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Char Margolis

Sometimes our wishful thinking gets in the way of our intuition. --Char Margolis

Char Margolis (b. 1951) works primarily on Dutch television (Char het Medium - RTL4) doing cold readings as a psychic, but she got her biggest boosts in show business from US TV personality Regis Philbin and from the youngest son of singer Dean Martin.

Philbin's relationship with Margolis goes back to the 1980s, but Philbin gave her a mighty bump when she appeared on his show in November 2000 and told the world that Kelly Ripa was pregnant. This news was presented as if Margolis had tapped into her psychic reservoir to get it. Philbin acted surprised and Ripa, who was co-hosting in a tryout role that day, said: "I haven't told my boss yet."

In addition to appearing several times on Live With Regis and Kelly, Margolis has appeared on Larry King Live, The View, The Ricki Lake Show, and Geraldo, among others. Larry King calls Margolis "a master at psychic intuitiveness" who "teaches people how to hone their own intuitive skills." Of course, Larry King's job is to hype his guests, not investigate them to discover if what they claim has any merit.

Margolis claims to get messages from dead spirits and to be a valuable psychic detective. Like Sylvia Browne, however, she failed the reality check. An investigation of her claims found that she was exaggerating her abilities or just making stuff up. She claimed to have helped locate missing pilot Dean Paul Martin, the son of singer Dean Martin. Paul Martin's younger brother Ricci supports Margolis's claim. He wrote in his memoir That's Amore (2004):

Even though Char had never been over the area, she seemed to be familiar with the terrain, giving the helicopter pilot directions just as the Air Force captain did. As we neared the site that Char had pinpointed, the pilot suddenly announced that we had to turn back. The military had located the crash site, cordoned off the airspace, and was ordering all civilian craft out of the area. The wreckage of Dean Paul's plane had been found in the precise spot where Char had said it would be.”

Martin was a California Air National Guard jet fighter pilot. He was on a training run in his F4-C Phantom jet. Two other fighter pilots in their F4-C Phantoms were also on the mission. They took off from March Air Force Base and were flying maneuvers near the San Bernardino mountain range when Martin's plane crashed. It's not like he was on a secret mission in the middle of nowhere. The Los Angeles Times reported that it was believed his plane crashed into the side of Mt. San Gorgonio, about 22 miles northeast of Riverside, California. (The wreckage was found on the east side of Wood Canyon, east of Potrero Canyon in Riverside County.) In 2008, the Dutch television program Zembla contacted the search team that located the plane. They had never heard of Margolis and denied that she had helped locate the pilot.* But even if she had gone with Ricci Martin in a helicopter to search for the wreckage, the likely whereabouts of the plane was no secret. Furthermore, his claim about her identifying the "precise spot" of the wreckage can't be right, since he admits they were turned away and ordered out of the area.

Margolis's show in the Netherlands is very popular. In 2010, she started her eleventh season on television there. Perhaps her popularity in The Netherlands explains why Dutch prisons are using psychics to counsel inmates.

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further reading

My commentaries on various alleged psychics and psychic powers:

ABC Television: Put to the Test II - Billed as a test of psychic powers

Court TV's "Psychic Detectives"

How F.B.I. profiling resembles psychic cold reading by Robert T. Carroll

"Psychic Detectives on TV: how do they affect paranormal beliefs?"

"Allison Dubois, Gary Schwartz, and 'Medium'"

Gary Schwartz's Subjective Evaluation of Mediums: Veritas or Wishful Thinking?

"It's All in the Framing"

Noreen Renier

Noreen Renier

Sylvia Browne

Sylvia Browne

Sylvia Browne

Lynn Ann Maker

Greta Alexander

Phil Jordan

Phil Jordan

James Van Praagh

James Van Praagh

James Van Praagh

James Van Praagh

James Van Praagh, John Edward, and Sylvia Browne

John Edward

Miss Cleo

George Anderson

Allison DuBois

Dorothy Allison