Phil Jordan, psychic helps police?

[clarsct]

Just saw this on Nancy Grace on CNN.
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/nancy.grace/ (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/nancy.grace/)


Did a psychic help police? I wonder. I noticed there wasn't much in the way of balanced reporting on this one.

Read about Mr. Jordan here:
http://www.philjordan.com/ (http://www.philjordan.com/)


So. real or phony? My BS detector is going off...

[Zep]

Thank you for calling [insert city name here] Police Department Psychic Reporting Hotline. All our psychic information officers are busy on other calls right now. But we can record your report for later processing. After the tone, please state clearly and precisely your psychic report, including which case it refers to. We will process your report in the prescribed manner as soon as an officer is available. Please note that, due to privacy controls, we cannot respond personally to ongoing requests for progress on your report. However you can be assured that the [insert city name here] Police Department is treating your report with the respect it deserves. Thank you..............>beep<

[case sensitive]

Just saw this on Nancy Grace on CNN.
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/nancy.grace/ (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/nancy.grace/)


Did a psychic help police? I wonder. I noticed there wasn't much in the way of balanced reporting on this one.

Read about Mr. Jordan here:
http://www.philjordan.com/ (http://www.philjordan.com/)


So. real or phony? My BS detector is going off...

I can't find this storys transcript but Nancy's show is well... blood and gore I guess. "Tonight, man molested by sea lion, but first some clips of people getting brutally stabbed, raped and murdered".

It looks like the usual American, anything for ratings, news show. And you can not trust them.

Phil Jordan takes 60 dollar/20 minutes of reading. But you can call him and then he works faster (last 10-15) for the same price. Well isn't that special...

If you send a letter the price is the same too.

400 if you want a house party with friends and Phil J for one hour and a half.

Public performances and fundraisers 450 green ones...

Or 18 $ for his book...

Now can you find any reason this guy would claim to be psychic if he isn't?

[clarsct]

Oh..I'm not ready to say the prize is won, yet..

I was just posting it for general info and seeing if anybody had stuff to add to the pile of BS that this smells like...

I only watched about 15 minutes of the story. I had food cooking and was starting to lose my appetite...

[case sensitive]

Did you hear any "real" evidence? What case had he help solve?

[Starthinker]

This is the problem with psychics helping police: When there is a major crime, say a murder, and a tip is phoned in most police departments HAVE to follow up on the tip, no matter what it is. So lets say I'm a psychic and Jane Doe has vanished and they found her car full of blood. So I call the police and say, "I see her wrapped in a shower curtain, laying next to trail, possibly the one in the state park, 100 miles from where her car was found." Most police departments, if not all, would have to send investigators out to the state park to search along trails wasting time and manpower in the process. NOT because it was a psychic tip, but because they have to follow up on ALL tips. Of course the psychic can then say that the local police used them, because after all, they went and searched the park based on a psychic tip, and put that in their resume.

I know some investigators here and they say they hate it, really, really hate it when a psychic calls in a tip.

And god forbid the someone thinks logically, figures out a crime out, but thinks they did it psychically. I just read a case like that in an old Randi's Commentary. That's when we lose people.

[Gr8wight]

Several months ago I sent out a number of e-mails to alleged psychics whose websites made the claim that the 'psychic' in question had aided in police investigations. In the e-mail I asked for details on the nature of the aid provided, and the exact law enforcement agency involved. Surprisingly, I did receive one reply (out of four or five e-mails sent to different people). Unsurprisingly, the alleged psychic who replied, while he identified a general region, did not mention an exact law enforcement agency, nor did he offer any details on the nature of the case, or his involvement. He also added the cautionary note to the effect that police departments will almost always deny consulting psychic when queried.

Sure.

[JPK]

Good morning clarsct.
Just saw this on Nancy Grace on CNN.
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/nancy.grace/ (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/nancy.grace/)


Did a psychic help police? I wonder. I noticed there wasn't much in the way of balanced reporting on this one.

Read about Mr. Jordan here:
http://www.philjordan.com/ (http://www.philjordan.com/)


So. real or phony? My BS detector is going off...
I wasn't able to see what case you are talking about. Was it the one about the missing kid in upstate NY? If I remember correctly, that story was covered by the rather one sided show Psychic Detectives shown, sadly enough, on Court TV.
If you watch those shows close enough and don't let the trippy camera effects and spooky music distract you, you will see that the Psychics do not solve the cases, inspite of what the show implies. I know there were some threads about that case on this forum. I will try to find them for you.
JPK

Edited to add: Look at this thread for a talk about that case.
http://206.225.95.123/forumlive/showthread.php?t=23248

[JLam]

From the May/June 2004 edition of Skeptical Inquirer (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_3_28/ai_n6090290)

Enter Phil Jordan, psychic sleuth cure spiritualist. He was, he says, "raised on dreams," and from about the age of six experienced clairvoyant visions. Prompted in part by "severe unemployment," he decided to offer "psychic consultations" to the public. Two years later, he launched his reputation as a psychic detective by supposedly locating a missing five-year-old boy. Although Jordan claims to have been helpful in other cases, it is this one that receives the most attention in his autobiography, I Knew This Day Would Come: A Personal Journey to Psychic Awareness (Jordan 1999, 58 64).

