Posted on 24 February 2025, 7:55

As I stated in my blog of May 20, 2013, if anyone has done more than Victor and Wendy Zammit to spread the gospel of survival, I don’t know who it might be. Little to nothing has changed since then.  Their Friday Afterlife Report at http://www.victorzammit.com has continued over the past 12 years and marked 25 years of publication during January.

Victor Zammit, LL.B., Ph.D. (below) is a retired lawyer of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and the High Court of Australia.  Wendy Zammit, M.A. has contributed significantly to their research and publication. Their book, “A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife,” first published in 1996, under the title “A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife,” was published in paperback in 2013 by White Crow Books.

“We have only a rough idea of how many people regularly review it as it is published on our four Facebook groups which have about 5,000 subscribers each as well as our mail-out list which has many thousands from all over the world,” Wendy Zammit (below) replied when I asked her about the current circulation. “It’s great to see it being read regularly by people in more than 70 countries.”

I put some additional questions to both Wendy and Victor.

Victor, when I last interviewed you, almost 12 years ago, you said that disseminating the evidence for the afterlife on a global level had become a passion for you.  Based on your regular Friday Report, it doesn’t appear that your passion has been dulled at all.  What keeps you motivated to continue with your reporting?

VZ: Yes, Michael it is still an all-consuming passion, one which I hope to continue until my last day on Earth. I have learned to make direct contact with my guides and my higher self which is so wonderful. They all tell me of the huge need to erase the fear of death and help people understand the true nature of the greater reality.

Wendy, I’d like to put the same question to you and add:  Are there times when you feel like cutting back or perhaps approaching “burn-out” with the weekly report?

WZ: No Michael, I am enjoying it more than ever. It’s the feeling of connection with our community of fellow researchers, writers, mediums and subscribers that keeps me going. We have people who tell us that they have been reading the Friday Report every week since it started more than 25 years ago. They say that it connects them with each other and draws them back each week to what is important in life. It has been a joy for us to help bring your wonderful books and blog posts on the great mediums and research of the past to a wider audience. You have made accessible so much incredible material that could otherwise have been lost forever. My only problem is that I wish I had more time.

I know it is hard to measure, but do you see much progress being made in recent years relative to accepting the evidence for survival and related psychic phenomena?  If so, what do you use to measure the progress? 

VZ: Since our last interview in 2013 I have noticed much more acceptance of mediumship, near-death experiences, deathbed visions, and after-death contacts in magazines, newspapers, movies and TV programs. It is definitely moving into the mainstream. They don’t talk about the evidence as such, but it’s as if they have just accepted the existence of the afterlife. There are more high-profile people who seem to have lost the fear of going public. The Bigelow Institute Essays, which you contributed to, have established a firm and accessible foundation as has the work of IANDS, The Windbridge Institute, and The University of Virginia Department of Perceptual Studies. Recently the Institute of Noetic Sciences has come on board with the Marco Project on physical mediumship and is running a course on The Science of Channeling. And we have all seen White Crow Books become a major force in spiritual publishing.

WZ: There has been a huge upsurge in interest even in the last 3 years, particularly in social media. The number of afterlife–related podcasts and interview programs has just exploded. When we last talked there was Bob Olson with “Afterlife TV” and Jeffrey Mishlove’s “Thinking Allowed”. Now it seems that thousands of YouTube channels, podcasts, Facebook groups, and Instagram and TikTok accounts explore afterlife-related topics. Suddenly hospice nurses are stars. For example, Penny Smith, a retired hospice nurse who talks about deathbed visions, has 864,000 followers on TikTok, 420,000 on Instagram and 275,000 on YouTube.  Next Level Soul, a slick professional interview program on YouTube has 1.1 million subscribers and individual interviews get hundreds of thousands of views.

Do you think that organized skeptics have much influence nowadays?

VZ: As you may remember I spent a lot of time rebutting the skeptics but they have ceased to be an issue for me these days. At one stage I would have received 50 emails protesting about things I wrote. But I never hear from them anymore. As the evidence has been piling up and more and more people of substance are going public, their influence has disappeared.

WZ: The young people we encounter don’t seem to take any notice of professional skeptics or debunkers. They don’t look to Wikipedia for information on afterlife matters. They are cautious, but, on the whole, they are open to being convinced by their own experience.

What do you see as the biggest obstacle to accepting the evidence?

VZ: The distractions of materialism. The majority of people in the West are still overwhelmed with working multiple jobs, shopping, maintaining their stuff and trying to pay rent or mortgage. And now people are dealing with political and economic issues that take up all the airtime.

WZ: I agree that people are time-poor and there are so many distractions. TikTok and Instagram are shortening people’s attention span with 1-2 minute videos. But there are still a lot of people reading and attending classes and trying to find meaning in life.

What have you learned about what attracts people to search for afterlife evidence?

