WWII Cryptanalyst Decodes Military Attack Using Intuition

I met Arnold Franco on board the Jeanne D'Arc, a French military ship, during a cocktail reception while docked in the New York City harbor.  A graduate of Queen College, where 60 percent of the class of 1943 were enlisted or called to military duty, Franco, now age 83, served with an elite group of code breakers - or crypanalysts -with the 3rd Radio Mobile Squadron.  In 2005, Franco was awarded the prestigious French Legion d'Honneur for his outstanding work during the war. 

As we stood on the metal deck of the ship, sipping our cocktails and looking at the Manhattan skyline, I decided to tell Franco about my chosen profession and my book on psychic intuition.  He seemed fully accepting and told me an incredible story about how he once used intuition in his military decoding activities and, as a result, was able to warn the Allies about Hitler's plans to invade southern France and saved countless numbers of human lives.

A coded German message came into his hands one day.  It was suspected to be an order to begin preparations for an atack somewhere in Europe around the Mediterranean Sea.  The message was heavily coded and, probably because it was top secret, did not contain the ordinary codes used by lower level orders from the German command.  The only letter the Allies were able to decipher was the letter "J" which appear once as the second letter of a scrambled word. 

Franco described the moment of his insight when he suddenly and instantaneously realized that the letter "J" was the second letter in the city on the small French island of Corsica, known as "Ajaccio."  He told me that his intuitive guess of "Ajaccio" was not a logical guess. He somehow suspected or intuitited that the coded word would be the name of a place and this place was the location of Hitler's attack.  He had no reason to logically suspect either one.  His knowledge of geography from his school days was pretty good so his brain was able to pull up the city of "Ajaccio" as having the letter "J" in the second letter spot.  He was also aware of another fact - not immediately relevent or obvious at the time - that Hitler was a student of Napoleon's military strategies, in particular, Napoleon's disasterous attempt to invade Russia.  Thus, in Franco's mind, he made the strange intuitive leap and correlation that this message might be related to Napoleon!  Therefore, since the city of Ajaccio was Napoleon's birthplace, the connection suddenly jumped out and made total sense. 

Psychic intuition is intimately linked with those other things we know and accept such as educated guesses, subliminal information, gut feelings and past knowledge.  The brain operates on multiple simultaneous levels and is capable of achieving extraordinary feats.  It is time that conventional military, legal, and corporate officials recognize its value.  Arnold Franco's intuitive leap is an excellent example.

My New Radio Show on Para-x.com Radio

My good friendnd co-host Pat Eldridge and I are launching our brand new radio show this coming Friday, December 10, 2010, called "Hot Leads Cold Cases" on Para-x Radio (http://www.para-x.com/) at 8pm EST.  The show is intended to spotlight ways in which psychic detectives, police, detectives, and law enforcement can interact effectively to help solve crimes and cases.

Also, we plan on discussing ways in which psychic mediums can be useful in other types of investigations, such as paranormal investigations, psychological profiling, and medical mysteries.  The idea is to create a forum for skeptics and believers alike to discuss the ways, if any, that psychics and mediums can be utilized as effective tools within conventional investigations to help solve mysteries and crimes.

We will also be devoting a portion of the show to working on real investigations.  Anyone desiring this kind of help should email me at ndt@theskepticalpsychic.com in advance of the show with an outline of the issues involved and the kind of help needed.  As usual, there are no guarantees - but my personal experience has led me to believe that very often psychic guidance can provide clues, tips or possible unforeseen pathways for investigators to pursue through traditional methods.

My New Book Explains Psychic Ability

According to Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, the reason why skeptics have, for very good and sound reasons, refused to acknowledge the validity of "psi" ability is no one has been able to explain why or how it functions within the brain. In his article "Why Most Scientists Do Not Believe in ESP or Psi Phenomena," he states:

"The deeper reason scientists remain unconvinced of psi is that there is no theory for how psi works [modus operandi]. Until psi pro­ponents can elucidate how thoughts generated by neurons in the senders brain can pass through the skull and into the brain of the receiver, skepticism is the appropriate response, as it was for continental drift sans plate tectonics. Until psi finds its Darwin, it will continue to drift on the fringes of science."

