Your New Editor

At the last conference I was elected editor of the New Zealand Skeptic. Some of you will have read my pieces in Metro magazine or in NBR over the years, or heard my “Soapboxes” on World Service Radio. If you have wondered about my recent absence from the media, it is because I have been preparing to launch my own magazine.

The New Zealand Skeptics first took our lead from our US parent organisation and focused our scepticism on the paranormal. Over the years I have seen the Skeptics extend their arena to include almost any area of pseudoscience, and finally to become critical of pseudoscience within science itself. I believe this is a healthy development. Criticism which excludes self-criticism carries little moral weight.

I hope to reflect these developments in the content of the magazine. Naturally I welcome contributions. But please remember, the magazine is read mainly by other Skeptics who do not need to be told and told, and told again that astrology is nonsense. We have made the base case — we are now looking for contemporary or local developments, novel challenges to conventional wisdom, or for pseudoscience where we least expect it.

Embarrassing Predictions

By now we are aware that those who try to make long term forecasts in the field of economics or weather forecasting are up against it because of the uncertainties inherent in such systems, which are governed by the laws of deterministic chaos.

We also need to be aware that our forecasting is no more reliable if we depend on predicting future knowledge — a point famously made by Sir Karl Popper in The Poverty of Historicism.

Physicists must have enjoyed watching the embarrassment of Treasury officials and weather forecasters alike over the last few months. Tax forecasters underestimated the windfall in Wellington, while weather forecasters underestimated the rainfall in Auckland.

But do physicists do any better? I have taken a fresh look at Charles Panati’s book called Breakthroughs — astonishing advances coming in your lifetime, in medicine, science and technology.

The inside cover tells us that Mr Panati “is a physicist, has taught at Columbia University, has been head physicist at RCA in space communications and for six years was a science editor for Newsweek magazine” and so on. The book of scientific predictions was published in 1980.

The back cover tells us we should expect the following:

By 1982: a chemical on the market will enable dieters to eat heartily and not gain an ounce

By 1984: a liquid will painlessly spray away tooth decay

By 1985: A biofeedback technique will cure atherosclerosis, and a synthetic product, SPE, will prevent cholesterol from causing heart disease

By 1986: magnetic fields will be a major new medical tool for healing fractured bones, diagnosing and curing diseases

By 1988: a vaccine will prevent pregnancy

By 1989: physicists will have harnessed fusion power, a clean and almost limitless energy source

By 1990: interferon, a substance naturally produced by our bodies, will be the most effective treatment for cancer

By 1994: hurricanes will be tamed and production of rainfall over arid lands will be commonplace

Oops?

Predicting the End of the World

Vicki Hyde suggests (Skeptic 30) that we are in for a lot more doomsday predictions as we approach the year 2000. I am afraid she is right, but why should fundamentalists get so excited about a round number of years?

They believe that the world was created in six days, and a very ancient prophesy is that it would last six thousand years because “…one day is like a thousand years” (2 Peter 3:8). That seems logical enough.

This prophecy originates from the first century when it was believed that the world was already around four thousand years old. It is contained in the Epistle of Barnabas1 chapter 13, and The Secrets of Enoch2 chapter 33. The former letter had as good a claim to be in the New Testament as several books that were included. Some early Christian writers believed it had the same author as the Epistle to the Hebrews.

This is thus a very ancient prophesy, but it is difficult to decide just when the 6,000 years are up. Our system of dating which identifies this year as AD 1994 was invented in AD 525 by Dionysius Exiguus. He tried to start his system from the birth of Jesus but miscalculated.

The Roman republic had counted years “AUC” (Ab Urba Condita, the year of the city). Afterwards they counted “in the year of the Emperor”. Dionysius added all this up, but missed the four years from when Octavian won the battle of Actium (31 BC) until he accepted the title of Emperor Augustus (27 BC).

