The Blue Lady of The Moss Beach Distillery. Parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach. Part 2: Episode 14

Mar 31

Parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach discusses why skeptics and scientists dismiss parapsychology if the evidence is so good? What evidence did the Ghost of The Blue Lady at The Moss beach Distillery give to convince him that she was real? What convinced him that there was an afterlife. What is the difference between genuine skeptics and pseudo skeptics. What are some red flags that will case Loyd to turn down. case as a paranormal investigator? Why don’t psychics predict the lottery or earthquakes and other disasters? Why haven’t any won James Randi’s million dollar reward for proving they have abilities? Parapsychologist of over 40 years, Loyd Auerbach, shares fascinating insights.

Parapsychologist, mentalist and author Loyd Auerbach speaks with Liz and Darren McEnaney of Seeking I. Loyd Auerbach has a master’s degree in parapsychology, is president of the Forever Family Foundation, is Vice President and on the board of Directors, at the Rhine Research Center and is one of the principal instructors for the Rhine Education Center. He has been in the field of parapsychology for over 42 years. He is also the author and co-author of many books on the paranormal. He is also a mentalist, psychic entertainer and former magician. He is also an occasional chocolatier.

Darren McEnaney is host of the podcast Seeking I. Like Liz, he takes a logical and science-minded approach to the evidence of an afterlife. He refers to himself as “ “a lay researcher of consciousness focused on anomalous experience and life beyond physical death.”

Follow Loyd Auerbach: About | YouTube | Facebook

Follow Darren McEnaney: Blog | YouTube | Website

Skeptics having psychic experiences.

The conversation dives in from last week where Loyd shares how he asked the renown and scientifically tested psychic medium Alex Tanous why weird paranormal things were happening to him. Liz shares that she experienced the same. She never would have thought she could experience anything psychic herself, but the few experiences she had did open her up to the fact there was something inexplicable really going on. It made her able to listen to what the mediums had to say at another level.

Out of body experiences and other paranormal experiences that are verified

Darren says that the out of body experiences Loyd had give real evidence of something going on since they were corroborated by other people. Loyd agrees that he is lucky to have had verifiable experiences of his own. Some people he has worked with and some of the cases he has worked on have had a lot of consistency and consistent information that is highly evidential. Many of his paranormal investigator cases have also had multiple witnesses.

The Moss Beach Distillery and the Blue Lady Ghost

Loyd conducted a lot of paranormal investigations with a psychic medium Annette Martin. They did a lot of work in a restaurant called Moss Beach Distillery, which Loyd is still involved with, and he collaborated on this investigation with Annette Martin until she sadly passed away. One time they conducted a seance there and Annette Martin went into a trance during a press event. The reporters began asking the ghost that supposedly “haunted” the restaurant a lot of questions. One answer that this ghost. The Blue Lady, gave did not make sense to Loyd. It did not seem possible. However, months later he was on another case, a longterm one, on an old aircraft carrier Museum, called the USS Hornet. Loyd spoke with a former Navy SEAL, who admitted he had had experiences, which he refused to call ghost experiences on the USS Hornet. He also shared that although he did not know if he believed in ghosts or not, he had had an experience at The Moss Beach Distillery back in the 1950’s. He saw the Blue Lady (the ghost everyone consistently saw). What he shared verified the answer The Blue Lady had given through Annette Martin. The answer Loyd had thought was impossible.

Enough anecdotal evidence is evidence.

Darren responds that those kind of stories are the ones most skeptics dismiss as anecdotal. Loyd responds however we would not be investigating anything, since any psychological experience at all is all anecdotal. Any subjective experience that somebody tells you about is anecdotal. So there is no social science without anecdotal evidence. Darren responds that anecdotal evidence is how we discovered meteors. People said there were rocks falling from the sky, which was dismissed at first. Loyd answers that is a problem when you have physical occurrences witnessed by a lot of people, to not look into them is ridiculous. When the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, in the early 1900s, there were reporters there, but many scientists around the world were saying for weeks later that that's not possible. Powered flight was not possible and this never happened. Darren is annoyed how often skeptics and scientists will derogatorily compare anomalous experiences to things like Big Foot and UFO abductions. Loyd thinks that you can't compare these things at all. They're not the same at all. The only comparison is it's an experience. It's something that somebody witnessed or had an experience. It’s a subjective experience.

Genuine skeptics and pseudo skeptics.

Loyd explains that of course, all reported psychic experiences are not necessarily the same and people do make mistakes. Loyd’s problem with the pseudo skeptics is not that they don't believe anything psychic or paranormal. It’s okay that they think psychic experiences are impossible. The issue is that they attack and insult people. They are arrogant and laugh at people and make them feel stupid or crazy. And that is as far from skepticism as possible. And it's far from being scientific as possible.

Loyd had a friend Bob Steiner who was one of the founders of the The Bay Area Skeptics. Both Bob and Loyd had been magicians together. He had thought that everyone who claimed psychic abilities was a fraud and was lying. He then met the people - the psychics and those people who claimed to have paranormal experiences. He spoke with them and listened to them. He was well versed in cold reading and other techniques of fraudulent being a fraudulent psychic. And he came to the conclusion that there were an awful lot of people who were very sincere, but wrong. He found that there were many people who may have been incredibly observant and intuitive and their family or friends told them they must be psychic, they should be a psychic. But they were not actually psychic. So sometimes the environment convinces you that you are psychic, even though you're not.

So while Bob never believed in psi phenomena, he was always willing to look at evidence always willing to talk about things. He did not automatically dismiss.

