From my blog…
Last night I went to watch psychic John Edward strut his stuff in front of a packed audience, each and every one of them eagerly anticipating a message from a loved one who had crossed over to the other side.
We arrived about 30 minutes before the show started and I waited in the foyer while my daughter got us something to drink and eavesdropped on a few conversations to try and gauge whether there were any other sceptics around. My daughter and I seemed to be the only ones in the area we were standing in.
About 10 minutes before the show started an entertaining young lady came out on stage to lay down the rules for audience behaviour. The show was being filmed so she set about telling people, in a light hearted and humorous way, how to behave if the camera happened to focus on them, and how and where to put the microphone if it was passed to them – apparently people can be quite stupid when they’re given a microphone. There was also a large screen behind John so that we could see who was being read and what their reactions were, we could also see John’s face clearly.
I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but there was no fancy introduction or drum roll before John Edward strode confidently onto the stage. He went through a brief description of what to expect, and then put the audience at ease by telling us about himself. There was one interesting titbit of information he gave while he was talking about himself and his family that I focused on, and it made me watch him even more closely – but I’ll let you in on it at the end of this post.
John explained that he was going to allow the audience to ask questions and that the questioner may or may not get a reading , that he may instead focus on people within the vicinity of the person asking the question. He then asked who’d like to ask him something and then selected ten or eleven people in various sections of the audience, only two of those questioners got a reading, the others were given answers or advice from John or his guides.
I’m not going to go into the details of the readings. Most of his guesses were “misses” and he had some “hits”. However, the “hits” he had somehow made me feel that he knew something about these people beforehand. One family in particular was related to the murder victim of a well publicised crime, although he had the way she was murdered incorrect, he quickly picked up on the complications of the case and related them to the family, but then all of the information he gave them is already in the public domain. What made me think that he may have had information beforehand, was that one of the conversations I happened to eavesdrop on in the theatre foyer, was between the person who runs the theatre and a woman who was thanking her for organising for her and her family to be there. This woman wasn’t one of the audience members who had a reading, but she could well have been one of those who were given special cards for a private reading after the show – these were handed out to a very few members of the audience, and to some of those who had been given readings during the show.
If you’re wondering how I knew the woman was speaking to the person who runs the theatre, the theatre manager was wearing a t-shirt with the theatre logo on it and her face was shown on the big screen when John Edward specifically thanked her at the end of his show.
The “misses” were memorable too. There was a woman he was reading who had lost her daughter, John said the daughter was one of three siblings, the woman denied it, saying that she only had two children. John said she must be mistaken because her daughter was insisting that she was one of three and that this woman must have had three pregnancies, miscarrying one. Again this woman said that she’d only ever had two pregnancies and two children, there never was a third. Again John insisted that this woman must be wrong; even I was beginning to get annoyed with him, surely she’d know how many pregnancies she’d had?!
He also got quite impatient and a little aggressive with people when they didn’t understand the message he was giving them, either it didn’t make sense or they were straining their memories to connect what he was saying. He bullied them into thinking that they were stupid for not understanding the message.
John Edward is slick, confident and has been doing his show long enough to come across as someone who is convincing as a psychic medium. If I had been undecided about the existence of an afterlife and if I didn’t know about the cold reading and hot reading methods that these charlatans use, I may have come away from that show as a believer.
I may be mistaken about how John Edward knew some of the stuff he got right, I’m not too clued up on the sneaky techniques psychics use to gather information, but I do know for certain that it wasn’t supernatural. How? Remember I said John Edward was relating some stories about himself and his family? He said that all his friends and family know when he’s receiving a message from the other side because his ears go bright red. I didn’t see his ears change colour once.
BTW…
John Edward is coming back to South Africa next year - not surprising since all five shows were sold out. I really hope that a group of us sceptics can get together and go to one of his shows, I’d love to see him answer more sceptical questions, and plus it’s an education in cold reading techniques.
mdg
