Episode Details

Are they just fun parlor tricks? Spiritual gifts and miracles like the ones we read in the Bible? Demonic manifestations? Or simply mind-over-matter?

Dr. Alan Streett was on a career trajectory to be a professional baseball player when a major arm injury and a psychic healer diverted him into Seminary studies as a non-believing church pastor-in-training who got drunk on Saturday nights, preached Billy Graham sermons the next morning, and spent the rest of his time researching the paranormal!?  After finishing his PhD, he had a life-changing spiritual experience and became a sincere Christian and a professor at a Christian college … and continued his fifty year long research project trying to understand the paranormal and psychic phenomena.

His interest in the paranormal was sparked by the psychic healer, who failed to restore his arm but told him many stories, recommended books to read, and got him connected to other people in that world.  He became fascinated, and dove head-first into this pursuit.  Over the course of 50 years, he went through four distinct stages in his understanding of that strange paranormal world.

Stage 1: he enrolled at a Bible Seminary (even though he wasn’t a Christian) and tried to integrate what he was learning about the secular paranormal with examples of the supernatural in the Bible.  To him at that time, they were one and the same.  It was all just neat stuff: harmless and interesting.

Stage 2: the cognitive dissonance of being a heavy-drinking non-Christian on the inside, but a Seminary student and pastor-in-training on the outside, finally triggered a mental crisis and then a profound and life-changing conversion experience.  He was born-again!  And on fire!  And while attending a charismatic church service, he learned that the paranormal/psychic phenomena were in fact demonic!  He immediately made a 180 degree turn away from that world, and completely rejected those phenomena.

Stage 3: after finishing his Seminary training and becoming a professor of Evangelism and New Testament at a Christian College in Texas, he invited a guest lecturer to speak on “Magic: real and fake.”  That guest convinced Alan that, in fact, many of the paranormal and psychic things that had previously so fascinated him (Stage 1), and then terrified him (Stage 2), were actually just devious parlor tricks and fraudulent illusion.  His guest even showed him how to do some of the tricks used by mentalists (“the Amazing Kreskin”; David Copperfield; Darren Brown), palm-readers, Tarot card readers … and even poker players (who read their opponents’ “tells”).  And Alan started perfecting the art himself: he too was now entertaining the crowds while teaching students and church audiences that this was not scary s