How many here remembers Peter Hurkos? Do you think he was a real psychic?

Question

Peter Hurkos fell off a ladder and the enjury made him psychic.

He died in the 1980's and was well known in the 40's, 50's, and 60's I think he was already well known in the 40's. I do recall he said he would submit to any test anwhere any time but do not know if he was ever tested for his abilities or not.

The first I knew anything about him was I got a copy of his first book at a news stand years ago. the book way simply titled Psychic.

Answer 1

His official website makes a lot of claims -- one being that he assisted in the case of the missing Thai Silk King, Jim Thompson. [1]  But according to BBC, he was of no help at all in that case -- only claiming that Jim Thompson had been taken by 14 communist soldiers but never offering any actual helpful or verifiable information. [2]

“Hurkos and his supporters maintained that he was a great psychic detective; by 1969, he cited the successful solution of 27 murder cases in 17 countries. However, in some cases the detectives assigned to these cases countered that Hurkos contributed no information unobtainable from newspapers and, in some cases, that he took no part in the investigations whatsoever. In response to Hurkos' claim that he located the stolen ‘Stone of Scone’ [also boasted on his official website], Home Secretary Chuter Edge declared: ‘The gentleman in question whose activities have been publicized (though not by the police) was among a number of persons authorized to come to Westminster Abbey to examine the scene of the crime. He was not invited by the police, his expenses have not been refunded by the Government, and he did not obtain any result whatsoever.’" [3]

Hurkos' website also claims that he helped with the Boston Strangler case.  "...and he did in fact travel to Boston and spend time with the police there. However, he was not of help to them; several days after he concluded his consultation, he was arrested (and eventually convicted) for impersonating a police officer. Hurkos allegedly posed as a police officer in order to gather information that he could later claim to be psychic revelations.” [3]

Another source:

"Boston, Massachusetts, 1964. High-profile, Dutch-born psychic detective Peter Hurkos (Pieter van der Hurk) claimed to have divined the identity of the serial killer known as the Boston Strangler. Unfortunately for Hurkos, the man he accused was eventually cleared of involvement in the rape-murders, and Albert DeSalvo confessed to the crimes. Shortly afterward, Hurkos was briefly jailed in New York for allegedly impersonating an FBI agent. Hurkos died in 1988.(Nickell 1994, pp. 23-24.)" [4]

"Actually, the case against psychics is worse than just their inability to provide information that actually solves crimes. A far more serious problem exists with regard to the wasted resources of police departments who expend precious time and human activity in following up on a psychic's meaningless ‘clues.’ In one instance the Nutley, New Jersey, police spent the whole of an afternoon in digging up a drainage ditch that Dorothy Allison mistakenly thought contained the body of a missing boy. In another case, the fire department pumped the water from the flooded basement of an abandoned building in a fruitless search for a boy's remains that eventually were discovered across town. Even worse, psychics have wrongfully accused persons of committing crimes, a memorable example being that of Peter Hurkos, ‘the man with the radar brain,’ who mistakenly identified an innocent man as the notorious Boston Strangler." [5]

Hurkos also used a social engineering technique similar to that of modern self-proclaimed psychic Jonathan Edwards. "Cold reading is a technique used to convince another person that the reader knows much more about a subject than they actually do. Even without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by carefully analyzing the person's body language, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. This technique is also called profiling. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses." [6]

Consider this transcript from one of his shows:

"Hurkos: I see an operation.

Subject: [no response]

Hurkos: Long time ago.

Subject: No. We have been lucky.

Hurkos: [somewhat angrily] Think! When you were a little girl. I see worried parents, and doctor, and scurrying about.

Subject: [no response]

Hurkos: [confidently] Long time ago.

Subject: [yielding] I cannot remember for certain. Maybe you are right. I'm not sure." [3]

Like Jonathan Edwards, Hurkos apparently asked vague questions and used common names (Edwards often limits himself to mere letters in order to be even more general!) to elicit some sort of memory.  The supposed psychic then goes along with the responses making more vague statements statistically probable to have some sort of meaning to someone such as the subject, thereby building on the subject's assumed confidence in the "psychic."

The real trick here is one of psychology: the vast majority of the subjects already have some confidence in the actor, as evidenced by the fact that they want his feedback.  That confidence is translated into a feeling of confirmation as the "psychic" merely echoes what the subject says and makes statements likely to strike a chord with the particular individual.  The same technique is used by successful sales people to make lots of money and by the socially adept in general: it's really nothing new, though in this case it becomes the commodity being sold rather than just the means to sell a commodity.