1329: Psychic Detectives | Skeptical Sunday

1329: Psychic Detectives | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Nick Pell. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, a bunch of people just turned this episode off, by the way, Nick. You have that effect on people. They either come for Nick Pell or they leave-

because of Nick Pell. That's how this works now.

Nick Pell: You people who leave will soon be staying for me. You just don't know it yet.

Jordan Harbinger: Challenge accepted. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, a police detective sits in a dimly lit, smoke-filled office researching the disappearance of a small girl. She's the picture of the type of girl the media gives extra attention to: pretty, blonde, precocious, and worst of all, there are absolutely no leads.

It's like she disappeared into thin air. The detective is at the end of his rope. He's tried [00:02:00] everything he knows to get the case going, but to no avail. The parents are frantic. They're willing to do anything to get their child back, even if it means using decidedly unorthodox methods. So the parents start to demand that the police use a psychic.

You may have seen this on the news, and if you're old enough, on the show Unsolved Mysteries. And like a lot of people, you've probably wondered to yourself if people really do this, and if it actually works. You may have reasoned that, hey, if they keep doing it, it's gotta work sometimes. So much so that we're gonna dig deep into the world of psychics today.

Not just any psychics, but the ones the cops call in when they hit a dead end in a case. Does it ever work? And if not, why do they keep doing it? Here today to help me peer into the crystal ball is writer and researcher Nick Pell. Nick, have you ever been to a psychic?

Nick Pell: No, but someone made a shitload of calls to Miss Cleo from my house in high school. Yeah. And my parents absolutely refused to believe that it wasn't me. Like, why would I be calling a psychic? Is that

Jordan Harbinger: rhetorical? [00:03:00]

Nick Pell: Yes. Also, there were, like, tons of kids always hanging out and sleeping over. Like, my house was the house everybody crashed at. It could've been one of 10 people.

We had bands that would come. I, we used to book bands, and they would stay with us for the weekend, so it could've been one of them. Anyway, I have no idea who called Miss Cleo from my house in 1996. A likely story. Sorta not funny because my parents were pissed. It was a big bill, and they were mad at me.

Otherwise, one of the weirdest things to me is how many real live psychics and palm readers there used to be. Even in my own hometown, there was more than one, and the people running them apparently did well enough that they paid the rent for years at a time. No idea if any of them are still there.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, they probably all got rich playing the stock market and moved to California.

Actually, there is a psychic in my neighborhood here in Silicon Valley who reads tarot cards, and it's, like, a block away from me. In my neighborhood. I have no idea how they stay in business. I have to [00:04:00] assume they bought the house 40 years ago and just they've been here, and they've rode the wave. But what about the cops back in your town?

Were they appealing to the local mediums to solve their hard cases? I don't think my town had any hard cases. I feel like cops have been tapping psychics and mediums to help with extra hard cases since we were kids, which leads me to believe that it's been happening for a lot longer than I've been around.

Nick Pell: Yeah, so people have been doing this long before Unsolved Mysteries terrified our generation. It all kinda begins with the spiritualism movement, which is more or less what you see in movies taking place in the 19th or early 20th century where people try to talk to the dead. Seances and stuff like that.

It's impossible really to say just how much the American Civil War impacted people's lives. There were entire towns where there simply weren't any young men anymore. There was just old ladies, little kids, and old men, and that was [00:05:00] it. There was a lot of loss across the country, and one of the ways that people coped with this was through seances designed to contact their dead relatives.

There was another big outbreak of spiritualism after World War I. Fortunately, they weren't organizing the regiments by town at that point. You didn't have an entire town wiped out, but there's still a lot of loss. So the spiritualism is therapy, pop religion, and reality TV all rolled into one.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I know this is pretty widespread at various points in American history.

Arthur Conan Doyle, the guy who created Sherlock Holmes, he was really into it. Harry Houdini was really into it. Harry

Nick Pell: Houdini was into spiritualism, but mostly from the side of debunking it. Weirdly, a hobby of s- stage magicians is going around and exposing psychics. As far as I can tell, Houdini is the trailblazer here.

James Randi was kind of Houdini's heir when it came to going hard in the paint fighting claims of psychic abilities.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:00] Yeah, I know. I think Penn and Teller are kinda into this too, and there's a few people around, all of whom are, yeah, m- magicians or performers of some way that are kinda like, "Hey, I'm gonna debunk this nonsense."

I've never heard of spiritualism being used by police departments to solve cases, though.

Nick Pell: We know they did, but we also don't have a ton of records. Record-keeping in general wasn't all that great during this time period. Things get thrown out because people just assume no one cares. But we do have some newspaper reports from the time because the papers absolutely loved it.

Newspapers of this era were way more sensational than even most social media today. So we have an article from The Evening Republican of Indiana where a psychic supposedly helped find a missing girl. So is that legit at all? This story is super tenuous, but the newspaper frames it with this kind of breathless sincerity.

All the article says is some people are convinced a [00:07:00] woman living hundreds of miles away with a different name is a missing girl. There's another story from 1909 where a psychic allegedly helped find a woman's body at the bottom of a lake. The article actually seems to be lost to the sands of time, but it's cited in a historiographic article, so it probably existed at some point.

Newspapers at the time always covered this stuff in a completely credulous tone, but there's no way of telling whether or not this is just dumb luck or what. And in the case of the woman living away, hundreds of miles away with a different name, I read the article and I was j- I didn't even get what point they were trying to make with it.

Okay. Does it matter if it's just dumb luck or if the psychics are onto something? I think it matters. It does when you start expending taxpayer dollars on hiring these people to find dead bodies or missing children.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, okay, that's fair. A- and also you're building the [00:08:00] brand of somebody who is a con artist if you give them credit.

