Psychic Claims Her Vague Help Prove Her Abilities
If you’ve been reading the news this week, you probably heard the story of Jaycee Dugard, the woman who was abducted at the age of 11 in 1991 and was recently discovered living in a virtual prison in the back yard of a couple’s come in Antioch, California. It now turns out a psychic by the name of Dayle Schear was hired by the parents to help locate their missing daughter and now that she’s been found all these years later, the psychic is claiming it proves her abilities. Say what?
Schear says she told Jaycee’s mother not to give up searching for her daughter: “I looked her in the eyes and I said… eventually she’ll walk through the door, you’re going to see her again.”Schear also claims that she correctly described the general area where Jaycee was being held. The psychic’s “information” is typical of what happens when missing persons are eventually found, dead or alive. Psychics come forward years later after the person was found to make retroactive claims about how they “knew” certain pieces of information.
This is a key aspect of psychic claims or clairvoyance – they make vague sounding statements that in hindsight can be rather easy to skew to fit the final outcome of the investigation. We see this all the time with people referencing Nostradamus or performing as a medium that contacts dead relatives. The psychic in the Dugard case never made a specific, accurate claim such as “she’s being held against her will in the backyard of a house.” Instead it was vague claims about her being “near water”, something that could be interpreted after the fact of being near a lake, a puddle or a bottle of water.
This is why the naturally skeptical aspect of double-blind scientific testing never reveals anything to psychic claims and attests to the fact that despite repeated claims, no missing person has been found solely from psychic claims. I’m sure there are charlatans amongst the psychic community that honestly know they are frauds conning people, but I suspect there’s also a segment that truly believes they have psychic abilities. This latter group is most likely sadly deluded and completely lacking a skeptical framework for critical thinking.