That is the real reason why Authorised Versions of the New Testament claim that Jesus was born in 4 BC. If Dionysius had counted correctly he would have started his system four years earlier. Of course, that means that the world should end in 1996 rather than 2000. It is later than you think.

Relax again, that is not the only alternative. Dionysius’s near contemporary, Victorius, produced a system of dating years from the Passion of Jesus. This was taken to occur in the year we call 28AD, and the system should have great appeal to fundamentalists (although I doubt that any have heard of it), the Passion being much more important than the birth of Jesus.

Consequently, many old dates may have an error of 28 years, because it is not known which system was being used. And the end of the world may not be due until 2028 — what a relief!

The popular idea that there was an end-of-world panic around AD 1000 is almost certainly a myth. There are (so far as I am aware) no contemporary references to such agitation. But at that time probably nobody knew the date. Although the system of Dionysius was nearly 500 years old it was rarely used. The world of Islam counted the years since the Hegira. Much of Europe counted “in the year of the Emperor”, and the Catholic church counted “in the year of Pope”. In Western Europe few outside the church were literate or numerate. According to Barbara Tuchman3, even as late as the fourteenth century in Western Europe no two writers ever agree about the date.

To go back to the beginning — literally — all these predictions are based on the world’s being created in six days. We know this is not true. It is not just geology and biology that refute the biblical creation story, geography does too. Try reading Genesis 1. The creation account assumes a flat Earth, for only a flat Earth can experience the “mornings and evenings” described. A spherical world has neither a date nor a time. There is always a morning somewhere, and always an evening somewhere else.

1. English translation in The Lost Books of the Bible, New American Library [text]

2. English translation in The Forgotten Books of Eden, New American Library [text]

3. A Distant Mirror
[text]

The End Is Nigh – Or Thereabouts

Are the End Times drawing nigh? Are fires and floods from heaven on the brink of seething down in wrathful purge, damning the damned and raising the faithful? Is God’s finger poised on the panic button?

It could be, but I wouldn’t cancel the beach party on the evidence. Doom forecasters have been striking out with almost miraculous regularity since the dawn of time.

Putting the history of the end of the world into a fast 400 words isn’t easy. In fact it borders on madness. It’s like stuffing the entire Labour Party into a phone booth, except weirder. I mean, you can always push a Labour-packed phone booth off a cliff; but who’s going to push 400 words off a cliff? It doesn’t make sense. Armageddon does this to you after a while.

Disaster merchants have always been around, but it was the Christians who really put death and destruction on a pedestal when they gave us the Book of Revelation.

No one knows what this book means, but it’s so horrifically spectacular it doesn’t matter. More importantly, it doesn’t give any dates, thus giving open slather to soothsayers and paving the way for twenty centuries of inaccurate predictions.

Methods of prediction vary. For some it’s a case of creative arithmetic. Dates with big simple numbers, like 500, are good too. Anything goes in number juggling.

Christians, for instance, were driven to a near frenzy of ecstatic fear as year 1000 approached. Signs and portents were sought and found. The tension grew. Sinners repented in droves and fled to the hilltops. The time was nigh! But…

No worries! The Apocalypse should have been dated from the death of Christ instead of the birth. But…

In the early 1800s a New York farmer named William Miller made a two-year study of the Bible and was astonished to discover that the world would end in 1843! He gathered a sizable flock who put up with three false-alarms before losing interest. Refugees from Miller’s movement evolved into Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists, both doomsday fanciers.

The Witnesses maintained a healthy zero batting average by striking out in 1874, 1914 and 1975. Surprisingly, few left the church, which shows you how integral reason is to religion.

Hearing voices is another popular method of predicting doomsday. This process is known as channeling. Here the “prophet”, or channel, gets “the word” first-hand from angels or devils, or nowadays, mysterious space aliens. But in either case, the amount of reliable information received adds up the same — nilch!

Objective investigators are more inclined to explain channeling in terms of multiple-personality-disorders and related mental problems, rather than invisible space lizards… but try telling that to the faithful.

