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CONNIE SONNE, Dowser

Ms. Sonne, you've moved the goal posts a very long way with your claim of having a recording of Madeline's voice. Personally, I don't really care about your failed prelim test at TAM but I do care that you, possibly, had the fate of an innocent child in your hands and you chose to make a recording and walk away. What despicible behaviour! How do you live with yourself after doing that? You make me sick.
 
Hi out there...now I know why Banacheck was "the card handler". I have been cheated. I did find the right cards. And there is one more thing. At the stage, Banacheck said to me BEFORE he even looked in the envelope I had cut...and here is spade ace, the one you looked for!!!! I first hit me now about that ....but maybe you can see it yourself if someone get the video. I don`t care about the money, that wasn`t the reason why I came. So no matter what you think out there......I was CHEATED!!!!!

Connie

This is so sad, and makes me feel even more sorry for you, Connie. I made a rather strongly worded post admonishing people I thought had been cruel to you on this forum, but now I can see why they are so irritated with you. I still stand by my statement that you should not be treated in an insulting manner, but for you to accuse the JREF of "CHEATING" is outright ridiculous. It's understandable, given the very human need to save face, but it stands in stark contrast to the dignity with which you conducted yourself during the test. As I said, this is so sad.
 
Welcome to the JREF, pakeha.:)

Is this the link you're trying to post?
****

Thanks so much, o Empress.
I owe you one.
The fact is, I wondered if this article might have inspired the claimant.
I've been reading the thread, 39 pages dedicated to trying to set up a protocol for an EVF preliminary test and it seems a daunting task, indeed.
And using a recording made over a year ago in 'uncontrolled' circumstances as proof of the presence of a missing child is simply horrendous, especially in light of the fact at the time of this experience, no reproductions of the child's voice had been made public.

Back to the 'cheating' at TAM7-
It will be interesting to see if the failed claimant takes up other challenges.
 
I don't know if "congratulations" is exactly the right word, but I think it's important to respect those who show up, take the test, and conduct themselves honorably.

Sonne's accusations notwithstanding, we don't do this because they're "the enemy." The MDC isn't an excuse for us to ridicule people we disagree with. JREF has this challenge for a reason - to promote critical thinking and scientific evaluation of supernatural claims.

Those who take the test, by and large, are not the Sylvia Brownes of the world. The people who go through with the process genuinely believe they have the powers they claim. They're not bad people, they're not frauds, and they don't rape puppies. They're just folks with some weird ideas and (at worst) delusions of grandeur.

If we disrespect those who take the challenge, we underscore every negative stereotype about skeptics. At that point, the MDC stops being about inquiry and investigation, and becomes an excuse for us to point, laugh, and say "look at this clown." That doesn't do anyone any good--not us, not the "psychic," not the JREF, not Randi, and not society as a whole.

There's a reason why the JREF was able to keep 1,000 witnesses absolutely silent during the entire test. That reason is that, whatever Sonne might say afterward, we respect the process. A number of people worked very hard to design and construct an experiment to test the claim, and we owed it to them not to introduce any foreign elements (such as noise or flashing lights) into the equation.

The moment we start sneering and mocking, not only will we show that we no longer respect the process, but the process will no longer be worthy of respect. At that point it's nothing more than a sideshow, a stunt, a way for us to "expose" people for being on the "wrong side."

Perhaps congratulations are not in order, but respect certainly is*. Not for her sake, but for ours.


* Well, respect was in order, up until the claim of cheating.

I wasn't going to say anything else about this but -

HOLY FALSE DICHOTOMY FALLACY BATMAN.

Congratulating and praising people like toddlers for failing to demonstrate they have powers is coddling people and wrong. I never said don't be polite, and at no point did I suggest or advocate for "sneering" or making fun of people. You can be polite without praising people for failing a test. Unless they admit that such a test is indeed evidence that they do not have supernatural powers, at which point the use of critical thinking skills would be worthy of praise.
 
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Connie,

Please post some more. I am VERY entertained with you making excuses for you non-performance.

Thank You in Advance,
YeahDude
 
...
about my accusations----just wait until I get my website...I will write it all-

Connie

Connie, you seem to have productive intentions. Unfortunately, your actions contradict this quite effectively.

You will do everything to confirm your belief. You will not accept evidence which contradicts you view of the world, or shall we say: Things.

Connie, you seem to be well-meaning in your behaviour to other people.

However, from what we understand as common sense and accept as given, you will realise some day - perhaps for just a fraction of a second, perhaps never - that the things you speak of only exist in your mind. They do not exist outside of it.

It's not your fault.
 
Ms. Sonne-

I thought you were finished posting here, as you stated before.

Since you are still participating in the forum, I have a couple of questions, if you wish to answer. Can you be specific about how Banachek cheated? Did he interfere with your selection, or did he somehow perform slight of hand on stage to switch out your card?