So I think you're right. It's weird, but it doesn't rise to the level of spooky psychic phenomenon. Police departments were pretty bad at solving crimes, I would think, before the advent of forensic evidence. I'm not just talking about DNA. I mean, it was kinda before like, "Who saw this happen? No one? We have blood, a random weapon that we have no idea where that was ever bought and we can never trace it, and a dead body and a bunch of hair, and it looks like clothing from someone who was here that killed him. And God, we're n- we just have no evidence. There's nothing we can do about this."

And it's like, okay. Now, it's like, there was a drop of blood under the fingernails of the victim that matches this guy who was seen in the area. He's definitely it. Throw him in prison. It's a different game now. But to your point, guessing that there's a dead body at the bottom of a lake, it's kind of a safe bet, whether it's a murder victim being hidden there or somebody just overestimated their swimming skills or, like, got drunk and went boating.

I bet you that most lakes, most big lakes have dead bodies in them from some point in time

Nick Pell: Yeah, that's a [00:09:00] pretty fair guess. After World War II, there's a whole uptick in interest in all things weird, pulp magazines and horror comics and things like that. This is the era of psychic detective because people stop conceptualizing psychic phenomena in terms of magic and start thinking of it in terms of science.

It's off to the side, but a really good way to illustrate this change in public consciousness is that before World War II, the comic book character Green Lantern was a guy with a big cape, and he had a magical green ring that he had to charge with a lantern to give it its magical powers back. And after World War II, he's a different guy with a green ring, but now the ring is advanced alien technology.

Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: that is actually interesting. So the idea that, hey, it's magic, that was no longer a sufficient explanation even in science fiction. So it, it sounds like part of this is just a general public [00:10:00] interest in psychic phenomena, and people are stepping up to meet that demand.

Nick Pell: I think that's a fair analysis.

There's a zillion different pulp magazines covering this stuff because people are just dying for as much as they can get their hands on. The psychic detectives are downstream from this general interest in occultism, psychic phenomenon as science, and things of that nature.

Jordan Harbinger: Which brings us to the era of unsolved mysteries.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Unsolved Mysteries- And America's

Jordan Harbinger: Most Wanted, and man- Yeah, basically that. I don't wanna get sued, but there you have it. Everybody remembers that.

Nick Pell: You just made me nine years old and terrified instantly all over again. Yeah, Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted, for people under 40, these are the very beginnings of reality television.

They're both exactly what they sound like. The first is a show covering unsolved mysteries, and the second looks for criminals. Both [00:11:00] were pretty good at what they did. I re-watched the entire series of Unsolved Mysteries last year, and the cool thing is they have updates when you watch it on Amazon. So I saw a lot of mysteries get solved, but I don't remember any of them being solved by psychics.

Jordan Harbinger: Calling in psychics, that was a whole thing on that show. I can just remember the B-roll of people walking through the forest with dogs, and there's, like, a psychic giving themselves a head massage, feeling trees. Look, some of this is survivorship bias, right? Survivor bias, where I just remember those episodes more because we're talking about them, but they were ridiculous, and I definitely remember that happening on that show.

Nick Pell: There's a bunch of psychic detective cases on Unsolved Mysteries. I couldn't- Find out exactly how many, but it's definitely, it's a thing. Not a single one of them resulted in a mystery being solved. But there's more to it than that. There are three somewhat prominent cases where people will claim that psychics helped solve the mystery.

There's the [00:12:00] Melanie Uribe case. Uribe was a nurse whose murder went unsolved. Etta Smith is a psychic who comes to work on the case and tells police to search a specific area for a body, and lo and behold, there they found the body. In fact, her prediction was so eerily accurate that the police made Smith an official suspect for the murder.

That is crazy. I mean, bad luck for her. Yeah, that is crazy. They were already searching the area before Etta Smith told them to search that area. And then months later, unrelated to any of her psychic predictions, the killers confessed. She gave the police precisely nothing.

Jordan Harbinger: So decidedly way less crazy than previously thought.

Okay. What else have you got from our main man, Robert Stack, host of the OG Unsolved Mysteries and the gang. By the way, how good was that guy at the host? Remember his smoky, mysterious voice and stuff, and he's like, the cadence. He, that guy was such a [00:13:00] boss.

Nick Pell: The, the trench coat- Yeah. That's right ... and his handsome baritoney voice.

We know our own. Yeah. Love Robert Stack in Unsolved Mysteries and Airplane!, for that matter. I forgot he was in that. Psychic Dorothy Allison claims to have assisted in solving the John List murders. List murdered his family in 1971, and the cops got him 18 years later with her psychic predictions. No, they absolutely didn't use her psychic predictions at all.

They used a age progressed bust made by a sculpture of what he would look like at the time, 18 years later, for America's Most Wanted. They sculpted a bust of his head and blasted that- And then showed it to the entire United

Jordan Harbinger: States on primetime TV, yeah.

Nick Pell: Yeah, and then they found him, which is decidedly not psychic.

All the information that Dorothy [00:14:00] Allison fed the cops was super vague, and it turned out that she more or less had a bunch of stock information that she fed cops on various cases. She gave the cops in the John List murders over 40 names None of which were helpful.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So that seems like pretty clear evidence of a straight-up scam or just crazy delusional, but it reminds me of how TV psychics work.

I've seen these filmed before. So someone will get up on stage and they guess a million things, and then when someone reacts, they chase that rabbit. So they'll say, "I'm seeing someone whose name starts with R," and there's 100 people in the audience. And if nobody bites, then they're like, "No, no, no, it's an M.

It's a- oh, it's a P, sorry." And they just keep doing that. And then someone's like, "My husband's name was Robert." And they're like, "Oh, okay," or Michael. And then they're like, "Yes, Michael. Michael says that he is your husband, cousin, friend, son," or whatever. And they're like, "That's my son." And you're like, "Oh my God."

And then they- when they edit the show, they only [00:15:00] keep the hits, and it looks like this dude just goes and says, "I'm sensing someone's name is M. Is it your son, Michael?" And she's like, "Oh my God," 'cause they cut out all the things he was just totally rolling the dice over and over and just hoping nobody notices.

