The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1329: Psychic Detectives | Skeptical Sunday

Episode Date: May 17, 2026

Psychics keep wedging themselves into police cases — and grieving families pay the price. Nick Pell explains the grift on Skeptical Sunday!Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Nick Pell!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1329On This Week's Skeptical Sunday:Psychic detective work traces back to 19th-century spiritualism, which surged after the Civil War and WWI as a grief-coping mechanism — part therapy, part pop religion, part proto-reality TV. The post-WWII pulp era rebranded it as "science," birthing the modern psychic detective archetype.The genre's most-cited "successes" — Etta Smith in the Melanie Uribe case, Dorothy Allison on the John List murders, and Noreen Renier's many TV appearances — all collapse under scrutiny. Police never credited any of them with usable leads, and Allison reportedly tried to bribe cops to vouch for her.Sylvia Browne is the cautionary tale that turns this from harmless grift into genuine harm. She told Amanda Berry's mother her daughter was dead in 2004 — Amanda was alive, held captive in Cleveland until 2013. Mom died never knowing. Browne botched the Shawn Hornbeck case too.Four mechanisms explain every "psychic solved it" story: confirmation bias (remembering hits, forgetting misses), post-hoc reasoning (vague claims retrofitted to fit), emotional vulnerability of grieving families, and Barnum statements — deliberately vague phrases like "I see water" that let your brain fill in the blanks.Real cases get cracked by forensic evidence, behavioral profiling, and community tip lines — the unsexy, methodical work that rarely makes headlines. Families seeking closure are better served by counseling and victim support than by false hope, and learning to spot the four tells above makes anyone a sharper media consumer.Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [e-mail] and let him know!And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: Lufthansa Allegris: Go to Lufthansa.com and search for "Allegris" to learn moreSimpliSafe Home Security: 50% off + 1st month free: simplisafe.com/jordanWhatnot: Start selling today: whatnot.com/sellZipRecruiter: Learn more at ziprecruiter.com/jordanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host writer and researcher Nick Bell. 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. You people who leave will soon be staying for me. You just don't know it yet.

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. And our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long-formed conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers. On Sundays, though, we do skeptical Sunday.

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash 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 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 got to work sometimes. much so that we're going to dig deep into the world of psychics today, not just any psychics, but the ones of 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? 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 rhetorical? Yes. Also, there were like tons of kids always hanging out and sleeping over. Like, my house was the house. Everybody crashed.

It could have been one of 10 people. We had bands that would come. I used to book bands and they would stay with us for the weekends. It could have been one of them. Anyway, I have no idea who called Miss Cleo from my house in 1996. A likely story. Sort of 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.

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 assume they bought the house 40 years ago, and just they've been here and they 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.

Yeah, so people have been doing this long before unsolved mysteries terrified our generation. It all kind of 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 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, His therapy, pop religion, and reality TV all rolled into one. 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 Houdini was into spiritualism, but mostly from the side of debunking it. Weirdly, a hobby of stage magicians is going around and exposing psychics. As far as I can tell, Houdini is the trailblazer here. James Randy was kind of who. Dini's air when it came to going hard the paint fighting claims of psychic abilities. Yeah, I know. I think Penn and Teller are kind of into this too. And there's a few people around, all of whom are magicians or performers of some way.

They're kind of like, hey, I'm going to debunk this nonsense. I've never heard of spiritualism being used by police departments to solve cases, though. 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 the, this kind of breathless sincerity. All the article says is some people are convinced a 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 didn't even get what point they were trying to make with it.

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 are missing children. Yeah, okay, that's fair. And also, you're building the 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 kind of before, like, who saw this happen? No one? We have blood, a random weapon that we have no idea. I 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 just have no evidence there's nothing we could 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 at 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. Yeah, that's a 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. 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, 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 sounds like part of this is just a general public interest in psychic phenomena and people are stepping up to meet that demand. 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 is science and things of that nature. Which brings us to the era of unsolved mysteries. Yeah. Unsolved mysteries and America's Most Wanted and man. Yeah, basically that.

