|
Dear
Ray,
...Turning to other matters, I agree with Victor Zammit
(Psychic World, March 2001) that any charges of fraud against the
Scole Group are completely unfounded - At no time during our
sittings with the Scole Group did Monty Keen, the late and sorely
missed Professor Arthur Ellison or myself (or any of the other
investigators who were invited to sit with us from time to time)
detect any hint of fraud. In addition, we were convinced of the
total integrity of each member of the Scole Group. I believe
that the only attempt to refer to fraud in print was by Bryan
Appleyard in the Sunday Times. Appleyard, the science
correspondent of the Sunday Times, had no sittings with the Scole
Group, and his article was based only on hearsay from critics and
contained numerous factual errors. To take just one example,
Appleyard printed, without bothering to check on its accuracy, a
claim made to him that no magician had been present at Scole. In
fact James Webster, a retired professional magician, an associate
of the Inner Magic Circle, and a man with many years of experience
in psychical research, attended three sittings, and made it
abundantly clear (for example at the SPR Study Day on Scole at
which he was one of our platform speakers) that in his
professional judgment the phenomena at Scole could not be
duplicated by trickery. I wrote to Appleyard listing the many
errors in his Sunday Times article, and published a paper
detailing them again in the Paranormal Review, one of the
publications of the SPR. Unfortunately (though I fear all too
predictably) Appleyard neither apologised for his errors nor
printed corrections to them in The Sunday Times.
In
our concluding chapter to the Scole Report (and at various points
throughout the Report itself) Monty Keen, the late Professor
Arthur Ellison and I detail all the vast range of activities which
the Scole Group would have had to carry out (and the detailed
equipment they would have needed) if fraud was even to be
attempted. No critic has taken up the challenge of explaining how
these activities could have taken place in the presence of
experienced investigators and given the circumstances of the room
at Scole in which the sittings were held. In addition, as authors
of the Scole Report, we challenged critics to duplicate by normal
means and under the conditions operating at Scole phenomena we
witnessed there. No-one took up the challenge.
Yours
Sincerely,
Prof
David Fontana
|
