Hello and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. This is your host, Steven Novella, President of the Dwayne on Skeptical Society.

Today is Tuesday, January 17th, 2006. With me tonight are Perry DeAngeles.

Hey everybody! Evan Bernstein. Good evening all.

And my bro, Bob Novella. Hey, what's up?

We're at the beginning of a new year, the end of an old year. And I think it would be appropriate to review the psychic predictions for 2005. How did our psychic friends do last year?

Eventually they batted a thousand.

There is a science writer Jean Emory who has made himself famous in Skeptical Circles by for a number of years, 20 years or so.

Actually since 1979 to 26 years, he has been tracking the psychic predictions, mainly those that have been published in tabloids like the Sun every year.

And at the end of the year he reviews them and tracks their success rate. Over the last 26 years their success rate has been very close to zero.

Now interestingly he notes this year that the tabloids stopped attributing specific predictions to specific psychics.

They just say here's our panel of psychics and here are all of their lumped together predictions.

Have you guys seen any of these efforts 2005? They're always so funny.

Now yeah, but Steve, would you find it a little unusual that their hit rate is close to zero percent? Isn't that anomalous in itself?

I would say that if they were trying to be accurate rather than just sensational, I think they probably would do a little bit better.

I think I could probably do better than zero percent if I was trying to make some fairly high probability hits. And the hits that they do make are high probability hits.

Like someone noted that there would be a change in the Pope in 2005, which could be either a death or a resignation.

So they left it a little bit open and they didn't predict the more difficult fact, which is that the Pope would be German. They did predict that the Pope would be Italian, which again is a high probability way to go.

So occasionally they do get these sort of high probability hits, but here are some of the things that they said for 2005.

One prediction is, communications would be disrupted when Earth's magnetic field reverses. A California inventor would cause earthquakes in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

NASA astronomers would find a ruined city on Mars. Of course, they did find one. They wouldn't tell us about it.

Of course. Is really in the United States would invade Syria and Iran? Yeah, this is a great one. Edible furniture designed for couch potatoes would have to be recalled because of a sanitation problem.

That's got to be a joke. That's got to be pure out of it. It's in the sun. Millions of dollars in divorce fees would be saved when disgruntled couples were allowed to play a new computer game where the loser dies in real life.

...