V: It’s mostly that they were stopped in their tracks – an illness or the death of a loved one. Or they suddenly realize that they are going to die one day. Many have rejected religion and want evidence, not beliefs.

WZ: We are also finding a lot of people who have had psychic awareness from childhood. There truly seem to be many awakened souls coming in. As well, we have more and more people having near-death experiences, after-death communications, and experiences of expanded consciousness.

What do you think of the standards of mediums today?

VZ: Apart from the cold readers, we have a lot of mediums who are going public too early and rely on vague statements that could apply to anyone. And of course, it is impossible to find a direct voice medium like Etta Wriedt or Lesley Flint giving private sittings anywhere. But, that said, there are still some brilliant mental mediums, trance mediums and channels who give highly evidential readings.

WZ: We have joined forces with a traditional medium to run a Spiritualist church and have been pleasantly surprised at being able to find excellent local mediums. We are trying to highlight good mediumship by running free Zoom demonstrations with outstanding Spiritualist mediums from the UK, Europe, Canada, USA and Australia twice a month. They have surprised us by being able to work just as well on Zoom as they can in person.

When I last interviewed you in 2013, you had been experiencing a lot of physical mediumship with David Thompson. I understand he moved to another country. Have you observed any interesting phenomena in recent years?

VZ: Yes, we are still fascinated with physical mediumship and were saddened when David Thompson moved to Auckland. He still demonstrates there and in the USA every couple of years. We were very fortunate to sit with him and Scott Milligan in Arizona a couple of times. Our good friend Inge Crosson runs a Centre for physical mediumship in Sydney and we were able to sit with physical mediums there and in England and Germany.

WZ: These days we have been able to connect with mediums and researchers via Zoom. Every Sunday we have meetings with between 40 and 60 mediums, researchers and experiencers and even conduct our own experiments. They have included:

* Jurgen Ziewe is an out-of-body experiencer who has been exploring the afterlife realms in full waking consciousness for more than 45 years. He is also an artist who draws what he sees.  He came onto our program every month for over a year to answer questions about his experiences. The videos of these talks have been put onto his You-Tube account as the Afterlife Answers series which is very popular.

* Last Sunday we had Maddalena Di Leo from Italy who for the last 25 years has been communicating with spirits through direct radio voice. We are planning for her to do a demonstration with other mediums present to see if the same entity can communicate through both radio voice and a different medium.
* My friend and co-host Karyn Jarvie transitioned last June and within 7 hours had contacted three of our regular mediums. She and her daughter have since come through live, channeling three different mediums on one program.

* Two of the mediums, Regina Ochoa and Jeanne Love from the Cosmic Voices Network, have been undertaking a 40-year project communicating with the astronauts from the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia. Some of their sessions over the years have been observed and verified by scientists.

* Two weeks ago Jeanne Love brought through President Jimmy Carter and we have been told that on Sunday 2nd March Estelle Roberts will be coming through with a ‘code blue’ message from the higher world.

* Gordon Phinn is teaching the technique of conscious meditation to connect and assist souls needing help to complete their crossing over following death of the physical body.  Videos of all these meetings are on my You-Tube Channel.

If you were giving a 30-minute talk to a group that knew little about the evidence for survival, is there any particular phenomenon or case in the annals of psychical research that you would focus on.

VZ: I love physical mediumship as we have said. I would tell them about Elizabeth Blake, Etta Wriedt, Leslie Flint, and David Thompson.  With Leslie Flint, I’d talk about the Anni Nanji tapes and with David Thompson I’d talk about the Montague Keen Communications.

WZ:  I’d be a bit reluctant to focus on physical mediumship with beginners. If they were absolute beginners I would focus on things that they can come across in their own friendship group – deathbed visions, after-death contacts and NDEs. This is because once they know what questions to ask, they can get ongoing validation from people they already know and trust.

What has changed in your work since we last talked 12 years ago?

VZ: We realized that we are not getting any younger and need to encourage others to develop the skills and confidence to speak out about their own afterlife experiences, share knowledge and collaborate on research. We also realized that people were tending to operate in silos – the near-death experiencers were not talking to the out-of-body experiencers and that would give people personal experience of afterlife contact. Americans did not know what was happening in Europe or Australia and so on. We also felt the need to promote organizations and events

WZ: Seven years ago we set up a series of Zoom groups – all free and run by volunteer facilitators which would be coordinated through the Friday Afterlife Report. We now have 30 groups a month which offer subjects as diverse as mediumship development, shamanism, different styles of meditation, how to conduct spirit rescues, out-of-body experiences, an afterlife book club, and animal communication. We video a lot of the sessions and make them available on YouTube and in the Friday Afterlife Report.

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.

There is nothing in the world that competes with the Friday Report. They It’s humbling to learn how much is going on behind my back. How does one keep up with it all? They manage. Every time I publish a book they make a point of introducing it to the world. They are wonderfully generous people.  When they pass, a great celebration in the astral heights should commence.