And if you're in the audience, I guess you either go, "What the heck is this nonsense?" But they don't film your face, or you just go, "Oh my gosh, he got something," and you're all looking at the lady to see what's next 'cause there's nothing in your life that rhymes with. So it's just a bunch of kinda camera tricks, as my mom used to call it back in the '80s.

Nick Pell: This is a very old carny trick. You can guess if I say, "Oh, it's a name with an M," you're not even saying it begins with an M. That's a good point. Could be anything. It's one of the eight most common letters in the English language. He must have meant my daughter

Jordan Harbinger: Carmen then, in that case. Yeah, like, "Uh, sure.

Yeah, it's an M in the middle."

Nick Pell: And they're just like, "Yeah," and they go with it. You also, if you do this for a living, you can just kinda tell certain things about some people when you [00:16:00] meet them.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's true. You can also just use someone's appearance or cultural stuff. There was an old fan of the show, and I'd never met him.

All I knew that, i- is that he was Indian 'cause he had an Indian name. So we're going by email here, okay? And he's like, "Hey Jordan, I know that you don't believe in psychics, but something has just converted me because I went to this university fair and they had a psychic there, and she was so good at reading me."

And I was like, "Dude, it's just cold reading." And he's like, "No, she was crazy accurate. It was wild." And I was like, "Bro, I could read you. I don't even wanna hear what she said. I bet I can read you." And he's like, "Give it a shot." And I was like, "Okay, you're Indian. You told me you're a graphic designer." So I- that's what I know about him, right?

Or actually, he... I don't even know if he told me that. I think it was in his email address. Like, it was like, you know those sidebars show up and it's like, "Graphic designer at Grooveshark." So I was like , "Okay, so you're an artistic personality. Your parents wish you were a little bit more of an engineering, doctor, lawyer kind of mind.

You have siblings or cousins and y- they're always comparing you to them, and those people have high-powered [00:17:00] jobs like a doctor or a lawyer." And he goes, "Oh my God, dude, my sister is a doctor. My parents compare me to her all the time. They hate my job." And I'm like, "Congrats, you're just like every other Indian dude in North America who has parents that want them to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, and has a sibling that did do that, and you got an artistic job at a startup that they hate because they think it's unstable and they can't brag to their friends about it."

And he was just like, "Really? But you're so accurate." And I'm like, "You and two million other men on this continent alone, plus a- another 100 million in India proper match this exact particular read, man. This is such a wide net. It just seems tailored to you because you are it. But if I put you next to 100 other Indian dudes that are not doctors, lawyers, or engineers, they're all gonna be like, 'Oh my God, Jordan is psychic.'

It's really not that hard to do this." "

Nick Pell: I'm from a suburban town in New England." "Oh, you're from a working class family and you're surrounded by alcoholism, and your dad is very, uh, stern and short-tempered." And [00:18:00] it's like that's everyone in... Like, congratulations, that's everybody I went to high school with.

You can guess stuff close enough that you're gonna get it a lot of the time. So getting back to Dorothy Allison, two of the cops accused her of attempting to bribe them to say she helped solve a case, which she denied. One more of these psychic interventions, there's Noreen Renier, who was on Unsolved Mysteries multiple times, touted as a legit psychic who was helping police solve all these outstanding cases, and there's just one problem.

The police never said any such thing, even on camera. They're very diplomatic. But they're not crediting her with solving any crimes. There's not a single case where her information led to an arrest. The so-called psychics are... They're really batting 1,000 here so far. The worst thing Ranier ever did was tell a family with a missing girl they'd find her by Christmas.

One problem, she was dead. Murdered. She was at the

Jordan Harbinger: bottom of a lake. Oh, man. [00:19:00] So did they find the body by Christmas or what? No. Sorry. Oh. Ugh. Unforgivably awful. That was poor taste, but this woman is out of her mind telling grieving parents something like that. "Oh, she's gonna be fine. You'll find her by Christmas."

Merry Christmas. She's dead. These people are terrible.

Nick Pell: They're gonna get worse as we go on, if you can believe that. The next development in the world of TV psychic detectives is the dawning of the '90s talk show era that I loved very much. Some of the psychics that we saw on Unsolved Mysteries started making appearances on Montel Williams and shows like that.

Like

Jordan Harbinger: this?

Nick Pell: You are not the guy. Like that one? Yes. Did Maury used to have psychics on? He probably did. I'm sure he did. You say talk show psychics, I in- I immediately think Montel Williams.

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Jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. Montel Williams, Jenny Jones, Ricki Lake, they, Maury Povich, were all competing for, like, the bottom rung of daytime TV. Donahue had retired, and then it was, like, Jerry Springer and Geraldo. God, there were a lot of these shows, man.

My

Nick Pell: God. Yeah, what's crazy, man, is, like, how Maury just became the paternity testing show. Yes. It was, like, all they did. Yes. Anyway. Memories. Money

Jordan Harbinger: printer. It must have been a money printer or they wouldn't have done it.

Nick Pell: We'll, in a roundabout way, we'll explain why it's a money printer in a bit, but there's something of a new wave of psychic [00:23:00] investigators now on social media, which I would put down to the renewed interest in true crime, combined with just a low bar to entry.

To get on Unsolved Mysteries or Montel Williams, you have to spend years cultivating a following as a psychic. All you need to do to get on TikTok is get on TikTok. Even in the era of local newspapers, you had to have some kind of cachet. You can't just call up the local paper and tell them you're a psychic.

Maybe that is all it took? Possible, but in general, there's a lower bar for entry to the media these days, and I think that the resurgence of psychics reflects that.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I can see why it's attractive to television producers, whether it's on daytime talk shows or Unsolved Mysteries. These segments are so easy to produce, man.