Little has changed over the years. The methods are eternally the same and the results are eternally wrong.

As the year 2000 approaches I predict many predictions.

The End of the World is Nigh, But Don’t Panic…Yet

For those of you who didn’t notice, the end of the world came and went on November 14th. It also ended on November 24th, and is set to do so at the end of this year. If you’ve got a Christmas trip to Los Angeles planned, don’t bother going — a massive earthquake wiped out the city of the Angels as well as neighbouring San Diego at 7pm on May 8th.

Are you wondering why you haven’t heard about any of these earth-shattering events? It’s because they were all predictions made by psychics, fundamentalists and other people apparently keen to see more misery and destruction in the world than already exists.

Yes folks, we’re gearing up for the end of the decade, the end of the century, the end of the millennium and — according to assorted doomsayers — the end of the world. Some have it ending rather neatly on New Year’s Day, the year 2000, while others are predicting all manner of wars, earthquakes, famines and increasingly decadent behaviour in the run-up to the big 2000.

There’s going to be a massive millenniarist industry build up. While one half of the population will be getting ready for the Mother of All New Year Parties, the other half will be getting ready for Armageddon. So what’s all the fuss about?

Well, I’m not worried about Nostradamus predicting the Gulf War as the start of the Apocalypse. I’m not worried about the European Community being the Beast of the Book of Revelations. I’m not worried about the Rapture picking up my friends and relations and whisking them away to Heaven while the rest of us perish in a global nuclear war.

What I do worry about is the associated fear, paranoia, gullibility and stupidity that inevitably accompanies such predictions.

I worry about the ominously named Ukrainian White Brotherhood who have caused riots and bloodshed in an already shaky nation. Their end of the world — the one predicted for November 14th — didn’t arrive, but that didn’t deter them from trying again with another date.

I feel sorry for the believers who sold up their businesses and their homes in preparation for the end of the world predicted by a Korean fraudster. There were people in New Zealand drawn into that fatalistic vision. Fortunately, unlike a number of other apocalyptic visionaries, the prophet in this case didn’t enjoin his followers to bring their world to a real end by mass suicide.

I worry about the people who end up with impoverished wallets and impoverished minds buying yet another book purporting to be the last word in interpreting the so-called prophecies of Nostradamus.

I worry about having a Cabinet Minister confidently asserting that the Bible tells us we’re going to have more earthquakes, and saying this the same month that two government seismologists lose their jobs.

I’m concerned about the fundamentalists who see the hand of Satan everywhere, most particularly at work in our child care centres. With the end-time coming, they say, a worldwide conspiracy of Satanists is preparing for the ultimate showdown by abusing, sacrificing and eating toddlers at your local crech

I worry about all these various apocalyptic views because I know that we will be seeing more and more of them as that crucial year 2000 approaches. And I know that the fear, paranoia and hysteria they engender will increase — we’re not so far removed from our ancestors who, on facing the turn of the first millennium, held their own riots, witch-hunts and death-watches. There’s something in human nature which seems to love a good doomsday scenario.

So don’t panic folks. Next time you hear a doomsday prediction, make a note of it — it means you can always laugh about it afterwards.

Police Use of Psychics

A detective with long experience in tracing missing persons gave the 1993 Skeptics Conference the word on how useful psychics are in police work.

During the last 25 years a number of police investigations have gained prominence in the news media due to the disappearance (sometimes permanently) of a victim. In the 1970s there were names like Jennifer Beard (West Coast), Mona Blades (Taupo), Gail McFadyen (Wellington); in the ’80s Yvonne Bennett (Auckland), Kirsa Jensen and Teresa Cormack (Napier), Maxine Walker (Auckland); in the ’90s the Swedish tourists (Coromandel), Dahlberg (Nelson), Cruickshanks (Lake Wakatipu), and Mavis Harris (Dunedin).

