If research is being conducted to prove empirically that water is wet, there is no reason not to devote time and resources to proving other truisms. For example, the Anne Germain fraud. For the youngest and most forgetful: Germain was a British lady who became famous in Spain and Portugal with programs in which she put the famous (and not so famous) in touch with their deceased relatives.
Well, it turns out – wait – it was a scam. In Public Mirror it is said that Germain invented everything to make a fortune from the gullible living. So they spent the week in the Antena 3 magazine, with a huge wealth of explanations and experience reports. Who would suspect that a psychic could betray the strict code of ethics of her profession? What's next? Isn't Aramís Fuster a collegial and reliable professional? What a world this is: we won't even be able to trust the card readers anymore.
Formal logic is insufficient for this fallacy: accusing a clairvoyant of fraud must be one of those paradoxes that short-circuit robots and are unable to process. It's like reporting Santa at the mall for identity theft. The only deception that could be attributed to Anne Germain would be that she was not British, but from Móstoles, like the proverbial empanadas. That would be scandalous because it would have exploited a secular Iberian weakness: from the Duke of Wellington to James Rhodes to the Hispanists, the Spanish are crazy about the Guiris, who prefer Rioja to Bordeaux. A Germain de Móstoles could have exploited this weakness, but Germain is as British as ghost stories get, and if there is anything the Spanish public loves more than a clairvoyant who talks to the dead, it is a clairvoyant who makes the Spanish dead power speak in English.
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