They provide a lot of audience engagement. From a producer perspective, okay, you just need a good bullshitter and you are set in terms of bang for your buck, right? You don't need special effects. You don't even need set dressing. You [00:24:00] need some lighting, a chair, a room to film them in, and someone who can talk their way around other people's skepticism.

And that's great. That's budget-friendly. So far, psychic investigators are clocking in at zero, though. But one thing I'm dying to know is what they actually do. They call up the cops and they say, "Hey, I'm psychic and I can help you find this missing person or this killer on the run." Fine, but then what?

What is it that they are actually doing to justify their presence in a police investigation?

Nick Pell: They're only sort of used as consultants in limited areas, and I- I perhaps overstated earlier the idea that they're getting taxpayer money. They're probably not. If they're- anyone's paying them, it's probably the families.

What they might get in terms of money is, I guess this is taxpayer money, but it's so insignificant, travel reimbursement to cover mileage, very small consulting fees, maybe a couple, few hundred bucks maybe. They're

Jordan Harbinger: probably hoping for a [00:25:00] big win, and then they get a bunch of news media, and then it's like their tarot bookings are out the next six months.

They don't have to worry about generating business.

Nick Pell: Yeah. It more seems to be a media thing for them. If they're gonna get any money, it's like they're gonna get 50 bucks. They're usually not gonna get any kind of money for this. Raniere and Allison, who we talked about, police gave her gas money and a few bucks.

Raniere got travel reimbursements. They're not really getting paid in any meaningful sense. What they do varies from psychic to psychic but is about what you would expect if you've ever seen a psychic in a movie or on television. They might hold an object and concentrate. They might have some kind of clairvoyant remote viewing capability that allows them to see things happening at a distance.

They might report having visions of the victim, disappeared person, or suspects. There's all kinds of ways they can operate, but they're also just... This is, like, [00:26:00] bog-standard psychic stu- psychic stuff that you see on TV and in movies.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The other thing I wonder about is how do the police react to this?

'Cause I find it quite hard to believe the cops are like, "Yeah, this all sounds great. We should definitely hire you on as our full-time psychic. Thanks for giving us 40 names, none of which actually were the killer. Oh, there's a body at the bottom of a lake. Thanks. We dredged the lake, and we found a body.

I mean, wrong body. I guess we found one. In fact, we found three 'cause it's a lake in Nevada near Las Vegas." Like- Yeah ... the end. Come on.

Nick Pell: I get the sense that when they get money, it's like, it's some sort of combination maybe of feeling bad for them and paying them to go away, but that's, whatever, speculation on my part.

I think the one thing to point out, though, is that this usually happens in small-town police departments. It's much more of a small-town police department phenomenon. These psychics very rarely interact with the police in any official capacity. They might come forward with their own tips, or [00:27:00] the families of the victims hire them, and then they expect the police to act on the information they're given.

The cops don't really seem to like it. It's also important to remember that politely nodding along with an alleged psychic while they feed you tips isn't an endorsement of anything that is going on. It's rare that the police will even admit to working with psychics, and when they do, it's usually some very vague information about how, "Yeah, we'll look into that."

They want enough of a paper trail to say they chased down every lead, but they don't really want to encourage people to come forward. with more time-wasting information, especially if they're a smaller department

Jordan Harbinger: that's strapped for resources. Can we drill down into some of the psychic investigators who have worked with the police?

Not each and every, obviously, but some contemporary psychics who've worked with police or at least claim to work with the police.

Nick Pell: Dorothy Allison, who we talked about earlier from Nutley, New Jersey, she was ironically named, yes. She was one of America's [00:28:00] best-known psychic detectives. She claimed to help police solve hundreds of cases, including murders and missing persons investigations across the country.

As I said, she worked on the List case. She relies on alleged visions. She'd see flashes of faces or car license plates, bits of numbers, vague descriptions of scenes. She considered these psychic communications from victims. She'd jot them down with crude sketches or some kind of word salad and then hand them off to the detectives.

Now, the media loved her. New York Daily News and People Magazine profiled her as a psychic who helped the police. She was on daytime talk shows and Unsolved Mysteries. In the List case, Allison claimed to have seen the name John and the numbers 303. Believers later referred to murderer John List and the address of a future residence as evidence that she was correct.

The problem is that she made hundreds of predictions like that, and most of them didn't fit [00:29:00] anything. Police later admitted she'd offered so many unrelated clues that it was easy to pick out the ones that looked right after the case

Jordan Harbinger: was solved. John is one of the most common names in the world, and the number 303, like, okay, it's a future residence.

Thanks. That's so helpful. It could be the last three digits of his phone number. It could be the zip code. It could be a bank account. It could be literally anything. What are we supposed to do with that?

Nick Pell: She was flown to Atlanta to assist a task force investigating the murders of more than 20 Black children and young men.

Local newspapers like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Associated Press ran stories like Psychic Helps Atlanta Police. But the case was closed, and they got the perpetrator, Wayne Williams, and he was arrested. Investigators clarified that none of her information was used and that most of it didn't match any real evidence.

Jordan Harbinger: At this point, it really sounds like a pattern. She inserts herself into the investigation. She claims the cops invited her [00:30:00] in. The papers eat it up. The police later deny she had anything to do with solving the crime. Rinse and repeat, and she's got a pretty good brand. And probably when she's not busy pretending to help the police, she's doing private readings and printing money.

Nick Pell: That's about right. The details are always super vague. A body near water, a J name, a bridge or a red car. Nothing about this is terribly compelling. Over time, Dorothy Allison became less known as an investigator and more as a media personality. Her stories worked better in print than in police work, and her successes tended to grow more accurate each time she retold the story.

By the '90s, she was regularly cited by true believer authors and talk shows as proof that psychics could solve crimes. But every police report that survives from those cases tells a different story. No verified hits, no usable leads, and no solved cases based on her visions.

