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Delayed Scepticism Recently there was an article in the paper on a psychic who claimed to be in touch with spirits of the dead. The paper got two people to test her out, neither who was known to her beforehand. One was a self-confessed sceptic, who said he would be pleased to be able to show her up as a fraud and the other was a woman who was more sympathetic. The psychic dealt with the sceptic first and reported on his brother who committed suicide, then on his grandfather, and then on a relative who was killed in the World Trade Center bombings. The sceptic was, to use his own words, ‘blown away’ by the accuracy of her readings. Some events he was unable to verify at the time but were verified later. It would seem as though the sceptic would be convinced that, to quote Shakespeare, ‘There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Many sceptics have been exposed to events that are beyond the realm of the normal and were overwhelmed at the time. However, with time scepticism creeps back in. The intellect is able to explain away events. For example, people who see UFOs that are convincing at the time later say they were fooled by the light. One of the tricks sceptics use to ‘explain’ psychic events is to say that if they could be a rational explanation then therefore that must be the correct one. This is the same mechanism that people use to rationalise in retrospect. So when someone says, for example, they saw what they thought at the time was a UFO, but in retrospect was able to explain it away, then be sceptical.