 Turn your radio off! How to think about dubious claims is the title of a free 10-part video lecture series by Ray Hyman, recently released by the James Randy Educational Foundation. The series draws lessons from scientists and other smart people who's thinking somehow went wrong and led them astray. It's a terrific course in which Professor Hyman, psychologist and veteran skeptic, provides a framework to help you avoid the kind of thinking error that anyone can make. You should go check it out. It's enjoyable. It's full of good information from my old friend Ray Hyman, and watching it made me think of a story about Ray and myself that I'd like to share with you now. So, it was January 7th, 1990, and Ray Hyman was visiting the Washington, D.C. area to address the National Capital Area Skeptics, or NCAS, on the subject of Why Are We Fool? Ray's a psychology professor, now emeritus, from the University of Oregon, an author and expert critic of parapsychology, a former professional magician, and a founding member of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, formerly known as PsyCOP, and now, rather less known simply as CSI. Those folks don't seem to watch a lot of TV. Ray was being trailed by a TV crew from CBS's 48 Hours for the duration of his visit to D.C. because they were doing a feature about parapsychology, and had chosen to focus on Ray to represent the skeptics' viewpoint. So, along with my friends Chip and Grace Denman, my co-founders of National Capital Area Skeptics in 1987, we had a fun and breathless weekend sitting around the Washington, D.C. area and the southern Maryland suburbs, where the Denmans and I lived at the time. That Sunday, we began the morning with the taping of a radio talk show, then in the afternoon, Ray gave his public presentation for NCAS, and then, on the same evening, Ray, Chip, and myself were slated to appear together on Q107 FM. We reported to the studio that evening, where we were also met by the 48 Hours crew who were shooting all of Ray's radio appearances that weekend, including another one the following morning. Once we waited and chatted with the radio show's producer, we learned that we were to be following an on-air visit from a channeler. You remember channeling, right? This is where a spirit medium of sort allegedly speaks with the voice of a spirit, or perhaps it's better to say a spirit speaks through the voice of the medium. Although a practice that has come and gone through millennia, you may recall that it experienced a fatter surge of popularity in the 1970s thanks to Shirley McLean's effusive endorsement of Jay-Z Knight, who claimed to channel the spirit of Ramtha, the spirit of a 35,000-year-old warrior. Pardon me just a moment. Okay, so channeling is a nutty idea, but not all that much nuttier than the likes of John Edward and countless predatory Hoxters like him who claimed to hear spirit voices in their heads while sparing us the cheap theatrics of bad accents and phony ancient language. If you can solve James Randi's encyclopedia of claims, frauds and hoaxes of the occult and supernatural and look up channeling, the entry concludes with my personal definition. Channeling is like bad ventriloquism. They talk funny, but their lips move. This reference is one of the proudest literary achievements of my career. Okay, so back at the radio station, there's a channeler on the air now with the host. The channeler, a woman, claims to be channeling the spirit of a sixth-century Irishman. She's talking into a microphone with the spirit voice, so she claims of a sixth-century Irishman. How do we know it's really the voice of a sixth-century Irish spirit? Does it speak Gaelic? Hell no. What's going on in the studio at this point is more like a bad Monty Python sketch because the spirit doesn't just speak in plain old everyday English. You can tell this woman is totally possessed with the actual spirit of a sixth-century Irishman because she uses thee and thou as personal pronouns. That's right. It's now just an on-air Renaissance festival just without the jousting. Well, some jousting was yet to come, so it was more like a rent fest, rather than a courtesy. I hear you skeptics laughing. How could anything be less historically accurate than your local Renaissance fair? Because the rent fairs are loosely based emphasis on the word loosely on Elizabethan England. And you know what? That's just around the time that the pronouns thee and thou first came into use in Old English. About 800 years later than our sixth-century Irishman supposedly was old enough to drink his first pint of mead. Now, the host actually has a brain in his head. The channeler is ridiculous. However, the radio producer is busy explaining to me with all the self-importance that anyone in media