Psychic Detectives

Looks like I’m not the only blogger skeptical of psychics. Steve Garfield’s Off On A Tangent blog today tells the story briefly of missing student Maura Murray and how a psychic has been called upon to help. Note that Garfield links to two skeptical sites, as well as the psychic’s own home page.

According to the psychic, the missing student was abducted then murdered. The psychic says:

… Murray hitched a ride with “a clean-cut looking man” in a truck following her car accident the night of Feb. 9. The man then sexually assaulted her and buried her body in a sparsely wooded area that may be a construction site, Baron said.

Note that there is not a single piece of information here that can be used to solve the crime. Sparsely wooded area? May be a construction site? (In other words, it may not be a construction site … by the way, how many construction sites are heavily wooded?). Clean-cut man with a truck? Gee, that really narrows it down. Anyone with a little imagination can think of these things. Doesn’t mean they have any validity.

So here’s my non-psychic prediction. None of this information will be used to find the missing student. The student may well have been abducted and murdered (that does happen unfortunately) and then the psychic will claim she successfully helped the police solve the murder (which she did not).

And one more thing … here is a story of a child who was murdered, and the psychics on the case did nothing to help. In fact the psychics hindered the investigation, and then used this tragedy to promote themselves.