Jordan Harbinger: I have a feeling [00:31:00] that we're just about to get a bunch of stories like this one,

Nick Pell: but okay, who's up

Jordan Harbinger: next?

Nick Pell: Dorothy Allison called herself a housewife psychic. Noreen Renier positioned herself as a psychic detective and touted her law enforcement credentials. She actually lectured at the FBI Academy in Quantico.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Really, though, this isn't just one of her outlandish claims? 'Cause I don't know, it seems like one of those things that's hard to prove.

Nick Pell: Here's the thing. A lot of these psychic detectives lean into certain aspects of the truth and leave out others. So the FBI lecture happened, but it was a public lecture on the subject of intuition. It was not sponsored by the FBI. It was not an FBI training session.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, those all sound like pretty important details.

You know what this reminds me of? So it's embarrassing and funny at the same time. So I got invited by this guy who I met at an event to speak at Harvard Business School, and I was like, "Okay." I mean, it's not paid, but okay, Harvard Business School. Cool. [00:32:00] Fine. He's like, "Look, it's gonna be filmed. I'll produce a really good video for you."

I was like, "Okay, Harvard Business School. I gotta get my reps in." I'd just sort of done this- like 30-hour speaking course. It was like really intense that I paid for, and I just started speaking for large amounts of money, so I was like, "Fine, I'll do this one." And I show up, and there's all these people there at Harvard Business School that are not Harvard Business School students.

And I speak, and I give a very truncated, shortened version of my talk, and I find out that everyone else there has five minutes to speak. And I was like, "Wait a minute." So I started talking to them, and it turns out they all paid I don't even know how many, several thousand dollars or something, to speak, quote-unquote, "at Harvard Business School," but for five minutes, and to get a little video trailer made.

And then when you leave, they turn it into a book, which they had pre-sold on Amazon, but since everybody in the room bought it, it was a, quote-unquote, "Amazon bestseller." So it was like all these people came out, and they were suddenly bestselling authors who'd spoken at Harvard Business School. But everyone [00:33:00] was like an internet marketer, like a chiropractor with a skincare line or something, right?

And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I got duped into being the front of this kind of scam speaking gig thing." Anyway, this just reminds me of this because it's like, "I lectured at Quantico for the FBI," and it's like, not to the FBI, but for the FBI, and it was open to the public, and it wasn't an official thing, and it was on the subject of intuition, and it wasn't sponsored by the FBI, and it wasn't a training session.

It's like, okay, so basically you could have had the talk at the YMCA. It's just that you wanted to have it at the FBI campus so that you could say, "I trained at Quantico." It's the same crap. It's the same nonsense. This is an old playbook.

Nick Pell: Ranier projected a polished, no-nonsense kinda demeanor. She didn't use incense or turbans or crystal balls.

She wore business suits. She carried around crime scene photos, and she had a Mid-Atlantic accent, which it's potentially worth noting that the Mid-Atlantic accent is itself an affectation. No one [00:34:00] talks like this naturally. Everyone with a Mid-Atlantic accent has to learn how to speak that way. I still don't necessarily know what this is.

So this is like Audrey Hepburn You, you could literally fi- you could throw a dart at a movie made between 1930 and 1960, and someone's gonna be using a, a Mid-Atlantic accent.

Whisky and Whiskey Clip: Hello. Fancy seeing you here. Don't tell me you've forsaken your beloved whiskey and whisky.

Nick Pell: It's this phony baloney accent that people use to sound more sophisticated.

Ranier claimed she could see the crimes from the eyes of the victim. You gave her a personal object of the victim, and she'd start talking. Reporters loved it because it looked like something out of Law & Order: Psychic Victims Unit.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, also, she doesn't actually solve cases either, right? We're getting to that part, I have a feeling.

Nick Pell: Her best-known moment came in the early 1980s when she offered psychic impressions in a Virginia missing person case. The missing person was later found dead near her [00:35:00] home. Here we get vague descriptions like, "White house on a hill, a bend in the road." And water nearby. Local papers such as The Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Washington Post quoted detectives saying her statements were interesting.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's what I say when I'm like, "Eh, whatever," but I can't say, "Pfft, sounds like bullshit to me," on the record to The Washington Post. So yeah, I'll say, "Interesting. Not for me, but someone certainly finds them interesting." Just not the police department.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So once the body was discovered, it was clear that her clues were so broad they could have applied to any rural property in the county.

Police stated that her input did not materially aid the investigation. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Water nearby, bend in the road, white house on a hill sounds like pretty much every rural landscape in the entire continental United States.

Nick Pell: Especially northern Virginia. Well, I guess it's [00:36:00] not northern Virginia. It's outside of Richmond, but yeah, sure.

Another example, the Snohomish County, Washington State plane crash in 1979. Rainier said she saw a wreck in a swamp surrounded by trees. They did find the plane in an area like she described, and that area's description basically applies to all of western Washington.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so tens of thousands of square miles or whatever.

Got it. But people still believe in her, and she keeps getting the limelight, so there's that.

Nick Pell: Yeah. She was on 20/20, Larry King Live, and of course Unsolved Mysteries. She claimed over 400 police consultations and successfully sued skeptic John Merrill. Tabloids spun this as a vindication of her powers in court.

The ruling had nothing to do with whether or not she was psychic. Merrill made false claims about Rainier's resume. She later had to file for bankruptcy because of other [00:37:00] lawsuits, including one where she had to pay damages to Merrill for violating their settlement agreement.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's kind of funny, so the skeptic wins in the end.

Nice. I can get behind that.

Nick Pell: The main thing she did was appear professional and polished, but her story is about the same as Allison's. Vague descriptions and a knack for publicity and not much else. The pattern is definitely forming, or should I say I'm getting the vision. The last person I wanna talk about is Sylvia Browne.

