Page 87 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - February 2023 Edition

Secret Sting to Expose Celebrity Psychic
Inside the Secret Sting
Operations to Expose
Celebrity Psychic
Continued from Page 86
Suddenly, the real sorrow of this
stranger’s loss was here, near me, on my
row. And then the whole room felt it.
“Your mom says I am taking
responsibility for that.” I could barely
look up. This little moment felt so
intimate and private. Grief is one of those
emotions that doesn’t happen publicly
too often, and so when it does, the mood
easily dominates the room. With each
reading, Fraser was, in fact, summoning
the dead because all these middle-aged
people had lived lives. We all knew
death, family death, deeply felt. One by
one, everyone in the room was reliving
some loss. Helplessly, I thought of my
own father, who died when I was 11, and
those old emotions, stored away but
never far off, took hold of me as if I were
graveside.
Grief is one of those emotions that
doesn’t happen publicly too often,
and so when it does, the mood shirt sleeves. Fraser stepped toward the
easily dominates the room.
By the time Fraser inched his way to the
other side of the auditorium, people were
even more forthcoming. Fraser came to a
middle-aged woman dressed in a colorful
scenic sweater. Her burly husband with a
snow white goatee and veteran’s cap was
beside her as she revealed losing two of
her sons, in tragic ways. She said she
missed them every day.
The audience was with her; our grief held
her. We were all wrapped in rich, old
memories of aching pain. Maybe dead
spirits aren’t real. But these emotions
were. My exhausted father waking up
early on his Saturday off to watch
cartoons with his little kid. Decades
disappeared. I squeezed back a little
boy’s confused tears. “Sonny boy,” my
mom said one morning, “I have
something sad to tell you.” I so miss him.
Fraser consoled the mother with news.
“Your son says he’s O.K.,” Fraser said,
speaking in the voice of one of her
deceased boys. The mother sobbed and
sank into her husband’s big chest. “More
important, they are together on the other
side.” Fraser learned that Christmas was out of character as Fraser signed one of
no longer celebrated at home, and Fraser his books for her: “Trust your own
crushed the room: “He says you have psychic voice.” []
another son, who needs you?” The
husband nodded; she nodded. “He says to
me, just because we’ve passed, it doesn’t
mean my mother stops her life.”
Even the most stoic of men were
overwhelmed, heads turned away, into
couple and took both of them in a long,
sobbing group hug. Then he moved away.
There were a few more readings, each a
little bit easier emotionally. Fraser was a
brilliant performer, cooling off the room.
With a couple of light jokes salted with
naughty words, he bolted onto the stage,
and then disappeared into the wings.
Eventually, Gerbic’s Guerrillas will
produce an account, and Operation Peach
Pit will be online with the hope of
reaching a future audience with logic.
But there was no denying the real power
of what we all felt in the room. “Reason,”
wrote the philosopher David Hume
almost 300 years ago, “is and ought only
to be the slave of passions.”
The real world was out there, in fact, just
down this hall, but it was hard for me to
get there as the crowd inched along.
Fraser appeared in the corridor at a table
with stacks of his book, “The Secrets to
Unlocking Your Psychic Ability.” On the
cover was oversmiling Tom Cruise
bathed in heavenly light, clutching a
gigantic key longer than his forearm. Out
the corner of my eye, I caught a blue wig
in the line of fans. Zoe couldn’t quite get
87
DEBUNKED: There’s Life On
Venus
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet
Union sent several uncrewed missions to
study Venus. Ten of these Venera probes
landed on the surface of Venus and were
able to transmit data and images for a few
minutes before succumbing to the planet's
extreme atmosphere. In 2012, the Russian
news service RIA Novosti reported that
Leonid Ksanfomaliti (opens in new tab), a
scientist who worked on the Venera
missions, suggested that the photographs
showed living objects moving around on
the planet's surface. (RIA Novosti ceased
operations (opens in new tab) in 2013.)
These alleged life-forms on Venus are just
an example of "letting your mind see
patterns in low-resolution data that simply
aren't real," Jonathon Hill, a research
technician who processes images taken
during NASA's Mars missions, explained to
Space.com's sister site, LiveScience (opens
in new tab), in 2012.
According to NASA, the objects that
appeared to be moving were actually
camera-lens covers that automatically
popped off of the cameras after landing
LiveScience reports. These half-circle
objects were seen in images from Venera-
13 and Venera-14, two identical spacecraft
that landed about 590 miles (950 km) apart.
Both had two identical cameras — one in
the front and one in the back — so it makes
sense that the covers would appear in
different places. Another photograph that
Ksanfomaliti said was a scorpion is actually
a blur in the image.