The first step in testing this claim is to confirm that the psychic is seeing something at all. We can worry about whether or not his diagnosis is accurate later on.

One might be tempted to do this by gathering a group of psychics and comparing what they describe; if they all independently see a sky blue aura around you, then perhaps we have a real phenomenon on our hands. However this approach isn’t as dependable as we’d like. In observing your face and demeanor they’re each gathering information about you, consciously or subconsciously. If they see that you have a calm, happy attitude and the cultural consensus is that calm, happy people have sky blue auras, then it isn’t unthinkable that their intuitions might be the product of a mundane mental process. We need to come up with a test that isn’t so vulnerable to non-psychic interference.

Such a test was conducted by James Randi during a TV special called Exploring Psychic Powers Live! that aired in 1989. The psychic being tested chose ten people whose auras were clearly visible to her. On stage were ten numbered screens which some of the volunteers were to stand behind. The screens were short enough that the psychic was comfortable a person’s aura could be seen above them, allowing her to identify which screens concealed a person and which didn’t. The volunteers were randomly distributed behind them and the psychic was asked to make her determination. She saw auras over all ten screens, however only four of the screens had a volunteer behind them. Had she been correct the agreed upon number of times (eight out of ten) she would have won a $100,000 prize, but her success rate was no better than predicted by chance.

The most important thing to take away from this experiment is that both the tester and the psychic were in agreement that the test was sound. She didn’t feel that the test was unfair; she simply failed it. You should take the same approach in your own tests. Always make sure that the person being tested is confident he can pass it. Stacking the deck against him in any way would be cheap and dishonest, making the test nothing but a waste of both of your time. The goal is to reveal the truth, not prove a point.

It was also wise of the testers to make sure that the aura was in plain sight. It would be an easy mistake to use a floor to ceiling barrier, assuming that whatever the psychic was perceiving would just pass right through it anyway. This would introduce an opportunity for the subject to cry foul — an unnecessary weakness in the test. It isn’t up to the tester to make decisions about the mechanics of clairvoyance. If the subject argues that something interferes with his abilities you should take his word for it. In fact, you should calibrate your experiment from the beginning by letting the subject watch a volunteer walk behind the screen and ask him, “Can you still see the aura?” Adjust the screen until he does, then proceed with the test.

But what about other aura reading techniques? Auras aren’t always seen; sometimes they’re felt.

A test for the tactile perception of the body’s energy field was brilliantly devised in 1996 by Emily Rosa, then 9 years old, for her 4th grade science project. She tested 21 Therapeutic Touch practitioners by having each one sit at a table and extend his or her hands through a screen. From the other side Emily would hover one of her hands (decided by coin toss) over one of the practitioner’s.

Being accomplished aura-manipulators it should have been trivial for them to pinpoint which of their hands was an inch from Emily’s, but given ten tries each none of the practitioners did better than chance. Two years later Emily became the youngest person ever to publish a paper — “A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch” — in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

We should all aspire to be at least as clever as a 4th grader in our own tests of the paranormal. Hopefully these real world examples give you some ideas to play with. If your subject sees auras when no one is there, and doesn’t when there’s a body right in front of him, then it’s a safe bet that what he’s perceiving was in his head all along. If you ever manage to find someone who can consistently pinpoint an aura where (and only where) an aura should be, I’d be very interested to hear about it. As would Randi and Rosa.

Since a person is more inclined to trust and value the opinions of a spirit guide and consequently be more willing to make life decisions based on its advice, exposing a false guide is especially important.

Testing channeling and testing spirit guides go hand in hand. You need to establish that your channel is indeed authentic before the words of a spirit guide can hold any cosmic weight (and if you find such a channel let me know). But even if you already trust your channel and don’t feel compelled to go through the process of validating it, I implore you to take these simple steps with your guides just to see what sorts of results you get. Your findings, positive or negative, can only carry you closer to the truth.

A spirit guide knows you very well. Some of them have more insight into your inner and outer lives than any embodied person could. There are only so many questions you can ask an unfamiliar entity that you can reasonably expect it to know the answers to, but with a spirit guide you have a goldmine of testing opportunities.

