NEWSPAPER ARTICLES RE PSYCHICS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96-00788R002000240037-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 5, 2003
• Sequence Number: 37
• Content Type: NSPR

Approved For Release 2003/09/WCtWkff)P$&bO788R002000240037-5
ik IN V
C ins Powers'
_
Polic
istound PAUL BANNISTER
Dutch psychic.Warner Tholen has amazed and
founded police and civilians alike with his uncanny
. ilities to find missing bodies and lost articles --
.td ever_ predict the future.
Among his successes, tf'holen has: pinpointed for police
exact spots at which bodies of missing people would be
md. Ile has also:
x Located urgently needed
ter at an African mission -
nnt an aerial photo.
? Documented the precise
ury of an astronaut at
lashdown.
'Tholen has found many
ssing people and has helped
police in a great many
ses," revealed Prof. W.H.C.
ycholo?'.y pro-
.sor at Uni-
riy of Ut-
(llt, N ho has
served Thol-
,'s work.
One o Thol-
I's recent sue-
sionary priest, Rev. Nicholas
:,sses occurred G? ?
hcn th,~ Dutch ,,, PSYCHIC - Borst, appealed to him for help
.iethoorn asked him to help
rd a musing man. "Tholen
Id us to look in a particular
-pot at the Beukesgracht Ca-
7al," rec aped Police Inspector
endrick Schut.
"There were the tracks of a
tsar leading into the water. We
. ont for the river police and they
the Apollo astronauts would be
dieted.
h
capsule landed two miles off
side of his head when tanning,
and that they would not land in
,heir target region.
On splashdown, Nov. 24, 1969,
Al Bean, youngest of the astro-
nauts, received a blow over his
right eve when he bumped into
e
In Tholen s favorite case,
located plans for 800-year-old
found the vehicle (and the miss-
ing man's body) in the water.
"Tholen really has incredible
power. lie's been called in by
police many times."
In another case, police found
the body of a missing 20-year-
old man in water near Lelystad
in the Netherlands - where
Tholen told them it would be.
At his home near Utrecht, the
psychic produced a letter from
the local police acknowledging,
"Without Tholen's help we
would never have solved this
case. We would not have found
the body."
One of the most astonishing
successes of the 66-year-old
psychic came when a mis-
water near his Catholic mission
in Tanzania, Africa.
"Ile sent me an aerial pho- water was found at 75 feet and
tograph of the mission and the at 112 feet - the exact depths
land around it," Tholen said. "I the psychic had predicted,
concentrated on the photograph In 1969, Prof. John Beloff of
and pinpointed the exact spot." the department of psychology,
A letter of thanks that Father at the University of Edinburgh
Borst wrote to Tholen tells how in Scotland, recorded Tholen's
,_ ---- 4h f at?, .,n?n YPCt of
MINI,
', ~,; Coevorden Castle, after a futile
four-nation search.
aw"WIA
BODY WAS FOUND: Inspector Hendrick Schut Tholen advised Dr. Corneille
WHERE
shows wheres/chic directed lice. Janssen, architect and director
n2000240037-5
of the Provenck Museum 01
Drenthe in the NetherlandF.
"Look for a fair-sized b.,nd-
ing to the southeast. There you
will find a large carved, wooden
chest painted red, green an white. In it you w i,l find a draw.
ing of the tower." When tlr
Janssen went to a farm 'as
three miles southeast of his uv i
home, the farmer handed h:.n
drawing of the tower.
"The farmer told me that un
til two years before, they h:it
been kept in a chest exactly irks
the one Tholen had described,'
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L.A. 1'olice Researching Psychics'
By Mark Jones
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES - How could. it be,
a police detective wondered, that a
housewife apparently with psychic
capabilities could help put together
the drawing of a man who a week
later would be the prime suspect in
a triple murder?
How was it, thought a deputy dis-
trict attorney recently, that a second
local psychic could reenact a two-year-
old murder after touching the killer's
fingerprint card?
And how was it possible, the FBI
wondered last month, that yet a third
Los Angeles psychic knew so much
about a $500,000 kidnaping in Las
Vegas , when, in fact, the crime was
still in progress?
Are any or all of these three cases
examples of clairvoyance or coincid-
ence? Did each of the psychics "see"
through time and distance or were
they just lucky? Answers are not
easy to come by when the topic is as
elusive as parapsychology.
But while psychics have been cas-
ually involved for years in criminal
investigations - the most recent local
case resulted in the arrest of a murd.
er suspect earlier this month by police
in South Gate near Los Angeles -
there have been few experiments to
determine their reliability. in crime
cases.
Until now.
Members of the Los Angeles Police
Department admitted recently that
for the past eight months they've been
conducting serious research into psy-
chic phenomena. The latest study,
which began in October; involves near-
ly four dozen specially selected Los
Angeles psychics, homicide investi-
gators and "ordinary" citizens.
The man leading what may be the
first announced police-psychic study
in the country is Dr. Martin Reiser,
director of the LAPD's behavioral
sciences department.
"So far it hasn't been demonstrat.
ed to my satisfaction that so-called re-
putable psychics can solve crimes,"
he said, "and yet the homicide division
and I do want to make a serious re-
evaluation of paranormal phenomena.
"In other words," he said, "I-want
to find out once and for all whether
the hundreds of tips volunteered by
psychics are all screwy or indeed
whether some of them have merit."
. Reiser said that late last month
the police department, with the aid
of clinical researchers at UCLA and
Los Angeles City College, gathered
four separate teams of psychics, homi-
cide detectives and citizens.
He said that during the next few
months each of them would be in-
dividually tested for their abilities to
perceive-or to "see"-crimes describ-
ed inside 12 sealed envelopes contain-
ing items of evidence pertaining to a
different crime.
