SCORING THE SEERS IN 1969 by Brad Steiger

It's easy for them to make the predictions, but how do our psychic stars actually score on their prognostication? Steiger grades a nice clutch of midcentury psychic stars here, most of whom would become regulars in his '70s book series coauthored with Warren Smith: What the Seers Predict - Smith would continue this series solo as the Predictions for 197X line before scuttling it after the final entry for 1977.

Supposed "hits" include Richard Burton and Liz Taylor going round and round, which tells you what to expect here. Conflict in the Middle East is another easy "prediction." Steiger rates predictress Irene Hughes especially high, with visions of de Gaulle's retirement and Ho Chi Minh's death among other hits. Steiger would cobble together a promotional volume for Hughes later this year with Know the Future Today!

Jeane Dixon's prediction of Governor Reagan having issues with rioting is part of a forgotten saga where Reagan proved his hippie-bashing bonafides via vehement rhetoric towards campus protests in California. See John Dolan's classic article "Reagan's Cheshire Snarl" for a window into this memory holed piece of the Gipper's career. Race baiting Dixon also predicts that Nixon will do more to advance the Negro's status than "any other man in the last 100 years" ... Steiger wisely considers this one too soon to call.

Frequent fliers like John Pendragon, Malva Dee, Paul Twitchell of the Eckankar cult, and the Countess Gypsy Markoff Amaya round out the proceedings. Amaya whiffs on a prediction of Castro's fall in 1970 ... woof! One of the most recent traces of her online is on the blog Eleanor Britton's People, where an anonymous commenter describes caring for Amaya's chihuahua and says the last they knew of her was in 1989. It's entirely possible Amaya suffered the same fate of so many predicting Castro's downfall, and ended up preceding him by quite some time.

Gypsy Markoff Amaya

The commenter ends by saying "we are trying to figure out what happened to her." How sad that so many of the psychics here have faded into history, with neither hide nor hair of their final fates before passing on to the great unknown. At least we know that John Pendragon passed in 1970, as sad as that knowledge is - he was relatively young at just 59 years old!

  

A rare pic of the addled John Pendragon!

This article is also available to read and download at archive dot org.

Courtesy Fate magazine, Volume 23 - Number 1, January 1970.

PREDICTIONS FOR 1976 compiled and edited by Warren Smith

San Antonio: a huge tornado, fires and Mexican Americans and blacks taking over!

Australia and New Zealand will have a problem!

Watch Glenn Ford do it again!

The next President will be George Wallace!

Warren Smith returns with a roster of psychics, minus a few names here and there from last year. The biggest loss is gay witch Leo Martello, no longer here to make canny "predictions" about the CIA. Instead we have psychic sleuth Beverly C. Jaegers predicting that "the CIA will be blamed for everything from food shortages and coffee prices to small takeovers in Southern Hemisphere countries, with no basis in fact." She's the one with the big, bold idea that Australia and New Zealand will have "a problem," too, so nothing gets past her!

Dr. Gil E. Gilly also returns with another beefy chapter full of cheerful nonsense, and you gotta hand it to him for putting it all out there with "predictions" like these:

The mammoth economic growth we’ve witnessed by Japan is going to be surpassed by a physical growth, not in number but in size and stature. This will be shown to be caused by the atomic pollution of the waters and food they eat.  

I believe Gerald Ford is going to run for President with Rockefeller as his running mate. I don’t see him winning, but if he should he'll step down afterwards and Rockefeller will run the country. You know who I see winning? Wallace. Not that I want him to, but that’s who I see winning.

Gilly also says 1976 will be the year for aloe vera, "a Hawaiian plant that's a sure cure for baldness," and also goes into detail about a "Telecheck system" that will monitor seniors for their own safety. It seems like a third of the predictions in this book are technowonders like this, another third are safe "gimme" predictions like "trouble in the Middle East" and Glenn Ford becoming even more popular due to his massive talent and charisma, and the final third are nuclear war, race riots, plague, death, and so on. Gilly doesn't disappoint here with runaway plague and fungus, and a campaign in Zaire to "can and sell human meat!" On the plus side, "Dinah Shore will have her recipes manufactured and distributed on the frozen foods market," hopefully sans long pork!