Many of these cases have become well known, and in some of them the bodies remain to this day unrecovered. The well-known “psychic,” Doris Stokes, claims in one of her books to have assisted the police to recover the body of Mona Blades, though the police themselves have no knowledge of this. Since the detective inspector who handled this particular investigation died some years ago,we can speculate that the psychic may have passed the information as to the whereabouts of the body on to him direct — in some other world!

In a number of these cases when the media have built up psychic speculation on the whereabouts of the missing persons, this has attracted the attention and proper scorn of the Skeptics Society.

My own personal involvement in such cases included Gail McFadyen who, despite psychic suggestion, was located (after a week) by routine police searching, and with the disappearance of Kirsa Jensen at Napier in September 1983. Having been the officer in charge of that investigation, I was in a position to review all of the information that came forward during the course of the inquiry. Thousands of people were seen by the police, many of them providing useful information that assisted the investigation. To this day the remains of Kirsa Jensen have never been found.

Unhelpful Information

On reviewing the investigation about six months after the disappearance, the police found that several hundred offers of assistance and advice had been made by people who were not actually witnesses to any incidents at all, and thus their information became part of a “miscellaneous file”. As it transpired, two-thirds of this information came from psychics, clairvoyants and dreamers and did not advance the investigation one bit. Most of the information was not specific as to any area where a body might be located, but some was quite graphic in detail and disturbing by its very nature.

In more recent times, the disappearance of Amber-Lee Cruickshanks, a 2-year-old child, near Lake Wakatipu, brought a further flood of assistance from those inclined to the paranormal. An officer working on the investigation commented that he had received “letters from clairvoyants, card readers, star watchers, prayer groups, crystal readers, palm readers, spiritualists, people who have visions, premonitions and total lunatics”. None of them assisted the search.

The media compounded the situation with a television programme actually taking a psychic to the scene of the disappearance. It should be noted though, that in this particular case the victim’s mother seemed to place some reliance on the use of this type of person, she having consulted psychics in the past.

Once again, the case was not advanced at all by the intervention of such people, and indeed rarely was any specific information provided. This is not uncommon, and I would guess that in 95% of the situations, only vague suggestions or descriptions are provided as to the whereabouts of the missing person, such as remarking that they will be found near water or trees. Indeed I would go further and predict myself that around 90% of people who go missing in New Zealand will be found near trees or water — and I have no special powers!

If people with some psychic ability really were helpful, then they would be of great assistance to the police. We could employ them on an “as required” basis and use them to supplement our dog section, search and rescue squad, and other investigators. Thus assisted, the police could go straight to the victim or missing person without the extensive and expensive investigations and searches that now take place.

The reality is, however, that psychics provide no assistance whatsoever and to the best of my knowledge, never have. I have canvassed all of the police districts in New Zealand and no one has been able to provide details which confirm accurate predictions. Occasionally instances have seemed to come close, but on detailed examination have proved negative — that is, the body was found by some normal means and the location may have accidentally coincided with some “psychic suggestion”.

With the thousands of opportunities that offer themselves and the numerous pieces of information provided by psychics, sooner or later there has got to be a discovery that could be attributed to psychic intervention. I suggest this will be nothing more than coincidence.

Why Listen to Them?

Do the police attach any significance to psychics’ submissions, or appear to be doing so?

I believe that New Zealand is unique in the world because nearly every homicide case is solved, and almost all missing people are found. This is due in large part to public support. We cannot invite such support on one hand and then on the other dismiss it.

It is possible, too, that a genuine witness, after pondering for some time on what they have seen, may become concerned as to whether they have actually seen an event or just dreamt it. As well, a witness may elect, for whatever reason, to pass genuine information through a third party or medium (in whatever sense of the word), or finally the person passing on some dream or psychic inspiration to the police may in fact be the offender and be seeking a way to pass that on to the authorities in some roundabout way.

