In October of 2002, Shawn Hornbeck was kidnapped at the age of eleven.
Understandably, his parents were horrified and desperate for answers, so much so that they went to self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne who told Shawn's parents that he was kidnapped by a Hispanic man with cornrows and that Shawn was dead and he would be found between two large stones in a park.
A few months later, Shawn was found alive. His kidnapper, a caucasian man with a crew cut, had been holding Shawn captive.
Needless to say, Sylvia Browne was proven wrong; but, that's not the point.
If Sylvia Browne ever had a conscience, she would have apologized, admitted that she's been lying to people for years, and gone away. She didn't. To her dying day, she was charging people $750 for a twenty minute reading over the phone. Of course, the saddest thing about this isn't that we know that people will lie in order to bilk people out of their money, it's that people continue to believe them after they're proven to be charlatans.
Sylvia Browne isn't alone. Peter Popoff made millions running a faith healing scam until it was revealed that rather than getting his information about people's names, residences, and afflictions straight from God, he was getting the information through an earpiece and his wife reading prayer cards. Popoff went away, for a little while, before he started selling little packets of holy water insisting that it would bring people wealth and happiness.
Try to go into a psychic reading with a persona that isn't yours. Like, if you're single, wear a wedding ring; the psychic is probably gonna talk to you about your nonexistent spouse. If you're gainfully employed and sober, go in to the reading with a stained t-shirt and use tequila as mouth wash and see how they do.
People like James Randi, his foundation, and the fine folks at Center for Inquiry have been running these tests for decades.
It's not just that magicians can do the same thing that psychics claim to do while letting you know that they're fooling you and that it's all just entertainment, they usually do it better than psychics.
The James Randi Foundation had offered a million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate psychic or other paranormal abilities for decades and nobody has taken home the money. Sylvia Browne agreed to take Randi's test on Larry King and then claimed that she couldn't figure out how to get ahold of Randi.
So, no, I don't believe in psychics. I don't think that all psychics are lying; some people do legitimately believe that they have the abilities that they claim to have. But I'm pretty damn certain that those abilities don't exist in the human species.
