There's a lot of things that divide us as a human race,
but if there's one thing that we all have in common, it's a desire to know what comes next.
Sylvia Browne made a career out of that need. Here's the untold truth of how she did it.
Sylvia Browne made a career out of seeking out the emotionally vulnerable,
especially the parents of missing children. She often claimed, without any evidence,
that she had helped save several missing children with her self-proclaimed psychic powers.
This supposed connection to children makes sense when you consider another one of her claims:
that she herself first exhibited her psychic powers when she was a child.
According to Browne, she was just 3 years old when her psychic gifts revealed themselves,
and one of her first predictions was that her parents would have another daughter.
She also claimed to have announced her grandfather's death and later told Larry
King that she had always been able to look at someone and see his or her death. She said,
"I do come from 300 years - I mean, this is absolutely valid - 300 years of psychics.
Everybody in my family from my mothers side was a working psychic."
Saving kids with psychic powers wasn't her only purported achievement, though.
In 1986, she also attempted to follow in the footsteps of Scientology founder L.
Ron Hubbard by concocting her own religion, the Society of Novus Spiritus. She said,
"'I am starting a new, world religion. [...] Novus Spiritus carries love, peace,
staying on track, and the answers to what we thought were mysteries."
Browne had a lot to say about herself, and it's very hard to tell whether any of it was
true or not. According to her publisher, Simon & Schuster, Browne wrote 46 books,
22 of which made the New York Times Bestseller list. So sorting through that
much self-promotion and that many spurious claims for nuggets of truth can be a real challenge.
But it's no secret that people have gone a long way to debunk her claims of having
psychic ability. After Browne's death in 2013, Skeptical Inquirer did some digging
to see just how many of her personal claims weren't entirely true. They found all kinds
of interesting things, one example being a case where Browne accidentally self-sabotaged.
In 2007, her ex-husband went public with the accusation that she lied about going to college.
The claim surfaced during an interview with Robert Lancaster, a skeptic who was behind
the website StopSylvia.com. Browne disputed her ex's accusation and sent Lancaster a transcript
from her college, St. Teresa's College, which is now called Avila University.
While the transcript did show that Browne attended college, it inadvertently revealed
that she had in fact been lying about getting a degree, as it proved she had dropped out.
When Sylvia Browne died in 2013, her obituary in The New York Times talked about her frequent
television appearances, and her alleged specialty: finding missing children. It
was the fame this brought her that led to the success of her over-the-phone psychic consultancy,
where callers would fork over an impressive $700 for a 30-minute reading.
Browne often claimed that she consulted with the FBI on missing persons cases,
worked on high-profile investigations like the Ted Bundy case, and also
gave information to the FBI after the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
These claims were repeated so many times that anyone with even a passing familiarity with
Browne has undoubtedly heard them, but Skeptical Inquirer was, well, skeptical.
After her death, they filed a Freedom of Information Act request for her FBI records.
What they found probably won't surprise you.
There were no records of her working on Bundy's case, no records of her participation in the
World Trade Center investigation, and they concluded there was, quote,
"no evidence [...] that Browne was involved with the agency."
In 2007, Anderson Cooper did some checking on Sylvia Browne in the aftermath of one of
her predictions going horribly wrong. Cooper interviewed an FBI agent named Ted Gunderson,
who confirmed that yes, he had worked with Browne quite a bit.
However, Gunderson had some credibility issues of his own.
A noted conspiracy theorist, he rose to fame in the '80s as part of the Satanic Panic,
and his unsubstantiated claims that Satanic cults were targeting children led to a national panic.
And according to NME, Gunderson was also behind the theory that Sonny Bono had died
not in an unfortunate skiing accident, but in a quote, "evil plot that was carried out to almost
perfection by ruthless assassins." Browne's input on that particular case is unclear.
Sylvia Browne did a ton of personal readings and predictions,
so it's impossible to fact-check her claims completely. But when it comes to her public
predictions, it's pretty impressive just how constantly wrong she was.
In 2010, researchers compiled all the public predictions Browne made regarding criminal cases.
It amounted to 115 deaths and missing persons, and she was "mostly correct" in the outcomes of
exactly 0 cases. Browne tended to give supposed "details" on things like the appearance of
perpetrators, locations of bodies, and whether or not missing children were still alive, and
she's been found to have been wrong so many times that flipping a coin may have been more accurate.
Browne was wrong about a lot of other things, too. According to the HuffPost, she explained away her
wrong predictions by saying — repeatedly — "Only God is right all the time." But her critics say
she's not even right some of the time. She made predictions for each upcoming year,
and most of those were wildly inaccurate. Take 2012, for example, during which she
predicted a cure for multiple sclerosis, and that President Barack Obama wouldn't win re-election.
Oh, and that cure for MS? Browne claimed that her spirit guide,
Francine, had told her that it was being researched by divine scientists in Heaven.
"I'd buy that for a dollar!"
While some of Sylvia Browne's predictions were definitely wrong, there are a few that stand out
as having particularly devastating consequences — like the case of missing teen Amanda Berry.
Berry went missing in April of 2003, and the following year,
her desperate mother appeared on "The Montel Williams Show" to consult with Browne.
