Sylvia Browne

From SkepticWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Sylvia Browne (born October 19, 1936, Kansas City, Missouri USA) is a self-proclaimed psychic, medium and author on the topic of spirituality, particularly pertaining to contacting the after-life.

Criticism of Sylvia Brown include James Randi[1], who has described her techniques as being mentalism and cold-reading techniques, posing as clairvoyance.[2][3]. The site Stop Sylvia Browne[4] was established by Robert Lancaster in 2006 in order to provide regular lengthy commentaries and articles about her claims, predictions and details of her historical background.[5]

Contents

[edit] Origins

Browne was born in Kansas City, Missouri USA, the eldest of two daughters to Bill and Celeste Shoemaker. Her father was a Jewish vice-president of a freight line; her mother was Episcopalian with Lutheran background. Browne described her faith as Jewish in a 2001 interview on Larry King.[6].

Browne's career as a claimed psychic began in 1974, developing world-wide supporters and critics [7]. She has claimed to have provided information to the FBI and police departments on missing person cases as a psychic detective [8]; according to The Skeptics Dictionary, in twenty-one of thirty-five cases, the details she gave were too vague, and in the remaining fourteen Browne played no useful role.[9]

Browne is the founder of a church in 1986 in Campbell, California, known as the 'Society of Novus Spiritus' and is head of the Sylvia Browne Corporation. From 1995, she was a frequent guest on 'The Montel Williams Show', a talk-show syndicated by CBS Paramount. She hosts an hour-length radio show on Hay House Radio, acting as a commentator and presenting in the guise of a psychic advisor.

As of 2007, she has authored and co-authored around sixty books on topics ranging from predictions, prayers, meditations and self-help.[10] Her career has involved one-on-one readings and lectures; as of 2008 she charges $850 for a 20-30 minute telephone reading.[11]

[edit] Quotations

"I've done 40-some-odd years of research. And for instance, I have taken people who were Islamic or Protestant or Children from Turkey to Egypt, in death and dying, in astral projection and in hypnosis, they all saw the exact same topography. There can't be some big imagination bubble in the sky that everybody tunes into. Why do they all see the Hall of Wisdom, the Hall of Records, when I didn't even know it existed? So why does everybody see the same thing?"[12]

"A ghost is someone who hasn't made it -- in other words, who died, and they don't know they're dead. So they keep walking around and thinking that you're inhabiting their -- let's say, their domain. So they're aggravated with you."[13]

“A spirit is, like, your mother, my dad, who've made it. They can come around, but they come around in a loving way because they've already made it to God. Most people make it.”[14]

“It's abundantly clear that we already have extraterrestrials living among us, and people are stepping forward who can communicate with them.” [15]

[edit] Shawn Hornbeck Case

In 2002, 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck was reported missing from his Missouri home on October 6th. Browne appeared on The Montel Williams Show on February 6, 2003, with the boy's parents, Pam and Craig Akers and informed the couple that he "is no longer with us".[16] Shawn Hornbeck was actually abducted and found alive four years later.

The case of Brown's false predictions about Shawn Hornbeck's death to his parents resulted in an Ofcom ruling in June 2008 that ITV2 "breached standards with a repeat of the Montel Williams Show in which a 'desperate' couple were told by a psychic their missing son Shawn was dead - even though he turned up alive last year." The ruling concerned "breaching rule 2.1 of the Broadcasting Code, which relates to protecting viewers against offensive material."[17] [18]

[edit] External Links

[edit] Related Topics

[edit] References

Retrieved from "http://skepticwiki.org/index.php/Sylvia_Browne"
Personal tools