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Pale Rider
11-21-2007, 10:52 PM
THE GIRL WITH X-RAY EYES

CSICOP CONVERTS VICTORY INTO DEFEAT


by GUY LYON PLAYFAIR


It's not about results - this is about belief - Richard Wiseman

THE FIRE BRIGADE in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was not in the business of putting fires out, but of starting them when told that an illegal book-owner had been unmasked. Likewise, CSICOP does not scientifically investigate claims of the paranormal (let alone the actual phenomena), it debunks them en bloc. So when the news about 17-year-old Russian clairvoyant diagnostician Natalya Demkina reached the top floor of the Ministry of Truth, out went the order: find this girl and stitch her up once and for all. Set up an experiment that's guaranteed to fail.

Firemen Hyman and Wiseman were introduced by the Bossyboots narrator of The Girl With X-ray Eyes (Channel 4, February 14) as 'card-carrying sceptics from CSICOP' and 'the world's foremost sceptical scientists' who have 'taken on and discredited many celebrity psychics - including Uri Geller'. With that gratuitous smear out of the way, the great scientists set to work.

After a 12-hour train journey from her home in Saransk to Moscow and an 11-hour flight to New York across eight time zones, Natalya was given just one day to catch up with her jet-lag (so I have learned, though this was not mentioned by the narrator) and then asked to demonstrate what she calls her 'medical vision' on six patients, five of whom announced that they were impressed by the accuracy of her diagnoses.

'Unbelievable but true,' said one.

'Amazing and disconcerting,' said another.

'She picked up on that right away', said a third, referring to her migraine.

At least one of the diagnoses was as close to a hundred-percent hit as you can get.


The rest of the story... (http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/Demkina/X-ray.htm)