Gordon Smith: psychic demonstration or Cold Reading?

[rainbows.]

If you burn me you will get kidnapped by the spiritlove girls,not worth the risk!

[Nasib]

He talks about a case about a year ago (prior to the show presumably) where he reads a woman whose son is missing, and advises her not to keep looking for the body, but she says she cannot give up. He then says his information leads to a thigh bone in a canal in France. Then about DNA testing, then that he received a letter thanking him. All very odd. Presumably by being so vague he knows it is difficult to check up.

It is he who is making the claims that he has helped find a missing body and solved a paedophile ring, and you who are defending him. It is up to him, or you, to present the unequivocal evidence that can be checked. What were the cases? What authorities/Police forces were involved? When did they happen?If he can or you can then, as always, you and he would be in for a most sincere apology and my undying dedication to promoting him and his work.

DD, you seem to have gone rather uncharacteristically quiet... or have I missed your follow-up to this?

[Matt]

DD, you seem to have gone rather uncharacteristically quiet... or have I missed your follow-up to this?

I think Farside equivocated on your evidence quite well enough.

[Nasib]

I think Farside equivocated on your evidence quite well enough.

Matt, are you saying that Farside equivocated - or that the evidence did?


equivocate:
to beat around the bush, prevaricate, misinform, mislead, to use vague or ambiguous language in order to deceive someone or to avoid telling the truth

[Trinoc]

I thought "equivocate" was probably the wrong word here as well, but I couldn't figure out which word was actually intended.

[Lord Muck oGentry]

Expatiate?

[Matt]

Richard said that he would issue an appology if unequivocal evidence was presented. The link no longer works but if memory serves. Here is the evidence that Gordon help find a missing person.

Person goes missing.
Parents of missing person contact Smith.
He says - wait for it... Passed away near running water (How original)
He also made them sign a piece of paper to say they wouldn't mention what he'd said (in case he was wrong?)
He passes them on to a colleague.
Suprise suprise this guy "independantly" makes the same prediction: Passed away near running water and even "pinpoints" a place to search.
Parents visit and search this area but find nothing.
A year later body is found by chance. The person who found the first body part remembers the search. Presumably if it weren't for the extra publicity caused by this second psychic conducting a search nearby this french fellow would just have ignored the human body part he found and not have contacted the police but thanks to the tireless efforts of our friends the psychics this was identified forensically as the missing person.
Since the body had been found in running water Gordon releases the parents from thier obligation to not mention his involvement.
This is presented in press sympathetic to the paranormal as psychic helps find missing person desperately trying to imply that had no psychic had been contacted things would have worked out very differently.

Farside went into more detail earlier in this thread. Showing that the evidence is far from unequivocal.

My use of the word equivocated may be wrong. I was merely trying to allude to the qualifier that Richard used. Yes Nasib you're right I should have said that it's the evidence that you presented which equivocates.

However Richard doesn't owe you an appology on the basis of it.

[Nasib]

Thanks Matt, although [with respect] I fear your memory may have been coloured somewhat by Farside's expatiated opinion of the evidence. Farside who said:

"It's impossible to have any respect for the man if you believe that what he is doing is fraudulent. I can't hide my disdain for someone who lies to grieving relatives unfortunately."

(I wonder if I had done the same, would it be inferred that I was hearing only what I wanted to hear?)

Farside also said:

"We also only have Sally Perrin's recollection of what she was told. We aren't told if there were things he said that weren't true, and she may not remember things she was told exactly."
"People who are grieving and not aware of the tricks of the game are the perfect fodder for a psychic. Cold reading is very successful in these conditions - who is going to question what a grieving relative is saying."

I disagree, and in this instance at least, the grieving mother's word is the integral source of the evidence, not tainted by any middle reporting embellishments. She has kept a conclusive diary of events from the day her son went missing - and as you can see from her writings, has admonished the newspaper reports which coloured any details to suit their own purposes.

(The link may no longer work, but I do have a cached verbatim version).