It is possible that some police officers, with no previous experience of dealing with psychics, could be inclined to accept them at first sight. Serious involvement with such people soon changes this belief. It is necessary, though, that the police listen to all of the suggestions that are made and act as they consider appropriate on the information they receive.

So much for the New Zealand experience. One reads of psychics being used overseas to assist the police, but any article that I have read suggests such assistance is as useless there as it is here.

A few years ago the Los Angeles Police Department conducted an experiment using 12 psychics, two-thirds of whom were “professional” (ie, earned their living by this means), to determine whether they could solve crimes. Four real crimes were examined, two that had been solved and two that remained unsolved. Some 20 to 30 key indicators were developed for each incident and the psychics were asked to examine an exhibit and speculate on the crime itself. At best they were able to guess correctly five or six of the indicators, and some got none at all right. The only degree of accuracy they achieved was in guessing the sex of the victim (or where it was known, the suspect) — they were correct on half of the occasions!
“Evaluation of the Use of Psychics in the Investigation of Major Crimes,” Reiser, Ludwig, Saxe and Wagner, Journal of Police Science and Administration, March 1979.)

A second experiment was later conducted using psychics and as well control groups of students and detectives. At the conclusion of the research, the researchers stated that “the data provided no support for the theory that psychics could produce investigatively useful information. In addition, the data failed to show that psychics could produce any information relating to the cases beyond a chance level of expectancy”.
“Comparison of Psychics, Detectives and Students in the Investigation of Major Crimes,” by Clyver and Reiser.

It is my view that psychics, dreamers, clairvoyants and the like have not provided any material assistance whatsoever to the police in New Zealand, and that accords with overseas research. Suggestions are certainly received, but they are rarely specific and often they raise false hopes in the minds of victims’ families.

The results of psychic intervention never stand up to test. There may occasionally be situations when it appears that some such suggestion has been useful, but that is not surprising in light of the volume of suggestions put forward for there must eventually be some coincidence.

Psychics and clairvoyants would be better off concentrating on Lotto numbers and race horse winners so that the profits thereby gained could be used to develop their science further and thus convince my colleagues and me of their ability.

Nostradamus — The 1994 Annual Almanac by V.J. Hewitt

Nostradamus — The 1994 Annual Almanac by V.J. Hewitt. Random House, $15.95

This book explains an approach to interpreting the French “prophet” Nostradamus’s predictions. It is the culmination of 16 years research by an English woman, V.J. Hewitt. She has invented a system of decoding his quatrains using anagrams — and not just the sort that you get in cryptic crosswords, but huge, French ones. She takes a Nostradamus quatrain, mixes up all the letters, removes the letters of the subject she is interested in (and it could be anything from soccer hooliganism to an air traffic controllers’ strike), adds the date, and then rearranges the remaining letters to produce the prophecy that Nostradamus had clearly intended. What’s more she does it in French.

Here’s a New Zealand version of what she does. Take the first two lines of our National Anthem: “God of Nations, at thy feet, in the bonds of love we meet. ” There are, in this dreary verse, many hidden prophecies which V.J. Hewitt would extract like this…

Remove the word “fish” because we want to see what the future of fishing is in this country. Mix up the remaining letters and you get: “Too many boats net the food we love. Ten get fined.” What could be clearer than that? On the other hand — and this is a little confusing — another anagram gives: “Eels need to have fatty food, gin. None wet bottom.” This could be disqualified by the grammatically pedantic on the grounds that it should be “wets” rather than “wet.” But Hewitt is a little flexible herself — in one prediction she is forced to change Phillip to Philip in order to get the anagram to fit the prediction comfortably.

Hewitt explains how unique and successful her system is, reminding me of the Spike Milligan line: “My uncle was a great man. He told me so himself, and you can’t argue with facts like that.” She is realistic enough to admit in her closing lines that she is “vulnerable to criticism unless and until each prediction is fulfilled.” Unusually for this sort of book, she is foolish enough to tie the events to reasonably definite dates. Most soothsayers pronounce woolly sooths but are cunning enough not to cite dates. She should have learnt a lesson from the “End of the World is Nigh” brigade — they tend not to pinpoint “nigh” and most of their placards seem to be made of fairly durable material.

