Dixon Carter Lee
Headliner
- Joined
- Nov 22, 1999
- Posts
- 48,682
From SkepDic :
I think I finally remember where I got the name "Dixon" from -- I read all of Jean Dixon's stuff as a kid, and she fascinated me. Sheesh. What a realization. I named myself after a fake psychic. Irony gets a gold star today.
(By the way, I don't buy that Jean Dixon was an FBI Stooge. I hope the people at SkepDic remain skeptical about that.)
Jeane Dixon & the Jeane Dixon effect
Jeane Dixon (1918-1997) was an astrologer and alleged psychic who did not predict the assassination of President Kennedy. She was featured every year in various publications that engage in the entertaining pursuit of making predictions for the new year. Ms. Dixon was never correct in any prediction of any consequence. She predicted that the Soviets would beat the U.S. to the moon, for example, and that World War III would begin in 1958. When that didn't happen, she predicted there would be a cure for cancer in 1967. Most of her predictions were equivocal, vague or mere possibility claims.
Dixon achieved a reputation as a very good psychic, however, when the mass media perpetuated the myth that she had predicted President Kennedy's assassination. In 1956 she predicted in Parade magazine that the 1960 election would be won by a Democrat and that he would die in office, "although not necessarily in his first term." However, in 1960, apparently forgetting or overriding her earlier prediction, she predicted unequivocally that "John F. Kennedy would fail to win the presidency." These inconvenient facts were omitted in Ruth Montgomery's 1965 book A Gift of Prophecy: the Phenomenal Jeane Dixon. More than 3,000,000 copies of this mythological account of Dixon's psychic prowess were sold with nary a cry of "non-sense" from the mass media.
Dixon was an FBI stooge, who agreed to make claims about Russia being behind the civil rights movement and left-wing agitation on college campuses. She was chummy enough with J. Edgar Hoover that he agreed to serve as an honorary director to Children to Children Inc., a foundation established by Dixon to help sick children.
In her obituary and in its final issue of 1997, The Sacramento Bee perpetuated the myth of Jeane Dixon's psychic powers by declaring her to have predicted the assassination of JFK.
The Jeane Dixon effect refers to the tendency of the mass media to hype or exaggerate a few correct predictions by a psychic, guaranteeing that they will be remembered, while forgetting or ignoring the much more numerous incorrect predictions.
I think I finally remember where I got the name "Dixon" from -- I read all of Jean Dixon's stuff as a kid, and she fascinated me. Sheesh. What a realization. I named myself after a fake psychic. Irony gets a gold star today.
(By the way, I don't buy that Jean Dixon was an FBI Stooge. I hope the people at SkepDic remain skeptical about that.)