This poster by Crispian Jago has been making the rounds of skeptical websites. It's so popular that it's been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Croatian. It's even available on a T-shirt!

Click for larger image.

I concede that it's clever, and there are many items in the diagram that I don't take seriously myself. There are even some that I regard as dangerous, such as "anti-vaccination."

Still, what strikes me about the diagram is how readily some people will toss any and all unconventional ideas into the catch-all category of "nonsense." It's unlikely that most of the people who admire this chart - or who wear it as as fashion accessory - have looked into very many of these topics in detail. Is the average reader of the Richard Dawkins Foundation's Facebook page, where the chart has been featured, truly knowledgeable about the evidence for telepathy, remote viewing, out-of-body experiences, automatic writing, mediumship, reincarnation, poltergeists, or ghosts?

Jago writes confidently, "... all the items depicted on the diagram are completely bereft of any form of scientific credibility." Really? All of them? Arch-skeptic Richard Wiseman has said, "I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven." True, he went on to say that the standards of other areas of science don't apply to "such an outlandish claim." Still, it sounds as if even Wiseman concedes that remote viewing (included in the set of "Paranormal Bollocks") is not completely bereft of scientific credibility.

And then there are items that really don't belong here. Stigmata? The explanation may be elusive, but the phenomenon itself has been extensively documented. Chiropractic? Acupuncture? Those are pretty mainstream therapies nowadays. Prayer? There's good evidence that prayer can have positive effects on health and well-being.

I was also intrigued by omissions in the chart. No mention of UFOs or alien abductions (though crop circles make an appearance). No love for the Loch Ness Monster? Bigfoot is there, but where's his shaggy cousin, the Himalayan yeti (now thought to be a bear)? Out-of-body experiences make the cut, but near-death experiences are absent. Prayer is listed, but not meditation. Moon-landing conspiracy theories get a shout-out, but not 9-11 "trutherism" or Holocaust denial. The set labeled "Religious Bollocks" focuses mainly on Christian beliefs; most other religions get a pass.

Jago prefaces his Periodic Table by writing, "I thought I'd try and apply the rational to the irrational ..." I'm sure that's what he thinks he's doing. But to a more, um, skeptical observer, it might appear as if both the table and the Venn diagram are merely lists of things that some people find obnoxious, stupid, and not worth looking into.

Maybe a more accurate, and certainly more concise, diagram would look something like this:

Chasing Omega, my 30,000-word paranormal novella, is now available at Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, and Smashwords.com .

Here's my blurb, in all its blurby goodness:

From New York Times and USA Today bestseller Michael Prescott, author of FINAL SINS and COLD AROUND THE HEART, comes something a little different – CHASING OMEGA, a 30,000 word paranormal novella.

"Do you believe in life after death?" It's a question Daniel Brand finds himself answering after he picks up a mysterious woman on the side of an Arizona highway long after midnight. The issue isn't merely philosophical. His passenger, Claire Holland, is a psychic medium on the run from a secret conspiracy holding the key to the truth about life, death ... and what comes after.

More than a thriller, CHASING OMEGA combines empirical evidence, cosmological speculation, and spiritual exploration in a fast-paced, twist-and-turn story of pursuit and betrayal from one of America's most widely read ebook writers.

The book sells for $2.99 in its ebook edition. A print edition (which will cost a few bucks more) should be available within a month or so.

After letting it simmer on the back burner for a couple of years, I've finally gotten around to writing my paranormal novella. It's called Chasing Omega, and it will be out in ebook form before long.

The 30,000 word story explores Dan Brown territory - people on the run, uncovering facts about a conspiracy. Along the way, there's a fair amount of expository dialogue laying out the basics of the empirical case for postmortem survival - NDEs, mediumship, etc. There's also some stuff about the nature of reality, which gets into the ever-controversial notion of the universe as the rendered output of an information processing system. In short, there's something to annoy just about everyone.

I've created an online bibliography for the book, which gives a pretty good idea of the topics covered (as well as some that aren't, like reincarnation). Note that most of these subjects are addressed very briefly in the story, since a full presentation would be impossible in a short novel. Though it's somewhat top-heavy with exposition, it's still essentially a thriller, and I have to keep the pace moving.

I'll put up an announcement when Chasing Omega goes on sale, but for now, here's a look at an early mockup of the cover (with original artwork by my friend Reenie Price) and a preview of the first scene.

Ω

“Do you believe in life after death?”

The question took me by surprise. It didn’t seem to track with anything we’d been talking about.

She turned in the passenger seat and fixed me with a stare. “Everybody’s thought about it.”

That was true, I supposed. And the fact was, I had thought about it–thought about it too much in the past two years. But I didn’t see why it was any business of hers.

I’d picked her up twenty minutes earlier on a desolate desert highway midway between Tucson and the Mexican border. Unusual to see a woman hitching alone, and even more unusual when it was after 2:00 AM in the middle of nowhere. She looked scuffed up and careworn and haunted. She had no handbag, only a leather satchel that she gripped close to her chest. She was dressed in a sort of white pantsuit that didn’t flatter her, her skin was pale, and even her hair was white, or silver-gray anyhow. Prematurely so–she couldn’t have been more than forty. My age, for what that’s worth.

The only thing I wasn’t sure about were her eyes. Green, maybe–or gray. In the chancy light, I couldn’t tell.