Glenn Ford (1916-2006) in the epic Midway, 1976

Our pal Doc Anderson does his thing too and also says that he sees "George Wallace is destined to be the President of the United States" ... and that Doris Day will be offered several TV specials! Allene Cunningham says that George Wallace will present us an "amazing and sincere" program for how to clean up America ... I'm starting to have some questions about these psychics!

Allene Cunningham (1921-2016) on the job. I've got my eye on her!

There's a lot of talk of "earth changes" a la Edgar Cayce, and of Atlantis rising. Jackie O's marital status is debated, as is John Wayne's health and Dick Cavett's image as a family man - though Sharon Naccarato beileves that this won't have an effect on his standing. To think we missed out on Dick Cavett's blue era ...

Smith's Predictions series has always been a mix of big B-names in the psychic scene like Irene Hughes and Tenny Hale, and relative nobodies like the anonymous Aquarius, a doctor in the Midwest who wants to keep his ESP under wraps. Maybe the biggest name Smith scored for this year is "the PK Man" himself, Ted Owens, who, despite Smith's usual disclaimer against using these volumes for financial advice, tell us to sell all our stocks and bonds and basically keep cash in hand! 

Ted Owens (1920-1987)

Ted sees bad news all over, with UFOs "kicking the slats" off of Texas and Nevada, with Florida, California, and Illinois also facing some dark future. If only Nixon had listened to Ted:

Years ago I wrote fo President Nixon (excuse the expression) and offered to organize all the great psychics in the land. I’d get Geller, Dixon, Doc Anderson, Gypsy Markoff (Countess Amaya), Hurkos, and others in the psychic field together as one superpsychic team. We'd help guide the United States through times ahead. The government would put up salaries for these top psychics so they would not want. They could devote their energies and time to helping the United States. This superpsychic team would be invaluable to the United States! Now, each psychic is helping an individual here or there with psychic powers. But the total picture would be much better if the psychics banded together to become a powerful psychic force.

Psychic Mark Vito predicts women giving birth to starseeds in 1976, though he avoids that exact term. His brief entry is mostly focused on UFOs and starseeds, which makes sense given he was a contactee:

“My second contact occurred on March 19, 1975,” reported Mark. “I received the following message, which was given to me by mental projection: ‘United States founded by Higher Beings, extraterrestrials. Study the Great Seal of the United States on reverse side of dollar bill. Our messengers responsible for its design. We are the Flying Eagle. Thirteen of us responsible, as shown by the thirteen stars above Eagle. Washington, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, a few of our coworkers. Divine Plan in operation. We bring you sweet tidings of great joy. This is the beginning of remarkable golden goodness. You have no idea of the magnitude of our work. The Great Seal of United States appears on our ships.'"

There's gotta be over a thousand predictions in this volume, although again many are safe bets and generic guesses. But for the out-there observations, of nuclear war and super-pills, of celebrity love and death, of President George Wallace and mass UFO disclosure, we'd have to wait for 1976 to pass us by to see ...

Predictions For 1976 is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1975

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: THE DEVIL'S SEA

The psychic survey of The Devil's Sea by Elizabeth Nichols is now available to read and download at archive dot org. Featuring the ESPer visions of Otto Binder, Irene Hughes, Ted "PK Man Owens," and others, alongside classic Triangle terror tales ...

Courtesy Award Books, 1975.

KNOW THE FUTURE TODAY! by Brad Steiger

Brad Steiger presents a promotional primer on celebrity psychic Irene Hughes, focusing on her supposed startling accuracy in mid-century affairs.

It's easy to snicker at psychic predictions of the Vietnam War ending in 1969, or famine in Italy by 1972, but beyond the simple failure of prophecy it illustrates the role that these celebrity psychics play in voicing our hopes and our fears. Another constant theme in these books is China launching a nuclear war - the PRC only got the Bomb in 1964, a fresh scare for Americans still reeling from a bipolar Cold War order. Assassination predictions for the Kennedy clan and marriage for widow Jackie are an easy gambit. Her prediction of "big business" helping out farmers (page 150) is a particularly bitter piece of black comedy given the '80s farm crisis.

Paperback Library, 1970

INTO THE STRANGE by Warren Smith

A well loved copy of an especially entertaining entry in Smith's line of Forteana. Sea serpents, ghosts, visions, and general weirdos make for a pleasant paranormal potpourri. UFO contactee Paul Villa Jr. is on hand to tell us the Saucer People don't particularly care if we blow ourselves to Kingdom Come with the Bomb! Dr. Robert Menzies hooks a mystery monster that bends his iron out right straight!

