Earlier this month, TLC aired a special with Ricky Paull Goldin who currently plays Dr. Jake Martin on All My Children. It was a paranormal reality show and called Seeing vs. Believing.
Ricky and his friend Jeff Gurtman traveled the country seeing if things were real or not. Ricky had an open mind and believed things while Jeff needed proof. Ricky’s dad was a famous hypnotist while Jeff’s mother was in the mental health field. Three tests took place during this episode. The guys met a perceptionist, went to a location that was said to be bedeviled, and visited a tornado ravished place to speak to a survivor.
As defined within the show a perceptionist is someone who has more control over the five senses. To show his abilities Jeff was given a book and had to choose and write down a word from it. It had to be something that could be visualized. The perceptionist guessed the word correctly which was “jackhammer”. Then in another test this man drove down an unfamiliar and deserted road wearing a mask and an opaque black bag over his head. The man just used cues from holding Jeff’s arm to figure out which way to go. They went a decent distance and more than 40 miles per hour. When Jeff and Ricky tried to emulate this task they didn’t even make it half a mile until Jeff ran into someone’s garbage, which included a dust buster vacuum. From seeing all of this Jeff believed the man had some talents that could not be explained.
Ricky and Jeff than went to the bedeviled land in Arkansas. It was in the middle of nowhere where there were only rocks and no vegetation. It took the guys more than one try to find someone willing to go visit this location even in the daytime. Two trained dogs were brought there and both were not interested. They animals cried, whined and would not go on the rocks and went in the opposite direction. Ricky and Jeff though were not undeterred and decided to go into the cave located underneath the rocks. From infrared testing, they knew the cave and rock area was much warmer than anything else located nearby. While underground, Ricky was attacked while Jeff wanted to go deeper into the cave. Since nothing definitive was gotten on camera, this was a draw. Once they left Ricky got cleansed by a local Native American to try to eliminate the evil spirits.
The last segment had Ricky and Jeff met a grandmother and grandson who survived a tornado in Missouri. The grandson had been helping to build a deck on her home and was lifted into the air hundreds of feet and then deposited a distance away in a field. No one should have survived such a twister, but he lived to tell his story. Jeff thought perhaps the man was imagining what happened, but from all accounts it seemed that he was telling the truth. They spoke to weather experts and they could not explain what happened in this storm that spared his life. One person they spoke to said perhaps it was something like good karma and this man did a lot of good things for people.
Considering this isn’t a reality sub-genre I watch regularly, I surprisingly enjoyed this special. Having three stories within the one episode, was just the right amount as none seemed too long. The concept of having one believer and one unbeliever made this show slightly unique. Of course, if the show continued over many episodes having one person never believing would be unrealistic, but while Jeff doubted his mind was not closed to the unexplained.
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