Browne callously told her, quote, "She's not alive, honey."
When Berry's mother asked if she was ever going to see her daughter again, Browne answered,
"Yeah, in heaven on the other side."
Miller later confirmed that she believed that Browne was right,
and a year later, died of heart failure.
But her daughter was actually alive. In 2013, she escaped after 10 years of captivity
and called 911. She later talked about how she had broken down crying when she saw the episode.
"I couldn't believe she said that. And then my mom broke down crying, so that hurt even worse."
In 2002, Sylvia Browne gave another devastating — and incredibly wrong — answer to parents who
asked her what had happened to their missing child. In 2002, 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck
disappeared while riding his bike. Once again appearing on "The Montel Williams Show," Browne
told his parents that he was dead, and they would find him buried between two boulders.
But he wasn't dead. Four years later, another boy named Ben Ownby went missing. Journalist Michelle
McNamara realized there was a connection between Hornbeck and Ownby based on physical similarities
and their ages when abducted. Sure enough, when Ownby was found by law enforcement four days
after his disappearance, they discovered Hornbeck was there too, still alive.
Hornbeck's father later told CNN,
"Hearing [Browne's prediction] was one of the hardest things we ever had to hear."
And Browne's completely wrong and damaging prediction? Well,
she told The Guardian it was just a case of mistaken identity, and her psychic powers just
got Hornby confused for another missing child who she claimed was actually dead.
"I think what I did was I got my wires crossed. There was a blonde and two boys who are dead.
I think I picked the wrong kid."
Browne's ex-husband, Gary Dufresne, condemned her, saying:
"The damage she does to unsuspecting people in crisis situations is just atrocious."
Preying on the desperate wasn't Browne's only business endeavor, though. In 2004,
Skeptical Inquirer uncovered a court case that went back to the late 1980s,
when Sylvia Browne and her ex-husband were accused of grand theft and investment fraud.
After getting involved in a gold mining venture, the couple reportedly pocketed $20,000 of the
mine's money. After telling the court that she had had a psychic vision instructing her
to invest in the gold mine, Browne pled no contest and ended up doing 200 hours of community service.
That wasn't the only time Browne got the attention of law enforcement. The Skeptical Inquirer also
learned that she had been investigated in the mid-1980s for falsifying financial documents
in loan applications. The investigation into the incidents stopped for a lack of evidence.
Fake psychics and charlatans have been preying on the vulnerable throughout history,
and for just as long there have been people working to debunk them. Famous escape artist
Harry Houdini, for instance, dedicated much of his life to exposing fraudulent mediums.
So naturally, Browne was a major target, and has been the subject of debunking operations
many times. In one instance, Susan Gerbic's group Guerilla Skeptics ended up confronting
Browne during a live show over Browne's handling of the case of Lynda McClelland.
Browne had told McClelland's daughters that McClelland was alive and well in Florida,
shortly before McClelland was found killed in Pennsylvania.
But the most high profile debunker in modern history was James Randi,
"The Amazing Randi." One of the greatest stage magicians of the 20th century,
Randi founded the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, offering first a $10,000 prize,
and then a $1 million prize to anyone who could prove paranormal abilities in a scientific
setting. Then he spent decades debunking fakers and scam artists, using his mastery
of magic tricks to uncover the techniques of deception used by fake mediums and psychics.
"They do it telling people their powers are real.
I think that's not fair. I think that people deserve a better shake
than that. They deserve at least to be told that they are being hornswaggled."
In 2001, Randi challenged Browne to prove her powers. She accepted the challenge on
"Larry King Live"… and then spent the next six years avoiding it. After much wrangling over how
exactly the test would work, Browne just never set a date, and never actually took the test.
Finally, in 2007, she said that she had, quote, "nothing to prove."
When events happen on a global scale, it's natural to look for signs that mankind
collectively missed. It would have been nice if we had a heads up about things like COVID-19,
so when one of Sylvia Browne's old predictions popped up in 2020,
it had believers convinced that she'd predicted the coronavirus pandemic.
In her book, Browne threw everything she had at the wall,
hoping something would stick. And something did, as she wrote:
"In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe,
attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.
Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish
as quickly as it arrived, attack ten years later, and then disappear completely."
This supposed prophecy caused sales of the book to go through the roof,
thanks in part to endorsements by those notorious arbiters of scientific inquiry, the Kardashians.
As the Center for Inquiry pointed out, though, Browne is just one person who
supposedly predicted COVID-19, along with a Dean Koontz book and episodes
of "The Simpsons." So maybe we shouldn't get too excited about COVID's prophesied disappearance.
In 2003, during one of her many guest appearances on Larry King's show,
Browne predicted her own death, saying that she was going to die at the ripe old age of 88.
She was off by 11 years. In November, 2013, Browne passed away at the age of 77. Details
of her death weren't released, but we do have details of her afterlife, provided
of course by Browne herself. Explaining what happens after you die, Browne said,
"You go through the tunnel and you go to the other side and it's a beautiful place with
actual buildings and art museums."
Finally, a prediction that can't be easily disproved.
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