One of Paul Villa's "startlingly realistic" UFO photos

A 1978 issue of Boy's Life featuring Dr. Menzies' experience

Italian strongman Agostino Colli is a medical wonder, with two hearts and six fingers. Sadly there isn't much out there on the world wide web about Mr. Colli, besides this Getty stock photo and some archived news articles. Some more "computer minds" and savants are also sprinkled throughout.

Smith reuses the grisly ghost ship Marlborough from Steiger's The Unknown, which Steiger had taken from Frank Edwards. The Tunguska Blast, also previously written up by Edwards, is here, as is a Mystery Airship sighting from 1896 and more star jelly, sourced from Fate magazine.

This title is available to read and download at archive dot org. Table of contents:

1. Haunted by a Dead Lover (5)

2. The Dream That Saved a Soldier's Life (7)

3. "They Buried Me Alive" (9)

4. The Reincarnated Hands of a Dead Doctor (11)

5. The Return of the Devil's Daughter (13)

6. The Voice From the Ancient Colossi of Memnon (16)

7. Who Buried the Strange Objects Centuries Ago in North America? (18)

8. The Duplicate People and Their Duplicate Thoughts (20)

9. The First Time I Died (22)

10. Flying Rocks and Bouncing Boulders (24)

11. The Man With Two Hearts and the Muscles of Superman (26)

12. The Day the Mississippi Flowed Backwards (28)

13. Did He Talk With Flying Saucer Occupants? (30)

14. He Weighed the Human Soul (32)

15. The Astral Guns Above Barisal (33)

16. Bizarre Giant Chase (35)

17. The Curse on Lincoln's Son (40)

18. Strange Sacrifice For a Dead Zulu Queen (42)

19. The Convict's Dream That Saved a King's Life (44)

20. Strange Shower of Sculpted Hailstones (46)

21. Enigma of the Ghost Blimp (47)

22. The Ghost Army of Crete (48)

23. England's Strange Flower Medium (49)

24. The Mysterious Thunder That Almost Sank a Fishing Boat (50)

25. Message From a Dead Father (51)

26. The Love That Conquered Death (52)

27. Strange Vision of the Silver Sword (54)

28. The Mysterious Ten-Day Curse (56)

29. The Living Skeleton (57)

30. The Disappearing Sailors (58)

31. Strange Luck of the Money Clip (59)

32. The Monster in Lake Washington (60)

33. Kashmir's Ghost Sergeant (62)

34. Hunza: Asia's Earthly Paradise (63)

35. Puzzling Psychic Photographs (65)

36. Strange Falling Food From the Skies (66)

37. Mystery of the Lost Pharaoh's Cave (68)

38. The Ghost in Buck Hill Caverns (70)

39. Strange Treasure Lights (72)

40. The Idiot Genius of Earleswood Asylum (73)

41. The Ghost Battle at Edge Hill (75)

42. India's Strange Murder Cult (78)

43. How It Feels to Die on the Gallows (81)

44. Calf With the Devil Brand (83)

45. People With Computer Minds (84)

46. The Mysterious Paralyzing Fog (85)

47. Strange Ghost of the Marble Mantelpiece (86)

48. The Prophecy About George Washington (87)

49. The Day Las Vegas Went Boom (89)

50. Mystery Ruins in Texas (91)

51. The Ghost Ghoul's Warning of Death (92)

52. The Englishman's Prophetic Song (95)

53. The Ocean's "Death Valley" (96)

54. Maritime Monster Madness (97)

55. Predictions of Our Future (100)

56. The Day Niagara Falls Disappeared (102)

57. Evangeline Adams - Astrology's Uncanny Prophet (103)

58. The Ghost Music That Floats Across Yellowstone Lake (106)

59. The Man Who Invented Life (108)

60. America's Strangest UFO Sighting (111)

61. Strange Bedroom Superstitions (113)

62. The Clairvoyant Who Caught Criminals (114)

63. Ship With the Grisly Skeleton Crew (115)

64. The Strange Phenomenon of the King's Healing Hands (117)

65. Arizona's Lost Viking Treasure Mines (120)

66. The Prophetic Phantom of Texas (121)

67. 80,000,000 Trees Are Burning (122)

68. The Ghost in the Library (124)

Popular Library, 1968