They are ubiquitous, operating in shabby storefronts, appearing on national TV shows, keeping tabloids in business, working with naïve police departments and even participating in ludicrous studies by DARPA, the Defense Department’s Agency for Advanced Research Projects. They are the psychics, a motley collection of mystics, charlatans, hoaxers and smooth con artists who have successfully buffaloed a good portion of the public into believing that they have supernatural powers. Among those supposed powers is the Nostradamus-like ability to prophesize, to foretell future events. Nowhere are these prophesies more promoted than in the tabloid press, and there is no one more familiar with them than Gene Emery, who has been tracking them for 26 years. Emery, to say the least, is not impressed. He has just completed his compilations of psychics’ predictions for 2004 and reported the results ion the Website of CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal. Among the 2004 headline-making events that psychics didn’t predict, for example, Emery lists the Janet Jackson Superbowl breast flash, the prison torture in Iraq and the Boston Red Sox World Series win. And he reminds us that, in the past, psychics have missed out on foreseeing such major events as the death of their once-favorite subject, Princess Diana, as well as the 9/11 attacks. According to psychic forecasts made in December, 2003, the next year would bring the discovery of giant animal fossils on Mars, the election of Colin Powell, who would switch parties and trounce George Bush, and the development by Americans of a taste for pressed bricks of dried plankton. The Sun, the tabloid that most heralds the psychics, claimed that its predictions for 2004 were “from the world’s most brilliant psychics and seers.” Among them were twins Terry and Linda Jamison, who vowed that “Saddam Hussein will be killed by U.S. troops early in the year,” and that “Pope John Paul II will pass away in June.”

Anthony Carr, “the world’s most documented psychic,” foresaw the accidental detonation of North Korean nuclear weapons and the resulting deaths of thousands, the shooting death of Saddam Hussein, which incidentally involved a woman, and scientists successfully bringing “the first-ever male pregnancy to term.” The baby’s gender, by the way, would be male. Psychic Martha Henstridge prophesized that 2004 would be the year an anti-gravity engine was developed and patented, and that Martha Stewart would “take the fashion world by storm with a new line of prison-themed designed clothing.”

View: Full Article | Source: Time Magazine

I find it hard to fathom how anyone these days can take these nutjobs seriously

You'd have to be naive or extremely gullible to fall for their bogus predictions.

They tell us of the end of the world one day when it doesnt happen they go back to telling women they're going to a meet a tall, dark stranger. They neglect to tell them he'll be mugging them though.

Geez...those were just stupid predictions anyway (except for the Saddam getting shot thing---I could believe that might happen). But really...giant animal fossils found on Mars? Give me a break, people.

Well Mars did once have water. I see no reason why it wouldn't have life too. Lets just hope it doesnt turn out their are a tribe of human-hater martian dinosaurs liveing in the centre of mars.