[name]:
My story is a long and complicated one, but I will try to make it a manageable size, since you asked so nicely...
From the 1970s & 1980s, I have been an admirer of James "The Amazing" Randi, for his public exposure of such "paranormal" con artists as Uri Gellar and Peter Popoff. I was intrigued and impressed that he used skepticism and critical thinking to do this, in what was almost a "public service".
I had not thought about Randi very often since those days, but in 2001, I happened upon an episode of John Edward's "Crossing Over" TV show (in which he claimsed to communicate with the dead loved ones of members of his studio audience. I felt it was an obvious con, and remembered Randi. I searched for his name on the web, and joined his web site's online discussion forum.
In 2002, I was fresh out of a divorce and started dating a woman I met on match.com. On one of our very first dates, she told me that she was a fan of John Edward. I told her my opinion of the man, which sparked a long conversation about such things as Cold Reading and fraudulent "psychics". I subsequently found out that she was also a fan (to a lesser extent) of James Van Praagh and Sylvia Browne.
In 2004, a woman going by the name of "Dr. Kaz DeMille-Jacobson" spoke at my mother's church. My mother was very taken by this woman's "testimony", which was cram-full of patent nonsense, up to and including her claiming that she had been in the North Tower of the World Trade Center when the terrorists attacked it on 9/11/2001. She told of her "heroic escape" just before the building collapsed, and blah, blah, blah.
I was certain that my mother was being taken in by a brazen con-artist, and I was highly offended that the woman was disrespecting the actual victims of 9/11, I started researching this woman's claims and story. I found it to be almost 100% bull, and put my research on a web site I created for that purpose, "Stop Kaz" (
www.StopKaz.com), hoping to warn her target victims - Christian congregations - about her.
I regularly posted about my "Stop Kaz" efforts on the onl;ine discussion forum at Randi's web site, where I became something of a local celebrity for my skeptical activism.
In 2006, as Kaz's nonsense was stopping (largely due to my web site), membersof the discussion forum asked me "Who's next? You successfully stopped Kaz, now use the same methods to stop some other fraud!" I hadn't considered it, but started putting together a list of frauds I thought needed to be stopped. James Van Praagh, John Edward and Sylvia Browne were high on the list.
I showed the list to my girlfriend (who had been hugely supportive of my Stop Kaz efforts). Between our talks about "psychics" and a TV expose' she had seen about them, she had come to agree with me that they were almost surely fraudulent. Looking at my list of potential "Stop Site" focuses, she said "If you truly think that these psychics are hurting people, stop complaining about it and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!" I started work on "Stop Sylvia Browne" the next day.
Why did I start with Browne rather than Edward or Van Praagh? A couple of reasons:
1. With all of her books, tapes, DVDs, CDs, and then-weekly appearances on The Montel Williams Show, there was a TON of material I could comb through for predictions to check out, and for inconsisancies in her story.
2. With her being arguably the most well-known psychic in America, I felt that if I showed good reason for people to doubt her abilities, it might make people a bit more wary of other psychics as well ("If Sylvia - the 'best of the bunch' - is questionable, what about the rest?")
The site went up in November 2006, and has done well. I have been told, but vannot verify, that her income has dropped dramatically since my site went up, and that she and her staff put the blame squarely on me and my site.
And that's how I got involved, and created the web site!
Best,
Robert S. Lancaster
Founder & Webmaster,
www.StopSylvia.com
