Re: Doonesbury 9/6

On Sep 8, 6:31 pm, "Beefies" <brianfiesSPAML...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

5. However, it also wouldn't surprise me to learn he can be a cranky,
prickly, abrupt SOB who has blind spots he doesn't see himself (he'd be the
first to tell you we all have such) and that your conversation went exactly
as you described. Having read Randi's work for quite a while, I suspect he
was aiming for something like "That may be what you thought you saw but
that's not what it really was." Still, I trust your reporting. And I'd
really like to know what supernatural event you witnessed.


I think I've described this before, but maybe not and if so, it was
quite awhile ago. Here's the story:

I had a talk show on a radio station in Colorado Springs in the early
1980s. One of the salespeople approached me and said she had a friend
who would make a great guest. Uh-oh. You don't want to alienate the
folks you work with, and she was very nice, but ... uh-oh. And then
she told me why her friend would make a great guest: She was a
psychic. Double uh-oh. There was some delay, a repeated request and
finally I said, well, okay, sure, give me the contact information. (I
did my own booking. This was not big-time radio.)

My plan was that, if she was a nice psychic -- basically a "magician"
who did parlor tricks -- we'd chat a little and I'd try to get her out
of there quickly, and if she was rubbing me the wrong way, I'd bust
her -- nicely, so as not to offend the woman I had to work with.
"Rubbing me the wrong way" would include making inflated claims or
suggesting things that made me think she was separating people from
their money. And as far as psychics go, "inflated claims" are pretty
much any claims at all.

She suggested that I bring a couple of metal objects and she'd do a
reading. Good. So I brought a large iron key that had been the key to
the elevator in the mineshaft where my grandfather worked in Ironwood,
Michigan, in the 1910s.

She had car trouble and showed up about 10 minutes into the show,
which of course meant that I got to ask her why she didn't tell me she
was going to be late. Ha ha. But it becomes significant later,
because, had she been on time, she might have seen me arrive. She did
not -- I was on the air when she got to the studio.

I expected some of those probing, half-question/half-statement things
in which she would slyly elicit information from me, leading me to
feed her enough data to make it seem she was "reading" the key. But it
didn't go like that.

She said the key was from back East and I said, well, kind of.
Midwest, really. And she seemed puzzled and said, "I think further
east than that," and I said, no, Michigan. She kind of shrugged and
went on, and said it was from someplace very cold. And I said, yes,
because the mineshaft would be cool. She went on to describe my
grandfather, including the fact that he had short legs which he was
very self-conscious about, which was absolutely true and nothing she
could have guessed from holding a key. And she certainly never saw my
grandfather, who was not only dead but hadn't been in Colorado since
he scouted a molybdenum mine in Leadville a half century before.

So we did the segment and a few days later, I told my parents about
it, how I had used the key from the mine elevator, and they
interrupted me: It was the key to the ice house in Pennsylvania. Yes,
some place cold on the East Coast. So, far from prying information out
of me, she was telling me things I didn't know -- or at least, didn't
remember.

Pretty cool, but that's not the end of the story. About two weeks
later, my wife lost her keys, which was not unusual except that they
usually turned up in a day or two, often after she offered our boys a
reward for finding them. It had been a week and she really needed to
find them. So I said, "I should call Phyllis."

Phyllis came on the phone and I asked her for a freebie and she
laughed and agreed. And it only took a moment: "They're in the pocket
of her green coat," she said.

Now, this woman was about 30 miles away, had never met my wife, had
never seen my house. My wife went and got her green anorak and looked
one more time in the pockets. Nothing. "Not there," I said.

"Yes, they are," she said. "It's hanging by the back door." I looked
and saw the green down jacket hanging by the back door. "Those are my
keys," I said.

"But it's her coat," Phyllis said.

"Well, it was her coat," I said. "But she never wore it, so I've been
wearing it for the last five years or so."

There was a pause on the line. "Okay," she said, "They're in the couch
cushions."

The boys had been through the couch several times, but they ran to the
livingroom couch and went through it again, even pulling out the
sleeper mattress and checking all those odd nooks in a sleeper sofa.
Nothing.

"Yes, they are," she insisted. "At the end by the closet."

There was no closet in our livingroom.

But then my son (about 11 at the time) yelled and ran out of the house
-- to the 1971 Volkswagen camper that Phyllis didn't know I owned. He
found that my wife's keys had fallen out of her pocket while she was
sitting in the back, on the bench seat, on a trip to Estes Park two
weeks ago, and had slid down between the cushion of the "couch" and
the little closet.

Now, I have no explanation for either of these events. In the first,
she actually told me things I did not know. In the second, she located
a set of keys -- actually, she located two sets of keys -- from 30
miles away, having never seen my house, met my family or seen either
my jacket or my car. And, while she had a chance to set up the first
event, the second was absolutely out of the blue.

I would have been happy to have Randi say, "That's an old carny
trick ..." and I did expect that he would ask, "Are you sure you
didn't ..."

I didn't expect to be curtly told that it hadn't happened.

It happened, and it happened as I described it, in front of witnesses
-- a radio audience in the first case, my family in the second. I
would love to hear a rational explanation because I'm absolutely sure
there is one.

But "It never happened" is not a rational explanation. And throwing
out the pieces that don't fit is not scientific or rational.

By the way, I am 100 percent in favor of busting those who take
advantage of people. Parlor tricks are fun -- I don't care if David
Copperfield makes the Statue of Liberty disappear and I don't see a
point in busting common card tricks -- you should sit back, smile and
watch to see how the magician does his thing. But if he's pulling
chicken livers out of people's guts or giving them lucky numbers, and
emptying their wallets in the process, bust him. And if, like Uri
Geller, he is making outrageous claims that help perpetuate ignorance,
bust him.

However, there ARE things we don't understand. When confronted with
one, the response should be curiosity, not dismissal.

(Sorry for the length but I thought I'd better tell the whole thing
rather than try to outline it.)

Mike Peterson
http://nellieblogs.blogspot.com
www.weeklystorybook.com
www.weeklystorybook.com/dana
.

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