Ah, yeah. A lot of listeners might have heard of her. She was on Montel Williams constantly in the '90s and 2000s. Browne made dozens of public predictions about missing persons that turned out to be wrong, and the most infamous example is Amanda Berry. In 2004, Browne told Amanda Berry's mother on national television that her daughter was dead and that her body would never be found.

In reality, Amanda Berry was very much alive. She and two other women [00:38:00] were being held captive in Cleveland by Ariel Castro. When Berry escaped in 2013, it was a devastating indictment of Brown's credibility. Amanda's mother had died two years earlier, never

Jordan Harbinger: knowing her daughter was alive. That is so sad and disgusting and terrible, and I think it really gets to the core of why this is actively harmful, and I have absolutely no qualms skewering these people because it's not just nonsense or some kind of benign scam.

Think about the damage that did to that whole family.

Nick Pell: And it wasn't a one-shot deal. Brown also told the parents of Shawn Hornback, a kidnapped Missouri boy, that he was dead. He was found alive in 2007. She claimed the Washington, D.C. sniper would be a white man traveling with his son. He wasn't. She said that Saddam Hussein was already dead.

He wasn't. I'm attaching a whole list of stuff she got wrong in the show notes, and this is like demonstrably, [00:39:00] verifiably, completely wrong

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, folks, my psychic crime-solving isn't paying the bills. Here's a message from the folks that are. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by ZipRecruiter.

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Thank you for listening to and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps the lights on around here. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. Yeah, good job, Sylvia.

Nailed it. She actually fooled my old producer back when I was on Sirius XM Satellite Radio, and it wasn't actually that impressive. So we were-- I was sitting in studio listening. My producer was there. This wasn't my show. It was another show that she produced And they were having a segment with Sylvia Browne.

And my producer was crunching away on those pretzel sticks 'cause didn't eat lunch slash it's, I don't know, whatever, hour of the night and she's [00:42:00] hungry. And you really can't really hear it that well, but you could if you were listening really closely, which Sylvia clearly was. And on the phone, and she goes, "I'm tasting salt."

And my producer was like, "Oh my God, I'm eating pretzels." And it was like, she thought you were eating chips. She made a guess based on the crunch. It's clearly someone eating something. It's probably not sweet because it's crunchy. Not a really big leap, but everybody was blown away. My producer was blown away.

She's like, "She's really psychic. It's unbelievable. The mafia guys used to ask her to predict things 'cause she's psychic." And I'm like, "I don't know if we should be trusting mafia enforcers- ... to be, like, the biggest skeptics. They're not exactly running the scientific method over here in New Jersey when they're burying bodies in concrete on construction sites.

None of it is impressive if you come at it with a skeptical eye. It's just not.

Nick Pell: No, it's not. A lot of people probably know the elephant in Denmark thing where you, like, ask somebody a bunch of questions and they, [00:43:00] you know, are thinking of elephants in Pennsylvania or elephants in Denmark.

Jordan Harbinger: You're supposed to surprise them by saying something like, "But there are no elephants in Pennsylvania."

And they're like, "Oh my God, how are you... You read my mind." And you're just programming them to think of this specific thing, and it seems amazing, but you've done it very deliberately, and it works, like, 90% of the time.

Nick Pell: Yeah, somebody did this to me in high school, and they get to the end, and they're like, "You're thinking of a green elephant in Pennsylvania," or whatever it is.

And I go, "No, I'm not." And they just look at me and go, "Did you pick an emu?" And I went, "Yes, I did." That's funny. 'Cause that's you. Pick an animal that begins with E. You're gonna say elephant. What other animal begins with E? Emu. Yeah. Eel. Eel. But these aren't things that, like, pop into your head. It's probably a thing that they use because there's a concept in linguistics called the semantic map where, like, if I say bird, the thing that pops into your head is a sparrow or, like, a finch or a blue jay or a robin.

Crow for me. Sure, but it's not an ostrich. It's not a [00:44:00] hummingbird. It's not a seagull. Yeah. There's things that when I say bird, you think, "Oh, this," but there's other things that you don't think. I'm picking cockatoo

Jordan Harbinger: next time. I'm just gonna try to- The magician or whatever's gonna be so frustrated with me.

"Who is this guy? Cockatoo? Get out of my house."

Nick Pell: So anyway, Br- Sylvia Browne. Yeah, everybody knows Sylvia Browne. What made her different was just her scale and her scope. Her cases weren't police files. They were, like- televised counseling sessions. The emotional stakes were real. Parents trusted her, and her wrong predictions often caused direct harm.

They convinced families to stop searching or to give up hope entirely. She continues to sell books about psychic- Stuff ... stuff, yeah, and make live appearances until her death in 2013. Her fan base largely forgave her errors, treating them as miscommunications from the other side.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, [00:45:00] that's awfully convenient when it's not your missing kid.

And also, that's kind of laughable. Miscommunications from the other side. Is it more that the ghosts have miscommunicated or this person is a complete bullshitter? I'm gonna go with the ghosts have miscommunicated to our psychic fri- I mean, at some point, you're like, "Okay, you're in a cult and nothing rational will change your mind, so here we are."

Nick Pell: It's a very convenient answer, and it's one of the things that I always thought was really cool about Christianity. You know that a prophet is false because they're wrong once. That's the bar. You're wrong never, or you're false. Because presumably, if you had these powers, you'd have a batting average that's a little better than these people are doing.

Yeah, that's right.

Jordan Harbinger: So the doomsday cult people who always get the date wrong, it's like, "Okay, bro. How are you getting five chances to predict the end of the world? You're not e- This is ridiculous, pal. The jig is up." Jehovah's Witnesses have been changing it since forever. Definitely gonna get emails about that, but okay, continue.

Nick Pell: Yeah, people stopped searching for missing kids because of her. [00:46:00] Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: it's awful. Well, these are all unmitigated disasters, and you haven't even given us a single example of psychic detectives working, actually. There has to be at least one case that the proponents of psychics point to and go like, "Hey, see?

