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Are All Psychics & Fortune Tellers Fakes?

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Anonymous

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Following the recent tragic events in the US, we can conclude that psychics/fortune tellers are just plain rip offs and only in it for the money. With the numerous alleged psychics in the world, how come not a single one could foretell these events coming and warn the relevant authorities? Maybe I am just wishful thinking here that somehow innocent lives could have been saved. :(
 
Not all are fakes and some true ones (only a tiny few) don't charge you for it.

Maybe one did see it coming! We don't know! But do you really think the authorities would of listened to them?

We will never know if they could of been saved or not now. Although reports are coming in that passengers on the fourth plane sacrifed themselves to make the plane crash in a area a lot less populated.

lucydru
 
Well, the problem is you only ever hear psychics predict things that aren´t very surprising. Nobody saw this coming, or Diana´s death. They can only see things like "trouble in the middle east" and such.
 
Innocent Victims?

This phrase has become a bit of a cliche. 'Not directly involved in this particular conflict' might be more relevent. In any disaster, how many cheats, bigamists, murderers, etc, get killed? By the law of averages (whatever that may be) some victims of one outrage may be guilty of other crimes.

As someone once said, 'Let him who is free from sin cast the first stone'.

(I can't believe I just said that - I'm an agnostic!)
 
Hey, I´m an atheist but that doesn´t mean Jesus didn´t say some neat things.

Well, they weren´t innocent victims. That´s like we don´t consider how many rapists, murderers and thieves there were among the jews killed on the Holocaust. But even if they weren´t innocent, they still got a worse punishment than they deserved. So they are in a sense innocent.
 
foofighter said:
With the numerous alleged psychics in the world, how come not a single one could foretell these events coming and warn the relevant authorities?

A friend of mine did have a precognitive dream about the WTC the night prior to the attack. He was standing in an ash and rubble strewn NYC street, looking up at the shattered remains of the WTC. Only the streets were deserted and he thought that it was just another typical post-apocalyptic nightmare. It wasn't until after he had seen the twin towers collapse did he realise that it was exactly what he had seen.

Just because some one is precognitive doesn't mean that they can correctly interpret what they see.

Niles
 
The very dodgy Rense site has some cases of murky prophecies
made by prognosticators. But cloudy dreams of doom and
gloom are published all the time. The WTC tragedy is one
of those events - Hiroshima and the Holocaust are others -
where the spirit world seems unable to repond on an
appropriate scale.

Wearing a sombre face, for once, I should say that the weird
sidelights on this tragedy, like the demon faces in the smoke,
afford me no amusement. Nor can I take them seriously, given
the miles of footage. Just two demon faces?

And I will not be applauding the merciful God who sent warning
dreams to a few people who stayed out of Manhattan that day.

They will be out in their droves soon, like flies, on a tv near you.

That's my prophecy for today.
 
I wonder how many people phoned the FBI or FAA to warn them of the impending disaster but were ignored, and why should anyone take them seriously, after all they can never provide details they only see the results, not what lead up to it.
would'nt it be a good idea if all these people could be logged and a kind of coterie created so that they could compare notes and get a more detailed picture of important events to come.
 
Yes, I believe that all fortune tellers/psychics are fakes. They may not know it themselves, they may just be naturally exceptionally good at, say, reading body language/reading between the lines, etc.

As for the premonition in the dream, with the large number of people in the world, I would summise that it would be more unlikely if a few people didn't have dreams that had resonant images such as buildings falling down, being in a disaster area, etc. Niles, you say that your freind only realised what he'd dreamt after the buildings went down? Is it not possible that he was looking up at the ruins of another building in another city in the dream, and the intensity of the images/emotions of the day altered the memory? Memeory is notoriously unreliable and easy to influence in any case, and with dreams in particular.

Of course, it could be a coincidence, too.
 
trollface: Yes that is a distinct possibility but there were other, more traumatic and personal details which I didn't post to both protect my friend and shorten the post. They're things which although meaningless to most people have a strong personal resonance with my friend (whos Canadian) and the WTC.

Sorry.

Niles.
 
Fair enough, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't just coincidence.
 
Sorry, I didn't realise that you were replying to that specific bit of my post.
 
Probably the wrong thread...

...but I can't find the one where someone reported that a few months ago a woman on Kilroy reported a dream apparently predicting the WTC attack, and according to a newspaper report she would be on again this week, with a recording from the original program. (If anyone knows the right thread, please repost this there.)

Kilroy today was on
predicting the future, so I watched (and taped) it all, but there was no
mention of the WTC prediction. In fact the whole program was not up to his
usual lively (and amusing) standards, and most of the participants were
pretty dull. As it's unlikely the beeb will cover the same topic again
tomorrow, I wonder if there was in fact a late change of plan to miss out
the WTC bit, and so some less interesting people were drafted in to fill
the gap. A good one for conspiracy theorists, that...
 
Did this report come after the attacks? I doubt that this is true, has anyone got conformation from the Beeb?
 
The original post on the Kilroy psychic

..was posted by Annasdottir on the "Kind of a prediction (etc)" thread in General Forteana. Details there. I'll also repost my Kilroy report there.
 
Shakespeare

I don't recall the Bard writing about planes crashing into skyscrapers :)
 
Someone once wrote "If you put enough monky's to work on typewriters, they will, given enough time write the entire works of Shakspeare"....or words to that effect. I just thought the same applied to these kinds of predictions.
 
