Berserk2 wrote on Jun 7th, 2012 at 6:42pm:Dr. Soal visited Blanche Cooper to contact his deceased brother, not Gordon Davis. Gordon Davis interrupted the session to express his concern for his "wife and kiddie" who survived him. GD "verifed" his identity to Soal with characteristic diction and expressions and details that Soal could confirm from the school days together. GD portrayed himself as dead when in fact the real GD was alive and knew nothing about this channeling. So telltale characteristic speech and impressive details of which the medium was ignorant are not argument for genuine contact. So at most Cooper was tapping the reail GD's mind for paranormal details. Right? Wrong for 2 reasons: (1) GD clairvoyantly disclosed the real GD's future; e. g. details about furniture arrangement and structure of GD's new home, a home he hadn't even purchased yet! So it's unlikely thet the medium discerned these detail from the real GD's mind. (2) Why isn't channeling refuted in this way more often? Well, Dr. Soal had been wrongly informed that GD had been killed in action during World War I. How often are we wrongly informed about a friend's death? So Dr. Soal's false belief in GD's death seems to have been a factor used by Cooper to reconstruct GD's personality and ife detals by ESP. Cases like this shift the burden of proof to the person who wants to claim genuine contact with the deceased on the other side. So should the Gordon Davis case be explained thrrugh super-ESP or spirit impersonation? I don't know and don't need to know to detect a serious flaw in claims of genuine contact through channeling.
Add to this the exposures of channeling through the invention of loved ones and their personality profiles that are paranormally discerned by the medium and channeled as if these ficticious characters are alive and communicating from beyond the grave. Such cases do not prove that no channeling is genuine, but IMO they make channeling the least likely explanation.
I have just finished reading Chris Carter's book called ' Science and the Afterlife Experience' and it has direct bearing on the Gordon Davis case. This case is a central plank in the argument that apparent examples of mediumship are in fact better explained as ' super-ESP'. However, Carter devotes pages 156-161 of his book in explaining, that at best, this case is highly dubious. Rather than copy out the whole text I will just add some of the relevent points.
In 1978 statistician Betty Markwick demonstrated that Soal had fraudulently manipulated results of his famous card-guessing experiments and thereby discredited his research into ESP. She said ' It is clear from the literature, and from the comments of those who knew Soal personally, that his was indeed a strange personality: obsessive, absorbed, and subject to bouts of dissociation'.
In 1982 Alan Gauld reviewed the case and noted that ' certain features of it raise doubts- for example, Soal's claim that he was able to record the medium's statements in detail in the dark using only his left hand, and the fact that his brother signed a statement that he had read the communications, which allegedly took place in January 1922, in the Christmas vacation of 1921'.
In 1986 BBC writer Melvin Harris found suspicious behaviour in that even though that Soal knew Davis was alive in Feb 1925 Soal made sure that no one saw his records until after he had had a chance to visit Davis six weeks later ( even though he had previously challenged another researcher for doing a similar thing previously ! ) Harris concluded that living only one mile away from Davis, Soal had plenty of opportunity to fake the house forecasts in that time. In fact fraud was found.
Soal claimed that a brief message about 'black dickie-think it's on the piano' had been communicated on behalf of Gordon Davis in the middle of the sitting on January 30 1922.In his article, Soal even included a sample of the transcript that contains the message. However, Harris writes ' This is pure fiction. His knowledge of the bird came from his observation of Davis's kingfisher ornament-not from any séance. When he spontaneously invented this morsel, he'd forgotten one vital factor.He'd forgotten that a complete record of the essential sitting had been in private hands for the past three years'.
Chris Carter concludes ' the six-week delay in contacting Davis, combined with Soal's untruthful remarks about the difficulty in contacting Davis; the ease with which all the major details of the case could have been gathered by fraudulent means during the six-week period; the ease by which the records could have been doctored; Soal's history of fraud; the evidence of fraud in this case; and Saul's strange personality -
all these factors combine to render the Gordon David completely worthless as evidence.'