Skepticism – Prairie Dog

Close Encounters Of The Coffey Kind

Chip Coffey sure doesn’t like me. He isn’t a big fan of the Centre For Inquiry Regina either. Found this out when I showed up before his show at the Hotel Saskatchewan last night to take some pics of the CFI crew. They were handing out fliers with information about the methods psychics use in their shows, and I thought a blog post on their action might make a nice coda to our Chip Coffey coverage.

Didn’t realize I’d end up getting a chance to shake the hand of the man himself.

Just as I was preparing to head home and CFI Regina was leaving to have a post-action drink at Beer Bros, Coffey stormed out from the lobby to confront the people protesting his show.

Of course, they weren’t actually protesting. As they tried to explain to him, they were standing around on a public walkway, handing out pamphlets to audience members who were interested. And, they told me, they also went into the hotel and left a few fliers in the bathrooms.

Coffey wasn’t interested in making distinctions between people distributing information and people marching around with placards and shouting slogans as at one point he declared that “you skeptics” are just like the Westboro Baptist Church. A bit of a stretch, but hey, the guy was pretty pissed off.

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The Dark Side Of Coffey: An Interview With Mentalist Mark Edward

As soon as Chris up at Planet S suggested I do a piece on psychic, Chip Coffey (complete Coffey interview here), I knew I wanted to talk to a professional magician who has some first-hand knowledge of how psychics work.

And I was lucky enough to get a hold of Mark Edward. He works as a mentalist and magician and also as a psychic entertainer — that’s someone who puts on readings and seances but doesn’t pretend that what he’s doing is in any way supernatural. He lets the audience know that it’s all tricks and craft.

He also works with the Center For Inquiry and recently published Psychic Blues: Confessions of a Conflicted Medium, a memoir of his time working the 900 lines as a psychic, learning the secrets of the industry.

Last year, Edward was ejected from a Chip Coffey show in Los Angeles for giving out cold reading tip sheets.

He refers to Coffey as a “grief vampire.”

Below the fold, an excerpt from our interview.¹

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Me Being A Duplicitous Bastard: My Interview With Psychic, Chip Coffey

Tonight, renowned paranormal-television personality, Chip Coffey, will be at the Sask Hotel showing off his skills of a psychic.

I interviewed him for the most recent issue and as I mentioned in the resulting article, “Psychic Coffey“, I am not a believer in the spiritual mumbo-jumbo that Coffey is selling so it was maybe a tad on the shitty side for me talk to him without tipping him to my skepticism.

But I’m unrepentant.

I find that whole mediumship schtick of claiming to contact the dead friends or relatives of grieving people to be a pretty egregious misuse of a talent for cold reading.

But Coffey took things a step or seven further with his A&E show, Psychic Kids, in which he convinced teens and pre-teens that their normal feelings of weirdness and adolescent confusion are actually signs of psychic powers. That was a despicable sideshow of child exploitation. These were kids who needed a sit down with a trained psychologist, or, more likely, a hug and a hobby.¹

Instead they were encouraged to chase chimeras.

I did ask Coffey about the show and the criticism he’s received. And he defended himself in the way you might expect.

After the jump, a transcript of the interview.

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