Blake Hartley went missing on 8th August 2004. The police had already made a thorough search of the river and all the surrounding areas. No body was found.
Not long after, Blake's mother was recommended to seek out Gordon Smith. She went to see him give a public demonstration of his mediumship and in a question-and-answer session asked him if he could help her find her son? He agreed to give her a private reading and as well as providing a wealth of information which, Sally Perrin says, "he couldn’t possibly have known", he confirmed her son was dead.

He "saw" people chatting around Blake in a bar or nightclub and a new mate he barely knew was with him. He also described a raging river with steep banks on either side, surrounded by marshy flat land with mountains in the background. It was in this river that Blake’s remains would be found – but not, he predicted, until towards the third anniversary of his disappearance.

Referring to Blake’s death, Gordon Smith had told his mother that he could "hear" fast moving water and felt his body was near a weir, 60 kilometres south of Chamonix. Having accepted that Blake was dead, they wanted closure by finding tangible evidence of his fate. But his body could have been anywhere in a 100-kilometre stretch of river. Fortunately, Gordon Smith’s reference to the weir narrowed the search to a specific point, some 60 kilometres from where Blake had disappeared. In fact, there were two weirs close together.

Gordon did not "pass her on to a colleague".
Sally Perrin wanted Gordon Smith to visit Chamonix with her and her husband to assist in the search but his commitments did not allow it. Instead, at the recommendation of someone who had seen the Blake Hartley website, they turned to another psychic, Dennis Mackenzie.

In May 2006 – long after the readings and the visit by Dennis Mackenzie to Chamonix – a man contacted Sally Perrin after seeing her website to tell her he had seen a body, which he was certain was Blake’s, 10 days after he disappeared. He had informed the French police but they didn’t seem to believe him.
The couple flew out to meet the man, who pledged that he and his friend, Claude Antoine, who knew the river well, would do everything they could to help find Blake’s remains. True to his word, that’s what they did for the next eight months, whenever conditions in the icy-cold, fast-running river allowed.

30 December 2006 a human femur was found. DNA proved it was Blake’s. It was virtually two years and five months since Blake had mysteriously vanished. (Gordon had predicted the body would not be found until nearing the 3rd anniversary of his first going missing)

Sally Perrin said "It was found in exactly the kind of area Gordon had described, Annoyingly, it was found just a few yards further south of the place where every search that we had conducted had ended, just downstream of a bridge that denotes the beginning of the torrent, where, according to the police, bodies do not get caught up!"


Back to DD. You said

"Claiming this sort of thing is so vile if it is untrue, and I know what odds I would give on it being legitimate."

Based on these accounts, are you prepared to at least go some way to reducing those odds?

[tolman]

Personally, if I were asked to guess about where a body might be found when a disappearance had been near a river, and in
the area of disappearance, the river and its surroundings had been searched without luck, 'somewhere downstream in the river' would be a the most obvious guess.

Given that initial guess, finding the body 'in or near water' isn't an extra prediction at all - it's unavoidable.

Likewise, it's rather likelier that a body might be found in relatively calmer areas of a river, which would tend to be either a natural or artificial lake, or flatter areas of the river. Weirs are far from uncommon on French rivers, and so would be a good place to suggest as a possible location for finding a body.

Having mountains somewhere in the distance is a total a no-brainer - for rivers in or near the Alps, you just can't get away from the things.

I'm interested in the direction though.
Of course, when it comes to river predictions, if someone says 'Xkm downstream', if they're not specific, that can cover a multitude of locations, depending whether the measurement is along the river at a fine or coarse scale, or as-the-crow-flies from the initial location.
You could only really be sure what they meant if they were explicit, or they took the time to point at a map, or travel to the location.

At the relevant scale, the river that runs through Chamonix runs somewhat west of northwest, towards Geneva, so I don't know what '60km south' is supposed to mean. 60km south is actually the middle of a National Park, at rather higher altitude than Chamonix.

I suppose if I didn't want to participate in a search and risk failing, then predicting that the body wouldn't be found for a while might be a good idea. That way, it might look less like I don't care if I say I can't go - after all, what's the point in going if the body isn't destined to be found soon?

[Nasib]

tolman:

Personally, if I were asked to guess about where a body might be found when a disappearance had been near a river, and in
the area of disappearance, the river and its surroundings had been searched without luck, 'somewhere downstream in the river' would be a the most obvious guess.

