I personally have also encountered apparently mediumnic occurrences
Yes, I'm sure you, and many others, have encountered "apparently mediumnic occurences". The key words being "apparently mediumnic". However, the fact that nobody is perfect and everyone is fallible means that personal experience is not enough. You, like all human beings, are heavily prone to confirmation bias.
which would go well beyond the possibility of a scam of any kind
Firstly, how do you know that? You have a remarkable skill if you are able to tell how all cons, magic and mentalist tricks are performed. Banachek was able to convice an entire team of parapsychologists that he had paranormal powers. Derren Brown has performed tricks that some would swear up and down are impossible. James Randi has been accused of being a psychic who only pretends to be performing conjuring tricks.
The whole point of a scam is to fool you into thinking it's real.
Secondly, it doesn't necessarily have to be a scam to have fooled both you and the 'medium' in question. One can inadvertently learn to cold read without realising what he or she is doing. Ray Hyman wrote an article on this very thing. Hyman once convinced himself that he was actually reading fortunes on the palms of strangers.
my 2nd wife's pregnancy of my daughter when my wife was just two weeks pregnant and neither she nor I even suspected that this could be possible,
This is one I've heard a few times (predicting a pregnancy). Without a recording of the reading, it is impossible to tell exactly how this 'prediction' may have worked. There are several possible explanations. For example:
- A lucky guess. The law of large numbers means even wild guesses result in hits from time to time. You happened to be one of the people who the 'medium' scored on.
- The 'medium' deliberately makes the pregnancy guess with a lot of couples. If he or she gets it wrong, the prediction is forgotten or another correct prediction takes its place in the sitter's memory (confirmation bias). If he or she gets it right, the story is spread and his or her reputation grows.
- The 'medium' deliberately makes the pregnancy guess with the intention of shifting the target based on feedback from the sitter (cold reading technique). The best result is if the couple is actually pregnant. If they are not, but they have a daughter, the 'medium' can shift the hit to be describing the previous pregnancy. If the couple aren't pregnant and don't have a daughter, the 'medium' shifts the prediction to the future (and then he or she technically can't be proven wrong until the woman hits menopause).
This is cold reading and the 'medium' can honestly believe he or she actually has paranormal powers or it may have been a scam. To say that the experience was "well beyond the possibility of a scam of any kind" is, with all due respect, naive. Scam artists use all three of the above techniques all the time (see Ian Rowland's
The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading).
and the death of Lady Diana just seven days prior to the actual event.
Again, the law of large numbers. Psychics all over the world make many, many wild predictions in many forms of media. From time to time some of them may get some predictions right. Fantastic! Forget or delete the long list of wrong predictions and focus and sell the right ones (confirmation bias).
Say I make 100 wild predictions about celebrities and tell each prediction to 100 different people. If one of those predictions turns out to be true, I guarantee you the 99 wrong ones will never be mentioned by 99 people (except maybe in passing). But the one correct guess is discussed on forums and conversations with family and friends. And so the reputation of the 'medium' and the unfounded belief in paranormal powers spreads.
Neither of these two incidents could have been a set up or a scam, but of course you may simply claim that I am lying in what I am saying and we can consider this case closed. That's fine...
Of course it's possible you are lying, but I generally give people the benefit of the doubt when they come to these forums. As mentioned above, the statement that "Neither of these two incidents could have been a set up or a scam" obviously comes from someone who does not know much about cold reading.
But to me who experienced these occurrences personally, the question as to how this is possible still remains.
I can't, for the life of me, figure out how David Copperfield changes a motorcycle into two women in a matter of seconds, but it doesn't mean we should accept that he has special powers.
If the only way I can tell the difference between performances by Banachek, James Randi, Derren Brown, John Edward and James Van Praagh is by trusting their explanations, I would be naive to accept that Edward and Van Praagh are talking to dead people, while Banachek, Randi and Brown are getting the same results using age-old mentalist techniques.
Welcome to the forum.
