Most everyone in the skeptic community has a hot-button
subject that really gets their heart racing. Mine is psychics.
Not the kind of psychic that you
meet at the Halloween party or the fortune-telling tent at the
county fair. Giving commonsense advice and having a bit of fun
is like going to a haunted
corn maze: it’s just fun and the average person should
understand that it is all fake and purely for entertainment.
What I have a problem with are those
people who say they can communicate with your dead family
members. The worst are the ones who claim to solve crimes,
find missing bodies, and say they have
worked with the police department. I call these people
“grief vampires.”
I’ve seen videos of mediums being caught in what looks
like a hot read, but they were random acts that just happened
to be caught on video. There were no
controls; the medium could claim they received the information
directly from the “spirit world” and not the
tattoo with a date, initials, and “RIP” on a
forearm. What we needed was solid evidence. My other motive
for engaging in this venture was that I had grown frustrated
with people posting “someone
should do something.” I had the idea if I could prove a
hot read, then we might just be able to expose that medium
with incontrovertible proof. For the two
of you that need a reminder, a cold read is a set of standard
generalities applied to a total stranger; a hot read is
information gained from outside
sources before the reading. I wanted to leave the bait in
plain sight without being suspicious. For this, I exclusively
used Facebook as part of Operation
Bumblebee, a sting I organized over the Internet in order to
show that it’s possible to catch a psychic in a hot read.
Our first target was psychic Chip Coffey, who was to have a
show near me in San Jose, California. We have had dealings
with Coffey in the past and gathered
quite a bit of information about how he operates.
I and other attendees from those shows have written about what
happened in detail. Coffey claimed to be clearly communicating
with our nonexistent family
members. What we did not write about was the four months of
work the team had been doing behind the scenes on Facebook to
try to catch him in a hot read.
Because we were still working on other projects, we could not
release that information at the time.
I put out a call on Facebook among my skeptic friends that I
was starting a project to expose a psychic; forty-five people
joined and I started a private
Facebook group for planning. I instructed people to start a
Facebook page for a fictitious psychic believer. Not to go
over the top, but to look like
someone who had the money for potential future readings and
shows, and could maybe even go on a themed psychic cruise. The
pages friended each other and
were closed to all viewing while we developed these
characters.
Several people were instrumental behind the scenes: Amanda
Devaus and Ross Balch from Australia, Amy Kelly from New York,
Ann in Florida, Mike Jarsulic in
Chicago, and Jay Diamond, Linda Lawrence, Jim Preston, Scott
Smith, Derek Serra, Greg Dorias, and John Friedman all from
California. Mark Edward and my
son, Stirling, were much needed advisers and sounding boards.
We spent months talking to each other about our
“pretend” lives, sharing photos of our cats,
talking about books and movies, and checking into restaurants
that we might not have actually gone to. We talked about the
good ole days even though most
of us had never met before. What we were trying to do was to
create real looking Facebook pages: occasionally posting
popular memes, celebrity photos, and
of course paranormal topics that we fully supported. We
uploaded photos of people who showed parts of faces and were
slightly blurry so that the photos
would be useful for almost anyone who would eventually be
attending the October 2014 show. From May through August 2014,
we didn’t know who that would be
and were just working to create realistic Facebook people.
At the beginning of this operation, I let it be known on my
fake Facebook page that I had a son named Matthew who had died
when he was three. I uploaded
photos of my real son, Stirling, from birth to age three and
everyone commented on the photos. I talked every few weeks
about having dreams about Matthew
trying to reach me.
These conversations continued until late August when I started
finalizing the end game. We knew that Chip Coffey’s
website gives the attendee several
opportunities to let his or her Facebook friends know he or
she is planning on attending his show. We know that by
clicking on these features Coffey’s
staff would receive a notification of who would be attending
the show. This is where it started to get really tedious and
complicated.
Next I posted that I was looking for people to attend the San
Jose and Los Angeles events, and we needed funds to make this
possible. One mistake skeptics
make is to buy the cheapest ticket possible when they attend a
psychic event, and psychics know this. One previous Coffey
event that happened in Los Angles
failed partly because one of the organizers faked up tickets
which drew attention to us. I planned on buying the VIP
tickets, which were $161. I raised
$900 from skeptics on Facebook in about twelve hours with the
promise of more if it were needed.
