I have written many times about Sylvia Browne, the evil woman who claims psychic powers and the ability to talk to the dead. I have interviewed Robert Lancaster of StopSylvia.com, James Randi, Phil Plait, and others about her. All of them have developed evidence through the years of Browne’s lies.
Now Ryan Shaffer and Agatha Jadwiszczok have cast a skeptical eye on how many of Browne’s predictions about missing persons and murder cases — most made on Montel Williams’ TV show — were true. Their conclusion: despite Browne’s claim that she is correct 87-90% of the time, of 115 predictions she has made about missing persons and murder cases, the researchers couldn’t find a single time when she was right.
Not one.
When she claimed people were alive, they were dead. When she said they were dead, they were alive. When she said missing persons were in other countries, they were found in the US. And so on and so on. You’d think that after she got several of these wrong, something ethical and moral in her would realize that she was doing harm to the loved ones of the dead and missing. But it’s clear that ethics and morals play no role in Browne’s world, where money is all that matters. Instead, Browne continued to take advantage of these folks while they were at emotional low points, all in an effort to enrich herself.
Fortunately, Montel Williams is no longer her enabler, as his show was cancelled a couple of years ago. But that hasn’t stopped Browne from traveling the country and taking advantage of people.
Read the summary of the research here
Here’s my 2004 conversation with James Randi about Sylvia Browne (there’s more at Randi.org).
Here’s my 2007 conversation with Robert Lancaster of StopSylviaBrowne.com.