What will happen of course is that Christmas shoppers will buy this book, be enthralled by the forecasts, and then forget it, until…in April 1994 Nelson Mandela actually does become the President of South Africa. Then they’ll say: “Didn’t Nostradamus predict that somewhere? Doris, go get that Hewitt book — I think it was written in there. There it is on page 48! Extraordinary!” No mention of similar predictions of political scientists world-wide nor, more importantly in terms of this publication, any mention of the fact that Nostradamus also predicted on page 47 that at the end of May (only a week or two before) two female Yeti would be found in the Himalayas, presumably out on a Sherpa-capturing expedition.

Large anagrams are funny things. You start with real creativity and freedom — there are a lot of letters to play with — but as you get near the end and all the “e”s have gone, there’s a “q” and no “u” left, and “Qantas” doesn’t suit a prediction on the return of Maggie Thatcher, so you juggle and end up with a small, three or four-letter word. It may take a lot of imagination to tie this in with the substance of the text. But like most Nostradamus students, Hewitt has a fertile mind. She is particularly motivated by the discovery that her very own name is mentioned in the 16th-century verses. Having been chosen as the official Nostradamus interpreter for the 20th Century, I suspect nothing will divert her. (It should be noted that when I solved the relevant quatrainal anagram the name I came up with was not “V.J. Hewitt” but “J.T.V. White,” who just happens to be my old maths teacher).

So we will continue to be presented every year with the V.J. Hewitt Annual Almanac regardless of the previous year’s inaccuracies, and it doesn’t take much of an anagram to predict quite a useful income for her from the New Age bookstores. This sort of book is a waster of time and forests, a ramble down one person’s “spiritual” cul-de-sac. Ingenious or ingenuous, it will still probably outsell Carl Sagan.

Psychics’ Predictions Fizzle for 1992

President Bush was not re-elected. Madonna did not become a gospel singer, and a UFO base was not found in the Mexican desert. These were just a few of the many predictions that had been made for 1992 by famous “psychics”, but were dead wrong, as chronicled by the Bay Area Skeptics.

At the end of each year, many well-known “psychics” issue predictions for the year to come. Twelve months later, they issue another set of predictions, conveniently forgetting those made the year before, which are always nearly 100% wrong. Each year, however, the Bay Area Skeptics dig up the predictions made the year before, to the embarrassment of those who made them.

Many of the “psychic” predictions made are so vague that it is impossible to say if they came true or not: for example, Jeane Dixon’s prediction that Tracey Gold “faces perilous periods in July and October” [The Star, April 14, 1992] is not obviously true or false. Many other “predictions” involve things that happen every year, or else are not difficult to guess, such as terrorist incidents, marital strife for Charles and Diana, or severe winter storms. Many supposed “predictions” simply state that ongoing events and trends will continue, such as economic uncertainty, or conflict in the Middle East. Some predictions did of course come true, especially those that were unspecific, or not at all difficult to guess: several “psychics” correctly predicted that a hurricane would cause major destruction in Florida or Cuba, but not one was specific as to the date or principal location of the damage. Hurricanes occur, of course, every season in the Caribbean. Significantly, not one prediction which was both specific and surprising came true.

Other supposed “predictions” are not really predictions at all, but are actually disclosures of little-known events which are already under way, such as movie productions, marriage plans, business ventures, or developing scandals. Because questionable claims of having made an amazing prediction are frequently made in the wake of major news stories, the Bay Area Skeptics only evaluates predictions that were published or broadcast before the events they claimed to foretell.

New York “psychic” Lou Wright predicted that three men would unsuccessfully attempt to kidnap Candice Bergen in Paris, and Marlon Brando would be arrested for trying to bust his son out of jail [National Enquirer, Jan. 2, 1992].