I don't want to get sued, but there you have it. Everybody remembers that. 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 books for criminals.

Both were pretty good at what they did. I rewatched 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. 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. 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 help solve the mystery. There's the Melanie Arribe case. Arribaebe was a nurse whose murder went unsolved. Atta 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, 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 Edith 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. So decidedly, Wayla's crazy than previously thought. Okay. What else have you guys? 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, that guy was such a boss. The Trenchco and his handsome, baritone 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. his head and then showed it to the entire United States on primetime TV. Yeah. Yeah. And then they found him, which is decidedly not psychic. All the information that Dorothy 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. 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 film 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 a hundred people in the audience. And if nobody bites, then they're like, 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, it's my son. You're like, oh, my God. And then when they edit the show, they only 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, because 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 because there's nothing in your life that rhymes with. So it's just a bunch of kind of camera tricks, as my mom used to call it back in the 80s. 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. It could be anything. It's one of the eight most common letters in the English language.

He must have met my daughter, Carmen. then in that case. Yeah, it's an M in the middle. And they're just like, yeah, and they go with it. You also, if you do this for a living, you can just kind of tell certain things about some people when you meet them. 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 is that he was Indian because 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 want to 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 that's what I know about him, right? Or actually, 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 they're always comparing you to them. And those people have high-powered 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 another hundred 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 a hundred other Indian dudes that are not doctors, lawyers, or engineers, they're all going to be like, oh my God, Jordan. is psychic. It's really not that hard to do this. 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 stern and short-tempered. And it's like, that's everyone in like, congratulations. That's everybody went to high school with. You can guess stuff close enough that you're going to 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. When more of these psychic interventions, there's Noreen Reneer, 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 a thousand here so far. The worst thing Reneer 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 bottom of a lake. Oh, man. So did they find the body bad Christmas or what? No. Oh. Unforgivably awful.

That was poor taste. But this woman is out of her mind telling grieving parents, something like that. Oh, she's going to be fine. You'll find her by Christmas. Merry Christmas, she's dead. These people are terrible. They're going to 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 start making appearances on Montel Williams and shows like that. Like this? You are not. Like that one? Yes. Did Mory used to have psychics on? He probably did. I'm sure he did.

You say talk show psychics, I immediately think Montel Williams. All right, y'all. I am getting the vision. It's a message from our sponsors. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Simpleysafe. I think a lot of us treat home security like one of those all get around to it adulting tasks, but the whole point is to take it seriously before something

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We don't put our name behind many brands, but we trust SimplySafe. Our listeners will get 50 person off a new system when you sign up for professional monitoring and your first month is free by visiting Simplysafe.com slash Jordan. That's half off at Simplysafe.com slash Jordan. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. This episode is also sponsored by What Not. You've probably seen some of the buzz around live shopping lately and I didn't really get it until I actually watched it happen on Whatnot.

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Don't forget about our newsletter, WebitWiser. Comes out every Wednesday, basically a two-minute read or less, depending on how slow you read. very practical, very actionable, something you can apply right away that'll affect your psychology, your relationships, your decision-making. It's a bit of wisdom from our 1,000-plus episodes. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. Montel Williams, Jenny Jones, Ricky Lake, Moripovich were all competing for like the bottom rung of daytime TV. Donahue had retired and that it was like Jerry Springer and Geraldo. God, there were,

a lot of these shows, man. My God. Yeah, what's crazy man is like how Mori just became the paternity testing show. It was like all they did. Yes. Anyway. Memorys.