with a small job and a big eagle can muster how she works so hard to insist to the host that he had to be completely fair to the channeler by concealing his point of view and not in any way revealing his rational judgment to the public that he was pretending to serve and speak truth to. But in the bizarre world of contemporary media, a man of the world speaking actual truth as he sees it just can't possibly be doing the right thing now, can he? So, we stand and listen to this babbling producer with tight smiles because we want to get to the microphones ourselves. She goes back to her very important job but now we start working with the 48 hours producer. And at first, he can't really believe that anyone takes the talking channeler seriously. I mean, it's just too ridiculous, isn't it? Well, yeah, it is except no, it isn't because there's people phoning into the show now in order to talk to the spirit. Oh, yeah, and they're not just talking to the spirit. They're asking for advice. The 48 hours producer thinks the channeler is so embarrassingly ludicrously bad that he doesn't even want to turn on his cameras to shoot. How can anyone take this seriously, he asks me, as if the answer is obvious. By this time, I'll be jumping up and down. It doesn't matter if you take it seriously, you're doing a story on power psychology. Obviously, somebody has taken this ludicrously. Watch, they're going to take phone calls. Don't you have a responsibility to show that? You don't even need to comment on it. You can just show it, let it speak for itself. Just show it. But no, it's just too ridiculous for him. So now we're in the studio. They add Ray to the panel. That would be the host, Ray Hyman, and the channeler and the spirit and those two are sharing a microphone. And so, Ray Hyman has the paragon of intellectual restraint for which he is renowned, the soft-spoken, genteel academic with the steely inner intellectual underbelly of the terminator poses his gentle but determinately rational questions. How would we know if this was a 6th century Irishman? It might be a 6th century Irishman, but isn't there some burden of proof that rests with the channeler? Shouldn't we be presented with some supporting evidence before we are commenced? What might the spirit be able to tell us about 6th century Ireland? Of course, no substantive answers are forthcoming. Right now, I'm sitting in the studio about to go on. The calls are stacking up by the host, and he is a professional pilot, an airline pilot. And he asks to speak with the channeler or with the spirit, actually. And he explains that he's up for a new job opportunity, and he's not yet sure what to do. Duff Thou ancient Irish spirit have any advice for me? What? What? WT? Before they had text messaging? And did I mention that 48 Hours is never even going to show any of this on the air? Following this bit of tragic comedy, the host finally offers me a spot at the dais. And long last I have a microphone before me. What do you think he asks me? What do I think? Okay, first of all, let me ask you this. Let's say for the moment it is a 6th century Irishman. Let's just stipulate that for a moment. The caller is a pilot for crying out loud. A pilot? What the hell does a 6th century Irishman know about? Airplanes! He's never even seen one! What does he know about career advice for you? What? At which point I decide to go for broke and offer the listeners some sincere, heartfelt advice about their personal lives. You want some advice? Here's some advice for you. It's Sunday night. It's 9 o'clock. Go out. Get out of the house. Get something to eat. Go to a movie. Hell, rent some porn. Because anything will be better than what you're doing right now, which is listening to this show and wasting your life. You want some advice? Turn your radio off now! Turn your radios off! I believe it remains one of my finest moments on live radio. The producer didn't quite see it that way. Afterwards, Ray actually complimented me on my restraint and signed a copy of his book to me with an inscription on that effect. I guess the fact that I didn't rip the old Irishman's microphone out of the console and choke him to death with the cable did show some kind of restraint. But Ray has always been a model of restrained rationality for me and eventually 48 hours aired and there was no footage of the channeler and Ray got a few moments to put in a word for rationalism. But we all had received a first-hand lesson in how the media so often treats these subjects and what its notions of fair play and balanced reportage often amount to representing stories about pseudo-scientific claims. Sometimes, more often than not, perhaps the best advice might just be to turn your radio off. This is Jamie in Swiss and I am the Honest Liar.