Critical Commentary
ABC's Nightline Beyond Belief program for August 17, 2011 featured psychic detectives and their involvement with the case of Ali Lowitzer. Typical of missing person cases, families are approached by people claiming they will help bring the missing home. "They told me, I see trees, water, dirt...but it is all very vague" according to Susan Lowitzer a mother whose daughter has been missing since April 26, 2010. Retired FBI agent and ABC consultant Brad Garrett states, "In 30 years...I have never seen a psychic solve a mystery". JREF investigator and mentalist Banachek feels that psychic detectives take advantage of families, "...because of fame and money, step in and try to act like an authority". Banachek believes that not all psychic detectives are frauds, some are self-deluded and believe they are helping, but they "send police on wild-goose chases wasting precious time and resources". Psychic Georgia O'Conner states that Ali is dead, she was tortured and her body dismembered. When asked by ABC's JuJu Chang how can she tell parents this kind of information when she might be wrong, O'Conner replies "I can't let my ego get in the way of what I see". Despite the attention from psychic detectives Ali Lowitzer remains missing from her Spring, TX home.
No psychic detective has ever been praised or given official recognition by the FBI or US national news for solving a crime, preventing a crime, or finding a kidnap victim or corpse.
The Australian Institute of Criminology, Australia's official crime research agency, advises parents of missing children not resort to psychics who approach them. Former FBI analyst and profiler Clint Van Zandt has criticized the use of psychic detectives and has stated that "What happens many times is that professed psychics allow themselves the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. After the case is solved, they make their previously vague predictions somehow fit the crime and the criminal." A detailed 2010 study of Sylvia Browne predictions about 115 missing persons and murder cases has found that despite her repeated claims to be more than 85% correct, "Browne has not even been mostly correct in a single case."
Read more about this topic: Psychic Detective
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