Genuine psychics and fake psychics.

Liz asks Loyd, when he does a paranormal investigation, how does he tell the difference between a genuine medium, or genuine PK (minds ability to move objects), versus someone making it up or hallucinating?

Loyd answers that especially though the graduate Parapsychology program he was a part of, they had a number of people who were psychics and some mediums who said that they wanted to work with them. The team would check them out. Loyd would have them do readings or take them on a paranormal investigation case. He would also have a long conversation with them because there are personality issues that would make him not work with someone. Even if they were the best and most accurate psychics. He explains those issues and what he does like to work with. He also has to test if they genuinely have abilities.

Paranormal Claims

It is harder when someone claims they have had a paranormal or inexplicable experience since you can’t go back and witness the actual experience. People do reach out though and claim to be able to do things like bend spoons and one guy even claimed he could bend a pencil. Anyone making those kind of claims needs to demonstrate and Loyd (and a team) need to be able to eliminate all “normal” alternative explanations.

When they get calls and a case might sound good, Loyd still questions and looks out for the red flags before he will move forward with a case. One red flag is when people want fame from it. Many people making claims of haunted houses end up just wanting to be on tv and wanting fame. Loyd and his colleagues have learned how to be aware of that.

If there are genuine psychics wouldn’t they have: Won Randi’s million dollar challenge.Predicted disasters like terrorist attacks and earthquakes. Won the lottery?

Loyd has logical answers to all three questions, which also leads into a discussion about the future. How pre-set is it? Is it changeable? Also “The Amazing Randi” and his challenge was not the genuine scientific experiment and test that many people believe. Loyd explains why. Liz also shares a time she heard about a test conducted by people who were part of Randi’s group, and it sounded as if they failed someone who had actually demonstrated genuine psi abilities. So one issue with the challenge, was that they demanded 100% accurate results instead of significantly beyond the odds of chance. And no one can be expected to get 100%. The best baseball player won’t hit a home run every time. If we applied that to physics, then the CERN Large Hadron Collider is a big is a significant disappointment.

Randi does deserve credit however for exposing many fraudulent psychics and faith healers. Loyd has also uncovered phony psychics. But there were a lot of issues with Randi, and how he conducted his research and the results he published which Loyd discusses.

Feeling the future:

Many skeptics never examine the evidence. As they talked about in part 1 ‘Lois the Ghost” James Alcock wrote an article forming an opinion on psi and admitted he never looked at the evidence. Psi researcher Daryl Bem had written an article called “Feeling the Future,” on a precognition study he conducted. When the topic of this article was announced and was published in a journal, many skeptics and sadly scientists trashed the journal and asked for the article to be retracted. When asked if they had even read the article, they would state no, “why would I? I know ESP is impossible.” Liz shares an article she read where a few skeptics wrote an article about an event they attended at The Rhine. One activity was spoon bending. In the article they knocked the event for having something as absurd as spoon bending and openly laughed stating of course they never bothered to try.

Skeptics and fundamentalist religion

Liz has noticed that many of the most ardent skeptics have come from fundamentalist religious upbringings. She wonders if their intense skepticism is a backlash against such an extreme religious upbringing. Loyd offers his feedback and opinion on this topic.

Brian Josephson, Parapsychology and the Skeptics:

Brian Josephson who is a Nobel Prize winning physicist has expressed interest in consciousness and even Parapsychology. Because of this he was disinvited from a physics conference in England. Luckily he was revisited when his colleagues were furious and supported him. There is a lot of academic prejudice.

Religion, Parapsychology, and Spirituality

Liz says that while there is nothing wrong with religion or spirituality, there is actually scientific data on paranormal research, but the skeptics often conflate religion and parapsychology. Loyd says a problem too is that they conflate religion and spirituality too. Loyd shares about a time he was on the Oprah Winfrey Show, about a paranormal poltergeist case that was in a book called the Black Hope Horror. This couple was having a swimming pool dug and bodies fell out! But there was a clearly normal explanation for the phenomena. It was not a ghost or anything paranormal. When word got out a writer came and canvassed the neighborhood, trying to write the next Amityville Horror type book.

When they discussed this case on a panel, a skeptic Paul Kurtz, was shocked to find out that Loyd’s was also incredibly skeptical of these people and that they agreed on pretty much everything. When Loyd and Paul were questioning one of the people involved in the case, and that other bad experiences were being attributed to ghosts, such as natural deaths, the guy responded, “You know, if you don't believe in God, you don't believe in ghosts.” But the two have nothing to do with one another. Loyd has noticed both believers and skeptics conflate the two.

Another thing that Loyd has noticed has made some skeptics dismiss all mediums and psi abilities as fraudulent is that they have been scammed by phony psychics in the past.

Liz and Darren close the episode by each asking one more question of Loyd.

Ghost hunting shows? Are any legitimate?

Loyd gives his opinion on if any of the shows seem to be using genuine scientific methods.

What does Loyd see as the strongest evidence of an afterlife?

As most afterlife researchers conclude, it’s a preponderance of evidence.

Loyd gives his opinion and directs people to read Jeffrey Mishlove’s prize winning essay in the Bigelow contest. Roger Bigelow is a very wealthy billionaire who is fascinated by the afterlife. He offered a large amount of money (first place being 500k) for anyone who gave the best evidence of an afterlife. First place winner was Jeffrey Mishlove.

Liz adds that she also suggests anyone in grief looking for valid evidence take classes at The Rhine, where Loyd teaches. That helped her a lot in her early days.

Liz Entin