Given that initial guess, finding the body 'in or near water' isn't an extra prediction at all - it's unavoidable.

Likewise, it's rather likelier that a body might be found in relatively calmer areas of a river, which would tend to be either a natural or artificial lake, or flatter areas of the river. Weirs are far from uncommon on French rivers, and so would be a good place to suggest as a possible location for finding a body.

In which case, why was the body not found in the early stages of the 'official searches' ? How was it then that the 'most likely' places were not covered - and that the remains were found where "every search that we had conducted had ended, just downstream of a bridge that denotes the beginning of the torrent, where, according to the police, bodies do not get caught up"

According to Sally Perrin the French police didn’t put much effort into trying to find him. "They were nice but useless. The British Army wasn’t much better."

She also said that Gordon told them that Blake’s body would remain hidden for almost three years and suggested that there was some sort of 'conspiracy' to cover up his true cause of death.


The manner of Blake’s death is still unclear. The few remains discovered were not enough to establish foul play and police cannot (or will not?) say whether he was murdered or died as the result of an accident.

More of Sally Perrin's words:

"The information that I received from Gordon was completely accurate,". "It wasn’t vague. There was lots of information that was private and that he couldn’t possibly have known about. It was his way of proving his credentials."

"As an example, Gordon told me that there was a picture close to the telephone of Blake abseiling down an ice-cliff. And there is. I put it up the day before meeting Gordon. Who the heck could have known that?"

"Gordon also said that he could see a gun dog sitting next to Blake, a very happy dog. The description perfectly matched Star, our dog who had passed over a few years earlier. Blake would often take her for a run. He also said that my daughter had received pink bed linen for Christmas that she still hadn’t unwrapped it. Who else could have known this?"

[tolman]

In which case, why was the body not found in the early stages of the 'official searches'? How was it then that the 'most likely' places were not covered

I understood that the predictions were made after unsuccessful official searches had been made in the initially most-likely places (close to where he went missing).
It seems fairly obvious that the most likely remaining places are places that hadn't been looked in, and if people are already known to have searched a river and then run out of enthusiasm/budget/whatever, then further downstream in the same river is also a fairly obvious place to suggest.
It really doesn't take a genius or a psychic to see where people stopped looking and then suggest one of the next remaining best areas as a possible target.

... - and that the remains were found where "every search that we had conducted had ended, just downstream of a bridge that denotes the beginning of the torrent, where, according to the police, bodies do not get caught up"

Seems to me the police may have been entirely right, since a body didn't get caught up there. Instead, a bone was found, which is a rather different thing.
It seems possible or even probable that the bone was not there when they were doing the original search, but slowly worked its way downstream over the following 2 years, and could have been hanging around at the bottom of deeper water upstream waiting to get carried down by a flood, so if they had looked farther downstream at the time, they might still have found nothing.

People looking for a body might easily miss body parts. For reasons possibly better not gone into, a body as a whole may be rather more likely to float than a leg, and so a search for a body might basically be an examination of the surface of the river, eddies, places with overhanging branches, etc

According to Sally Perrin the French police didn’t put much effort into trying to find him. "They were nice but useless. The British Army wasn’t much better."

Police don't have unlimited budgets, and local volunteers only have so much time to give.
Not knowing the local situation, I don't even know how far one load of police can search before ending up on someone else's patch.
They may take the view that a certain size of search is all they can afford, and that if someone is further down the river, they'll turn up eventually anyway, or never be found.
That kind-of seems to be what happens here as well. In the specific cases I can think of, that's true even when someone is known to have gone into the river, since searching an entire river could be an expensive and dangerous process.

The manner of Blake’s death is still unclear. The few remains discovered were not enough to establish foul play and police cannot (or will not?) say whether he was murdered or died as the result of an accident.

Short of finding poisons or clear marks of violence, the manner of many deaths is unclear if they happened years before. That's not spooky, it's just the way things work out.
It rather sounds like (from your own assessment) that it's a case of the police not having (and never being likely to have) enough evidence to say what actually happened, and therefore responsibly choosing not to to give a definitive answer.
What else could they do, apart from saying that working from statistics, they think it was probably an accident?
It's very easy for people to hold onto the idea of foul play, since in a case of someone falling/possibly being pushed into a river, without eyewitnesses, it's never possible to disprove.