One approach is to ask it for details about your day to day life. Think of it as just another person who spends a lot of time with you. Like an embodied person it has its own life and isn’t always present, so a question like “what was I doing at exactly 2:48pm last Tuesday?” wouldn’t be fair. Remember, we want to design a test that’s almost impossible for a made-up entity to pass, and almost impossible for the genuine article to fail.

Ideally you don’t want to make the answer to your question guessable. “Did I have waffles or cereal for breakfast this morning?” gives a fraudulent medium a 50/50 chance of getting the right answer. These odds are far too generous. Leave the question open-ended. Ask the entity for a description of a recent scene of its choice and see what it comes up with. Be very wary of a vague, ambiguous response, and try not to let yourself shrug and decide “well, that’s close enough” because you want so much for the guide to be real. There’s no reason the answer couldn’t be just as specific and accurate as one your mother or your best friend would give.

I checked in on you while you were at the grocery store yesterday. You were upset about your breakup with Allison and I came to provide emotional support. You were mumbling bitterly to yourself about her not returning the DVDs you loaned her. You walked past that ice cream your grandmother used to give you (against your mother’s wishes) to make you feel better. I nudged it into your awareness hoping you would put it in your cart, and you did…

A little snapshot of one minute of your week that the medium wasn’t around to see is all it would take. I would find the above extremely compelling if the medium didn’t know any of these details about my life. And it’s not a lot to ask for if the universe is as the medium says it is; it’s downright trivial.

If the medium claims that you can contact your guide telepathically (as is commonly believed) you don’t even have to go this far. You can simply send a message to the guide on the spot and ask it to repeat it through the medium. Telepathy may not be as precise as verbal communication, so you could even cut the guide a little slack here. If you pick a message that’s completely random and off topic and the medium still gets the gist of it, that’s an interesting piece of evidence. Make sure the medium can pass the test more than once.

In my own experience with spirit guide communication, I’ve had two reasons to be very suspicious. The first was that every time the medium channeled a guide for me, it was an entity I was being introduced to for the first time. Other people in the group I practiced with who had known the medium for years got messages constantly from guides they were familiar with. Because the group spent so much time discussing these messages between channelings, the medium came to learn the names of all these different guides without having to receive them psychically upon making contact. As an ongoing experiment I made it a point never to remind the medium of the names of my guides if I could help it. When messages came to me I didn’t want him to be able to just pull a name from his own memory.

As a result I ended up collecting a large number of one-shots who I never heard from again. Sometimes even a guide with a very important, long-term role would be replaced by a brand new guide a few months later, as if the medium had forgotten he had already filled that slot in my entourage. Unfortunately I wasn’t as gung-ho about testing mediums in those days so I didn’t delve deeper into this disparity, but it’s something to watch for.

The second thing that always nagged at me was the fact that I would never get messages from a guide I was familiar with through two separate mediums. Your guides are your guides; it shouldn’t matter which medium they speak through any more than it should matter whether a friend emails you or calls you. Alarm bells should be going off in your head if you’re maintaining a different circle of guides for every medium you work with, especially if those guides have overlapping roles.

I’ve only witnessed guides speaking to someone through a second medium on one occasion: during the Spiritualist workshop. And, surprise surprise, the names of those guides had been revealed to the Spiritualists at the message service the day before. I withheld the names of my guides and I was contacted by strangers yet again.

To hear a spirit guide start a conversation through one medium and finish it through another — without those mediums ever coming into contact with each other — could make for spectacular validation of the existence of these beings. And it should be a ridiculously easy feat. For a person who regularly interacts with a lot of mediums, this should happen on its own without encouragement.

If the mediums and the entities are genuine, why wouldn’t it?

If you’re currently under the counsel of the disembodied and are as frustrated as I was, this is an illuminating question to ask yourself.

For this sample test, we’ll assume that the entity doing the talking is located in the room and can independently perceive its audience (rather than seeing and hearing what the medium sees and hears). I believe this has been the case with every channeling I’ve attended, but the mechanics of mediumship will vary and you may encounter different scenarios.