"We're trying to be as unbiased as
possible," Reiser said. "And if it looks
as though investigative information
supplied by psychics not only is fea-
sible but has utility, then we'll use it.
That's the nature of a police organiza-
tion, isn't it?"
Despite the psychologist's guarded
optimism, there was through it all a
bedrock of pessimism laid down by
the results of Reiser's -first police-
psychic study last May.
In that smaller experiment a dozen
Los Angeles psychics were tested in
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Psychic'- Crime Solving
L.A. Police Researching
PSYCHIC, From Gl
. evidence-to "see" the killer together
with his victims in a psychic vision
one afternoon in October.
Sims said that the psychic and a
police artist produced the drawing
of a man who later was identified by
the mother of one of the victims as
having been with her boy shortly be-
fore his death.
Under questioning, Sims said, the
man--a family acquaintance with a
record of sex offenses=told police
where they could find the body of one
of three victims. And with that, and
other evidence, the 33-year-old unem-
ployed truck driver, Harold Ray Mem-
ro, was arrested and charged with
murder.
In nearby Downey and Torrance a
Dutch-born psychic named Jan Steers
figured in some of the most curious
police-psychic cases in Southern Cali-
fornia in the early 1970s.
The small, quiet, middle-aged psy-
chic, who has since returned to Hol-
land, is said by police officers to have
disclosed secret information about at
least two unsolved murders and-
over the telephone-was able to pin-
point the location of a dying police-
man within minutes of his near-fatal,
injury.
One of the officers who worked
with the psychic in 1973 was'Torrance
police detective Ray Gross. One day
recently Gross recalled the first time
he met the psychic.
"It was the strangest 'thing," he
said. "I was staying late at the sta-
tion one night when this man called
me and began rattling off some stuff
about the Rolling Hills Theater mur-
der (in which four persons were slain
in 1972).
"The guy insisted that if I would
return to the scene of the crime, I
would find a set of the killer's finger-
See PSYCHIC ,,G6, Col.1
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Ability toSoive Crimes
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1978
much the same fashion as those in the
current study.
One psychic, he said, astonished
everyone by managing to "see" a
crime involving a church while hold-
ing one of the test envelopes (the con-
tents of which described the murder
of a church official).
In another example, five of the in-
dividually tested psychics "visualized"
a crime in which a car was especially
important (the case described in the
test envelope concerned a murder
associated with an auto theft).
In spite of the infrequent surprises,
though, Reiser spelled out his disap-
pointment in a 14-page research paper
entitled "An Evaluation of the Use
of Psychics in the Investigation of
Major Crimes," to be published in
March by the Journal of Police Science
and Administration.
In it Reiser concluded, "... Over-
all, little, if any, information was eli-
cited from the 12 psychic partici-
pants that would provide material
helpful in the investigation of the
major crimes in question."
'For years the stereotype of psychics,
in the words of Los Angeles psychic
Kebrina Kinkade, on the whole has
been "a bunch of nuts and kooks who
came out of the woodwork when a big
case broke."
And it followed, she said, that if
police had brought a psychic in on a
particularly baffling case they cringed
at the thought of admitting it in pub-
lic for fear of censure.
That may be changing. Parapsy-
G1
chology is the subject of clinical re-
search at recognized universities, and
there is a growing public belief that
some individuals may be Cnvested
with the ability to "see" through time
and distance.
South Gate police detective Wil-
liam Sims said his department had ex-
hausted what was felt to be every
lead in the sex murders of three
young boys between 1976 and Septem-
ber 1978. Then, through an interme- -
diary, Sims and a second officer soli-
cited the aid of a local (and unidenti
fied) woman psychic in her 40s.
The detective told the Los Angeles
Times he is still "spooked" at the way
the psychic had been able-without
a single clue or revealing item of
See PSYCHIC, G3, Col.1
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UNCLASSIFIED
~G6
PSYCHIC, From G3
prints on the right door jamb, exactly
4yz Inches up from the floor.
"Well," said the detective, "my
sergeant and I figured what the heck.
The guy was pretty insistent and, any-
i way, by that time we hadn't any really
solid leads in the case."
Thursday, November 23, 1979 THE WASHINGTON POST
,Psychics' Crime.Solvilig
:1' ekes up from the floor, Gross said.
They were 0inches." The finger-
prints later matched those of a sus-
pect.
`When the psychic volunteered to
eom to the station to share his in-
formation, Gross thought, "By this
time I figured that when the guy ar-
-i'ived I was going to throw him in the
clink because he knew as much about
the murder as I did." As it happened,
however, the psychic had an unshak.
able alibi. And more.
"When Steers began to tell the
sergeant and myself about how the
victims were laid out the night of the
So the next day the detective re-
turned to the theater, where he found
a set of prints overlooked in the ori-
ginal investigation and where the
psyhcic said they'd be.
Well, almost. They weren't 41/2
murder-and believe me, he was cor-
rect'all the way down the line-I got
white as a sheet," the officer said. "I
mean, there was just no way this man
could have known what we found at
the murder scene unless he was truly
psychic."
The officer, who through his associ.
ation with Steers came to be humor-
ously known by his fellow investiga-
tors as "detective of the kook squad"
(someone even put a miniature crystal
ball on his desk one day), said also
that the psychic's predictions about
the killer all checked out down to the
.32-cal pistol hidden in his blood-
stained boots the day of his eventual
arrest.
The case never went to trial,
though because the suspect hanged
himself in the Torrance jail.
"I don't think you can say that
psychics are a panacea in solving
crimes," the Torrance detective says.
"But they can be an invaluable inves.
tigating tool. I mean, you get the right
investigator working in tune with the
right psychid and a department could
settle a lot more of their unsolved
cases."
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