This is exactly why I wrote my recently published 440-page book entitled "Psychic Intuition" - now available on my website, www.theskepticalpsychic.com and www.amazon.com (and also Kindle format). My book explains how psychic ability works, what it is and is not (because most skeptics don't understand what it really is or involves), and why skeptics and psychics literally do not share the same reality and so, in a sense, they are both correct.

I have interviewed many of the world's most famous neuroscientists, physicians, psychics, artists, artificial intelligence experts, physicists, military experts, psychologists, and others involved in the field of intuition. The entire purpose of my book was to create a bridge of understanding between skeptics and believers, scientists and psychics. I lay a simple scientific foundation so that even die-hard skeptics can appreciate the direction I take. The book is loaded with scientific studies, research, and analysis, as well as my own personal anecdotal stories to illustrate different aspects of psychic ability, and terminates with my highly original theory. And yes, I offer a neurological theory for the existence of psychic ability! The bottom line is that we have innate psychic ability, most of us lose it for a series of reasons, but the good news is that it is indeed a trainable skill.

I hope all skeptics will check out my book and I am interested in your feedback!

International Perceptions of the Paranormal

A haunted cellar in a Swedish restaurant



Having just returned from a whirlwind trip of visiting ten countries, I was interested to see how people from many diverse cultures respond to stories of the paranormal.

While on a cruise in the Baltic Sea, I met an Israeli family currently living in Belgium. Of course the conversation over breakfast necessarily turned to what everyone did for a living. I have overcome my reluctance of many years about telling people what I do - fearing that they will either become silent with embarassment of not knowing what to say next or take me less than seriously. So I introduced myself as an attorney-turned-psychic-detective, figuring at worst, my pronouncement could be an interesting icebreaker for the conversation. Indeed it was.

The husband was intrigued - but quickly stated he was a skeptic about all such matters. His wife and even their 14-year-old son also claimed to be skeptics. However, when I told them about meeting their famous fellow-countryman and world-famous psychic spoon-bender Uri Geller in London, their attitude changed. Apparently, the son and several other family members had witnessed one of Uri Geller's famous television shows, broadcast all over the world, in which he asked everyone to put a spoon or something made of metal near the TV set and claimed that he would simultaneously cause spoons all over the world to bend.

In fact, I remember Uri telling me about this program. He also did a program where he claimed to have caused London's giant tower clock Big Ben to stop ticking for a minute or so and then restarted it along with broken watches all over the world. Being a skeptic myself, I did not put much stock in Uri's fantastic-sounding story and I attributed it to a bunch of hype.

It turns out that this family put a spoon on top of their television set and literally watched it bend by itself during Uri's TV show. I asked them over and over again, where the spoon was placed (on top of the TV); whether anyone touched it (no); whether they could actually see it moving (yes); was there a noticable difference in the bend (yes); and so on. I was actually quite shocked to have run into a family that had witnesses this alleged worldwide psychic event. The young boy claimed that it freaked him out so much that he still thinks about it and is still someone frightened by the spookiness of watching a spoon bend by itself. Several cousins and his aunt and uncle also witnessed the spoon bending. Everyone was apparently quite shocked.

It's funny how the world is a small place. Only last month, I attended a party with many Israelis present. When I brought up my "profession," one of them (clearly a no-bullshit type of Israeli businessman)told me he had been in the same army detail with Uri Geller while doing his military duty, and had watched firsthand how Uri had been able to accurately help the soldiers with psychic reconnaissance and locate objects that were hidden.

And here I am. I actually had the opportunity in private to watch Uri bend two different spoons before my very eyes and yet, still, I question the reality of it. I mistrust his magician origins and I mistrust my own eyes. It is so difficult to overcome our mental prejudices which are nothing but a lifetime accumulation of practical personal experiences about how the world does (and therefore "should") operate. While none of us really trusts anecdotal evidence of the paranormal, we should learn to accept multiple similar reports of such activity - since scientific "repetition" in the normal sense of the word is generally not possible.