Money printer. It must have been a money printer or they wouldn't have done it. Well, 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 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 cash out. 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. 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 need some lighting, a chair, a room to film them in, and someone who could 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? They're only sort of used as consultants in limited areas. And I perhaps overstated earlier the idea that they're giving taxpayer money. They're probably not. If 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, the cover mileage, very small consulting fees, maybe a couple few hundred bucks, maybe. They're probably hoping for a 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. Yeah, it more seems to be a media thing for them. If they're going to get any money, it's like they're going to get 50 bucks. They're usually not going to get any kind of money for this.

Reneer and Allison, who we talked about, police gave her gas money in a few bucks. Reneer 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 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 bog standard

psychic stuff, psychic stuff that you see on TV and in movies. Yeah. The other thing I wonder about is How do the police react to this? Because 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 because it's a lake in Nevada near Las Vegas. Yeah. The end. Come on. 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 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, well, look into that. They want enough of a paper trail to say they chase 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 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.

Dorothy Allison, who we talked about earlier from Nutley, New Jersey, she was ironically named, yes. She was one of America's 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 did fit 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 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 its phone number. It could be the zip code, could be a bank account, could be literally anything. What are we supposed to do with that? 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. At this point, it really sounds like a pattern. She inserts herself into the investigation, She claims the cops invited her 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. 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. I have a feeling that we're just about to get a bunch of stories like this one, but okay, who's up next?

Dorothy Allison called herself a housewife psychic. Noreen Reneer positioned herself as a psychic detective and touted her law enforcement credentials. She actually lectured at the FBI Academy in Quantico. Okay, really, though, this isn't just one of her outlandish claims because I don't know, It seems like one of those things it's hard to prove. 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. 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 in 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, 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 just sort of done this 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 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. Reneer projected a polished, no-nonsense kind of demeanor. She didn't use incense or turbans or crystal balls. She wore business suits. She carried our crime scene photos.

and she had a mid-Atlantic accent, which it's potentially worth noting that the mid-Atlantic accent is itself in affectation. No one 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 could literally fly, you could throw a dart at a movie made between 1930 and 1960, and someone's going to be used in a mid-Atlantic accent. Hello. Fancy seeing you here. Now tell me you've forsaken your beloved whiskey and whiskey.

It's this phony baloney accent that people use to sound more sophisticated. Reneer claims she could see the crimes from the eyes of the victim. You gave her a personal object to the victim and she'd start talking. The reporters loved it because it looked like something out of law and order psychic victims unit. Yeah, also, she doesn't actually solve cases either, right? We're getting to that part. I have a feeling. 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 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. Yeah, that's what I say when I'm like, whatever, but I can't say, 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. 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

investigation. Yeah. Water nearby, bend in the road, White House on a hill sounds like pretty much every rural landscape in the entire continental United States. Especially northern Virginia. I guess it's not northern Virginia. It's outside of Richmond, but yeah, sure. Another example, the Snohomish County Washington State plane crash in 1979. Reneer 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. 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. Yeah, she was on 2020, 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 were psychic. Merrill made false claims about Reneer's resume. She later had to file for bankruptcy because of other lawsuits,

including one where she had to pay damages to Merrill for violating their settlement agreement. Oh, that's kind of funny. So the skeptic wins in the end. Nice. I can get behind that. 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 want to talk about is Sylvia Brown. A lot of listeners might have heard her. She was on Montel Williams constantly in the 90s and 2000s. Brown made dozens of public predictions about missing persons that turned out to be wrong. And the most infamous example is Amanda Berry. In 2004, Brown told Amanda Berry's mother on national television that her daughter was dead and that her body would never be found. In reality, Amanda Barry was very much alive.

She and two other women were being held captive in Cleveland by Ariel Castro. When Barry escaped in 2013, it was a devastating indictment of Brown's credibility. Amanda's mother had died two years earlier, never 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. And it wasn't a one-shot deal.

Brown also told the parents of Sean 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 verifiably completely wrong.

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 so. sponsored in part by ZipRecruiter. One thing I've learned from hiring is this. The best candidates aren't just qualified. They actually want the job.

