TV Historian Required

I can’t argue with you there as I agree and I try to be equally critical. However, as I stated above, I do believe that some mediums have genuine experiences and it is a valid field of study. However, I am not convinced yet that they are having supernatural (for want of a better word) experiences or that they are contacting the dead. I do struggle to accept groups that totally accept mediumship at face value and then use that as a tool to prove or investigate hauntings.

Your right that I have no experience in conversational mediumship and would love to here more.

Thanks for your comments. Historical mediumship depends on a proxy sitter as opposed to an absent or actual sitter which is typical in classical mediumship. The medium is forced to develop information in the absence of feedback. This technique has been adopted in lab research in the past decade. I was doing this  in the late 1970s (and was by no means the only person doing so).

Conversational mediumship must account for a dialog. It is not a one-way communication as is more common in classic mediumship. At the same time we are careful not to lead, direct or cue the medium. We record everything on video and audio so the conversations can be analyzed post hoc for indications of subtle cuing that might not have been obvious at the time, to study the participants' body language for clues as to sources of behaviors, and for purposes of statement transcriptions. Of these only the last,  transcriptions, are common with more conventional mediumship research.

Conventional mediumship research uses sitter rating methods to establish accuracy. We have no sitters per se so this is not possible with historical mediumship. Instead we rate each statement on a 10 point specifity scale originally developed for research into reincarnation cases at the University of Virgina. We further check the proxy sitter and medium backgrounds for correllated events consistent with statements made by the medium. Lastly, of course, we check for consistency with known or developed historical facts. The more statements that are highly specific, consistent with history and uncorrellated with the proxy sitter and medium experiences, the more we are tempted to believe we have useful information.

A further word about the viability of mediums, and I believe we are in acord on this point: it is the case that we have not proven communication with the deceased to the exclusion of other potential information sources. We believe we can rule out fraud based on our controls which I have not outlined here intentionally and our analytical methods. Pragmatically we must accept that the information could be the result of precognition, postcognition, telepathy, clairvoyance or after-death communications or a combination of these. For our purposes we truly don't care from the historical perspective. What we truly care about from the historical perspective, is our ability to seek out unknown information and validate it thus potentially although not certainly assisting a possible discarnate and definitely furthering our understanding of true history.

Are the proxy sitters aware of the information that they are trying to obtain from the mediums?

Has any of this research been published in any peer reviewed journal?

Proxy sitters are unaware of topics in most all modern controlled laboratory mediumship experiments.

I am working on a Journal article at this time that will probably appear this year. The data has been satisfactorily substantiated to a level of historical accuracy only recently.

That's great.  Can you let us know when it is published and where?  I'd really like to read it.