It is so easy to bump into the paranormal and the psychic all over the world, no matter where you go, or who you talk to. We are all just embarassed to talk about such things.

I met a very pragmatic woman who lives outside of Helsinki, Finland. She is the owner of a huge horse farm operation. She confessed to me in private that there are two ghosts on her property: a kindly female ghost who lives in the old main house who was probably once a servant and who turns lights on and off and turns doorknobs, and a male ghost who lives in the horse stable.

While dining at one of the best restaurants in Sweden located in the collective basement cellars of five 17th century townhouses near the water, I was told by several waiters and waitresses that the restaurant is haunted by a female ghost who was the proprietor of the establishment in the mid-1600's when it served as a tavern house for local sailors. It is also believed that her lover haunts the cellar with her. In fact, I was told, many of the waitresses and waiters refuse to go certain rooms because they are just too freaked out by the presence of the ghosts!

Clearly, ghosts and psychic attunement are univeral phenomena. So is our shared international fear of them... I did not have to look far to find people with experiences with the paranormal. They are everywhere - in every country in the world regardless of culture or societal mores. It is time we began to engage in an intelligent conversation about these kinds of phenomena without fear of being ridiculed or deemed hare-brained.

I remember walking into my "Physics for Poets" class at Princeton University many years ago, and being totally charmed by the antics of my professor (who recently passed away at the ripe old age of 96). Professor John Archibald Wheeler was a tour de force in the world of physics. He is the person who coined the term "black hole" in astrophysics to describe the strange behavior of dead stars when collapsing in on themselves. His close teachers and mentors were Albert Einstein and Danish physicist Neils Bohr. He was a member of the famed Manhattan Project, headed by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, that was created to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. Many of Professor Wheeler's students went on to become extraordinary physicists and Nobel Prize winners in their own right.

My physics class was not part of my major at college. I majored in languages. In fact, I only took the class because I thought I ought to know something about physics. I expected to be bored and overwhelmed. Instead I was truly fascinated. Professor Wheeler usually came to class with some odd contraption or simple machine and would demonstrate how they worked in front of the class. He explained that these were "Einstein's toys" - little gadgets that Einstein had created to graphically demonstrate how certain principles of physics worked. I loved these "toys." They were fun and simple. Professor Wheeler would run from one end of the lecture hall to the other waving these toys in the air to show how they worked. It was as if he had momentarily resurrected his good friend and teacher, Einstein himself, and brought him alive before our very eyes.

At my most recent psychic development worksop in New York, I decided to create some "toys" of my own to demonstrate to my students how psychic ability works. I was explaining to them about "psychometry" - a type of psychic sensing which involves holding an object and obtaining information about it (and its owner) merely by tuning in to the "vibrations" trapped within the object. This is clearly another "impossible" feat in the ordinary world in which we live. But, if you are willing to bend your concepts of physical reality a bit, such things become possible.

I created, for example, a box with a hole on each side. I placed all kinds of ordinary objects (e.g. a plastic hair clip with teeth, a barometer, an empty toothbrush holder, a nightlight, a plastic toy motorcycle, an electronic game, etc.) into the box. The job of each student was to put their hands through the holes, feel around, grab an object inside, and then describe it to the other students without using an language which presupposed that they knew what it was. In other words, they had to describe the object as if they were a space alien who didn't know anything about earthly objects, materials or functions. The job of all the other students was to guess what the item was that was being described. A strangely difficult task.

I watched and listened as each student put their hands inside the box and felt an object. They struggled mightily to describe it. Their eyes rolled upwards and they almost looked as though they were in a light trance. Most chose to focus on only a particular aspect of the object such as its surface texture, or its size, or the different types of materials it seemed to be made of. The more they focused on one aspect, the more they forgot about the others. It was like the old proverbial description of an elephant by someone who can only describe its trunk due to the fact that they are located in front of the animal. The descriptions ended up sounding vague and most students, including the ones holding the object, had no clue what it was!

