That’s not really true, though.
The following are some effects I know of which rival or exceed the quality of what John Edward did with you. Note that in every one of the cases there are three things true which are not true for John Edward’s reading: (1) Each one is directed at a specific person, no waffling, no ability to change to someone else if it doesn’t fit the chosen person, (2) No questions asked; everything is a statement that is either right or wrong and turns out to be right, and (3) No ignoring the misses.
1. Effects I have performed myself, even though I am not a performer and am not all that skilled:
a. On three occasions I was “challenged” to prove my abilities (in each case I had been good naturedly joking about my incredible psychic powers). I asked the challenger to think of a word. Any word at all, no restrictions. There was nothing ever written down, there was no collusion with anyone, there was no set up with me guiding them psychologically to a specific word; they had an absolutely free choice. I looked in their eyes for the appropriately spooky time and told them the word they were thinking of. When I say I have done this three times, I mean that I have attempted it those three times and succeeded each time. There are exactly zero failures on my part regarding this effect.
b. I have done the effect I am about to describe multiple times and again have never failed. Frankly, with this very old method, one of the oldest in magical history, it simply cannot fail. Even moderately informed magicians out there will read the effect and know the method immediately. I place a handful of quarters in front of my subject. These are the U.S. coins with state symbols on them. I use as many as we have state symbols for without repeating. I’ve done this with as few as three and as many as nine or ten. I take another coin that duplicates one of the displayed state symbols and without revealing which state it represents place it on the table beneath something like a salt shaker or cup or coaster. After that point I do not touch the coin again. I have the subject choose one of the displayed coins. The subject picks up the coin I used as my prediction to find that they match. Note that my prediction was made openly before the subject began to choose a coin from the displayed coins and that there is no switching of coins involved, no getting the subject to change the choice or anything like that.
c. I have walked up to people, both men and women, and told them their Zodiac sign, no guessing. Unlike the others, this effect does not always work, but it works more than the 1 in 12 indicated by chance, and it works more than John Edward’s hit rate.
d. I have Sherlock-Holmesed a few people that I legitimately did not know, have never met and did not know I was going to meet. By this I mean that immediately upon being introduced I have told them their job, their hobby, and what they did last night. I can distinctly recall four times doing this with astounding success and only one time doing it with just partial success.
2. Bryn Reynolds is a fellow military man whom I have never met in person but with whom I have had discussions both online and via email. In civilian life he is a law enforcement officer; last time I knew his status he commanded a SWAT team in New York. His magical career is the reverse of most people’s in that as a younger man he performed magic full time to support himself but now does it as a hobby.
a. In his first book, Bryn tells the following story, retold here in my words:
As a young enlisted man with the MPs during Desert Storm, he was on the night shift guarding a POW camp. He had made a name for himself among the Iraqis as a legitimate magic man doing coin vanishes. By “legitimate” I mean that they thought he performed real magic. One night a senior Iraqi POW hid a small stone in a large cloth and carried the cloth to each of the approximately 60 seated POWs. Each POW reached into the cloth and brought his hand out in a closed fist as if it concealed the stone; of course, only one POW actually had the stone, but no one knew which one it was. Bryn did not notice what was happening until the very end; when he asked his interpreter what was going on, the interpreter explained that it was a game they played among themselves to pass the time, but this time they wanted The Magic Man to play. Given the nature of the situation, Bryn could not really refuse, so he accepted and without any delay walked up to one of the seated Iraqis and pointed. No waffling, no moving between POWs, no questions, no pointing at multiple POWs or a group; he chose one POW immediately and stuck with him. He was right, and the POWs went wild, and his shift at the POW camp became known as the best behaved of all of them in that area. Note that he did not see the entire episode of the elderly Iraqi carrying the cloth and stone around; he did not know what was going on until the end when his interpreter explained. There was no collusion; he never actually saw the stone or even the hands of the Iraqis as they kept them behind their backs or covered in their laps. He simply walked to the right Iraqi and chose him.
b. In the same book as the above episode, and as a follow-on to it, Bryn developed what I consider to be perhaps the best ever “Which Hand” method. By “Which Hand” I mean the effect of having a spectator place a small coin in one hand such that it really cannot be discerned which hand holds it and yet the mentalist determines exactly that, without fail, without question, without anything at all. Any small object will do, and it can be supplied by the spectator and never touched by the magician. And it is simple. I read Bryn’s method once and immediately performed it perfectly. If you were to walk up to me on the street and surprise me when I am distracted with a hundred other things and asked me to divine which hand holds the coin you are hiding I could do it 100%.