Stafford Betty

Paul,
I’m not prepared to answer your question about the direct-voice and why it is so rare other than to make an analogy with certain sports.  Why is it that only one athlete has been able to jump over a bar eight-feet high?  Cuban high jumper Javier Sotomayor set the world record of 8-feet, 1/4 inch (2.45 meters) on July 27, 1993.  Nobody has replicated that jump in some 32 years.  Others have gone within a few inches of it, but nobody else has jumped eight feet. Moreover, Sotomayor did it only once.  In spite of his seemingly spring-loaded legs, Sotomayor was not competitive, to my knowledge, in other jumping events, such as the long jump or triple jump.  You’d think that with such “spring” in his legs he would have been competitive in other jumping events. His ability was very specific, and that seems to be the case with mediums as well.  Why isn’t the best long jumper a competitive high jumper?  Thank you for the comment and question.  See my blog of March 18, 2019. 

I wanted to make a specific inquiry regarding Victor Zammit’s observation that “And of course, it is impossible to find a direct voice medium like Etta Wriedt or Leslie Flint giving private sittings anywhere.” In a comment that I made to Stafford Betty’s current blog post [11 February 2025], I had occasion to make reference to Raymond Bayless’s book ‘Voices from Beyond’ (1976), dedicated to the phenomenon of direct voice mediumship. In his preface, Bayless states, regarding the phenomena of the direct voice, that it represents “a paranormal manifestation of the greatest importance that probably offers the finest evidence for human survival after death.” (p.15) I would agree with that assessment. It is worth noting that direct voice is somewhat odd to classify in the sense that, strictly speaking, it is a species of physical mediumship. Yet, unlike physical mediumship generally, it is not concerned with the production of phenomena of whatever type. Rather, like trance, mental, and other forms of non-physical mediumship, it is entirely concerned with communication.

I have had a question in my mind for some time regarding the underlying nature of direct voice mediumship in connection with its historical rarity and present absence. In the Woods-Greene recordings archive of the direct voice mediumship of Leslie Flint, which includes Douglas Conacher’s numerous communications to his then-living wife Eira (sadly reduced on the Leslie Flint Educational Trust website to a mere eight sessions of the forty sessions originally available there), Conacher describes the means by which, from his discarnate position, the direct voice is generated. An essentially identical description is given in great detail in Ch.6 of Arthur Findlay’s ‘On the Edge of the Etheric’ regarding the direct voice mediumship of John Campbell Sloan. In both cases, what is described is the formation of an ectoplasmic voice box or larynx with which the discarnate communicator interacts in order to generate the direct voice phenomenon in our physical world. I fully expect that, if the writings associated with other direct voice mediums were carefully reviewed, a similar explanation would be found there as well. The following webpage goes into further explanatory detail in the specific context of Leslie Flint’s mediumship: https://www.scienceofwholeness.com/wholejoy/I/DirectVoiceExplained.html.

The general conclusion that one may extract from this description of the phenomena is that the medium’s specific contribution, as would be typical in nearly all physical mediumship (Scole excepted), is that of the provision of ectoplasm. The construction of, sustainment of and interaction with the ectoplasmic voice box is entirely the work of discarnates, in relation to which the medium makes no specific contribution. Given this, why should direct voice mediumship be as rare as it is, and specifically why should it be rarer than other forms of physical mediumship? And yet, despite its tremendous significance, direct voice mediumship is one of the rarest forms of mediumship. Do Michael, Victor, Wendy or others have any insight regarding this question?

Best,

Paul

I must add that I too have enjoyed the efforts of Wendy and Victor Zammit over the years to spread the word about survival and spiritualism generally.  I know it must be an all-consuming activity for them.  Wendy has done a great job bringing it all together.  I have looked forward to each Friday Report over many years and along with Michael Tymn’s blog they have been my main source of information about topics not found in mainstream sources. I think they were forerunners of what has become today many blogs and websites about evidence for the afterlife.  - AOD

Michael,

A bit of trivia. Victor and Wendy were doing the rounds of the Spiritualist Churches in Sydney Australia after their book launch in 1996. I was at the Seven Hills Spiritualist Church with Rev Norman Ivory and they gave their book launch talk either the month before or after my book launch - History of Spiritualism in Australia 1996. It was unusual for any book launches let alone two.
Our paths did not cross for some reason and Norman mentioned that they were in the physical mediumship group. Victor was in the legal world and many students of the selective school which I attended such as Neville Wran (Premier of NSW) and Michael Kirby (High Court) were also lawyers who were in Victor’s world. None were known for psychic leanings.

My world was in the marketing of high technology products with lawyers being mainly patent lawyers.  It is funny how different professions approach the afterlife. It depends on their psychic abilities. Australia has 26 million people and one US CEO said to me that Australia had great talent but it is like having a party, USA would have 340 versus Aussie 26. I replied it could be that there is quality not quantity.
Thanks for the article,
Bruce