Can psychics see into the future? Although one might wish for a psychic stock forecaster, the tallied forecasts of "leading psychics" reveal meager accuracy. Between 1978 and 1985, the New Year's predictions of the National Enquirer's favorite psychics yielded 2 accurate predictions out of 486 (Strentz, 1986). During the early 1990s, tabloid psychics were all wrong in predicting surprising events (Madonna did not become a gospel singer, a UFO base was not found in the Mexican desert, Queen Elizabeth did not abdicate her throne to enter a convent). And they again missed all the significant unexpected events, such as the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Saddam Hussein's assault on Kuwait, and the World Trade Center bombing.

The National Star has a winner at last

Analyses of psychic visions offered to police departments reveal that these, too, are no more accurate than guesses made by others (Reiser, 1982). Psychics working with the police do, however, generate dozens or even hundreds of predictions; this increases the odds of an occasional correct guess, which psychics can then report to the media. Moreover, vague predictions can later be interpreted to match events, which provide a perceptual set for interpreting them. Nostradamus, a sixteenth-century French psychic, explained in an unguarded moment that his ambiguous prophecies "could not possibly be understood till they were interpreted after the event and by it." Police departments are wise to all this. When Jane Ayers Sweat and Mark Durm (1993) asked the police departments of America's 50 largest cities whether they ever used psychics, 65 percent said they never had. Of those that had, not one had found it helpful.

Are the spontaneous "visions" of ordinary people any more accurate? Consider our dreams. Do they foretell the future, as about half of university students believe (Messer & Griggs, 1989)? Or do they only seem to because we are more likely to recall or reconstruct dreams that seem to have come true? Sixty years ago, two Harvard psychologists (Murray & Wheeler, 1937) tested the prophetic power of dreams. After aviator Charles Lindbergh's baby son was kidnapped and murdered but before the body was discovered, the researchers invited the public to report their dreams about the child. Of the 1300 dream reports submitted, how many accurately envisioned the child dead? A mere 5 percent. And how many also correctly anticipated the body's location‹buried among trees? Only 4 of the 1300. Although this number was surely no better than chance, to those 4 dreamers the accuracy of their apparent precognitions must have seemed uncanny.

Every day each of us imagines many events. Occasionally an unlikely imagined event is bound to occur and to astonish us when it does. If you tell everyone in a group of 100 people to think "heads" before each tosses six coins, someone is likely to get all heads (whether thinking heads or not) and to feel eerie afterwards. As Chapter 1 explained, random sequences will sometimes contain weird conjunctions or streaks. Given the billions of events that occur in the world each day, and given enough days, some stunning coincidences are sure to occur. "Time converts the improbable to the inevitable," notes Stephen Jay Gould.

Finally, consider this, say the skeptics: After tens of thousands of experiments, there has never been discovered a reproducible ESP phenomenon, nor any individual who can convincingly demonstrate psychic ability (Marks, 1986). A National Research Council investigation of ESP similarly concludes that "the best available evidence does not support the contention that these phenomena exist" (Druckman & Swets, 1988).

One skeptic, magician James Randi, has offered $10,000 to anyone who can demonstrate "any paranormal ability" before a group of competent experts. Other similar offers total more than a third of a million dollars (Jones, 1985­1986; Karr, 1993). To anyone whose claims could be authenticated, the scientific seal of approval would be worth far more. Randi's offer has been publicized for well over two decades, and dozens of people have been tested, sometimes under the scrutiny of an independent panel of judges. To refute those who say there is no ESP, one need only produce a single person who can demonstrate a single reproducible ESP phenomenon. As yet, no one has exhibited any such power.

Lacking such, and faced with increasing skepticism, the Parapsychological Association has recently been losing membership, and several major parapsychological laboratories lost their funding and closed during the 1980s (Hess, 1993). Even while fascination with ESP grows in some parts of the world, doubts about ESP are increasing among American teens. The 67 percent who told the 1978 Gallup Youth Survey they believed in ESP declined to 43 percent in 1992.