The case--the rescue of Tommy Kennedy in Tioga County, New York--began on August 3, 1975. Young Kennedy had wandered away from his family at Empire Lake, and some searchers feared he might have fallen into the water and drowned. Using psychometry (or object-reading, an alleged type of ESP) Jordan supposedly received impressions from the boy's discovered T-shirt. Jordan announced, "He's alive," and, producing a sketch, said, "that's where they will find him." Subsequently, Jordan led searchers into the woods where "they found the exhausted five-year-old, under a tree in the exact location sketched by the psychic the night before" (Randles and Hough 2001).

Unfortunately, the story has become "mythologized," according to Kenneth L. Feder and Michael Alan Park, who investigated the Kennedy case for my book Psychic Sleuths (Nickell 1994). They demonstrated how facts have been exaggerated and the story subjected to various embellishments. For example, the psychic's own accounts (Jordan 1977, 1999) fail to mention the T-shirt, a detail given in Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi's The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime (1991, 74), citing Fate magazine and the tabloid National Enquirer. It is repeated by Jenny Randles and Peter Hough in their credulous Psychic Detectives (2001, 86-88), which, astonishingly, ascribes the Kennedy case to 1982!

Moreover, Jordan's map was vague and contained erroneous details. It was apparently of little use in the search, during which Jordan supposedly received vibrations telling him "to go here, to go there" (Feder and Park 1994). Jordan had, by his own admission, chosen an area of the woods that "no one had searched" (although Randles and Hough [2001] report otherwise). "Just as I was ready to give up, he says, "I looked down and saw the footprint of a young barefoot human headed up the trail." Even with such good luck, Jordan happened to be elsewhere--in a ravine--when other searchers in the party actually located the lost child. They had heard him "yelling for help" (Jordan 1999, 58-63).

A 1989 television re-creation further exaggerated the story, leading Feder and Park (1994) to conclude, "It is curious indeed that this case, with all of its contradictions and odd coincidences, is considered an example compelling enough to be singled out in a television documentary more than a decade after the fact." And, of course, it has also been featured in mystery-mongering books such as that by Randles and Hough (2001).

[Iamme]

Just saw this on Nancy Grace on CNN.
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/nancy.grace/ (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/nancy.grace/)


Did a psychic help police? I wonder. I noticed there wasn't much in the way of balanced reporting on this one.

Read about Mr. Jordan here:
http://www.philjordan.com/ (http://www.philjordan.com/)


So. real or phony? My BS detector is going off...

I saw the show.

Very impressive to hear the claims. Trouble is, we weren't told anything about what the psychic was told, or what they asked the investigators. How do we not know that these psychics are just simply 'intuitive' based on their intelligence of knowing what to ask and look for? That is not being psychic. It's just being more smart than the detectives.

For example, how do we not know that, the psychic lady learned that the ol guy who disappeared and was found dead along the path, he never drove, never rode with anybody, never had friends, liked to take daily walks, etc. None of this was asked or addressed in the show. Neither was anything said about this psychic woman's record to getting her guesses correct on some percentage basis. They said that she said that the color green meant a lot to him. I think in one of his photos, he was dressed in green. Who knows what she was shown or told before saying that.

I feel I can't even comment on the validity of this without knowing more.

The show was porly done and I feel sensationized for ratings only. Maybe next week they will have a re-review of the Bigfoot film, or perhaps the Roswell incident, again.

[Euromutt]

From the transcript of the show (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0511/24/ng.01.html):MUCCI: Nancy, actually, most amazing to me, we had taken down, without his knowledge, a stack of photographs, mug shots, that we presented to Phil, and asked him if there was any significance with any of the people in the pile of photographs.

Obviously, then, knowing who the defendants or who the suspects were, he actually pulled the two suspects out of that pile of photographs.So if I read this correctly, Jordan's contribution to the Swartwood case was that, when detective Mucci showed him a stack of mugshots, he (Jordan) picked out the photos of two men who were already Mucci's primary suspects. In other words, Jordan did nothing that couldn't be achieved by simple cold reading of Mucci's body language (à la Clever Hans) and didn't actually contribute anything to the investigation, since Cuddy and Moore were already under suspicion prior to Mucci calling in Jordan.

I note that on Jordan's website, the only anecdotal evidence testimonial which Jordan includes (http://www.philjordan.com/about.html) is the 1975 recovery of Thomas Kennedy. In thirty years, he hasn't been able to come up with anything better?