Ah, wait, here it is :
Last week, Sally Morgan — a performer who bills herself as “Britain’s best-loved psychic” — sued the publisher of the Daily Mail for £150,000 for printing an article suggesting that she and other self-proclaimed psychics might be using trickery rather than mystical powers when they appear to talk to the dead.
Ok, so Sally Morgan the self-proclaimed psychic took offence at someone suggesting that she might be a fraud. So far, no surprise. But what happened next is somewhat amusing, and may challenge some irony meters :
The irony is that just after that article was published, when the allegations that “Psychic Sally” was a cheat were front-page news, our organization along with peer organizations in the UK offered her $1,000,000 and the chance to clear her name, simply by proving her powers were real. Yet, she declined. Why?
If Sally Morgan is not a fraud, then the preliminary test we proposed to prove her powers should be easy. The test — devised by Professor Chris French, Simon Singh, and the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) — was based on the same routine she performs every time she takes the stage: looking at photographs of deceased persons and communicating with their spirits to learn their names.
Sally the psychic apparently didn’t like the offer of the challenge, and she sent some goons out to threaten Simon Singh with legal action. Of all people. Singh’s response on his blog is worth reading, it’s hilarious.
DJ Grothe sums up my own opinion on this :
When a celebrity “psychic” spends so much time and money trying to quash reports of fraud and silence people who question her claimed abilities… yet turns down a $1 million opportunity in order to avoid a simple test that could prove she’s on the up-and-up… It makes one wonder if even Sally Morgan believes that Sally Morgan’s powers are real.
Of course she doesn’t. No need to wonder. The one person who knows for sure that Sally Morgan has no psychic powers, is Sally Morgan.
I live in the UK and had never heard of Sally Morgan until now. I would have thought that it could easily be proven that she is a fraud simply by describing cold reading techniques to someone before having them demonstrated at one of her shows.
Specifically. Guesses framed as questions; statements that are true about almost everybody; fishing with vague questions in a large audience; bold statements about anything that no-one can possibly know and therefore no-one can refute; claiming as a hit anything that comes within a couple of million miles of the truth; moving on quickly when a blatant miss occurs knowing that the true believers ignore the misses anyway.
Of course threatening litigation rather than picking up a million dollar reward kind of seals it too.