Also, I'd like to know why we should believe that Banachek performed such an elaborate and extraordinary feat, rather than the perfectly ordinary explanation that you failed because your selection abilities are no better than chance.
 
I think several people have asked her to be specific about her cheating claim but all we've gotten thus far is that she would "reveal" her evidence in September. Why wait months and why only reveal it on the internet and not in a court case? Because the claim isn't based in reality.
 
day I should travel, bringing my dog and a voicerecorder.On the third day I came to a little town. My dog should pee, and he suddenly rushed to a house, where I then knew Maddie was. That was the house, they kept her at that time. I knew that I would get something from there the following evening,and I should bring my voicerecorder. Beside the house there was an empty summerhouse, where I could be outside, just 5 meters away from the house, where M was.

I did, and one hour later Maddie and a man(who kept her) showed up. I did see him, and I recorded it all.

Back at the hotel I got some of the irrelevant noices away with a program called Wawepad. When I played the voices slowly another voices said something else! That voices belongs to "mine", and you can clearly hear it (it is all in english) I write it shortly here:

Sorry, I just saw this - is she seriously claiming that she FOUND Maddie and, instead of immediately alerting the police, sat by and taped her from afar?

This gets more disgusting all the time.
 
I am admittedly a new commenter on this board, and everybody's efforts to not stretch conclusions notwithstanding, it seems to me that the nature of our protagonist's various statements and the way they are changing and seemingly escalating over time must lead us to suspect that, perhaps, all is not entirely right. With apologies all round, it seems to me that it may be appropriate to consider deescalating things a little bit ...
 
I am admittedly a new commenter on this board, and everybody's efforts to not stretch conclusions notwithstanding, it seems to me that the nature of our protagonist's various statements and the way they are changing and seemingly escalating over time must lead us to suspect that, perhaps, all is not entirely right. With apologies all round, it seems to me that it may be appropriate to consider deescalating things a little bit ...

And my reply would be that this is a forum where we discuss things. If the moderators think the posts in this thread have "escalated" they'll handle it.
 
...it seems to me that the nature of our protagonist's various statements and the way they are changing and seemingly escalating over time must lead us to suspect that, perhaps, all is not entirely right.

All is not right... with the protagonist? There has been suspicion of that for some time. With the test? Not likely; this is hardly the first time someone has agreed to a protocol, performed adequately in the "sound check" (to misuse an analogy), failed miserably in the actual preliminary test... and then mysteriously gone back and started hurling blame everywhere they could.

It's mostly just their ego kicking in; so much of their self-image has been built around them being able to do $PARANORMAL_THING, that the ego simply cannot handle the possibility that they actually can't, and starts lashing out indiscriminately in an attempt to protect the crumbling self-image.
 
Several bickering posts moved to AAH. Please keep it civil and polite.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Tricky
 
I think that you are coming at this from the wrong direction. It is true that there is more room for missing an effect than there is for finding an effect, so that a conclusion that an effect is not present is less reliable than if one had been found. However, what is really at issue here is whether or not the information that Connie used to form the idea that she had paranormal abilities is present. Since that information was present and did not support Connie's conclusion that it represented paranormal knowledge, one can conclude that it was false for Connie to think that she had paranormal abilities in the first place.


I think I need a translation. :D
 
Fair enough. Though the line in my post [The clearly observable evidence suggests you have no paranormal/supernatural/psychic abilities] wasn't intended to be an exact statement of the MDC result. It was a personal reflection based on what I had seen. In fact, the manner in which I wrote the line was not so bold as to masquerade as a conclusion:
Well, okay, what you saw suggested to you that Connie has no paranormal abilities. But, what I am saying is that what you saw should not have suggested that Connie has no paranormal abilities but that, if she does have the paranormal ability being tested for, she did not demonstrate this ability on this occasion and under these circumstances.

I used a "weasel word" because I know the type of eagle-eye forumites who post here! And because I had to to be accurate.
It was merely an observation on my part that what you saw should not have suggested to you that Connie has no paranormal abilities, but that....(see above).
 
I was intending to refer exclusively to the first of these.

Suspected. You may find that a number of people are much more precise here than on other webforums (for good reason), so you may get rather a number of questions like the previous if things are unclear. :)
 
Just as many of us here believe it immensely unlikely that such powers exist on the basis that there's no reason to believe they do, unless those such as Connie Sonne were married so strongly to their delusions, it would not be unreasonable to expect them to question their premises on the evidence of such a failure.
If Connie was so confident of her claimed ability - as a result of the apparently successful application of her claimed ability on numermous occasions in the past over many years - that she applied for the MDC, it would be unreasonable to expect her to immediately deny her claimed ability as the result of a single failure. After all, the result of every scientific experiment must be verified by repeated experiments before it is accepted as valid.
 

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