Piero Calvi-Parisetti

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Putting the psycho in
Parapsychology
Icon psychic.svg
Men who stare at goats
By the powers of tinfoil

Piero Calvi-Parisetti is a Scottish/Italian crank author, parapsychologist, spiritualist and pseudoscience promoter.

Calvi-Parisetti is a member of the Society for Psychical Research and of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. He is also a retired psychotherapist and now works as a "grief counselor". He trained with the parapsychologist Raymond Moody.[1]

Calvi-Parisetti who refers to himself as "Dr. Parisetti" is a convinced spiritualist, and he claims to reduce the pain of bereavement of his clients by giving them hope that science has proven life after death.[2] He charges $49.95 for his online pseudoscience course "Transforming the Fear, Healing the Pain" which is basically a collection of parapsychology woo and debunked reports of fraudulent mediums that Calvi-Parisetti pretends to his clients are all factual.

Calvi-Parisetti is the author of the book 21 Days into the Afterlife which claims to offer evidence for human personality beyond death. However, in reality, the entire book is dishonest quackery. The book says that everything from ectoplasm, levitation, mediumship, psi, and remote viewing have all been proven by science whilst all critical or skeptical material is ignored.[3] Calvi-Parisetti believes the best evidence for an afterlife is ectoplasm and materialization mediumship. This seriously undermines his credibility as all investigations into ectoplasm materializations have proven fraud, with the "ectoplasm" having been discovered to be made from cheesecloth, muslin, or other perfectly-non-supernatural materials. Calvi-Parisetti does not report any evidence of fraud in the mediums he writes about.

Calvi-Parisetti has written that Helen Duncan was a genuine psychic medium. He says Duncan communicated with spirits, and her ectoplasm was real. He does not mention that her ectoplasm was exposed by psychical researchers, such as Harry Price, as being made from a doll made from a painted papier-mâché mask draped in an old sheet and in other cases from cheesecloth. He also claims the materializations by the notorious medium Eva Carriere were genuine and not the result of fraud. He says other fraudulent mediums such as Leslie Flint and Gladys Osborne Leonard communicated with spirits. His book and course offer no evidence for an afterlife at all.

The only supporters of Calvi-Parisetti are other spiritualist cranks such as Michael Prescott.[4]

Calvi-Parisetti posts woo on the Mind-Energy forum.[5]

References[edit]