How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [42]
The highlight of the 20/20 piece, however, was a case of hot reading. On a break, with a camera rolling, while relaxing and sipping a glass of water, Van Praagh suddenly called out to a young woman named Mary Jo: “Did your mother pass on?” Mary Jo shook her head negatively, and then volunteered: “Grandmother.” Fifty-four minutes later Van Praagh turned to her and said: “I want to tell you, there is a lady sitting behind you. She feels like a grandmother to me.” The next day, when I was shown this clip, one of the line producers said, “You know, I think he got that on the break. Too bad we don’t have it on film.” After checking they discovered they did, so Van Praagh was caught red-handed. When confronted by 20/20 correspondent Bill Ritter with the video clip, however, Van Praagh demurred: “I don’t cheat. I don’t have to prove … I don’t cheat. I don’t cheat. I mean, come on … .” Interesting. No one said anything about cheating. The gentleman doth protest too much.
As an example of the power of the Belief Engine, even after we caught Van Praagh cheating, Barbara Walters concluded in the wrap-up discussion: “I was skeptical. I still am. But I met James Van Praagh. He didn’t expect to meet me. He knew that my father’s name was Lew—Lewis he said—and he knew that my father had a glass eye. People don’t know that.” Ritter, doing his homework on this piece to the bitter end, explained: “You told me the story yesterday and I told you I would look and see what I could find out. Within a few minutes I found out that your father’s name was Lew and that he was very well known in show business. And this morning I was looking in a book and found a passage that says he was blind in one eye—an accidental incident as a child—and he had a glass eye. If I found that out, then he could have.” While Walters flustered in frustration, Hugh Downs declared without qualification: “I don’t believe him.”
Where have we heard all this before? A hundred years ago, when mediums, seances, and spiritualism were all the rage in England and America, Thomas Henry Huxley concluded, as only he could in his biting wit, that as nonsensical as it was, spiritual manifestations might at least reduce suicides: “Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a ‘medium’ hired at a guinea a seance.”
The Tragedy of Death
The simplest explanation for how James Van Praagh can get away with such an outrageous claim on such questionable techniques is that he is 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.
I experienced the full force of this reality on April 2, 1998. The events of that day prompted me to consider what I would say to someone who is grieving. The ABC television program 20/20 came to my home and office, then followed