I received assurances from Sheldon Helms, whom I had worked
with once before during a Sylvia Browne protest at TAM 2012,
and Jan Wachtel, from my local
skeptic group, Monterey County Skeptics. Jim Preston and his
wife as well as my son, Stirling, all attended to take copious
notes and act as witnesses if
Chip should hot read any of us. Because they were not going to
be part of the bait, they could sit in the back and get the
cheap seats. For the Los Angeles
show, Linda Lawrence, Emery Emery, Dan Geduld, and Heather
Henderson promised to attend.
According to Coffey’s website, each attendee had to show
ID at the door. In order to not be Googled and shown to be
skeptic activists, we altered the names
or used maiden or middle names to match our real IDs. We used
gift Visa cards for our online purchases so even that could
not be traced back to our real
names.
Now we were really ready to start baiting the hot read. All
Facebook pages opened up so that we could friend outsiders and
start posting on Chip Coffey’s
Facebook page. We talked openly about attending the event,
each time tagging the event page and mentioning what day we
would be attending. We had a lot of
Facebook friends that had nothing to do with the project. We
joined cat video clubs as well as other non-paranormal groups
to make us look like we were
real people.
During this time we were more open about who we would like
Coffey to contact. We posted photos and told stories about our
loved ones. We posted on Chip’s
Facebook page telling him and anyone watching how excited we
were to be meeting him. We made it as easy as possible for one
of his staff members to learn
all about us.
We then set up controls. Every one of our show attendees had
their Facebook passwords changed, and once they arrived at the
venue they were “checked in” at
the location, tagged the Coffey event, and then one statement
was made for Coffey’s team to find. An innocent
statement that could have been repeated as if
it came directly from the spirit world, but in fact our team
had no clue what that statement might be. All of our attendees
were informed to agree to
whatever Coffey told them if called on.
As you will read from the blogs that recounted what happened
at the Los Angeles and San Jose events, Chip Coffey did not
use these Facebook profiles at all
to get a hot read. He did clearly communicate with our
nonexistent family members, but he learned about those because
we had been loudly chatting to
everyone around us about who we were there for. When he stated
from stage that he was “getting an older woman and a
child,” we sprang on that statement as
coming from our people. Then we just rode it through agreeing
to everything he said.
In our opinion, everything he said that entire night could
have been a cold read. Everything was general, and the
audience gave lots of feedback and
information. At least a third of the room had paid $160 to get
a seat near the front. People who have invested this much
money and time reading his books,
attending his live shows, and memorizing his TV performances
are likely to overlook any mistakes he might make and not be
interested in an alternative
explanation for his accuracy.
The only thing that could be considered a hot read was the
statement he made to me: When I said privately to his manager
during a break that I was worried
that my son Matthew would be too young to contact, I was
assured that Chip had reached children who were stillborn.
Then when Chip spoke to me thirty
minutes later he said, “You said you are worried that I
won’t be able to reach your son.” The only person
I had said that to was his manager.
After all this work, months of preparing, and over $900 given to the Chip Coffey experiment, all we could be reasonably sure of is that he did not know we were skeptics and he did not know we were lying, and he claimed to have seen the two nonexistent people we pretended to have: a sister for Jan and my son Matthew. He “spoke” to Wade’s dead mother who was really alive and is nothing like the personality that he described. He even smiled through the photo session we had paid extra for. In my opinion, there was nothing more we could have done to make it as easy as possible for the Coffey team to find our bait and repeat it back as messages from the other side.
I know the argument could be made that even psychics have a
bad day and “it doesn’t work like that,” but
if he was able to clearly see all that he had seen
that night, hundreds of statements down to one woman from the
spirit world showing him a bottle of Vicks Vapor Rub, then you
would think that one of these
spirits would have told him to avoid us. Yet he didn’t.
I’ve heard from many skeptics that they expected us to
stand up and disrupt the show saying that we had made up the
people with whom Coffey said he was
clearly communicating. That might have been satisfying at the
moment, but we weren’t there to educate this audience.
They probably would not have listened
anyway, and we would have been escorted out, unable to gain
more information. Our goal is to educate a much larger
audience.
We had the team. We had these very detailed profiles. We wanted to try again; this time with a phone psychic.
To be continued…