First Annual "What Ever Happened to David Thompson?" Essay Contest

WARNING: Sense of Humor Required.

I'm happy to announce the first annual, "What ever happened to David Thompson?" Essay Contest.

As some of you may know, an Australian Survival of Death enthusiast, Victor Zammit, declared last year that the physical materializations of medium David Thompson were "Earth Shattering" and would change everything we know about consciousness survival. This Earth shattering news has barely reached the level of a yawn in the heavens. Why? Well, for starters, the experiments Down Under are anything but scientific, despite the claims of Mr. Zammit. Secondly, David Thompson is a fraud.

In the 4-5 years since David Thompson has been claiming to materialize dead people through the secretion of ectoplasm which supposedly exudes from his bodily orifices, no one has taken these ludicrous claims seriously. Yet, David Thompson is still pulling the wool over people's eyes Down Under, and now, he's taking his ScamFlam on the road with a tour of the UK.

Knowing I couldn't save a few poor British souls from being taken in by this charlatan-come-lately, I decided that the best thing to do in this situation was to mentally fast-forward another year or so in time and live happy knowing David Thompson has either been exposed as the fraud he is, or he's been rightfully forgotten. Yes, in the very near future, David Thompson will have been sent back to the boggy marsh from whence he emerged, and his giddy publicist, Victor Zammit, will be off chasing some other quixotic windmill.

Wait a second, this smells like a contest. Maybe my version of David Thompson's future is totally off. Perhaps some reader out there can come up with a better scenario for David Thompson's eventual downfall.

So, I decided to invite the public to write their own essay on how the David Thompson story should end? Why not? David Thompson's claims are so incredulous and imaginative, they deserve an equally imaginative finale.

So, even if you don't know who materialization medium David Thompson is, you can still take part in the contest by reading up on all the controversy here.

The What Ever Happened to David Thompson? Essay Contest

Rules and Guidelines

1)Write a 500 word or less imaginative and fictitious essay answering the question, "What ever happened to David Thompson?"

2)The essay must be creative and entertaining.

3)Essay must end with the phrase, "Ectoplasm! I knew it."

4) All submissions must be received by Halloween night, October 31, 2007.

5)All submissions must be sent to mc@afterlifemedium.com and must be from a valid email address and include a first name* and verifiable telephone number.**

Judging & Voting

I will personally pick the 10 best essays and then ask the viewing public to vote for their top three favorites.

Prizes
The top three entries will receive a FREE reading with me.
Winners who may have already had a reading with me or anyone else not desiring the reading for themselves may gift the prize to anyone of their own choosing.

First prize - a FREE 2 hour reading
Second Prize - a FREE hour and a half reading
Third prize - a FREE hour reading.

Legalities

*I will only allow anonymous entries, as long as the true author reveals themselves privately to me.
**Personal phone numbers are only requested to authenticate essay entrant and will never be published, sold or used for any form of marketing or solicitation.


Now, for your listening pleasure, my AfterlifeFM interview with blogger, Michael Prescott, where we discuss the dubious claims of materialization medium, David Thompson.

So, let's all get creative and help me figure out "What ever happened to David Thompson?"

10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain

The real mystery of who we are lies somewhere between the known and the unknown territory we call the brain. I think future generations will look back to the beginning of the 21st century as the time when we humans realized that the Keep It Simple Stupid(KISS) principle wasn't such a bad way to exist. :-)

For people crazy for information about our brain 10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain

Talking Consciousness

Courtesy of famed neuroscientist, Christof Koch and his Klab we have a wonderful compilation of definitions of terms used in the study of consciousness.

Better off dead?

The old saying, everyone has their price, has even more meaning now that Mingle2, an online dating service, has put up a cadaver calculator on their website.

When you think that love-hungry singles are meeting total strangers on the net, then the whole cadaver calculator on a dating site seems even more creepy than usual.

BTW, my cadaver is worth $4115.00. Don't tell my wife that, though...

$4115.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth. From Mingle2 - Free Dating Site

Mingle² - Free Dating Site

David Thompson - The Fraud from Oz

My colleague in the study of psi and the paranormal, Michael Prescott, has written a thorough and stinging final episode about David Thompson and his claims of materialization mediumship. It is definitely worth the read. I have been vocally challenging the claims coming out of Australia for some time now. Last year, I interviewed Victor Zammit, Mr. Thompson's sponsor, about the controversy on the radio show, Conversations from Beyond.

This year, I interviewed Michael Prescott on the very same topic on my new radio show, AfterlifeFM.

Some people, including my wife, have asked, "why do you care so much about what that guy does in Sydney?" My answer is very simple. He is destroying the credibility of something I cherish deeply - the study of consciousness survival. If phonies and frauds are allowed to bamboozle the believing public, then when that person is eventually exposed, why would any scientist or interested person ever believe me in what I am saying about consciousness survival. In some tangent way, confronting frauds like David Thompson is as important as confronting Holocaust deniers.

Sadly, when there's money to be made from people''s need to believe, the rats and vultures are never far behind. Be Skeptical. Be Open. Beware.

The Rhetoric of Madness

Last night I watch the Republican Party debate and came away with a feeling that the only true debate taking place was a brief, yet, heated exchange over the war in Iraq between Texas Congressman, Ron Paul, and former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee.

Then today, I received an email from a friend who sent me a link to another video making some noise on YouTube. The video is a hard-biting, poignant and unequivocal damnation of Bush’s strategy and policy in Iraq. Watch it here.

Agree or disagree, it is hard to ignore the quotable facts behind Keith Olbermann’s recent commentary on MSNBC.

There’s a lot to think about before next year’s election, but there’s nothing, outside of one’s own health and family, that’s more important. I have two children now. I don’t want to even imagine what awaits them in tomorrow’s world. I guess that’s what all parents have said, generation after generation, but it seems that few generations have raised the stakes as high as ours has.

I don’t care about Republicans or Democrats anymore. I just crave truth and honesty, and frankly, I don’t even know where to start looking for that. So, I am going to just pray for the end of madness and hope someone hears me. Please feel free to join in.

Who's Afraid of the Afterlife?

The following is an abstract of a paper written by Dr. Neal Grossman. The article appears in the first issue of AntiMatters, a quarterly open-access journal addressing issues in science and the humanities from non-materialistic perspectives.

The evidence for an afterlife is sufficiently strong and compelling that an unbiased person ought to conclude that materialism is a false theory. Yet the academy refuses to examine the evidence, and clings to materialism as if it were a priori true, instead of a posteriori false. I suggest several explanations for the monumental failure of curiosity on the part of academia. First, there is deep confusion between the concepts of evidence and proof. Second, materialism functions as a powerful paradigm that structures the shape of scientific explanations, but is not itself open to question. The third explanation is intellectual arrogance, as the possible existence of disembodied intelligence threatens the materialistic belief that the educated human brain is the highest form of intelligence in existence. Finally, there is a social taboo against belief in an afterlife, as our whole way of life is predicated on materialism and might collapse if near-death experiences, particularly the life review, was accepted as fact.

PDF link to Dr. Grossman's article