Saturday, March 19, 2011

The Adventures of Chip Coffey in Paradacity

The night Paradacity turned into Para Dance City

Chip Coffey was the featured guest on Paradacity's radio show on Wednesday, March 16. For those of you unfamiliar with this late night internet radio show on SRN, it features a trio of female paranormal investigators as hosts.

For 90 minutes chatty Chip Coffey demonstrated that he could dance with the best of them. ABC's “Dancing with the Stars” should hold a spot open for him next season. Chippie proved he could waltz, cha cha and do a lively quickstep. Yet he also reinforced many of the negative perceptions held by various bloggers and members of the paranormal field. Mr. Coffey  used vulgar words, refused to give clear answers, outside of scripted ones, and played the gay card and the “Woe is me, I am the victim!” role when it suited him.

The Ladies of Paradacity don't seem to have a clear plan for the interview and the listener walked away with the feeling that much of what was said and done was talked about and planned before the show went live. Not until very late in the show did they start pulling any tough questions from the chat room. When they did, Chip gave very vague answers or he couldn't recall certain episodes of Paranormal State that he had been involved with. Apparently, while Chippie was monitoring the activity in the chat room he had 70 minutes to formulate his responses.

On their Facebook page earlier in the day, the ladies of Paradacity had the audacity to label themselves as para-journalists. This label brings with it much responsibility. They showed a clear lack of living up to it while they tossed softball questions his way. They left a few out; how did his morning bowel movement go and what did he have for dinner? A journalist has a responsibility to dig past the press information that they are given or pulled from a website. They never asked why is there no information about Chip's grandmother who was a Cherokee medicine woman. None can be found on the net nor do any tribal elders know anything about this person. And what has Chippie written that is internationally known? If one does an internet search on Mr. Coffey you realize that the source of most of the information out there is from Mr. Coffey himself.

After only a few questions concerning allegations of misconduct and fakery on Mr. Coffey's part, it was decided that there is nothing to these claims. Again, if the so-called para-journalists of Paradacity did basic searches they would have found that only a few people say this. In fact, Google Chip Coffey and on the bottom of the page you'll discover a section entitled Searches related to Chip Coffey. There you'll see eight suggestions, including: Chip Coffey Fake and Chip Coffey Fraud. 

Mr. Coffey and the ladies also refused to address the issues raised in the book Paranormal Reality: Investigating Paranormal State. Mr. Coffey either cursed or had memory lapses concerning anything mentioned in the book about the cases he worked on. He claimed to have forgotten "The Messenger" episode which was one of the most controversial episodes of Paranormal State. Due to Kelli Ryan's allegations, this season 2 episode can no longer be found on the DVD.

Perhaps the most grievous error repeatedly made by the team of para-jounalists of Paradacity was in allowing Mr. Coffey to make frequent false claims concerning my book Paranormal Reality: Investigating Paranormal State. In this book it's proven beyond any rational doubt that the show was staged, scripted and most of the paranormal claims were either fake or non-existent. Mr. Coffey was allowed to attack the credibility of our evidence and research by saying, "Claiming to have on set sources I call that bulls***." In response you hear one of the ladies say: "Uh huh." This means she takes the stance that the hosts agree with Mr. Coffey. Did Mr. Coffey and the staff at Paradacity take the time to: 1] actually read the entire book? 2] Cover the same ground that we did in our research of this subject? Unless they did, they aren't ethically allowed to make and/or support the making of such statements. By doing so, the show stopped being an unbiased presentation of information and became an advertorial for Mr. Coffey. It's easy to attack a subject and others' credibility when the other side is not allowed to refute such attacks.

Will there be the other side of this issue aired on this show? This is doubtful. So many paranormal shows have chosen to ignore the misdeeds and misconduct by para-celebs. They want these same guests to keep coming back to do their shows. Rest assured that the Eye on the Paranormal will never blink for any fake para-celeb no matter how nimble they are on the dance floor.

P.S. One wonders why Chip Coffey, who usually never shows any restraint on self-promotion, doesn't mention his radio appearances on any of his websites? Is he afraid that his followers might read or hear something that could cause them to doubt his claims?