3. Richard Osterlind was the entertainer at a function for Gerald Ford and his wife when Mr. Ford was President. Secret Service was all around preventing any shenanigans and vetting everyone who was there, including Richard Osterlind. During one part of the function, Richard was seated at the table with President Ford who told him stories from his childhood regarding his dog and things he had done. At the end, the President said it was remarkable that he had told those stories at all because he had never spoken about them to anyone in decades, perhaps since his childhood, and they certainly were not written down anywhere. At that point, Richard Osterlind said there was perhaps a reason that the President had decided to tell those stories then, and Richard pointed at the table placard in front of the President, the one with the President’s name on it and folded double. The President (note: NOT Richard Osterlind) picked up the placard, unfolded it and saw that the details of the story he had just told, the story he had never told anyone in years and which had never been published anywhere, were written in Richard Osterlind’s hand on the inside; the information included the name of the dog from the President's childhood, a name that the President swore no one knew. There was no hanky panky before the show; Osterlind did no prior research; he had no help from anyone else; there was no insider information provided; the Secret Service was standing within ten feet of the President at all times. And yet those intimate, unknown, unpublished details were written on the placard.
(For the record, I have done similar things on more than one occasion. The method he used, like so many methods that are the foundation of apparent miracles, is not all that complex or unattainable.)
4. Long, long ago, long before the internet and long before telephones were common and certainly long before international calls were common, the famous magician Harry Kellar was in Hong Kong where he met a travelling acting troupe. One member of the troupe talked about how all the spiritualistic talk was nonsense so Kellar decided to play a trick on him and invited the young man to join him the next evening in his hotel room (NOTE: I will not reveal Kellar’s method here, but I will let you know that Kellar had never met the man before and did exactly nothing between the time of their meeting and the next night to find out anything about him; he could have performed his effects immediately if he had wanted, but he was hoping to create the right atmosphere).
When the young man joined Kellar at the hotel the next night, Kellar did the spooky séance and going-into-a-trance stuff that was all the rage at the time. During the trance he told the young man things that the man swore that no one, not even his parents, knew. Kellar told him about a girl the man knew in the states, a girl who had committed suicide because of the man’s jealousy; he told him about his struggles in San Francisco trying to make it as an actor, he told the man his real name, which the man at first denied but which Kellar insisted was true until finally the man relented and admitted his real name. Kellar told him that his father had recently died (something the man did not know) and that he would receive a letter within a few days from his mother telling him of this.
Of course, the letter did arrive a few days later (SECOND NOTE: Kellar did not intercept the mail and did not know of this letter’s existence or contents; he never saw it nor was he told of its existence). At that point, the skeptical actor began to believe in spiritualism and spirits. Kellar tried to dissuade him; he never told him his method, but he did tell the man that it was all a trick; sadly, the man never believed Kellar’s confession.
And there you have it. You might argue that my little coin predictions and the “Which Hand” effects don’t rival what you think John Edward did, and I won’t push the point though I would disagree. However, you cannot legitimately claim that my “Tell you what word you are thinking” effect, Bryn Reynold’s “Choose which of 60 people has the stone” effect, Richard Osterlind’s “magically write the long untold secret stories of the President on the placard when surrounded by the Secret Service” effect, or Kellar’s utterly mystifying “tell the man specific things he does not know including things which have not yet happened” effect are not at least the equal of what Edward did. Frankly, if you don’t admit that Osterlind’s and Kellar’s feats far surpass anything that John Edward has ever done then you are willfully blind to fact.
Please bear in mind that every single one of the examples I have posted above involves dealing with one person, not tossing information out to a group of people to see if someone there latches on to it, and none of it involves questions of any kind, and none of it involves picking the hits out of the misses (with the exception of my Zodiac signs and occasional Sherlock Homes bits, and even those have a greater success rate than John Edward). Edward, on the other hand, relies on all those: throwing information to a group and letting them decide who it applies to, asking questions and then repeating answers back as if he knew it all along, and glossing over the far more misses than hits.
So there it is, Robin. Skeptics can do and have done things as impressive as and more impressive than the things that John Edward did which convinces you. Your course now is to decide how you will use that information.