It can also be tempting to think that a loved one wasn't responsible for their own death by wandering around after a night in a bar. However, encouraging that temptation seems like a deeply unpleasant and irresponsible thing to do.

Any suggestions on where the '60km south' came from, or what it is supposed to relate to?

[Nasib]

This is the part that I find slightly disturbing - and which no-one seems to have picked up on:

In May 2006 – long after the readings and the visit by Dennis Mackenzie to Chamonix – a man contacted Sally Perrin after seeing her website to tell her he had seen a body, which he was certain was Blake’s, 10 days after he disappeared. He had informed the French police but they didn’t seem to believe him. ??? Suggests to me that there is more there than meets the eye. I could not find any more (public) mention of that, which I find surprising. I wonder, was there perhaps an internal inquiry conducted by the Army - which the public may never get to hear about. Is this where the "code of honour" comes into it?

ETA: He is the same man who eventually found the femur bone, a long time after that.

[tolman]

Suggests to me that there is more there than meets the eye.

I suppose a lot depends on how many people typically claim to have seen bodies, (or to have seen what they thought were bodies) when someone goes missing in or near a river.
Maybe that's a large number, maybe it isn't.
If judging whether a sighting is worth following up it could depend on how the witness presents themselves, when they saw what they saw (lighting conditions, etc), whether it was a good look or a brief glimpse, where the sighting was (how far would the body might have moved by now, would you expect it to get conveniently caught up at the next weir if it does exist), what the existing search plan was (are there enough people to divert someone without wrecking an existing methodical plan?)

I wonder, was there perhaps an internal inquiry conducted by the Army - which the public may never get to hear about. Is this where the "code of honour" comes into it?

So now you're inventing a hypothetical enquiry to explain the 'code of honour' stuff that Smith invented?

If someone had pushed him into the river, (or, conversely, if someone had seen him jump in the river, or drown while showing off when drunk) would they *really* be likely to tell any enquiry the truth while 'likely accidental death' was the current best theory, and the initial evidence given to police was that no-one knew what happened?
If there had been an enquiry, it seems unlikely it would have actually been given any embarrassing evidence, or reached any embarrassing conclusions, so if there was a desire to cover things up, what would be the harm of an enquiry in public?

However, if all the people who last saw him tell the same story "He just wandered off from the camp", there's really not a lot to enquire about unless you have some cause not to believe them, or you think they were sober enough that they should have been able to stop him.
Someone being drunk enough not to believe they were in the right place even when they were is reasonably consistent with someone who's ambulatory but possibly at a fair risk of harm if wandering around near a river.

[Nasib]

So now you're inventing a hypothetical enquiry to explain the 'code of honour' stuff that Smith invented?

No, just turning things over in my mind. After all, there must have been a reason for this expression being brought up. Someone here has suggested a likely reason was that Gordon was making excuses - ok, that's a fair and reasonable deduction, but it's not the only one and if it were the case that he found it necessary to make an excuse, isn't it a rather unusual and complicated choice of wording?

However, if all the people who last saw him tell the same story "He just wandered off from the camp",

He didn't wander off from the camp, as such ...

After striking camp, Blake and the lads wandered into the heart of Chamonix to spend an evening sampling fine French food and wine in the local bars and restaurants.

There were 8 of them in all, drinking heavily by all accounts for some length of time. He and one other soldier left, together, to head back to camp.

In the early hours of the next morning, Blake separated from the others and headed back to the campsite with a colleague. Blake and the other soldier apparently disagreed on the way home so they each headed in different directions.

So, that "one other" would have been the last person to have seen Blake, and his account of what happened would surely hold some importance. The last person to see him was another soldier. He would surely have been questioned by his superiors. A "disagreement on the way home"? They each headed in different directions.

Ominously, Blake was last seen wandering towards a raging tributary of the river L’Arve. He was never seen alive again.

Last seen by whom? The other soldier? If so, why on earth would he continue on in a different direction, in the knowledge that Blake was "wandering towards a raging tributary of the river"? Not exactly a disagreement on the way home. ???