This works."

Nick Pell: We covered, like, the best examples that they have. These are the strongest cases that they've got. We've really steel manned this one. In the show notes, I'm gonna include an article in Reader's Digest about 21 times psychics really solved cases.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, okay. And how many of them involve psychics really solving cases?

Nick Pell: Here's the thing. The article is purposefully framed to make it look like a psychic solved the case. But I think it's worth people checking out, because once you know what to be on the lookout for, it's pretty obvious that none of this stuff works, ever. But people keep trying to make fetch happen- ... and the age of digital media has not reduced the number of articles [00:47:00] about psychic detectives solving big cases.

Jordan Harbinger: Why do you think that is? Look, this might be an obvious answer, but why do you think the media loves reporting that psychics helped solve crimes when even the cops are like, "Nah, not really"?

Nick Pell: I think that psychic solves case, as a headline, moves more units than the much more accurate Boring but ultimately reliable police investigative procedure solves case.

One moves a lot of units, one who cares. And I think the media is in the business of making money, not disseminating the truth. In the age of digital media, this is doubly true. Websites have to make absolutely lord claims to get you to click. And their entire business model is a numbers game where you try to get as many clicks as possible to justify selling ad space at your current rates, or you sell tchotchkes, you sell mugs with a logo on them.

But mostly it's this ad

Jordan Harbinger: revenue [00:48:00] model. So what are the main things people need to look out for anytime they're reading about a psychic supposedly solving a crime?

Nick Pell: There are four main things in play in every case where people claim that a psychic solved the case. First, good old-fashioned confirmation bias.

Psychic gets two vague details right, 98 other vague details totally wrong. People remember the hits, forget that the psychic was throwing spaghetti at the wall. Next, and related to this, is post-hoc reasoning. Vague statements get reinterpreted as strangely prescient once they're confirmed.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, the episode about remote viewing relied heavily on this, right?

A large cold object, which could be anything from a parked dump truck in Chicago to the no longer a planet celestial body that we call Pluto, or used to call Pluto, or still do. I don't know.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it could be an iceberg. Who knows? It could be anything. There's the emotional vulnerability of the victim's family.

They're going through a lot. And that's going to override what would normally be a natural [00:49:00] skepticism about psychic investigators as opposed to good old-fashioned police work. Finally, there's the Barnum statement. This is the term for these vague statements. I see water. There's someone involved who has a J somewhere in their name.

These statements exist to be vague and then let your mind fill in the blanks and prove that they were correct after the fact.

Jordan Harbinger: The common denominator on all these is vague details that get retrofitted once the case has been solved. And then people conveniently forget all the stuff they got wrong. I'm scanning this Reader's Digest article while we talk, and I'm seeing a lot of what you're talking about.

It's also framed in a way to make it seem like the psychic is leading the investigation and the cops are just following behind, right? Like you would see like a canine unit, but it's psychic. But if that were true, even one time, every police department in America would have a psychic on staff or like all major metro areas would have one that they loan out for the hard cases, right?

Why bother with evidence when the psychic [00:50:00] can just be like, look under the bed, there's a stash of drugs. You're going to find DNA in the bathroom. The blood is on the stain in the car. I mean, why bother with actual investigation if these people can lead you around to everything?

Nick Pell: Yeah. If magic worked, you'd be able to hire magicians.

Yes. Everywhere. They would provide a valuable service and not nonsense. So I wanna be careful for legal reasons, but if a psychic knew where a missing girl was, they would be shrieking from the tops of their lungs about where to find her, not holding a press conference and posing for cameras. Yeah. Are you saying these people are potentially mere grifters and frauds?

What I think is that the human brain has an enormous capacity to convince itself that things are true which aren't, first of all. I also think the world is full of shady people who don't care who they hurt as long as they collect a check without having to go to work. There's a term called patternicity.

That means the tendency of the human brain to find patterns in meaningless noise.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, like thinking a [00:51:00] cloud looks like a Christmas tree, or what is that? Pareidolia, where you're like, "There's a face on that electrical socket."

Nick Pell: So I do think that some of these people are absolutely high on their own supply, which would make them bad actors because they're doing bad stuff, but it also means that they're operating in good faith in as much as they think they're psychic.

And I'm not gonna g- get into delineating who is just bullshitting to get a check and who actually thinks they're psychic. Sure. Yeah. No way of knowing that. It

Jordan Harbinger: also doesn't even matter 'cause it doesn't work anyways. That seems like a fair operating theory that explains this phenomenon of psychics inserting themselves into criminal cases.

But what I'm still curious about is why the police tolerate it, because from everything you've told me, tolerating it is a great description of what they're doing.

Nick Pell: I think that the main reason is that they're desperate, at a dead end, and thinking, "Why the hell not?" In a lot of cases, there's also going to be [00:52:00] heat from the media and from elected officials to get this case wrapped.

The parents or other family members may be in the ear of the department trying to get them to consult a psychic. Now, the one thing the cops absolutely can't do is just blow off the psychics because then they seem uncooperative, so they have to go along with it. And then when the psychic gives an answer, even if it's, "They're dead," the general population and perhaps even the family are pleased because they just want some kind of closure.

In small departments, there might just not be solid resources to do a heck of a lot. I think I read somewhere that the easiest place to get away with murder is in a mid-sized American city because you're at the sweet spot of no good police force and enough people that you can hide. And I think that, yeah, if you're the police chief of Burlington, Vermont, you probably have a real hard time solving tough cases because you got enough people that you [00:53:00] don't know who's a trouble- everyone who's a troublemaker, and you don't have the money that New York or LA or Chicago does.

And that's, they're just like, "Why the hell? Why not?" There's just not much else they can do. And even if it's something totally stupid, they go, "We asked the psychic. We followed up on the lead from the psychic," or whatever it is. You might get the odd cop who is a true believer, but I think that's just such an outlier.

It's in the extreme.