First we need to establish that the information we’re receiving is really coming from an unseen entity and not from the medium himself. The value or prescience of this information isn’t important yet; we need to evaluate the channel itself before we start worrying about what comes through it. The degree of honesty and authority an entity demonstrates on a given subject is a judgment you’ll have to make over time, just as it is with any embodied person you meet.

You can devise a basic test for this one pretty easily. The entity can presumably wander the room, so all you have to do is ask it a question about something the medium can’t see. Write a message on a piece of paper obscured from view, making sure to check for reflective surfaces and the eyes of possible accomplices to keep things clean. If the entity can recite that message through the medium, then you have something impressive on your hands.

A long, unguessable message easily meets our criteria for weeding out false positives; now we have false negatives to deal with. If the test fails you’re just going to hear excuses for it, and if you inadvertently stack the deck against the entity they may be justified, so it’s important to ask the entity the following questions beforehand to prevent ambiguity:

1. Are you willing to participate in a quick test to confirm your presence?
2. Can you see the surface of the paper I’m about to write on?
3. Can you read aloud a message written in English?

If you receive something other than a solid “yes” to any of these questions, ask the medium if it would be possible to speak to another entity. Keep doing this with new entities until one comes along who’s eager to play the game, otherwise you probably won’t get anywhere. Trying to force a test will just work against you.

If the entity answers the first question affirmatively but has trouble with the others (e.g. it only sees through the medium’s eyes, or it doesn’t independently understand English and the medium’s brain somehow acts as a translator) then you at least have the opportunity to come up with a new test that’s more suitable.

And if you have the means, here’s a more complicated and potentially more interesting option. Seat the medium in a soundproof booth and sit outside the booth asking the entity questions. The entity should have no trouble hearing you — assuming the medium’s ears aren’t involved in the process — by situating itself outside the booth next to you. Record both sides of the conversation and play them back together. Do you get a coherent dialog as a result?

If the medium isn’t interested in participating in even a simple test, you have to start asking yourself if he has something to hide, or if he just doesn’t appreciate the need for an investigative approach. I’m not really sure which is worse, and you may be better off working with someone else either way. If the entity declines to cooperate and instead asks that you just have faith, well, the notion of faith in spiritual matters is, in my opinion, just a frighteningly effective tool for preserving the ambiguity needed to keep people believing in silly things (usually for someone else’s benefit). If the entity needs you to take a message to heart then granting you confirmation is the easiest and most effective way to make that happen. In a sane world, they would all be jumping at the chance. It just makes sense. Resort to faith at your own peril.

I should add that these tests don’t immediately confirm the presence of an entity. They only confirm that the medium can access information beyond the reach of his senses. The first test could conceivably be passed by a remote viewer, for instance. However, with more experience and more tests I think a separate entity would quickly become the simplest explanation. I’d devote more attention to this caveat but I don’t think you’ll find someone that tests this positively anyway. If you do, let me know.

Alert readers have probably asked themselves how a disembodied, immaterial being can be sensitive to material objects or even have a location in the first place. What exactly is it seeing and hearing with, and how could light and acoustics possibly be involved? And what does it mean to be somewhere in space and yet not occupy it? I’ve only come across a few unsatisfying answers from believers, and those are a subject for the future.

For anyone who doesn’t know how this is done, I’ll reveal it ahead of time. The cane is attached to a platform on the ground that’s hidden under the carpet. At the top of the cane is another platform, hidden by his pants, which he’s sitting on. You can even see it bending under his weight in this photo.

The ideal test for a paranormal claim like this is about as obvious as it gets, which is why I’m using it as our first example. With other claims it can get much murkier.

For someone who’s truly floating, letting go of the cane should be the easiest thing in the world to do. If after dropping it he drifts down slowly or even comes crashing to the ground (revealing that there was no platform), an inexplicable marvel has been confirmed.

And for someone who’s faking it, tossing the cane aside should be the hardest thing in the world to do. There’d have to be more to the cane than meets the eye which dropping it (if possible) would expose.

A good illusionist will have a few tests that he’ll volunteer. For example, he might “prove” that he’s floating by making a show of taking his hand off the cane — mustering up enough focus, steadying the cane against his thigh, timidly letting go, and then grabbing it again as soon as the strain becomes too great. All misdirection of course. There’s nothing wrong with being suspicious of tests that have been prepared for you in advance.

