I had highly evolved beings of white and gold light that were ready to work with me," he said.

"I remember sitting there thinking 'Oh my god this woman is out of her mind'. She might as well have said 'Hey, I have a TARDIS in the backyard, let's go flying around the universe'," he said.

As a teenager, he remembers asking a schoolmate if he ever saw dead relatives - as Edward did. The answer was a very firm "no". The revelation was a turning point.

Years later, when he began working in a hospital laboratory, he soon found himself working two jobs.

"I had two different identities, it was like Clark Kent and Superman," he said.

"By day I was a student and phlebotomist, and by night I was the psychic: two different worlds."

Edward's double identity came to a head when people started to ring the hospital switchboard where he worked, asking for him to make connections with their dead loved ones during his lunch-hour.

Eventually, he gave the laboratory job away, but not before doing a thorough psychic reading on his boss.

The New Yorker is now a psychic superstar. He has more than his fair share of critics and sceptics, although he doesn't give them a second thought.

"I don't really care, it's the thick-skinned thing you have to have when you make the choice to do this," he said.

He recalls that once, he was that person making fun of the psychics coming to his grandmother's house.

"I was coming from a place of not understanding what existed," he said.

Although he doesn't know what his future holds, Edward hopes that when he transitions - because that's how he views death - his family will understand he is still around, just in another form.

"I hope that my kids, my grandchildren will mourn the physical loss of me but yet know that I'm still connected to them in some way. That to me would be the greatest legacy, more than anything," he said.

Topics: people, human-interest, broadcasting, television-broadcasting, information-and-communication, united-states

First posted October 30, 2015 09:09:45

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John Edward: The making of a psychic superstar

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Updated November 03, 2015 19:34:34 Growing up in the working-class borough of Queens, New York in the seventies, the young John Edward's favourite TV show was I Dream of Jeannie. "I was very intrigued by anything that was powers-related," he told Jane Hutcheon on One Plus One.

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Superstar "psychic medium" John Edward is a stand-up guy. Unlike the spiritualists of yore, who typically plied their trade in dark-room séances, Edward and his ilk often perform before live audiences and even under the glare of TV lights. Indeed, Edward (a pseudonym: he was born John MaGee Jr.) has his own popular show on the SciFi channel called Crossing Over, which has gone into national syndication (Barrett 2001; Mui 2001). I was asked by television newsmagazine Dateline NBC to study Edward's act: was he really talking to the dead?

The Old Spiritualism

Today's spiritualism traces its roots to 1848 and the schoolgirl antics of the Fox sisters, Maggie and Katie. They seemed to communicate with the ghost of a murdered peddler by means of mysterious rapping sounds. Four decades later the foxy sisters confessed how they had produced the noises by trickery (Nickell 1994), but meanwhile others discovered they too could be "mediums" (those who supposedly communicate with the dead).

The "spiritualism" craze spread across the United States, Europe, and beyond. In darkened séance rooms, lecture halls, and theaters, various "spirit" phenomena occurred. The Davenport Brothers conjured up spirit entities to play musical instruments while the two mediums were, apparently, securely tied in a special "spirit cabinet." Unfortunately the Davenports were exposed many times, once by a local printer. He visited their spook show and volunteered as part of an audience committee to help secure the two mediums. He took that opportunity to secretly place some printer's ink on the neck of a violin, and after the séance one of the duo had his shoulder smeared with the black substance (Nickell 1999).

In Boston, while photographer William H. Mumler was recycling some glass photographic plates, he accidentally obtained faint images of previous sitters. He soon adapted the technique to producing "spirit extras" in photographs of his clients. But Mumler's scam was revealed when some of his ethereal entities were recognized as living Boston residents (Nickell 1994).

The great magician Harry Houdini (1874-1926) crusaded against phony spiritualists, seeking out elderly mediums who taught him the tricks of the trade. For example, while sitters touched hands around the séance table, mediums had clever ways of gaining the use of one hand. (One method was to slowly move the hands close together so that the fingers of one could be substituted for those of the other.) This allowed the production of special effects, such as causing a tin trumpet to appear to be levitating. Houdini gave public demonstrations of the deceptions. "Do Spirits Return?" asked one of his posters. "Houdini Says No-and Proves It" (Gibson 1977, 157).

Continuing the tradition, I have investigated various mediums, sometimes attending séances undercover and once obtaining police warrants against a fraudulent medium from the notorious Camp Chesterfield spiritualist center in Indiana (Nickell 1998). The camp is the subject of the book The Psychic Mafia, written by a former medium who recanted and revealed the tricks of floating trumpets (with disembodied voices), ghostly apparitions, materializing "apports," and other fake phenomena (Keene 1976)-some of which I have also witnessed firsthand.

Mental Mediumship

The new breed of spiritualists-like Edward, James Van Praagh, Rosemary Altea, Sylvia Browne, and George Anderson-avoid the physical approach with its risks of exposure and possible criminal charges. Instead they opt for the comparatively safe "mental mediumship" which involves the purported use of psychic ability to obtain messages from the spirit realm.

