Michael Prescott

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Can such things be?

Paranormal

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The Twilight Zone

Michael Prescott (born 1960) is an American writer and paranormal researcher.

Contents

[edit] Background

Prescott grew up in New Jersey where he attended Wesleyan University, majoring in Film Studies. He has had some success as an author of a number of horror and suspense novels which have sold over 2.5 million copies in America.[1]

Prescott's interests include intelligent design, Jesus, the Bible and parapsychology.[2]

[edit] Paranormal studies

A doll dressed in cloth in a séance with the medium Linda Gazzera which Cesare Lombroso believed to be real.

Prescott owns a blog where he posts on paranormal, spiritualism and topics related to life after death but has not actually done any experiments or investigations into parapsychology other than read books on the topic. On his blog he claims that everything from mediumship to levitation is scientifically valid. He usually rants against "materialist skeptics", and even opposes those within parapsychology who are skeptical about certain phenomena. Prescott rejects the psychological explanation for the paranormal, he also rejects hallucinations as an explanation for certain phenomena.

Prescott has written that ectoplasm is genuine though if he had done some real research into experiments carried out by scientists during séances he would see that ectoplasm is universally discredited even amongst other parapsychologists since all investigations into the substance turned out to be butter, muslin, plastic dolls and the result of fraud. He also claims the mediumship of Eusapia Palladino is genuine, however Palladino was exposed as using trickery.

As Prescott believes ectoplasm is real, in defence of this view he cites the work of the spiritualist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909). If you look in the photo you can easily see the figure in the back is a doll but Lombroso claimed such photos were genuine. Considering that Prescott believes the work of Lombroso is scientific evidence for life after death, this seriously undermines his credibility.

Prescott has also written that many of the victorian seances and mediums were genuine and ignores any data on the contrary. There are many books published and even papers written in journals written by psychical researchers (eg. Society for Psychical Research) in that era who had exposed many of the victorian mediums as using trickery yet Prescott ignores all of this data. Users in debates who post on the skeptiko forum website usually cite Prescott as a source that materialism is false and mediumship has been proven.

Critics point out that Prescott does not look at the data objectively and that he is a promoter of pseudoscience.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

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