Something about the way she’d materialized out of the moonlight appealed to me on a visceral level. From a distance she was almost more wraith than woman. Up close she was real enough. Her name, she said, was Claire–just Claire–and she was nervous. Throughout our ride she’d kept her head down while glancing slyly in the side-view mirror, trying to be inconspicuous as she scanned the road behind us.

I’d kept the conversation going, talking about nothing in particular, as we sped west with the top down, the warm sandpapery wind scrubbing our faces. My car was a 1962 Rambler American with a long-ago rebuilt engine, and nothing about it was cherry except the color. I’d picked it up three years ago from a friend who had put a hundred thousand miles on the new engine, and since then I’d added nearly another hundred thousand myself. The damn thing still started up every time I turned the key, a fact that never stopped taking me by surprise.

Our talk had been safely meaningless until she suddenly went all metaphysical on me. Which is where you came in when I started my little story, like Homer, in medias res.

“The same way I know about Santa Claus, or those Nigerian princes who want to transfer a million dollars to my bank account. Anything that sounds too good to be true is a lie.”

“That’s the answer a lot of people would give. But not all of them would be so angry about it.”

Was I angry? I decided I was. “I don’t like people who give false hope. Who prey on weakness. Like those phony psychics who claim they can get your dear departed on the line–for a fee. It’s cruel and … and stupid. I don’t know which part bothers me more. Probably the stupidity. Cruelty I almost understand. Stupidity just pisses me off.”

“I see.”

She was quiet after that.

I wondered why it mattered to her. It wasn’t a subject I wanted to pursue.

But when I looked at her again, she was still watching me with that vaguely disappointed, vaguely challenging stare.

“How about you?” I asked reluctantly. “Do you believe?”

“No, I don’t believe. I know.”

Terrific.

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I let the road speak for me with its endless low-octave hum.

“You’re awfully quiet all of a sudden,” she said.

“That afterlife stuff is kind of a conversation stopper. Why’d you bring it up?”

“Because there’s a car following us. The people in the car are after me. And it all has to do with life after death.”

Recently I found myself trying to recall the name of the Universal Studios makeup artist who designed the makeup for the original Frankenstein's Monster (Boris Karloff) and the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney, Jr.). There was no pressing urgency about it, but it annoyed me that I couldn't remember. As a kid, I was fascinated by movie makeup, and the name of the Universal guy would have come easily to me. Over the years, it had been misfiled somewhere in my memory banks. Rather than look it up, I tried to see if I could retrieve it.

Boris Karloff and What's-His-Name

I put myself into a light meditative state and tried to see if the name would float to the surface of my mind. I don't remember the exact order in which these things occurred to me, but over the course of at least twenty minutes I got a variety of impressions.

At some point I found myself thinking of Jack Paar and Jack Palance.

I felt that the overall name was something short and simple.

The first name probably was Jack. That felt right.

For the first letter of the last name, I ran through all the letters of the alphabet to see if something would ring a bell. The letter P seemed best.

And there seemed to be an R sound in the last name.

Again I found myself thinking of Jack Paar. That was really close. Not quite it, but almost …

Finally I figured I'd gone as far as I could, so I stopped meditating and Googled it. The name was Jack Pierce.

The completed effect

Now, obviously this process had no paranormal or psychic component, since I was simply struggling to retrieve a datum that had gotten lost somewhere in my subconscious. But I do think the episode sheds some light on the behavior of mediums who also struggle with names and other specific facts.

A medium trying to get a name may go through the same kinds of mental contortions. She may see images related to the name (in this case, Jack Paar and Jack Palance). She may get an impression that the overall name is short, or common. A particular sound of the alphabet may impress itself on her - "I'm getting a P sound."

The similarities, I suggest, are attributable to the fact that the channeled information is piped through the medium's subconscious and thus must be retrieved in the same way that I was trying to recover my lost memory.

Mediums are frequently accused of fishing for information, and certainly the fakes do just that. But my own process of memory retrieval was also a form of fishing. I kept asking questions of myself, trying out different letters and sounds, pursuing certain leads. In effect I was fishing for clues in my own subconscious. I wonder how much mediumistic "fishing" is of this type - fishing in the subconscious in an effort to bring the message through.

Imagine that I'd conducted this experiment in the company of someone who knew the name Jack Pierce but was not willing to tell me, and suppose I'd spoken all my thoughts aloud. A skeptic could easily contend that I hadn't pulled the information from my own mind at all, but instead had played off the other person's body language and facial expressions, consciously or unconsciously following his lead.

The skeptic might also ask why I couldn't just give the name Jack Pierce. Why did I have to go through all these dramatics? This question is also asked about mediums: Why can't they just tell you whatever you need to know, with no hemming and hawing? Either they're in communication with the spirits, or they're not.

But the vagaries of retrieving information from the nether regions of the mind - whether by an exercise of memory or mediumship - seem to be more complicated than that.

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On the subject of mediums, Julie Beischel of the Windbridge Institute has put out a short ebook called Meaningful Messages: Making the Most of Your Mediumship Reading. It's more of an essay than a book, and can be read in about twenty minutes. The material is pretty basic, but I enjoyed it and think it would be a useful guide for anyone thinking of using a medium. The price is only 99 cents.