One of the difficulties with establishing paranormal claims is that there are so many ways of getting the wrong answer.
There are the inevitable battles with confirmation bias and dart-thrower's bias, and even when there's actual numerical data to work with, you have to contend with the subtler problem of cherry-picking and p-hacking (something that has plagued experiments designed to detect telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition). The difficulty becomes even worse when you have the additional problems that sometimes people honestly believe what they're claiming even though it's false (i.e. they're delusional) or that they don't believe what they're saying but say it anyhow for their own reasons, often having to do with personal gain (i.e. they're lying).
Those last two can be hard to tell apart. Our memories are plastic enough that if you tell the same lie often enough, you're in danger of falling for it yourself. Take, for example, the strange figure of John Dee, who was in his heyday during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England.
Dee was of Welsh ancestry but was born and raised in London. His father was one of Henry VIII's courtiers; John had access to a good education, and got a degree at Cambridge University (something that was as prestigious then as it is now). He studied in Belgium, France, and Italy, ultimately returning to England with an excellent background in mathematics, astronomy... and divination.
It was this last-mentioned that got him in trouble for the first (but not the only) time. He was arrested and charged with the crime of "calculating" -- casting horoscopes -- in particular doing one for Queen Mary, who was a bit on the superstitious and paranoid side herself and looked upon anything like that as tantamount to wishing her dead. He ultimately cleared his name through what appears to have been mere luck; "don't shoot the messenger" didn't carry a lot of weight with monarchs back then. But when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne in 1558, he found a much more willing ear, and in short order really saw his star in ascendancy. (*rimshot*)
Where things get interesting -- and where the question of "did he really believe what he was saying?" comes up -- is when he fell in with one Edward Kelley. Kelley is a mysterious figure, probably by choice. It is thought he was born in Worcester in 1555, but what he was doing between childhood and ending up in the Elizabethan court in his twenties is pure conjecture. Kelley was obviously educated -- he knew Greek and Latin -- and in 1582 he approached Dee with the idea of a partnership.
Kelley told Dee he was in contact with angels, and they spoke to him in a language called "Enochian." As the angels dictated, Kelley said, he'd transmit what they told him to Dee, who would then write it all down. And they did... resulting in numerous diary entries and two books, the Liber Loagaeth and the Claves Angelicae. Linguists have analyzed Enochian to a fare-thee-well, and found that it's in that odd shadowland between a conlang (i.e. an invented language with actual syntax, morphology, and phonology) and glossolalia, the random noisemaking that occurs during "speaking with tongues." What syntax it does have is remarkably like English; this is a tipoff that it's not even an authentic conlang, but a simple one-to-one substitution code. (As someone who has tried his hand at writing a conlang, I can verify that it ain't easy to come up with a language that has its own distinctive structure, and not merely to copycat the languages you know.)
Now, I hasten to reassure you that I don't think Kelley actually was in communication with angels. But you have to wonder if he thought he was. A lot of the portrayals of Dee and Kelley in historical fiction have painted Kelley as a cunning liar and charlatan and Dee as a dupe, but from the extant records they both seem awfully earnest. Both of them ended their lives still clinging to the claim that they were capable of magic -- they traveled all over Europe trying to convince people of their angelic communications, eventually ending up at the court of King Stephen Báthory of Poland and Hungary (interestingly, the uncle of the infamous serial killer Elizabeth Báthory). The king, though, was a devout Catholic and told Dee and Kelley to shove off, that any claims of that sort had to get the approval of the Pope before they'd get his imprimatur. Little chance of that; Dee and Kelley were both Protestants, and had worked in the court of the much-detested-at-the-Vatican Queen Elizabeth I of England.
Their case was not helped when Kelley told Dee to relay the message that the archangel Uriel had told him that men were now commanded to share all their possessions freely, including their wives.
You can only imagine how that went over.
Kelley, in fact, never made it back to England. He and Dee parted ways in the 1590s, and Kelley ended up in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, whom he had convinced that he could transmute lead into gold. He couldn't. Kelley died in prison in 1598 -- by one account, from injuries incurred while trying to escape, by another from poison at his own hand. His end is as mysterious as his origins.
Dee didn't fare much better. He got back to England to find his huge library had been burglarized, his home damaged by vandals, and his reputation sullied by his association with Kelley. When James I succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, Dee found his presence at the royal court was no longer welcome -- James was deeply religious and hated anything that smacked of occultism or witchcraft. Dee died in poverty and obscurity in Mortlake, Richmond upon Thames, in 1608 or 1609.
Dee's name, however, was still revered centuries later by the Spiritualists, Hermeticists, and Rosicrucians. (Kelley's, not so much, which is odd; it's hard to imagine an explanation for the whole thing where Dee was speaking revealed truth but Kelley was a liar.) Aleister Crowley (and many other members of The Golden Dawn) thought Enochian especially was the cat's pajamas, and claimed it was the "Adamic language" -- i.e., the language spoken by humans prior to getting their phonemes blenderized by the Almighty during the whole Tower of Babel incident. Others have claimed that Kelley was in touch with a spiritual power, all right -- but an evil one. In other words, a demon.
It's a curious story. Like I said, whatever spin you put on this, both Kelley and Dee were claiming stuff that was objectively false. But you have to wonder if they thought they were telling the truth. And it's tempting to think that in our scientific, high-tech world, we're immune to falling for people like this -- either delusional fanatics or else cunning and persuasive liars. I don't think I need to name names for you to come up with a few modern examples that prove we're still all too susceptible. They may not be trying to persuade us that they can turn base metals into gold any more, but the falsehoods they're promulgating are perhaps even more dangerous. The descendants of Dr. Dee, it seems, are still with us -- and now, as then, the only cure for their poison is a combination draught of facts, evidence, and critical thinking.
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