Here’s an interesting story found via AltReligion: A many went missing in Georgia. His car was found, and police made a thorough search of the area, but found nothing. The man’s family then found a “psychic detective” online named Lynn Ann Maker. After touching an article of the missing man’s clothes, she began to have images of where he was - a process called psychometry. One article about the incident says:

Lynn says, she kept feeling that Wallace was submerged in water,”I saw trees, but I was looking up, and to me I was trying to make sense of it. What it was, he was submerged in water, and he was under the water looking out at the trees, and I was him, you know, in his body.”

Lynn ended up going back to the original location where his car was found. There was a pond nearby, which the police had previously searched and come up empty-handed. Another article about her explains what happened after she waded into the pond:

“I walked four or five steps and in front of me I saw something come out of the water,” she said. “It was the top of his head. I didn’t know for sure it was him.

“After his neck came out of the water, he turned,” she said. “I could see it was him and I called 911.”

For whatever reason, police have decided that she merely found the body through luck, and not through psychic perception. Another article on the topic says of this mystery that “noone can explain why or how.” Are these people daft? How much more obvious could it be? She’s psychic!

It’s like if I tell you, “I think I’m gonna go buy a pair of shoes today,” then I go buy some shoes - it’s not fucking attributable to “luck.” And it’s not some humongous accidental coincidental mystery: “Oh my god! How did he get those shoes?!”

I guess this really upsets some people’s worldviews, but the fact is that this shit happens all the time. Remember the woman who located a missing girl in Washington last October because she had a dream about it? These are not isolated incidents. There are thousands of these on record, and probably thousands more off.

Psychologist Marie Louise Von Franz mentions something similar to this in a book of hers I’m re-reading: On Divination and Synchronicity. She talks about how mathematical (especially statistical) theories often focus on creating a usable theory which works in general to describe a phenomenon. By doing this, they will tend to gloss over the individual case - even when it doesn’t fit the theory. She references a researcher at Duke University some years ago who evidently was one of the many who tries to prove parapsychological/paranormal phenomena using standard science:

[…] He was foolish enough to believe that if he wanted to sell parapsychological phenomena to the scientific world then he must prove them statistically or with the concept of probability and - what a fool - he ended up by that in enemy territory. He should have stayed on his own territory. He tries to prove with the very means which eliminates the single case, something which is only valid in the single case,

It’s an interesting way to explain why so many studies that try to “prove” paranormal stuff scientifically fail (although, a great many admittedly succeed).

Going back to the news articles though, it’s very funny how the other conclusion they all seem to draw readily is that the whole thing was a “coincidence.” Coincidence is just about the shittiest fall-back explanation in the world, and yet everybody trots it out ad nauseum. It really drives me batty. It makes me wonder just how hard it is for people to accept that psychic phenomena are just a part of life. I guess the real issue is though, that for most people in order for them to do that, they’d basically have to go back in and re-engineer years and years of patterning and cultural conditioning, and a bunch of other running programs would necessarily be altered as a consequence. Faced with this enormous workload for such a small payoff, it must be just easier to write it off as luck or coincidence, and go about your business.

[View Lynn Ann Maker’s website here]