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Psychic Can Only Light (One or Possibly) Two Lamps

1/23/2015

 
By Michael Jones 

It can be illuminating to check the primary sources cited by people making extraordinary claims.  Blatant omissions and misrepresentations can distort a kernel of truth into a misleading message.  Sometimes, the source can be quite evasive.  This is a story of my futile effort (so far) to track down such a source.

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Yes, no, goodbye: The ouija board used for spirit communication

10/2/2014

 
By Bobby Nelson

Coming up around Halloween is a new movie based on the Ouija board. Popular culture ideas have a great impact on social acceptability and spread of beliefs. You can guarantee that the popularity of Ouija boards and the volumes of strange stories people tell about them will increase precipitously in conjunction with portrayals of totally fictional events. 

One of the most controversial tools ever used in spirit communication, still used today, is a simple wooden board. It comes in many different sizes, with a variety of beautiful painted scenes and symbols. They all share certain characteristics. The surface of these boards will have inscribed the words “Yes”, “No” and “Goodbye“, the letters A through Z, and the numbers 0 through 9. The pointer, a planchette, is most typically a triangular or heart-shaped device that will point to the letters, numbers or words, spelling out phrases, names and dates. The planchette predates these boards, first seen in China a millennium ago and also used with a pencil attached for automatic writing (a method used regularly during the spiritualist movement of 19th century America.) Now the planchette and this board go hand in hand. 

The board goes by many names - talking board, a witch board, spirit board - but most of us know it as the Ouija board.
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    SWIFT is named after Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels. In the book, Gulliver encounters among other things a floating island inhabited by spaced-out scientists and philosophers who hardly deal with reality. Swift was among the first to launch well-designed critiques against the flummery - political, philosophical, and scientific - of his time, a tradition that we hope to maintain at The James Randi Foundation.

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