Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Predictions That Didn't Work Out

It is the time of the year when psychics trot out their predictions for the new year, and in this case, the new decade, if you believe the decade begins with a zero... and no, I don’t want to start a debate on this.

I bring this up because I have been converting my audio tapes to CDs, and in 1996, I interviewed Irene Hughes on my old radio show on KTSM-AM in El Paso, Texas. I wanted to get some predictions from her so that we might revisit them in the future and see how she had done. Well, she didn’t give us much to go on, remaining vague about what was going to happen, but we did pin her down a couple of times... and I have found other predictions she made over the years, predications, rather than claims of accuracy that were published after the fact.

One of the callers to the January 6, 1996 show wanted to know what the Stock Market would do. She talked about a four hundred point difference and how she had made that prediction prior to the crash of 500 points in the days before that happened in the late 1980s, all without answering his question. The caller asked where the market would be on December 31, 1996.

She said, "Sir, it will have crashed... I think it’s going to go way down... it’s going to lose a thousand points... this market is going to start losing a lot of points, like a thousand points and two weeks later, it may lose a thousand and then you see it trickle down a little, come up a little and trickle down... by the end of this year and April of next [1997] that [it’s] maybe 400 points..."

By the end of 1996, the Stock Market was up1400 points at 6448.27. The trend for the entire year was upward with the normal little retreats as the climb continued.

I tried to pin her down on the presidential election. She said that the Republicans were leaning toward Buchanan and that Dole would retire... but anyone paying attention to the election news at the time might have been able to predict that. The Republicans eventually selected Dole over Buchanan, but she was vague enough about exactly what she said and what she meant that she could call it a hit. I was left underwhelmed.

She said that Clinton would win in a landslide in 1996. But Clinton was the president and they aren’t defeated often. Clinton won, but not in a landslide. He didn’t even get 50% of the popular vote with a third party candidate bleeding off some of Dole’s support.

In a similar vain, back in the 1970s, Hughes predicted that Jimmy Carter would win a second term and he would have a black vice president. She said that Barack Obama would not win the presidency, and now says that he will be a one term president. She said that the president elected in 1980 would die in office and it would be somewhere near Russia. So far she was wrong on just about everything. We don’t know if Obama will only have one term.

She also suggested, back in the 1980s, that the two-party system would expand to three and that this new party, whatever it was, would win in 1984. Of course, there have been many attempts at creating a viable third party, but all have failed. Ross Perot came the closest but he self-destructed and we still have the two parties in power.

Of the Super Bowl that year, she said that it would be Kansas City and Green Bay, though that might change. In the end it was Dallas and Pittsburgh, which is what I said. I even said that Dallas would win by ten. She couldn’t even predict which two teams would be in the game, let alone predict the winner.

She predicted in 2007 that the Cubs would win the Pennant in 2008. They won their division but not the Pennant and they did not appear in the World Series.

She predicted that the Ayatollah Khomeini would be assassinated in 1983. He died of a heart attack, in a hospital, in 1989

I could go on, but is there a point? Her answers, for the most part were vague, and as she discussed things with the callers, I could hear her gathering information and then giving it back in different words. If a caller asked about finances, she talked a little about that and then said things should improve in the next year, especially after she learned that a caller was moving to another job.

She told a caller that he was involved with two children, meaning that there were two children somewhere in his life. He had no kids, he had no nieces or nephews, he wasn’t dating a woman with kids, but she insisted that there were two kids somewhere... maybe in the future.

I though she was rude to some of the callers but she was quick to take me to task as she was grilled by a caller. I should have stopped the call she said. But he was saying all the things I wanted to say, but felt, as the host, I had to be polite. Besides, had she been a true psychic, she should have known it was coming and been able to deal with it. She couldn’t... and that I suppose, says all that needs to be said.

7 comments:

  1. Kevin: I will make one pretty safe prediction for you. If you have, say, between 30 and 40 friends I predict that at least two of them will have the same birthday.

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  3. Merry Christmas to all and a Happy New Year too.
    Kevin, you might think of making those old radio shows available to fans. I have several on tape and still listen to them from time to time. The old commercials and news briefs are cool too.

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  4. She sounds awful.

    Hope you don't generalize about all psychics from this experience. Like all human capacities, psychic ability is limited.

    I've never seen any psychic reliably predict large-scale world events. The only exception I can think of is Nostradamus, and that's a whole other can of worms.

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  5. Nostradamus was no better than te others. His use of symbolic langauge is a sure sign of fraud. Like the Delphic oracle, it isn't possible to prove him wrong because it isn't certain what he meant in the first place. You can interpret him a thousand different ways, one of which is bound to be "right."

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  7. Kev, being a 'prophet' is a tricky ol' business - especially when you ain't interested.

    Round about midway through 1999, I started getting 'Scrooged': all these 'gods' started turning up, (some of them 'gods' for things I didn't know there were 'gods' for - utterly bizarre things!); and they started taking me on merry 'Ebenezer' style adventures, (and no, I've never taken drugs), in between telling me some sort of end of the world type scenario was in the process of unfolding.

    I was shown visions - not dreams -of giant 'golden' tidal waves drowning huge numbers of people, and told it was down to me to choose which parts of the world'd be doing an 'Atlantis', and much else besides.

    I kept refusing to sanction even so much as a single ant stubbing so much as a single 'toe' in my name, until I eventually just said, "Oh, f*ck off!" and curled up into a ball for three days and nights until the b*st*rds eventually went away.

    Then, all through 2000 I was shocked to be bombarded with this whole new batch of material by something far more subtle than the 'gods', (which I still struggle to describe), which told me a gang of Muslims were apparently planning some massive, history shaking attack at the very heart of the Western World for 2001, (which directly contradicted my own perceptions of the Islamic world, for which I hold a high esteem - at least as high as any of the other spiritual traditions).

    I was shown visions of countless smoking bodies strewn over huge areas of land, skyscrapers reduced to rubble, all to the accompaniment of the endlessly repeated term, "Desolation", which eventually metamorphed into the phrase, "Desolation of abomination!"

    When, to my horror, it dawned on me the scenario I was beholding most resembled that of a single nuclear device being set off, I was then shown scenes of various individuals scouring the world in negotiations attempting to acquire portable nuclear devices.

    The two people I provided a running commentary for at the time'll probably confirm how terribly distressed I was by the whole thing, far more than the previous year's 'gods' session, not just because I couldn't bear the infamy such an outrage'd unfairly reflect on the Prophet and The Koran, but because it seemed like something that could actually be stopped, (unlike, say, the 'Atlantis' like unleashing of natural forces).

    By the end of the year, though, when the whole thing'd gotten to me so much I felt I had to inform 'the Authorities', it suddenly dawned on me - tell who, what?

    Besides, which there was probably already a thousand other nut jobs out there who'd been getting much the same thing already banging on the door of their nearest British/American/Arabian/Israeli embassy, clamouring insane pronouncements about impossible things.

    Anyway, Kev, it doesn't really make any difference to me what anyone makes of all this, except those individuals out there reading this who're currently undergoing - or about to undergo - similar things for the first time.

    First of all, know that it's survivable, (if you don't allow your ego to sucker you in - it's the unconscious manipulative and shaping effect our individual ego deficiencies have on these critters that's the key to all this stuff); but also know it's highly likely surviving this particular session won't be the end of it - apparently it's all part of the testing process, don't you know!.

    alanborky

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