What was the purpose of this toy? The box represented the human brain. Our hands are our perceptions. When we try to describe something that has no words already attached to it, we become extremely inarticulate. We over-focus on certain aspects and ignore others. We apply all kinds of preconceptions and biases in order to have the object "make sense" to us in our desperation to describe it. This is the problem that most psychics have when trying to describe psychic sensations or imagery that arrive in their brains. There are no prefabricated words or common understandings to share with others. You must really grope around in your linguistic library to find ways to describe to yourself and others that which you sense.

Professor Wheeler was once interviewed and stated:

"If there's one thing in physics I feel more responsible for than any other, it's this perception of how everything fits together. I like to think of myself as having a sense of judgment. I am willing to go anywhere, talk to anybody, ask any question that will make headway.

"I confess to being an optimist about things, especially about someday being able to understand how things are put together. So many young people are forced to specialize in one line or another, that a young person can't afford to try and cover this waterfront - only an old fogy who can afford to make a fool of himself

"If I don't, who will?"

I feel like I am listening to myself when I read Professor Wheeler's words. I have uttered similar things about my own work in the psychic realm. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and other students of the human brain are far too concerned about protecting their highly specialized professional careers than exploring the frontiers of the human mind. I have nothing to protect. I am willing to play the fool. I have nothing to lose!

Miami Premonitions

One week ago, a friend of mine who is one of the top gemstone jewelry designers in the country, called me up on the phone. Her voice sounded odd, compressed. I asked if she was okay.

She said, "I'm fine. How are your kids?"

"Oh, they're fine," I said. "Why?"

"Well, I don't really know. I was just...er... worried."

"Well, my husband and I are leaving for Miami in two days, on Wednesday, and the kids are staying home by themselves."

"Really? Maybe that's why I was concerned," she said. "I got one of those feelings and it wouldn't go away, so I knew I had to call you and let you know."

"Oh," I said suddenly appreciating her anxious-sounding voice. Now I was actually a bit worried myself. This friend had once told her husband not to take an airplane flight because she got one of those "feelings." She fought with him for two days until he finally relented and made a reservation on a different flight. As it turned out, the flight he was supposed to have originally taken ended up in a crash and everyone on board died. So when my friend has a "feeling" I pay attention even when it doesn't "make sense." Now since I am not a fan of flying, I began to get very nervous that her bad feeling related to our plane reservations.

"No I don't think so," she said, "It seems to have more to do with the kids, but I'm not really sure. Just make sure you have someone watching over the kids while you are gone."

"It sounds to me," I said, "judging from your tone of voice that on the scale of good (1) to bad (10) this has an ominous feeling of about a seven, is that right?"

"Yes."

Long story short, I made arrangements with two neighbors who are mothers/friends, to call in and keep an eye on the kids while we were gone. Just in case.

Meantime, I taught my regular psychic development workshop in NYC. During one of our exercises doing a bit of remote viewing, one of my students said, rather incongruously and unrelated to the exercise, that he "saw" Miami, and "heard" a song "Meet me in Miami" and "saw" something that looked like a fish aquarium with the water slowly draining out of it behind the glass.

I think I looked at him slightly cross-eyed and said, "Well, I am going to Miami the day after tomorrow. I certainly hope you are not telling me that my plane is going to crash in the ocean! Because I already got someone else's premonition that there is a potential problem."

He said, "No, no, I'm not getting a scary feeling - just kind of gentle."

We flew to Miami and the flight went without a hitch. Actually it was almost enjoyable. We had a fabulous time dining, drinking, partying. I began to think my tuned-in friends may all have been way off the mark and just plain wrong.

