En gammel klassiker, til glede for dem som ikke har hørt den før. CSIs (CSICOPs) Joe Nickell mimrer: In May 1995, I helped Philadelphia’s WCAU-TV launch a “sting” against various “psychic” readers and advisors as well as 900-number clairvoyants. After consulting with me to devise a suitable strategy, Herb Denenberg and other members of his […]
En gammel klassiker, til glede for dem som ikke har hørt den før. CSIs (CSICOPs) Joe Nickell mimrer:
In May 1995, I helped Philadelphia’s WCAU-TV launch a “sting” against various “psychic” readers and advisors as well as 900-number clairvoyants. After consulting with me to devise a suitable strategy, Herb Denenberg and other members of his “Newscenter 10” unit went undercover to set up a test of the soothsayers’ abilities. The sting was inspired by Jody Himebaugh whose eleven-year-old son Mark had disappeared November 25, 1991. Himebaugh said more than one hundred self-claimed psychics had since offered their visions, typically seeing a “dark car,” “the number 5,” or similar “clues.” These were never any help, but they could later be matched to actual evidence once it became known—a clever technique called “retrofitting” (Nickell 2001).
Denenberg’s team enlisted a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl named Kate. Although she was safely at home (for example playing softball in her front yard), the psychics were told that she had been missing since January. Some psychics “saw” her experiencing physical harm; one collected a fee of $50 for reporting her “confined against her will”; and another charged $180 to divine that the girl had run away and was “probably pregnant.” While one psychic envisioned her just two miles from home, another saw her far away in Florida. Not one among the several seers ever divined the truth, that the teenager was not missing and that Channel 10 was conducting a sting operation.
Lett moro med et dessverre alt for seriøst fenomen. Det har vært flere tilsvarende aksjoner med lignende resultat – akkurat som nullresultatene og de meningsløse belastningene på familier vi ser i det virkelige liv.
Les hele her.