This is not a new approach, since mediums have long done readings for their credulous clients. In the early days they exhibited "the classic form of trance mediumship, as practiced by shamans and oracles," giving spoken "'spirit messages' that ranged all the way from personal (and sometimes strikingly accurate) trivia to hours-long public trance-lectures on subjects of the deepest philosophical and religious import" (McHargue 1972).

Some mediums produced "automatic" or "trance" or "spirit" writing, which the entities supposedly dictated to the medium or produced by guiding his or her hand. Such writings could be in flowery language indeed, as in this excerpt from one spirit writing in my collection:

Oh my Brother-I am so glad to be able to come here with you and hold sweet communion for it has been a long time since I have controlled this medium but I remember how well used I had become to her magnetism[,] but we will soon get accustomed to her again and then renew the pleasant times we used to have. I want to assure you that we are all here with you this afternoon[-]Father[,] Mother[,] little Alice[-]and so glad to find it so well with you and we hope and feel dear Brother that you have seen the darkest part of life and that times are not with you now as they have been . . . .

and so on in this talkative fashion.

"Cold Reading"

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.

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the assistance of Tom Flynn who helped me analyze the video clips mentioned in the text and refine the hypothesis that Edward may have glimpsed a reflection. I am also grateful to Tim Binga, Barry Karr, Kevin Christopher, Ben Radford, and Ranjit Sandhu for other assistance.

References

Ballard, Chris. 2001. Oprah of the other side. The New York Times Magazine, July 29, 38-41.

Barrett, Greg. 2001. Can the living talk to the dead? Gannett News Service, published in USA Today, August 10.

Edward, John. 1999. One Last Time. New York: Berkley Books.

-. 2001. Crossing Over. San Diego: Jodere Group.

Gibson, Walter B. 1977. The Original Houdini Scrapbook. New York: Corwin/Sterling.

Gresham, William Lindsay. 1953. Monster Midway. New York: Rinehart, 113-136.

Houdini, Harry. 1924. A Magician Among the Spirits. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Hyman, Ray. 1977. Cold reading: how to convince strangers that you know all about them. Skeptical Inquirer 2(1), (Spring/Summer): 18-37.

Jaroff, Leon. 2001. Talking to the dead. Time, March 5, 52.

Keene, M. Lamar. 1976. The Psychic Mafia. Reprinted Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1997.

King, Larry. 2001. Are psychics for real? Larry King Live, March 6.

McHargue, Georgess. 1972. Facts, Frauds, and Phantasms: A Survey of the Spiritualist Movement. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 44-45.

Mui, Ylan Q. 2001. Bring me your dead. New York Post: TV Sunday, July 8, 105.

Nickell, Joe. 1994. Camera Clues. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 147-149.

-. 1998. Investigating spirit communications. Skeptical Briefs 8(3) (September): 5-6.

-. 1999. The Davenport Brothers: Religious practitioners, entertainers, or frauds? Skeptical Inquirer 23(4) (July/August): 14-17.

-. 2000. Hustling Heaven. Skeptical Briefs 10(3) (September): 1-3.

Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer. 1988. Secrets of the Supernatural. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 47-60.

Nordlander, Charles. 2001. Letter from executive producer of Crossing Over to Time, March 26.

Schwartz, Gary E.R., et al. 2001. Accuracy and replicability of anomalous after-death communication across highly skilled mediums. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, January: 1-25.

Joe Nickell

Joe Nickell, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and "Investigative Files" Columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. A former stage magician, private investigator, and teacher, he is author of numerous books, including Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1998), Pen, Ink and Evidence (2003), Unsolved History (2005) and Adventures in Paranormal Investigation (2007). He has appeared in many television documentaries and has been profiled in The New Yorker and on NBC's Today Show. His personal website is at joenickell.com.

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John Edward: Hustling the Bereaved - CSI

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Superstar "psychic medium" John Edward is a stand-up guy. Unlike the spiritualists of yore, who typically plied their trade in dark-room séances, Edward and his ilk often perform before live audiences and even under the glare of TV lights. Indeed, Edward (a pseudonym: he was born John MaGee Jr.)

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Psychic Medium Char Margolis & John Edward

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Cheryl Ladd & Psychic Medium John Edward On The Donny & Marie Osmond Talk Show

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Psychic medium John Edward does a live reading of our Studio 10 audience. Studio 10 | 8:30am on TEN facebook.com/studio10au twitter.com/studio10au instagram.com/studio10au

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Psychic John Edward: Communicating with the Dead | The Oprah Winfrey Show | Oprah Winfrey Network

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John Edward, the rockstar of psychics, made his name by helping people reach out to the 'other side' and make one more connection with their loved ones on television shows like 'Crossing Over with John Edward.'

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Dr. Phil Receives a Reading from Psychic Medium John Edward

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Dr. Phil, an admitted "healthy skeptic," sits down for a reading with psychic medium John Edward. http://drphil.com Buy The 20/20 Diet: http://bit.ly/drphil2020diet Buy Life Code: http://bitly.com/LifeCodeDP Subscribe to Dr. Phil: http://bitly.com/SubscribeDrPhil LIKE us on Facebook: http://bitly.com/DrPhilFacebook Follow us on Twitter: http://bitly.com/DrPhilTwitter

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(Roger) Mackenzie Rowley