Los Angeles “psychic” Maria Graciette predicted that a secret UFO base would be found deep in the Mexican desert, thousands of years old, and that Vice-President Dan Quayle, attending a World Series game, would impulsively interfere with a play [National Enquirer, June 9, 1992].

New York “psychic” John Monti predicted that “a massive hurricane will devastate Cuba and topple Castro’s regime,” that a huge AIDS epidemic would “threaten to end professional sports” [National Enquirer, Jan. 2, 1992], and that a scientific advance would allow women to delay menopause, allowing them to have children into their 60s [National Enquirer, June 9, 1992].

The famous Washington, D. C. “psychic” Jeane Dixon, who supposedly has a “gift of prophecy”, saw that Fidel Castro would be overthrown, possibly resulting in Cuba becoming part of the U. S., and Virginia governor Douglas Wilder would gain enough support for a “vice-presidential invitation”. President-elect Bill Clinton, however, she described as “the Democratic shooting star,” for whom “an organization of women will try to block his path” [The Star, Jan. 21, 1992]. President Bush’s ratings would climb, resulting in his re-election [The Star, July 7, 1992]. She also predicted “a promising economic upturn in the spring,” and that “broccoli will become the miracle vegetable of the ’90s” [The Star, Jan. 21, 1992].

Chicago “psychic” Irene Hughes predicted that Vanna White and her husband would purchase a “haunted” mansion in Beverly Hills, from which they would flee in terror a week later. Madonna’s career would be interrupted by a “mystery illness,” but she would recover after having a religious vision, and become a gospel singer [National Enquirer, June 9, 1992].

New York “psychic” Laura Steele predicted that an earthquake would topple the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and that William Kennedy Smith would enter the priesthood to become a missionary in Africa [National Enquirer, Jan. 2, 1992].

Los Angeles “psychic” Judy Hevenly predicted that George Bush would be re-elected “by a landslide,” that Madonna would be hit by a car while jogging in New York’s Central Park [National Enquirer, Jan. 2, 1992], and that Gennifer Flowers would join the cast of a popular daytime soap opera [National Enquirer, June 9, 1992].

Another Southern California “psychic,” Clarisa Bernhardt, who is claimed to make “uncanny earthquake predictions,” warned that scientists would be “shocked” in October when supposedly earthquake-proof Florida is hit by a trembler, only weeks after being hit by “the worst hurricane in the state’s history.” The prediction that this year’s hurricane season would produce Florida’s worst destruction yet was correct, but the earthquake prediction was dead wrong. Bernhardt also predicted that Joan Lunden would renew her marriage vows on her TV show, “Good Morning America” [National Enquirer, June 9, 1992], that Michael Jackson would lose his voice and quit singing, and that Joan Rivers would be plagued by three look-alikes created through “extensive plastic surgery” [National Enquirer, Jan. 2, 1992].

Joan Quigley of San Francisco, White House astrologer to the Reagans, predicted that Bill Clinton would run out of money toward the campaign’s end, and that the total eclipse of the sun on June 30 will cause earthshaking events in China [Washington Post, April 18, 1992].

Here in Northern California, the date of that devastating California earthquake everybody keeps predicting was pegged for Oct. 17, the third anniversary of the Loma Prieta quake, by “psychic” Ernesto A. Moshe Montgomery, who claims an accuracy of 99 1/2 percent [San Jose Metro, Feb. 27, 1992].

Based on the continuing failure of the “psychics” to make accurate predictions over the years, the Bay Area Skeptics urges everyone — especially the media — to exercise some healthy skepticism when “psychics” and other purveyors of the paranormal make extra-ordinary claims or predictions. Anyone who swallows the “psychics'” claims year after year without checking the record is setting a bad example for students and for the public.

