Psychic Detectives

Psychics are people who are gifted with paranormal perception, a mental ability that seems to transcend time, space and the known physical laws of matter and energy.  Paranormal perception, also known by some who link it with the heightened intuition used by law enforcement as "the blue sense," is explained as an energy that sensitive people (or people with certain chemical interactions in the brain) can contact. 

Collectively known as psi abilities, this type of perception can take a number of forms, but those most relevant to crime investigation, as defined in several psychic dictionaries, are:

• Automatic writing using unconscious muscular energies in the arm and hand, the person allows the spirit of someone to communicate via writing.  A pencil is held over paper and the deceased is invited to give a statement.  It is also considered a way for a person's unconscious to communicate with his or her conscious mind.  In any event, the pencil is allowed to be directed by some energy other than the hand holding it.
• Akashic records a giant recording library of all the events of a person's life, supposedly lodged in the "ether."  The medium picks up information and must make sense out of it.  These records are also known as the Book of Life, and there's a record for every individual who has ever lived, containing every word, deed, feeling, thought and intent that has ever occurred.  The "seer," Edgar Cayce, introduced this concept, suggesting that these records can be accessed via thought.
• "Bird-dogging" Psychic Renie Wiley claims to place her mind into the mind of a criminal to learn about what that person did, following the crime's trail like a bird dog.
• Channeling allowing spiritual entities to use one's body and mind as a link between this plane and the spirit plane, for the purpose of receiving information. This person is known as a medium.
• Chiromancy the ability to read about a person's personality and future from his or her palm.
• Clair senses - any or all types of psychic sensitivity corresponding to the five senses: clairvoyance (inner sight), clairaudience (inner ear), clairsentience (a feeling in the body), clairscent (a smell) and clairsavorance (taste).  These are mental impressions received without the use of the physical organs.
• Clairempathy - to psychically appreciate the emotional experience or aura of a person, place or animal.
• Dowsing - The skill of divining for underground sources of water, items, objects or answers by means of a divining rod or an item such as the pendulum, or even by deviceless techniques.  Often the pendulum's direction of swing when held on a string determines a yes or no answer to a question, or locates something on a map.
• Dreams and visions A few days before his death, President Abraham Lincoln dreamed that his body lay in state, brought down by an assassin's bullet.  Many psychics rely on dreams, despite their confusing symbolic nature, to provide such messages of both the present and the future.
• ESP Extra Sensory Perception, as coined by J.B. Rhine of Duke University; it means that one can experience a thought and/or feeling from one mind to another over a distance, without physical means.
• Premonitions in 1993, a boy recorded a description of being hit by a car and dying.  Not long after, a woman ran a red light and hit him while he was walking.  The manner in which he had described his injuries matched what had happened to him, as if he had glimpsed his own fate. 
• Precognition seeing things before they happen.
• Psychometry using an item that had been owned by the person about whom information is sought, on the idea that energies left behind by the person inhabit things and can offer clues.
• Remote viewing seeing things happening in places far from the seer.
• Retroconition a power that psychic Peter Hurkos claimed to use, wherein he would meet someone for the first time and "see" backwards to the past events of that person's life.
• Tarot card readings Tarot is a deck of 78 picture cards used in divination and some psychics use them to channel a reading of psychic energies along a certain track.

Some people who claim to have this perception say that it's based on the natural sense of intuition, or the way we use and focus our inner awareness to provide self-guidance.  Operating beyond our conscious awareness, its a gut feeling on which one acts in faith, on the border somewhere between cognitive and emotive skills.  Something inside tells you, without you having to slow down and analyze it, that what youre doing is correct.  Those who regularly follow this sense of direction generally strengthen its power of insight.  For some people, it becomes a sort of knowing, an inner assurance.

Intuition can take many forms:

• a feeling that something is going to happen
• an inner voice directing us
• the sense that we must pay attention right now
• any kind of fleeting sense or sudden energy
• any seemingly significant encounter
• a sudden flow of inspiration
• the easy visualization of steps in a plan
• finishing someone elses thought
• sensing a distant event that proves to have taken place
• getting the flash of a name and then having that person contact you

Several of these methods were used in a famous case involving the daughter of a best-selling author.