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| Volume 11 Number 5 |
The REALL News"It's a very dangerous thing to believe in nonsense." |
May 2003 |
| Features | Departments |
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NBC Reveals Psychic SecretsAs you may already know, I write about skeptical topics for this newsletter and elsewhere, and reality TV for other venues. In April, the two came together as a veteran reality TV producer put together a show on NBC that unmasked "psychic" tricks. Secrets of the Psychics Revealed reached over nine million viewers according to early returns, and was the second-place ratings finisher in the coveted young adult age group. In other words, it got the word out to a lot of people! If you saw those Fox shows with the "Masked Magician" a little while back where he exposed magician's secrets, you kind of understand the concept here - except that this one was much, much better, and it exposed magic tricks that "psychics" claim are much more than that. Several different "psychics" performed tricks - either in front of a
live studio audience who thought they were at a "real" psychic show, or
in one case in a location that mimicked a street-corner psychic "shop."
The show jumped from one to the other, first showing the performance and
then explaining how it was done. |
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