However, during a cocktail party Friday night, a friend of mine told me she had been invited by the wife of someone who was a business acquaintance of her husband's to go to Miami's aquarium as a day trip - and would she had told the woman she would have to ask me first because otherwise she would not go! Of course I said yes. It was fate! What was odd was that my friend's husband said he had just met these people one hour earlier. He was stunned when I told him about my student's prediction.

Score one - for my psychic workshop student's clairvoyance. I didn't even know that Miami had an aquarium! In fact it was in Key Biscayne and we had to drive 45 minutes to get there! The aquarium trip was fun and there were no disasters. I breathed a big sigh of relief. Perhaps my other friend was just plain wrong this time. Nothing even remotely bad had happened.

However, Saturday evening I spoke with my son on the phone. He was home by himself while his big sister was out babysitting. He told me he was just coming home and it was extremely blustery and windy out. He heard a huge crackling explosion and noise and jumped inside the house. There was no power. He was very frightened and ended up spending the night with one of the neighbor/moms I had called. I found out the next day that my daughter had been unable to come home that night because our street was blocked off by the police. A huge tree in our neighbor's house had crashed down across the street and all power was cut off due to the electrical lines being severed. My daughter slept at a friend's house one hour away since it was 1:00 am and she couldn't call anyone nearby.

Score one for my jewelry-designer friend! Now I understood why her premonition feeling was "ominous" and yet not totally catastrophic. It was a good thing I took her seriously and arranged with my friends to look after my kids in advance.

But there was still one slightly ominous piece left. Sunday morning I also learned that the high winds that my friend (with whom my son was staying) equated to a French mistral - something just shy of a hurricane - were still gusting in New Jersey. The last thing I ever want to do is fly in turbulence. Yet our flight was scheduled to arrive mid-afternoon in Newark, New Jersey. I told my husband, as we sat in the airport, that I wanted to cancel my flight and sleep one more night in Miami - I was very scared. He said, "Go ahead, but I have to be in New York City tomorrow and I don't have a choice."

Before I knew it they called our flight for boarding. I knew all the other flights were booked and I found myself, against my will, joining the line for boarding the aircraft.

The flight was fine until we got to New Jersey. I knew something was odd. The terraine was not familiar indicating an unusual airport approach. The cloud formations indicated that there were not high winds above 5,000 feet which meant, to me, that the wind was closer to the ground. Sure enough, we made some very sharp, strange banks with the airplane and started coming down at a very high speed toward the runway. As we were about to land our plane was hit by sudden low wind sheer and it smashed us down to the runway. The wings began to wobble up and down out of the control. The pilot immediately aborted the landing and pulled us straight up back into the sky. We flew around in the turbulent air and then attempted a second landing. This time it worked - even though we hit the runway very hard. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, thanked God, and then thanked the pilot. My husband, who is in the airplane business, said it was the worst landing he had ever experienced...

So, I thank all my friends and students for being so insightful. Their intuitions were totally correct. Thank goodness they were brave enough to report their "unverifiable" intuitions.

Seeing is Believing

I recently joined the New Jersey Ghost Investigations team as their psychic medium. I finally had the occasion to go out on my first investigation with the team. I have been on plenty of other investigations with other teams around the country and in Wales, and have my own little stash of what has now become in recent years fairly standard ghost-hunting equipment. When you go out with a team as a medium, you are also relying heavily on your personal sensory and mental equipment to pick up information about spirits.

In all of my various investigations, I have been privy to all kinds of bizarre and seemingly "impossible" events. I have been virtually lifted off the ground by the scruff of my neck by a spirit that I later found out was an angry security guard standing outside a judge's chambers when I apparently ventured too close to the judge's door. I have felt sudden cold spots and cool breezes signaling the presence of spirits. I have smelled odors that appeared and disappeared in impossible sequences in response to spirit communication that were without a tangible, physical or logical source. I have heard them in many ways including footsteps, muffled body movements, canon fire, tapping and so on. I have certainly been able to obtain information about spirits which came without any underlying logical or rational foundation, simply by tuning my "imagination" in the right direction.

