Sean David Morton is a fake, a sham, and a fraud
A lot of what Sean David Morton claimed has been criticized - perhaps rightly so, I don't know about that stuff - so I'll only comment on his statement about observing UFO-type vehicles doing wild maneuvers over Area 51.
About 1998, as an employee of Lockheed Martin, I was assigned to F-22 Flight Test Operations at our Marietta facility. One of my co-workers was a C-130 pilot, and we got into a discussion about UFOs one day when he described having seen the exact same thing.
He wasn't in the air when this happened, but had heard about Area 51, so out of curiosity had gone out to a nearby observation place known as "the black mailbox." This had been a few years prior to his telling me the story, but he too described having watched multiple vehicles being put into the air shortly after dark; incredible aerobatics performed over a period of several hours, then everything buttoned-up again before dawn.
Perhaps there's fire associated with that particular smoke, at least.
SDM is a person around whom exists a cult of personality. He's a charismatic "nice" guy with an intersting backstory--he was psychic to start out with, he went to the Himalayas to study in some ancient temples which unleashed his potential (the background of nearly
every comic book character at one point or another), and came back after many years to go to Mt. Shasta and have incredible experiences after which he was able to make spot-on predictions and know what investments to get into--and became rich!
Well, he may have the savvy to steer the people who pay for his newsletter into good investments, but his predictions are almost always wrong. Like anyone else in this game, if he made correct predictions, he'd be on the Tonight Show every night instead of going on these dinky-brained radio shows and getting millions of people to pay for his newsletter.
Obviously if you steer a bunch of people to all buy the same stock, commodity or mutual fund, it's going to go up.
DUH.
However, when you make predictions about a triple earthquake in 2005 all in a certain area of California--in which I happened to live at the time--and none of them come to pass--you start to look like an asshole. My
fiancée at the time was so enamored by Sean David Morton (she wasn't even into UFOs and had never heard of him until I dragged her to the Bay Area UFO convention) that she wanted to leave Vallejo, Ca. Which we eventually did.
At the Expo, in his workshop Sean had a bevy of visual aids, laser pointers and geologic data which he used to
prove beyond a doubt, through the aid of his "sources" that there would be a small temblor, which would be the first sign, then a larger quake, that would register high on the Richter scale, and finally, a big one, in Vallejo, that would kill hundreds and leave thousands homeless. These were all to be in a perfect triangle, along fault lines that weren't known (and still aren't) to be subduction zones.
Oh, and the workshop was $40 extra.
Afterward--no earthquake. She was so scared to even be in California (having grown up in St. Louis) because of earthquakes (an irrational but powerful fear) that when she heard him mention the city we lived in, that was the last straw. She pulled up stakes and moved away (and that was the last I ever saw of her).
When this trifecta of doom failed to occur, I wrote SDM over and over and over and over without response to see "what had happened". After eating silence for nearly a year, I finally got a reply from Sean's wife, who suggested that "maybe it was divine intervention?"
That's a big help to an atheist.
And--and, "maybe"? And from his wife? What, he couldn't answer me personally? Didn't he know why his prediction hadn't come true? Either it was divine intervention (in which case, I really have to rearrange my priorities and belief systems), or it wasn't. What the hell?
Now, don't get me wrong, I like Sean, like I said, he's a nice guy. A very nice guy. He's generous with his time, he makes sure everyone gets a piece of him, he's all hugs and smiles and photo ops--but the guy makes an unbelievable amount of money by shilling for his newsletter (he mentions it every chance he gets) and being a savvy stock market predictor (which you don't have to by psychic to be good at).
I don't blame Sean for my fiancee leaving Vallejo--it was kind of a catbox of a town, anyway--but to go on Coast every six months and make predictions and push the newsletter and take phone calls and pretend to be something he isn't takes a special kind of willingness to deceive. Maybe he believes it himself. He pretends that he's half psychic and half remote viewer.
Whatever he is, he's
all fake.
He talks about UFOs and the stock market knowlegably, that just means that he's interested in it and has done his homework.
He also holds these trips up to Mt. Shasta, and I won't even pretend to know what they do up there--meditation or prayer, maybe, or perhaps it's just a good hike up the mountain with a camping trip at the end. I really don't know. But it's promoted as more than that, and it costs more than a Pacific Princess cruise. If you want to get remote and exclusive with SDM, you can, but it'll cost you.
His area 51 claims? He was bound to get something right after throwing meatballs at the wall for thirty years--something was gonna stick. And saying that there are lights in the sky at some point over Area 51 is like predicting that eventually the sun will set in the West--even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Sean David Morton has been involved in the field for a long, long time, and he has honed his act over time to know exactly what he is doing. But his downfall is making predictions that are based on guessing, that have such a remote chance of actually coming to pass that he'd better have some inside information.
People always remember the stuff that predictors and psychics get right, and tend to forget the huge claims that never come to pass. That's why so rarely do you hear Coast replay a prediction show (other than the New Year's Eve one in which just regular folk make their own predictions--one of which, by the way correctly predicted the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami!)
If you're going to make a living based on correct predictive guessing, the first time you're wrong, you're going to start losing customers. He certainly lost me.
