A friend and NDE researcher has just given me a link to the article:
Premonitions of Disaster & Death by Michael Tymn
and I am amazed to find out about how accurately William Thomas Stead (who was a British journalist, editor and publisher, but also a medium and active researcher in the field of After Death Communication, who died as a result of the Titanic disaster), describes the situation in which people trying to communicate from the Other Side can find themselves owing to generalized skepticism and the need for objective evidence:
In a speech delivered by Stead to members of the Cosmos Club during 1909, he talked about what he felt to be overly strict barriers imposed by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in accepting communication from spirits of the dead. He pictured himself as shipwrecked and drowning in the sea, calling frantically for help.
Nonetheless, after his death, Stead appears to have made a tremendous effort to communicate with the aid of his daughter, Estelle, and of a psychically gifted man named Pardoe Woodman, who took notes from Stead through automatic writing. The manuscript was then published with the title The Blue Island: Experiences of a New Arrival Beyond the Veil.Suppose that instead of throwing me a rope the rescuers should shout back, ‘Who are you? What is your name? ‘I am Stead! W. T. Stead! I am drowning here in the sea! Throw me the rope. Be quick!’ But instead of throwing me the rope they continue to shout back, “How do we know that you are Stead? Where were you born? Tell us the name of your grandmother! Well, that is pretty typical of the ‘help’ given by the SPR to the friends who are trying to make us hear them from the Other Side!