However, I have always been somewhat aggravated by the fact that while I am a very visual person, and can "see" spirits with my internal third eye, I have not been able to "see" them with my physical eyes. Many people can and do see spirits - most often in the form of apparitions and shadow figures. I have never quite understood why I have not been able to do this. I assumed that it was due to a subconscious fear and desire not to see. It is helpful to pay attention to old adages such as "Be careful what you wish for" - particularly when it comes to seeing ghosts. I often wondered whether I could truly handle the emotional fear of seeing a ghost. What if they appeared all bloody and disgusting as in death? What if they came to my bedroom and crawled into bed with me? Not unusual, since I have heard several personal stories to this effect. What if I couldn't handle the visual impact? What then? I think all these fears stopped me from "seeing" with my eyes. This, of course, implicitly assumes that ghosts can indeed be "seen" with one's physical eyes.

I am no longer an apparition-virgin! Our team visited a very old haunted firehouse in New Jersey. A fireman committed suicide at this firehouse and apparently was actually seen years later by one of his fellow firefighters in the mirror of the firetruck as it was parked inside the garage. The firefighters who work there to this day are so spooked by the eerie feeling that pervades this old building that they race to see who can be the second-to-last to leave the building at night. No one dares to stay there by themselves. True, the place has a strange feeling. I felt as if I were being followed as I walked around.

During the course of the night, this poor spirit was extremely active in communicating with our group. He not only responded to questions with appropriate, immediate knocking noises, but you could also hear his footsteps in the firetruck garage while no one was there, and he actually threw three plastic spoons from the kitchen counter into an adjoining hallway upon request by our team member! There was no one near the counter or in the hallway at the time. There were plenty of witnesses to the flying spoons - myself included. Once, while we all gathered to examine the spoon on the floor, this elusive ghost decided to throw a brochure from the table behind us, and threw it about five feet away onto the ground. We all heard it - and there was no one in the room and no currents of air that might have caused it. It was clearly deliberate.

However, the crowning moment came while I stood in the little hallway with my team member and one other woman. We were facing a little dark hallway where the restrooms were located. My team member said, "Do either of you see a mirror in that bathroom?" We both said yes. And as we looked at the mirror, which reflected some light from a kitchen window behind us, we saw a black figure, head and shoulders, moving in the mirror. We all moved slightly just to see if any one of us was reflecting in the mirror - but we weren't. This black figure seemed to float up and down a couple of times, very gently as if he (it was clearly a young man) were slowly bending his knees and standing up. Then he turned his face so we could clearly see his profile. Then he turned back and looked at us directly.

As he was moving around, I (being skeptical by nature) kept the corner of my eye on the other two women to see if they moved in tandem with this black figure. But they didn't - not only that, but one was too short to be visible in the mirror and the other was located to the side of a wall not within the reflection range. Nor could anyone have walked in front of the kitchen window outside because this figure took up the entire space in the mirror - not just the window area. One of the other team members heard us exclaiming about this figure. He stood behind me and the four of us watching this silent black figure moving around in the mirror. Then the figure slowly moved to the left and out of the frame of the mirror - like a bad pantomime. Then, as if goofing on us, he snuck back in again from the left. All this time - and it lasted for several minutes - we were all talking about what we saw.

This spirit was not vague and undefined or wispy as one often hears about. No. This spirit was very well defined. He was obviously male and obviously relatively young. To the others he appeared to be wearing a strange black cape around his head and shoulders. To me, he seemed to have a particularly bad mullet haircut with long hair reaching his shoulders. He clearly wanted us to see him. He obviously wanted to play with us by his demeanor.

How did I feel while watching my first ghost apparition? Strangely normal. I was not frightened or disturbed. I was merely fascinated. This spirit gave us the luxury of time to look around and try to debunk him while he was moving around. That is what was extraordinary. Four witnesses saw him with their physcial eyes and could not debunk what they saw!

Even for "believers" in the supernatural, it is one thing to trust that spirits exist and something else entirely when you can see them with your physical eyes...