Victor Zammit attends a David Thompson seance

Well firstly Michael Prescott says this:
Now, I think paranormal phenomena - including materializations - are sometimes genuine. But materialization seances are an area that has always been rife with fraud.
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It's a bit hard to know how to take this guy.

Yes he knows that this area is 'rife with fraud' yet for some reason he thinks that sometimes it's real? Why?
It reminds me of the whole "Well sure Uri bent the spoon with his hands that time, but maybe he did it with his mind another time".


Also I don't know why but his next article kind of annoyed me:
"
From Drudge: a photo of actual honest-to-God vultures roosting near the space shuttle.

I wouldn't go up in that thing for a million bucks. "

I was at the Space Centre 2 weeks ago and, er, vultures are all over the place there.
They live there Michael. Why are vultures so scary to him?
Is the implication that if a vulture lands on something then anyone who gets in it will die and they will eat them?
It's just weird.

And I personally would pay to go in the space shuttle.
I met astronaut John Blaha while I was there and had a totally superb day.

In fact it struck me while I was there that we all know the names of pointless celebrities, footballers, baseball stars, Big Brother contestants etc. but how many of us could name Space Shuttle commanders?
These are people who really deserve respect. Massively talented, educated, dedicated and hardworking men and women.

People who probably wouldn't go "Eurgh, a vulture is sitting on the Space Shuttle! I'm not getting in that."
 
Oh I've read a bit more of his blog.

Having given the impression that mediums consist mainly of untested celebrity figures, Montenegro then launches into the standard litany of complaints.
Why do recently dead people have trouble communicating? Where do they get these [symbolic] objects that they show Edward and Van Praagh? Why can’t they just project their thoughts into Edward’s mind? Why are their messages so prosaic and, well, boring? The picture one gets of these creatures certainly does not present a very interesting company of people to pass the time with.
​
Sigh. How many times do these objections need to be answered? The triviality of the messages is necessary because it is only trivial personal details that are evidential. If a medium says that the spirit of your grandmother is coming through, you will probably not be convinced unless Grandma tells you something that only you and she would know. Of necessity, this will be something obscure, unimportant, and personal. As for the difficulties of communication, well, why should we expect messages from a dimension outside the space-time universe to be delivered flawlessly? This is like saying that telephones don't work because sometimes there is static on the line.
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*Bigger sigh*

Well that's one author to avoid.
 
Oh now I'm really annoyed.

One of the strangest skeptical objections to psychic research is that psychic phenomena cannot be "replicated on demand." In other words, it is impossible to predict the outcome of any single psi experiment with certainty. One person may score well above chance in a mind-reading test, while the next person may score at chance or below. Since replication is a key concept in science, skeptics conclude that psi has not been scientifically verified.
This criticism is strange because it overlooks the crucial distinction between the hard sciences and the social sciences. In a hard science, such as chemistry, replication of individual test results can indeed be expected. If you mix two chemicals together under the same conditions, you will get the same chemical reaction - every time. But social science experiments are not like this, because the test subjects in these experiments are people, and people vary in their abilities and biases and behavior.
Suppose you're a social scientist testing memory. You place a large number of items in a room, then have a volunteer sit in the room for a few minutes. Next, you remove the volunteer from the room and ask him to list all the items he remembers. If you run this test with twenty different volunteers, you may get twenty different responses - because people's powers of observation and memory vary widely. How, then, can you get any usable data? You must run the experiment a hundred times or a thousand, until you have collected a large enough database to permit drawing statistical inferences. Then you may conclude that the average person remembers, say, fifty percent of the items in the room.
The fact that no two people may remember the exact same list of items certainly does not prove that there is no such thing as memory. It merely shows that memory varies from person to person.
Parapsychology is a branch of the social sciences, and the same rules apply.
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Is he really implying that a psychologist could not devise a replicable experiment to demonstrate that memory actually exists?

What an utter idiot. Really - I quite despise him.

I hate this whole argument that parapsychology is like psychology.

Psychology has demonstrated many replicable observations about the mind and the nature of thought, speech, memory, perception etc.

Parapsychology... hasn't produced replicable results about anything. At all. Ever. Not even that the subjects it studies actually exist.
Comparisons of the two are idiotic.

And even this guy still thinks Zammit's been had? Victor - that don't look good.
 
Ashles, you haven't yet said anything about Prescott's specific criticisms of the seance Zammit attended. Do you have any thoughts on those?
 
Mike D. said:
Ashles, you haven't yet said anything about Prescott's specific criticisms of the seance Zammit attended. Do you have any thoughts on those?
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Yes - most people here would probably come to the same conclusions on most of those points.

Trickery in a seance like that is not very difficult.

What sort of comments were you looking for? I just found it more interesting that someone could appear to be sceptical about certain aspects of a specific seance, and then totally the opposite in various other areas.
It's clear he believes that seances can be genuine
Now, I think paranormal phenomena - including materializations - are sometimes genuine.
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So his account of how a very standard seance could be faked is not really the most interesting aspect of this to me.
 
Ashles, I was looking for any comments you might care to make that related to the seance Zammit attended or to Prescott's specific criticisms of it. You have now shared your comments on that, so I am satisfied.
 
You need to remember this salient point: Victor Zammit is off his trolley. He's lost it, he's a kook, he's nuttier than a fruitcake. He's not unintelligent nor incompetent, just that his cogs are definitely slipping most of the time.
 
I love Vic Zammit's weekly reports as there's always a guarantee of a belly laugh. This week's revelations:

"WORLD SHATTERING SCIENTIFIC AFTERLIFE EXPERIENCES:– David Thompson - one of the World’s Foremost Direct Voice & Materialisation Mediums. Next meeting tonight Friday 7th July 06. This has NOTHING to do with faith, nothing to do with belief. This has nothing to do with theories or theology or what somebody said thousands of years ago. This is here and now. This is empiricism. This is science. This is a scientific repeatable experiment. The results are just revolutionary. Tell your friends – tell everyone. This is the greatest proof for survival in the history of mankind."
 
Zep said:
You need to remember this salient point: Victor Zammit is off his trolley. He's lost it, he's a kook, he's nuttier than a fruitcake. He's not unintelligent nor incompetent, just that his cogs are definitely slipping most of the time.
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Refute his book then.
 
jazzalta said:
Refute his book then.
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probably better if you tell us about one thing his book establishes....otherwise you could waste some time refuting the invisible unicorn I have in my pocket....interested?
 
I have been in email contact with Victor Zammit for several weeks. As a lawyer myself, I though Victor was not being honest with himself about the serious flaws in his arguments.

In our correspondence, he frequently changed the subject, retreated from some points and made the most ludicrous statements of "fact." The truth of the thing really has to be taken as a given in order for him to prove the truth of the thing - his arguments about "ectoplasm" being a prime example.

I have to say that he has been a remarkably polite, well-spoken and deferential correspondent and I enjoy his emails immensely.

His emails are at work and I will post excerpts tomorrow if anyone has an interest.
 
jazzalta said:
Okay, that's clear.
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Well, for example, Victor says the medium exudes ectoplasm. I ask for a sample and he says that he can't get a sample because, as everyone knows, if you interupt the medium during the seance the ectoplasm will "snap back" and kill him. You have to believe in ectoplasm in order to see proof of ectoplasm. Does that make it less unclear?
 
It may be clearer but I disagree. It is possible to be at a seance and not be cognizant of ectoplasm.
 
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