When I first met CSI Fellow Richard Saunders, the producer and host of The Skeptic Zone podcast, at CSICon 2017, I had no way of knowing that in less than a year I would be writing for skepticalinquirer.org. I also had no way of knowing that once I had that job, my first article would be an interview with Saunders. I also had no way of knowing that a few years later, I’d be working with Saunders for several hours every week over the course of a year and a half as part of his twelve-year project researching Australian psychic predictions—a project that became known as the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project (GAPPP).

Of course, if I were psychic, then I should have had a way of knowing all that, right? I could have easily predicted these otherwise unforeseeable events in my own future.

Or could I have? Could anyone have done that? Can self-proclaimed psychics predict unlikely future events with any greater accuracy than chance? That’s precisely what Saunders set out to determine when he began this project over a decade ago. The project was described in the Australian Skeptics’ quarterly publication, The Skeptic, as follows: “The Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project is an analysis of over 3800 psychic or otherwise paranormal predictions, made by 207 people in Australia claiming to have knowledge of future events. All were published in Australian media … covering a 21-year period (2000 to 2020).”

 

The project’s final results have now been published in The Skeptic (Vol. 41, no. 4, December 2021), and the results are striking. As Saunders summarized it:

• Psychics are appallingly bad at predicting future events. Only 11 percent of predictions are “correct.”

• Most predictions were too vague, expected, or simply wrong.

• Most of what happens is not predicted, and most of what is predicted does not happen.

I must point out that 11 percent is generous. One example demonstrating this point is our scoring for the prediction: “Australian cricket team does very well on tour this year” (Heather Alexander, 2009). We scored that as correct—but clearly there was a 50/50 chance: the team would either do well or they would not. If every prediction was like that, the average for correct psychic predictions would have been 50 percent. The more of those types of predictions that psychics make, the closer to 50 percent correct their average will get. And they make a lot of those.

There are also many predictions regarding births, or lack thereof, for celebrities. One such example was “Kylie Minogue: No pregnancy / children” (Milton Black, 2006). We scored that as correct, but isn’t not having a child in any one-year period more likely than having one? That was a safe bet with a substantially greater than 50 percent likelihood.

The fact that the GAPPP team was often overly generous in scoring 50:50 and some even more likely predictions as correct, rather than expected, should make it clear that we were not determined—as I predict will be claimed by the psychics—to prove them wrong. When psychics rate themselves, they always come out smelling like roses. As Saunders points out in the GAPPP article in The Skeptic:

It is not uncommon for those making predictions to pore over their work and highlight successes either real or perceived. An example of psychics assessing their own predictions can be found in an archived web page from Sarah Kulkens and her mother Kerry Kulkens dated from 2006, where 176 predictions were listed going back to 2001. The predictions they considered to have come true … equate to about 75%. These include:

• The start of major Earth changes

• Wild storms and bush fire danger

• Using anti-gravity to lift heavy objects will become a reality instead of a dream.

Damn! Did I miss the deals on anti-gravity devices on Amazon during its Cyber Monday sales?

 

Another thing psychics do to increase their apparent accuracy is to make predictions regarding things that are anticipated to happen. We did not score these 15 percent of items in the database as correct but instead marked them as expected. Here are some examples:

• Certainly, one area that is going to do fantastic stuff is the internet, specifically areas like shopping. (Simon Turnbull, 2000)
• I see large earthquakes happening in several parts of the world in particular California (United States), Mexico, China, and Japan. (Harry T, 2015)
• Snowstorms in Germany. (Julie McKenzie, 2020)

A common tactic is for psychics to make many vague predictions. In this way, they can claim these were correct by retroactively finding something that sort of fits. Having a large set of these also drives down the percentage of absolutely wrong predictions. So now let’s look at the type of predictions we scored as too vague and thus unverifiable:

• Before the end of the year, we’ll also see a lot of underhand things revealed in politics and business. (Angelica Danton, 2001)
• Unexpected objects falling to Earth. (Sarah Kulkens, 2007)
• I see a purple flower from a cactus being used to prevent brain bleeding. It will be beneficial to brain surgery. (Kim Dodgson, 2013)
• A global charity could appeal to her [Nicole Kidman’s] soft-hearted side. (Jenny Blume, 2016)
• Who will win the U.S. election? … the numerology shows that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden have a chance of winning the next U.S. presidential election. It is still up to the people to decide. (Sarah Yip, October 21, 2020)

Next, let’s look at a sample of the predictions that we scored as absolutely wrong, which amounted to 53 percent:

• Using anti-gravity to lift heavy objects will become a reality instead of a dream. (Kerry Kulkens, 2001)
• I don’t think authorities will catch Osama bin Laden next year. I don’t think they’ll ever catch him. I think it is likely he has had plastic surgery to hide his identity. (Sandor, 2005)
• I also see Sydney being hit with a rather large earthquake, which will cause a lot of damage, within the next few years. (Rebecca Millman, 2013)
• Hillary Clinton will be the next president for the United States. (Kris Currier, 2016)
• Joe Biden will be nominated but will drop out before the election. Donald Trump to win election. (David the Medium, 2020)

Maybe you are thinking that 53 percent wrong doesn’t seem too bad. But if the items that were scored as expected (15 percent), too vague (18 percent) and unknown (2 percent) are all eliminated from the data, then the percentage wrong becomes 83 percent—a horrendous failure rate by anyone’s standards. But making many vague and expected predictions obfuscates this reality, making psychics seem far less wrong than they actually are.

One last thing: when combing through their own past predictions to rate success, no psychic ever mentions what they didn’t see coming. To showcase this, the GAPPP team spent time determining newsworthy Australian and global events we thought should have been too big to miss. If these people could predict relatively uneventful things, then predicting the big ten items we documented for each year the project covered should have been a piece of cake. Here is just a small sample of significant events that were not predicted:

• 2000: Stalemate in U.S. presidential election. Supreme Court decides the winner.
• 2001: The 9/11 attack on the United States happens.
• 2003: The Space Shuttle Columbia burns up on reentry, the first such accident in the U.S. space program.
• 2004: An Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami on December 26 kills an estimated 227,898 people in fourteen countries.
• 2009: Pop singer Michael Jackson dies at the age of fifty.
• 2010: An 8.8-magnitude earthquake, one of the largest in recorded history, occurs in Chile, triggering a tsunami in the Pacific Ocean killing at least 525 people.
• 2011: A tsunami triggers the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
• 2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappears.
• 2017: ‘Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object, is detected passing through the solar system.
• 2019: A fire engulfs the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, destroying much of the historic building.
• 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic begins.

Failing to predict a single one of the over 210 items such as these should be downright embarrassing to people claiming clairvoyance. It’s almost as if none of these people are actually psychic. Sometimes absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Finally, let me say that it was a great privilege to be part of this project, and I encourage readers to access the full report as published by Richard Saunders. It is available online at http://tinyurl.com/GAPPP.