Undoubtedly, these questions must already have been asked and an investigation of sorts carried out, involving liaison between Army and Police, and it's my inclination (not invention, just my thoughts) that the involvement of the Police in a situation like this would come second place. In other words, the matter would be investigated internally.
A similar situation, were it to occur in Northern Ireland, e.g. I believe would be dealt with in the same manner (in which case a "code of honour" may have some relevance).

[tolman]

No, just turning things over in my mind. After all, there must have been a reason for this expression being brought up. Someone here has suggested a likely reason was that Gordon was making excuses - ok, that's a fair and reasonable deduction, but it's not the only one and if it were the case that he found it necessary to make an excuse, isn't it a rather unusual and complicated choice of wording?

It's not at all an unusual choice of words, if he wanted to avoid saying anything explicit.

There were 8 of them in all, drinking heavily by all accounts for some length of time. He and one other soldier left, together, to head back to camp.

So, that "one other" would have been the last person to have seen Blake, and his account of what happened would surely hold some importance. The last person to see him was another soldier. He would surely have been questioned by his superiors. A "disagreement on the way home"? They each headed in different directions.

There's a world of difference between asking the only known person who might know anything, and 'holding an enquiry'.

What could an enquiry possibly do apart from ask the last known person to see him what happened?
About the only likely outcome of an enquiry would be a conclusion that it was probably an accidental death, which someone with suspicions would then consider to be a cover-up.

Last seen by whom? The other soldier? If so, why on earth would he continue on in a different direction, in the knowledge that Blake was "wandering towards a raging tributary of the river"? Not exactly a disagreement on the way home.

The other soldier apparently thought [correctly] that he was going the right way - why on earth would he follow someone he thought was going the wrong way?
In any case, if I was sober in an unfamiliar town at night, even if I knew where I was going, and the direction someone else was heading off in, I wouldn't necessarily know exactly what they were heading towards.
Even if I did know someone was heading generally towards a river, I could be forgiven for assuming they'd only try to cross it where there was a bridge.

Have you had any experience of people who are getting argumentative-drunk or stubborn-drunk? It's pretty much impossible to convince them that they're wrong, and it's by no means unlikely that the other soldier was in a similar state, only he happened to be right, and wanting to get back to his pit.
Sometimes, you just have to let people realise that they're wrong, and the vast majority of the time, they're fine, especially if they're generally OK at looking after themselves.
People end up finding their way back home hours later, or spending the night in a barn or under a hedge massively more often than they end up coming to harm. It's just that you only hear about the situations where things have gone wrong.

Undoubtedly, these questions must already have been asked and an investigation of sorts carried out, involving liaison between Army and Police, and it's my inclination (not invention, just my thoughts) that the involvement of the Police in a situation like this would come second place. In other words, the matter would be investigated internally.
A similar situation, were it to occur in Northern Ireland, e.g. I believe would be dealt with in the same manner (in which case a "code of honour" may have some relevance).

'Investigation of sorts'?
That seems like a rather sinister way of describing what apparently couldn't amount to much more than a brief questioning, whoever was undertaking it.

If the only thing you can discover is a short and quite plausible explanation from someone who doesn't show any apparent signs of being dishonest, what more could you do?
Keep asking them over and over in a way that implies you think they're lying, even in a situation where all you know is that someone is missing?

I assume you're aware that even in cases where there are actually solid reasons to suspect foul play (someone's estranged spouse disappearing, etc), sensible authorities are fairly reluctant to throw accusations around until they have actual evidence.
On the other hand, a self-proclaimed psychic can effectively point a finger without taking responsibility.

The pissing about with initials would seem to be a way of apparently identifying someone whilst keeping some comforting vagueness.
If there were spirits, giving the initial would basically be a coward's way of trying to sneak around a self-claimed code of honour.
Even if something had happened, it would seem far better to either really keep quiet (or say it was just an accident), or bring everything out into the open if it would lead to some kind of resolution.

However, for a psychic cynically pandering to the worries of a parent, the initial makes perfect sense - enough to make an accusation without any need to stand behind it.