We saw many interventions and predictions about this case from many psychics last year and two things stand out: none of them came up with a story that matched any other psychic’s (wouldn’t they all be the same if their ability was real?); and none of them came up with anything that was of the least bit of use.

As usual, they’re simply relying on the police to solve the case and when details come to light the psychics will cherry-pick any details that can be retrofitted and shoehorned to anything they said and start claiming that they helped the police, or more likely in a long case like this that the police should have listened to them. That’s how this game works: psychics offer nothing at all that’s useful to a case but they cash in on the work of others, for example the police, after they have done their job.

If that isn’t bad enough, we now have another low. The TV show Haunting Reality is one of those where a team of ‘psychic investigators’ (all self-titled: psychic profiler Carla Baron, medium John J. Oliver and paranormal investigator Patrick Burns) look at unsolved crimes and provide their ‘insights’ into the case – of course, nothing is ever solved.

Recently they did an ‘investigation’ into the Madeleine McCann case. They made a few specific predictions, reported in the Daily Express, so it is worth recording them here so they can be evaluated should the case ever be solved.

The most notable prediction they came up with was a picture of the abductor:

Drawing of the alleged abductor

“The drawing is of a man aged between 36 and 42 with thick dark brown or black hair and stubble. It has now been handed over to police in Portugal.”

Although they have provided a picture of the alleged abductor, photos like this are really only of use in retrofitting – they will claim success as long as there’s a slight resemblance between the abductor and the picture. A quick example of how this can be done is shown here:

This is a psychic’s drawing of a suspect matched to the real person:

It looks reasonably accurate; however, here’s an alternative view:

They’re nothing like each other in reality. There is no way that the real person could have ever been identified using the psychic’s drawing, but with a bit of careful alignment, the two pictures can be made to look reasonably similar.

The visual aspect of the alleged abductor’s photo makes it seem quite powerful as evidence; however, its use will only be for retrospective validation should the abductor ever be caught, and should he bear some resemblance to the photo – all assuming the abductor was male, of course!

They also came out with a couple of specifics and much of the usual vague and meaningless information that is of no use other than to be retrofitted after the case is solved:

• the man has a pronounced accent and looks and sounds Middle East­ern, possibly Egyptian;
• [he] drives a mid-sized dark silver car with a parking permit or some other identifying sticker inside the windscreen on the driver’s side;
• He may have been wearing a blue, button-up shirt and working as a transient labourer close to the apartment in Praia da Luz on the Algarve where Madeleine was staying with her family before vanishing on May 3;
• the man is known as Steve or Stav;
• [he] took the child to a summer rental apartment in the nearby village of Lagos;
• she [Madeleine] was murdered there by being smothered by a pillow several days after her abduction because the man feared he would be caught;
• Ms Baron believes the man then bundled her into the boot of his car and drove to a remote area, close to a landfill and man-made dam, where he buried her.

The only particularly specific prediction was that the man’s name will be Steve or Stav. Again, this can only be checked, as always with psychic predictions, after the police have solved the case.

The rest is even more speculative:

Of particular interest is the information that was withheld from us but passed on to the police:

“Executives at Tru TV, part of media tycoon Ted Turner’s CNN network, which makes the Haunting Evidence programme, passed the apartment address to police but withheld it from transmission.”

and

“Ms Baron believes the man then bundled her into the boot of his car and drove to a remote area, close to a landfill and man-made dam, where he buried her. This location has also been passed to police.”

It has already been a good while since this ‘information’ will have been passed on to the police. Whether the police took it seriously or not we won’t know; but there certainly haven’t been any headlines stating that Madeleine has been found or that any new developments have occurred – and this is probably the best indication as to the worth of the psychics’ information.

Sadly this case remains unsolved and will probably remain so, despite the input from many psychics. That, in itself, should be a good indication that psychics can offer absolutely nothing of use to such cases.

It is only when cases like this one are solved that the input from psychics can be evaluated; and their ‘information’ is never anything more than cherry-picked and retrofitted trivia.

Hopefully we will be able to evaluate this information (and that of other psychic predators) one day.