It is important to note that no “psychic” succeeded in predicting the genuinely surprising news stories of 1992: The destructive fire in Windsor Castle; the feud between Vice-President Quayle and Murphy Brown; the surprising presidential campaign of Ross Perot. These major news stories were so totally unexpected that someone would have had to be genuinely “psychic” to have predicted them twelve months ago! Given the sheer number of so-called “psychics” out there, one would expect that if even one of them were genuine, these things would have been correctly predicted; and since they were not, it suggests that all such claims of “psychic powers” are without foundation.

“Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: 126)

Tattooed Maoris Did It!

The failure of clairvoyants to locate the missing Wellington man, Michael Kelly, or to know the manner of his death, will not startle many skeptics. No major missing persons case in the history of New Zealand has been solved with paranormal help, despite the fact that police have been deluged with clairvoyant tips over the years — from Mona Blades to Kirsa Jensen, Teresa Cormack, Luisa Damodron, Heidi Paakkonen or Michael Kelly.

Nor are we surprised that self-described psychics were called in by a desperate family. When all leads go cold, people are vulnerable to the suggestion that paranormal powers can help.

What ought to worry us is the media-generated atmosphere in which such delusion can flourish. Both the Dominion and the Evening Post published straight accounts of the clairvoyants’ visions of Michael Kelly’s “abductors” (See News Front). Kelly was supposedly robbed by two or three “rough-looking, tattooed Maoris,” about 26 years old. All the clairvoyants agreed on a description of their car. I’ll bet it was a Holden in need of body work.

No sooner had the Dominion published these psychic delusions than police phones started ringing hot with reports of suspicious-looking Maoris motoring about Wellington.

Both the Dominion and the Evening Post richly deserve a Bent Spoon for treating psychic fantasies as though they were news, but they’re not the only guilty parties. The Holmes show recently featured an item on a clairvoyant who was “helping” in the search for a toddler missing near the shore of Lake Wakitipu. Just as Michael Kelly’s family was told foul play was involved in his disappearance, so the mother of this little drowning victim has been given psychic visions implying abduction by a man. This psychic search also failed, but that fact didn’t make it onto Holmes.

Particularly upsetting in the Kelly case is that the clairvoyants were at last report still insisting another person was involved in the death, implying foul play. To the family’s anguish can now be added the burden of disquiet about the coroner’s findings.

Holmes, the Dominion, the Evening Post — why, even Sharon Crosbie gave at least one skeptic an attack of near-clinical depression on a recent morning when she provided fifteen minutes of unchallenged air-time to a visiting American “clairvoyant.” This huckster told Sharon that she got into the psychic business 25 years ago when she had a seven-hour conversation in French with her daughter, though neither of them had ever spoken the language before. Seems they simply “flipped back to the year 1654 in the south of France.” Sharon fairly giggled and gushed while the woman babbled on about akashic past lives and predicted “many, many changes on the planet … a lot of earthquake activity in New Zealand,” all because “we’re moving into a higher level of vibration.”

Let’s give Sharon credit: two days later she had the good grace to read on air a letter from Peter Lange excoriating her for the interview. Sharon’s an intelligent woman and, what the hell, we all have our off days. (Though the Press Association carried our official condemnation of the use of clairvoyants in police investigations, neither the Dominion nor the Evening Post chose to publish the story — guess they’re having an off month.)

It’s the continual tacit validation of claims to psychic power in gullible broadcast interviews and published articles that leads anguished, vulnerable families of missing persons to resort to clairvoyants. “There must be something in it — after all, I heard a woman on the radio just the other morning…”

But critical intelligence isn’t dead yet. The reliable Kim Hill recently interviewed Dave Allman, promoter of the Elliott Wave Theory, a form of share market voodoo that’s been around for a long time. Like Sharon’s psychic, Allman was a nonstop talker. When she could finally get a word in, Kim brought the interview to a close. “I was going to ask you if it’s an art or a science,” she sighed, “but I guess it’s a religion.”