Jordan Harbinger: Are there any police guidelines about the use of psychics in investigations at all?

Nick Pell: The FBI's behavioral science unit has actually issued internal memos about this. They don't endorse psychic input, but they also don't forbid it outright, partly to avoid alienating victims' families.

Most police departments quietly file psychic tips in the same drawer as anonymous cranks and conspiracy theorists.

Jordan Harbinger: And they're also probably thinking, "What can it hurt? Why not? As long as we ignore the input for the most part, let them do [00:54:00] this. If the family feels better, then fine. What do we care?" But as we have established, there are definitely cases where it can and does hurt people, especially the victims and their families.

Nick Pell: Yeah, and these are just the famous cases we know about. We don't have access to the small-town charlatan who inserts himself in a case or gets the ear of a family. And I think we also need to assume that these types of smaller police departments with limited resources that we're talking about, your Burlington, Vermont, your Pueblo, Colorado, they do not have the resources to be talking to Sylvia Browne.

They already are strapped, and so they do not need to be giving five minutes to Sylvia Browne. False leads waste resources. And even in the most well-funded and equipped departments, these resources are limited. And again, this is assuming good faith on the part of the psychic, which I don't think that you should do.

Yeah. I feel like there's two options here, and it's that the [00:55:00] psychic is a liar knowingly wasting resources, or the psychic is a nut job who actually believes that they have magic powers.

Jordan Harbinger: There's also an issue where the police can lose credibility by even appearing alongside psychics. Even if it's not some super public-facing thing where they're holding joint press conferences or whatever, just it becoming common knowledge that the police department is working with psychics, I feel like that makes them look like clowns, honestly.

Nick Pell: Yeah, and I'd add to that a broader social problem of people bringing magical thinking to criminal investigations. There's television shows like Medium and The Mentalist or even Unsolved Mysteries that portray crime-solving as something magical rather than what it really is. And what it really is is just insanely mind-numbingly tedious and boring stuff.

It does not make for even a good TV show if, without the magic. And you can say, "Well, that's fiction," but I think that [00:56:00] has an impact on the way that people look at Psychics working with cops, like fiction has an influence on how people view the world.

Jordan Harbinger: This is slightly unrelated, but I think you'll see my point here.

I read an article recently about how juries now expect DNA evidence in every trial, which is totally unrealistic, and it creates a huge burden for police and prosecutors because they're, usually they don't have that. And so juries are watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and they're like, "Where's the DNA?"

It's like, "There's no DNA. We just have a video where we think it's him, and his phone data says that he was in this area." And they're like, "But wouldn't there be DNA at the crime scene?" And they're like, "Dude, we don't get DNA data from a random assault- ... at a crime scene that's outdoors. No, we don't have that."

And they're like acquitting people who are obviously guilty because they don't have DNA evidence. It's really bad news. You can say like, "Oh, they solved that crime with a psychic just like on TV." It's just, it really is not a good precedent to set for the public.

Nick Pell: It primes the pump for [00:57:00] psychic shenanigans.

In reality, crime is solved through forensic evidence, which is not DNA evidence. Very different thing. May include DNA evidence. Behavioral profiling and community involvement through things like tip lines. Families that want closure should be getting it through counseling and other forms of victim support, and not false hope that comes from psychic investigators stepping in and claiming to have all the answers and save the day.

Jordan Harbinger: So the whole psychics helping cops thing is a story that just won't die, despite overwhelming evidence that it doesn't work at all. It's kept alive through a desperate search for answers, media attention, and no small amount of credulity. But real investigations are built on criminal investigative science, not criminal pseudo-investigative magic.

And when tragedy strikes, people want some kind of answer. And sad as it is to say, a lot of times in life we simply don't have answers or neat little endings. Illusions might provide some kind of comfort, but people need [00:58:00] the truth for any meaningful form of closure. And ultimately, psychic policing says a lot more about human psychology than it does about crime-solving.

Thanks as always to Nick Pell for helping me separate the clues from the voodoos. And thanks to you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to Jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own. And yeah, I'm a lawyer, but I'm definitely not your lawyer. Also, we try to get these as right as we can.

Not everything is gospel, even if it's fact-checked. What, you guys think I'm psychic? Consult a professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the [00:59:00] skepticism and knowledge we doled out today.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

To hear more on why Cold War tech still outsmarts modern surveillance and why Andrew Bustamante believes World War III may already be happening, check out episode 1220 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

JHS Trailer Clip: There's actually 161 active conflicts around the world right now where bullets are being fired and explosions are going off. When you look at each of those conflicts, it's not just one group against another group in the same country or even across a state boundary. It's multiple countries engaged in supporting one side or another side, proxy conflicts.

Right now in the United States, we're focused on Israel, we're focused on Ukraine and Afghanistan and Russia, and then sometimes we're focused on something else. When people think World War III, the common misconception is that a nuclear weapon must be used. If you're waiting for a nuclear weapon to go off, that's [01:00:00] not going to be World War III.

It's a whole different evolving landscape, and that's what we need to understand. And I don't think our chances of a nuclear weapon going off are getting less each year. I actually think they're getting to be more each year, but I don't know why people think it's going to look like a thermonuclear weapon being launched from a missile silo and going off in the middle of a first world country.

That's not what it's going to look like. Israel's MO is to do incredibly brazen acts of violence and take public credit for it and then air footage and everything else because they know that there's a fear-mongering element that deters its enemies even further. Whereas China goes in and just breaks everything and they don't really care if they get caught and Russia doesn't want to get caught.

The United States also doesn't want to get caught, which is why the United States denies everything. It seems to me like we have more indicators that we are in a world war rather than we are

Jordan Harbinger: not in a world war. To hear more on why Cold War tech still outsmarts modern surveillance and why Andrew Bustamante believes World War III may already be happening, check out episode 1220 of The Jordan Harbinger [01:01:00] Show.