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The Other Side
Enfield Psychic Angelina Diana is the Real Thing
August 2007
By Janet Reynolds | Photography by Nick Lacy
PAGE TWO
It's a trip skeptics like Dr. Michael Shermer feel leads to dead-ends. A former college professor and founder of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine, Shermer has appeared as a debunker of all things weird and extraordinary on shows from Charlie Rose and 20/20 to Oprah. He is a book author and contributing editor and monthly columnist for Scientific American.
His response to my question about the existence of psychic phenomenon is simple. "There is no data to show we have something that needs to be explained," he says. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Data and theory, evidence and mechanism — these are the twin pillars of sound science, according to Shermer. They are pillars that crumble like sand in any exploration of psychic phenomena, he says.
In the course of any readrng, Shermer notes, hundreds of statements are made. He says so-called psychics rely on tricks of the trade to make sitters think they are psychic. "You can always find very specific things," Shermer says, "There are tried and true hundreds of thrngs you can say [to make it seem as if you're talking about the specifics of someone's life]," he says, adding there are books on how to pull this scam.
"You go through all the way human memory
works and certain things will stand out, things that are true for a high percentage of the population."
Shermer offers an example. About 90 percent all of men, for instance, keep a watch from a dead male relative, often their father. A psychic trolling for details will often say, according to Shermer, "He's telling me something about a watch" figuring it's safe territory. "It's golden. You can't miss," Shermer concludes. "You only have to get a few things right [for people to be convinced you have psychic power]."
If psychic ability is real, Shermer continues, "How about giving us something we can really go check? Where is Jimmy Hoffa's body? Or how about something useful like where is Osama bin Laden hiding?"
But what about my mother's alcoholism or my father's middle name? Aren't those too specific to be simply lucky guesses?
The first problem, Shermer says, is that those choices are my version of what was said. He records readings and says that what is said is often different from what people remember or how they interpret what was said. He has also tested psychics who claim some supernatural power and they don't do any better guessing, say, the number written on a card than statistical chance.
People are drawn to psychics because humans by nature like to connect the dots, Shermer says. That's why we see the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese sandwiches. We
learn through association.
While Diana would disagree with much of what Shermer says, she concurs that scam artists exist. "Unfortunately just like the medical field, there are bad horrible practitioners," she says. If people would just recognize their latent intuition, she says, scam artists would soon be out of business.
Diana knows how scary that openness can be, though. As a child, her grandmother predicted events and it made her daughter, Diana's mother, uncomfortable, so Diana became scared as well. "I took on that fear," she says.
It wasn't until her grandmother died and her mother began hearing from her, that both she and her mother became more open to the psychic world. "It shifted her feeling," Diana says, "and that shifted my feelings."
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