What Skeptics fail to understand (spot on, bull's eye!)

[Nostradamus]

[Eteponge]

[ProfWag]

Okay, I'll ask again. What case did she solve? "Solve" being the key word here. Webster's Dictionary says of the word "solve:"
transitive verb
1 : to find a solution, explanation, or answer for <solve a problem> <solved the crime>

You provide a wealth of information on her cases, even admitting that she missed on a lot too, which is respectable of you. But I've asked before and I'll ask again until I either get a somewhat verifiable, affirmative answer or I'll get a negative answer. So, here it goes again. Please, take your time if need be. What case did she S-O-L-V-E? If that's a negative, then I'll ask this: What body did she F-I-N-D? Or, if that's a negative, I'll ask this: What criminal did she have C-A-P-T-U-R-E-D?
Thanks in advance. I'm anxious to find evidence that a psychic detective can actually solve crimes. What a lift to our justice system that will be.
Wag

[Eteponge]

[Eteponge]

There are however, several cases of Psychic's clues actually leading to the finding of the body that I remember. (I need to find sources for them again.)

One I saw the actual video interview with a police detective, talking about how the psychic described a number of accurate things such as an old farm, the dead girl lying right next to a tree, with chickens clucking all around her body. And the police detective actually located the body *himself* with these clues. And yes, chickens were all around her body clucking, and she was lying right next to a tree on an old farm that matched the Psychic's description.

Damn I need to find that case again, it was profiled on a TV Show, where the Police Detective and the Psychic were both interviewed, along with another person.

One very good case I know about where the actual Psychic went right to the body and actually discovered the body, was that of Etta Smith...

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/crim ... ics/8.html

"In 1980, Etta Smith, a shipping clerk in Los Angeles, heard an announcement on the radio about a house-to-house search for Melanie Uribe, a missing woman from her neighborhood, as documented in A&E's film and Larsen's Psychic Sleuths. Smith had an impression that the woman was not inside a building but outside in a certain area, and though she'd never before had such an overwhelming sense of something, it seemed so vivid that she reported it to the police. "It was like someone was talking to me," she said. She felt that the nurse had been hit in the head and dumped in a canyon, which she showed to a detective on a map. She said there was a dirt path going to her. When he seemed not to take her seriously, she decided to go have a look on her own.

As Etta drove through the target area in Lopez Canyon, she had a feeling of "urgency." Spotting some tire tracks in the dirt, she felt them and sensed the trauma that had taken place there. "It was like a thermometer going up." She got back into her car and drove, but her daughter told her to stop because she'd seen something. What she had spotted were a pair of white nurse's shoes.

Smith knew who was there. She drove away and spotted a policeman. She waved him to a stop and told him about the body. He told her to go home. She did, but then two detectives came to bring her in for questioning. She agreed to take a lie detector test, and the police later said that she'd been judged "deceptive," so she was treated as a suspect, strip-searched, and put into a cell for three days. They planted an undercover cop in the cell with her to try to find out why she had come forward and whether her information had come from neighborhood gossip, as suspected. The cop reported that her motive was money.

Then three men confessed and Etta was released. She filed a wrongful arrest suit, asking $750,000 in damages. The jury awarded her $24,000.

She says she never had another such vision, or if she did, she was smart to not report it."

[Nostradamus]

So what I see here about Dorothy Allison is that her information was of no use. The operative word here is IF. What you wrote is that no person was able to make any use of the information in any case. Is that the meaning of the word useless?

To say something was a veridical clue does not seem to be the case. The statements made by D. Allison appear to be shoe horned to the cases involved. To say its a specific clue does not of course say anything about its utility.

Fr example, consider that the numerical matches could as well have been house numbers, telephone numbers, credit card numbers, school record numbers, social security numbers, days till Christmas numbers, distances, times, elevations, VINs, patent numbers, part numbers, sales receipt numbers, ... We are surrounded by numbers. It's a wonder that there there were not multiple matches. Making a match is simple. I have 3 bills in my wallet this evening. The sequence 222 was on one of them.

[ProfWag]

Okay, so you are putting out a TON of information. This is good and bad at the same time. Information overload is not always a good thing so please allow me to clarify what has been said concerning Dorothy Allison and psychic detectives in general and, as usual, please correct me where I'm wrong as you have in the other posts (and I appreciate the clarifications)

1. Police Detectives solve crimes.
2. Psychic Detectives have never solved a crime (other than what truTV says which is right up there in credibility with Unsolved Mysteries.) (Oh, and the FBI and the National Center for Missing Children have gone on record to say they have never recognized a successful psychic.)
3. Psychic Detectives waste the valuable time and resources of the police departments (In the Caylee Anthony murder alone, police have had to investigate somewhere along the lines of 5,000 tips, and "The majority come from psychics who claim to have visions about what happened to Caylee. However most are just too vague to help."
(http://www.wesh.com/news/17850702/detail.html)
4. Sylvia Browne told Shawn Hornbreck's parents their son was DEAD. (Let me know if you need the video link for that one.)
Does that pretty much sum up all that you've written? (Except #s 3 & 4, I just threw them in as a show of support real police work.)

[Eteponge]

[Nostradamus]

[Eteponge]

[Eteponge]

I think we've reached a standstill to this discussion. Neither side will budge, you suggest that it's all just coincidence, lucky guesses, information that seems significant on the surface but isn't, and I state over and over again why I see the data as indicating far more than you are dealing with. And now we are just going back and forth endlessly with this.

I have a stress headache from all of this, and I have more important things to do with my time than squabble back and forth endlessly over this topic, unless you can present anything new besides me going, "This is significant!", then you going, "No it isn't!", "Yes it is!", "No, it isn't.", "Yes it is!", "No, it isn't." Rinse Repeat, ad infinitum. Which is basically what this thread has deteriorated into.

*Bows Out*