Re: Monkeys

Phil Randal said:
I see you have a sense of humour failure... ~sighs~
Someone also said, "when your in a hole, stop digging";)
 
In my opinion, definitely not. Not content with second hand testimony, I investigated myself, and booked in with a clairvoyant based more than 400 miles from where I lived at the time.
She relayed specific information regarding people who were long dead, including names, addresses, dates of birthdays, deaths etc.
much of which was meaningless to me until I played the tapes to my mother and granparents, who confirmed all she had told me, and have since become Spiritualists. (I personally align myself with no particular set of beliefs).
I have also witnessed metal bending feats many times.

Besides this, there is also a mountain of scientific evidence, the details of which can be found in any book on parapsychology.

The idea that a psychic/clairvoyant or whatever would predict a major event (such as the WTC attack) and publicly be taken seriously by the media or politicians is, frankly, RIDICULOUS, especially in a situation where Bin Laden's own warning was ignored!
 
Tubal Cain said:
....She relayed specific information regarding people who were long dead, including names, addresses, dates of birthdays, deaths etc. much of which was meaningless to me until I played the tapes to my mother and granparents, who confirmed all she had told me, and have since become Spiritualists.

...What's the point of getting a list of long dead relatives? I've always wondered why the people from beyond would want to tell you stuff you a) already know or b) is completely irrelevant.

As a sideline - I've recently been researching my family tree, and have been amazed at the number of names that have popped up in only 4 generations or so - I've already got over 200 people by following various branches - plenty of scope there.

...then again, I am reading "The Art of Cold Reading" by Ian Rowland - definately recommended to anyone who is interested in Spiritualism/mediumship.

Cheers

Nick
 
I applaud Tubal cain for investigating things at first hand, and not just regurgitating the opinions of others.

I reguarly went to a spiritualist church a few years back in the same spirit of enquiry. I hadn't lost anyone, I wasn't grieving, I wasn't looking for solace - I just wanted to know what went on. 80% of it was pretty meaningless, but the occasional hits were well worth hearing. Again, I have to stress the importance of personal experience, because a lot of the 'messages' do seem totally trivial to outsiders. One medium said she saw me walking along, looking at some red flowers. This meant nothing to me, and I said so, but she insisted that was what she saw.

After she passed on to someone else I suddenly remembered a recent time when I had been looking at some red flowers. Something about the shade of red was very significant to me, but it would take too long to explain it here. It was trivial, and yet significant!

I don't have any answers, just perhaps more experience now to ask better questions!
 
I was a Spiritualist for 4 or 5 years, and there was certainly plenty of cold reading going on. For instance, the medium would very commonly say something like "I'm getting the name George here" with no further details; George could be somebody's husband, somebody's grandad, or somebody's budgie. But someone in the audience could usually identify the name as familiar to them; if they didn't, the medium would hurriedly say "Or it could be Gregory!" or something, until somebody put their hand up. The medium would then take a good look at them, then say something that might be relevant; an elderly woman wearing black would get "He says to tell you he didn't suffer", for instance (which could equally well apply to her budgie, I suppose).
I didn't start out sceptical; like the X-Files character, I wanted to believe. I actually wanted info about an important piece of family history that only a medium could supply; no medium I ever encountered (and I must have gone to at least one Spiritualist service every week) ever came near to telling me anything about it. Instead I witnessed performance after performance of cold reading, plus 'warm' readings from mediums who clearly already knew their sitters' backgrounds - greeting sitters by their first name and chatting about previous readings. Never once did I witness anything that convinced me.
Too, much of the 'evidence' for mediumship seemed utterly pointless - recitals of names, extremely approximate guesses at causes of death ("I'm getting a pain in my chest here" - so would that be a heart attack, impalement or just acute indigestion?), assurances that "he didn't suffer", rosy descriptions of the afterlife. I once had a session with Carol Polge, a 'psychic artist', who produced a pencil portrait of a young woman who looked vaguely like me; this was apparently some discarnate spirit she could 'see' with me. Carol didn't give me any messages, was unable to supply a name for this person and suggested I looked in old family photos for anyone who looked like her! I was too polite to ask her what it was all supposed to prove.
One mediumship group that I attended in the early 70's did seem to be more promising; they were channelling messages from a similar group on 'the other side' who were developing plans for a machine that could transmit 2-way voice communications between this world and the next. But nothing came of it - they were perpetually on the edge of the big breakthrough, but just faffed around; eventually I left and never heard anything more of it (I know this sounds a bit like Raudive communications, but this group were already familiar with Raudive's work and were adamant that their concept was entirely different).
 
rynner said:
I applaud Tubal cain for investigating things at first hand, and not just regurgitating the opinions of others.

My apologies if you find my post rather flippant - I was trying to write it whilst pretending to work! I have to say though that my opinion is my own drawn from a long standing interest, various readings, and conversations with a spiritualist relative. I can have an opinion on the Moon without having to go there.....

The reference to Rowland's book is a pointer for other interested parties. As you said yourself...

I don't have any answers, just perhaps more experience now to ask better questions!


...a sentiment I'd drink to!

Cheers

Nick
 
Do "psychics" really exist? That's what this poll is about! I want to find out what others think, since I have divided views about this.
 
I believe they must, in some form, be legitimate, just judging from my own experiences in life (dreams, premonitions, etc) but I'm sure they (the "real" ones) are the minority, not the majority. (Although I'm sure everyone is capable to some extent.)
And I'm sure most (if not all?) of the "real" psychics shy away from tv shows and pay-per-call lines, for obvious reasons. The TV psychic is more or less a modern-day Houdini.
 
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