My advice is not to settle for ambiguity and not to accept mysterious excuses. Go straight to the heart of it. Just make him drop the damn cane. It really can be that simple.

There’s no reason why someone who is both genuine and who wants you to know that he’s genuine wouldn’t graciously comply.

If he can’t do that for you, move on to the next claim. It’s safe to say that there are vastly more charlatans in the world than authentic mystics who behave like charlatans. Your time is better spent on someone else.

The desire to test is often misinterpreted as an attack. It’s seen as equivalent to the statement, “I don’t believe you.” But in my opinion you honor something immensely by testing it. You give it the chance to reveal its full glory to you and the rest of the world. You imbue it with the strength and weight it deserves. A well-designed test is never a threat to something that’s true, only to something that’s false.

By testing a claim — especially a claim of your own — you can only come to a better and more authentic understanding of it. This is only a problem when you’re more interested in what you want to be true than in what is true. If it’s the latter you value, testing is always a win-win.

I’ve often had people try to sell me on an idea, and after talking to them I discover that they haven’t really tested the idea at all. They simply trusted the source of it, or liked the sound of it, and that was enough for them. If that’s really all they want it’s not my place to criticize, but I eagerly await the day when I come upon a claim that has already been tested more thoroughly by the bearer of it than I would have done myself. Then I know I’m dealing with someone serious.

Test, test, test. It’s ok. Really. This is what science is all about.

I’ve tried to come up with various tests that will most effectively prevent ambiguous results. Ambiguity can create just enough mystery to lure people into believing things which they would have otherwise been unimpressed by. It leaves gaps for people to hide in who are still clinging to shaky ideologies. It’s where wishful thinking flourishes.

There are ambiguities that we’ll never be relieved of, but some are surprisingly easy to wipe out with a little worthwhile effort. Let’s focus for now on the easy stuff.

You can make some excellent progress by sticking to this simple principle:

Every test should be as easy as possible for a genuine participant to pass, and as hard as possible for a fraudulent participant to pass, simultaneously.

Say you’re confronted by a blind person who claims that he can see. How could you test his claim quickly and easily in a way that would remove ambiguity?

You could try asking him what color the sky is. Our guiding principle shows us, however, that this is a pretty useless test. It is indeed easy for a sighted person to pass, but it’s also easy for a blind person to pass. A blind person has probably learned that if the sun is beating down on him, blue is a very good guess. If not, it might be better to go with white. If tested at night, he knows he should answer black. There’s huge potential here for a false positive.

So instead you try asking him how many fingers you’re holding up. This is still extremely easy for a sighted person, but there’s only a 10% chance of a false positive. Or a 9% chance if you’re clever enough to consider not holding up any fingers at all.

We can still do much better. We want the chance of a false positive or a false negative to be astronomically low — effectively zero, in other words.

You might consider writing a word on a piece of paper and asking him to read it aloud. A false positive is now incredibly unlikely, but what about a false negative? Could the person be able to see, but unable to read? Could he be dyslexic and have trouble with certain words? Do you have really sloppy handwriting? There isn’t that much danger of a false negative here, but if you can improve the test even further it’s worth doing.

You could return to the finger counting game, but instead of counting them once, you make him count them ten separate times. Now the odds are even greater against a false positive than in the word test (one in 26 billion), and you won’t find many sighted people out there who can’t count to ten.

And none of these tests take more than a minute to do.

We could improve on them further; I just want to give you the gist of the process.

By following this principle you manage to weed out a great deal of the ambiguity that will haunt you later, while keeping things very easy for the person being tested so he has little reason to object. The attitude is more likely to be, “That’s all I have to do? Piece of cake!” rather than, “Why are you bothering me with all this?” You don’t want to chase away the people who actually have something to show you, if you can help it.

The process isn’t rigorous or scientific, but done well it can give you a solid idea of someone’s true abilities in a very short period of time. When the truth of someone’s claim could alter your whole understanding of the very universe — as most supernatural claims would — it seems crazy not to take these very simple steps on a regular basis.

In the future I’ll try to give examples of tests that I think work well for specific claims that I’ve run into. The first is coming up next.