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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 Jordan Harbinger.com slash 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 X-X-M.

satellite radio. And it wasn't actually that impressive. So 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 Brown. And my producer was crunching away on those pretzel sticks because didn't eat lunch slash it's, I don't know, whatever hour of the night and she's 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 because 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. 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, you know, are thinking of elephants in Pennsylvania or elephants in Denmark. 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.

Yeah, somebody did this to me in high school, and they get to the end, and they're like, you're thinking you have 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. Because that's you. Pick an animal that begins with E.

You're going to say elephant. What other animal begins with Eamoo? Yeah. Eel. Eel. But these aren't things that pop into your head. It's probably a thing that they use because there's a concept in linguistics called a semantic map or 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 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 next time. I'm just going to try to do it. The magician or whatever is going to be so frustrated with me. Who is this guy? Cockatoo, get out of my house. So anyway, Sylvia Brown. Yeah, everybody knows Sylvia Brown. 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, to stop searching or to give up hope entirely. She continues to tell 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. Yeah, 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 miscommunications, or this person is a complete bullshitter. I'm going to go with the ghosts have miscommunicated to our psychic.

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. 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. 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? This is ridiculous, pal. The jig is- Jehovah's Witnesses have been changing it since forever. Definitely going to get emails about that, but okay, continue.

Yeah, people stop searching for missing kids because of her. Yeah, 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. We covered, like, the best examples that they have. These are the strongest cases that they've got.

We've really steel, man, this one. In the show notes, I'm going to include an article in Reader's Digest about 21 times psychics really solved cases. Oh, okay. And how many of them involve psychics really solving cases? Here's the thing. The article is purposely framed to make it look like a psychic solve 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 about psychic detectives solving big cases. 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? 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 mayhemers. 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 chotchkes, you sell mugs with a logo on them, but mostly it's this ad revenue model. So what are the main things people need to look out for anytime they're reading about a psychic supposedly solving a crime. 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. Ninety-eight 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. 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. 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 skepticism about psychic investigators as opposed to good old fashion 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. 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. 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 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 staying in the car?

I mean, why bother with actual investigation if these people can lead you around to everything? Yeah, if magic work, you'd be able to hire magicians. Yes. everywhere. They would provide a valuable service and not nonsense. So I want to 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. 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, 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. Yes, like thinking a cloud looks like a Christmas tree or what is that? Paradolia where you're like, there's a face on that electrical socket. 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 going to 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 also doesn't even matter because 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. 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 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 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 don't know

who's a trouble. Everyone is a troublemaker and you don't have the money that New York or L.A. or Chicago does. And that's 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 ask 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.

Are there any police guidelines about the use of psychics and investigations at all? The FBI's behavioral science unit has actually issued internal memos about this. They don't endorse psychic input, but they also don't forbear. bid 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. 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 this if the family feels better than 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.

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 year 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 Brown. They already are strapped. And so they do not need to be giving five minutes. to Sylvia Brown. 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 psychic is a liar knowingly wasting resources or the psychic is a nut job who actually believes that they have magic powers. 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 becoming common knowledge that the police department is working with psychics. I feel like that makes them look like clowns, honestly.

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 without the magic. And you can say, that's fiction, but I think that has an impact on the way that people look at

psychics working with cops, like fiction as an influence, on how people view the world. 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 usually they don't have that. And so juries are watching law and 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 assaults 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

solve that crime with a psychic just like on TV. It's just, it really is not a good precedent to set for the public. It primes the pump for psychic shenanigans. In reality, crime is solved through forensic evidence, which is not DNA evidence, very different thing, but 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. 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 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 voodos.

And thanks to you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com, advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast 1. is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Tata Sadlowskis, Robert Fogart, 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 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. What if the safest way to send a secret is something anyone can hear, but no one can trace?

You're about to hear a preview where former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante pulls back the curtain on a hidden world where global conflicts are quietly connected. 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, 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 not going to be World War free. 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 M.O. 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 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 Show.

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